ODCR. TVE. VOD. OTT.
Doesn’t it seem like this year’s Upfront presentations were filled with way too many acronyms, making it harder and harder to make sense of them? Playing House’s Executive Producers, writers and stars Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair break down what they all mean and how they illustrate the innovation taking place at NBCUniversal.
Darcy Frisch, vice president of Hearst Ventures, discusses the unique model, business structure and future of Hearst Ventures’ newest investment, ride-sharing service Via.
Hearst Ventures is always on the lookout for the next big thing in the technology space that can help impact consumers’ lives. The group’s newest investment, ride-sharing company Via, shows big promise in the on-demand transportation sector and has a unique business model that provides an attractive price point and sophisticated technology that differentiates the company from the ever-expanding market competition.
Can you give us a brief background on Via?
Frisch: Via is a ride-sharing service that allows you to reserve a seat in a car using an app on your smartphone. Using Via’s app, customers drop a pin in the location where they’d like to be picked up and where they’d like to be dropped off. Via’s technology matches the request with a nearby vehicle that can fulfill the ride, and dynamically coordinates the route to include other users going in the same direction.
We think there is pent-up demand for transportation alternatives in Manhattan and other major metro areas. Via offers a solution to riders who want to share the cost of their ride, but are looking for, and willing to pay for, more convenience and comfort than what is currently offered by mass transit.
What Hearst Ventures finds particularly compelling about Via is its software platform: an automated dynamic routing system optimized for many variables ranging from traffic conditions to predicted demand along routes traveled. The software—not the vehicle driver—chooses the route and ensures that the customer will always be picked up and dropped off within two blocks of their pin drops. It automatically communicates critical information about the location of the vehicle as it approaches and clearly instructs the customer, through the app, on where to meet their driver and vehicle.
Can you talk a bit about Via’s plans for expansion?
Frisch: Via has been expanding its service in Manhattan gradually over the past year or so and demand for the service has been extraordinary. At the time Hearst invested, service was operating limited hours and in a zone from 32nd Street to 110th Street. Very recently, Via announced that it was extending its hours of operation to be 6:30 a.m.-9 p.m. and expanding its service zone to cover from 14th Street to 110th Street, river to river. Via also has plans to expand into other metro areas in the U.S., and eventually internationally. The first two targets will likely be Chicago and Washington, D.C.
Tell us a little about Via’s pricing model and how the company keeps costs so low.
Frisch: There is a pre-pay option on the app where customers can use money they have already loaded, at the five dollar per-ride price. If customers pay for each individual ride, the cost is seven dollars per ride. If there is more than one person being picked up, each additional rider is charged at 50 percent of your per-ride price. The company keeps the cost low by matching vehicle supply and customer demand. The drivers are independent contractors, licensed by the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission, and are called to work based on what Via expects demand to be on a given day, at a given time. Fully utilized, a vehicle can make three to three and a half loaded trips per hour. Ideally, Via’s vehicles will run at full capacity, but there will always be times of less-than-full utilization. The supply of drivers and vehicles is being managed to grow with demand for the service. The two will expand together.
Tell us more about the founders and the team behind Via.
Frisch: The founders, Daniel Ramot and Oren Shoval, are impressive entrepreneurs. In their home country of Israel, they grew up with Sheruts—shared taxis and vans—that are a popular and effective means of transportation. Ramot and Shoval are both graduates of the elite Talpiot program of the Israel Defense Forces, and clearly have the engineering skills, training and experience that made them able to build the Via technology and successfully roll out the service in New York. Their team is divided between New York and Tel Aviv. The engineering team resides in Tel Aviv, under Shoval, and the operations and marketing teams are based here in New York with Ramot.
What separates Via from some of its competitors?
Frisch: We think there is a lot of room for new transportation solutions in Manhattan. Via is offering a new type of service that combines the low price and sharing aspects of mass transit with the personalization and convenience of a for hire taxi or limo ride. Also, the software and technology platform that I described before is a defensible advantage that Via has over its competitors.
What about Via ultimately made it an attractive investment for Hearst?
Frisch: Hearst Ventures has been interested in on-demand service models and we have spent a good deal of time thinking about these businesses. On-demand transportation is particularly interesting because it is a very large market opportunity that is in its early days of disruption by smartphone hailing services like Uber and Lyft. We spent a long time thinking about the market, and Hearst President and CEO Steve Swartz challenged us to find a company for investment that offered a real competitive advantage to the market counterparts. When I came across Via, I honed-in on its technology platform as something that would differentiate the service. The automated routing system that enables the shared service and the low price point is truly groundbreaking.
