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| Online media opportunities abound if publishers are but willing to look beyond their traditional definitions. Opportunopoly examines emerging technology and market game-changers, thought leaders and, well, opportunities that may lie beyond the usual newspaper comfort zone. |
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Regular OPPY readers know that I'm a huge fan of AlwaysOn (Stanford Summit, OnMedia, etc.) It's a great place to glean intelligence far upstream on disruptive innovations that are being or about to be funded to "go big." AlwaysOn customarily releases a list of the top 100 media-related
private companies, heralded as the most successful disrupters of the
digital media ecosystem, in conjunction with its conferences. OnMedia is currently live at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York City through
Feb. 3 and is being streamed live. (Log on and leave it on... Mark Cuban is on at 9 a.m. today.)
Paul Palmieri, Millennial Media's CEO, in
accepting AlwaysOn’s “OnMedia” award for the top private company of
2009 said that, while 2009 was a tough year for some companies,
“mobile marketing was on fire.” From 2008 to 2009, brand budgets for
mobile marketing tripled, he added. Millennial was judged the best of a stellar class, Past winners, judged on such qualities as growth
rate, return on investment for seed capital, size of potential market
and overall likelihood to make their investors money, have included
BlueLitium, Gaia, Twitter and The Rubicon Project.
I've posted Palmieri's acceptance speech on digiday:DAILY, where you can hear what he had to say about the iPad (“it’s a large mobile device, not a small
computer,”) Millennial Media’s prospects (average yearly growth of
350%, served 10 billion ad impressions in January in the U.S. alone),
and where to expect the next wave of mobile media (PSP?)
Click the upper right of the DAILY today to watch, because soon it will be available only to DM2PRO.com
members. I'll be profiling some of the most promising media/marketing companies
over the course of the week. Follow my tweets @dm2pro.
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NPR’s
Kinsey Wilson didn’t reply to my question on whether KALW’s new
hyper-local portal is coordinated by corporate, but coming from the Bay
Area, KALWNews.org
is more likely a bellwether than a cookie cutter. The site is crisp and
deceptively spare at first glance, but the underlying functionality is
designed to capture the true local buzz from one of the most
interactive communities on Earth.
And,
to a very great extent, it does it through Twitter. From the
consolidated local news sources to the site’s own community lists, the
portal harnesses local Twitter feeds more comprehensively than I’ve
seen in other local news sites.
Senior
Reporter and Producer Zoe Corneli says that, besides the usual local
arts stories, the site empowers blogs, photos, social media,
interactivity and mapping. Like the SanDiegoNewsNetwork we’ve covered
in the past, it features a range of Bay Area hyper-local journalism
outlets, and “digests” the “mainstream local news sources” – with one
very interesting difference: there are no ads.
The site integrates local “feedback” technology from Uservoice.com,
and, Corneli says, “Visitors can submit their own content and use the
collaborative ‘Fixipedia’ tool to help generate solutions to issues in
the news. The site really aims to capture the essence of what it is to
live in the Bay Area, in the spirit of public media.”
The
education section features student journalism, and entices readers to
“get involved” by “reporting on your community” or “joining our street
team.” Featured on the “Community” page as “community correspondent” is
one of the Bay Area’s more famous faces: Craig Newmark (founder of
Craigslist).
The
site’s own “lists” feature (an integrated, community Twitter feed)
pulls in notices from users ranging from “help wanted’s,” to plugs for
local businesses, to self-published posts from not-so-local news
sources. But, as already noted, except for the classifieds visible at
any given moment on the front page, there are no display ads, nor even
the Public Radio acceptable sponsorship notifications.
It’s
a fascinating conundrum for local news providers who are rocking the
Twitterverse for their own followers. Exposure on KALW brings exposure,
and probable new followers, but how many of these users ever follow the
source upstream? Ads, which presumably support the collection and
dissemination of news are now two leaps upstream, a tough task for even
the most news-junkie salmon.
Outsell’s
third annual News Users report, based on a survey about the online and
offline news preferences of 2,787 U.S. news consumers, says that, at
least on Google News, 44 percent of visitors scan the headlines but
don’t click through. As reviewed on TechCrunch, (the report itself is $1295)
it’s information habits like these that will have the “dramatic effect”
of fueling continuing, steep drops in U.S. newspapers’ print
circulation. Again, according to TechCrunch, Outsell forecasts 3.5
percent annual declines in both daily and Sunday circulation by 2012.
Some
57 percent of news seekers go to digital sources, up from 33 percent a
few years ago, and they’re more likely to turn to a news aggregator (31
percent) than a newspaper (8 percent) or some other site (18 percent).
Only 10 percent of news users would be willing to pay for a print
newspaper subscription to gain online access, and 75 percent say they’d
turn to a different source for local online news if their newspapers
put up a pay wall, which undoubtedly has featured in NYTimes.com’s long deliberations in weighing the risk-reward of any pay strategy.
Is
it “a good thing” for the Bay Area community that they can now draw on
both KALW’s insightful, local reporting and an aggregation of other
news tweets? Absolutely. But might other local news producers also need
to become local news aggregators to earn their spot in the habits of
online news users? Yes. KALW points the way.
--- After
we went to press on this item, we heard back from Corneli about NPR's
support for other stations to follow in KALW's footprints. "NPR
is working with 12 local stations throughout the country to develop
stronger online presences through its Argo Project. We are one of those
stations, but our project was conceived before Argo started, and I
believe we are significantly farther along in the development process."
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It’s
no secret that news organizations – even major ones like NPR and ABC
News – have used YouTube as their video backbone for some time. Not
only is it free, it affords access to the largest pool of video viewers
online. Some of these marquee players have been afforded special status
to create channels on the Internet’s video cache and share in ad
revenue driven by viewership, but now the company seems to be willing
to open the doors to any and all news organizations.
The new offering is called YouTube “Direct”
and the program will allow Webcasters to integrate the functionality of
YouTube directly to their own sites. (Something that's been relatively
easy to "hack" anyway.) As YouTube portrays the advance, it hands the
controls to the video producer, allowing producers to “request, review,
and re-broadcast user submitted video with ease.” Using the YouTube
API, the video destination site can tailor the look and feel of its
YouTube viewer and its surroundings, even allowing user-generated video
(“citizen journalism” for the newsies out there) to be uploaded to
YouTube and become viewable directly from the publisher’s site.
A
video CMS seems to accompany the offering, because one of its features
is a “moderation panel” that allows editors to review and either
approve or reject all submitted videos, “deciding which ones meet your
organization’s editorial criteria” before they go live. All videos that
pass the test of acceptability and relevance will include a link back
to the publisher’s site when they're posted on YouTube.
This
is undoubtedly a relief to some organizations who withdrew from
YouTube’s earlier content channel offering when it became clear that
YouTube, not necessarily the publisher, was exercising editorial
control. (I detailed some of the thornier issues in my Opportunopoly blog posting more than a year ago.)
Some
of the advertising issues may be TBD, but this at least represents
YouTube’s effort to mature into the kind of video repository that can
make the next leap into the home viewing channel of the future.
