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| Thursday, November 30, 2006 |
 Earlier this week The New York Times highlighted the return of "old school" branded content, with sponsors such as Match.com buying both high-profile product placements and co-naming rights to cable and broadcast U.S. television programs. Shades of the 1950s, when shows like Texaco Star Theater were branded by corporations looking for cost-effective exposure - and control - in a young medium hungry for ad dollars. But Variety points to a new take on content branding - destination content focused on major brand products assembled by Yahoo. Yahoo has targeted 100 top consumer brands and products and has assembled content from their various portal properties to develop an immersive brand experience. First up: Nintendo's new Wii game console. Content from Yahoo covering the Wii includes postings from user-generated properties such as del.icio.us, Flicker and Yahoo! Answers as well as content from Yahoo! Games, branded gear for your Yahoo! Avatar, a buyer's guide with content from Yahoo! Shopping, and so on - and, of course, ads from both Nintendo and other advertisers taking advantage of a highly brand-centric environment. Brand heaven, right? Well, kind of. Creating a community around a major brand as destination content is a great idea, but the problem is that everything is so...YAHOO. Like so much of Yahoo it's hard to walk away from the experience feeling like you're really inside the featured brand: it's a little like saying "NBC's Texaco Star Theater." Yahoo is pressing hard to romance major corporate advertisers to take advantage of their brand-friendly approach to advertising, but as it trips over its own brand development efforts it seems to lay a consistent trail of brand conflicts. The mini-portal concept has a lot going for it but Yahoo needs to allow its own branding to recede a bit more and let the context speak for itself. An ideal environment would be a little more like a Wikipedia or MySpace, where the tools are there to create specialized portal presences but without an overbearing hand of traditional media-oriented marketers making too much of a fuss over the details. Let ANY brand use these tools to create their own brand heaven - and just stand back and enjoy the results.
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:32 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 1:31 PM |
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An entry on Google Blog yesterday announced the death of Google Answers, a premium reference service that allowed users to get live support from hundreds of researchers to answer an unlimited range of questions. The content published via Google Answers lives on, but it will be an archive at this point. Google was remarkably open about its motives and reasons: Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time -- and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product...For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people's minds...Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. Certainly the relative success of Yahoo! Answers provides an interesting contrast to the fizzling out of Google's service. While the quality of answers in the user-generated content provided by Yahoo! Answers may not be professional grade in many - if not most - instances, Yahoo! is doing a good job of turning the product into an entertaining community portal - kind of an ad-hoc discussion service with voting and a smattering of useful information. Yahoo's marketing alliance with Answers.com may help to turn the product into a more serious reference service, but in the meantime the question becomes: what's the right model for a reference service that can incorporate user-generated content? Wikipedia tends to overshadow this question more than most services. With excellent placement in Google search results and its own unique following and quality control capabilities, it is rapidly becoming the default reference service of choice for many content users. People trust their peers to come up with useful information, but the lesson of Wikipedia seems to be that moderation and people with reasonable levels of expertise are key to successful user-generated reference materials. In the meantime reference desks at local libraries seem to be increasingly popular alternatives for people looking for one-on-one answers from research professionals, while professional reference services such as Guideline (which absorbed Find/SVP) have positioned their services on a more upscale plane of executive research. And while oftentimes overlooked in a new galaxy of user-generated content options online bulletin board services still provide a wealth of timely answers to pressing questions from experts knee-deep in very focused topics. All of these models provide Google with a lot of interesting options as it decides how best to be a source of answers to people who use its leading search service. It's refreshing to see Google admitting that not every hack generated by kids fresh out of grad school is going to be worth its weight in gold and to be willing to consider how to focus its energies on being a well-integrated service that makes it easy for people to go to one place to find as many answers as possible. Google is still chasing the dream of a Star Trek-like computer that allows one to simply ask a question and get an answer -and that's not a bad thing. What Star Trek's visionaries couldn't quite grasp at the time, though, is how user-publishers would fit into the picture. We'll see what Google can craft on its holodeck soon enough...
