That kind of first-week sales stat used to be no big deal for the music industry, back when people routinely bought music. In 2000, the year sales peaked, Justin Timberlake and the rest of ’N Sync sold more than two million copies of an album in a debut week, and people like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys would put up similar numbers.

Since then, of course, music sales have fallen apart (though the decline may have stopped). Just as important, the idea of a media monoculture — where everyone watches or listens to or reads the same thing — has atomized, courtesy of Facebook and Twitter and 500 channels on TV and an infinite number on YouTube, etc.

So, at a minimum, the success of “20/20” reminds us that, on occasion, lots of people are still interested in the same thing.

Especially if that thing comes out on a big label — Sony’s RCA — and is supported by a promotional blitz that includes a David Fincher-directed video, a “Saturday Night Live” appearance, a week-long stint on “Jimmy Fallon”, a Target campaign, a Bud Light campaign, appearances at Super Bowl and South by Southwest events, etc., a huge push from radio, etc., etc.

Wait a minute, though. What about Alex Day, the YouTube star with no record label and no Big Media promotional support, who beat Justin Timberlake on iTunes?

That was the story James Altucher wrote up on TechCrunch last week. And it’s a pretty great one, in part because Day is a great interview and in part because Altucher is a great writer.

But it’s not exactly true.

There was indeed a point in time where Day ranked ahead of Timberlake on the iTunes U.K. album charts. But the thing about iTunes music charts is that they don’t tell you how many units anyone has sold in aggregate, or even over a week or a day. They just provide a snapshot of how different acts are performing, relative to each other, in something close to real time.

That is — at some point this month, Alex Day was moving more units than Justin Timberlake. For a couple hours. Or maybe even longer.

But not much longer. Timberlake’s album hit the top spot on the U.K. chart within a couple days of its release. I haven’t seen anyone spit out an iTunes sales number for either artist, but so far this year, he’s sold more albums in the U.K. than anyone else.

Which again, isn’t to diminish what Day has done. His unsigned-ness has now become part of his story/marketing, but there’s nothing wrong with maximizing your assets.

And lots of artists who do break on the Web end up signing with a big label anyway, so more power to Day for making it work on his own.

But sometimes it also helps to have a giant label and an even bigger marketing apparatus working on your behalf. Ask Justin Timberlake.

The protesting drivers had told AllThingsD that they planned to strike on St. Patrick’s Day weekend, taking their cars off the streets at a time when demand from revelers would be high.

But according to Ilya Abyzov, Uber’s general manager in San Francisco, “I checked the stats and it was the second busiest Sunday we’ve ever had in SF, second only to the Sunday that the 49ers were in the Super Bowl. Definitely safe to say there was no impact on anyone’s ability to get a ride this weekend.”

Dozens of current and former Uber drivers had joined the protest on Friday, saying they were upset about lowered rates, firings and inclusion of non-commercial drivers, and giving out soundbites like, “They’re running a sweatshop with an app.”

Following the protest, Uber painted a picture of the group as disgruntled drivers who were cut off after low reviews for unsafe or unprofessional behavior.

While it’s unclear how good the drivers’ case is, at this point their soundbite-to-impact ratio is pretty high. Their “Limo Union” Facebook page currently has only nine likes.

Limo Union organizer and spokesman Raj Alazzeh declined to comment about the effectiveness of the protest, referring AllThingsD to the group’s Facebook and Google+ pages, where they plan to release more information in the coming weeks.

With reporting by Mike Isaac.

The post was both effective — it showed up high on Google searches, which is the reason Huffpo created it — and symbolic of Huffpo’s traffic strategy — which was either craven or clear-minded, depending on your perspective.

Now that kind of Google-baiting is old hat. Even for august newspapers with 41 Pulitzers. Here’s what the same query for today’s Oscars looks like today:

Say this for the Los Angeles Times piece — it delivers the goods, for both humans and Google’s robots. Here’s the keyword-filled top:

The 85th Academy Award nominees and winners have been chosen, the red carpet has been rolled out and the gilded Oscar statues have been polished. But what time is the show again?

The 2013 Oscars ceremony honoring the films of 2012 is set to take place Sunday at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. The pre-show broadcast will begin on ABC with red carpet arrivals at 4 p.m. PST (7 p.m. EST) and will be hosted by Lara Spencer, Jess Cagle, Kristin Chenoweth and Kelly Rowland.

