Expect failure from Hulu, according to George Kliavkoff, NBC Universal's chief digital officer. Just as NBC expects some of its new fall TV series to flop, NBC Digital is factoring some degree of failure into its joint venture with News Corp., he told a packed crowd at OMMA New York on Monday. "The most important thing is to not be presumptuous about what's going to work," Kliavkoff said. But to fail successfully, he added, you have to fail fast in order to quickly identify your errors and cut your losses. Success involves setting up "processes to fail fast," he said. His message to marketers? "Anything you want to try, we'll try it with you." As competitive as the media business has become, there has never been a better time to be a content owner, according to Kliavkoff. The reasons for that include unlimited distribution opportunities, new tools for engaging with consumers, and shortly, proper tools to measure that engagement. While broad distribution is a key factor for Hulu, NBC will provide incentives for viewers to spend time on the Hulu destination site, Kliavkoff said. When the site launches next month, visitors can expect more tools for experiencing and engaging with videos, higher-quality videos, and the ability to take "something"--most likely content--away from the site. According to Kliavkoff, the single biggest opportunity for NBC is mobile, while the current revenue split makes it hard to pay for the creation of suitable content. "Think what your cell phone means to you as opposed to your TV," he suggested to the audience. There is no reason why advertising has to necessarily worsen the viewing experience, Kliavkoff believes. "Folks don't want ads that are not relevant," he said. "When I'm in the mood for a car, I'll sit through half an hour of car ads." A potential concern for Kliavkoff is the effect that NBC's broad distribution will eventually have on its syndication business. "It's potentially a point of exposure," he admitted on Monday. For his part, Kliavkoff does not believe that viewers will ever prefer consumer-generated content over premium fare. Particularly for marketers, he said, "at the end of the day, premium, produced content wins." What does concern him, said Kliavkoff, is how much time is spent creating and sharing CGM. "We're worried about anywhere [people are] spending time that they could be spending watching our video," he said.
With all eyes on the imminent success of mobile, MySpace on Monday launched a free, ad-supported mobile service for its users. Fox Interactive Media, which oversees MySpace, is readying similar initiatives for its other properties, including gaming site IGN.com, FoxSports.com, and photo-sharing site Photobucket.com. FIM already offers premium, subscription-based versions of MySpace through wireless carrier partners like AT&T and Helio. The new version works on all U.S. carriers, and allows users, free of charge, to send and receive messages and friend requests, comment on pictures and profiles, post bulletins, update blogs, and find and search for friends, as well as view or change their "mood" status. FIM executives said the move is in preparation for a time when mobile Web surfing is ubiquitous. "Accessing the Internet from a mobile phone will soon be as common as text-messaging and voice calling, and it's FIM's goal to deliver these new free, ad-supported experiences," said John Smelzer, senior vice president and general manager of mobile at Fox Interactive. Smelzer is betting on FIM's established carrier partnerships and its roughly 80 million monthly U.S. users for success in the mobile arena. Clearly seeking greater profits from its mass user-base, MySpace just last week revealed plans to sell targeted ads using the personal information that its members provide on their profiles. The potential for mobile to generate ad-revenue is just as exciting a prospect for Amit Kapur, MySpace's vice president of business development. "An ad-supported MySpace offering is a major component of our mobile monetization strategy," said Kapur. For the initiative, FIM has enlisted mobile ad network Millennial Media to both sell and serve mobile-based ads, including custom sponsorship packages within MySpace and more traditional display-based ads with other FIM properties, such as IGN, FoxSports.com, AskMen and RottenTomatoes.com. With Millennial, FIM plans to sell a limited number of charter sponsorships within MySpace's new mobile site over the next several months, then open all ad inventory by the end of the calendar year. Significant barriers presently exist for any content or platform company seeking to profit off mobile advertising. According to one Forrester Research study, for instance, a mere 3% of consumers trust the mobile ads they encounter.
As the only growth market in the world of media and marketing, online ad spending will expand 28.6% this year, according to eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey. Next year, digital ad spending will increase 32%--amounting to nearly $28.8 billion, Ramsey said in his opening remarks at OMMA New York on Monday morning. The future? Branded and video advertising, said Ramsey, assuring that branding dollars are fast on their way to matching the budgets spent on search. "With video, you can do a heck of a lot better job of storytelling," he said. Now big business, Web videos are watched by 72% of Web users--or 135 million people--every month. Ad spending around them is set to hit $775 million this year, and $1.3 billion by next year. With YouTube in tow, Google is poised to lead the burgeoning video market, and grab the bulk of ad dollars flowing into the medium, according to Ramsey. What are the greatest challenges facing online marketers today? Audience fragmentation; ad clutter; consumers' eroding trust in marketers; and something Ramsey likes to call "trend-itis"--or the propensity for marketers to blindly follow trends without implementing proper checks and balances. Ramsey spent a good portion of the morning knocking various research firms and the industry at large. TNS Media Intelligence, he noted with disbelief, has yet to factor search into its online ad spending numbers. As things stand, 76% of marketers say ad agencies don't provide them with sufficient data on ROI. Most marketers, said Ramsey, express a "vague undercurrent of discontent with their agencies." Additionally, nearly a fifth of consumers (18%) report that they dislike all forms of advertising, while only 6% currently believe the claims made by marketers.
