The power of the personal brand (in a social world)

December 22nd, 2011

In a recent Nieman Journalism Lab article on the possibility of newspapers making money by selling ads on Twitter, Justin Ellis notes the successful efforts pioneered by celebrities and athletes. The fact is that the reach of certain celebrities far exceeds that of traditional media companies, so why shouldn’t advertisers pay them instead of media companies to get their word out? Besides, there’s that whole illusion of endorsement thing.

Mr. Ellis says much in a tongue-in-cheek reference to a certain reality show “star.”

Not to mention non-news outlets like, um, Kim Kardashian, for whom pay-per-tweet is a long-standing phenomenon.

Kardashian may be a “non-news outlet,” but she is so only in the sense of a traditional view of “news.” Prior to social media, celebrities required the filter of news organizations in order to be promoted, but much of that is now in their own hands. Are they “media companies?” Of course they are. And just as Wal-Mart has a bigger advertising platform than the New York Times and the Washington Post combined, Hollywood and our athletic fields are cranking out new platforms regularly. It’s into this environment that the efforts of newspapers to play copycat look just a little weak in comparison.

In the last few weeks, The Hartford Courant and The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune have experimented with using Twitter as a new advertising channel. At the Courant, they’ve started offering twice-daily deals to local businesses — think Groupon by tweet — to their followers. The Times-Picayune, more controversially, used Twitter to advertise itself — or at least its website, as the online division of its parent company, Advance Publications, paid New Orleans Saints players to tweet about the newspaper’s relaunched Saints site on Nola.com.

Mr. Ellis notes that the hashtag #spon, which appears at the end of some tweets is a “semi-legible indicator of a sponsored tweet.”

“A Twitter search for #spon is an enlightening look,” he adds, “into what sorts of companies are paying people to tweet: at the moment, Verizon, Clorox, Pepperidge Farm, and Q-Tips.”

I like what Advance Publications did in employing NFL celebrities to promote its website, but the use of a mass media Twitter news stream is problematic. It’s is a part of what I dubbed “unbundled advertising” in a 2005 essay about how to make money in the unbundled universe of the Web. It was written prior to Twitter.

If unbundled media is where we’re headed, then unbundled advertising must necessarily follow. This is a scary concept, however, for there is no command and control mechanism or manipulable infrastructure in the unbundled world. The upside, though, is that it costs very little to participate. All that’s necessary is the release what I call “ad pieces” into the seeming chaos of the Internet, where other businesses will take those pieces and reassemble them when summoned by customers who are trading their scarcity for information they actually want.

So while I fully support the concept here, we need to go back to the comparison with Kim Kardashian to understand why media companies using this particular application — in their own streams — is suspect strategically. The problem is that Kim Kardashian is a real person; The Hartford Courant is not. Ms. Kardashian’s brand is personal and as transparent as a reality star can be. Followers and fans connect with her on a visceral level. They experience emotions in their vicarious relationship with her. When Ms. Kardashian tweets for a sponsor, there’s an inference that she wouldn’t try to “fool” her fans. The endorsement also benefits her directly, and fans understand, accept and appreciate that. The few seconds it takes to “see” the endorsement isn’t wasted; it supports a real person with whom fans are connected.

Moreover, the purpose of following a celebrity on Twitter is different than the purpose of following a news organization’s stream. For Ms. Kardashian, it’s about the connection. With The Hartford Courant, it’s about the news feed. To the former, therefore, a sponsored tweet is about the person, but to the latter, it’s about noise, an interference. A sponsored tweet in the midst of a stream of news is an interruption. It’s, well, advertising.

Nevertheless, it’s good strategic thinking, because it gets us into the world of unbundling, where aggregation is the real value proposition. We’d do much better, however, if we would take up the challenge of developing the personal brands of our news people and helping them create the relational types of connections with fans enjoyed by others with celebrity. This would directly conflict with the core value proposition of mass media — the maintenance of a sterile stage from which to place advertisements — so it’s not likely a concept that media companies will enthusiastically embrace. Moreover, media companies think of employees as “theirs,” so the idea of trumpeting a brand that might one day quit and go elsewhere seems counterintuitive. This is, however, precisely the kind of thinking we need to employ, for today’s media is increasingly unbundled and social, and people follow people, not institutions.

But Mr. Ellis nails the real problem. “Newspapers,” he wrote, “are trying to insert themselves as a middleman in a medium that doesn’t require one.” He’s right. With the possible exception of aggregators, there’s just no market for middlemen online. Advertising is the new content king, because they can place that content directly in front of people in the same way we can. The people formerly known as the advertisers are now competing with us for the same eyeballs.

It’s a battle we’ll lose, because they have the money.