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:33 AM |
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| Wednesday, November 29, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 9:47 AM |
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TechCrunch reports on the move by retail giant Wal-Mart to include rights to a digital download of the movie "Superman Returns" as its first foray into a sales model that includes both physical and digital product package. For USD 1.97 more than the DVDs face price a purchaser can get a low-res version in Windows Media format with PlaysForSure rights protection suitable for handheld devices with smaller screens. USD 2.97 gets you a copy of the movie with the same protection but in a hi-res version suitable for PC viewing, while USD 3.97 gets you both portable and PC versions. The rights-protected copies can be used only on one device at a time, but the license for viewing may be moved from one device to another. TechCrunch has its doubts about this arrangement, but overall you have to give Wal-Mart credit for being the first to feel out how rights-protected content can be used to move towards a model that can allow consumers to move towards downloaded movies at a nominal fee. With retail shelving space at a premium - DVDs take up more space in our local market than lettuce - and terabyte-scaled local content storage devices becoming widely affordable, it makes sense for the Wal-Marts of the world to start encouraging the digital option. Purists will decry the lack of a digital-only option and the inability to access fair use clips, but think for a moment where we were only a year ago with digital video content. Here we have a cross-platform, rights-protected download model for Hollywood entertainment in the hands of a major retailer, where a year ago most studios were mostly squabbling about what to do with digital download distribution. The big piece missing from this and from the recent BitTorrent deal with movie studios is a mechanism to enable viral marketing. Movie studios pour millions of dollars into major film releases to generate a little buzz that will help a movie generate theatre traffic. In the meantime services such as YouTube are out there enabling audiences to generate their own enthusiasm for digital video. With so much emphasis on locking down digital rights Hollywood is missing out on the opportunity to build up enthusiasm for a content product by enabling peer-to-peer marketing via fair use clips, mashups and other tools that enable people to create street-level credibility for content. Instead of trying to push their content at light speed into a brief window of mass distribution that trails off into "long tail" obscurity movie producers need to experiment with reversing this model. Let content find its own audience and digital sales via online channels to the point where theatre distribution will be accelerated by an active word-of-mouth from the online leaders in downloading. Since they'll be paying for the rights-protected version of this content and clipping out pieces to send friends, extra-digital marketing could be funded to some degree out of the proceeds of these efforts and probably targeted more effectively by zeroing in on the stuff that was most popular in clippings. Think of the theatre as the culmination of a communal content sharing event, rather than the be-all and end-all. Well, we can only hope for this - and wait for aggressive distributors to give it a go.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:47 AM |
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| Tuesday, November 28, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 4:45 PM |
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| Monday, November 27, 2006 |
As major media consolidation deals bring more and more publishing houses into private hands, the challenges of converting these properties that can respond to the needs of niche markets are becoming more acute. Combining infrastructure and staffs cannot be the only factor leading to more success in publishing markets that are by their nature highly decentralized. There is a gap in management skills, industry outlook and strategic vision in publishing companies that is going to be hard to fill without confronting the waves of users who are eager to create their own decentralized media markets. Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 11:53 PM |
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User-generated content becomes more diverse and powerful by the day. Where a questionable performance in a relatively obscure venue may have been excusable by a big media name in the past, the all-seeing eye of user content puts it out there for the world to see - and to judge. Recent court decisions in the U.S. and in Canada have recognized the rights and responsibilities of individuals who act as news agents independent of media companies or technology providers, providing a much stronger legal underpinning for these user-publishers. In the U.S. decision information posted to a Web site that could be considered libelous was deemed the responsibility of the person posting it and not of the services supporting them - a big win for portals supporting user-generated media services. In the Canadian decision a weblogger covering a public event who was harassed by local officials was deemed to have the same rights as official members of the press covering the event who were not troubled by the authorities - yet another precedent of press freedoms being extended to citizen journalists. Both of these decisions come at a time when the recognition and use of user-generated content sources forces the hand of the courts to defend content producers who have become valuable publishers in their own right. If they were not so, then the courts would have been far more easily convinced that portal providers were responsible for users' actions. Instead, the courts see that user-generated content producers, for better or for worse, are now fulfilling an important part of the role in public debate once reserved for traditional media sources. It's a very crucial step forward in creating a broader commercial framework for intellectual property management that can encompass all content producers effectively and fairly.
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By John Blossom - posted at 5:35 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:42 PM |
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While real-time financial quotes, trading tools and market analytics form the backbone of major content services in the securities industry, news is one of the key features of a financial content service that put its brand on the lips of traders. Thomson Financial's broadening of its news services through its announced deal with the Associated Press is another major step by Thomson to build an "on the lips" news brand, building on its July acquisition of AFX News from Agence France-Presse. Just as the AP-Dow Jones Economic Report created in the 1960s a combined service with far broader impact in financial markets Thomson is assembling a range of content with global reach to compete with providers such as Reuters who have had a worldwide financial news footprint for more than a century. But will building up news assets through traditional news channels be enough to make a deal-changing impact for Thomson Financial? Certainly deals like the AP alliance are absolutely necessary for Thomson to have a hope of pulling down more major deals beyond its core of low-end equities services and bond trading networks, but to some degree Thomson is chasing a target whose time is already passed. News wire services are no longer the be-all and end-all for news that moves markets, with corporate weblogs, proprietary Web scraping services and other news gathering capabilities competing with major news services for the attention of traders and analysts in financial institutions. At the same time the huge trading rooms that these services once powered are getting smaller by the day as highly automated trading capabilities begin to create a more narrow marketplace for financial news services. Even as Thomson Financial has a tough row to hoe in priming up a world class news service in the twilight of the widespread desktop trading era, competitors such as Reuters are learning how to leverage news assets far more effectively in online media markets. When Thomson jettisoned most of its print operations several years ago it lost touch with not only the surging ad revenues now found in online media markets but also a media outlook that provides a more engaged and interactive relationship with content markets. As a wide array of database publishers consider how to make more use of online outlets for their assets so must Thomson Financial consider how to build a more supple and engaged content brand that goes beyond the lockstep chase of Bloomberg and Reuters desktop positions via traditional marketing channels. Hopefully future Thomson news deals will be able to build on a now-impressive core of essential media to incorporate more progressive news sources and delivery platforms.
