Said one observer: "It's not that Fianna Fail won the election. It's that the media lost."

Real winner of Election 2007?

Vincent Browne . . . made the quota on the "rst count thanks to some great stunts that sources say have probably resurrected sales of Village.

ONLINE ADVERTISING PT 2

LAST week we re"ected on the perplexing persistence of stubbornly low numbers for online advertising.

Certainly that remains true in Ireland, but in the US the old world advertising order is under evergreater threat. Paid search, like Google's AdSense . . . the contextsensitive ads that read your mind . . .has 40% of the online ad market, but a series of recent acquisitions point the way towards a shift in more sophisticated selling of inventory on the online display-ad side.

Google snapped up broker DoubleClick for $3.1bn in April. WPP Group bought 24/7 Real Media for $649m.

Microsoft is a special case. It is building data centres like mad around the world, as is Google, but unlike Google those properties currently aren't getting them a lot of return on investment. Two weeks ago Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6bn to bolster its online ad machine to reverse that equation.

And the talk about buying Yahoo is all about the online revenue strategy.

So what about the Irish market?

The two leading "rms in Irish online ad sales, Sales Online and Generator, have to date been operating successfully as independent specialist players. How long before one or both get snapped up by a traditional media-buying shop? You can hear the rulers being unsheathed to be run over those businesses as Publius types.

MR TAYTO'S NEXT STEPS

IS IT our diseased imagination or was the Mr Tayto character meant to be off-limits to executions in the last round of pitching for creative, under the now Largo-owned brand? If so, can anyone tell Publius what was up with that mini-elections campaign?

Answers to the email below.

DIE, JAR JAR, DIE

THREE cheers for Lucasfilm, who . . .to mix our sci-fi taglines . . . are boldly going where no content provider has gone before. On Friday, starwars. com made available to fans 250 clips from the 'Star Wars' films. Unlike many other intellectual propertyholders, however, Star Wars isn't just letting you see the content. They're letting you become a Jedi Mash-up Master.

Using some basic, free, videoediting software from a firm called Eyespot, the owners of the 'Star Wars' franchise now lets fans chop and change the clips and make their own videos, and to post the result on the starwars. com website . . . all in time for the 30th anniversary of the first 'Star Wars' film.

From Lucas, whose company isn't generally shy of litigation to protect infringement of 'Star Wars' stuff, this sounds daft . . . at first. But they are simply bowing to reality. A search for "Star Wars" on YouTube returns 98,000 clips, either just illegally posted famous scenes or re-edited packages. One favourite is "Lost Limbs", a montage of all the scenes in the films in which characters lose an arm to a light sabre.

"We see what's going on at YouTube, " Lucasfilm's Jeffrey Ulin told the 'Wall Street Journal'. "We see what's going on out there on the web generally. And we wanted fans to come to starwars. com as the centre of fan activity." Starwars. com gets two million visitors a month. Ulin says the hope is the new usergenerated content can boost traffic.

Fans are actually invited to indulge their dislike of the awful Jar-Jar Binks character. But they won't be permitted to indulge other sorts of fantasies . . . perhaps involving Princess Leia (below) in 'Return of the Jedi' . . . a team of screeners in Costa Rica will block clips containing nudity before they ever get posted.

It does give the biggest support yet to the Cluetrain Manifesto singular insight . . . your customers, not you, control your brand . . . and it will be closely-watched to see whether or not the 'Star Wars' experiment will lead others to follow.

Publius suspects not everyone will be able to embrace the Zen wu-hsin approach to marketing that the Jedi make look easy.

Cawley Nea/TBWA are among the leaders in Irish AdLand in getting this insight . . . this week they're bringing to town Jessica Greenwood, staff writer with 'Contagious' magazine, to bring this "use the Force . . . let go" message to Dublin's marketing masses.

QUE TARAGH TARAGH

ANOTHER three cheers . . . this time for the lovely and talented Taragh Loughrey-Grant. Publius was a fan of TLG before TLG was cool, but now she is a multimedia force, with her own movie show on Channel 6. On Friday it emerged that she is leaving her reporting gig for FM 104 behind and get her own gig presenting on Phantom FM. We salute her.