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Wednesday, January 27, 2010
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: Information Wants to Be Expensive
Moderator:
Henry Blodget, CEO & Editor-in-Chief, The Business Insider
Panelists: Gaby Darbyshire, COO, Gawker Media
Cheryl Milone, CEO, Article One Partners, LLC
Jim Fowler, CEO, Jigsaw Data Corporation

Gaby Darbyshire kicked off the panel with a great summary of the shifting role of blogs and traditional news outlets, emphasizing that in a world in which facts can be collected so easily many traditional media organizations are going to have to focus on more in-depth analysis and commentary, a trend already underway in some ways. Cheryl Milone's Article One Partners helps patent holders increase quality and avoid disputes through a global research community. Jim Fowler runs Jigsaw's crowdsourced database of company and contact information, building "data as a service" capabilities for both enterprises and individuals, piping real-time updates to them as their sources provide validated information.

"Nobody cares about privacy," Jim notes, meaning that in an era in which basic facts on people are so widely available, the fact that people are contributing information about other people who they have in their contacts is an accepted practice these days. This allows Jigsaw to deliver content updates more rapidly through disruptive a business model than incumbents such as Dun and Bradstreet, Henry Blodget noted. Henry emphasized the importance of "good enough" information from disruptors such as Gawker, but often in business information "good enough" that's more up-to-date and accurate in domains that traditional sources simply don't collect is more than good enough - it's better, at least for a limited range of content.

What happens to companies like The New York Times in this mix? Gaby noted that it will be more towards 2011 before the Times implements this approach, perhaps allowing the idea to percolate through people's minds, much in the way that politicians sometimes leak ideas of what they may be doing to gauge public reaction to the idea and others' implementations before committing to a new model. This is probably especially important, given their semi-retreat from a hybrid paid model. Henry noted a newspaper that had spend $4 million on implementing a paywall system that elicited only 35 signups, which may be part of the reason for this gun-shyness, but my assumption is that NYT and others will be implementing this new service on a phased rollout basis, trying via an A/B testing regimen where the value points may be.

Why don't traditional firms do more of what the disruptors? Cheryl notes that they incentivize their community, with seven-figure payouts in some instances for providing research, so it's a model that may be foreign to their competitors. Jim noted that the real-time update nature of their content's change is the real value point; instead of selling data per se, they focus on selling freshness within their domain. 40 percent of Jigsaw's enterprise clients share their data, presumably in most instances from their "golden source" master files. Knowing that having this information provides limited competitive advantage on a proprietary basis, Jigsaw clients gladly trade breadth of older data with freshness from whatever source it comes from. This creates, Jim believes, "why would I go anywhere else" types of business models.

It turns out, Henry believes, that it can be very hard for a company to fight off a disruptor that is using technologies that aren't scaled to take advantage of their traditional strengths. Gaby sees publishers such as the NYT "hide-bound" by their attachment to their traditional image of well-established success, whereas sites like Gawker focus more on site metrics to understand what content is successful in the moment. The way to build a sustained audience via these metrics is to do more in-depth content in ways that print journalism can't do effectively. Traditional "credibility" and "brilliance" aren't similar metrics and harder to monetize, ultimately, in the moment-by-moment world of Web publishing. Henry suggests that the NYT should consider looking at the 20 percent of their writers that produce 80 percent of their revenues and to either teach the others to do what they do - and, presumably, to suggest alternatives for them if they can't.

"Be impatient for profit, but patient for growth," Jim observes, pointing out that it's important for disruptors to work hard to find winning formulas that will scale, rather than scaling before you understand what really works. It's good business sense, but a concept that was neglected in the Blodget-driven dot-com era's focus on clicks rather than sustainable business models. Jim notes that late entrants can go out and buy players to help them catch up with the disruptors, but Gaby notes that "you can milk the cash cow, but eventually the cow will die." As traditional media shrinks, buying or killing your competitors will become harder for established media companies.

In the short run, large companies looking at disruptors may try to minimize them, but since many of these companies are small private companies that can innovate and change plans without as much scrutiny and legal overhead, it's hard to ignore them. On the other hand, sometimes disruptors can be "frenemies," as in Jigsaw's successful business relationship with Dun and Bradstreet that supplies D&B with Jigsaw content. "They've been a great partner for us, they've taught us a ton about how to sell our data and it gives it credibility," he notes. Win-win partnerships can work out often, and I agree with Ken Doctor that many media companies will be seeking these kinds of partnerships as they see key capabilities being developed by others that they cannot replicate effectively.

Great panel, I have to get ready for my presentation, now, thanks to Henry for doing a great job of leading a great discussion.


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SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: Ken Doctor on the Tablet Era of News
News expert Ken Doctor of Content Bridges focused initially in his talk on the debuting Apple tablet and its promise, which is, in a nutshell, its big advertising potential with its better reading experience. Ken sees some potential for the Apple tablet to support news operations better, but he also noted that there is 40 percent less newsprint than there was a year ago and 20 percent less newsroom staff. The tablet looks great, but where is the content going to come from? A lot of it has, of course, migrated to the Web, oftentimes to startup operations founded by journalists laid off by traditional news operations. Scrappy operations such as these with highly affordable publishing infrastructure and simply implemented ad revenues will be the focus of may eyeballs that major news organizations would like to capture. Ken noted Outsell research shows that 57 percent of consumers go to the Web already in the U.S. for news, with 25 percent using the Web sites of broadcast news sites daily. Ten percent say that they would pay for news - which correlates nicely with Gordon Crovitz' seat-of-the-pants number that he's been using to promote his Journalism Online initiative with Steve Brill. I think that this is a good industry heuristic for consumer-oriented online content at this point, presuming that you have a strong online brand.

But Ken also pointed out that many companies are spending heavily on self-marketeing; in other words, what is traditional media when your advertisers know how to "do" media themselves? Ken noted that he believes that 12 or 15 large news companies will continue to dominate, but with due respect, I think that in five years we will see far closer to five large news players worldwide, with the remaining properties being either gone or relaunched by people who care about their local news markets as independent brands that are web-scaled, lean and mean, and able to gain good audiences through search engines and social media links instead of having to rely on services such as AP and large media companies to broaden the appeal of their content. I agree with Ken that major companies can become virtual aggregators themselves via licensing to use other outlets' content to build the reach of other content properties, but this is a technique that any publisher of any scale can use. Automated content licensing will accelerate this process to the most effective outlets, which may or may not be Ken's "digital dozen."

At the same time, Ken notes that News Corporation is an example of a diversified media company that is using revenues from entertainment properties such as the $2-billion hit movie "Avatar" to fuel their operations. That will work for some time as a scaling issue, but Ken noted that the cost structure for many of these conglomerates' operations will not sustain them on a reliable basis. Beats me how this math will work for long, especially when, as Ken points out, the Bit.ly link referral is processing two billion link referrals a month. Value each of those links at a dollar, which is not too far off the mark given online ad rates, then you have an "Avatar"'s worth of ad revenues being generated by Content Nation every day via social media.

