The Digitalists

New Perspectives on New Media

“You don’t own your brand”

Posted by Greg on June 4, 2010

Over the past week, I’ve been following a hilarious Twitter feed called @BPGlobalPR, which may soon overtake @LTrainRat as my favorite parody Twitter account. The person or people behind the feed lampoons not just BP and its response to the Gulf oil spill, but the very notion of PR spin, with tweets such as:

  • ANNOUNCEMENT: No one is allowed to look at our oil. All Gulf residents are required to close their eyes until this is over.
  • As part of our continued re-branding effort, we are now referring to the spill as “Shell Oil’s Gulf Coast Disaster”. #bpcares
  • If we’re being accused of being criminals, we want to be tried by a jury of our peers- wealthy execs who don’t give a damn. #fairisfair

Yesterday, the anonymous tweeter revealed himself … sort of. In a post authored under the (clearly pseudonymous) name “Leroy Stick”, the author explained the motivation behind the feed:

I started @BPGlobalPR, because the oil spill had been going on for almost a month and all BP had to offer were bullshit PR statements.  No solutions, no urgency, no sincerity, no nothing.  That’s why I decided to relate to the public for them ….

Why has this caught on?  I think it’s because people can smell the bullshit and sometimes laughing at it feels better than getting angry or depressed over it.  At the very least, it’s a welcome break from that routine.  The reason @BPGlobalPR continues to grow is because BP continues to spew their bullshit.

But Stick saved his most trenchant criticism for the very idea that companies in crisis should focus on PR: Read the rest of this entry »

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Math is hard, especially for journalists

Posted by Greg on May 17, 2010

In this week’s New York Times magazine, Andrew Rice has an piece on journalism startups wrestling with the dilemma of how to put a value on articles in a world where the written word has become commoditized. It’s a good overview of the issue, and I probably should provide some sort of in-depth analysis or fresh perspective. And maybe I will, eventually. But to be honest, right now I’m trying to end my unplanned two-month blogging hiatus, so I’ll just limit myself to a couple snarky asides.

First of all, while I applaud the fact that the companies profiled are experimenting with different ways to fund journalism, I had to laugh at this passage about True/Slant:

In fact, if you break it down, True/Slant pays its writers more than the amount of revenue their work generates at the current online advertising rates. Stripped down as it is, the start-up isn’t yet turning a profit, and it’s now in the process of raising a second round of venture capital.

I asked Bateman, as a matter of raw economics, how much an individual article is worth to True/Slant’s bottom line, on average. He told me he calculated it out: around $10.

Ah yes, the old “lose money on every sale but make it up on volume venture capital” plan that worked so well during the dot-com boom. A piece of advice to any of the VCs talking to True/Slant: Make sure they use your money to hire an ad-sales staff.

Then again, Rice himself doesn’t show much of a grasp of basic numbers when he mentions that “individual articles, if sold at the going rates, bring in between a penny and nickel each time a reader looks at one.” I don’t know whether Rice transcribed his notes incorrectly, misheard his interview subject, or got snowed by a fast-talking head of sales, but basic arithmetic should have told him those numbers were BS.

Think about it for a second. Earning one penny per pageview equates to a $10 CPM. A nickel is $50. (And that’s assuming the site is selling all of their ads. In reality, unsold inventory generally means that sites’ net-effective CPM is far lower than what advertisers are actually paying.) If publishers were commanding CPMs like that, the industry would be flush with cash and Rice would have to find something else to write about. Or to put it another way, if sites like True/Slant are making $10 per article on CPMs of $10-$50, that means those articles would be getting between 200 and 1,000 views apiece.  If True/Slant’s traffic numbers were really that piddling, the Times wouldn’t be wasting time covering them, and again, there’d be no article.

Archimedes wept.

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Who is online video advertising’s game changer?

Posted by Daniel Granof on March 11, 2010

A few interesting advertising stats:

  • Global Ad Business in 2010:  $544 billion
  • The average city dweller gets 51,000 ad messages per day
  • Cost of 30-second spot on American Idol:  $750,000
  • 4 global companies buy 80% of advertising
  • Ad spends by industry:
    • Food:  $3.2 billion
    • Cars:  $15 billion
    • Political:  $2.6 billion

These figures, which paint a simple but enlightening portrait of  the ad industry, appeared onscreen throughout the film Art&Copy, a documentary on great ad campaigns and the legends behind them (trailer above).  In the movie, the ad creators tell fascinating stories behind some of the most famous commercials of all time, several of which were almost nixed by nervous clients.   They included Macintosh’s “1984″ Super Bowl Ad (Lee Clow of Chiat\Day, directed by Ridley Scott!), Alka Seltzer’s “Plop Plop Fizz Fizz”  jingle (Mary Wells), Nike’s “Just Do It” (Dan Wieden and David Kennedy), “I Want My MTV” (George Lois), and “Got Milk?” (Rich Silverstein and Jeff Goodby, directed by Michael Bay!).