Posted in Advertising, Culture, Journalism, personal media, Reinventing Local Media, Unbundled Media | 1 Comment » |

Driving traffic (that doesn’t want the ride)

November 14th, 2011

The new Pew study revealing that media companies use Twitter almost exclusively for spreading links to their own content comes as no surprise.

…mainstream news organizations primarily use Twitter to move information and push content to readers. For these organizations, Twitter functions as an RSS feed or headline service for news consumers, with links ideally driving traffic to the organization’s website.

Back when Twitter first came along, I predicted that media companies would immediately become big users, because they could easily see it’s one-to-many functionality. It’s what we know and what we practice. The strategy became:

1. Get a lot of followers
2. Feed them breaking news and weather
3. Feed them promotional content
4. Feed them stories, many stories
5. Put a link in everything

Twitter is a terrific notification system, so it’s hard to blame media companies for this practice, but it points to a serious weakness that media has today: its mission can’t help but come across as hypocritical. What appears to be one of disseminating information and being society’s watchdog is actually a commercial mission to make money. There’s nothing inherently evil about that, but think about it. If influencing public life is the goal, then readership is what matters, and there are many ways to efficiently deliver unbundled content via the Web. When forcing people to read our content within our infrastructure, then it’s clear that monetizing that content is more important than anything else.

Using Twitter this way is easy, but it’s also lazy and sells short a tool for newsgathering and news dissemination. When I talk to clients about Twitter, the stumbling block question is always “How many people do YOU follow?” The answer is simple — none or very few. This means that Twitter is to them, in fact, nothing more than a notification system.

However, some individual employees of news organizations use Twitter in a myriad of ways, including to participate in its unique discussions. These employees seem aware of the new reality that their personal brands are everything in the world that’s ahead, so they participate in social media. These smart people may include links to their work as well, but that isn’t necessarily the sole purpose of their accounts. It gets very tricky for some media companies when they try to control the personal accounts of employees, because they cling to the notification system paradigm and the ethical (and profitable) mechanism of an opinion-less stage.

Twitter is also very useful on mobile device, so the practice of only spreading links — that then lead to a fully-packed website and not an HTML5 landing page — is ultimately self-defeating. This is a different playing field with different rules, and we risk our own relevancy by insisting that it’s best used to drive traffic to our advertiser-fed websites.

And nobody ever asked to be driven to such a place in the first place.

Posted in Technology, Twitter, Unbundled Media, Uncategorized | 3 Comments » |

My personal viewing space

June 12th, 2011

I find that after I get caught up with my reading, I’m increasingly spending Sunday mornings with YouTube, just aimlessly drifting but finding myself genuinely satisfied. The place is amazing, and if you’ve never done so, just start a search and let the site guide you on a serendipitous path of discovery.

In so doing, I’ve discovered something about “lean back” TV versus “lean forward” TV: the former can be done with a group, but the latter is most certainly a singular experience. This is why I wonder about mixing the two and whether that will ever be the success that some hope it will.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a strong believer in unbundled TV, but I do think it’s much more something you do by yourself, because we all have different tastes. My Sunday morning journey through unbundled video is likely not to be the same as yours. It’s more than, “Honey, what do you want to watch;” it’s more like, “I want to watch this clip or that one. Go find your own.” If I want to share, I can use Twitter, or I can send a link to my wife across the room. The point is that the new serendipity can’t be planned by some programmer; it has to come from one’s own curiosity. The best that media can do is make everything available and put it in a place where it can be discovered.

Up to a point, Hulu’s the same way, but the variety’s simply not there. Plus, there’s that pay thing. This morning, John Hagel turned me on to Bridget Bardot, the French actress who awakened those adult thoughts in this adolescent boy. I then searched for James Brown’s Superbad, because I’d been hearing the thing during the NBA Finals. Then to the Blues Brothers. Finally, thanks to Eric Deggans, the drum solos from Letterman last week. I’m not sure that any of that could have been shared in the same room with my family. They would’ve just looked at me funny.

In this environment, the marketers of the world need something different to reach me, for unbundled clips aren’t conducive to 15-second TV ads. We’ve simply got to find something that moves the serendipitous adventure along, because if I see Geico, I’m bailing – immediately.

Although I did watch a bunch of Dos Equuis ads (that I chose for myself). YouTube’s like that.

Posted in Unbundled Media, YouTube | 1 Comment » |

TMZ.com goes full-feed RSS

May 18th, 2011

Something extraordinary happened in the world of online media this week, and nobody seems to have noticed. TMZ.com, that entertainment news and gossip juggernaut, became the biggest site on the planet to offer full-feed RSS. As of this writing, TMZ has not gotten back to me for comments, so the best I can do is speculate. As a person who has followed TMZ since its humble beginnings — and reported extensively (here) on their model, which we call “Continuous News” — I can assure you that full-feed RSS from them is significant.