Will the tablet be the convergence of social, mobile and video that many in the media industry hope that it will be? Well, I am sure that the tablet will be impressive, but given that we've had color screens staring us in our living rooms for fifty years and PC screens for thirty years, I am not sure what it is about Steve Jobs that will overcome decades of media company failure to learn how to tailor mass media to interactive content markets. The gains of online video services such as Hulu are impressive, but are dwarfed by Content Nation's production on services such as YouTube. Aggregating social media and traditional media will be the key to the emerging model of success in this environment, as Ken highlighted in a Seattle effort to aggregate area blogs and other content sources.

I do think that local aggregation efforts such as Ken's Seattle example are now feasible on a cost-effective scale and will represent one of the most exciting stories for news production in 2010. For a great example of this, I refer you to the emerging Patch local news service sponsored by AOL, which resembles a business plan that I floated for local news about ten years ago just prior to the dot-com crash in 2000. Ten years later, technologies, ad networks and pervasive social media are combining to make a combination of professional and citizen-generated content economically viable.

The other side of the news equation that Ken touched on is the transformation of advertising into contextual content placement, in which journalists find themselves increasingly working for the advertisers to generate content instead of the news outlets. It's cheap content, often, and far from high quality at times, but thinking of newspapers filled with lightly retouched press releases passed off as journalism and the fawning of media for leads and coverage that throws objectivity under the bus too often, it's a matter of the name of the master sometimes and not the evil.

At the end of the day, the issue is revenues. "There's not enough revenue to do what we used to do," notes Ken, and chasing what Ken calls "interim technology." There are no magic technology bullets that will return an era that no longer exists, but there are strategies to move forward. Ken suggests:
  • Make it social
  • Approach the "digital dozen"
  • Gather other people's content
  • Drive your publishing business with data
All good recommendations, though ones that any Web publishers can apply also, including enterprises reaching their markets directly via the Web. News is a great business, perhaps closer to its original roots today than it's been in many years, but it's not the "Mad Men" business that some yearn for even today. Great presentation, Ken, enjoyed it.

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Tuesday, January 26, 2010
CEO Outlook: In Search of New Business Models Fear, Greed and Hope As Traditional Media Go into Free Fall
Moderator: Jim Kollegger, CEO, Genesys Partners, Inc.
Panelists:
Mark Anderson, CEO, Strategic News Service
Andrew Lack, CEO Multimedia Group, Bloomberg LP
Dick Harrington, Chairman and General Partner, The Cue Ball Group
David Eun, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships, YouTube

Jim Colleger has an amazing knack to assemble impressive C-level panelists, this one was no exception. Jim kicked off his "skate to where the puck is" session by asking Dick Harrington how he made the decision to sell Thomson's print divisions at more than $4 billion. Dick noted that he saw that eBay was growing rapidly and was typical of services that were going to kill newspaper classified advertising. But Harrington noted also that in B2B markets Thomson developed technology assets that enabled them to provide workflow-based products and services in a more client-centric approach to enterprise publishing. Thomson Reuters is still a work in progress, but how far it came under Harrington's leadership is impressive.

Andrew Lack of Bloomberg, LP's multimedia group was brought on to help Bloomberg integrate their media assets more effectively. He enjoys not having "analysts crawling up your backside" as being part of a private company, which enables it to look at the cost structure for its 2,000-plus reporters around the world and to repurpose them aggressively for professional audiences through media and enterprise distribution channels. Of course, when Bloomberg's revenues come primarily from its enterprise financial trading services, you have the luxury of looking at media markets with the comfort of stronger financial support than many news media companies face. Lack wants Bloomberg to be "among the most influential news producers in the world," but not with the same profit requirements hanging over their heads that a company such as Dow Jones may face with a far less robust enterprise revenue stream. Lack is planning to take these news assets and focus more on consumer markets, presumably, as I noted earlier in ContentBlogger, to take on Dow Jones' recently consolidated enterprise and media assets more effectively. Lack didn't give too many hints on competing with the WSJ Online "freemium" model, but it's a given that they will have that option based on their strong branding from enterprise markets that appeals to many consumer investors.

David Eun focused on YouTube's relationship to Google's overall mission, seeing video as data that can be connected with audiences. Google takes a long-term view of markets at YouTube, seeing that it would need to be easy to use as the key goal. The growth of YouTube is staggering, with more than a billion views per day, but business models are now a key focus also. This seems to sync in with Ken Auletta's earlier comments about driving more revenues from premium content, and certainly syncs with YouTube's efforts to deliver more premium content via YouTube. It turns out that free is amazing and great, but people like paying for stuff, too.

Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service noted that the concept of value is key to success in content markets, where there is more direct pay for value and less emphasis on ad-supported access. He notes, though, that Google's "fortuitous" implementation of ads as their revenues sources changed everything. Today, kids don't expect to pay for media ever. "That's a long time to wait," Anderson notes. The old world of "I'll tell you what to watch and when to watch it" is gone, though, and the customer's perception of value is in the drivers' seat. There is a generational gap, however, in which more adult people are more willing to pay, be it just general maturity or a generational difference. He believes that these people entering the workforce will be willing to pay for services such as Westlaw (I am not sure that our own research bears that out).

David Eun pointed out, though, that there are many different kinds of value transactions. "The challenge is that most [video] advertising doesn't work, you have to put the right ad in front of the right person at the right time." Eun believes that ads will work, especially if you think of ads as content, and begin to think not just about keyword matches but audience matches. Thinking of Apple's iTunes store, he sees that people are willing to pay for well-designed, convenient services, a concept that should be applicable to other types of content. Lack noted that the model for purchasing music via iTunes is not attractive to most music producers, but with the music industry competing with piracy at the time and seeing its whole model going down the drain rapidly, he was able to corral music publishers into the iTunes platform fairly rapidly. Today, he notes, subscription models have new meaning, in part because of iTunes and other mobile-oriented ecommerce models.

Jim asked if today's Kindles and tablets are actually dedicated terminals in a different packages. Anderson noted that there is a limit as to how many of these devices people will buy. "It's all going to the same place, it's nine inches by seven inches and will do your email." To me, that is a compelling rationale for cost-effective, open source Google Chrome OS devices conquering the tablet markets globally in 2011. Harrington notes, though, that you have to be very vertical, rather than very horizontal, to make money in the content industry today. He's right in an important way, of course, but that's not necessarily a concept that you can tie to a hardware platform: a tablet is not a vertical any more than a Bloomberg terminal is, or was, a vertical. It's the markets that they serve that are verticals, verticals which are increasingly real-time verticals of markets as small as one or a few people in a given moment.

This has been a great panel, though my overall impression is that although most publishers have accepted the reality of digital markets, they have not necessarily accepted their place in them. I agree with Mark Anderson that publishers shouldn't be shy about charging for valuable products and services, but it has to be more than a self-declared artificial scarcity that defines the uniqueness and value of their capabilities. The three billion-plus people empowered as publishers around the world, including businesses that are using content to create transactions on a different level than most publishers do, are competing for the value equation of publishing. What we're talking about emerging is a robust but far more specialized publishing industry which still provides highly valuable content, often on a paid basis, but which recognizes that the world has moved on to an era in which they can no longer dictate platforms arbitrarily and expect to succeed for any significant length of time.