Via’s management team is rock solid and their business model is new and different. The timing feels right, since well-funded companies already in the space have educated both the drivers and riders that it is very easy and convenient to transact using smartphones. With this new round of funding, Via can expand and grow more quickly. We are very excited about working with them as they do.
Innovation was the dominant theme at the Collision conference, which was held May 5-6 in Las Vegas. This is not surprising given that the event attracts hundreds of startups and hosts a two-day pitch competition. In fact, the event format innovates on the traditional tech conference by eschewing the standard Las Vegas strip stomping grounds for a couple of airplane hangars near the old section of the city. Collision founder Paddy Cosgrave teamed up with Zappos Founder Tony Hsieh to bring the event to this section of the Vegas as part of Hsieh’s vision to reinvent the area where he moved the company two years ago.
Cosgrave sat down with Hsieh at Collision to discuss their shared passion for innovation. Having recently announced that Zappos will become a Holacracy, in which authority and decision-making are distributed throughout self-organizing teams rather than with senior management, Hsieh is no stranger to risk taking. His goal is to inspire a new era of creativity at the company, which has swelled to 1,500 employees—a number that has led to “systemic bureaucracy” he feels is antithetical to innovation. Hsieh said that as of April 30th, there are no longer people manager roles at Zappos; nstead, he wants every employee to be a mini-entrepreneur. Though he admits that this approach won’t be right for every organization, he made it clear that innovation is a must in order to survive. Stating that most innovation is inspired by something outside your industry, Hsieh encouraged attendees to get out into the event and “collide” with unexpected people to generate new ideas; to be inspired by those outside one’s peer-group, company, and industry to prompt truly groundbreaking thinking.
This set a tone for the event, which was a hive of conversations—many among seemingly disparate individuals. More than 7,000 attendees, startup exhibitors, students and investors mixed it up on ideas ranging from new social apps for just about everything to drone grocery delivery and using your Apple Watch to help the homeless. While some ideas seemed like solutions without a problem, others sparked nothing short of awe. Two students from UC San Diego, Alex Finch and Deepak Atyam, showed off a rocket engine they’d built with a 3D printer, an idea they hope could make communication satellites smaller and more affordable. Other entrepreneurs sought to help travelers find food trucks, optimize ad budgets on the fly, and create personalized VOD channels.
However there were also those who, like Hsieh, are seeking to ignite renewed innovation from within established businesses or to disrupt long-held models. One that fits both descriptions is advertising agencies. Jeben Burr, founder of Zealot Networks and Neil Robinson, founder of Chapter noted that there has been a disconnect between product development and marketing teams that needs to be mended in order to deliver experiences that resonate with consumers. Robinson’s approach has been “to step away from the big digital agency model and build a high-density of talent; people who can be the architect of something.” Both Burr and Robinson felt that starting fresh was the right way for them to create a new approach to digital advertising. Burr added that acquisition can be an effective way to bring new life to a large organization. And while Robinson said he’s seen some organizations create incubators that do impressive work, unfortunately he rarely sees their innovation “leak out into the larger organization,” something that needs to happen in order for systemic change to take place.
Another Collision speaker, AdRoll founder Aaron Bell said that “in 1997, you bought ads online just like you did offline—with a fax machine and insertion orders.” Today, he pointed out, “there’s been billions of dollars spent in ad tech and the Lumascape has become incredibly complex.” However, he anticipates a steady stream of startups in the space, not only because there’s money to be made, but because of the experimental spirit of marketers and their desire for continuous innovation. This opinion was reinforced by Ashu Garg, general partner of Foundation Capital. Garg said he expects to see tenfold growth in marketing software spending in the next few years because “marketers don’t want one-size-fits-all… and are looking for competitive advantage, not just operational efficiency.”
Robert Stephens who, founded Geek Squad and served as CTO of Best Buy after his company’s acquisition by the retail giant, says that the experience showed him how disconnected customer service can be from modern communication. He is bullish on the potential for instant messaging to infuse more aspects of business and customer communication. In fact, he recently co-founded Assist, which allows travelers to text questions about an area and receive a quick response from those who live in the area. His belief is that “calling a business will be as obsolete in a few years as printing out a boarding pass.” And while Stephens’ approach is to build something new, he believes that everyone has the opportunity to look at things differently and that opportunity is not limited to young upstarts. “Large companies have the opportunity to use their powers to change things,” he said.