What is full-feed RSS and why is it so important?

Traditional media companies all have RSS feeds, but the distributed XML portion of new items is capped at a headline and one or two sentences. This is driven by strategy: the media companies want people to read their content on their own websites, because that’s where the money is (they think). This type of feed requires people click on a link to be taken to the company’s own website. It makes sense if mass media is your model, but it makes no sense in the world of distributed (unbundled) media. Traditional media companies have, therefore, used RSS only as a marketing toy, a notification system, of sorts.

But it wasn’t created for that, and every blogger knows it. And apparently, TMZ.com now knows it, too. Here’s the way their feed looked in my RSS reader this week. Before this week, the only thing I’d see in the viewing panel was a headline and a sentence. Now, the entire story is available for viewing WITHOUT me bringing up their website in the browser associated with my reader.

Let’s say your TV station carries the syndicated TMZ program. You can now create an RSS widget that brings all of their news into your window. If you’re creating an aggregator of entertainment news using RSS, TMZ’s content will stand out, because it will all “be there.” This is the beauty of place-based distribution, because it doesn’t care where it’s posted; it simply wants to be seen.

This flies in the face of traditional mass media thinking. Who would be so crazy, the thinking goes, as to “give” their exclusive content away like that? The proverbial “crazy like a fox,” that’s who.

Let me state clearly why this is so important.

• Distributed or unbundled content IS the future of news content. It “fits” the handshake, the touchpoint, the missing puzzle piece of the Web. Downstream, every piece of exclusive content will be unbundled, because if it’s not, it won’t be a part of the coming aggregation plays, those business that SERVE users by filtering or curating the content of the many for the consumption of the one. This is inevitable, no matter how much traditional media kicks and screams against it.
• Advertising “as items” in an RSS feed are where the real future money is, although it’s only there in a trickle today. These ads are visible. There’s no “banner blindness.” And they provide real SEO value (see below). Look at the image of my reader again. Above the viewing panel is, like any email software, the headlines of the feed. If I see a headline I like, I can read its content below. Now imagine if, say, every 10th headline began with: “ADVERTISEMENT” or “SPONSOR.” I could look at it or not. Ads done this way are of very high value. As I noted a few weeks ago, John Gruber of the geek blog “Daring Fireball” sells a weekly sponsorship for his blog for $5,500 (that’s $22k a month). He’s currently sold out through mid-July. Here’s the way that looks in my reader:
• An advertisement as a part of content on a media website is worth another $250 a month, simply due to search engine optimization (SEO) value. It’s a permanent piece of content with a link or multiple links back to the sponsor, and it has significant value back to the advertiser. I know one advertiser who buys the cheapest ad deals possible simply to get his ads (with links) “on” the pages of big websites. Why? He doesn’t care if people actually “see” the ads; for him, it’s all about SEO.
• There are ad networks that will populate your RSS feed with banners, including all the standard IAB sizes. The problem with these in a viewing panel of a headline-and-sentence feed is that the banner dominates everything, and frankly, that’s an insult. For example, here’s what TMZ competitor Enews Daily’s feed looks like:You can see how ridiculous (and transparent) that looks compared to a whole story with an ad.

RSS advertising hasn’t taken off for the same reason RSS hasn’t fully taken off: the media industry doesn’t see the value (or like it), but I expect that to be changing sooner than later. When that happens, we’ll discover even more about how to monetize that distributed content. There’s been a lot of talk lately about RSS “dying” due to social media, but RSS is the mechanism by which unbundled media moves around the Web, and contrary to dying, I think it’s just moved from the bottle to solid food.

TMZ.com pioneered the Continuous News model by proving that they could produce compelling news content in blog format, item by item and bit by bit. They saw the demand and had the courage to go with the “latest item on top” concept of Web display, something traditional media companies have a hard time grasping. It has served them well

What about you and your company? Are you going to wait until somebody else writes the rules about unbundled advertising, or do you have the courage and conviction to do that yourself?

Posted in RSS, Unbundled Media | 2 Comments » |

An open letter to television managers

May 11th, 2011

Dear Television Manager,

This letter is offered in good faith and asks some fundamental strategic questions that have probably already been on your mind. If not, this might be eye-opening. Either way, it’s my hope you will act on what’s stated here.

When I first began consulting nearly ten years ago, I was known for little sayings about news that people dubbed “Heatonisms.” Here’s the very first: “Revenue isn’t the problem; audience is the problem. Fix the problem.” What television did back then is the same thing we’re doing today, we’re trying to fix a secondary revenue problem while the real problem just keeps getting worse.