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SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: Where is the Money in Custom Publishing
Moderator: Gregory Brown, Senior Director, Strategic Development, DataStream Content Solutions (DSCS)
Panelists:
David Prichard, President & CEO, Ingram Content Group, Inc.
Matt Turner, Senior Consultant, Mark Logic Corporation
Steven Alperin, Entrepreneur in Residence, MyWire, Consultant ABC , MyWire, Week's Best

Skip Prichard highlighted some of the tailored publications that they produce, one unit at a time. Their average run is 1.8 books. They find customers from both major players like Amazon and major bookstores but also small local retailers. Either way they're making money. Matt Turner was asked by Gregory about custom publishing beyond print. They can feed single-unit print cycles, but they have done far more with partners such as Wiley enables publishers to replace back-end operations that are used to create books more cost-effectively. Mark Logic sees custom publishing as pervasive, moving into workflow products also on electronic platforms. Steven Alperin came from a mass media background, but now focuses at MyWire on how to access audiences in ways that help them be more engaged with content on a personal basis.

What does it take to enable technology to get content to work effectively in a custom publishing environment? Matt noted success needs to be hinged around a company invested in the idea of custom content, the technology is there, but there's a mind shift that needs to occur. In terms of what needs to be invested in, Skip noted that you can't invest in everything, but tools like VitalSource can help publishers not only to package content but to offer feedback on usage and, via social networking tools, feedback on the content itself to refine the product constantly. Matt noted that the investments are largely there, now, with the trend towards customizing being driven by the opportunities being revealed by platforms that are already good at repurposing. "Content that wants to be expensive tends to be really, really narrow sets of content that custom publishing can reveal," Matt noted. Investigating your usage data is one of the key opportunities to understand custom publishing opportunities and to define them, noted Steven.

I agree with the panelists that custom publishing needs to be elevated radically from a sideline to a core rationale for premium publishing. Recently I received a post card invitation to an upcoming publishers' conference. Not only was the card tailored to me personally but the conference organizers had created a custom Web address personalized for me to explore the content that was printed on the card. That's highly targeted marketing that's a cross between the capabilities of custom print and online technologies. This is the key to driving publishing today, be it in print or online.

I do think especially that print-oriented publishers are missing many opportunities to develop custom markets for print as they fret about how to protect existing mass distribution models. Why focus on dwindling margins on rights-protected content when you can help people to add value to printable materials by opening up printable content to customization by partners and individuals? People can talk about eInk, tablets and other electronic display all they want, but cost-effective custom print is going to be a key factor in the renaissance of print publishing over the next several years. This rebirth may not result in an industry as we know it today, but it will still offer a very powerful value-add channel for most publishers.

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SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: The Post-Search World
Moderator: Fernando Pereira, Research Director, Google
Panelists:
Amiad Solomon, CEO, Peer39
Chris Lamb, SVP Alliances, the OpenCalais Initiative, Thomson Reuters
Nancy Harvey, Executive Director, Wolfram Research Inc.
Paul Martino , CEO and Co-founder, Aggregate Knowledge

Pereira kicked off the panel by asking panelists to give a very brief statement of the problem with search as it stands today and how it can or should be "fixed" for users and enterprises. Chris Lamb of Thomson Reuters gave an OpenCalais perspective, seeing the "bounce" effect of people completing one search and then returning to initiate another search, resulting in getting data but not necessarily a lot of information. The OpenCalais linked data cloud of links will help people to traverse content more easily than in typical search engine-driven information retrieval. Amiad Solomon of Pier39 focuses on search applications sees the post-search world focusing a lot more on monetizing content once people land on pages, providing different data layers for specific types of people engaging content. Nancy Harvey of Wolfram Research focuses on eliminating search inefficiencies by making fact retrieval more accurate and natural. A "clean" database of information has a natural language query interface on top of it that returns results "in a visually stunning way." She sees them co-existing with traditional search, providing specific answers to specific questions. Paul Martino of Aggregate Knowledge gave the analogy of seeing an ad for a television show that he watches appearing in Times Square alerting him to a new season of episodes. Being able to deliver information focused on interests without having to express those interests explicitly is key to the post-search world in his mind.

FP: Search does not have to be very good because users are very good filters, which makes search a fairly "forgiving" tool. But how do you deal with the risk of mistakes when people get the wrong results?
PM: Not a semantic person, Google AdSense gets it wrong a lot of the time, does a passive read of the page, meaning oftentimes inappropriate results. But it can be mitigated with whitelists, blacklists and so on, but ultimately the user doesn't get mad typically. The question from his perspective is how to deal with brand safety issues.
NH: Have to watch out for "artificial stupidity" in search results. For example, a search "what was the weather on Valentine's Day last year" may return different results for different locations or try to disambiguate before answering (for example, "Did you mean San Francisco in California"). They also manage this by steering away from domains that they don't understand. But the number of times that they need to do this is declining.
AS: Look at it from the advertising perspective, all major brands are saying that they don't want to be next to the wrong message, have to know how ad servers work, but takes sophistication. If there's an airline disaster, you need to be sensitive to avoid mismatches.
CL: Dealing with a more constrained group of users, optimized for business content, enables them to do a better job for that domain. But there are still domain issues, such as the term "The Fed" meaning the federal government in Australia and referring to the Federal Reserve in the U.S.
PM: Histograms of information on why an ad was displayed - nobody was clicking on them. Most people didn't even know that it was there. Sites with recommendations may be more important to them, people, content and ads are all of the same type, what's the best match across these lines, the user sees it all as potentially useful content.
CL: OpenCalais does disambiguation, offers a way to get into the linked data world, disambiguating offers a way to match content to content in meaningful ways. For example a press release may offers an Apple story and links to company information, not the fruit. This means a fundamental change to the surfing experience, over time there will be an increasing demand to match content to content.
AS: Need to understand the creative itself, look at the description (I would add, also look at the graphics for familiar patterns)
FP: With this melding of ads and content and content-to-content matching, it becomes a blurred editorial experience for users. How can this be managed?
PM: If ads are scored higher than content for a particular user, but sometimes when the best content is the ad the social contract is difficult to implement only with "sponsored content" labels.
FP: One school of thought tends to go for a statistical approach to infer relevance for content and ads. Some come from a semantic approach.
CL: They do use both natural language processing tools powered by a tech staff of about 40 people developing rules and coding.
AS: Mostly machine learning
NH: W/A is "intensely hand-crafted," engage world-class experts (comment: not scalable, not sure what business model this gives them ultimately)
PM: A semantic approach overall, used OpenCalais to build semantic maps internally to determine and test their weighting, try to treat all data sets the same and adjust weights objectively.

