Maroon Ventures Blog

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo

Via LifeHacker, I came across this intriguing guess at what life on the Web will be like 10 years from now. Is it just me, or does it seem rather Apple-esque? And that creepy music in the background. It’s just a little too close to the airy-yet-ominous soundtrack on the Epic 2015 video.

But all snarkiness aside, Adaptive Path’s Aurora represents some fascinating thinking. Definitely worth a look.

And while we’re talking about user interface, check out “The Creative Destruction of a Website” post on Innoblog. It looks at the disruptive implications of ad agency Modernista!s new home page design. It takes the disaggregation that’s occurring on the web to the next level, essentially conceding that users will find, gain and access information in their own way. Modernista! just provides navigation and tools that allow its users to learn about the agency in a way that isn’t predicated on everything residing on the agency’s site. It’s almost the navigation equivalent of RSS ..

Update: Part Two of the Aurora video is now online.

Posted by Bob Benz

Root Clip, which has emerged from the innovation group at Scripps newspapers, has opened voting on its second film, Chance Encounters. The site has come a long way since I initially took note of it in this blog. Clearly, Erik Luchauer and Kevin Antoine are iterating as they go, refining the process and streamlining the user interface.

The premise of the site is that Erik and Kevin post a short video, a root clip, and other filmmakers are urged to submit the next video in the sequence. Users vote on the best submission with the winner becoming the second installment. Then on to the next round. In the end, if all goes well, you end up with a short video story that is created by myriad filmmakers in a collaborative process. Talk about social media.

The major obstacle I hit when voting on Chance Encounter was the need to register. While I understand why it’s necessary to avoid voting fraud, it was a pain to have to go and register just as I was about to vote. But go ahead and register. Then vote. It’s an interesting project that’s worth checking out.

And why would a newspaper company be messing around with this? I’m not sure, exactly. But there’s something cool here, something outside the bounds of what newspapers traditionally do that could help as they cast around for what role they’ll play in an interactive world. It doesn’t take much extrapolation to come up with ideas that could apply in local markets, advertising and news.

Posted by Bob Benz

I don’t like to toot horns that are reasonably in my proximity but this is a milestone to which I have to draw attention.  Yahoo! recently announced that it has provided over 100 million referrals to the newspapers of the Newspaper Consortium. Multiply that by a reasonable 2.5 or 3 subsequent pageviews, then multiply that by the number of ad positions on each page and that quickly nudges the total number of impressions generated by the Yahoo! partnership into well over 1 billion. Not to mix metaphors but that’s some serious wind folks. 

Here’s the beauty of it - this is a two part solution. Pageviews and impressions are meaningless from a revenue standpoint. It is what you do with the added traffic that matters. That brings us to AMP.

For years now we’ve been dealing with the placement oriented sale. That is to say, advertisers lust to appear on business and travel sections/pages of newspaper websites but for general news, opinion, sports, etc, not so much. Essentially, advertisers were making the correlation between what type of page a user is looking at to the type of potential customer the user is. Call it Cro-Magnon behavioral targeting. AMP changes that.

With AMP, newspaper inventory can be sold based on the behavioral targeting profile of the user regardless of the section the user is reading. So while such “windfall” traffic used to be regarded as low revenue because essentially you are monetizing these pageviews at a remnant or low CPM, now it can be effectively monetized at a premium or super premium CPM based on behavioral targeting. All the while delivering a superior advertising product to newspaper advertisers. Couple that with the national sales pressure brought by Yahoo to target non-local users and you not only create a lot of wind, you will create a lot of very profitable wind through this relationship once fully launched on AMP. And this thing is just getting started.

Okay, i’ll get down from my soapbox. Something to think about though…

P.S. I am still in iPhone bliss - wonky keyboard and all.

Posted by Chris Tippie

Social Networking - you hear about it everywhere. Just about anything that involves communication from one person to another is being branded as “Social Networking” these days. Tired of consultant-speak presentations about how Social Networking will do everything including balancing the budget and curing cancer? Still don’t see the “there” there in terms of revenue? You’re not alone.  I recently ran across a handy weekly digest from Jeremiah Owyang. Reading it won’t make your an expert but it will allow you to call BS when you hear it. Sometimes, that’s even more important….  Just saying.

Posted by Chris Tippie

I bought an iPhone. This goes out to all the ADD Crackberry heads out there. Gonna do it fast and tell you everything you need to know in 10 definitive statements.  Ready?

1. Email? not so much - keyboard still sucks
2. 3G Network? much better
3. Battery life? ‘meh
4. Web browsing? very nice. Never be uninformed again
5. GPS? the bomb! Read prior posts for Oliver Stone-like conspiracy theories
6. iPhone Apps? this is THE reason to get the phone. Would never go back until RIM gets stuff like this.
7. Phone? oh ya, that’s nice too. 3 way calling that actually makes sense.
8. Music and Video? Oh ya, It does that… so I hear. That’s so 2007.
9. Black or White?  Black
10. 8 or 16? 16 if you get the subsidized pricing.

Posted by Chris Tippie

Greg Sterling discusses Local and the Future of Ad Serving on his Screenwerk blog, and it’s definitely worth a look.

