Digital LA is hosting the Female Founders Panel tomorrow night at the Hotel Palomar in Los Angeles. The panel of seven women will be discussing keys to success, opportunities, and challenges faced in running successful startups and companies. Following the success Digital LA had with their Silicon Beach Fest, Digital LA’s founder Kevin Winston wanted to do a panel specifically showcasing the “Female Founders” of Silicon Beach. Amanda MacNaughton, co-founder and CMO of PromoJam, is one of the women on the panel. “I am thrilled and excited to be participant in the Digital LA – Female Founders Panel.” MacNaughton said. “I look forward to sharing my story from a female perspective of running a business, getting funded, setting goals…and constantly moving the business forward.” MacNaughton says that attendees aren’t the only ones that will be learning at the event. “I’m also extremely excited to hear the stories and lessons my fellow female panelists will share. A great way to improve is to learn from others.” Speakers include MacNaughton; Holden Steinberg, co-founder, PageWoo; Sophia Viklund, founder, BackCode; and four others - one of whom will be joining the panel via Skype. Winston will moderate the panel. All panelists are from Los Angeles companies.
LAGUNA NIGUEL, CA – If content truly is king, then be prepared for Madison Avenue’s brand-generated content to be held for a $3 billion ransom. That’s what Douglas Wood, senior partner at Reed Smith LLP, and the Association of National Advertisers' chief counsel more or less suggested will happen next year when the Hollywood talent unions -- SAG and AFTRA -- try to get their hooks into the kind of digital marketing content that is not currently classified as “advertising” or “commercials” and therefore does not fall under current contract provisions between Madison Avenue and its commercial talent pool. Speaking Monday during a Q&A session at the ANA’s Digital and Social Media Summit, Wood threw the $3 billion number out there, suggesting it might be the contractual value of some testy negotiations he anticipates taking place between the ad industry and the Hollywood unions. “The unions desperately need to capture the content that you are putting on the digital platforms,” Wood advised a roomful of marketing execs. He indicated that the negotiations would likely be tenacious, drawn out, and could lead to the first significant labor action (i.e., strike) by Hollywood’s talent unions against Madison Avenue in years. He cited several reasons, including the fact that the unions are desperate to “capture” talent revenues from some of the new forms of brand content – especially user- and brand-generated video -- in order for them to survive and to pay pension and health plans as the industry shifts away from conventional commercial content production. “That’s where they see the real money,” Wood said, adding that the unions will try to “redefine what a commercial is in terms of video. Wood advised the advertisers to produce any commercials they are planning for next year during the first quarter of 2013, before any labor action manifests. “You won’t be able to get actors,” he warned. “It’s that serious.” From the ad industry’s standpoint, he said it will be equally important for Madison Avenue to dig in its heels, because he said it may not be possible to determine what the long-term economic impact of changing the definition of “commercial” content might be in terms of talent and residual fees paid by advertisers.
As initially reported in MarketingDaily, Santa Monica-based advertising agency RPA this week saw their summer campaign for Honda launch. Karl Greenberg notes that RPA is Honda's AOR, and the local ad agency created a "humorous inventory clearance campaign." "In this campaign, we directly address six key demographic with executions that are colorful and big like Hollywood blockbusters," said RPA/ACD/Copy Sarah May Bates at RPA. The ads will run on shows like “America’s Got Talent,” “Castle,” “NCIS,” “The Middle,” “The Office,” “Two Broke Girls,” “Vampire Diaries” and cable networks, including A&E, Animal Planet, Bravo, Discovery and TBS. Print ads will be featured in pubs like People, Sports Illustrated, Time and USA Today.
PostRelease, a venture-backed and Long Beach-based technology platform provider, is ready to unveil PostRelease, a platform that they hope will power content discovery across the web. The company has been in the product development stage for over a year. PostRelease's advertising allows marketers to post images, videos, and written content to blogs, forums, and content sites as sponsored articles and posts. As the platform rises in popularity, the company strives to directly address the challenge of driving content discovery. “Our goal is to provide the ease and control of display advertising with the deeper engagement of content,” said Justin Choi, CEO of PostRelease. According to Choi, the company’s software also allows marketers new levels of control over their content marketing efforts. PostRelease’s software automatically identifies contextually relevant publications and inserts the content, optimizes the placements based on response rates, and provides analytics of the results. In addition to contextual matching, companies further target their content by geographic region or device. Advertisers will also be able monitor their content through a dashboard on PostRelease’s website. Through PostRelease’s analytics, advertisers will be able to track the number of articles read, videos viewed, time spent on content, and shares. This level of control is a feature that Choi says makes for product innovation. “The lack of scalability makes a big challenge for brand discovery,” Choi said. “Providing scalable discovery allows [consumers] to cross a lot of sites that are contextually relevant.” “[PostRelease] wants to reach people with meaningful information that is relevant to them that just happens to come from an advertiser,” Choi said.
Jerry Seinfeld wants to give us a coffee break from our usual TV menu by starting a Web-based series,"Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," on Sony Pictures Television’s original video site Crackle. That will help boost Crackle in its competition with bigger video sites like Hulu, YouTube and Netflix. Crackle has done this before with a few other celebrities. Some might say they are vanity projects. Well, why not? Seinfeld's online effort is a no-lose proposition: His brand name is pretty well intact, as he is still playing big comedy venues. The simple premise of comedians talking in cars and sitting in coffee places, telling jokes, is perfect online material. But this kind of online fare doesn't have the depth, story lines and character development that people still expect from the lean-back entertainment environment of traditional TV. CBS converted a popular Twitter account into the TV show "$#*! My Dad Says," but it didn't last. To date, no Internet-based content -- video or otherwise -- has become a successful, long-term, financially thriving TV show. Internet proponents would tell you that new TV models should be invented to incorporate this stuff, especially shorter-length two and four-minute series that would last about 10 episodes or so. But after all these years, one still has to wonder -- where is the monetization for such original efforts in the online space? Short-attention-span, multitasking traditional TV viewers would seem a perfect fit for this stuff. The audience would include older viewers -- remember that fans of “Seinfeld,” which went of the air in 1998, are still around -- who seem to be gravitating in this direction. But don't expect Sony to market Seinfeld’s latest effort on television, where big-time shows get exposure. Sony will count on social media, search and other online marketing tools. That virtually assures that “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” will not get big TV-like audiences. This isn't to say that some day there will not be a true breakout hit -- perhaps a germ of an idea -- for a traditional TV show. Maybe the day will come when we'll be watching a half-hour time-shifted comedy from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CW or even Univision and then easily switch to a three-minute episode of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.". But in an instant, some of us will probably miss that three-minute bit -- or decide to move to another bit of media, as we pour another espresso.