The awards show will start at 5:30 p.m. PST (8:30 p.m. EST) and is scheduled to last three hours. It will be hosted by “Family Guy” and “Ted” star Seth MacFarlane and televised live in more than 225 countries.

And Google is presumably extra pleased that the story’s author, reporter/Web producer Nardine Saad, is a diligent Google+ contributor who has posted more than 30 LAT links so far this month.*

What’s that? You still find this sort of thing disheartening, even if it gives readers what they want and delivers some clicks to a newspaper that can use them? Well, you’re not alone. Here’s a gut reaction from New York Times editor Patrick LaForge:

Sad. RT @harrisj: LA Times starts the SEO battle for tomorrow bit.ly/15Fnmh4

— Patrick LaForge, NYT (@palafo) February 24, 2013

But you’re probably going to be in an ever-shrinking minority, says Raju Narisetti, who heads up The Wall Street Journal digital network (the Dow Jones digital umbrella which includes this Web site).

A (good) lasting lesson @huffingtonpost taught big newsrooms MT @harrisj: @latimes starts SEO battle for tomorrow twitter.com/harrisj/status…”

— Raju Narisetti (@rajunarisetti) February 24, 2013

And yes, even people like yours truly try to engage Google (and Facebook, and Twitter, and anyone that will increase the number of eyeballs on my stuff). AllThingsD’s publishing system, for instance, allows us to create “SEO heds” — headlines created with Google’s automatons in mind.

And if you know how to find the one I’ve created for this post, you’ll be able to figure out what time to watch the Oscars tonight. Enjoy!

* Conventional wisdom among Google-watchers is that even if no one reads anything you post on Google+, the search engine will reward active users with Google juice in search results. So get posting!

While there was certainly a lot of squirming in the broadcast booth, there was plenty of chatter on social networks, even though technically speaking, most people gave the Web the night off.

Anyway, if you didn’t see it last night, here’s the sketch, courtesy Hulu.

Hello, and happy Read In the Bathtub Day! (AllThingsD takes no responsibility for any damage to your electronics caused by reading this post in the bathtub.)

Here are our top 10 stories from the week of 2/4:

1.) Coming Soon to Yahoo: Ads From Google

2.) Twitter Got Hacked. Expect More Companies to Follow.

3.) Surface Pro: Hefty Tablet Is a Laptop Lightweight

4.) A Tasty Little Slice of Geek History: PBS’s “Silicon Valley” (Video)

5.) Samsung’s Super Bowl Ad Leaves Apple Alone

6.) In One Fell Swoop, Facebook Glitch Deep-Sixes the Web

7.) BlackBerry Z10 Off to a Strong Start in U.K.

8.) Why Twitter Is Buying Bluefin — And Why Bluefin Is Selling [Sidebar: Bluefin will also be presenting at D: Dive Into Media next week.]

9.) Salesforce Just Made Another Quiet Acquisition

10.) Nudged by Apple, Twitter’s Porn Saga Ends in a Raw Deal for Vine

For more of the week in review, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Here, via broadband service company Sandvine, is what happened to Web traffic during the game, at an unnamed East Coast-based ISP:

Overall, Sandvine says, network usage was down 15 percent during the game. And that makes plenty of sense. Though it would have been interesting to see what had happened if the 49ers hadn’t shown up, post-blackout, and decided to make it an actual competition.

Also not-that-surprising-but-still-interesting: Those of you who did tune into CBS’s livestream (and bonus features) did it more often when there was something interesting to watch — like Beyonce, or Colin Kaepernick running at super speed.

No coincidence, right?

Well. Maybe. The numbers are still rough, and will morph a bit over time. But here are the basics:

TV ratings are up slightly: CBS says last night’s game earned a 48.1 rating, which means it drew a few hundred thousand more U.S. households than the 2011 Super Bowl, which held the previous record with a 47.9 rating. Each ratings point equals about 1.14 million households, so once you’re done rounding, the audience for both games was right around 54 million homes. The Super Bowl is such a huge event that it’s hard to move the numbers much one way or another.

Social numbers are up a lot: You can take your pick of social metrics here, all of which measure different data sets. Social tracker Trendrr says social activity was up 2.7x, from 17.5 million comments to 47.7 million. Competitor Bluefin thinks comments were up 2.5x, from 12.2 million to 30.6 million. Twitter itself tracked 22.1 million comments, up from 13.7 million last year.