Kiptronic announced that it will integrate data from the Nielsen//NetRatings SiteCensus tool into its media management platform--giving publishers and advertisers a better grasp on tracking and monetizing downloadable content. The New York-based online ad technology firm places, tracks and manages ads that CondéNet and other clients use to monetize content like white papers, podcasts and video, while Nielsen's browser-based SiteCensus service tags content to measure and verify downloads. According to Kiptronic founder and CTO Jonathan Cobb, bundling third-party measurement into Kiptronic's ad management platform is the next logical step toward providing a more complete view of how users interact with a publisher's content and ads. "It's important because advertisers are interested in whatever metrics they can get their hands on," said Cobb. "If a publisher creates a podcast or video that has their ad in it, there's a need to understand where it's going." Cobb added that the Nielsen metrics allow for finer-grain targeting that ultimately allows publishers to increase their effective CPM rates. "An online news outlet can say, if you want my NY metro area downloads, it's going to cost you 'x' times the rate," said Cobb. "Advertisers will get fewer downloads, but they'll only come from the people that are in their market. Then the publisher's media becomes a much better value to local or regional advertisers." As more traditional media outlets seek to monetize the full scope of their content on the Web, Cobb says the industry will see an uptick in use of solutions like Kiptronic. "Radio and print are big sectors that have really reached out to us to expand online," said Cobb--"especially newspapers, because the traditional sources of revenue are drying up." While Kiptronic has done some work with TV and other media sectors, their interest is less need-driven. "Unfortunately," Cobb noted, "fear is a stronger motivator to put ads in downloadable content than being innovative right now." Kiptronic plans to offer the added SiteCensus measurement to clients for no additional cost, although there may be a subscription fee increase in the future--since the firm continues to add new features to its ad management platform. And though Kiptronic's client base is largely business-to-consumer, the company forecasts a strong surge of business-to-business growth over the next 8-12 months.
Here comes another entry to the increasingly crowded social media space. Set for launch today, New York-based Attendi (pronounced "attendee") is an amalgam of standard search, social networking and chat that aims to index conversations about specific topics and make them searchable. At www.attendi.com, users type their query into the search bar and get a list of members who have commented on that particular subject--complete with profile info, a tag cloud that lists other subjects they've logged conversations about, and an icon noting their online or offline status. All users can click through to the profile and read through the member's Attendi posts and conversations, as well as links to their off-site blogs and other articles. But community members have the added option of chatting directly with the person if they're online--a dialogue that, according to founder Drew Rayman, has the potential to better answer specific questions than standard search results. Attendi is the brainchild of Rayman and CTO Benny Simon, two industry vets currently serving in leadership roles at full-service interactive agency i33 Communications. While there is a designated space for AdSense ads alongside the first page of search results, Simon and Rayman said that the company is more focused on building the community and creating a trove of new, searchable information. "Right now, these contextual ads will monetize what we're doing," said Rayman, "but the focus is not about finding unique ways to monetize. The goal is to have Attendi become the largest database of human insight in the world--a way to inject a little color into traditional search." Members will have the option to advertise their own services within Attendi in the future as well. So if a motorcycle enthusiast has a shop, for example, "they could purchase the keyword 'Harley' and have a custom ad unit that shows up in the search results," said Simon--much like the sponsored search links at the traditional search engines. Simon added that there are also plans to serve Attendi as a white-label interactive community database for companies. According to Simon, the difference between Attendi and Spock, PeekYou or other social search engines is that the new service doesn't draw from the same "well of documents" that most engines do--including Google and Yahoo. Attendi users create new content and provide each other with valuable information with every conversation--and the site's crawler (built on the Java-based Lucene search protocol) indexes that content to give searchers the most relevant results. The Attendi service seems a bit like Yahoo Answers, with some features of LinkedIn and Wikipedia bundled in--but the real-time chat factor is what really separates it from other Web 2.0 social networks, according to Simon. The chat window opens up automatically, with no applications or software to download--and members have a clear warning that what they say will be logged: "Don't forget that conversations on Attendi are public and will automatically be added to your profile. Enjoy!" The service currently has options to flag conversations as mature or to alert administrators to disruptive or malicious behavior, and Simon said that there are plans to use extensive member feedback in the months following the launch to decide what tweaks are necessary for content monitoring and other features. Attendi's platform is open source, so developers can come in and build widgets, as well as link the service to established tools like AIM or Windows Live Messenger.