This
year’s CES, now taking place in Las Vegas, is replete with hundreds of
new devices that incorporate Internet video and audio networks – we
covered the coming inclusion of Pandora in many new devices at last
month’s digiday:APPS show in Los Angeles. NetFlix is making a bid to
upgrade its streaming video offering by cutting a deal yesterday with
Warner Brothers to wait 28 days before making new releases available
for consumer distribution via DVD and online. (WSJ.com notes
that live video streaming by NetFlix subscribers jumped 20 percent in
the third quarter.) NetFlix CEO Reed Hastings told CNBC that more than
100 new devices made their debut at CES this year “with NetFlix built
right in.”
Asked
whether online behemoths Apple with its iTunes store or Amazon posed a
competitive threat to NetFlix' enhanced streaming business, he
essentially said that one-off purchases would certainly find synergy on
these popular platforms (and probably Hulu as well, though he didn’t
name this platform specifically.) But for people looking to subscribe
to a service that offered them access to more than 100,000 titles,
including new releases, for less than $9/month, a NetFlix subscription
remained a good value play, Hastings said.
Lurking over YouTube’s shoulder, Cisco made an interesting bid for the video content creation space last March with its acquisition of Pure Digital Technologies, maker of the popular Flip camcorder. At the time, observers thought
it was likely Cisco would be building in Flip integration with its
Linksys Media Hubs, something that eventually could morph into some
kind of personal or family-centric video cloud.
Our
observation is this: everyone may be a videographer, but there remains
an appetite for “news” video by reputable providers. Giving such
entities the tools to till their own video gardens is long overdue by
YouTube and a definite sign that the portal acknowledges the need to
share the wealth with those channels that can raise the bar on its
content offerings. News providers can’t follow NetFlix’s example and
turn these channels into potential subscription plays, however, without
Google (YouTube’s owner) being willing to take the next step:
permitting pay-per-view or subscription models.
Note
that this is a step Google already has taken for paid content providers
who allow the search giant to scan and index their site information.
Essentially, it would allow site-published video to be discoverable via
YouTube, but only viewable on the publisher’s site. Publishers could,
conversely, only upload excerpts of longer form stories (YouTube said
nothing about lifting its 10-minute limit in its information page on
the new service), or adopt some form of the YouTube channel scheme that
allows them to sell video overlays and keep the revenue. But it's well
past time to have this conversation.
YouTube
was at least open enough to ask potential “Direct” program participants
what they planned to do with their improved opportunities. Doubtless,
what the company hears will cause it to change the landscape once
again.
DM2Events is planning a video “upfront” half-day conference in
NYC in April to explore all the digital ad delivery options available to
agencies and brands in what will undoubtedly make 2010 “the year that
it happens” for online video. As the kinds of reputable content providers who would benefit from better access to online video advertisers, I’d welcome your suggestions on what would be the most useful take-aways from such an event (email Melinda.gipson at gmail.com.)
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It takes Morgan Stanley 424 pages to say what I did in 28: it's still early in the era of the mobile Web, but things are about to heat up. It's not exactly light reading, but the 92-page slide "highlight reel" is probably worth booking a conference room and just kicking the ideas around.
Here's what I suggest. Hold a "mobile day" conference -- on a Saturday if you have to -- book a room, and make an announcement to everyone in the company: 1. Everyone with a mobile phone that accesses the Internet gets to come. Free food. 2. Everyone who qualifies to be invited has to read the MS report and print out JUST ONE of their favorite slides or observations. 3. Everyone offering input should complete the sentence, "If I believed these predictions to be true, here are the 5 things I'd do immediately, and the 5 things shortly thereafter." Because, what MS has said is nothing more complicated than this: within five years (and I think they're off by at least 2), more people will access "the Internet" via mobile than via computers. The mobile Web, in other words, will replace -- or at least radically alter the way people absorb -- everything that you're doing online -- by 2015. Here are MS's quick crib notes (in quotes), with my own, sometimes resonant, sometimes contrary opinions thrown in:
"Material wealth creation / destruction should surpass earlier computing cycles.
The mobile Internet cycle, the 5th cycle in 50 years, is just starting.
Winners in each cycle often create more market capitalization than in
the last. New winners emerge, some incumbents survive – or thrive –
while many past winners falter." Translation -- there's a whole new breed of developers and mobile content creators who are filling up those shiny new phones with shiny new apps. There are plenty of monetization engines like AdWhirl and AdMob and Quattro Wireless ready to help them monetize their creations, almost without lifting a finger. "The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years." Translation: We've been through this before -- this time it will go much faster and hit much harder. "Five IP-based products / services are growing / converging
and providing the underpinnings for dramatic growth in mobile Internet
usage – 3G adoption + social networking + video + VoIP + impressive
mobile devices." Okay, but did you see the video I posted called the "Blair Scare"? It turns out that the guy at the FCC who is IN CHARGE of the nation's broadband initiative says that outages that have been besetting AT&T in cities like New York will be COMMONPLACE in every major city in the country within four years without IMMEDIATE attention to faster allocation of more bandwidth to accommodate demand. Not everyone noticed, but AT&T quietly stopped selling iPhones over the holidays in NYC, presumably because the grid already is groaning under the load. "Apple + Facebook platforms serving to raise the bar for how users connect / communicate – their respective ramps in user and developer engagement may be unprecedented." Shiny, cool toy + "the kids are doing it" + status X API's = massive multiplier effect. It costs $99 to become an iPhone developer. You can build an iPhone app in an hour using NewsGator's TapLynx and an RSS feed. (Disclaimer: I had help.) But it's not just the iPhone that provides the megaphone to whatever you're data-casting. There are just shy of a dozen other APIs that afford users the ability to engage, share and re-publish data with their own networks. (Facebook Connect, MySpaceID, Sign In With Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo! mail
and AOL mail being just a few.) Companies like Gigya offer technology that makes it possible for users to sign on one time with your system -- whatever it is -- and "socialize" your information wherever they interact electronically. The era of the dreaded, cave-dwelling "multiple sign-on" is almost extinct.
"Decade-plus Internet usage / monetization ramps for mobile Internet in Japan plus desktop Internet in developed markets provide roadmaps for global ramp and monetization." Just wait 'till QR codes replace coupons. Eventually, people will share their own PERSONALIZED codes with merchandisers so they'll only be bothered when someone knows they're in the market for something. If the light's not on, pretend nobody's home (sending a signal that you don't want to be bothered will be the only way in future to protect your privacy and possibly your sanity.) "Massive mobile data growth is driving transitions for carriers and equipment providers." No kidding. All of a sudden CDMA starts to make a lot of sense -- but Qualcomm already knew that. Massive demands on bandwidth mean bandwidth sharing, hopping and splitting are going to put increasing demands on handset and chip manufacturers. Phones may become increasingly disposable, and carrier contracts obsolete. The idea that publishers can keep up with the manufacturers and play this game as equals begins to look hopelessly naive, unless they're flexible enough not to get hooked on any single device or technology. "Emerging markets have material potential for mobile Internet
user growth. Low penetration of fixed-line telephone and already
vibrant mobile value-added services mean that for many EM users and
SMEs, the Internet will be mobile." For "local" publishers, the world isn't as flat as Friedman says it is. True, you can make a product anywhere and sell it to anyone in the world, so long as you can reach them with the appropriate marketing and delivery means (no mean feat in secondary markets, and even some bigger ones as folks along the East Coast learned just a couple of weeks ago). On some level, local publishers have had to push the concept of "shopping local" to mask the fact that that notion, for many businesses, died along with "Main Street." Civic responsibility is local. Education is local (except when it, too, is online), but shopping is definitively not -- 2009's holiday blizzard drove the last stake into that canard. I'm not saying that Main Street merchants and local businesses don't matter. They are vital to the economy and the success of any local publisher, but the tools they need to be provided to succeed have to be focused at a much broader market. This toolset will very likely involve mobility, information about how to access and connectivity to new markets, search marketing and cross-cultural translation. What does it really mean when business is everywhere the customer is all the time? What's the "Open Table" equivalent of just-in-time services and purchase behavior? Figure it out people. Like Morgan Stanley says -- one survivor to another: "New winners emerge, some incumbents survive – or thrive –
while many past winners falter." Welcome to the 'tens.