Change and adaptability ran strong as themes until the closing hour. Rocket Fuel President Richard Frankel emphasized the point in his talk, “the organizations that are struggling the most are those refusing to change, are afraid to change or are in change-denial.” There’s no denying change, of course. It is as inevitable as Vegas heat in May. And while it there is risk associated with internal change or a high-stakes startup, there is also the possibility of great reward.
Nothing makes a narrative more compelling than a villain: evil that must be overcome so the hero can prevail. Maybe that’s why every few years a new nefarious buzzword arises that both energizes the digital media industry and rattles the cages of the establishment. But the business of digital media is just not as tidy as a formulaic series. The real problems are complex. And the bad actors aren’t parading their final 15 minutes of fame on Dancing with the Stars, they are lurking in the shadows, profiting from marketers’ best intentions and the great content created by others. While the story of programmatic is barely a few years old, the plot lines are deep and we’re clearly still early in the first season.
It wasn’t too long ago that programmatic was referred to as the latest chapter in digital media’s “race to the bottom.” The word was associated with everything bad in the digital advertising supply chain because it started off as a murky pool of third parties offering marketers an easy way to reach massive (if dubious) audiences and for publishers to offload “remnant” inventory at bargain basement prices. Unsold inventory from great brands mixed with a whole lot of garbage—the old ad network model. This (thankfully brief) period in the story of programmatic did little for anyone besides intermediaries—though it did help draw attention to the fact that digital advertising processes were ripe for change.
The reality is that programmatic emerged as a response to the complexity of the digital ad buy and has evolved into a way to automate as much as possible, making digital media easier for marketers to buy and potentially more profitable for publishers. Our research shows that forward thinking media companies have wisely jumped into the programmatic fray in order to address marketers’ desire for efficiency while also leveraging their first party audience data to deliver highly targeted, efficient and impactful campaigns.
Yes, a whole lot of programmatic inventory is still remnant but that is starting to change as more premium inventory becomes available for programmatic buys. In fact, a growing number of our members are starting to see programmatic guaranteed and preferred deals that rival direct deals in terms of CPMs. The big difference is that the programmatic deals—those that have pre-agreed prices and guaranteed high-quality inventory—offer automation of the back-end processes.
As representatives for the digital content brands that marketers trust, it is our responsibility to shine a light on any “trust parasites” in programmatic and to work with advertising and agency partners to maximize their confidence in the value they will receive when they put money into programmatic. The rise of programmatic direct and private marketplaces offer an example of how this is taking shape. And right now, buying direct from a trusted premium publisher is the best way to execute a programmatic campaign without risk.
Villain’s and heroes aren’t what we need to focus on in the story of digital media. However we do need to recognize that there’s a lot at stake here if all of the players don’t work together to educate the market, given the predictions that programmatic will dominate digital advertising within a few years. If you are one of the few still debating whether or not to embrace programmatic: Stop now. Automating the bidding, buying, securing and execution of an ad campaign in real-time using machines rather than paper and humans is a no-brainer.
If you put on your marketer cap, it’s fairly obvious. Do you want your ads to be viewable meaning actually show up in the active window? Absolutely. Do you want your ads to be in front of humans rather than bots? Um, of course. Do you want your ads to run in a clean, well-lit brand-safe environment? Yes, please. Do you want all of the above as easily as possible? Bring it on.
With every change, every challenge comes an opportunity to step up and “save the day.” And there are few better examples of the opportunity for digital innovation than programmatic. Get on board and let’s drive this narrative forward.
Image credit: kosmolaut.
The web is becoming an increasingly visual place. From Pinterest to selfies and animated Gifs to infographics, consumers are gobbling up digital imagery at an insatiable rate. This holds true whether the digital content is delivered via social media platforms or by a brand, business or media website. And given that visual and interactive content experiences aren’t just pretty pictures but have been shown to increase engagement, it appears to be worth the investment, something that Forbes is counting on with the launch of its new Pulse product.
When Forbes Media launched BrandVoice more than four years ago, “We had the core philosophy that all content is equal—that journalists had interesting things to say and that marketers have interesting things to say,” says chief product officer Lewis Dvorkin. And since then, Dvorkin’s provided the publications’ editorial staff, outside contributors, and brand partners alike with robust tools to tell their stories.
“As the web becomes more visual, marketers seek to create much more immersive experiences in brand safe environments.” He’s seen that while consumers still enjoy text-based pages, they find immersive and interactive experiences highly engaging. The BrandVoice team built Pulse to be highly flexible in order to enable marketers to create unique experiences in a credible environment.