So: A lot more chatter, not many more eyeballs. This actually looks quite a bit like last year’s numbers, which saw chatter go way up while actual viewing dropped a tiny bit. And we’ve seen other examples, like last fall’s MTV Music Video Awards, where social metrics went up a bunch while ratings slumped.

So perhaps it’s time to stop associating increased Twitter and Facebook traffic with increased ratings. Social activity may help the TV guys keep an audience, and that’s certainly a good thing from their perspective.

But my hunch is what we’re really seeing is an increase in the per capita volume of social chatter. That is, people who like to talk about TV on Twitter and Facebook are even more likely to talk about TV than they were last year, or the year before that.

Now we have to figure out what that means for advertisers, programmers and the social networks themselves.

The worst part of the Super Bowl blackout is the inevitable episode of Newsroom that Sorkin will write.

– From Gerry Duggan via Twitter

We’ll be weighing in on all of these — as well as the Twitter reactions to each, in our second annual Super Bowl liveblog. For a taste of what to expect, here’s a link to last year’s liveblog.

Things should get started just before kickoff. On the football front, its the battle of the Harbaugh brothers, while the tech front will feature rival ads from BlackBerry and Samsung, as well as spots from Best Buy and others.

So pull up a chair, flip on the TV (or view CBS’s live Web stream on a second device) and get ready for some football.

3:20 pm: OK, it’s almost kic-off time. The Sandy Hook Elementary School just backed up Jennifer Hudson in singing “America the Beautiful.”

So, who do you have in the pool? Political numbers expert Nate Silver is going with the 49ers.

3:22 pm: Alicia Keys is — as some on Twitter had surmised — on the keys, playing the piano for a subdued version of the national anthem.

3:28 pm: Heads or tails. It’s a coin toss.

The 49ers will start with the ball, while Hyundai has possession of the next commercial, and Alicia Keys is getting some flack on Twitter for that rendition of the anthem. At least she wasn’t (or maybe she should have been) lip-synching.

3:38 pm: Some technical difficulties here have forced the laptop to the sidelines. Luckily, the iPad has been waiting for this opportunity all season.

3:40 pm: Back on the field, Baltimore is out to the early lead with a touchdown.

3:45 pm: Uh. Oh. GoDaddy.com commercial time. They usually manage to offend.

And they deliver… Lots of kissing in commercials this year.

3:55 pm: Amy Poehler is rocking the Best Buy spot. BTW, marketers, the word “dongle” is always funny.

If you missed it, here’s a link to the spot. We’ve also got the scoop coming up on a mobile-specific follow-up ad that Best Buy plans to run.

In the mobile ad, Poehler again quizzes the Best Buy sales rep, this time asking if they have the latest phones (they do), if they have all the plans (they do), and if they make commissions (they don’t).

Best Buy is touting the fact that it has all the major providers, as well as a new promotion that gives customers $50 in credit if they buy their next phone at the retailer.

4:28 pm: Cable Internet is failing me here, too, by the way. Thank goodness for iPad with LTE.

4:34 pm: As for the mood in the San Francisco Bay Area, Anand Iyer summed it up pretty well on Twitter. “The entire city is deflated.”

I’d expect a serious decrease in Silicon Valley innovation this week if things don’t turn around.

4:36 pm: Some racist ad for VW. Hmm. Maybe they are trying to compete with Go Daddy for the most offensive crown.

4:37 pm: The most offensive moment, followed by the cutest so far. An NFL commercial with Sam Gordon, a 9-year-old girl, running down the field against her presumably all-male Pee Wee peers.

4:43 pm: Meanwhile, if you want a really alternative take on the Super Bowl, check out the Portlandia on Twitter.

4:45 pm: Okay. The starters are back. My laptop and cable modem, that is. Hopefully that will mean faster updates, if not wittier.

4:47 pm: In the strangest commercial yet, Taco Bell has a bunch of older folks running around acting like hipsters.

4:49 pm: Ravens score again. Halftime can’t come soon enough for 49ers fans. Or Beyonce fans.

4:52 pm: Sorry, my wittiness is failing me. Not as much as the 49ers offense is failing them, though. Hopefully both will be better in the second half.

4:56 pm: For another perspective, check out this page from moment.me that sources different perspectives from within the Super Bowl crowd.