Television news just isn’t what it used to be, and it never will be again. We look at research proving we’re still the best advertising bang for the buck and completely miss the point that it won’t matter soon, because the trend lines are unmistakable. Viewing has been dropping for many years, and nothing is going to change that, absent some totally different way of presenting some local product.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual “State of the News Media” report earlier this year was straightforward about this:

The most basic problem facing local television news is that its traditional audience is shrinking. In 2010, audiences continued to decline in all three key time slots: morning, early evening and late night.

…A pattern noticed a year ago continued in 2010. Our analysis found that ratings dropped more sharply than share (emphasis mine) for all key time slots in most sweeps periods. Ratings measure the percentage of households with TVs that are tuned to a particular program. Share measures the percentage of people who actually have their TVs on at a particular time and who are tuned to a specific program. A ratings decline, while share holds steady, means a program has fewer total viewers but the same percentage of the available audience. To put it another way, one reason local TV news in the traditional time slots is losing viewers is because people are turning off their sets when the news is on (emphasis mine).

Why are they turning TV sets off during news time? Because “the news” is already known by the people formerly known as the audience. So we fiddle with managing revenue in an environment that needs — but doesn’t get — attention. Well, Terry, it is what it is. What would you have us do?

We are promoting a decaying strategy, so the first thing we need to do is to stop that, and nowhere is this worse than on the Web. We have websites. We use Twitter. We use Facebook. But our essential purpose in so doing is to be a better TV station online. Make no mistake about it, this is a dreadful error, for AR&D’s own research shows that up to 90% of a TV station website’s traffic is comprised of the station’s own viewers. We’re talking to a closed and shrinking universe. We brag when we beat our competition online with absolutely no sense of who that competition really is. We’re still competing with the other TV stations online, and how foolish is that? This is the same strategic flaw that produces convergence sales. The brand of a TV station is today both a blessing and a curse.

So, Mr. and Ms. Managers, lead the local TV cheers for your sales departments, because they won’t be inspired to sell otherwise, but let’s work on fixing what’s really broken: the loss of audience. Let’s begin with four simple acknowledgements.

1. Television news as it’s currently presented is a dying beast. We can do lots of things to be top dog in our markets, but even the top dog is the equivalent of the last buggy whip maker. At AR&D, we’re working on some prototype program concepts, because we know that nobody’s going to come back for that from which they fled. Those people turning their sets off will never reverse themselves for the same old good-looking people with boxes over their shoulders. Online is the future (I consider mobile to be “online”), so let’s look there.
2. Our online competition is not the other TV stations; it’s all the pureplay revenue grabs that aren’t bound by the rules of being a TV station online. The most important current and future use of our TV stations is to use them to promote our online offerings, and that’s smart strategy. That and feet-on-the-street are the only competitive advantages we have over those pureplays. Doing news online is a smart thing, but it needs to be in real-time across-the-board and not just Twitter and Facebook. News also needs to be aggregated and curated, and that means acknowledging the other news producers in the market. That’s what the pureplays do. They’re not encumbered by a local brand.
3. We need to embrace the reality that content isn’t our “business;” advertising is our business, and we need to be immersed in the latest from the revolution in advertising. The biggest, most fruitful shift in advertising today is the sharing of risk. Google pioneered it (pay only for clicks); Groupon raised it to an art level (split revenue; no customers, no deal). However, I think the greatest innovations in this area are still ahead. Advertisers are the new media companies, and the idea of money for simple placement alone is slowly dying, unless you’re the Superbowl. Results are what the new advertising world wants, provable results, and unless we’re in there with those who are offering such, we’re simply going to be left behind. But this is an advertising problem, not a content problem, so content solutions won’t do much. If you believe that advertisements adjacent to content is the best business model for the Web, I feel sorry for you.
4. Our content will be aggregated, and this is where we will compete with traditional and other forms of local media. We resist this at our own peril, and so the smart thing to do is develop strategies that make it profitable to completely unbundle our content from our owned infrastructure. We want our content aggregated. We want ours to shine among the rest. We want users to take our content with them and to interact with that at their convenience. We want to find new advertising opportunities within an aggregated environment.

The paradox of working in media today is that it’s both brutal and exciting at the same time, kind of like being at sea during a storm. The advice there is to keep your focus on the horizon dead ahead, for attention to the waves is will make you sick. Here, that focus must be on the truths made apparent by acceptance of certain big trends. Follow those and hang on for the bumpy ride.

There is a future, and it is bright.

Thanks for reading,

Terry

Posted in Broadcasting, Continuous News, Culture, Disruptions, Facebook, Reinventing Local Media, Twitter, Unbundled Media | 1 Comment » |

RSS is not now, nor will it ever be “dead!”