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A few Facebook stats to start us off: - More than
350 million active users; more than 35 million users update their status each
day
- Every
month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications
- More than
500,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
- More than
250 applications have more than one million monthly active users
- More than
80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since its general
availability in December 2008
- More than
60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook Connect on external websites
every month
Now, would you believe that the 100 or so publishers who answered the call to participate in a recent apps survey were even MORE likely to have developed an iPhone app than a Facebook App? I'm not saying you should be developing for Facebook -- necessarily. Just that it's so inexpensive and easy to plug Facebook Connect into your OWN Website that even other social networking sites are doing it. It's turning Facebook into a kind of social operating system for those who are successful -- and the rest, like LinkedIn -- are using Twitter. For a really fine installation of Facebook Connect, check out what TVGuide.com has done with the "favorite TV show" field. If I'm not mistaken, you can add fields too; they just may not been seen on Facebook profile pages, but with the "cause" option and any number of icebreakers that Facebook itself has envisioned, there's plenty to play with. But, back to apps. In a survey of more than 600 digital media and/or marketing professionals, done in the name of DM2PRO.com and with Quattro Wireless as a sponsor, here are just a few of the things that we found: * Think apps are a fad? The tipping point to the contrary will be reached in 2010 for the advertising community. Among advertisers or agencies who have
worked with mobile apps, a third expect their mobile apps budgets to increase
by more than 75 percent in 2010, some by greater than 200 percent. As a reality check, more than half of
the more than 234 advertisers, agencies and marketers who participated in the
survey, said they haven’t yet developed mobile or social apps. But, among these
skeptics, 65 percent said they plan to develop mobile apps in 2010, with iPhone
being the clear winner in terms of platform of choice at 91 percent (followed
by Android at 39 percent, RIM at 33 percent, Palm at 19 percent.)
* Among those who have already developed
apps, the leading platform is still Facebook, by about 12 percent (and Facebook's own stats would seem to back that up.) But iPhone is a close second,
showing that marketers are keen to follow audiences wherever they live or work
or interact. Branded community sites are the next most popular venue for apps,
then MySpace. Android lags this list at just 9.5 percent, though it’s more
popular in the developer community, and with publishers.
* For publishers who’ve developed apps,
the inverse is true: iPhone leads Facebook. More than 35 percent of publisher’s who
took the survey say that, even in today’s tight times, they expect their mobile
revenues to increase by more than 50 percent. * Social-only
developers focus mainly on Facebook (74 percent), but 90 percent of this group
are going mobile in 2010, with 75 percent working on iPhone apps and 55 percent
on RIM. * Android is more a factor with developers who view apps as a business and see upside in all the new Google phones.
The survey was really the first in-depth look at the entire applications or “apps”
ecosystem. As the mobile landscape continues to evolve, these data provide an
essential window into where the industry stands today and where it is headed. Considering that more than half the total advertising/agency
respondents in our respondents represent agencies (130), presumably with
multiple clients, the number of branded mobile applications entering the market
next year could be substantial. You would think that would put news organizations with still-large traditional media reach in the driver's seat here. After all, how better to rise above the clutter than with an unlimited print marketing budget at your disposal? The surprise, of course, is that publishers who have in fact developed mobile applications rank traditional advertising near the bottom of means to promote them effectively.
For background, these State of the Industry Surveys I do are developed alongside targeted
"digiday" events to give digital media and marketers insights on what their peers
are really doing in that environment. The affiliated daily publication reaches more than 35,000 practitioners in the digital marketing and media industry. The whole point of the exercise is to
expand what professionals need to know to plan
and execute their programs profitably. Quattro Wireless’ deep reach into the
mobile developer community made it the perfect industry collaborator for this
research because developers will exercise substantial influence on the way this
market goes, and Quattro helps developers promote their apps, and provides an advertising network to help them monetize those that are ad-supported. (You might recall that Google just bought a little company called AdMob that does something very similar.) Developers' apparent inclination to ramp up Android development could
make this market interesting; apps that are monetized through consumer sales
certainly will represent a burgeoning market. But advertisers appear convinced that
iPhone apps are their best clear pathway to consumer connections.
Developers who work for advertisers or
agencies said they expect mobile development budgets to increase sharply, while
their counterpart social-only developers report their spending for next year
should be roughly flat. At a time when online advertising is inching downward,
58 percent of agency mobile developers expect increases of more than 40
percent.
The most engaged brand categories with
apps, according to active respondents who represent them, are: CPG, retail,
automotive, entertainment, financial, health/pharma, media, tech, B2B and
beverage. Lagging brands – those represented by advertisers or agencies who
haven’t yet developed apps, in order of response by least engaged are roughly the inverse: B2B,
health/pharma, media, retail, financial, entertainment, travel, CPG, tech, and
auto. The whole shebang -- including some fascinating data points on what mobile phone each group (advertisers/developers/publishers) employ for personal use, is available on DM2PRO.com. Publishers who took the survey got it free.
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Bill
Wise, VP and GM of Display Platforms at Yahoo!, heads the ad platforms
business, including the Right Media Exchange and the APT behavioral
targeting platform. His past includes heading Did-it, which enabled ad
agencies to manage all their SEM programs from one dashboard, and he’s
on the client advisory board for Microsoft
Digital Advertising Solutions, the search engine marketing council
board for Google, and is a board member for the DMA IMAB (Interactive
Marketing Advisory Board).
When
he entered the business there were six ad networks. The next year there
were 20. Now there are 400 and the “ad exchange” is the new ad network
-- necessary to reassemble a fragmented market for the marketers. His
view: this recession, like the last one, will spur a wave of new
innovation from people who, empowered by their Internet knowledge, may
create their own brands and their own companies. But that innovation,
he predicts, will likely come from the “buy side” of the market.
“Marketers
for decades have used content as ad proxies for audiences. They don’t
want to use proxies at all. They wan to use data to target the exact
people they want.” How should publishers respond in a world where –
because of micropublishing, verticals are growing at a faster pace than
their traditional brands and, “That brand becomes less relevant year
over year.”