A good panel, was a little frustrating trying to blog this, as it covered a lot of ground, but I found it interesting. What seemed to be brushed over were the full impact of search on editorial operations as well as ad operations. I think that Paul Martino tuned in to one of the key "post-search" issues, namely the ability of search tools to build content that will have both editorial and sponsored "slots" that may appeal to different audiences on different levels. This sponsorship is thought of today mostly in terms of traditional media ads, but it is going to work its way into the enterprise space as well. How do suppliers and clients gain the attention of organizations, and how do publishers enable companies to provide factual content through their channels to enterprises on a sponsored basis? These are opportunities for search technologies to ponder. Ultimately search tools may frustrate traditional publishers, as it seems like a different language that's creating content value, but these technologies are creating opportunities for relationships between audiences and content producers that are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

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SIIA Information Industry Summit 2010: Google's View on Ad Technologies In The Content Mix
When Google acquired DoubleClick, one of the assets that came over was Ari Paparo, who now serves as a Product Management Director focused on ad services. Ari was introduced and interviewed by David Sidman, Founder & Chairman of Linkstorm. Ari noted that 100 percent of ad agency holding companies are developing demand-side platforms, with 72 percent of Ad Exchange volume leveraging retargeting and 24 percent now regularly using behavioral targeting. Ari also noted that today's ad model is like a mutual fund, but that we're moving towards a "day trading" like model for ad buys, with more precise tactical acquisitions.l Research from Google is indicating that digital media is 50 percent less efficient versus other media in terms of overhead dollar spent, with 28 percent of video buyers noting that workflow efficiency a key issue holding back online video ad spends and 43 percent of U.S. marketing execs agreeing that brand measurement is holding back the growth of online marketing. So although the eyes are all turning to online content, the ad industry is still in its infancy in understanding how to compel audiences in online environments efficiently, even though online portals are getting to be more efficient in tracing an audience's footpaths.

The question becomes, though, when is an ad slot something more than a pork belly-like commodity? The premium value comes in when you can show that you can do something special in online environments. Sometimes that's "wow factor" via videos and online animated graphics, but Ari notes that in general the high-end creative approach works best when it's intense and impactful. Ari provided an example of a Harley Davidson campaign keyed to Veterans Day that enabled people to send tributes to troops overseas - combining altruism with sex appeal as a path to branding via a different approach. He notes that video is expected to be 15 percent of online spend in the next few years, but the efficiency factor is not encouraging. Getting overnight delivery of creative material and other basic logistics need to be overcome to make video a cost-effective choice, but in the meantime it's good groundwork that's needed to build expertise.

Data enrichment is key for effective ads also, such as data on specific real estate listings instead of just a generic ad for a realtor. Packaging for categories of users instead of categories of content is key also, enabling advertisers to target effectively to people who may be looking at more cost-effective ad inventory available in sections such a religion-oriented portion of a newspaper site. This can enable an ad sales force to raise their inventory up from "remnant" status to inventory that can be packaged more effectively for specific marketing targets.

David keyed off his questioning with a probe on paywalls; is paid content or ad-supported content going to pay the bills? Ari sees no one answer, but he sees it vitally important to segment effectively before you make decisions on what gets thrown behind a paywall. David notes that the ad side has the granular data, which can help publishers to make these kinds of decisions. However, Ari notes that publishers have lots of data that shows how site visitors move through a site. "There are gray areas," he notes, such as who is allowed to use cookie-derived data. Or, when someone buys something, would that site be allowed to advertise sporting goods based on what they have learned from inbound data? He recommends that publishers monitor their data and metadata rights carefully to control these kinds of opportunities carefully. The big mistake is to divide up inventories and missing the opportunity for in-depth understanding and analysis of data related to users. Publishers are now starting to monetize their on-site data off-site, renting lists to marketing and online services - an old business made new.

David and the audience probed on a few fronts in his questions for Ari:
  • The benefits of content management and categorization tools to improve ad revenues, but Ari notes that much of the potential for these types of technologies has been realized already.
  • On premium ad units, the cost-benefits of rich media are focused mostly now on super-premium brand advertisers, who do get some value as they connect to consumers. But down the value chain to typical retailers, Ari notes that it's not clear that rich media makes the cash registers ring.
  • On semantic processing in ad placement, Ari was not forthcoming in detail, but he noted that some smaller vendors are working with focusing terminology. He hasn't seen that semantic technologies have brought that much to the table yet.
  • On the ComScore panel/cookie hybrid measurement model, in which publishers are being charged for being ranked, he thinks that the panel approach is useful
  • Agencies are having to step up their technology commitments in a big way, they are trying to adapt rapidly, he things that they are adaptable and will be around in the excxhange-oriented future of ads
  • Mobile markets: advertisers are frustrated but very excited about mobile, formats and measurement still in its early days
Ari gave a great presentation, but the larger question does seem to be what marketers need to do in general to extract the most efficiency out of online advertising. Certainly improved data, audience analysis and measurement and better ad production techniques can be important advances. However, to some degree marketing itself is changing in the face of a Web that finds people spending a huge amount of time online in social media services that encourage one-to-one exchanges. Managing millions of individual personal selling relationships online is a far cry from managing CPMs. So although there is more efficiency coming in ad networks, the broader question of how companies like Google can help companies to measure success with online marketing is still a work in its early progress.

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Tuesday, January 27, 2009
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009: Frictionless Information - Adding Value in the Age of Google
Kristian J. Hammond, Co-Director, Intelligent Information Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University

You have incredibly valuable content but nobody can tell the difference between it and something that someone has hacked up and thrown on the Internet. People get what they can from it and go away, driving up the bounce rate. Why should anyone in the world get it for money? People can wait it out, and it will be free. NYT will say, "Just take it, at least show up some time."

People think that they can defeat Google on its own turf with search. Like a new soda trying to go head-to-head with Coca-Cola. Unless there is a serious cultural change, the last battle that you fought is going to be fought over and over again. There's an arms race going on, someone out there is trying to bust into your information. We'll crawl the Web and have a parallel information repository to make "one-stop" shopping for our vertical. Nice idea, but still head-to-head with Google. Or, make a deal with Google, but that's just getting your information out more efficiently, doesn't address monetization.

"We suggest leapfrogging the problems altogether..." In cellular telephony, adoption in developing nations surged where land lines were mediocre at best. Leapfrogged rather than trying to make technology work in old environments. We work on frictionless information systems, or intelligent information systems. "Whatever you're thinking, we'll get to your heart's desire." We want to get rid of the search box, so that you don't interact with it directly. Need information systems that are aware of the context of your behavior. Knowing your customer at this second and using it as a driver of information. We're a lab, we don't care where information comes from.

Examples: the desktop relevance engine and "beyond broadcast," for online video, and "make my page," for machine-generated content. Pulls information on the Web based on the document being read (COMMENT: not really so different from "more like this" feature or training data for semantic searches). Really on-point, finds docs first on own Web site, then other sites. Also pulls up discussions, experts, methods, learning, Web and desktop collections. (COMMENT: good idea. Not done often enough). Integrated with desktop activity (COMMENT: like Watson, kind of), can pull from any searchable source. Kind of like doing enterprise portal services for the world).

Then looked at server-side versions of this. Chicago Sun-Times example, other blogs, videos, Web, other S-T news, S-T blogs (COMMENT: This is a lot like Sphere in a sense, all fine and good, but Sphere is not really helping publishers to generate engagement or revenues to any significant degree). In video, main context is watching television. Build a small piece of code for TiVo box, "beyond broadcast," watches television with you, notices what channel you're on, look at closed caption text, feed that information to server, hijack a TiVo remote button, would build a microsite based on the content and the context. Different for cooking show, how-to show, dramas, etc. (COMMENT: This has strong potential as a concept, contextual content and ads for television). Were elated with this, people will come to us, but then YouTube happened and convergence happened anyway without television. Took same system, moved it online. Works pretty much the same, change banner ads based on what' being discussed in the video.