Over the past nine months or so, Dvorkin says Forbes has been rolling out upgrades to its article, individual, and sponsored editorial pages using a “methodical, consistent approach.” This latest iteration, which debuts with BrandVoice client Toyota, will soon be made available to the editorial side of the house as well.
Toyota’s Pulse incorporates video, trivia questions and data visualization in a highly-visual endless scroll page. Dvorkin emphasized the speed and relative ease with which this campaign came to fruition: It took about six to eight weeks, only a fraction of which was production time and involved a relatively small team, given the complexity of the end result, says Dvorkin. “There were definitely designers and others involved, but this is not something where we had to hire dozens of staff to get it done.” And given that this was the debut project for Pulse, Dvorkin is confident that the process will quickly become even more streamlined.
From a content perspective, the Toyota campaign centers around a range of ideas that skeptics said would never come to pass–such computers in every home and hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles–but that have evolved into successful innovation. Forbes Media has encountered a good deal of skepticism itself as it innovated on the business of media over the years, first with its contributor model and then with BrandVoice. In answer to the skeptics, Dvorkin points responds simply by pointing to the company’s continued growth. He also notes that the marketplace has become increasingly accepting of quality branded content.
Looking back at the growth of digital publishing over the past 10 years, Dvorkin says “it was very clear to me that, just as a journalist or expert could reach a digital audience without a brand, so could a marketer publish content digitally without a publisher.” Yet there remains a steady desire on the part of marketers to place their brands in a credible environment, particularly as consumers struggle to navigate the “vast sea of content.” Dvorkin notes he’s seen the maturing of a “new generation out there that’s wise to the ways of the web.” Give them good information and a positive experience, and he’s confident that they’ll be back for more.
Apple’s slow reveal for the new wearable Watch has given publishers some time to think about how it might fit into their plans. Digital content makers are already dealing with a dizzying array of distribution options on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Periscope — and now the Watch!
Developers have submitted more than 1,000 apps for Apple’s approval ahead of the company’s upcoming official release date on April 24 (though most people won’t get them until much later). But the question of whether people might actually use the Apple Watch — and whether publishers should pour resources into creating their own apps — has to do with how users first understand and use the Watch in the first place.
In the case of news apps, for example, the Apple Watch would encourage a sort of “glance journalism.” The New York Times is coming out with an app for the Apple Watch that would feature one-sentence stories. It’s neither a tweet, a headline nor a condensed version of an article appearing on other Times’ platforms, but “a new form of storytelling to help readers catch up in seconds,” as a Times representative put it. The length of this one-sentence story won’t be contained in the number of characters but in the amount of space it would take up on the Apple Watch screen. NPR and CNN have also reportedly developed apps to make the watch a “wearable news source,” as Nick Gallagher wrote in the American Journalism Review.
Personalized Experiences
In other words, even if few publishers have yet to actually use the Apple Watch, they’re foreseeing a utility with it. CNN’s Apple Watch app is also aimed at creating a more personalized experience for its user by sending push notifications, though its developers admit they have to be careful with it because of the low tolerance for these alerts on wearable devices. The Economist, meanwhile, doesn’t plan to focus on text and push notifications, which most publishers are doing, but will use the app as a remote control device to control its audio edition on the iPhone. It also doesn’t plan to include advertising on its app. Economist deputy editor Tom Standage said, however, that its strategy might change over time and will ultimately depend on the usage patterns of its users, which still remain a mystery.
Another publisher, NBC’s Breaking News, has developed an app that will offer alerts as well as a “tip” button that users could use to send information back to Breaking News about news happening around them. Breaking News co-founder Cory Bergman told The Verge that they expect new users to tap on this tip button “just for fun,” but that “over time we’re expecting more signal than noise.”
Ups and Downs
It’s still hard to say whether Apple Watch will remain exclusive to the very wealthy and geeky. Some analysts believe Apple could help boost an entirely new category of devices. Others are lamenting its shortcomings even before it’s officially come to market.
One problem is that not everyone gets to develop “native apps” that run much better than third-party apps. The latter have a tendency to load and perform slowly, making it much more difficult for newer companies to break out on the Apple Watch — for now.
The bottom line is that the Apple Watch is “first and foremost, an iPhone accessory,” as Scott Stein wrote in CNET. The scope for what apps, including third party apps, can do in the future will no doubt increase once the Watch firmly plants its footprint on the market and more users start testing it. But it’s safe to say that until the Watch becomes less of an iPhone accessory and more of its own independent device, it’s best for publishers to approach this new device with a grain of salt, and first learn more how to integrate it into future efforts.