4:58 pm: Did the Niners QB just trip over the blue line of scrimmage? I thought that was only on TV.

5:01 pm: One thing that is a bit weird: If you watch the livestream, you see some of the same companies advertising — but generally not the same ads. But all the ads are themselves available online.

5:03 pm: Scientology ad. Guess it’s not just for Atlantic readers anymore.

If you need to replay any of the first half, here they are. The commercials, that is.

5:07 pm: Important analysis. If the 49ers don’t improve, they will lose.

5:09 pm: Time for the Pepsi Beyonce concert, Pepcifully brought to you by Pepsi.

5:11 pm: I can already predict the final score. Beyonce 1, Alicia Keys 0.

That said, it’s nice Keys was able to get time off from her job as BlackBerry Chief Creative Officer to perform at the Super Bowl.

5:16 pm: Here’s how the first quarter ads stacked up, according to Poptip.

5:25 pm: If you like our troops, apparently you have to go buy a Jeep.

5:29 pm: GoPro just had a cute baby commercial. Though, even with a rugged camera, I am still not sure you are supposed to throw your baby.

5:34 pm: The Ravens have come back on the field for the second half.

5:39 pm: It’s lights out for the 49ers. And the Ravens.

Seems like a blackout of some kind.

5:40 pm: And with that, it’s the BlackBerry commercial.

5:41 pm: Power’s still out.

Maybe CBS pulled the plug so they could show more commercials.

5:45 pm: 49ers have finally found a way to contain the Ravens.

5:57 pm: Bloomberg News is reporting that it was a power surge that caused the blackout. It sure didn’t come from the 49ers.

6:00 pm: Score one for PBS.

6:02 pm: Ravens expected to resume playing in seven to 10 minutes. No estimate on when 49ers might start playing.

6:03 pm: CBS briefly showed a clock counting the outage. It was at 27 minutes.

6:08 pm: And in case you are wondering, of course, the Super Bowl lights have their own Twitter account.

6:10 pm: Lights back. 49ers offense not.

6:12 pm: Hmm. Maybe not the best thing to be touting …

6:15 pm: When the lights went out in New Orleans, a lightbulb went on over at Oreo.

6:21 pm: Anti-poverty group One Campaign notes that 500 million people in Africa have never had power.

6:29 pm: BuzzFeed has a nice collection of Super Bowl blackout tweets.

6:33 pm: Power now restored to the 49ers, too, as they cut the Ravens lead to single digits.

6:37 pm: My Super Bowl math: One-minute commercial costs $3.7 million. So a 33-minute power outage equals $122.1 million worth of free advertising for Twitter.

6:40 pm: I thought they would restore power and play would resume. Never thought there would actually be a game.

6:42 pm: This.

From Kevin Mitnick:

6:49 pm: Breaking: Superdome to be renamed Enron Field.

6:56 pm: Meanwhile, Samsung just got some nice free advertising for its Galaxy Camera from Martha Stewart.

7:21 pm: That Sodastream ad aired. Anyone know the full story?

Oh. I guess the original had the Coke and Pepsi logos

7:29 pm: Samsung’s fourth-quarter ad placement, which looked like a bust earlier, turns out to be pretty good.

7:39 pm: Don’t the 49ers still have one blackout remaining?

7:41 pm: And that’s the ball game. I’d say that fans, CBS and advertisers got their money’s worth.

And maybe a handful of you will want to do that, for some odd reason. CBS, which is streaming the game, figures the rest of us won’t.

“Our firm belief is that when it comes to the Super Bowl, most people are going to choose the best available screen,” says CBS Interactive head Jim Lanzone.

But Lanzone and his advertisers, who are spending something like $12 million on digital ads today, do want to get some of your attention focused on the network’s site during the game.

NBC made the first foray into Super Bowl streaming last year, with mixed results. A bunch of people checked out the network’s Webcast, but many came away underwhelmed.

If you wanted to spend “second screen” time during the game, chances are you did it the way you always spend second screen time: On Facebook and/or Twitter, both of which logged a record number of comments during last year’s game.

This year, the CBS game plan sounds much better, at least on paper. The network has several features ready that seem like they’ll reward viewers who are ready to split their attention among multiple screens.

For instance, there’s an “all 22” camera angle, which will give football junkies a rare look at the entire field of play — something that’s usually reserved for the likes of NFL coaches.