Looked at a few examples, "good eats" on the Food Network, links to Wikipedia entry on corn dogs. Look at other version of recipes, etc. (COMMENT: Again, not much new on one level, but doing it in real-time is a fantastic tool, equivalent to AdWords on Google search). Give them everything that they might be interested in (COMMENT: But do publishers really want more distractions from their content? I agree with the "real-time portal" based on content of interest, but again, Sphere experience raises questions).

"Make my page" function, pulls together new document, primarily links to other document, open to social media editing. Highly relevant, will percolate up to the top and stay there. (COMMENT: Now, that works better. Make the associations of content more enduring, even when they are assembled in real-time. If the aggregation works for one person, it may work for others, and it will be improved for others. Similar to my old concept of distributable objects that grow in value as they are passed from person to person contextually). "We will get you to your heart's desire."

Great stuff, I like the idea of the persistent contextual objects that grow over time, that's the real winning ingredient. Many of the other ideas have been done before, but if you can create content that becomes more popular over time automatically as it expands and transforms over time through contextual use, it will be self-optimizing for engagement.

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SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009: Licensing Digital Information: Satisfying Customers While Protecting Assets
Moderator: Dan Duncan, Senior Director, Government Affairs, The McGraw-Hill Companies

Panel:
Ed Collaran, Senior Director, International Relations, Copyright Clearance Center
Dominic Young, Director of Group Publishing Services, News International
Caitlin Grusauskas, 3rd year student, Columbia University School of Law
Mindy Pennington, Manager, External Content, Library Services, Pfizer Global Research and Development

Duncan: Apple taking DRM block off of music, France suits, law would have mandated taking off DRM, effort was abandoned. Apple got together with industry, no restrictions on reuse at a higher price. Today, new users all the time, new solutions as well. What works?

Caitlin: People have expectations that it's all going to be free, quick answers from things like Google Toolbar. The idea of copyright is foreign, you assume that you can share it, has serious implications for content owners.

Pennington: People want to make it easier to share, things like CCC Rightsphere work but take time to set up, content is desired on mobile devices, how or whether it works can be problematic, as is who you can share it with. Taking something from your digital library and giving it to partners is a problem, need for more flexible relationships.

Colleran: From the user's standpoint, they're busy people, make it easy as possible, but offering broader rights is key. Pharma industry initiative to broaden contract terms, looking to share content that they license as a key contract factor.

Young: Part of ACAP, news initiative for managing access. To actually manage and control it without licensing is needed in some way, licensing not well adapted for all circumstances, ACAP allows end-users to take control more easily when it's legal and reasonable to do so.

Duncan: Many users don't look at terms and conditions, if they do access it they don't access it or understand it. From the perspective of users, where do they fit in today?

Young: Doing it in a way that's highly automated is key, tools don't exist to do that, so people do things because there's no reasonable alternative. Business models aren't there, either (COMMENT: Micropayments is underutilized, technologies are there that COULD support it, but there is resistance. That resistance is a key factor in today's media revenue gap.)

Pennington: We get questions about usage even with Rightsphere, most people are aware of what they're allowed to do, internal news stories and other communications about what's allowed.

Duncan: Pfizer has its own valuable intellectual property as well. Caitlin, in your experience, are students aware of terms and conditions?

Caitlin: In law school it's different, they rely on Westlaw and LexisNexis, people understand that there are terms and conditions with their accounts. In the broader university community, I can access materials from the university library seamlessly. In some ways there's a problem because there's so much out there.

Pennington: In the last couple of years new programs provide text mining, automated systems may pull thousands of articles in a couple of hours, users may notice first when content is blocked. Work with publishers, understand what's allowed, text mining system will be programmed to obey terms. (COMMENT: But what if an agreement could be executed automatically? Huge under-explored opportunities, let people get a taste for free, when throttles are reached then an ecommerce opportunity can be activated, either through online human agents or an auto-execution micropayment system. Works for mobile carriers, folks, it's not rocket science).

Young: Search engine access works well for some publishers, not for others, ACAP helps search engines to discover terms and conditions. Can be done machine to machine. But scaling up the capability of the network is a challenge. (COMMENT: ACAP still has potential, but, no offense to my European friends, it's being pursued in a lethargic manner, needs to go open source, with multiple serving agents, akin to DNS services).

Collaeran: With social media tools, publishers find it to be an incredible branding tool, FT gives first five articles away, then second five with registration, then you have to pay. Don't have to pay for each article.

Duncan: Caitlin, what's your reaction?

Caitlin: Depends how easy it is to use, didn't sign up for NYT premium, but if price is right, it's worth it. Some kids want to "stick it to the man," but if it's pretty easy to do the right thing, then they comply. HuLu, good quality, people want it fast and quick, people will pay.

Pennington: A lot easier for people not to worry about it when the corproation licenses it, but more flexible arrangement for doing the right thing would be important. When the physician sees the advertising and is measurable, that's important. So, why not make a version of the online product that looks like the magazine? Why won't publishers make another version? We have devices like Kindle now. With copiers sharing was harder, would be nice to have technology advances for today's needs.

Caitlin: People doing online research are used to putting in all sorts of search terms to see what pops up. Topical search would be nice, to see what pops up, more like an index than a traditional book (COMMENT: Works on relatively discrete content sets with tools such as taxonomies).

Young: Things like ACAP are a step in the right direction, we have gloom and doom about old business models, innovation can help. In a world that's well functioning, rewards will be linked to access.

Colleran: Not just about text content, any type of media could be involved, need to license those different kinds of content. Not just publishers, authors are taking a far more prominent role with self-publishing.

Duncan: How will authors be paid for content, major publishing companies have marketing department, sells into an area where the customer understands the value.

Collaran: Creative Commons-style authors may want some content out there for free, but others may want payment (COMMENT: CC does have hooks in its licensing for payment, early days still, remarkably, on activating that capability.)

Pennington: Make licensing more relevant for the specific people using content, critical going forward, especially as organizations divide into global business units, granular licensing needed.

Caitlin: People may use terms and conditions, the ability to share music is there, but I haven't tried it, don't want to be restricted by DRM. Rhapsody is one model, could work for other types of content.

Colleran: Ease of use and compliance are key "microscripts" coming out of this. Education is not sexy but it can help. Users need to be educated what they can and cannot do with copyrighted content.

Young: Micropayments would be wonderful, need the best innovators to help the best content to win out, that may be authors as well.

Pennington: People are willing to pay for what they need.

Question: Agreement between Gatehouse Media and NYT on Boston.com?

Duncan: Not that familiar with it, but not settled law. IP community on the publishing side were happy, but also scratching heads.

Great panel, excellent moderation, Dan.

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SIIA Information Industry Summit 2009 - Mark Walsh with Lessons from Politics
Views from the "evidence-free" zone.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was the father of the atomic bomb, as they were getting ready to test it in New Mexico for the 6AM detonation, Oppenheimer noticed that the mathematician was not there, when to get him, he said, "If I got the math wrong, none of you are coming back."

We got the math wrong on a lot of things in the past several years, but certainly since September 15th.