How
advertisers and publishers leverage data in the next 12 months could
begin to shape the content/marketing exchange for a decade. I've pared
Wise’s digiday:TARGET keynote down to around 20 minutes. This is the kind of season where the prescience of a few "wise men" are
reinacted (if Bill will pardon the inevitable pun.) So, take a few
minutes between holiday parties to reminisce about where the ad
network/ ad targeting market has been, and hear where one of the key
players in our industry thinks it’s going. (Click on the upper right-hand corner to play the video.)
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I've spend the last week at not one but two conferences on the cutting edge of media transformation, and it will probably take me more than a few blog posts to convey the essence of what's important to online newspapers from each. The two shows were digiday:TARGET and digiday:APPS, and both came at the issue of media disruption from seemingly opposite ends of we as publishers might call the "client continuum."
The data-meisters at TARGET made the point that it isn't enough for agencies anymore to sit back and cook up a good idea or a great, well-integrated campaign. It's what they do, sure, but where they want to be is where publishers were for many years, followed by ad networks, followed by ad exchanges (seeking to reassemble the marketplace fractured by increasingly targeted ad networks). They want to know where their consumer is at all times. If they could tag the lot of them with ankle bracelets and follow them throughout the day, they would. There are of course more subtle ways to tease behavioral insights from the horn-billed, blue-Friday doorbuster. But the trend to watch is that, while most online publishers seem to try to engage "readers" while they're involved in a certain "activity" (i.e. READING), the next wave of media mogul will be able to demonstrate engagement across a number of devices employed in a number of activities from mobile to social to business applications. Which is, of course, what brings us to "apps," or the portable / interactive content experience. For most publishers, the app is an extension of a more traditional brand -- a way to extend the experience and return people to home base to transact or more deeply engage. For some lucky brands, the activity is ubiquitous and the app is anywhere there's a device that can support it. Take Pandora. Pandora's
goal is nothing less than to replace terrestrial radio, Lizzie Widhelm
told digiday:APPS LA last week. Far from being a grandiose pipe dream, it's entirely possible, “if we can
be anytime anywhere,” she added. Terrestrial radio right now garners 18 hours a
week from the average American. For Pandora, usage spikes in the car,
possible with iPhone in-dash hook-ups, and on the weekend, when users
use it to track their parties.
But, now Pandora
is working with major chip-set manufacturers to embed the personalized
radio service into more than 70 new devices to be shown at next month’s
Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month, including a
refrigerator.
The idea, says
Widhelm in this video excerpt, is that advertisers and agencies
will begin to reach users individually, and by their activities, such
as when cooking or dining. “That’s where the app space is going,” she
said. And, it's where advertisers want to reach them. Taking this full circle, companies like Rubicon, who've been putting audience data back in the hands of publishers, plus BlueKai, and Targus, will all be pressured to reassemble data for brands and agencies who know that, at the end of the day, it's about finding the right audiene. After the first privacy hearing of last week, it became crystal clear to me that, at least for brands that fall into the category of financial and pharma, advertisers will have to go the extra mile to create a large and vibrant community of consumers who have opted in to their information and marketing or they risk being stripped of any customer insights whatsoever. Holding your customers closer may start to squeeze out the agencies and marketers who've taken brands the last mile to the consumer's field of view. What if the brand itself can satisfy that need? Look no further than to American Express OPEN for a superb example of this vertical integration. Amex's OPEN took a best of show in the DPAC Awards that followed Target in NYC because it was so clearly head-and-shoulders above its competition in at least three core categories. OPEN trounced BusinessWeek in "Best Branded Social Media Community," "Best Branded Website" and "Best Digital Branding Campaign." We're already at the point where supporting a community of prospective clients with the tools and the contacts that they need to thrive constitutes both branding and publishing. While Amex is itself a publisher with publications like Travel, it owes much to agencies Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Federated Media, Ogilvy + Mather and Digitas for its OPEN campaigns. All these specialists excel because of their ability to assemble audiences for their clients, even if it makes more sense to become a publisher than to sponsor one. They partnered with top bloggers of course -- including those that work for well-established websites. But they were also willing to fully immerse themselves into the minds of their target audience to know what business owners were thinking and reading, and then spend what was necessary to reassemble that content into a place they could begin to call "home" on the Web. Other than the fact that the bloggers were paid to participate (not true in the case of HuffPo and others), this is a form of content aggregation traditional publishers decry, but might be better off imitating. Publishers can use the data-miners' insights to slice, dice and reassemble audiences for sponsors, or just learn more about what their audiences read so they can make more and better content in the same vein, or collect and disperse it into the channels the information user finds most useful. If you listen closely, your audience will even tell you the brands they favor, and that you'd do well to engage to support your activities. In short, learn where the audience is, how they're employing your information, where else they derive useful data, and what use they make of it. Then, undoubtedly, there's an app for that.
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The FTC Privacy Workshop Monday did what all FTC workshops do: serve as the deadline for a significant slate of industry product or policy announcements. Some, like the Yahoo! “Ad Interest Manager BETA,” have clearly been cooking for a while. (If Alan Davidson, Google’s Director for Public Policy and Government Affairs is to be believed, it’s the same system Google developed that was “hacked” and shared to all search engines. “Which is fine,” he hastened to add, “we endorse that.”) But the premise behind the public interest pay-back of such a “feature,” may be flawed to the core.
Davidson says Google’s beta, which has been operating since Spring, draws only tens of thousands of users each week. He explains, “it also may be that this is something users don’t do on a regular basis. So, I don’t think we necessarily expect a lot of recurring traffic to the site.” Done right, “it’s probably the kind of thing that users do once and forget.” (Pause for marketers to retort, “as quickly as possible.”) Yet, one of the clear take-aways from the panel on which Davidson appeared is that consumers don’t know how their data is used by sites, and surveys show their assumptions are badly flawed. Clearly, said Jules Polonetsky, Co‐Chair, Director, for the Future of Privacy Forum, the sites themselves are largely to blame. Polonetsky’s point: if publishers and sites spent the same kind of time explaining to users the benefits of targeting as they did implementing the science, much of the argument about online privacy would go away. Nowhere was his point more instantly observable than with the Yahoo Ad Interest Manager. It wasn’t linked or trumpeted from the front page (no “notification” take-over here.) It was buried as a link to its privacy policy, which all the research panelists collectively agreed nobody reads (and might not understand if they did.) What it does do is give users the opportunity to opt OUT of certain interest categories: Finance >Consumer Credit Info, General Health, Life Stages > Education > College and University, Miscellaneous > News, Sports, Travel > Destinations > North America > United States, Travel. According to Davidson, health and finance (in particular consumer credit) are among a list of items Google explicitly has decided not to use for ad targeting. People who are informed about behavioral targeting would opt out of it at a rate of 75 percent, according to Joseph Turow, associate dean for grad studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Yet, transparency isn’t really notification if consumers don’t do the work necessary to protect themselves, a.k.a. read site privacy policies. If that were true, Davidson said, you’d expect most of the visitors to the Google opt-out page to turn targeting off. In fact, “Four times as many people actually change their preferences rather than opting out….Ten times as many people do nothing as opt out. To simply say people will get rid of it (isn’t predictable). Your mileage may vary." Polonetsky’s suggestion: Give people the “gist” of what happens when they use your site – quickly, easily and in English. Make sure that means what happens to their information when they’re off your site. A little more effort on the part of industry is clearly necessary, Davidson conceded. It’s feasible to do a better job in consumer notification and transparency. “I don’t necessarily know how, but the industry has to get together to do something” to address the issue. He praised the efforts of Carnegie Mellon University (Privacyfinder.org) to create easily recognizable symbols that represent the “nutritional value” of various sites’ privacy policies. But, as became clear in the afternoon session, it’s Google – and probably Comcast – that has the target painted on its back. Pamela Jones Harbour, FTC Commissioner, opened the session by saying that she fears society is nearing a “tipping point” – one might more accurately call it a bridge too far – where the amount of personally identifiable information available on every living American outstrips government’s ability to regulate it. She raised the specter of “the database of intentions” in John Battelle’s book “The Search” on Google, residing in the hands of just a few media monoliths, and made clear that both Google’s acquisition of AdMob and Comscore’s merger with NBC Universal would be subject to vigilant scrutiny, “from both competition and consumer protection angles.”