There’s also what CBS is internally calling its “subservient chicken camera angle,” where a roving cameraman will take cues from viewers, and head to whatever part of the field he’s told to go. And CBS’ player will have the equivalent of a DVR that lets you rewatch a play you just missed.

You like watching the Super Bowl ads? Sure, they’ve got that, too. In many cases the ones that appear on the live stream won’t be the same as the ones on broadcast — CBS has sold the streaming ads separately from broadcast, at prices Lanzone says are higher than the network’s standard Web video pricing.

But CBS says you’ll also be able to watch the broadcast ads on its site, immediately after each one airs.

*Want to watch it on your phone? To do it legally, you’ll need to be a Verizon customer, download an app and shell out $5, because the carrier has exclusive mobile rights. But isn’t an iPad or Nexus 10 mobile, too? Well, yes. But mobile sports rights only make sense to lawyers and biz dev people.

But now the guy who pushed that campaign has gone over to Google. And Samsung’s new spot doesn’t even bother to tease the competition. Here’s the company’s Apple-less Super Bowl spot (remember, you no longer have to wait to see the game if you want to watch the ads):

Peter Kafka Patented Snap Judgement Review: Bob Odenkirk, Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd are all awesome. But they’re more awesome when they’re not doing this stuff for a sponsor.

Nate Silver, the famous poll expert for the New York Times who correctly called the U.S. presidential election for Barack Obama, has really gone out on a limb today, prognosticating that the San Francisco 49ers will likely win the Super Bowl.

“The reasons that exceptional defenses fare so much better in the Super Bowl are still somewhat murky, but this factor bodes well for this year’s 49ers, whose defense belongs in the elite group, according to S.R.S. (it ranks 17th among Super Bowl teams),” wrote Silver, in part.

The football team is the favorite already, so it’s not that much of a limb to crawl out on — and it’s also unlikely to attract as much controversy as Silver’s election calls that sent Republicans into a tizzy.

Except to those pulling for the Baltimore Ravens, of course.

Really funny:

That’s dumb, says Adobe — which could make this argument about any TV ad spending. On the other hand, Adobe and the rest of the digital media business have been making that argument for a very long time, and TV ad rates keep going up.

Those who want to take advantage of the deal need to sign up between Feb. 3 and Feb. 9. Then they can buy the phone anytime between Feb. 10 and Dec. 31, and they will get a $50 gift card.

Best Buy did the same thing last year, and plans to begin marketing it on Super Bowl Sunday. It will support the campaign with a TV ad related to a spot it will air during the Super Bowl.

Best Buy said it saw “tremendous results” with the similar campaign it did a year ago, particularly among its Reward Zone customers.

Separately, the store is also running a two-day deal through Saturday, offering the popular Samsung Galaxy S III for $99 with a new two-year contract on AT&T, Sprint or Verizon. That’s $100 off the usual price.

The ad, dubbed “The Big Pitch,” features several products in Samsung’s Galaxy line, including the Galaxy Note II, Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet.

Here’s a sneak peek:

Now you don’t have to fret on Sunday, when the Super Bowl and the newest episode of “Girls” were set to collide: A clever stunt from HBO will let you watch Dunham’s sitcom in advance, starting today.

HBO is letting subscribers watch the next episode of “Girls” right now, via its on-demand cable service and its HBO Go online service. And if negotiating either of those options is too much for you, the pay network will air the new episode Saturday night, a day before the show would normally run. The same goes for “Enlightened,” the Laura Dern sort-of-sitcom.

That’s a smart promotional move, which primarily highlights the benefits of HBO’s watch-when-you-like features. And it gives people like me a chance to write about “Girls,” which is a win-win-win.

But what about the plight of “Downton Abbey” fans, who face the same scheduling dilemma? Slightly less good news for them: They’ll also be able to watch Sunday’s show in advance, if they’ve paid up for an iTunes season pass.

*And yes, we’re assuming there’s someone who falls into that Venn diagram.

Image: Ivelin Radkov / Shutterstock.com | Illustration: AllThingsD.com

The company confirmed on Friday that it plans a Super Bowl ad as part of the marketing push behind its new BlackBerry 10 operating system.

“A Super Bowl commercial is a great opportunity to show the re-designed, re-engineered and re-invented BlackBerry to tens of millions of consumers on the largest advertising stage of the year,” RIM marketing chief Frank Boulben said in a statement. RIM said the Super Bowl ad will kick off a week of launch activities across the globe to highlight the new operating system and the first two BlackBerry 10 devices.