2005 dinner with new senator Obama, Walsh concerned that Democrats aren't prepared for a knife fight. You're the savior of the Democratic party? Where's the bench strength? You're it? "Who knew?"

Politics is an odd business, it's Hollywood for unattractive people, like Junior High, one-day sale with 100 percent market share. Political marketing: how does it work and how does it affect consumer marketing?

When a sound bite takes hold it's hard to get rid of, we still attribute the "Al Gore invented the Internet" to him, but he never said it. Sound bites become micro-scripts, help your constituents to attack your opponents. "They work." 24 months ago, "Lipstick, Nowhere, Maverick, Change" were not microscripts, the campaign made them so. Candidate doesn't have to defend records with microscripts. When they work, they're powerful. Became the branding tactic for the whole campaign, gave us permission to validate Obama's aspiration and forgive a light background and plan details. "Change we can Believe In" - two microscripts together.

Marketers must have shorter ways to define their brands. Unique selling proposition - USP - the one thing that you can say about your brand that nobody else can. These are the future mantras in our markets. It will leak into our world. "It's not an elevator speech any more, it's a bumper sticker." Kids say "whatever," it's kind of a sub-microscript. How do we increase the bandwidth of customers and citizens? "Are we screwed?" This administration is the "reboot", Obama speaks deliberately and slowly, has thoughtful approaches, "the anti-microscript, human Ritalin." People will shun the easy label, the bon mot. Everybody knows when promises are kept and not kept, political marketers know it, other marketers have to catch up. Some proportion will not get it, they will continue to use microscripts to process things. "Playing to the base" is off to the left or right, they get microscripts such as "God, guns and gays," still useful. Try to bring the bell curve to where the microscripts don't work. "We're better than that." But my microscript: "Shift happens." Shifting away from patent phrases (COMMENT: great points, but I think that history shows that simple concepts are important for communication. They help to build consensus broadly. He acknowledges this in the Q&A when he acknowledges that brands like Apple do microscripting well. I think that the key point today is that social media allows us to discuss, spin and position microscripting very rapidly in a broader conversation).

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SIIA Information Industry Summit: Sink or Swim: How can you Grow an Information Company Now?
Moderator: Kevin English, SVP - M&E, Satayam

Michael Wolff: NYT not the future of publishing, traditional print organizations are "over", 18 months at the outside. A fascinating historical moment, general interest print is done. Model has to move "all the way," Google has established an absolutely new model. First, they don't create their own content. They don't "do" it. They have monopolized the primary revenue stream - advertising. Everyone here is looking at this and saying, "The game is changed. How do we look at this new model and mimic it or adapt to it?" How can we pay nothing at all for content is the primary strategic question. Just about using everyone's else's content (COMMENT: Not. It's about people creating their own content and putting it in the most valuable contexts. It's about the "printing press" being everywhere. Print is NOT dead, just waiting for new models to exploit it, even as electronic services expand.

Vivek Shah, Time, Inc - Fundamentals the same, you need a great product still. Way too many people knocking on marketers' doors waiting for them to help them. Voice, personality matter in successful brands, points of view matter, a change for parts of American journalism. Scale matters, need to address audiences. Google changes the scale of audiences that can be addressed effectively via advertising. As you go from PC-based web to mobile, real estate for ads is relatively small and revenue potential disappears. (COMMENT: Agreed. The fundamental experience of advertising online is deficient in comparison in many ways to the print experience. Part of the answer is new technologies, but part of the answer is also recognizing that what you do in a space where you used to do advertising has changed fundamentally online. It's about personal transactions as much as Vance Packard's "hidden persuaders.")

English: What do publishers provide now?

Shah: Looking at Time.com, you have to build the content around the formats, smaller audience for long form content. Just because you can write stuff doesn't mean that you have an online "metabolism."
Wolff: Hard to make the case that traditional print outlets know what they're supposed to be doing. Used to be the covers of Time and Newsweek changed national conversations, doesn't happen in the same way today.
Shah: People aren't racing for screen grabs. Time was launched when there were 28 dailies in Chicago alone. They responded to a glut.

English: Environment is changing, customers are changing, newest generation expects it all for free.

Bob Merrym CQ: 70 percent subscription/circ revs and high-margin ad revenues for focused audience. Shouldn't cede circulation revs.
Shah: Marketers. Google satisfies advertising ROI, rest is branding ads, which are hard to measure for success. CTRs are low. (COMMENT: The Web is not about seduction - unless you're looking for a "good time." It's about real relationships and real social transactions). The consumer movements can be overdone, there's lots of media.
Wolff: Direct model has much lower margins, direct marketers give "the piece" in the mail or the advertorial (Disagree, look at sponsorship and private media such as captive magazines, corporate blogs and forums.). Value of content has gone down consistently. Content costs less and less and less. Technology can create cheaper content, and technology itself can give functionality as well. People go to the web for technology AND function.
Oakliegh Thorne, Thorne Information Partners: People go to local papers for information, especially in local outlets. The Chicago Tribune has always been a lousy paper, so slow that they have to do features on the front page.
Merry: Community newspapers struggling, type of news is commoditized, available for free. Web practically killed my business, did kill my competitor, because it was commoditized, so we increased the value of the content. Editorial effort, extremely functional and efficient platforms to distribute. That's what you're going to have to grapple with. (COMMENT: Agreed, the basic formula, CQ bit the bullet at a great time and is reaping the rewards.)
Question: Who pays for foreign correspondents if everything's free? (Ken Wasch, President, SIIA)
Wolff: Probably no one, the "foreign bureau" goes away, and in fact in some ways HAS gone away. You can make the argument that we have more information from foreign markets than ever before. Where once we were dependent on Time magazine for foreign news, we're dependent on new sources and other sources that are on site - e.g., if the Guardian is on site, do you really need your own correspondent? Difficult to argue that we don't know more as a result.
Shah: If you look at Nielsen, sports, etc., all top ten brands are established brands (hmm, guess he's looking at different stats, but I would agree that established brands have capital and unique value as long as there's unique content.) Need voice, personality. (Didn't help NYT with columns, new voices compete.)
Merry: One of the factors is a clinging to the editorial model. (Dang, Bob gets it.) 19th century, papers were going to be objective. That's what we grew up with it, that's dead, technology destroyed it, and people in the news business don't get that. 1840's papers were highly partisan but had great coverage. (Agreed, we're getting a higher quality conversation overall, as long as it's not propaganda dominating the bandwidth). Times-Picayune used to dominate news from Mexico, made its way up and down the east coast. What we had is over, they were small businesses then, will be so again.

English: Who's the winner in this new environment?

Merry: I am! I am in Washington, where billions of dolars are being spent (CQ is indeed a very model for success, not always easy to replicate, but in the right niches it can be done well.)