Yet she also excoriated efforts by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) to selectively legislate against behavioral targeting, saying that she hoped more comprehensive privacy legislation might ensue from the FTC’s dialog with industry, which will continue into next year.
I'll be blogging tomorrow from the digiday:TARGET show in New York, which will undoubtedly be packed with commentary for the FTC's continuing efforts.
***
Among the other new products taking a dive off the FTC springboard: BlueKai's "In-Market Reports," providing agencies and their clients with insights into the in-market shopping profiles of advertisers' site audiences. Such intelligence can be used to verify the data profile of a target audience while discovering actionable data segments in the BlueKai Exchange to reach similar prospects at scale.
“Advertisers need to know more about their site audience and what they are shopping for. The BlueKai In-Market Report is the first of its kind to provide knowledge into actual shopping patterns vs. audience surveying,” Omar Tawakol, BlueKai’s CEO said in a press release. BlueKai’s panel of 160 million "true intenders" based on more than 10,000 behavioral attributes, aims to offer a shopper profiling service that "unmatched in the market today.”
Tawakol also spoke at the FTC hearing and his comments are worth a listen.
Also interesting, though -- Experian Chief Privacy Officer Jim Adler's comments that marketing database companies can't be held to an excessively high standard for marketing data because much of their information is only estimated (income ranges, for example). Such data is "good enough" for marketers, because they're not targeting individuals anyway, they're targeting "types" of people who fit into a squishily broad range.
Needless to say, the vast majority of the FTC's attention is being driven by an impression diametrically opposed to this assertion: that the very survival of online publishers hinges on increasingly targeted advertising.
One example from BlueKai's new service is instructive. BlueKai may uncover that an online luxury women’s shopping site is comprised of consumers who are 20 times more likely than the general internet audience to be in-market for branded women’s accessories (a likely assumption). But it may also reveal that the same audience is ten times more likely to be in-market for Paris travel. Such information helps publishers expand their revenue base, and even expand their editorial offerings.
Money quote: "BlueKai In-Market Reports take the guesswork out of data targeting and let us hone in on our most relevant prospects before we spend a penny on media,” says Matthew Greitzer, VP and Head of ATOM Systems at Razorfish, whose team has implemented BlueKai In-Market Reports for clients across retail and travel verticals.
Agencies, certainly, will look for consumers whether the "publisher" in question is a lifestyle magazine, or a cataloger. It begs the conclusion that, if newspapers don't adequately explain the information exchange -- for the explicit purpose of better marketing -- that adheres to free content, they'll have less data to monetize than Walmart.
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I'm thinking Marketwatch got it right. Instead of discussing a “divestiture” by GE of NBC Universal, consider that GE is buying 49% of Comcast.
“GE
goes from owning 80% of bunch of content creation and content ownership
resources to owning 49% of a bunch more content creation and content
ownership and most importantly, content distribution (that’d be
Comcast’s cable networks themselves) resources.”
At simple face value, the family-controlled Comcast puts Brian Roberts at the helm of:
* The nation’s largest cable operator, in 24 million homes
* The country’s 2nd largest internet provider with 15 M customers
* NBC-owned broadcast and cable, including 27 TV stations and 11 cable networks
* Movie studios, and
* Hulu.com
At
the very least, it’s a marriage of content and distribution – NBC and
Comcast Sports. A thoroughly vertical (end-to-end server farm to
customer) Internet platform, complete with what’s arguably the TV
viewer of choice: Hulu. Some of the most popular cable channels.
Unprecedented knowledge of what people watch, how they consume that
content and advertising access to them.
On
the regulatory front, the Center for Digital Democracy has called it
akin to Godzilla swallowing Rockefeller Center. NBC owns TV stations in
Philadelphia and Chicago where Comcast owns cable franchises, and where
it may arguably be asked to divest to meet FCC market domination rules.
Full details will likely emerge Thursday (today) when the full scale of the deal is announced, but, in the meantime, the Washington Post reports
that the dealmakers are already moving to anticipate objections and
build in curb appeal for regulators to approve the merger.
WaPo’s
summary: "The $30 billion transaction would significantly reshape the
media landscape by giving the nation's largest cable and broadband
Internet provider control over content that makes up one out of five TV
viewing hours, according to some analysts."
At minimum, interactive video just got a whole lot more interesting.
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Found it -- a company that facilitates catalog sharing -- or something close. And in NoVa too. As my mother used to say, "If it'd been a snake, it ha' bit ya." Back around Black Friday I complained that nobody had invented a way to really socially share catalogs. Well, someone's come close. It's a Clearspring company (the widget and app company based in Vienna, funded by Ted Leonsis that I blogged about here in October of 2008), and it's called AddThis. AddThis -- akin to ShareThis -- lets you grab and share all kinds of content. Typically, you just post a link to the content onto any number of social networks -- you still can't talk about it in the widget. So, this still has a ways to go to become collaborative shopping. But it's a start. Here's a short list of who, besides Kohl's "today's add" application which must be too new to have made AddThis' website list, is using it so far:
Autoblog.com
Borders Australia
Drugstore.com
Ducati
eBay
EddieBauer
Fisher Price
Foot Locker
Nikon
Shop CCS
Swatch
Vogue Paris
Wedding Channel
Zazzle
Now that I know what sharing a catalog looks like in today's technology, I have to say that the thing that seems most like the ability to share shopping "finds" and actually discuss them looks a lot like Grouptivity. Grouptivity, btw, was just awarded a patent for its core technology, which involves capturing and sharing content in email and on social networks, so the next wave of innovators in the space must tread gingerly. Bottom line: don't think you're ever too observant to overlook the obvious. (Hmmm... art of the obvious -- isn't that what some people call journalism? ;-)
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Does every
brand need an app?
It’s more than one of the panel questions I'll be asking at next week's LA digiday:APPS show. It’s the kind of
nagging, resource allocation issue plaguing an already strapped online
newspaper industry. But recent technology advances – and key, market-reach
strategic plays – may turn apps development into a kind of offer publishers
can’t refuse. It’s an oversimplification, but a couple recent
offers essentially break down into do-it-yourself with RSS, and aggregated
“best of breed.”