RIM is due to show off BlackBerry 10 and the first phones running the software at a New York event on Jan. 30.

Earlier this week, Major League Baseball announced it is bringing its At Bat app to the BlackBerry, while the National Hockey League also plans streaming video support for the new RIM devices.

Image: Ivelin Radkov / Shutterstock.com | Illustration: AllThingsD.com

New Super Bowl cliche: You don’t have to wait for the Super Bowl to see the Super Bowl ads — just check YouTube!

Neither one of those are completely truthful, of course. For instance, the most talked-about ad of last year’s game was Chrysler’s, which featured a pre-Obama-chair Clint Eastwood. And that one didn’t run early on the Web.

Still, it’s easier than ever to watch a lot of Super Bowl ads without watching the game, and to watch them before the game airs. Last year’s good example: Honda’s Ferris Bueller mom-wagon ad, which “accidentally leaked” onto YouTube. And increasingly we’re seeing brands simply putting out their in-game ads without any pretense at all.

Here, via Ad Age, is one of the GoDaddy spots the registrar will show off during the game. Of course, as Nat Ives points out, the ad is also an ad for other GoDaddy SuperBowl ads, so it works both ways. Ditto for a Coke teaser campaign.

Note that if you’re one of those weird people who wants to watch the Super Bowl on a browser instead of a TV, and you’re one of the people who wants to see the ads (smallish Venn overlap there, methinks), you’ll be in luck this year. CBS, which is streaming the game on the Web, says that it will also stream the broadcast ads on the Web — something that NBC didn’t do when it streamed last year’s game.

The huge first day marked the best start ever for the franchise on this generation of hardware, with sales up 7 percent compared to last year. EA said the franchise also set a day-one online record, with a 28 percent jump in the number of users logging in to play simultaneously.

At launch, the game was available in North America for four systems: Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 3, for $40 to $60.

Critics are raving about the new technical innovations that allow tackles and other movements to look more realistic — and more painful. The game received high rankings on Metacritic.com, including a score of 82 out of 100 on the Xbox and a score of 85 on the PlayStation 3.

Of course, the hilarious YouTube videos that EA is using to market the game probably helped, too. The clips feature Paul Rudd, perhaps better known as the brother-in-law from “Knocked Up,” and Ray Lewis, the 240-pound linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens, pretending to be best friends and poking fun at each other while playing Madden.

Those viral efforts among others probably helped to generate the estimated 665,464 social interactions on Facebook and Twitter combined during the launch.

For kicks and tackles, here’s the video of Rudd dancing to Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” in Lewis’s face to honor the Ravens’ big rival, the Steelers.

But do companies with super-smart, digitally-savvy CMOs really outperform their market peers?

Take a look at the share-price growth over the past year of three public companies with cutting-edge CMOs — Volkswagen, UPS and Comcast — and then compare this growth to the industry benchmark in their respective categories.

In the last six months, Volkswagen consistently outperformed Ford, GM, Fiat, Volvo, and other competitors. Although it’s impossible to pinpoint just how much CMO Tim Mahoney has contributed to that market success since he joined as CMO one year ago, it’s clear he’s doing something right. Volkswagen recently reported a 35 percent increase in March 2012 sales, the auto maker’s best first quarter since 1973. Likewise, UPS has also recently outperformed its fiercest competitor, FedEx; similarly, Comcast has outperformed its nearest competitors, Time Warner and Cablevision.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t tip my hat to Red Bull’s amazing digital marketing efforts, but, alas, they’re not a publicly traded company).

So what are these companies doing right? Here are three strategies to consider that can help boost shareholder value:

Pair memorable creative with effective targeting
Volkswagen, UPS, and Comcast have all turned to creative and targeting to gain consumer attention. In a world of constant distraction, getting a consumer’s attention has become increasing difficult. Consumers are overwhelmed by hundreds of ads thrown their way on a daily basis. By staying on the cutting-edge of creative as well as targeting the right audiences, companies can break through all the clutter and build brand loyalty.