April 20th, 2011

There are many communications tools that have changed my news and information life in the early 21st Century, but none more than RSS and my trusty RSS reader. I use a reliable piece of desktop software called “Feedreader,” because I like desktop readers, as opposed to Web or cloud-based readers (at least for now — mobile may change that), and it has been such a reliable old friend.

Every other week, it seems, there’s some self-serving link-baiter hollering that RSS is dead, to which I simply shake my head in utter amazement. It’s not just that the whole unbundled Web world works on RSS, it’s that the path one must take in order to get to that belief is so utterly gutted with potholes of lies and absurdities, that to actually arrive at that conclusion, one’s intelligence has been completely dislodged by all the bumping and shuddering of the ride. Plainly speaking, it’s sloppy thinking to even remotely take such a stand. RSS dead? Holy crap, no; it’s just getting started.

As if it’s the sole determiner of the “right” path, people always ask me, “Where’s the money?” Unbundled ads — RSS items that begin with a page of content (think SEO value) and are sent into the website’s stream — haven’t been introduced yet (they will), but a lunch with old friend Mike Orren led me to the RSS feed of John Gruber. Gruber sells a weekly sponsorship of his RSS feed for $5,500 (that’s $286k, if sold out). Gruber’s Daring Fireball website has a highly unique, desirable, and large audience of ubergeeks, but the point is that he values his RSS feed enough to price it accordingly and pay his bills. Here’s the value proposition, as presented by Gruber:

Week-long sponsorships are available for Daring Fireball’s syndicated feed (RSS). This is the only way to promote your product or service specifically to Daring Fireball’s audience of Mac nerds, designers, nitpickers, perfectionists, and connoisseurs of fine sarcasm.

• Estimated Daring Fireball feed subscribers: Over 400,000.
• Estimated monthly web page views: 3 million.
• Sponsorship is exclusive. Only one sponsor per week.
• A promotional item from the sponsor will appear in the feed at the start of the week.
• At some point during the week, I’ll also post a Linked List item thanking the feed sponsor.

That’s right, he actually posts a “promotional item” in the feed. News organizations tremble at the thought, but let’s be real. Firstly, Gruber doesn’t accept sponsorships from products he doesn’t or wouldn’t use, and the audience reads each and every one of them. Why? Because they trust Gruber’s opinion. Here’s what it looks like in my RSS reader.

Geeks understand the value of RSS where media companies don’t, because they come at the Web from two different perspectives. The tech crowd views RSS as an efficient way to spread knowledge and information, whereas media companies view RSS only as a way to tease people and bring them back to their home base. Consequently, RSS is an afterthought to media companies, and that’s one of the big reasons why the process hasn’t really reached the masses.

There’s one major reason that media companies don’t play well with RSS: it’s a pull technology, while media is a world of push. With RSS, the user is the one making all the decisions. This is chaos to those used to control, which is why the concept is counterintuitive to mass media. This is an inertia barrier that we simply must get past, because RSS will take us forward into the world of unbundled media. while refusing simply holds us back.

Where do we begin? At the top of our organizations, all managers and leaders must use RSS. Take the couple of hours it’ll take to set up an RSS reader on your laptop, because the only way to know what’s going on in this world is to participate. Like me, I’ll wager that it changes your news consumption habits forever.

Posted in Disruptions, Reinventing Local Media, RSS, Unbundled Media | 2 Comments » |

Preparing for Unbundled Television

March 21st, 2011

Last week’s big news about Netflix acquiring rights to a potentially big hit program prior to production – and in the process outbidding even HBO – ought to get our attention. Unbundled television is the future of television, and it’s a scary thought for those of us who’ve spent our lives exploiting the linear “broadcast” paradigm. No one would argue that unbundled consumption is THE current reality in the music world, and it’s just a matter of time before the same can be said of video. This won’t happen overnight (although it might seem that way one day), but what can we do now? How do we prepare for such a shift? That’s the essence of this essay.

Preparing for Unbundled Television

I believe this essay is especially important today and that you’ll use the information contained here to begin the unbundled discussion at your station.

Posted in Broadcasting, Reinventing Local Media, RSS, Unbundled Media | 2 Comments » |

Twitter could unlock the economy of unbundled advertising

March 17th, 2011

The horrible disasters in Japan over the past week have once again proven Twitter’s value as a global news ecosystem. Most of the early information I got about the events came via Twitter, and it continues to grow as THE source during an emergency. Learning (and teaching people) how to follow the news via Twitter is perhaps a greater challenge for future journalists than actually reporting the news. The networks — and even some local TV stations — dispatched anchors to the scene, but this eventually ends up to appear self-serving, when the real reporting is taking place among the eyewitnesses and individual aggregators via Twitter. Its real-time nature genuinely reflects the magnitude of events such as we saw last week in Japan, and that’s hard to ignore, even for those who don’t trust the veracity of the accounts.