A recent American Press Institute report showed that although audiences are increasingly viewing news on laptops (69%) and cell phones (56%) television remained the number one news source, with over 87%. According to a 2014 Pew Research report the top six most known and trusted news sources were all television outlets.
Your area’s local TV station most likely has the dominant news brand in your market and despite their usefulness, hot new devices and clever apps have yet to change that. TV news has the dominant, trusted brand, visual quality, and local star power to retain audiences. But in order to keep that position, TV stations are having to operate in ways that go beyond “traditional.”
Today, local newsrooms need to think not just about appearing on multiple platforms, but also in terms of making the local newscasts that are the staple of their brand better suited to a digitally-savvy audience.
So, how are they meeting the challenge? Here are three ways:
Showing is always better than telling and touchscreen presentations are an easy way to do that because those on-air touchscreens used by many TV news anchors are much more than just a fancy display. Touchscreens allow vivid, animated presentations for elections, sports, 3D modelling, local events, traffic, and weather all to be created on the fly and put directly into the hands of the on-air talent.
Touchscreens not only make it easier to create and use animated presentations, they show on-air personalities using technology similar to what audiences use at home, which builds the perception of broadcasters being on the right side of the technological curve.
Social Media is used by 73% of the people in the U.S. Viewers on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are enthusiastically uploading pictures and commentary as quickly as stories develop. Social media comments, images, and videos can (and should) be integrated with news broadcasts. This is accomplished through touchscreen presentations using complex filtering to grab user-generated content as it becomes available. The result is that viewers are transformed into a virtual army of on-the-scene reporters and, perhaps even more importantly, increasingly dedicated viewers.
Arguably, all content consumers today expect real-time information. But when it comes to news, time is of the essence. As information about events emerge, social media provides a way to keep on top of events as they unfold. However it is also important for on-air talent to demonstrate their expertise and integrate the video coverage and on-the-scene reporting that viewers expect, despite the demands of the increasingly rapid news cycle. From Amber alerts to elections, crime coverage, severe weather and national disasters, today’s broadcasters need to leverage digital tools to deliver real-time information.
At AccuWeather, we’ve worked with TV news for 30 years to help them not only with accurate weather forecasts, but also by developing digital tools that help them continue to evolve their craft. The future of the complete digital newsroom is already here. This year, at the 2015 NAB Show, AccuWeather will introduce a number of new features and enhancements to help create a complete digital newsroom, including street-level, 3D traffic, social media and UGC integration, real-time polling, and drone HD video.
In the landscape of local news, TV may still be king. But it won’t stay that way if it ignores the power of digital. By leveraging the power of their brands while embracing the changes in their audiences’ behavior and expectations, local TV news stations will stay dominant news forces in their markets that can grow with rapidly evolving media technology.
Loren Tobia, VP of Display Sales & Services at AccuWeather, has over 25 years of experience in broadcast news, as television news director for stations including WTVH Syracuse, NY; KMTV Omaha, NE; and WSAZ Huntington, WV. Loren was also chairman of RTDNA in 1996 and has been treasurer of the same organization since 2001. He is a former member of CBS News Affiliates Board, a former member of the Bloomberg News Affiliate Board, and the former chair of West Virginia Associated Press Broadcasters.
A certain buzz has been building in the media industry lately. It started getting louder with the ascent of the smash public radio podcast, “Serial,” and it’s since grown into a full-on craze: Podcasts are making a major comeback.
Recent research from Edison found that around 46 million Americans listen to podcasts every month, nearly twice as many listeners as compared to 2008. Subscriptions of podcasts through iTunes reached one billion in 2013, according Apple. And NPR doubled its podcasting revenue in 2014 and is set to double that revenue again this year. NPR’s vice president of programming told Poynter last month that monthly downloads for its portfolio of podcasts have also increased, “from 37.5 million in October 2013 to more than 90 million in March 2015.”
But the bigger question has less to do with content and quality and more to do with sustainability: How economically viable are podcasts?
The barriers to entry for podcasting are fairly low, but financing podcasting is another story. Crowdfunding has worked in some cases, such as with the podcast 99% Invisible, which became the most successful Kickstarter in journalism when it launched its campaign in 2012. And that podcast even had a fantastic follow-up crowdfunding campaign to create Radiotopia, a podcasting network that has since become the Kickstarter’s most funded campaign for radio.
