Feb

21

Viewable Impressions I

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media | 1 Comment

Two days out at the Digital Media Strategies conference (organized by The Media Briefing Team) was a breath of fresh air. For one thing Rory Brown and Neil Thackray, and their Editor, Patrick Smith, have now tuned the programme and its marketing to the point where they get 220 delegates in one place with a great sense of mission. Then again, this is a variegated audience – C-suite in places, but also real functional managers with something to learn and share – as I found out in the two Roundtables that I moderated. And in a vast hotel on a traffic island in Westminster, the fresh air of London in February at half-term braced your entrances and exits: drink cans and paper bags fly at head height on the South Bank’s bleakly resculptured walkways.

Inside nothing flew other than the odd insult, but the attendees found absorbing quality. Let me however check an initial prejudice in at the cloakroom. I did not attend the advertising-related streams, given that the advertising-related panels gave me a distinct feeling of doom. The title of this piece relates to the current conviction that a “viewable impression” occurs when up to 50% of an advertisement is viewed for a second. Here is the language of madness: if advertising is designed to bring buyer and seller together then what we are doing online is an endgame for screen space, simply stretching the print model to extinction because we adare not change it online. With rates falling catastrophically and inventory unsold, digital advertising will never be what its proponents want it to be, and I watched fascinated by the lemming-like intensity with which audiences concentrated on how to get things right and make the model work. I believe the answers lie in social media, and are now close at hand, but a lot more magazines have to go over the lemming leap before we get there.

But elsewhere there was sweetness and light, and it was Nick Gee, Mobile Director at Trader Media (AutoTrader) who really got me going. This is AaaS – Advertising as a Service – if I may coin a usage, and I was not surprized to hear that mobile has moved from 7 to 15% of all usage of the car-advertising service in a year without cannibalization. Or that people like Nissan and Toyota are now prepared to sponsor the iPad edition for month at a time. Here is advertising that readily goes social, and results in paid-for premium upgrades to get instant used vehicle histories. They have even developed on online magazine (Ignition) which also cross-references to the search capacity; easier to build the magazine once you have a paying audience for other services. This was a story of single platform and data – driven development – data integration lies at the heart of this success. And motor dealers can even get a smartphone app to do quick uploads! But there is the rub: as non-executive chairman of Fish4 years ago I competed with these guys and knew how brilliant they were at getting into dealerships, supplying inventory software and edging my newspaper clients out. However, now this market goes social – why does the seller need a dealer? Increasingly AutoTrader will experience the tensions between its old affiliation to the real world market structure and its new audience, who will expect to find their vehicle history online, a price check, a warranty from an insurer or a repair shop, and to be able to view images and video of the vehicle to complete online purchasing. Financing commissions on these deals may well be the future, but what do you do with those loyal dealers as they see the market peeling away from them, led by the service that they once enabled?

No such doubts assailed me as I listened to Emma Fulton, from audience measurement at News International. “We really strive to have direct relationships with users, not via intermediaries, and luckily the majority of our users come directly”. But there are only 300,000 of them, the churn remains undisclosed, and while 56% are direct, I would be worried by Apple owning 18% of them – and the rest being unresolved triallists. Nothing here which demonstrates the place of The Times or the Sun in the digital galaxy. As with Raju Narisetti, who runs digital for the Wall Street Journal and who spoke earlier in the day, there was a surprising absence of discussion beyond the old print format online. Just a word on personalization would have offered contradiction to the thought that the News Corp interests are heading for the great Digital Museum in the Clouds!

And yet there was much to be learned from Nick Blunden, not quite the Chief Digital Officer at the Economist but almost! First came the shock: people do read the words in the Economist and it is not just a business coffee table medium for selling Swiss watches and expensive cars. Print subs have risen to £1.5 m and there are 650k online readers. Unbundling has worked brilliantly in the US to get a premium price for print plus online, and 60% of users now opt for this. Then it was refreshing to hear talk of audio – a very neglected medium – and learn that Economist Radio handles 1.5 m monthly streams. But still I kept coming back to the idea that the Economist’s ability to fillet an issue and allow an online catch-up had a Wikipedia-like quality when found in an interrogation – type context. Clearly the Economist are a long way from using their content in this way – but if they attached their source references to the articles they would create a very considerable value.

Tomorrow I will tackle Day 2 of a very interesting mixed media conference.

Feb

13

After the Newspaper, the Russians

Filed Under Big Data, data protection, Education, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

Well, I think I have waited long enough! When Ashley Highfield became CEO of Johnston Press in the UK I had hoped that the next generation newspaper would pop out as speedily as the BBC iPlayer did during his digital reign at the BBC. But time is moving on and I feel that I must file at least an interim report on this front. And in doing so I will try to avoid the now useless words of the day, the “over-used and under-defined until meaningless “terms like Ecosystem and Curation which now litter this discussion until whole sentences can be written in code which only the originator can unpick – and which he dares us to question. Twenty five years as a consultant has made me value obscurity and multiple shades of meaning as much as the next man from McKinsey, but here I will try to avoid terms that defeat the object and soften the brain, and you can be the judge of my success!