The problem for many with Twitter as a news ecosystem is that Twitter is a private company. The problematic nature of this was revealed this week, because the company got into a bunch of hot water with developers over revisions to its Terms of Service (TOS), revisions that put restrictions on people developing using its API. While this only really matters today if you use one of the Twitter clients that’s “offending” Twitter, the ramifications are clear: use a private entity’s API at your own risk, for they can always change the rules. There’s a lot of name-calling going on, but Twitter’s within its rights to do this. It is, however, prompting renewed calls for an open, micro-messaging service not tied to anybody’s servers, and when that happens (Dave Winer’s working on it) Twitter, as we know it, may drift out of favor as a news ecosystem. It’ll take some doing, however, because of the ubiquitous use of Twitter worldwide.

The Twitter brand is strong, and the extent to which it is used by businesses is its strongest, most monetizable advantage, and what I don’t get is why the company doesn’t pursue this instead of trying to manage its use as a news ecosystem. In January of 2006, I published “The Economy of Unbundled Advertising,” which predicted a Twitter-like system for enabling commerce.

But now we’ve entered the world of unbundled media, where people download individual songs instead of buying CDs, watch programs when and where they want (without the commercials), and read news stories or snippets of stories via the World Wide Web instead of going out to the driveway every morning. Movie-going is down; music radio is falling fast; and you can now watch Lost on your Video iPod instead of Wednesday night on ABC. The mass audience is disappearing and with it, and the economy it supports.

If unbundled media is where we’re headed, then unbundled advertising must necessarily follow. This is a scary concept, however, for there is no command and control mechanism or manipulable infrastructure in the unbundled world. The upside, though, is that it costs very little to participate. All that’s necessary is the release what I call “ad pieces” into the seeming chaos of the Internet, where other businesses will take those pieces and reassemble them when summoned by customers who are trading their scarcity for information they actually want.

Ad pieces don’t have to be slick, finished ads. Think of them as parts of a conversation with customers.

What appears to the traditional marketer as the swirling vortex of a black hole is actually a highly efficient machine that sorts and filters based on product, service, price point, location, and a whole host of variables determined by the customer and/or his liaisons with all those pieces — aggregators. In the illustration below, the customer has at least three options in acquiring knowledge: search, dumb aggregators (where aggregation is strictly a software solution) and smart aggregators (where human “editing” enters the picture).

An advertiser can influence positioning with search results by paying for it. This is how Google makes its money, but it’s essentially mass marketing, because the advertiser’s message is placed in front of lots of eyeballs. Similarly, an advertiser could buy positioning in a dumb aggregator. After all, any software can be “instructed” to give precedence to the highest bidder.

But a smart aggregator is a different animal altogether, and it’s here where potential customers will increasingly provide their scarcity while the unbundled media world is exploding. With options expanding exponentially, people will turn to each other (as they always have) for advice on purchasing decisions. New businesses — perhaps subscriber-driven — will flourish based on their ability to cull the wheat from the chaff and meet the needs of their customers. Buying influence here may ultimately be acceptable, but the price tag for the smart aggregator will be transparency, and that may negatively impact customer appeal. In all things Media 2.0, we must never forget that the customer is in complete control.

Twitter is, at core, a notification system. Its software provides the content management system (CMS) that could enable unbundled advertising, and it’s something they could own for themselves while letting everybody else play with the news ecosystem aspects. It may not seem as big or as sexy, but it’s where the money’s at, and if I was advising them, this is where I’d point their energy.

Thousands of businesses already use Twitter as a marketing outlet, so moving them to simply release ad messages into the open Twitter stream is a much easier mission than creating something from scratch that’ll do the same thing. Hey, Twitter, are you listening?

Posted in Advertising, Twitter, Unbundled Media | 1 Comment » |

The intriguing new appointment of Michael Powell

March 16th, 2011

As the new head of the Cable Television trade association, history can judge Michael Powell only one of two ways. He will either be the biggest sell-out in the history of the digital age, or he will be the man who leads cable TV into the era of unbundled television. There’s no middle ground for Powell, because the stakes are too high and he knows too much.

