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We’ll announce our Innovator of the Year award in New York on Tuesday, and I’m sure the person who walks through the luncheon crowd to the podium will be a surprise.  One might think it would go to a Web site manager who’s done something different, or a developer who’s created an app that emits the aroma of coffee from a Droid when you’re near a Starbucks.

Uh, no.  It’s going to a chief executive at a traditional media company.  Saywhat? A stodgy, button-downed media CEO worthy of an online innovator’s award?  Don’t innovators become innovators despite executive management?

That’s exactly why we selected this year’s recipient for the 2010 Borrell Award of Merit.  Our winner has demonostrated a deep understanding of disruptive innovation, organized the company for optimum performance, and drove outstanding results.  The litmus test for all three of our Awards of Merit is financial results, not “coolness.” And the financial performance that this executive stimulated is a real head-turner.

In a column for Inside Radio last November, I plucked a few CEO’s ears for failing to even recognize the outstanding effort that their interactive directors were tackling.   Only one company — RadioOne — routinely described its online ventures in any detail.  Bonneville Broadcasting produced a snazzy 22-minute video to describe all the great things it accomplished, snubbing its online efforts with an eight-second mention.  Even TV executives spend very little time discussing online ventures in their annual reports and presentations.

By now I guess you figured I’m not going to name the person or even give any clues, but thanks for getting to the end of the blog anyway.  Suffice it to say that we’re selecting this recipient because we believe that innovation may start at the bottom, but too often gets thumb-squashed by bean-counting CEOs at the top.  This executive opened the doors wide and stimulated transformation in a way that I think Wall Street will sit up and pay attention.

We’ll post the recipient’s name on our Web site Tuesday afternoon — along with the names of three other companies who will receive awards.  But if you’d like the immediate scoop, I’ll Twitter a few minutes before the announcement.  You can pick it up at www.twitter.com/goborrell.

Digital media has twisted our language into a new hip lexicon.  We google something, friend someone or LOL at a joke. If it’s really funny, we might ROFLMAO.

And now advertisers are speaking a different language – different at least than traditional media companies.

At the Radio Forecast Summit this week in New York, ad buyers and agency folks seemed to be speaking different languages speaking a foreign language to people who have been laboring for decades under a simple model where great programming brings massive audiences that fetch big bucks from advertisers.  It’s a model that newspapers and TV managers operate under as well.

Don’t get me wrong — the summit was great.  Lots of forecasting information and debate about the future and value of media and how some companies are meeting those challenges.  But what agency and advertisers were describing was an example of the disconnect between traditional media folks and Madison Avenue.

The message from the radio executives could best be summed up like this:  We have a megaphone that reaches 250 million people.

The message from the marketers went like this:  We need more creative solutions to help us collect and analyze more data about our advertising and our customers.

I visualized little comic-book bubbles floating above everyone’s heads. Huh?

Let me offer the 40,000-foot view. Businesses will spend about $680 billion this year to market their products and services. One-third of that goes toward traditional media advertising; the rest goes to things like coupons, rebates, Web site development, contests, trade shows, and public relations.  Over the next five years, the amount spent on advertising is forecast to decline 7.5%.  The amount spent on everything else is expected to increase 24%.

Traditional media advertising has entered the era of perpetual decline.  Perpetual decline, my friends.  No more riding the annual tide.

The advertisers were actually saying something very simple, and I think local media companies have a great opportunity to meet their needs.  All they really want is to drive store traffic or make the phone ring.  What they need from local media companies is a little help getting and managing bits and pieces of information that quantifies the success of those campaigns.  They need pageviews, clickthroughs, email addresses, abandon rates, demographics, time spent on pages, etc., etc. etc.

It’s not a foreign language at all.  It just takes a little more brainpower and creativity (and tools) to reach into the “non-advertising” side of the equation.  The days of order-taking are clearly over. As the COO of ad agency Neo@Oglivy said, “There is huge potential to go beyond advertising.  There’s a big opportunity here.”

Everybody bemoans the absence of the “youth” audience from newspapers, radio, and TV.   How, they ask, can there be any future for legacy media if young people aren’t  reading, listening or watching?  

One answer might be a site called TweenTribune, which should be a local news editor’s dream when it comes to reaching “tomorrow’s” news consumers.  Teachers in six countries are using TweenTribune – including one who happens to teach one of the tweens living in my household.

Let’s talk about tweens for a minute.  There are about 25 million of these confused and generally annoying little people in the U.S. alone.  (I’ve got a lot of experience here.  Two have already passed through this stage at my household.  One is in the throes of Tweendom, and two more are not far behind.)

They are responsible for many things – most of which they’ll deny – but the most important of which is about $150 billion in spending.  I’m talking cell phones, dresses, board shorts, sneakers, T-shirts, sneakers, gum, sweat shirts, video games, skate boards, sneakers, fast-food and ringtones.  That doesn’t count the estimated $170 billion in matching expenditures by parents and relatives on things like braces, sneakers, haircuts, skateboards, text-messaging fees and music downloads.

How in the world does traditional media reach them anymore?  Advertisers have been perplexed for more than a decade, since newspapers cut their comics, radio lost out to iPods and MTV’s reality got too unreal for them.

TweenTribune is the brainchild of Alan Jacobson, a newspaper designer with tweens of his own.  It combines the attraction of totally interesting news (make sure you say “totally” with the right inflection) with the power of social networking on the Web.  And the irony is that, even though it’s sanctioned by both parents and schools, the kids are really into it. Jacobson has pitched the idea to newspapers and TV stations as local partners, but schools are learning about it on their own and coming to him directly.

Traffic has skyrocketed, even though TweenTribune has only been around since last spring and hasn’t been actively promoted since mid-September.  It’s approaching a half-million pageviews per month.   Jacobson says he’s flooded with registration requests from teachers – averaging 100 per week in the past two months – and 10,000 students per month.

The concept is pretty simple.  Take any oddly interesting  news item – like the kid in the runaway balloon, the Octamom, Michael Jackson’s death, or the opening of a new vampire movie – and put it on a protected Web site for a school where teachers can ask kids to log in and comment on one or two stories for a Social Studies grade.  The comments go “live” only when the teacher approves them.  The kids get to read others’ comments as well, and the stories get ranked by the number of kids commenting on them.

The execution is a bit more complicated, but not much.  Space is reserved for advertising, and teachers can print out comment reports for easy grading.  So the ads appear in front of the students, teachers and, often, parents who see the grades.

Wow.  This is the way local media companies ought to be thinking.