NewsGator: Better App-ing through RSS
Over Black Friday, upstart NewsGator claims to have logged
blockbuster sales of its new “TapLynx” app
framework that requires “absolutely no coding” to develop an iPhone app.
Leveraging the modular RSS feed technology that makes NewsGator a popular social
networking/widget platform (powering CBS, CNN, Discovery, National Geographic,
Procter & Gamble and USA Today), and its free NetNewsWire RSS aggregator
for the iPhone, NewsGator’s proposition is this: fill out a simple config file,
plug in standard RSS feeds and “voila” – iPhone app in an afternoon.
The framework incorporates anything that can be “fed,”
including text, images and video, all viewed inline with the application. And,
at least on Black Friday, it sold for just $500 – less than a day’s cost of
professional mobile coding.
Users of the app can share the content with their Facebook,
e-mail and Twitter followers, and all apps work equally well on the iPod Touch.
All Things Digital, Variety.com and
NewsGator itself have apps built on TapLynx, and proponents say it’s as easy as
configuring an iGoogle page.
TapLynx features include:
• Support for ads, sponsorships and/or download fees.
• Customization: Developers can change content or look and feel without
resubmitting their apps to the iTunes App Store.
• The flexibility to use existing content presentation templates, or
extending the framework to use their own, and
• Analytics – TapLynx measures application usage both online and off.
“TapLynx makes iPhone apps as easy to create as they are to
conceive,” said Daniel Feld, chief operating officer of Slice of Lime, a Webby award winning Web
development firm and NewsGator’s TapLynx launch partner. “Developing one
shouldn’t have to be rocket science, and now it isn’t.”
AP Hurls Verve into White-Label Apps
The big dog in the race to app-etize newspapers is still Verve Wireless. The company’s
technology underlies AP’s wireless news portal, which already integrates
content from more than 1,000 local news sources. Just yesterday, AP announced
that it would be adding impreMedia’s Hispanic news content into the offering as
an “AP Mobile Noticías en Español” channel. The deal mobilizes content from
across impreMedia’s network including El Diario/La Prensa in New York, La Raza
in Chicago and La Opinion in Los Angeles.
In the broader race for content collaborators everywhere,
Verve last month revealed that it was teaming with AP to offer “White Label
Mobile Application Publishing Services” to its media partners. Benjamin Moss,
AP’s well known mobile products director, told us, “It is available to all
Verve customers. News organizations do not have to be affiliated with AP in
order to sign up for this service.”
Hope you’re paying attention to that one – newspapers’ local
competitors, including local broadcasters, have an equal opportunity to profit
from the deal.
The positive appeal to news organizations that have already
adapted their feeds to the AP aggregated app should be obvious. The ability to
leverage AP’s interface work and its already massive reach among news junkies
is just smart. AP’s app has been downloaded by more than 2.4 million people and
has more than 55 million page views a month. The application provides rich
media graphics, audio and video in addition to breaking news alerts.
“Customization” is a word that sounds expensive to news
managers, but Verve claims news apps can be templated, and the ability to
amortize its development costs across hundreds of news clients adds weight to
this impression.
Another potential, long-term edge: Verve’s platform
encompasses Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Nokia, Palm Pre and Windows Mobile.
Even in corporate-owned news organizations with centralized developer
resources, few program to all six platforms.
Verve cites studies showing that mobile apps drive 4-X-10X
greater usage than Web editions, and newspapers have been struggling with the
frequency issue. Verve’s argument for publishers to “own” a piece of the user’s
mobile screen is compelling, too. Unstated but implicit is the option for
publishers to charge subscription fees in future if either market demand or a
dearth of advertising force a re-evaluation of their business models. Asking
someone to pay for something they use regularly would undoubtedly be an easier
sell than pay-to-download from day one.
"When we launched the AP Mobile news network, the main
objective was to deliver new revenue opportunities for our AP members at the
local level. This new solution further supports that mission," said Jeff
Litvack, AP's general manager of mobile and emerging products in the Verve release.
"Building an app from scratch is time consuming and costly, there are
numerous things to consider, and we want AP member news outlets to leverage
what we've learned from our experiences with AP Mobile, freeing them to focus
on creating compelling editorial content as well as developing new means for advertisers
to reach readers."
The plan calls for Verve to handle the set up and launch of
a publishers' branded app, giving media companies the controls to select and
deliver relevant local news to mobile users through a customizable interface –
and this is the real kicker – “supported by existing and in-network
advertisers.” AP is stepping up its efforts on network ad sales, but the more
compelling opportunity for newspapers would be to “sell up” into the network
for local or regional ad clients.
Benchmarking against platform-wide ad delivery metrics is
one draw in this context, but Verve has taken things a step further, providing
a dashboard that gives advertisers and marketers access as well. Publishing
options include mobile Web, client applications for all platforms, and video.
Advertising options include display, messages, interstitial, video, and
national geo-targeting, with the ability to manage one campaign across all
properties using the national network. Reporting and analytics are all provided
through the dashboard.
Verve’s independent client base is a window into what’s to
come in mobile media; it works with more than 600 leading media companies from
the U.S., Canada and Europe, including many broadcast stations.
Why choose?
Good question. My view: there are
myriad reasons -- and development options -- for creating inexpensive iPhone
apps. Media General was such a big believer in the medium that it acquired
NetInformer, which offers additional SMS services like classifieds, news alerts
and mobile coupons.
But for simplicity and exposure,
NewsGator’s price point is hard to ignore. iPhone is likely the market leader
for some time to come (as will be evident from my current survey in collaboration with Quattro Wireless), making a simple,
constantly updateable, multimedia iPhone app an inexpensive no-brainer. With
such experience under their belts, publishers would be even better positioned
to weigh the benefits of working with existing mobile ad networks with the
reach and embedded clientele of AP’s Verve platform.
How effective AP is in creating an
open, collaborative sales operation will be a key factor in the platform’s
financial success, and commensurate appeal to participating publishers.
Publishers -- at least those willing to
spend 5 minutes in taking a survey!!! -- will be swimming in the kind of data they
need to make these key decisions in coming weeks. I'll have more input on the
market factors affecting APPS decision makers next week, and NewsGator will shortly release a survey
of more than 200 iPhone developers, which I'll share as soon as it's public.