A common theme among these successes was Read the rest of this entry »

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Sezmi? Not so much maybe. . .

Posted by Daniel Granof on March 3, 2010

Thanks to Eric for his comment referencing less-than-stellar reviews on Sezmi.  Worth reading are specific reviews from commenters to a January 6 post on tech-geek blog Zatz Not Funny.    A few highlights:

I’m in the LA Pilot.

It’s lousy.

The box is slow, often taking several seconds to register button presses on the remote. Kind of like modern-day cable company DVRs in that respect.

The live TV guide only shows three channels at a time. There’s no number buttons on the remote, so you have to page up or down many many times just to do a simple channel change.

The quality of the cable channels is beyond horrible. They look as good as video downloads on the internet did about 10 years ago. All cable audio is plain ol’ stereo – no DD here.

* * *

I’m also in the LA Pilot. The box is in my bedroom…I have it unplugged. It’s REALLY loud. I have the aerial on my roof plugged into the box pointed at Mt. Wilson, so I have excellent Read the rest of this entry »

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CPM watch: major video site getting $20-25

Posted by Daniel Granof on February 26, 2010

The other day I met with the head of a well-known site that publishes lots of videos (viral and series).  He said they are getting $20-25 CPMs for some of their pre-rolls.  For reference:  at that rate a single video getting 100,000 views makes $2,000.  So if you can sell an advertiser on long-tail viewing of a bunch of your videos and provide significant reach, you’re not doing too badly.

By the way, when I brought up rumors of Hulu getting $40, he suggested that the figure covers all of a sponsor’s ads within an episode, not just a single spot.  Is there anyone who can confirm that that’s how it works?

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Cut the cable cord? Says who?! Sezmi

Posted by Daniel Granof on February 22, 2010

A new competitor will try to make it easier for people to cut the cable cord, albeit by replacing it with a new tether.  Sezmi has just launched in L.A., and I’d be dying to try it out if I had a beautiful flat panel TV.  The company does an end-around on cable/satellite with a mix of old and new media solutions.  The old is a digital receiver that picks up channels over the airwaves just like old TV—the company actually leases unused spectrum from local TV stations—so that you can still watch your local stations as always (some cable channels too).  The new is a 1 terabyte DVR and set-top box that delivers programming from several cable channels, YouTube, video podcasts, and on-demand movies and TV shows.  All for about $20 per month plus a $300 outlay for the hardware.  Considering cable TV service can cost upward of $100 per month for many channel packages, Sezmi recoups its costs in a very short time.*

This is an intriguing proposition on several fronts.  For the consumer, Read the rest of this entry »

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ReadWriteWeb, Facebook, and the limits of usability

Posted by Greg on February 12, 2010

The other day, the tech blog ReadWriteWeb published a piece entitled “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login“. Shortly afterward, the editors noticed something strange: the post attracted a number of comments from users upset for reasons that had nothing to do with anything the post said:

when can we log in? …

I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!! …

please give me back the old facebook login this is crazy…

I am going to delete my account (IF I CAN EVER LOG IN) as this SUCKS BIG TIME ! If this does not get back to NORMAL you are going to lose a lot of folks who hate this and as you can see from all the comments they think it sucks too !!! facebook was great for connecting with old friends …now, NOT SO MUCH. SO HOW DO I LOG IN ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

It turned out that the post had briefly appeared at the top of Google results for the phrase “Facebook login” (as I write this, it’s currently No. 4), and users were clicking on it thinking they were being taken to Facebook. Once they got there, some of them scrolled down to the comment form, saw the Facebook Connect prompt (which reads “Sign in with Facebook”) and were confused when entering their login information didn’t take them to Facebook. Even after RWW put up a disclaimer at the top of the page explaining how to get to Facebook, complaints continued to pour in; there are currently 620 (though most of the later ones are people poking fun at the mistake).

