So when news broke that NBC tapped Jimmy Fallon to replace Jay Leno as host of The Tonight Show and move the storied franchise back to its original home, New York City, the public collectively sighed and vowed to remind itself to set its DVR or check out Hulu at work. Clearly NBC is seeking the next Johnny Carson to revive television ratings (which is kinda like the music industry seeking the next Michael Bolton or Kenny G to revive CD sales).

News flash: The Roots are a great house band and all, but the public has moved on.

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But this isn’t your father’s 11:35pm time slot. No longer is it a lonely post-news netherworld for budding insomniacs and beleaguered parents looking to steal a drink and a laugh before bed. Today, the nightly monologue must compete with Call of Duty, Twitter surfing, Funny or Die marathons and the endless distractions emanating from our iPads and digital televisions. (At least we can still do all these things with a cocktail in hand.)

With an increase in options, however, comes a decrease in loyalty–and younger generations aren’t bonding with TV personalities like the generations that revered anchors like Walter Cronkite and late night personalities like Johnny Carson. Jimmy Kimmel is staring into the abyss, but he’s cool with that–and he should be. continued…

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PRNewser previously reported that Glenn Selig is representing Gary Faulkner, the so called “Osama Bin Laden hunter,” who was recently busted by authorities in Pakistan for trying to hunt down and kill the world’s most well-known terrorist.

Now that Faulkner is back on U.S. soil, he is making the press rounds with the help of Selig. Already this week, he has turned up on the CBS “Early” show, “The View,” The New York Post, and “The Late Show with David Letterman.”

Selig has other controversial clients, namely former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagoejevich.

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A high profile biographer, Kitty Kelley, is about to release a much anticipated, albeit unauthorized biography of one of the biggest names in media, Oprah Winfrey. One would think all of the big talk shows would be eager to have her on during the promotional tour for the book. Not so.

Galleycat highlights the following excerpt from an interview with the NY Times, in which Kelley says, “In promoting this book, we have already been told by Barbara Walters‘s producer, No, you cannot be on The View, I cannot disrupt my relationship with Oprah. Joy Behar, the same thing. Charlie Rose; Larry King said, I will not do it, it might upset Oprah. Even David Letterman.”

Kelley’s Winfrey biography debuts on April 13. In mid-April, mediabistro.com will feature an exclusive Media Beat interview with the biographer about the book.

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This is more AgencySpy’s territory, but PRNewser wanted to provide a quick recap of who “won” and who “lost” in last night’s Super Bowl marketing bonanza.

Winners:

Pepsi Refresh

Although the jury is still out on Pepsi’s decision to skip the Super Bowl in favor of a cause based social marketing campaign, Advertising Age reports that “pass or fail,” the campaign will be a “case for marketing textbooks.”

“It is surprising how much emotion is tied to the Super Bowl in terms of the industry and general public,” Chief Engagement Officer Frank Cooper told PRNewser last week in reference to how much press the brand has received for its choice not to buy an ad int the big game.

Bonin Bough, Global Director of Digital and Social Media for PepsiCo told AdAge that the strategy of using a TV spot and then making that spot into an online or Facebook strategy “does not exist anymore. That is not relevant whatsoever.”

Indeed, very few brands used their commercials as a vehicle to drive traffic to social sites. Did you notice that hardly any commercials promoted Facebook, Twitter or Youtube links?

AdAge reports that agencies Huge, Firstborn, Tribal DDB and VML have all picked up Pespi business in the last few months. Add that to the list of agencies PRNewser has confirmed to be working on the campaign — TBWA, R/GA, Epiphany/Porter Novelli, Edelman and Weber Shandwick — and that brings the total to ten PR and advertising agencies.

Google

Google’s simple ad seemed to have the highest emotional connection with views.

“We didn’t set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search. Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it’s had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience,” wrote Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a blog post. Just the fact that Google advertised in the Super Bowl will get the company a slew of press.

The Late Show with David Letterman

The ad featuring Jay Leno, Oprah Winfrey and David Letterman is getting lots of buzz, for obvious reasons.

Focus on The Family

Regardless of where you stand on the issue, the group’s ad garnered a ton of media attention. “By setting up an expectation that it was going to do something controversial, Focus made it easy to come off as moderate and inclusive by comparison” writes Jeff Bercovici at Daily Finance.

Losers:

GoDaddy

The domain seller’s ads were predictable, yet not memorable. What does GoDaddy do again?

The U.S. Census Bureau

2.5 million of our tax dollars for that? The Bureau had to issue a press release defending itself against criticism.