The relationship with the newspaper has broken down, but not our relationship with the news. Excellent commentators like Chris Anderson have pointed out that very local news – the car crash on the next street, the local government decision on street lighting in an area – can have more lasting resonance than an international crisis or a distant war. Yet if we are interested in either type of information, we want all we can get until our interest peaks – and wanes. Our friends can be vital news sources alongside Reuters or AP. We need to be able to follow new themes without fussy form-filling, and we do not need to be bored by news updates on issues of no or of former concern. We want no intrusive advertising, but we are happy to be sold the new product lines of retailers who interest us, provided that they disappear when they cease to interest us. We want the back story in full when we want it, as a desirable default which we can call up but not as something which we have to endure on every theme that interests us. We want services that learn from us, yet also services which give us the opportunity to find new issues (“if you liked that, try this…”).

So the next newspaper is a community, with social networking elements, and an intelligent system with regard to internet-wide story-gathering. It looks to its readers privacy, and security, at every stage, and links to retail are permitted by assent of users only. It is dedicated to the avoidance of spam and casual advertising contact. In order to ensure that its lists cannot be sold for lead generation purposes it is probably a subscription service, utilizing some existing news brands to give it authority and credibility. Like Darwin’s tree shrews, there are some prototypes of aspects of all of this around, but no niche-dominating mammals are yet in sight. Facebook, with its graph search and its links to Bing clearly thinks this way, and poses a huge threat to the dessicated remains of the old guard press in Europe and North America. Yet Facebook may not survive its willingness to sell its audience. And at present it does not quite engage with the “workflow” of the consumer – this service must also link to user requirements in education (personal and family), to health and healthcare and to savings and investments – just like that good old jumbo Sunday supplement in print, only fully profiled. Facebook has the Recommendation style to do the job, using the community effectively to drive choice, but I believe it will be the inspiration of the next generation of solutions, rather than the floor plan.

Turn instead to look at some of the software available. Start with Gravity (www.gravity.com), the haven of the escaped crew of My Space regrouped under CEO Anit Kapur . But this is not another Community. It launched its Personalization API last week (1 February 2013) and has become a very effective technology for interfacing trad Web with the device world of mobile. And this is vital – Your Newspaper is very Mobile. Whether this personalization works for advertisers I rather doubt, but here is a technology which is ready to go for “publishers” and well worth experimenting with: press coverage of Davos noted that Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer had said that “interest graphs” (see Facebook above) were part of Yahoo’s future. Well, here they are in the present. And then, look at My6Sense (www.my6sense.com), the Israeli contestant in this beauty parade. Maybe the first move in mobile will be the personalised content bar of this type, since we currently seem lost for an interface on mobile platforms which enables us to unwrap personalised services at will… And now, go for a long browse on Trap!t (http://trap.it). Ignore that annoying exclamation mark! Here is a beta with a sample of 100,000 news sources just moving into AI gear to give a new twist to “adaptive reasoning “in the context of personalized information. It is founded on CALO technology – Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes – and comes out of DARPA (a first cousin therefore of Apple’s Siri). Despite the appalling linguistic crimes on this site (the founders, in true Silicon Valley mode, claim to have created a “cognitive prosthetic”), this is the closest that I can identify at present as the progenitor of the newspaper of the future. Mobile, intelligent, personalized ( yet suggesting new avenues). So who can implement, and what happened to those Russians?

The Russians in my headline are the Lebedevs, Alexander and Evgeny, Father and Son. And the context here is the fact that they own London’s evening newspaper, the Evening Standard. Formerly a DMGT property, this also entails owning some 33 hyperlocal web services around the London region. And the UK’s regulator, ever dedicated to preventing dangerous concentrations of media power in Britain, has just awarded the local television franchise for London, London Live, to (you have guessed it) the Lebedevs (presumably on the grounds that they were not Murdochs!) For once, I applaud a monopoly, since this media integration in a region large enough to sustain development at scale could be the spawning ground for the rise of MyNewpaperInLondon, as they will probably call it. When real broadband comes to the UK it will come to the London region first (the EU/UK plan calls for 100 mb/second by 2020, though that plan has been reduced in funding from £50bn to $24bn so the British government can build a prestige railway line to the North!). Whatever the politics, this intense content concentration, plus mobile, plus infrastructure, plus all of the available intelligent software equals an immense opportunity. Hope we are all equal to it!

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