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By John Blossom - posted at 8:23 AM |
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Want to catch up on last week's headlines? Try our weekly categorized summary with embedded commentary on the latest trends. Click here to view last week's headlines in review
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:04 AM |
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| Friday, November 24, 2006 |
It turns out that not all is well in the world of Second Life these days. While members are still skimming around this virtual city in forever-young electronic avatar bodies, the growth of the service is creating new opportunities for crime, just as with any other municipality. Gamespot reports on problems with destructive worm programs destroying gamers' experiences in addition to last week's concerns about software that allows users to make copies of intellectual property sold by vendors in the online world. So much for good looks solving everything. Time and again we see software-oriented companies come up with great ideas for products that turn out to be recognized as content plays after the fact - at which point it's usually too late to address the basic questions of how to enforce intellectual property rights. As we warned in our News Analysis a few weeks back the lessons to be learned from Second Life are more about the general need of publishers to think about how to appeal to digital natives who have been brought up with gaming and a sense of being able to access content as they wish. Many marketers thought that they had found a special Nirvana in Second Life to bridge into this market segment, but you don't leave the rules of the "real world" behind in doing so. Instead of rushing towards a crude tool like Second Life to solve their marketing issues publishers and marketers need to concentrate more on how the lessons that can be learned in Second Life can be applied more effectively in the much more complex world of online publishing beyond it.
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:10 PM |
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A kind of geekish article by Om Malik on rapidly shifting technologies supporting municipal wirelesss Internet access prompted me to catch up on the world of WiFi a bit on a quiet post-Thanksgiving afternoon. A nice summary of recent news developments affecting WiFi provided by eWeek can be found here. In a nutshell muni WiFi is still taking baby steps but is beginning to spread through Silicon Valley communities fairly quickly, with some towns having their choice of networks from which to choose. While some major carriers are charging user USD 20 a month or so for town-wide access ad-supported systems by Google and others are also in play and gathering steam. One of the eWeek articles highlighted new fourth-generation wireless broadband equipment announced by Nortel that includes Internet everywhere, mobile video, VOIP, streaming media, data applications and mobile electronic commerce. This equipment will be ready to support new networking standards expected in mid-2007 that will mark the start of cost-effective, video-grade wireless services. I believe that one of the trends that we can expect to see unfolding next year is a radical expansion of the push towards municipal WiFi services in the U.S. Initial forays are already fairly successful in major cities, and with the advent of video wireless we're likely to see a much broader push not only for media-produced video but video being churned out by users and local merchants communicating with one another via municipal wireless services. It's also likely to spur on a new interest in automated content download services, such that people on the go can have their favorite news and entertainment showing up on mobile devices with greater ease than ever before. I have been warning for some time about the potential impact of WiFi on content deals cut by major media companies with phone companies using underpowered proprietary cell networks as a transport. It looks as if publishers will need to be particularly careful in 2007 in determining just how long of a lock-in on these kinds of deals will be in their best interest as Internet-friendly WiFi gains momentum. Presuming a "choke hold" on distribution via wireless is no longer an option in many markets. In the meantime expect plenty of legislative and legal rough-and-tumble as new power plays develop to get a piece of the municipal wireless Internet action.
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:51 PM |
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By John Blossom - posted at 12:02 PM |
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| Thursday, November 23, 2006 |
Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
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By John Blossom - posted at 10:11 AM |
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| Wednesday, November 22, 2006 |
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By John Blossom - posted at 2:03 PM |
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| Tuesday, November 21, 2006 |
Yahoo has been faulted for being slow on the draw in its deal-making efforts as of late, but with its deal with 176 major newspapers and a separate deal to provide user-generated content to Answers.com Yahoo is seeking to place its content and its ads in a broader array of destinations to make the bottom line look as good as the top line. In the meantime the global contextualization engine that is Google keeps chugging along with far better margins. Is it better to serve in the heaven of user-driven context than to rule in the hell of decaying media empires? Click here to read the full News Analysis
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By John Blossom - posted at 3:30 PM |
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