But crowdfunding doesn’t work for every publisher. Take Invisibilia, a new NPR podcast launched in the beginning of this year. Its staffers set aside about $1,500 to purchase Facebook ads to promote the show ahead of its release. They also promoted previews of the show on two of the most well-known radio shows, “This American Life” and “Radiolab.” That promotion worked so well that its staffers cancelled the Facebook ads after spending around $400.
Most popular podcasts have cashed in with a very personal form of advertising — hosts speaking about brands in conversational mode just as in the early days of radio. That has been “the dominant advertising model for podcasts,” according to Andy Bowers, the executive producer of Slate’s podcasts. Listeners generally feel a certain intimacy with the host, and to hear that personality speak an ad therefore has an effect that’s specific to the medium. You could call it an audio version of a native ad, and they bring in a higher CPM in the $20 to $45 range.
The downside to this form of advertising, however, is that it’s very difficult to scale and remain personal.
Slate, a longtime podcast hub, also recently launched Panoply, a “podcast network for media brands, authors, personalities, and premier organizations” that currently includes podcasts from New York Times Magazine, HBO Documentary Films, the Huffington Post and Popular Science. The network not only helps audiences to discover new podcasts, but it’s also out to assist with the advertising and revenue side of podcasting as well. Slate general manager and Panoply co-creator Brendan Monaghan told DCN’s Michelle Manafy that “acquiring programs that can fit into “audience- and advertiser-friendly categories such as news and politics, culture and lifestyle, sports, and women’s issues”—categories he says are currently underserved.
Unfortunately podcasting has its own “viewability” issue, similar to the problem where humans don’t see web ads. In this case, it’s difficult to tell if people who downloaded a podcast actually listened to it, and for how long. But that varies depending on the app, as some of the apps such as Stitcher and SoundCloud can give more depth, and are readying their own ad networks.
Another possible podcasting revenue model is subscription based or pay-per-listen. This tactic debuted with Ricky Gervais in the first round of the podcasting boom and these days, Marc Maron and Fox News are charging for some of their content. Given the desire for revenue diversification among media companies, we may see more experiments with subscription models around podcasting.
One thing is certain with podcasting, though: Technology is helping to drive this boom, with easier synching and updates to in-car apps. Podcasting remains a very personal medium for listeners on the go, so expect more and more publishers to add audio as another platform to conquer, while incrementally increasing revenues and experimenting with monetization methods.
As busy media executives we often find ourselves heads down, getting the work done and facing each new challenge as it arises. But to really get somewhere, we need to save some time to think about what’s next and to find places and people that encourage that future focus. On March 26th, DCN hosted The Next Conversation dinner – an event inside the Digiday Publishers Summit in Vail, CO.
Co-hosted by Digiday Editor-in-Chief Brian Morrissey and DCN CEO Jason Kint, the intimate dinner discussion included a mix of some of the most forward-thinking minds in the digital media industry – each of whom was hand-picked to attend this first-time DCN event. The talk ranged from finding and cultivating talent to how we create a sustainable future for this business that we love, even as we realize that it will look very different than it does today.
Our first segment in this three-part series covers culture and talent with dinner guests advising to look for smart people you like, who fit your brand and who have diverse experience.
Some highlights:
“We don’t necessarily need the absolute superstar rock star with the upside. We need people we like and people that give a shit and people that are competent. If you can get those three things…I’ll take those over the potential superstar 10 times out of 10.”
—Neil Vogel, CEO, About.com
“We prefer someone that understands and appreciates the curiosity of our editors even if we’re hiring them for the business side. It’s important that they feel the Atlantic. If they don’t, it’s not going to work. The Atlantic is a quirky publication…we can’t afford to have someone on board who doesn’t really get it.”
—David Minkin, Executive Director,
Revenue Operations, The Atlantic
“We need to have a diverse team…in my team alone we have a bunch of architects, a bunch of lawyers, a bunch of engineers, a bunch of marketers and a bunch of biologists, including myself. And that kind of spun off that kind of creativity and that innovation…and makes it even a better team.”
—Steve Suthiana, Global Head, Digital Media
& Operations, Mansueto Ventures
“We hire, basically, interns. We bring in 10 or 15 every semester. We hire the people who mesh with the organization…and who produce. Who produce a lot.”
—Brian Danza, CTO, Daily Caller
“In any of us, I think our job is always to hire and train and to build the best teams possible. And that usually means they’ll go off and get other great jobs.”
—Lauri Baker, VP, Brand Strategy, Huffington Post
“[Marketers] want to know how you fit in to their marketing plan and that you know the landscape very, very well. I think once you have someone who is very deeply knowledgeable in one thing they become a vendor and not a partner.”