Powell is a brilliant visionary who served well as FCC Chairman during the early Bush years (he was a Clinton appointee), defending the open Internet before it was popular. Widely regarded as a man who “gets it,” it was Powell’s words to students at Stanford University at the end of 2003 that opened so many eyes as to what was really taking place in the disruptive world of digital media. A strong advocate for the disruptive power of what he called “application separation,” Powell wove the concept into everything he did atop the FCC. For those who have forgotten, here are those remarkable words from December 2003:

“To be a phone company you don’t have to weave tightly the voice service into the infrastructure. You can ride it on top of the infrastructure. So if you’re a Vonage, you own no infrastructure, you own no trucks, you roll to no one’s house. They turn voice into an application and shoot it across one of these platforms and suddenly you’re in business. And that’s why if you’re the music industry you’re scared. And if you’re the television studio, movie industry, you’re scared. And if you’re an incumbent infrastructure carrier, you’d better be scared because this application separation is the most important paradigm shift in the history of communications and will change things forever. I have no problem if a big and venerable company no longer exists tomorrow, as long as that value is transferred somewhere else in the economy.”

“We don’t want one pipe,” he added. “We’re doing everything we can to incent the free-radical opportunities for multiple routes to the home. So when you look at FCC proceedings, that’s where there’s so much energy going into WiFi, and ultra-wideband and powerline broadband and laser optics and free-space optics and other policies that encourage and incent the creation of alternate digital platforms.”

But it is this vision — “The most powerful paradigm shift is the fact that applications are not woven into the platforms” — that he now finds himself confronting as the leader of the cable industry’s highest lobbying organization. Cable wants only one pipe. Cable resists application separation. Cable is a venerable institution. Cable is THE incumbent infrastructure carrier. Cable is everything painted in the above picture as completely hosed by technology, and yet here we have Michael Powell working on its behalf. Go back and read that again, and ask yourself how a man like Powell will defend the status quo against this “most important paradigm shift in the history of communications.”

I don’t see how it can happen.

Political observers are already noting that Powell, a Republican, is a natural fit to lobby on behalf of the cable industry, but I think this move is provocative and could be seen as unsettling for entrenched industry insiders.

Television faces unbundling just as surely as the music industry did at the end of the 20th Century. People reject the bundles on every level, and technology is there to assist them dismantle what they’re being force-fed. Google TV — and other applications like it — offers searchable content, which I still believe is the way entertainment will be consumed tomorrow. Unbundled Netflix is another powerful competitor of the cable industry (see this new TechCrunch article). Will Powell go after them? How will Powell —; knowing what’s really taking place — stop the impossible? Or will he lead an important effort for the industry to cannibalize itself, rather than be taken apart from outside?

My sense is that Michael Powell is too smart to take this job to be a caretaker for a dying industry, and that’s why I like the appointment so much. Powell is THE right guy to helm an industry in transition, and I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt, at least for now. If, however, he chooses to defend the old paradigm in the midst of disruption, the only fitting word for history to describe him will be FAIL. That would be a crying shame.

Posted in Broadcasting, Culture, Disruptions, Unbundled Media | 1 Comment » |

Keep your long-term glasses on

January 19th, 2011

When I was a news director, I was often hired in turn-around situations, where a company was dissatisfied with something involving the news department, usually the news ratings. Not every one of my appointments fell into this category, but I always enjoyed the challenge of competing with entrenched winners. I had a few rules that I’m sure the talented people who worked for me remember. Rule number one: there are no rules. We wouldn’t let ANYTHING hold us back from disrupting the status quo. Another rule was: keep your long-term glasses on. We needed to know that taking the mountain was a process that wouldn’t happen overnight.

This rule about long-term focus applies to traditional media, I think, in these times of change, because we’re on a path illuminated not by short-term fads but by long-term trends. It’s vitally more important, therefore, that we always act on behalf of those trends but always question the short term whirligigs that come along every day. I learned in the Coast Guard that the way to avoid sea sickness in rough weather is to keep your focus on the horizon, not on the waves or the view that keeps rising and falling. That’s good advice in any time of change.

But the problem is that many can’t see the horizon. We’ve either got our heads down, buried in day-to-day operations, or we’re trying to make ends meet. The horizon, however — our destination point — is what we need most, because if we can see the goal, we can create the processes needed to get us there. This does require, however, fixating our gaze forward instead of down or to the side.

Take, for example, Twitter. To properly view this wonderful notification system, we must begin with AOL. In fact, you’ll always be safe if AOL sits in the back of your mind as a red flag. AOL was training wheels for the Web, but it was its walled garden approach — building a web within the Web — that eventually spelled trouble, the same kind of trouble that Twitter, Facebook and other proprietary, closed systems provide today. What are the broader strokes that Twitter is providing? This is the important question.

This is why AR&D is writing a new book, 2015: The Future of Local Media. Nobody who reads this newsletter regularly will be surprised by anything in the book, because the book merely advances our vision. In the interim — and in the name of our long-term glasses — I thought I’d publish a list of five of the broad trends that we’re following. We’re all just overwhelmed with options these days, so use this list as a filter to keep yourself focused on what’s really important for tomorrow.