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Wednesday, January 30, 2008
SIIA Information Industry Summit 2008: CEOs Outlook - The Tipping Point for Old and New Media
Moderator: Jim G. Kollegger, CEO, Genesys Partners, Inc.
Panelists:
Ken Auletta, Author and Annals of Communications Columnist, The New Yorker
Michael Barrett, EVP and Chief Revenue Officer, Fox Interactive Media
Jim Kelly, Managing Editor, Time Inc.
Alan Patricof, Founder and Managing Director, Greycroft LLC

Jim: This is the seventh summit of the merged Software and Informaiton Industry Association, it's like surfing, the industry has to catch the wave, need to skate to where the puck is going to be. Last summer watched YouTube presidential debate, on Meet the Press Ariana Huffington is there as an equal because of Huffington Post. A tipping point is developing, there's a slow building up and then a dramatic increase. Newspapers are in free fall, magazines are getting thinner, new media doesn't kill old media but repositions things. [To Kelley] How do you position yourself in this era?

Kelly: Has 125 media properties, most are in Britain as a part of IPC, much different model over there, here it's the familiar brands, some of those titles make a considerable amount of money from print advertisers and subscribers. People magazine has 2 million people who are willing to subscribe for USD 109 per year. Another 1.5 million will buy it as the newsstand. Makes hundreds of millions a year. Each magazine has been tasked to find their own digital future, some have a bigger opportunity than others, Sports Illustrated doing well, acquired FanNation, Face of the Crowd (Greycroft company). People has StyleWatch online, we're an increasingly mobile society, using devices that are not friendly to a 2,000 word narrative. Advertisers are finding more effective ways to reach consumers, Johnson & Johnson's Baby Center is making parenting magazines ask what they can do to counter. The younger you are, the more likely you're likely to see everything on the Web as content, whether YouTube, an alert from WaPo, to define models around topics is harder as communities create their own power.

Barrett: Every challenge creates a business opportunity, allowing time-shifting, old distribution under assault, look at MySpace, 70,000 vidos posted every day, all this consumption and creation, none of this takes away the value of major TV shows. MySpace communities can create a place for media brands to build audience rather than erode it. If you stream video content you erode TV but if they're people who don't want to miss an episode you can keep them captured, will be a constructve model, not destructive. Haven't closed the gap in economics, but getting there.

Jim: Would you invest in a magazine property today?
Patricof: If just print, no, but now there are new channels from old media. Video to magazine Web sites, Tackle sports network for football, synergistic aspects of print publication that can help to power online content. Every has adapted to new media, we're in venture capital business, corporate investors come and go, now major media brands are the major investors, now right on the front line of making investments.

Jim: Why the investment in HuffPost, Ariana?
Patricof: Started as political blog, now entertainment, finance, unique visitors are climbing dramatically, have invested in blog site - paidContent.org, lot lower investment to get into that than to get into magazine industry. Huffington left a fund-raiser to be at blog conference.

Kelly: When willl HuffPost make money?
Patricof: Let me ask you about some of your publications. Took years to build many print titles.
Kelly: Sports Illustrated took at least a decade.

Jim: Are newspapers in free-fall?
Auletta: If you interview people who are in news you meet people who are terrified. Online newspapers are exciting, but how do you monetize is not the same as paper, haven't figured it out. FT is profitable, WSJ, but they are closed universe, limited shelf space for advertisers. Are they open to new media, are the open to breaking out of old patterns?

Jim: Tribune sold for about half a million, how do you make a small fortune in the news business? Start with a large fortune. Murdoch bought MySpace when daughter brought it to his attention.

Barrett: News Corp driven from the top, not a lot of analysis, not sophmoric but where other companies can spend months in analysis for boards, private companies can react quickly, deals done in 24-hour windows. They can afford to wait years to make investments pay off.

Jim: WSJ over-weekend advertiser, but makes sense.
Patricof: Flies in the face of terrified print.
Auletta:Synergy is an overused word, but Murdoch can move fast and create synergies.
Kelly: Murdoch making paper broader.
Patricof: What about books, Eisner putting out webisodes, book based on webisodes being released in their wake.

Jim: Behind every great media company is a mogul [comment: Brin and Paige as moguls? Close enough.].
Kelly: Luce sold Time mag twice over at first, was able to turn it into a real investment eventally.
Auletta: Old and new media, new media dominated by engineers, Google's had palpable success, engineering culture is driving these companies, represent different value systems, different cultures. If you said the engineer is no longer king at Google it wouldn't work, Terry Semel took over Yahoo, didn't work, don't understand half of the words that engineers were saying. John Scully didn't understand Apple.

Jim: What are your driver, what do you lose sleep over?
Kelly: Spend a lot of time with video, monetization is still a work in progress. Look at reviews on Amazon.com, look at all those reviews, why not sell them to NYTimes.com?
Auletta: It's a way of looking at things.
Barrett: Everything's going digital, mobile, whatever, we have a stake in all, what concerns us is the race to who has the most data on people. Google will be 10x as they learn more about end users. Advertisers are going to demand that information, won't settle for household demographics. Don't get disintermediated with your own consumers.

Jim: Yahoo in China?
Barrett: Have to play by the rules, privacy is a huge concern, however people get the fact that they're not paying for a social network, why send me ads for singles when you know that I am married? Have to stop somewhere, but would you rather have an ad that means something to yo or not?
Patricof: Relevance is part of it, localization is a bigger part. Down to zip codes, neighborhoods, addresses, television is moving in that direction.
Auletta: 4 billion cell phones, but do I want to be interrupted on the phone with an ad? Facebook related ads had to be pulled, users didn't want them.

QUICK TAKE: A really good panel, senior media players but people who really understand the issues. Long story short, old media is hosed in terms of the old platforms with old models but new platforms and old platforms with new models are going to do quite well. I think the largest issue that's lurking at the edges is the rise of video as a factor in devaluing the written word as monetizable content whilst at the same time we have a hard time monetizing video online. There are huge gaps in revenue development that aren't easy to address in the short term. But the good news is that major media companies are indeed begining to learn how to invest in new plays, hopefully with the patience that old "moguls" had. They are becoming the exit strategy for many plays, but there's only so many immature media plays that you can absorb before owners and shareholders get itchy. We're going to see an impatience gap soon enough: angel-level investors who are more content for the long haul hanging on, higher levels of equity providing mostly an acceleration path for spinoff to media holding companies. You can't innovate in media as a fully public company effectively - Google was wise to move cautiously into public shares. The economic models are not mature, but economies follow value. The economies may not look like old models, but they will come indeed.

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Tuesday, April 17, 2007
SIIA Content Forum 2007: Top Line - Who Pays for Content, Why and How?
George Beckerman of Marlin & Associates conducted a conversation with Cindy Hill, focusing on how to approach the convergence of media and enterprise content markets and to manage the acceptance of content from premium services with ads in the services. Cindy points out there that there's a huge "what's in it for me" from users but also a willingness to consider ads from subscription services if it doesn't impede access to content. Print-based journal providers are getting pushback on budgets not only on the basis of price but also on the basis of budget for storage, so migration to more ad-based content aimed at institutions into electronic media is going to be crucial. George points out that at the Amsterdam SIIA conference Claudia Juech, VP of Central Information Services at Deutsche Bank, was definitely open to the concept, so there was some anecdotal evidence for ads in enterprise-oriented content having support.