In short, he argues that sophisticated ad serving platforms are moving us much closer to true one-to-one marketing, and the end result will be the ability to mix and match creative on the fly to target specific demographics and behaviors in a very complex — yet easy to execute — process.

“It’s a bit of a “Zen” thing,” Sterling writes. “First there was simplicity, followed by complexity and then there will be simplicity on the other side of complexity.

“In other words, all that the agency and marketer will eventually have to know about digital marketing (including mobile) is that they want to target women, 18-34 who live in New York, San Francisco or Chicago and are interested in certain product categories. They’ll create their ads accordingly. Then they’ll deliver electronic data feeds of their creative and the platform will determine what to show when. They won’t have to figure out much tactically or mechanically. The complexity of the entire system will be in the ‘black box’ of the platform and buried for both the marketer and the end user, who will just see an ad and respond or not respond.”

Posted by Bob Benz

Ken Doctor is a smart guy, and I enjoy reading his assessments of the industry. But I think he’s overreacting a bit in his recent post on the turbulence at Yahoo! and its impact on the newspaper consortium. Without a doubt, the papers I’m talking to are concerned. But they also realize there are several important things that are playing in their favor:

1. On Yahoo!’s search deal with Google: Ken is right that it’s unknown what the newspapers will get here. But it’s important to note that when the deal was negotiated, the guaranteed revenue was based on how Google, Yahoo and other contextual ads were performing on newspaper sites. Even if the Google ads were made available to the newspapers, there’s a strong chance the newspapers have a better deal as it’s currently structured than they would with Google contextual ads instead of Yahoo!

2. On the turbulence at Yahoo!: Yes, they are seeing a lot of turnover. But where AMP is concerned, we’ve seen nothing but razor focus and dedication. Yahoo! has staffed this effort very adequately and has significantly increased staff to work with the newspapers. With one exception, I’m not aware of any Yahoo!’s who are involved with the consortium who have moved on to other companies. In addition, Yahoo! is doing a bang-up job on AMP. It’s freakin’ impressive and I believe it will be a game changer for newspapers

3. On the contention that graphical and text ads will converge, Ken does have a valid point where yield is concerned. I don’t think the two ad formats will merge. They serve significantly different purposes. The real merger comes on how pages are monetized. A product like AMP might be able to look at all the available advertising opportunities on a page and decide which mix of graphical, text and other formats will drive the highest effective yield. If it happens to be a Google ad, so be it. Where I think Ken misses the point is that the potential to serve Google ads via AMP wouldn’t be detrimental to Yahoo! It’s actually to their advantage to have a mechanism that can make these decisions on pages across the Internet, helping myriad content providers to get the highest yield possible on their pages, regardless of the inventory served to get that yield. If I’m getting the highest yield possible, I’m not sure if I care if the ads come from Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft or the TV station I compete with in my market.

4. While Yahoo!’s woes do cause turbulence, I don’t think it calls into question the deal newspapers did with Yahoo! If anything, it makes the newspapers a key player in these talks and a force to be reckoned with regardless of the outcome. Without going into details, the Yahoo! deal has considerable change of control language baked into it (as every good contract does), and I think the newspapers are well protected.

Was the deal with Yahoo! a bad idea, or “playing with fire”? I really don’t think so. Yahoo! has been a stand-up partner thus far and I believe that will continue. The deal was a calculated risk, as are all major partnerships. But I wouldn’t call it playing with fire. If Yahoo! were to change hands, it puts the newspapers in a good spot to be a player in whatever emerges. I’m not saying I”d want Yahoo! to change hands. I think the newspapers are better served as things stand. But I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the newspapers emerge stronger in a change of control.

In short, don’t count Yahoo! out. They still have incredible audience, great technology and smart people. And their current leadership strongly advocated the newspaper deal. Hang on to your hats. This is going to be an interesting ride.

Full disclosure: I was one of the newspaper execs who helped negotiate the deal with Yahoo!, and Maroon Ventures is acting as general manager of the newspaper consortium.

Posted by Bob Benz

Mark Glaser had a good post today on MediaShift that looks at academic responses to the disruptive hit journalism is suffering. He notes that lots of universities are talking about the problem, but some also are doing something about it. His post includes the beginning of a list and he encourages readers to amend it with more examples.

“My hope is that these various centers will do more than simply spend huge sums of money on buildings and make big pronouncements,” Glaser writes. “If they can help change the old mindset at educational institutions, with students, with faculty — and with the larger media business at large — then they will have proven their worth.”

Amen.

Posted by Bob Benz

Via Lost Remote, I stumbled across this Slate piece on how we read online. Fascinating and pretty much on the mark. So much so that as I was reading it, I found myself skimming through the denser paragraphs and gravitating toward the bullets and short graphs.

And I love this quote, comparing people who are reading in a utilitarian, gain-information fashion and those who read for the sheer joy of it:

“I suppose ludic (pleasure) readers would be the little sloths hiding in the jungle while everyone else is out rampaging around for fresh meat.”

Gotta run now. I smell fresh meat out there somewhere …

Posted by Bob Benz

MSNBC and others are reporting that journalist and NBC Washington bureau chief  Tim Russert died today of a heart attack. He was 58. We’ll miss ya! Thoughts go out to his family and coworkers.

Posted by Chris Tippie