1. The shift to real time news and information. Dave Winer wrote recently that Twitter is a dress rehearsal for what’s coming, and I think that’s true. During my interview with Kevin Kelly for the book, he noted that THE most important trend to follow is the move from a static Web to “the real time flows and streams” inherent in the living or “Live” Web. Let’s not think of real time as necessarily replacing that which is “finished, vetted and complete,” but rather as a new entity that is evolving before our eyes. Journalists must consider a commitment to real time as a part of doing their jobs, because the stream is the process of gathering news itself. It’s also important to understand that the stream is bigger than anything we put into it. Monetizing the stream, we believe, will come from curating the fire hose for individual consumption and from organizing separate streams from merchants wishing to get messages out to existing or potential customers.
2. Portability. This is the year that analysts project more portable computing devices will be sold than those that are hard-wired to an Internet connection. 2011 is a tipping point, because portability brings proximity into the media equation, and that brings opportunity in the form of hyperlocal relevance, not only for news and information but also for making money. But don’t be fooled into thinking that portability is something other than just the good old Web. It’s not. Magazine apps for the iPad, for example, have been a bust, because the iPad is just a presentation layer on top of the Web. If it didn’t work on the Web, it won’t work via a portable device. Portability/proximity also brings a heightened sense of “local” into the information equation, almost a redefinition of the term and one with which we will have to contend in the years ahead.
3. Unbundled content. In 2004, then FCC Chairman Michael Powell noted that “application separation is the most important paradigm change in the history of communications, and it will change things forever.” Media hasn’t fully caught on yet, because the act of “application separation” means, in large part, the unbolting of media content from the original source in which it was presented. Just as it was with the music industry, so it will be with media, because people not only object to our packaging as inefficient and time-wasting but also as self-serving despite claims of the opposite. There’s an old adage among successful bloggers that “if you send people away, they’ll come back,” which influences many strategic decisions about content, including full-feed RSS and outbound linking. Legacy media doesn’t get this, because it’s counterintuitive to its fundamental need to corral and maintain large audiences. Make no mistake, though, content distribution in the future will be unbundled, and the sooner we get there, the better.
4. Consumers rule. This is perhaps the most overlooked and underestimated new reality for business in the 21st Century. The industrial age was all about a Mad Men sort of “warfare” in which brilliant marketers attacked the minds of people to move them to buy products. How heroic! The problem is nobody asked people if they could play with them this way, and now we have a problem. Consumers can not only talk back, but they can talk to each other, and this is a serious issue for those who need a one-way mechanism to change our minds. How have we responded? I just read in Online Media Dialy of “new video pre-roll units” that will leverage a “variety of targeting methods to deliver high-quality audiences more efficiently than the typical online video campaign.” People as “targets” aren’t really people, so we can put 15-30 second pre-rolls in front of 90-second videos and think that’s tolerable. Everybody knows that the optimum for pre-rolls is 7-10 seconds, but Madison Avenue refuses to believe that it no longer has carte blanche in messing with the lives of consumers. Starcomm’s Rishad Tobaccowala said many years ago that “we’ve entered an empowered era in which humans are God, because technology allows them to be godlike. He asks, “How will you engage God?” It’s a question we should be asking.
5. Video, video, video. By 2014, Cisco projects that the average downbound bandwidth of the Web will be 14.4 megs and that nearly all of the growth in traffic will be video. Much, if not most of that video will be advertising of one form or the other (if you don’t believe this, spend a little time on YouTube), and this is something local media companies are ideally suited to provide. At many local TV stations, we have whole production departments sitting around twirling their thumbs while waiting for the next commercial shoot when they could be on-the-street making YouTube and other videos for online consumption. We don’t see this, because we’re too busy waiting for the next ad agency to come along with a new pre-roll. We’re so stuck on attaching ads to OUR content as the only source of revenue, but a whole new world is opening for us to pursue. Newspapers could (and are) easily steal this right out from under the noses of TV stations. The online video world has just begun, and we’re stuck waiting for somebody to show us the way rather than attacking it head-on today.

What, Terry, no “deals” application? Perhaps. There are many other trends we’ll be examining in the book, in addition to putting it all together for you in a “here’s what it’ll look like” view of local media, circa 2015. Meanwhile, though, if we’ll run anything that’s presented to us through these filters, we’ll be on solid ground for tomorrow. Is it video-centric? Is it pro-consumer? Is it unbundled and free to be passed around? Is it meant for portable Web consumption? Is it a part of the real time flows and streams? If that which is before you provides a “yes” to those, then take it to the bank that you’re on solid ground. If not, you might want to proceed cautiously.

And keep your long-term glasses on.

Posted in Continuous News, Culture, Disruptions, Mobile, Reinventing Local Media, Unbundled Media, Video | No Comments » |