But Cindy point out that you do need eyeballs for content to make this work. Cindy and George have been doing research as to what the real receptivity is for ads. George points out that Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra, has done some experimentation with premium ads. Outsell research highlighted by George indicates that people in professional roles do respond to ads, so there is also some broader evidence for this response factor. Cindy underscores the need for ethical standards as a key factor for moving ads into enterprise-oriented content. Her research with George indicates that they would consider convergence pricing, but that they expect faster access to more essential informaiton in the process. So instead of having ads as sidebars direct embedding with useful information would be key. [COMMENT: We've been suggesting this for years, monetize context does not necessarily equate to traditional advertising.] But not everyone is in favor of ads in enterprise content - interestingly coming from individuals who were of the opinion that they were already able to negotiate pricing effectively and from those who are concerned about objectivity. So although that there is promise for this concept more insights and experimentation is required. Metrics are highly important, Cindy indicated that if a journal is not used at least one hundred times it's cancelled - a relatively low threshold of usage. Ads could help to offset the cost in these kinds of instances. There may be a number of solutions to be worked out for this, especially given earlier models for sponsored content in the financial industry.

In Q&A it came out that Alacra has done research and received strong push-back in their markets, Dow Jones is working on an enterprise-based product for financial information and news, BLR has added ads to some of their business and legal content with no pushback from subscribers.

Selling context in enterprise products can be tricky - interrupting workflow is a huge issue, but that's subject to interpretation. People are going to Google and other search engines as a part of their workflow any way, to implicitly there is a strong degree of acceptance for ads in business information anyway. The key factor to focus on is the value of context - content in context could be an ad, it could be objective content with sponsorship, it could be a database that has some content distributed on a licensed basis and other content on an ad basis, it could be the customer themselves offering that context for content that could be useful for their purposes.

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SIIA Content Forum 2007: Top Line - Who Pays for Content, Why and How?
George Beckerman of Marlin & Associates conducted a conversation with Cindy Hill, focusing on how to approach the convergence of media and enterprise content markets and to manage the acceptance of content from premium services with ads in the services. Cindy points out there that there's a huge "what's in it for me" from users but also a willingness to consider ads from subscription services if it doesn't impede access to content. Print-based journal providers are getting pushback on budgets not only on the basis of price but also on the basis of budget for storage, so migration to more ad-based content aimed at institutions into electronic media is going to be crucial. George points out that at the Amsterdam SIIA conference Claudia Juech, VP of Central Information Services at Deutsche Bank, was definitely open to the concept, so there was some anecdotal evidence for ads in enterprise-oriented content having support.

But Cindy point out that you do need eyeballs for content to make this work. Cindy and George have been doing research as to what the real receptivity is for ads. George points out that Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra, has done some experimentation with premium ads. Outsell research highlighted by George indicates that people in professional roles do respond to ads, so there is also some broader evidence for this response factor. Cindy underscores the need for ethical standards as a key factor for moving ads into enterprise-oriented content. Her research with George indicates that they would consider convergence pricing, but that they expect faster access to more essential informaiton in the process. So instead of having ads as sidebars direct embedding with useful information would be key. [COMMENT: We've been suggesting this for years, monetize context does not necessarily equate to traditional advertising.] But not everyone is in favor of ads in enterprise content - interestingly coming from individuals who were of the opinion that they were already able to negotiate pricing effectively and from those who are concerned about objectivity. So although that there is promise for this concept more insights and experimentation is required. Metrics are highly important, Cindy indicated that if a journal is not used at least one hundred times it's cancelled - a relatively low threshold of usage. Ads could help to offset the cost in these kinds of instances. There may be a number of solutions to be worked out for this, especially given earlier models for sponsored content in the financial industry. Great insights, would have loved to have heard more.

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Wednesday, March 28, 2007
ABM Digital Velocity 2007: Implementing a Web Content Management System
Tony Byrne of CMSWatch.com gave a great presentation on the best practices on CMS systems, it's not typically the focus of our community so I took the liberty of breaking from my blogging it live. Tony covered the waterfront of hows and whys, from full-blown services like Stellant to hosted services to open source systems. This is a huge focus for this audience, so it was a presentation that got a strong welcome. Content management is fairly ubiquitous in some areas of B2B publishing but many publishers still struggle with it. Tony's publication is a great source of research and insights, strongly recommend it.

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ABM Digital Velocity 2007: Editorial/Content Strategies in a User-Generated World
Michael Lavitt, Senior Content Producer, Aviation Week, introduces a panel of plays for user-generated content that integrates with mainstream content: Laurel Touby, Founder of Mediabistro, a site that covers mainstream and new media; Eric Newman, VP and GM for Pluck, providing tools and content for integrating user-generated media into mainstream portals; Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 and Atlantic Media; and Laurel Toby, Editor of MediaPost, exploring how to integrate user generated content.

Building a Web community: Laurel - many in community were content producers but now they're also in PR and marketing. Brought the community online. Put stuff on site that they have to engage with. The aggregation of all of the news of the day. Asks who has bulletin boards, comments, etc., very few hands, one question, "What's a bulletin board?" Oops. But ever her editors weren't sure about discussions. Started with "party marketing," reached out to community members. Got volunteers. See what you can get for free. Now 200 events, some around the world.

Are we doing the same things with better technology: Laurie - Web 2.0 technologies changed things dramatically, a journalist is not the same beast as a result. Still need fundamental skills such as sourcing and verification, but the job is more about putting things in context and finding educated opinion. Everyone has to learn video, a lot of things she learned at iVillage - how to provoke discussion and debate - is part of the skill set for journalists these days.

What will journalists have to give up in terms of reporting: Laurie - at a classic trade show, did blogging, video, show daily and regular online daily news coverage and special email bursts. Did a dozen video interviews, realized that she didn't talk to a lot of people when she was there, didn't sleep a lot. Trade journalism is changing, wasn't sure that she'd make it here today from having to deal with stuff.

How can trade media experience relate to User-Generated Content. Eric - five years from now every site will have interactivity but not necessarily community. It's about taking metaphors that you're comfortable with and extending them. Editorial has to be part of the discussion, no longer an us-to-them model, results are amazing when it works. Pluck powers TheStreet.com comments, skyrocketed the site visits. "We the Media" book, at a conference posts on a blog got back to the blogger who asked questions that interacted with the event. Journalists help to facilitate the news.

How do you manage the content coming from users, how do we feel safe: Scott - getting people to use embedded features is different from "who wants to set up a blog." When comments get turned on all of a sudden people are all over your article. Two different challenges - floods of content of varying quality, or people are scared and don't contribute. Weblogs are just content management, to ask users to blog is to ask them to create content. Laurie - don't allow anonymous posting, people upload party photos. Scott - now we can have an infinite number of columns.

How do we write for online: Scott - in old days held on to stories, now we have the online medium that's great at breaking stories. Nothing drives traffic like real news. When people want to know things they will come. Eric - Web provides unlimited scale of content than can be delivered. Were some other good topics, but by this point the cream was skimmed off. Bottom line: there's a major disconnect between attendees and user-generated content. Most are just beginning to get good focus on integrating traditional print editorial operations and online operations. It's good background for many of these publishers, but most are at the foothills of user interactivity. A good motivator came up in the spirited Q&A: what's the financial upside for blogs? Laurel quipped that it's cheaper than editorial, and that's the point. An audience can generate usable content more quickly than an editorial team in many instances. Excellent panel.

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