Additional notes:

• The New York Times‘ Stuart Elliott live-blogged the ads.

• Agency Mullen and monitoring vendor Radian6 also hosted “BrandBowl” which examined 98,656 tweets from ad and marketing types. These Tweets, “provided an overall ranking of the brands advertising on the game based on a composite score that takes into consideration both volume of tweets and sentiment (both positive and negative).”

• AgencySpy will have more commentary today as well.

Leave your take on who “won” and “lost” in the comments.

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Liza Anderson knows it’s not easy to grow your agency in the midst of a recession. Her tricks: Hard work, hiring lots of great people, and “constant hustling.” Anderson founded Anderson Group Public Relations, and has since taken on a number of celebrity clients including Eva Longoria and Michael Emerson of Lost.

In this interview, Anderson talks about her style of PR (“I don’t see the benefit of being on Page Six.”) why truth and honesty is key to her business (“I don’t think press is necessarily used to that from a publicist.”) and if Hollywood is overly scared of blogger Nikki Finke (“I don’t pay that much attention.”)

You’ve quadrupled the size of your agency in three years. What are they keys to growing an agency?

Very little sleep. Lots of hard work. I’ve just been working a lot and hiring lots of great people. It’s constant hustling. The minute we opened our doors there was the writer’s strike then the actor’s strike followed by recession. There was a constant black cloud that’s followed us as we’ve grown as a company. That overwhelming gloom and doom is a great motivator for success. It makes you work twice as hard. Sometimes fear is great motivator and it’s worked wonders in my case.

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Last night on the “Late Show,” host David Letterman revealed that he had affairs with staffers on the show and that someone had tried to blackmail him for $2 million to keep the story secret. That someone is a CBS News “48 Hours” employee, Robert J. Halderman, who is currently under arrest.

Tom Keaney of Rubenstein handles all PR for Mr. Letterman. He has not returned calls as of the time of this post. A CBS spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter, “Mr. Letterman’s comments on the broadcast tonight speak for themselves.” Of course, we’re curious to see what you think on how it was handled. Was it best to do it on the show with laughs?

Howard Bragman, chairman of agency Fifteen Minutes, and a well respected crisis PR counselor who has worked with clients including Monica Lewinsky‘s family, Ed McMahon and Paula Abdul, told PRNewser, “There is not a good way to do this, there are ‘less bad’ ways to do this.”

“You look at your options and you’re on CBS so you’re not going to do it with Barbara Walters, you’re not going to go on “The Early Show,” of course you’re not going to go on Leno,” he said. “Why not do it where you’re most comfortable, where you’re surrounded by people that care about you?”

Despite the many ways this story can play out, Bragman insisted that Letterman only has to speak publicly once. “He’s David Letterman, he doesn’t invest a lot of time in being up front on good news, bad news or otherwise. His ratings are good. Tonight there will probably be a big boost in his ratings. We live in a world where there is a lot of crisis. There are so many, that they tend to go away and they have a half life of a fly. I always tell people, ‘once you say it, shut up.’ Rubenstein is a great firm, I suspect he’s in great hands.”

UPDATE: A press conference with Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau began at 11:30am ET. TVNewser has more.

UPDATE 2: Rubenstein’s Tom Keaney tells PRNewser that Rubenstein President Steven Rubenstein has represented Letterman “even longer than I have.”

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President Barack Obama‘s five Sunday morning talk show interviews aired yesterday (after being filmed back to back from the White House Roosevelt Room on Friday). That leaves Obama with one major interview left in his latest media blitz: tonight the President will appear on “The Late Show With David Letterman.”

So, how did he do? The Times‘ Alessandra Stanley called the round of interviews a, “remarkable – and remarkably overt – display of media management.”

“He’s turning the presidency into an infomercial,” former White House speechwriter Matt Latimer told the New York Post.

The White House stood by their strategy. “In an increasingly fragmented audience that gets information from a number of different sources, putting a huge amount of his time behind one medium increases our ability to really break through and get a message out. The effect of one interview, given how rapidly the news environment moves, doesn’t last as long as it used to,” White House communications director Anita Dunn told the Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz.

Mediaite’s Steve Krakauer reviewed each interview and said that CNN’s John King came out on top. “…many of the foreign policy questions gave the CNN audience a perspective not seen in the other three,” he said.

As is usual with any high profile interview, network PR teams rushed out transcripts with highlighted sound bites as early as Friday afternoon, hoping their respective interview would get the largest share of coverage.

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