comScore on Monday introduced Ad Metrix Publisher, a service that reports where display ads are actually viewed across the Internet and the characteristics of the people exposed to them. The reports generated by the service include: Ad impressions and reach for sites with display advertising Who's seeing those impressions, via reach/frequency and GRP for individual sites. How impression and share trends change over time. To illustrate, comScore released results of a study showing the differences in display ad views by demographic across ESPN, Fox Sports on MSN, and Yahoo Sports. While the three sites had similar ratios of males to females viewing display ads, comScore pointed out, they skewed differently by age and household income, with ESPN reaching more 35- to-44-year-olds and households with at least $100,000 in income; Fox Sports on MSN skewing toward people ages 45 and older and households earning $40,000-$59,999; and YahooSports doing best with the coveted 18-34 demo. comScore also released a chart delving deeper into the 18-34 demo, showing that Yahoo Sports delivered about twice as many ad views to this demographic.
In what it termed the first joint MSN/Atlas solution since closing its $6 billion purchase of Atlas parent aQuantive last month, Microsoft launched a video ad server for the Associated Press Online Video Network (OVN) that uses MSN Video and Atlas AdManager. The server allows OPN affiliates like WCBD-TV, Charleston, SC, and The Knoxville (TN) News Sentinel to sell and deliver local ads with local content. National video ad inventory will be served by Microsoft adCenter and sold exclusively by Microsoft's own ad sales team. Microsoft also said that more than 20 publishers have switched to the Atlas Publisher Suite from other ad servers since its plans to acquire aQuantive were announced in May. The publishers joining Microsoft's newly formed Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group include SmartBrief, Reunion.com, Entrepreneur.com and IAC, with three IAC properties--CollegeHumor, Vimeo and 23/6--already going live on Atlas AdManager.
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Congratulations again widget! In merely a matter of months you went from a buzzword towards a tipping point, if not there already. It's time to do it right this time around. As I wrote last month in "Widget Me This: A Buzzword in Perspective", widgets may be a major buzzword in the current digital marketing lexicon, however the term achieved that status based on merit. The Web experience is evolving as we enter a more interoperable and platform-agnostic era. Content and experiences becoming portable databased assets with easy connections to any platform or channel will create another major shift in media consumption, and with it will come a world of new marketing and advertising opportunities. Amazon last week announced its official entry into widget-world. Of course, Amazon has offered API's to developers for several years now, but never had offered widgets in such a manner. I think the angle is pretty slick. The original king of the affiliate program, rolled out these widgets for its affiliates. Some of the widgets are quite clever ways of extending Amazon's product catalog and opportunity for relevant placement. An example of one of the more clever ideas is the Slide-show Widget, which "Makes elegant slide-show widgets out of images chosen from products across the entire Amazon catalog -- CD cover art, DVD's, books, anything!" They also have rolled out widgets that add contextual links inside blog or site content. As a major player in the ecommerce world, Amazon will most likely incite a bandwagon of commerce related widgets to follow...and a bandwagon is not necessarily a bad thing when it progresses the market. Like I've mentioned before, buzzwords are like folklore, they almost always have some firm root in reality. The trend of increasing demand for and supply of content and utility across digital boundaries, so to speak, is driving a lot of innovation and providing consumers with better experiences and features than ever before. Welcome to the brave new web. Go Go Google Gadget Another big announcement last week -- Google Gadgets are officially being integrated into the Ad Words program, which now combines the power and breadth of their massive market place of publishers and consumers, with an incredibly engaging and flexible means of reaching targeted audiences with relevant communication and commerce experiences. Previous forays into graphical ads were not as successful, this may fuel some change in that regard. The concept of digital media mobility, which I rant about regularly, is approaching a tipping point, or maybe we're there already. The ability to provide consumers with the experiences they want, and some they didn't realize they wanted, on-demand, anywhere, on any platform, is going to spawn another spurt of growth for digital media and marketing consumption in the near future. I'm psyched! This is great news! In the spirit of Facebook opening up their back end to developers earlier this year, and Yahoo recently following suit, Google (in pure Google fashion) is one-upping the rest of the industry by going one step further and actually providing funding to start ups to help develop revenue-generating widgets for the Gadgets product. Plenty of VC's are also eyeing this space and betting on the future being an interoperable one. Investments in Web 2.0 and widget development projects seem to be at a crescendo. The interesting part for me personally, is how excited about these developments I am as a consumer, as well as a marketing strategist. Usually the scale tips in one direction or another. The "open source ecosystem" we are evolving towards is ripe for innovation and growth, and the future's bright for both consumers and marketers alike. Let the next marketing renaissance begin.