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I don't have a DROID phone -- or even a phone with an Android browser of any kind (note to self: must become more important to phone mfgrs.) And yet, I'm really REALLY not alone. DM2PRO.com's survey of the apps developer community shows the following personal preferences for mobile phone use:
| Response
Percent |
|
|---|
| BlackBerry / RIM | | 10.0% |
| | Palm | | 3.3% |
| | iPhone | | 63.3% |
| | Android-based phone | | 38.3% |
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I have to say that I was actually impressed with how high the Android number was, but the iPhone remains the clear leader and RIM and Palm laggards. One interjection -- we have extremely low response among publisher-based developers. Is that because folks like online newspapers don't have in-house apps developers, or because online newspaper publishers no longer take surveys? I suspect the latter, given how many people on my own personal lists have opted out of Survey Monkey. For the record, this is just sad. Digital agency and brand folks are every bit as busy as their publishing counterparts, and yet they take the time to engage in such surveys because they share in the knowledge of the results. Why? It's invaluable industry intel. How do you expect to know where your market is going unless you study it relentlessly. This is worth the 10 minutes/quarter it would take to answer this or a similar request. But back to my point. I don't have an Android phone, and this presents one interesting challenge when it comes to seeing how retailers are appealing to their Black Friday audience on mobile. Kudos go to Steve Smith at MediaPost who blogged his own reactions to top retailers' mobile interfaces here. Among his cogent observations: "Foremost, and I can't emphasize this enough, if a modern retail or
content site is not sniffing my browser and serving the appropriate
mobile version of itself, it just invites me to leave." Search agents are complicit and don't push the mobile variant to their rightful place in search return results. Sites worth a look on the mobile include Amazon, in a class by itself as always, but also Walmart and Target, which put the deals front and center. (Particularly impressive to Smith was Target's calendar of deals -- which I'll just observe is a direct lift from Amazon's own virtual BF deals, which arise and expire regularly like the real-world K-Mart blue-light specials.) Think about it -- and this is my own observation -- I'm using my mobile to check prices at o-dark-30 while I'm in line for this <blanking> door-buster aren't I? You should anticipate why I'm here and give me what I want as quickly as humanly possible. Just as with the circular observation I made earlier in the week, I couldn't find any newspapers trying to localize a mobile index of such sites and sales, which would have been extremely helpful. After all, the WaPo dead-tree Thursday door-buster circular packet weighed at least a pound and a half. The mobile edition? Breaking news, politics, photos, blogs, weather, sports -- check. Shopping? Nope. If several thousand people in your target market are out standing in front of a store at 4 a.m., coordinating with their family members via mobile for the wish-list door-buster, I assure you this is a highly desirable target market for the local retailers in your area. Just having a mobile shopping index, and maybe an "exit poll" of the most popular "IT" toy of the season would be an amusing diversion from the long lines if nothing else. Take this as a not-too-subtle nudge on three fronts. 1. Take my state of the industry app survey, or forward it to someone in your shop with an informed opinion: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/69BGLGM . You'll at least have a clue what's going on in apps from the perspective of the brands and agencies who care the most about them, not to mention the developers who are shaping your audience, right now, as we speak. 2. If you don't have a developer -- in house or on call -- for mobile apps or functionality, how is this possible? Find one, and quickly. 3. You're cool on mobile. Your m-stats are growing by the hour. So why haven't you paid attention to shopping yet? There are some fairly killer apps out there that provide comparison pricing and other services to mobile users that are quite easily discerned from the medium itself. They carry with them the ability to disenfranchise online newspapers from the value chain that runs from the consumer to them to their retail clients. And yet I would wager that which line people ended up in this morning was 90% plus driven by the paper on their porch. I'm sure it was real money to WaPo to sell its poly-bag to Kohl's. I'm equally sure that if the paper had put its SMS message to a link or even a reminder of its mobile edition with a massive hint that users in line could use its service to access an on-the-go index of all the circulars inside that bag, that they would have driven monster wireless traffic today, and made their sponsor retailers that much happier. (Mobile bulletins from the stores on when the Wii's ran out? Even more compelling from a user standpoint. Take this to the Tweet-deck and really watch your mobile traffic spike.) 4. Finally, take a 12-year-old to a doorbuster this holiday season. What a FONT of information. Penguin Club? Who knew. There are entire cultural phenoms out there just below the surface, and, whatever they are, if you don't see it from their vantage point, you're missing true enlightenment. Enough of being a nudge. I know you're trying out there, and I'm thankful of that. I'm even more grateful for your attention to my regular ranting on Opportunopoly, and wish you both a profitable and happy holiday season. As always, I'd love to get your feedback below on any of the topics we cover here.
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First, my frustration with online catalogs. Zovue,
a New Zealand company has developed a collaborative shopping
platform that could either become a shopping social network or a kind
of community catalog swap-fest for shopaholic fans of the medium.
Growing up in the mid-West, it was one of those
girlish holiday traditions we enjoyed. “The gals” would have a cookie
exchange and one of the things we’d do was bring in the piles of
catalogs we got during the year and just flip through them, swap them,
and tear out pictures or plan fantasy shopping sprees. (Occasionally,
the random page might end up under Mom’s coffee the next morning in an
envelope that read: “Beth thinks I'd look good in this...What do YOU
think?”) In case you think I'm making this up -- and to warm the hearts of the pre-print providers among us -- my son's girlfriend says her posse has come up with an equivalent. Take all the circulars from all the newspapers, circle all the doorbusters from everyone's wish lists and each pick a store to stake out at midnight or 4 a.m. (She drew BestBuy.)
There’s no digital equivalent, although I admit ShopLocal comes close, and Nielsen, below, tracks an online doorbuster tracker -- but circulars and catalogs just aren't the same, sorry. Cyber Monday will be a force of nature this year, even without modular catalogs. But whatever became
of that “collaborative shopping” thing that LL Bean tried early on?
Other than swapping urls on IM ("see this: what think for Lynn’s
kids?"), there’s no real equivalent. Whatever it is that happens
between friends in the mall when they either validate each other’s
selections, or make tactful re-directs, it’s still clunky online. And
yet, businesses can plan a nationwide roll-out of a new sales product
or the most complex engineering fix with collaboration software.
What Zovue has done is digitize catalogs
(check), and layer that with a social shopping element where people can
“share” their desktops as with other business collaboration tools
(hmmm... Interesting.) You can circle the items, drop post-its, flip
through lists, etc. – or, that is, you could if there were more
catalogs available.
It’s the classic chicken-and-the-egg scenario:
interesting technology meets marketplace monolith. But the one truly
SIMPLE thing direct mail merchandisers could do to make this an immersive reality today is this: let users click and drag whole
catalogs onto your own desktop or a shared shopping site like a widget.
If you could, a platform like Zovue could begin to approximate those
by-gone suger-high, giggle-fests around the kitchen table.
I hear the retailers out there – why would we, who
have taken such pains to make our .com site destinations, want OUR
digital catalogs to be seen next to BRAND X? Here are just a couple
of reasons.
1. A) Successful, well-branded merchandise holds its own in any environment. Retailers could be benefiting by comparison.
2. B)
Collaborative shopping multiplies the numbers of eyeballs trained on a
given item times two or three at the very least. (Think times 10 during
school breaks.)
3. C)
Content hyper-syndication is the whole point of the Web; why do you
think apps and widgets are all the rage? Retailers love their catalogs
anyway – they’re gorgeous and immersive and maybe the best
merchandising tool in the shed – why wouldn’t they want users to share
them and swap them in an environment where they could fold down the
virtual pages and circle their favorite ensembles? (It's user generated
content but for products...the key to cool, as anyone will tell you, is
in the ensemble.)
4. D)
Many merchants are already on Amazon, which is one big brand buzzkill. Why
not maintain the brand, while using retailers' biggest fans to co-market for
you?
E) It’s the next step beyond recommendations, which have already been found to carry more weight than mere product descriptions.