The next day, Jolie O’Dell, RWW’s community manager, did a follow-up post explaining what happened, and trying to draw some lessons from the experience. At a general level, I agreed with most of what O’Dell said: “Users don’t care about what you care about,” “users don’t read your copy or look at your branding,” and “users gravitate toward the simple and the familiar.” It was also classy of her not to simply make fun of the commenters for being dumb. But the fact is, they were being pretty dumb, and I would have liked to see her grapple a bit more with what that says about the usability paradigm. Read the rest of this entry »

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SAG: give your content away for free, but not your acting

Posted by Daniel Granof on February 11, 2010

Sort of the same old at a panel and networking event I attended last night at the Screen Actors Guild, put on by Digital LA.  Meant to teach SAG actors as well as producers, directors, and writers about the how-tos of doing online video, it covered well-trodden ground, almost as if it we time-warped back to February 2009.  To a person, the panelists all advocated getting your series up on the web, marketing it 24/7 to build a meaningful audience, and then seeking partnerships that monetize the eyeballs.

The most interesting moment for me came during Q&A.  An actor putting out a web series told of how she got all her friends to work for free as crew and asked, so is it okay to use SAG actors and have them work for free?  Mark Friedlander of SAG’s new media department responded by promoting SAG’s fantastic and simple new media agreement that producers can use to negotiate in place of the union’s arduous processes meant for large TV and film studios.  But when the moderator followed up by asking, “So can actors work for free?” he responded, “No, not for free.”

The paradox between subject matter and location crystallized right then.   SAG hosts a panel advocating the “build it and they will come” model, but apparently it doesn’t have the same faith in such a model for its actors.  You can’t blame SAG for that position since its mission is to protect actors.  But it does highlight a kind of NIMBY phenomenon in online video.  Everyone says, “You give your stuff away for free, but of course I’ve got to get paid.”  Not exactly a sustainable, long-term ecosystem.

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Monster.com chases its own scale

Posted by Greg on February 9, 2010

I remain puzzled by Monster’s decision last week to buy HotJobs from Yahoo for $225 million. I should say at the outset that I’m hardly a disinterested observer; my own employer makes a good chunk of its revenue from a niche job board that competes with both companies. But it is precisely that perspective as a competitor — as well as that of a hiring manager and job seeker — that leaves me scratching my head. Monster’s official explanation for the purchase offered the type of blather you’d expect about the benefits of size and “efficiencies”. But while scale obviously has some importance for job boards — if no one’s coming to your job board, then no one else will either — the medium also experiences rapidly diminishing returns. In other words, there’s a huge risk of being huge, specifically, that it will make it harder for job boards to achieve their core purpose of matching employers and job seekers.

In one sense, job boards are similar to other types of advertising markets, but while a typical advertiser is looking to sell as much product as the audience is willing to buy, an employer advertising a job has a very limited inventory; namely, a single open position. And it’s not like they can just give that position away on a first-come, first-serve basis, or sell it to the highest bidder. So as the scale of responses increases, so does the work the employer has to do to process them and pull out the top candidates.

What does that mean in practical terms? As a hiring manager, I’m reluctant to post a listing on a mass job board, since I know I’ll get inundated with responses, many of which will be a poor match. As a job seeker, I’m reluctant to apply for those jobs, since the odds are very good my resume will get stuck at the bottom of a large pile. That disconnect has allowed niche job boards like ours to cut into the business of the market leaders by promising employers an applicant pool that is more relevant but also more manageable.

So does that mean the Monsters of the world should be acquiring niche sites? Well, that might be a better use of their money than buying HotJobs, but if niche sites are successful, they ultimately bump up against the same scale constraints as the big boys. A better strategy is to move beyond the “classified ad” approach and try to figure out a better way to match up employer and applicant. For example, in this video, eHire CEO Ben Sabrin explains how his company is looking to move from “searching” to “matching”: Read the rest of this entry »

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MTV = TMI*

Posted by Greg on February 9, 2010

I know that as a child of the ’80s, I’m contractually obligated to complain about the fact that MTV doesn’t play music videos anymore, and now has apparently removed the words “music television” from their logo. But really, who cares? MTV is a business, not a Gen X nostalgia factory. I heard their director of programming speak a few years ago, and he said that their shows get 10 times the viewers as their videos. That’s why they stopped playing them.

If you want to criticize MTV for anything, how about the fact that the network that had supposedly cornered the youth demographic completely missed the boat on the two biggest trends to hit that market in the past 10 years (MP3s and social networking)?

* For the record, that stands for “Three Meaningless Initials”, though as anyone who’s watched “Jersey Shore” could tell you, the other phrase associated with that acronym is equally appropriate.

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