—Brendan Spain, US Commercial Director, FT.com
At our Digital Content Next members-only Tech Day, held April 2 at the Time and Life building in NYC, topics included dealing with cyber security threats, how to make decisions about moving into the Hybrid Cloud and how to respond to the challenges brought on by viewability and ad blocking.
This event brought together senior-level technology executives from our member companies to learn, network and share common experiences from their respective – and sometimes very different – businesses among them Slate, CBS Interactive, AP, Forbes, About.com, Everyday Health, and Hearst. We also hosted a special interview with Co-founder and President of Power to Fly Katharine Zaleski. Three takeaways from the event:
“Different groups needed to interact with content in very different ways.” By decoupling the schema from its CMS About.com “Created a content schema that could grow and change as business needs do.”
— Nabil Ahmad, CTO, About.com
“Moving to the cloud has allowed us to cut the order processing time but even more importantly, it allows us to move from concept to deployment much more quickly.”
— Lorraine Cichowski, SVP, CIO, Associated Press
“Flexibility is a bad word to a lot of people… but allowing people to work remotely and be focused on outcomes actually allows them to work longer and harder.”
— Katharine Zaleski, Co-Founder & President, Power to Fly
Building its CMS using Google Polymer Web Components allows Atavist’s CMS to quickly and flexibly produce interoperable custom elements. The result “encourages unique and creative stories” that include “easily assembled blocks of images, sound, video and interactive charts.”
— Jefferson Rabb, CTO and
Thomas Rhiel, Director of Reader Experience, Atavist
“It is essential to be a technology-enabled company…technology can enable better monetization. You need your tech team to be tied into revenue goals. If they are in the loop, they can make ad delivery better or faster and make you, as a publisher, able to perform better than anybody else.”
— Dan Check, Vice Chairman & VP, Engineering/Product, Slate
“You must have a security strategy from the top down. The reality is that employees are often the weakest link it any company’s security…it is essential to not only inform employees, but also to enable security to be everyone’s business, not just the tech department.
— David Hahn, CISO, Hearst
“Today’s audience wants to easily transition across devices: 40% of users run the same app in multiple devices, many switch between devices to complete a task. We need content and UX to work together to maintain a seamless experience.”
—Deepak Chokkadi, VP, Software Development and
Premal Parikh, CTO, Everyday Health
“For me the whole thing is culture. You want people who will fit in and inspire others around them…you can do a lot to train them and get them fully up to speed.
—Nabil Ahmad, CTO, About.com
“The numbers speak for themselves, we don’t have enough people in tech so we can’t afford not to have women in these careers…I think we have to give up this idea of being valued by the amount of time you sit at a desk and evaluate our tech performance based on outcomes.”
—Katharine Zaleski, Co-Founder & President, Power to Fly
“As we work on our strategic cloud planning, we find that tech staff needs new skill sets so we are doing cloud training for some of the staff.”
—Lorraine Cichowski, SVP, CIO, AP
Click here to see the full agenda with speakers and sessions.
So much of digital publishing is now focused on the post-mortem: What happened on my site? Which stories performed well? Which stories did my audience share? Are those two things equivocal? How can we do better next time?
The emergence of data as a publisher’s new best friend in answering those questions is a compelling development, provided publishers have the tools and teams to act on this new information. Understanding audience behavior and patterns can inform everything from the way that editors plan and program content to the new products publishers build (or, just as importantly, don’t build).
Unfortunately, the constituent who consistently gets left out of the post-mortem is the most important one: the reader. Maybe it’s time to reconsider.
A while back, my colleague Elizabeth thought her HuffPo app was actually including her in the postmortem – by telling her how she was doing as a reader.
More than most people I know, Elizabeth is acutely aware of the kinds of stories she typically reads and makes no apology if they skew towards, say, “lighter” categories in Entertainment. (She is, for the record, a whip-smart graphic designer.)
So it was with great delight she observed that News and Tech & Innovation appeared foremost in her category navigation, ahead of even Comedy (which she’s constantly trying to get me to appreciate more as a pastime). The order of these Categories, she insisted, was moving periodically according to her recent reading habits. The fact that, at that moment, News and Tech were ahead of her self-described favorites, was evidence that she was blossoming into the well-rounded reader she aspired to be.
Neither of us was entirely sure her HuffPo app was actually playing back this data to her, but in a way it didn’t matter because it provided an interesting perspective: What if publishers explicitly reflected back our current regimen of content? What could that do for our relationship with publishers – and engagement with their content?