The two things missing here might be the catalog
“container” – what’s the open-source or industry-standard widget for
digital catalogs? (Zinio? Harvest? Olive? Adobe? Kindle?) And, where can
people go to swap them and collaboratively shop? Probably no single
site would do, and yet, without the modular content, there's no getting
started.
Zovue’s got a take on the latter that’s worth a
look. Don't be too judgmental -- innovation has to start somewhere.
Instead, as you find yourself surrounded by paper shoppers and
catalogs around the family feast on the eve of this most critical of
commerce holidays, imagine how far your retailers' catalogs could go if they could
just be detached from the immovable Web. Now, imagine what could happen if online newspapers each linked to a platform where users could all share their favorite catalogs. Hmmm... Interesting. The Huff-Po-Ization of Circulars Would it surprise anyone to know that the Web's "deal" aggregators outperformed many retailers in the past week for Web traffic? On some level, it's somehow strangely comforting to know that the big brand stores are suffering the same fate as original content providers, isn't it? According to Nielsen: "Among the top Web sites dedicated to Black Friday deals and
previews, TGI BlackFriday was the fastest growing in terms of unique
visitors, increasing 154 percent week-over-week during the week ending
Nov. 15. BlackFriday.fm and BlackFridayAds.com were the No. 2 and No. 3
fastest growing, increasing 125 and 114 percent, respectively." Retailers themselves have given over their cable ads in particular to the relentless drumbeat of "go to our Web site to pre-shop our holiday doorbusters." Week-over-week, traffic to sites that offer black Friday previews like BFads.com "has increased 87 percent, from
3.8 million unique visitors during the week ending Nov. 8 to 7.0
million during the week ending Nov. 15," Nielsen reported. And, dwell time is through the roof: "Total minutes spent on the top deal
sites increased 763 percent over the last four weeks, from 6.3 million
minutes during the week ending Oct. 25 to 54.6 million minutes in the
week ending Nov. 15." Now I know what to buy for Christmas: Akamai stock! (How will the Web stay up on Friday with the increased demand? Good thing non-retailers are largely taking the day off or we'd be in big trouble.)
But here's my main point -- if your newspaper isn't aggregating these deals for consumers, if only to maintain your place in the value chain ("How can I save my readers money and help them find what they need?"), why not? Don't stop there either. Turn your Twitter channel into a brag-fest on what great deals your readers are grabbing as a result of their early-bird-itis. (Staples was the big winner here, according to Nielsen.) Bottom line: if you can't turn the words "Black Friday deals" into a larger Twitter audience for your online newspaper, then you may as well roll up the rug.
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If for some reason the Nielsen release on the Scarborough numbers left any of you scratching your heads, you may always rely on Scarborough's Gary Meo to bring clarity. His comments: "We measure readership of printed
newspapers separately from the audience of newspaper web sites. The percentage of U.S. adults who read a printed newspaper in the past week is 70%. The percentage of U.S. adults who visited a newspaper web site in past week is 19%. The percentage of adults who read a printed newspaper in the past week OR visited a newspaper web site is 74%."
How many people who say they're reading a "printed newspaper"
are ONLY doing so online?
"If the respondent said that they are
reading the printed newspaper, than we assume they are reading in print. If they are reading in print, than, by
definition, they can’t be reading online only. Our print question is very clear that we
are talking about print and our web site question is very clear that we are
talking about the web site." He adds, "We did an internal study earlier this year
where we looked at the Integrated Newspaper Audience (INA) for 88 newspapers in
the top 50 markets. If the
aggregate INA audience is 100% of the audience pie, 75% of the audience is reading
in Print only; 9% are visiting the web site only; and 16% are reading both in
print and online." Is online newspaper readership increasing? Absolutely. "We did the same analysis in 2007 and, at
that time, 80% of the audience was reading in Print only; 6% were visiting the
web site only; and 14% were reading both in print and online. So, is the percentage of
adults reading online only increasing?
Yes, at least for the aggregate of these 88 newspapers." For the math challenged, of the people who read newspapers, those who were ONLY reading it online grew from 6% to 9% in two years -- no surprise. But the number that read both print and online also increased by two percentage points, which some might consider a near wash.
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I have to start with a couple of really big thoughts just to help you share my foul mood.
* Search remains the number one way people find
things to buy.
* The proliferation of niche shopping sites made newspapers
feel safe for awhile – there are just so many places you can go to find stuff
before you get tired and pick up a paper to see what’s on sale.
* Remember the days when you had to BUY search? Those days
are gone.
Newspapers may have had one brief and shining moment to
“fix” their retail problem. To my
way of thinking, it would have had to involve something akin to the
TotallyLocal Shopping project I undertook at GateHouse Media. It goes like
this: find someone smaller than google whose business consists of assembling
shopping feeds from any and everywhere. The closer this connectivity to the actual
retailer, the better. If there’s a working model of what this looks like
locally – eureka; you’re halfway there. Set up a shopping search portal where
shoppers can find anything they want via proximity search. The vast database of
local stuff that’s been compiled from the shopping search vendor (Yokel in this
case), will provide enough results to make the application viable while you go
out and sell it to local retailers.
Getting found on google is retailers' felt need, so
include SEM in your offering for those who don't understand the SEO benefits of being linked. Make it especially easy for merchants to send
their feeds to you; and include each product as a separate page. Linking every
product of every merchant in town to your shopping site, and linking your
shopping site to the front page of every one of your newspaper sites carries
with it plenty of google juice – even if you don’t have a couple of hundred
newspapers to magnify this effect 100-fold. Why, just being listed would help
merchants be found by local shoppers.
But wait! A key benefit for your consultative ad sales
people – the ones who really have to care about the success of their local
retailers – is instant access to the search engine’s back end. What do people
want to buy? Do we have a local retailer in our engine to provide more relevant
results for that category? No? Let's call them today and let them know what their perspective
shoppers are having to settle for because they can’t find something better
locally. (Why, you could even use the top FOUND results as a print promotion –
genius!)
Except for the print part, this all starts to unravel with
Google Product search. It’s in beta, but that’s just another way of saying that Google is promoting
like mad behind the scenes, and just in time for Black Friday too. Of course,
Google isn’t one to hand-hold; merchants are certainly welcome to provide a
feed, though, for free.
AND, they can even put the google product search box on
their own sites to make it easier for people to find what they’re selling. One
giant shopping engine, removing the friction of commerce and turning unspent
gas money into retail buying power. Google just had to get out of its own way. Froogle as a
brand just didn’t cut it. But, of course, that’s only because Google’s own
brand was already so dominating.
Until now, I would have said the only rival Google had for
becoming the de-facto commerce engine on the Internet was Amazon. Want to see something
funny? Who’s the top-listed satisfied customer in Google’s success stories? And, who recently BOUGHT them?
I don’t want to spoil the fun of looking so I’ll just end
with the retailer's testimonial for Google product search: “To keep growing, we needed to increase
traffic. And Product Search increases traffic like no other shopping engine.
Even more important, we need to continue to increase sales. That's where
Product Search is really crucial – it delivers customers who actually
buy." Ooooh, you're a mean one, Mr. Google.
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