For example, Volkswagen’s “Star Wars”-themed “The Force” 2011 Super Bowl ad wasn’t just hyper-cute and creative; it became the most-shared Super Bowl video of all time. And though its 2012 follow-up video, “The Bark Side,” didn’t reach the same sharing heights, it still has a place in the viral video hall of fame. Not surprisingly, Volkswagen also has 1.2 million “Likes” on Facebook, compared to 540,000 for Subaru, another car brand consumers love to love. This is a prime example of great creative and targeting the right audience to drive viral distribution.

UPS tapped into the hype around this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament. They ran an ad entitled “The Pass,” that replayed the 1992 Duke and Kentucky winning shot. In tandem, the company relayed their “Logistics” messaging, highlighting the company’s ability to get something precisely where it needs to be at precisely the right time. Though controversial to some (mainly Kentucky fans), and beautiful to others (me, as a Duke grad, and just about all other basketball lovers), this ad was certainly memorable. Again, well-conceived creative with the right targeting online to drive distribution.

With a similar approach, Comcast pokes fun at consumers’ increasing appetite to consume content. To the tune of the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” Comcast launched their new streaming service with a creative ad entitled, “Stream, Stream, Stream.”

Engage consumers where they already are
Today’s CMOs must strive to be everywhere their prospective clients are consuming media, in order to stay top of mind. The average U.S. consumer is spending 32 hours a month online, with much of that time — 22 percent — spent on social networking sites. Companies need to connect with consumers on their turf.

At UPS, one of the reasons for the company’s success stems from CMO Alan Gershenhorn’s commitment to use social media for customer service. The company set up a special Twitter feed @UPSHelp to answer customers’ delivery and other questions in real time. Since UPS launched the Twitter program, the company has accumulated more than a million positive impressions from customers who give grateful replies.

Comcast has also jumped on the social customer service bandwagon. The company’s manager of customer service strategy and operations, Bill Gerth, connects with customers in real time via the Twitter feed @comcastbill and @comcastcares.

Additionally, the company’s official customer-focused blog, Comcast Voices, invites customers to comment on any aspect of Comcast’s service or company strategy. Comcast has opened itself up to any type of feedback, including criticism, and shown that it really cares what its customers think — so much so that it has incorporated customers’ ideas into new products and services.

Think multichannel
Standout companies are also breaking ground through the adoption of multichannel campaigns. Crain’s BtoB Magazine, in conjunction with Bizo, recently conducted a study that highlights the importance of expanding the marketing mix. However, according to the study, 63 percent of respondents stated that their current mix of programs does not meet sales demand.

UPS, on the other hand, has recently figured out how to successfully implement a multichannel campaign, and their “We ♥ Logistics” initiative takes it to a whole new level. According to the company, the campaign included TV, print, out-of-home, digital, display, direct mail and email — and it was the first time in U.S. history that UPS had a unified global communications and ad strategy. They are still rocking this campaign today, too.

For the UPS campaign, consumers are driven to the campaign’s microsite, www.thenewlogistics.com, with the goal of bringing the benefits of logistics to life. Likewise, Volkswagen, in keeping with the “Star Wars” theme, created a microsite for their “The Force” campaign, where people could create digital invites to their Super Bowl Party, which included a customized version of the movie’s famous opening crawl.

All of these public companies are innovators — with CMOs who embrace digital technologies to deliver what customers want, and who understand that social media is the glue of their entire digital marketing strategy. This relentless focus on the customer, innovative creative and multichannel strategies have helped contributed to above-average stock market performance.

Russell Glass is a serial technology entrepreneur, having founded or held senior positions at four venture-backed technology companies. Before founding Bizo, Russ led the marketing and product management teams at ZoomInfo, a business information search engine, where he sharpened his B2B marketing skill set and developed his love for business data.

And if you like that idea, then you’ll love watching a promotional video for the app.

Hey! Isn’t the The Daily owned by News Corp., which also owns this Web site? Yes, yes it is. Good of you to notice, so we can deal with the disclosure here.

The Daily is also the real point of this post: The tablet newspaper is quietly getting into the custom publishing business.

Putting out other publications using the infrastructure you built to put out your own stuff is a mainstay of lots of traditional newspapers and magazines. But it wasn’t something that was in The Daily’s original business plan.

A year after launch, though, The Daily has put out several standalone apps, using the same Web app publishing system it built in-house in the fall of 2010. Most are put out using The Daily’s name and branding, like the gadget guide it published last fall.

Last month, though, The Daily helped the NFL put out a commemorative Super Bowl mag/app, and publisher Greg Clayman says more of this stuff should be coming down the line.

