We’ve watched consumers pave the way for brands on the Internet for years.First, wherever eyeballs flocked online, brands followed with banner and display ads. Web hits were virtual dollar signs. In the 2.0 era, as internet users migrated to Facebook, Myspace and Twitter, brands quickly tried to join the conversation. Content creation vehicles and blogging platforms gave birth to new media titles like Mashable, BoingBoing, and TechCrunch that werethe precursors to corporate blogs.YouTube discovered Justin Bieber, Soulja Boy, and even found a new lead singer for Journey. Somewhere along the way, The Old Spice Man …

Surprisingly, the two driving forces that have most shaped media consumption and distribution over the past few decades remain catalysts in media’s ongoing evolution today. While historians will tell us that it is important to understand our history in order not to repeat it, the media world, especially those focused on online video, should study the past in order to peer into the future.Those forces - “more” and “personalized” - have shaped consumption habits since the days of the newsreel. While these catalysts have cultivated media habits both independently and as a combined force, we can expect them …

“Innovate relentlessly.” That’s the message that successful media brands have absorbed over the past 10 years as digital media has grown and flourished. Traditional outlets like newspapers and magazines have struggled to preserve readership, while new, digitally-native companies unencumbered by entrenched business models have rapidly emerged and grown to incredible scale...and they're all chasing the same ad dollars.  The social networking era has only further complicated the situation. That sought-after, high-share-of-voice placement called the “homepage roadblock” isn't worth what it once was, with media brands’ most passionate followers now cherry-picking content from social feeds. Fewer dedicated readers hit the New …

We live in transformational times and nowhere is this more apparent than in the worlds of digital and social media. The last few years have seen a revolution in the way we communicate and any one person in the world can now have an amplified voice.  The question I was asked is “what is the future of digital and social media”.  I think the answer can be summed up like this:  The future IS digital and social media! The ability to share music, the written word and video online, coupled with our ability to access that material anywhere and all the time, has changed not only how we communicate but …

Consumer’s growing dependency on accessing the web 24/7 has wreacked havoc on the ad world’s traditional operating model. For decades, marketers have relied on agencies to help craft and tell stories about their brands in a fairly linear, streamlined process. Today, however, we’re operating in a worldwhere the storyteller is sharing a stage with its audience and their input is critical to the overall story of the brand. The ad world’s ecosystem of lead-time, project planning and publishing schedules now needs to find a way to take in the consumer voice, and incorporate it into the story.Finding …

At a recent OMMA show, Jeremy Woodlee of Doubleclick quoted a statistic I found incredibly interesting. Publishers only gets 18% of the total revenue on premium display advertising sold through programmatic buying. That means if the average CPM paid by an advertiser is $4.50, after it passes through all the intermediaries in the value chain (trading desk, DSP, ad network, exchange, SSP) the publisher gets, on average only $0.80.That number is fascinating for two reasons. First, it shows that the current distribution chain is unsustainable. On the one hand, no publisher in their right mind is going to …

JC Penney, Nordstrom and Gap have all opened and closed stores on Facebook in the last year, but the drive to get eCommerce conversions from Facebook (fCommerce), or any social media platform, is nothing new. Brands have been questioning the ROI for a while now. Finding the value in Facebook as a sales channel may actually mean rethinking the role the platform plays in aiding sales. Despite ongoing focus to build ROI through social media, brands focusing on the traditional definition of commerce through these channels – direct sales on a site – are missing the boat on what’s far more important to social media users. The real value of Facebook’s 900 million …

Historically, the advertising industry has built services on top of categories of data…for example, competitive services on top of competitive data.  CRM services were built on top of customer profile stores.  Marketing mix on top of media spend data.  Even more recently, we have built “social” services on top of “social data” (quoted because of the enormous and undefined scope of data falling under the umbrella of that label). However, this paradigm—the “data-centric” approach—no longer makes sense.  It limits our insights, and it suffocates our imagination. It first restricts our ability to appropriately analyze data as we all know we …

In 1964, NBC made its Olympic television debut with the broadcast of the Summer Olympics from Tokyo. This was made possible through the Syncom 3 satellite, which delivered daily highlights of the Games across the Pacific within a few hours of the events. Additionally, 1964 marked the first opening ceremony that audiences watched on TV in color. Although seemingly primitive by modern-day standards, these advances made an indelible mark on the television landscape and once again showcased what was possible in the delivery of content to mass audiences. In July 2012, the London Olympics created yet another landmark moment in …

The top 100 TV shows have Twitter accounts.  Every new theatrical release has a Facebook page.  Heck, a quarter of TV ads now proudly display a URL or handle.  Marketers and publishers are racing to augment their content with social arms and legs.    And from the Olympics to the Election, it is inarguable that social media has changed how we interact with content.  But what if we’ve been overstating that change?  What if social media is just the garnish to the content main course:  enhancing its presentation and appeal, but not fundamentally …