Most of us would like to think we’re relatively informed readers, even if we’re not up on the very latest in global politics or other proxies we use for “being informed.” And most of us would admit we have some guilty pleasures mixed in there too — from listicles to cat videos to celebrity gossip, few of us are completely immune to the appeal of these stories, no matter how frivolous or motivated by schadenfreude.
To stretch the nutrition metaphor a bit, maybe some sort of “content pyramid” would help us identify and organize the optimal consumption of each “content group” specific to our needs.
Theoretically, this is a utility publishers could provide with their growing data fluency. Opting in to an interaction like this could fulfill a need – not too far removed from why we share content on our social networks – in the form of validation; it could serve as a measure of reassurance, encouragement, or simply well-defined information on what kinds of readers we are (kind of like a less cynical Buzzfeed quiz), and by extension, the people we aspire to be. At its most basic function, a utility like this would communicate that the publisher and the reader had in fact entered into a relationship predicated on consideration and appreciation of the reader’s time and habits.
For publishers it could even be used to incentivize audiences to step up their engagement with certain categories or products e.g. rewarding users who hit a certain threshold with access to exclusive content. It might even be a service worth paying for.
We’re starting to see signs that publishers are moving towards more relationship-building cues via reader utilities. The Pool, a new site from 6 Music presenter Lauren Lavern and former Cosmopolitan and Red Magazine editor Sam Baker joins the likes of Medium in telling readers right up front how long it will take to consume each story. The Pool goes a step further and lets users search for content based on how much time they have.
A logical next step in this more personal approach to publishing would be to not just reflect what users should read based on their habits, but to let them know what they are in fact reading, acting as the mirror that journalism has always purported to be, albeit on a larger cultural scale. In digital, publishers have the opportunity to project that responsibility down to an individual level.
Brandon Carter is a Content Specialist at Outbrain (@brandedcarter @Outbrain). He began his career as a staff journalist for the Maine weekly ‘The Coastal Journal’ before moving to New York and joining the product licensing divisions of Peanuts Worldwide and Sesame Workshop.
Time Inc.’s All You and Health brands have partnered with eMeals to deliver weekly meal plans. Clare McHugh, Group Editor, All You and Health says that her team is always on the lookout for new ways to provide content that their audiences will find useful. They were familiar with eMeals’ reputation for delivering customized meal plans to more than 1 million subscribers so when eMeals approached them to launch its first-ever branded meal offering, McHugh says they immediately saw an opportunity to deliver something the readers of All You and Health would find truly beneficial.
McHugh describes the Health audience as busy people who are focused on making small changes that help them live happier lives: “They are doers; they take tips and put them to work.” Fans of All You, she says, are women trying to make the most of their time and money. While both audiences increasingly engage with the brands digitally, the All You reader “does everything on her smartphone—it’s her camera, travel planner, newsstand…her total life organizer.” Both groups are pressed for time, but want to make healthy decisions about what to eat and how to feed their families, so these brands were ideal for developing eMeal plans.
The All You– and Health-branded meal plans are delivered by email or through the free eMeals mobile app and provide main dish recipes for seven dinners per week designed for a family of four. The Health recipes are made with whole foods and loaded with good nutrition. The All You recipes are balanced, designed to please the entire family and cost less than $3.50 per serving. The All You plan also offers a bonus dessert recipe and a cost-per-serving breakdown for each meal. Subscribers to both plans also receive interactive shopping lists and a nutritional analysis of each recipe.
Both All You and Health have a long history of providing recipes suited to readers’ lifestyles and expectations. In addition to nutritional information, it is noteworthy that recipes feature “regular, not obscure or intimidating, ingredients.” At the same time, they can be relied on to offer healthy, easy-to-prepare and, in the case of All You, affordable meals for the whole family. “We’ve tested all of our recipes, so people know you can trust them.”
Maintaining that trust was important as the All You and Health eMeals offerings were being developed. In fact, McHugh tested the plans out herself, “I went to the store on Sunday with the weekly plan and made all of the recipes during the week. I experienced such a sense of relief that all of the meal planning and grocery lists were already done…I love the eMeals approach. It does so much of the hard work for you.”
McHugh points out that women’s magazines have been in the business of helping women run their lives more efficiently “as long as there has been a republic. Though the mediums continue to evolve, the fundamental needs don’t change,” she says. Thus, this latest offering is a natural extension of what women’s magazines have always done. “We’ve taken a print expectation—cutting out great recipes and putting them in a recipe box—and brought it to the digital age.”