Right now, he says, the don’t-call-it-a-newspaper is using its existing staff to put out the new publications. Which must make News Corp. execs happy, since that means more revenue without more costs. But Clayman says he can envision building a standalone custom pub staff if this stuff takes off.

Yes. But not that many people.

Social TV tracker Bluefin Labs counted 3.44 million “social comments” about last night’s Oscar awards. That metric, which primarily tracks Twitter usage but also includes some data from Facebook and other services, is certainly big. But it’s much smaller than two other big live-TV events this month. Bluefin counted some 12 million comments for the Super Bowl, and 13 million for the Grammys.

And the comment volume for those two events showed much more year-over-year growth than the Oscars, too. Bluefin says Oscar Tweets were up more than 250 percent this year, compared to a crazy 2,300 percent bump for the Grammys and 580 percent for the Super Bowl.

That might seem a little odd to someone like, um, me, whose Sunday evening Twitter feed seemed to be clogged exclusively with people live-tweeting the same broadcast. (Which, really — love you guys, but I could do without.)

So this ends up being a very healthy reminder that different people use Twitter for different things. Hard to remember that sometimes, because the medium so closely mimics a traditional broadcast system, with its one-to-many structure (even if CEO Dick Costolo insists it’s not a media company). But on Twitter, there are a whole lot more broadcasters out there, and not all of them go freaking nuts about the Oscars, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

(Photo courtesy of Academy Award official site)

Many of those folks work at Trendrr, one of several start-ups trying to make a go of the “social TV” boom. A dozen of the company’s 20 employees will spend the day monitoring the broadcast, as well as the red carpet run-up to the show and the post-event recaps.

But Trendrr did its heaviest lifting last week, when it had to figure out exactly how it was going to track Twitter’s Oscar conversation. (Like its peers, Trendrr also keeps tabs on Facebook and other social outfits, but Twitter provides it with the most complete data stream.)

Some of you will go out of your way to help Trendrr and its competitors, like Bluefin and Socialguide, by explicitly labeling your Oscar tweets via hashtags like “#oscars.”

But many of you may simply type something about “The Descendants” at some point during ABC’s broadcast. And some of you may leave out the space between the two words, or the “The” altogether. How to account for all of that?

A combination of art and science, says Trendrr CEO Mark Ghuneim. His team spent the week going through the list of award categories and nominees that will be televised, as well as any presenters expected to be on stage, etc.

That yielded around 200 search terms that his computers will use to search the Twitter stream. And each search term will contain multiple queries — not just “The Artist,” for instance, but “TheArtist.” (You can see some of the list, pictured left.)

Some of the other stuff is trickier to account for, and Trendrr will need to make some decisions about some of the tweets on the fly. If it sees a spike in tweets about “Drive,” for instance, it will need to figure out if people are talking about tooling around in a Toyota, or a sound-editing award.

All of which make for interesting data points after the event, some of which I’ll happy to write up here. (Spoiler alert: Just like the Super Bowl and the Grammys, the Oscars will generate a big year-over-year increase in Twitter activity.)

The long-term question is what kind of value all of this data will provide for programmers and advertisers.

Even if it turns out that Twitter (and Facebook, and every other social service) is directing more eyeballs toward TV — a narrative that pleases both the old- and new-media folks — how is it helpful to know that “George Clooney” was a popular term on Twitter last night?

“This is a swarm event,” Ghuneim says. “And when you have a swarm event, that’s when the action is most actionable.”

That sounds smart, though I’m a little skeptical that the ad world is anything close to nimble enough to do a lot with the data right now. Still, lots of marketing folks seem interested in this stuff in the present tense — if you visit Interpublic Group’s Media Lab, for instance, you’ll see Trendrr data displayed prominently. And always better to have more data than less, right?

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to finish my preshow Melissa McCarthy appreciation exercises.

*If I had to bet, I’d go along with the conventional wisdom that gives “The Artist” an armful of statues. And if you haven’t seen it, I’d say this: It’s fun! You should go! But if you don’t see it in a theater, and end up watching at home, you’re going to be underwhelmed. Can’t watch this one with a remote or an iPhone in your hand.

This is a really clever mashup by AkooTV of the new “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” Honda ad played during the Super Bowl and the 1986 movie, both starring Matthew Broderick, in a side-by-side comparison.

Well done: