Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Class #4, July 15th 2009
Welcome to class #4 to be led by Levi Shapiro. Have a great class! Notes will be added here. Please check the blog and comment. I am in an immersive program and will have little time the next few weeks but I will continue to respond to emails.
Sphere: Related Content
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Class #3 July 8th Trends
Some articles for this week:
Quantcast
You might not be able to read this unless you have a WSJ sub. It’s about how Quantcast is selling Behavioral Targeting to as an ad network server system to ostensibly boost CPM rates. I often use QC to get a relative read on site stats. BT is derived from data-mining methods using multi-variant analysis to infer correlations. It generally draws upon taxonomy and ontology disciplines and sometime semantic analysis using “bag-of-words” statistical analysis such as the frequency distribution of terms. In other words, if you have visited www.edmunds.com and www.lexus.com and www.wsj.com we can make certain demographics / psychographic inferences about you Vs. if you visit www.mtv.com , www.tmz.com , www.perezhilton.com and we can therefore target the right ads to the right audience for bigger bucks. In fact some of these systems can collect not only WHAT sites you visit, but WHICH pages you go to on those sites.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124684239585598449.html
As a counterpoint to the above, there are many privacy worries about the vast amount of data these companies are collecting on a vast number of users. Is this big brother? Is PRC Communist Party sourcing the software? The industry claims that this information is held “Anonymously” so that actual “personal” info is not really stored. But who believes that?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/business/media/02adco.html
And finally, this piece on the flame out of JOOST and the elusiveness of an online video business model even when you start with $45 million VC dollars and have to reinvent yourself after an initial disaster with “client” software and a second disaster due to a surprise called HULU.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/joost-reinvents-itself-again/
Sphere: Related ContentFriday, July 3, 2009
Class #2 July 1st Mark Heninger
Happy 4th of July weekend to everyone! Please post and comment on this class.
Thank you for all the great comments for the first class. I will be responding to the all.
Sphere: Related Content
Tangentially related to our course, I had a fascinating meeting in Chicago with Adam Siegel, the Co-Founder of www.inklingmarkets.com , which is a crowdsourced "prediction marketplace" useful for consumer insight and in some cases, a form of advertising itself.
Angelica will post her summary of the class as well.
Please start choosing and asking approval on your book report and course presentation. Several have asked about BLINK and TIPPING POINT. I think I have to take the off the list. I think Mr. Gladwell makes great points that inform many thing related to our subject but I don't believe the books are relevant enough in light of so many more pertinent works available.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Summer Quarter Class #1, Next Class, Reading Assignment
Welcome to the Summer Quarter! Our class of 46 students has a great cross section of interests and careers represented.
Please be sure to download and review the Syllabus and let us know if there are any questions or additional topics that you want covered.
Here is the TRENDS presentation which I began, and will continue on July 8th.
In the first class I covered the Syllabus including course obj
ectives, topics, and the assignments. Three of the assignments are designed to encourage class participation:
- Discussion Article
- Media Diary
- Mystery Shopper
The other 2 are will also fuel discussions, allow you to go deeper into subjects of interest, and form a broader basis for your grades:
- Book Report
- Elevator Pitch or Research Paper.
I have created an Amazon bookstore for the course. Please select a book from here, or suggest one. Please get approval on a book for your book report, and on your topic for the research paper.
Please take advantage of the opportunities to get to know each other, network, and learn from each other.
In the first class we we fortunate to have Tammara Holzman as our guest speaker. She provided valuable insight into the online/Interactive advertising world and shared here experience
with AVVENTA Worldwide , a large Interactive agency that provides services to some large ad agencies such as DIGITAS as well as directly to large advertisers such as General Motors. They create campaigns for entertainment, publishing, sports and other sectors. They keep personnel costs low by maintaining offices and tech teams in Costa Rica.
She pointed out
how complex the Interactive ad business has become with so
many technologies and metrics and how it is constantly changing. "Internet used to added value for advertisers, now it is considered essential by advertisers."
We began discussion threads regarding audience fragmentation and the decreasing effectiveness of the 30 second spot.
Next week's class will be given by guest Instructor MARK HENNINGER, founder and President of 11AMPS . Mark has Co-Instructed the class for the past 2 years and will deliver his lecture on THE HISTORY OF CONTENT which covers the origins of radio, television and the Internet up through the present.
In preparation for this class, also please read the first two sections of my white paper:
Overview of the Entertainment Industry in The U.S.: History, Business, Technology, Trends, and check out these two timelines which will put things in perspective and which we will refer to for the rest of the quarter.
Thats Mark on the right below.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
From Champaign IL.
Greetings from Urbana-Champaign IL. and the offices of Illinois Ventures and One Llama Media Inc.
I apologize for the delayed post. A bit of travel, a lot of work, and family chaos.
Music Librarians Association http://www.mla2009.org/
Tomorrow I am giving a presentation to the Music Librarians Conference about Music Search which relates to many of the discussions I have had over the last two days about data and metadata and The Semantic Web.
This teases my lecture about music search.
When you do a typical Google search you are looking for string matches, that is a simple match to a string of letters usually in the form of a word or phrase. There are almost always far too many matches for all but the most unique words or phrases to possibly explore so Google uses some mathematical sorcery embodied in its page rank algorithm to rank order the results by relevancy. Google doesn’t know if by U2 you mean the video, the concert tour, the MP3, the JPEG of Bono or a submarine. It would be nice if somehow the concepts, aka the categories of audio files or biography or concert or rockstar or vessels were contained within the web pages themselves and reported to Google’s query so that it would be able to cluster around such things. In a Semantic Web universe web pages not only contain keywords, they tell search engines what the context of the keywords are and if there are special vocabularies to consider.
News
To follow-up on my Moguls and Megacorps lecture, Viacom reported its Q4 Profits down 69%, Pioneer announced its laying off 10,000, most of the chipmakers reported decreased demands. We discussed the change in Facebook’s TOS last week and sure enough it triggered a firestorm of criticism, which has resulted in FB backtracking on the the policy of “keeping” user data in perpetuity even after it has been “deleted”. This inspires me to re-read Huxley’s BIG BROTHER.
Rhapsody subscribers landed at 775,000 by the end of 2008, up 29 percent from a year-ago figure of 600,000, but still far less than needed for success. Sirius XM is saved by John Malone and Liberty Media, the holding company we learned about last week. Could be a blocking strategy against Charlie Ergen and DISH Network’s takeover intent. Why do you think satellite radio is important to DBS? I believe that the only long term economic solution for the Music recording industry is bundled all-you-can-eat DRM-free, or light-DRM subscription services along with broadband and / or mobile services.
What Would Google Do?
As Mr. Jarvis Jarvis told us last week, Google is always in beta. What would Google Do? Know when to hold em, know when to fold em. Over the past few weeks Google nixed at least 7 projects/companies/experiments.
Jaiku.com: Competition to twitter but was advertised as a multimedia activity stream. Google acquired this in October of ’07. Never reached critical mass. Why twitter and not Jaiku?
Have a great class tonight without me!
Don't forget to sign up for your presentation spot! Sphere: Related Content
I apologize for the delayed post. A bit of travel, a lot of work, and family chaos.
Music Librarians Association http://www.mla2009.org/
Tomorrow I am giving a presentation to the Music Librarians Conference about Music Search which relates to many of the discussions I have had over the last two days about data and metadata and The Semantic Web.
This teases my lecture about music search.
When you do a typical Google search you are looking for string matches, that is a simple match to a string of letters usually in the form of a word or phrase. There are almost always far too many matches for all but the most unique words or phrases to possibly explore so Google uses some mathematical sorcery embodied in its page rank algorithm to rank order the results by relevancy. Google doesn’t know if by U2 you mean the video, the concert tour, the MP3, the JPEG of Bono or a submarine. It would be nice if somehow the concepts, aka the categories of audio files or biography or concert or rockstar or vessels were contained within the web pages themselves and reported to Google’s query so that it would be able to cluster around such things. In a Semantic Web universe web pages not only contain keywords, they tell search engines what the context of the keywords are and if there are special vocabularies to consider.
News
To follow-up on my Moguls and Megacorps lecture, Viacom reported its Q4 Profits down 69%, Pioneer announced its laying off 10,000, most of the chipmakers reported decreased demands. We discussed the change in Facebook’s TOS last week and sure enough it triggered a firestorm of criticism, which has resulted in FB backtracking on the the policy of “keeping” user data in perpetuity even after it has been “deleted”. This inspires me to re-read Huxley’s BIG BROTHER.
Rhapsody subscribers landed at 775,000 by the end of 2008, up 29 percent from a year-ago figure of 600,000, but still far less than needed for success. Sirius XM is saved by John Malone and Liberty Media, the holding company we learned about last week. Could be a blocking strategy against Charlie Ergen and DISH Network’s takeover intent. Why do you think satellite radio is important to DBS? I believe that the only long term economic solution for the Music recording industry is bundled all-you-can-eat DRM-free, or light-DRM subscription services along with broadband and / or mobile services.
What Would Google Do?
As Mr. Jarvis Jarvis told us last week, Google is always in beta. What would Google Do? Know when to hold em, know when to fold em. Over the past few weeks Google nixed at least 7 projects/companies/experiments.
Jaiku.com: Competition to twitter but was advertised as a multimedia activity stream. Google acquired this in October of ’07. Never reached critical mass. Why twitter and not Jaiku?
- Lively.com: 3D Vitual World
- Dodgeball.com: Location aware app that knows where your friends are. This was another acquisition only a few years old.
- Radio Ad Program: Based on dMark which Google also acquired.
- Print Ad Program: As we discussed
- Catalog Search: Searched print catalogues and was pretty handy.
- Notebook: I never heard of it before the news if its demise.
- A very interesting Digital Supply Chain company:
http://www.nstein.com - An online MTV-Like network
www.lp33.com
Have a great class tonight without me!
Don't forget to sign up for your presentation spot! Sphere: Related Content
Monday, February 2, 2009
PGA West Panel Summary: Crossing Over, Bridging the Gap Between Traditional and New Media
I learned two new terms at the PGA seminar at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood last night, Transmedia and Retail Media Network.
Jeff Gomez, the CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment characterized his company’s work as developing Transmedia properties. His case study was the Coke “Fun Factory” commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwCn-D5xFdc ). The most popular commercial ever for Coke featured an animated fantasy universe populated by whimsical characters who create a bottle of Coke for delivery through a vending machine. After the Ad Agency of record failed to deliver, Starlight took the characters and narrative threads and expanded them into a universe with back-stories, characters, myths and legends along with a 7 year rollout plan for all media to exploit for Coke which could include animated features, shorts and games. Starlight’s has also created such transmedia extenstions for Mattel, Hasbro and Acclaim Entertainment. This concept of extending story and character into all dimensions is a fascinating aspect of advertising, marketing and new media. Properly done it can imprint a brand in new and compelling ways.
Adam Sigel is a Writer / Producer with a special skill set for adapting materials across platforms. TV, Film, Internet. Afterworld.com is an example of a “universe” that could be a TV series, or feature film but exists as a 30 episode animated Internet series with a website that immerses fans in characters, backstories and mysteries about this dystopian world. Adam reminded us that on the Internet you could create and distribute unfettered by corporate media citadels and go direct to the audience.
Jason VanBorsum is Executive Director of Director Digital Content Acquisition and Strategy at Sony Picture Television’s Crackle.com. Jason emphasized that Crackle specializes in releasing original episodic content onto the Internet. One can easily spend several evenings browsing dozens of shows in almost every genre. Crackle acts like a sort of farm league for programs, some of which may graduate to Sony Televison for “traditional” production and distribution. Jason emphasized that Crackle does not rely on “supersyndication” which he felt de-values original content too much. Supersyndication is the practice of publishing content on sites such as YouTube, Bebo, Veho and others. Although simply posting content on YouTube is enough to reach a about half of the Internet audience. Mr. VanBorsum could not reveal audience statistics on Crackle so it is left for me to speculate on how the audience for original entertainment online will shakeout. From viewing eps on Crackle, it is obvious that these are low budget productions. It is also obvious that there is an explosion of creativity and experimentation here, full of programming that gets a chance to find an audience that it would not get on traditional TV.
Anne White is VP of Content and Strategy & Development for the Premier Retail Network, which reaches an astounding 300 million people per week! PRN creates the in-store, AKA, out-of-home, TV networks that you see in retail chains including Best Buy and Wallmart. It was interesting to hear her talk about how content is developed for these networks and how precisely it targets shoppers with relevant content for their demographic and their shopping mindsets. Using IP, networked technology, shoppers can now interact with screens to get specific information about what they want when they want it. Programmers can instantly adjust content at the network, store, department and even the screen level! The classic example shown is rain gear goes on sale and is advertised the instant it starts raining! Sphere: Related Content
Jeff Gomez, the CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment characterized his company’s work as developing Transmedia properties. His case study was the Coke “Fun Factory” commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwCn-D5xFdc ). The most popular commercial ever for Coke featured an animated fantasy universe populated by whimsical characters who create a bottle of Coke for delivery through a vending machine. After the Ad Agency of record failed to deliver, Starlight took the characters and narrative threads and expanded them into a universe with back-stories, characters, myths and legends along with a 7 year rollout plan for all media to exploit for Coke which could include animated features, shorts and games. Starlight’s has also created such transmedia extenstions for Mattel, Hasbro and Acclaim Entertainment. This concept of extending story and character into all dimensions is a fascinating aspect of advertising, marketing and new media. Properly done it can imprint a brand in new and compelling ways.
Adam Sigel is a Writer / Producer with a special skill set for adapting materials across platforms. TV, Film, Internet. Afterworld.com is an example of a “universe” that could be a TV series, or feature film but exists as a 30 episode animated Internet series with a website that immerses fans in characters, backstories and mysteries about this dystopian world. Adam reminded us that on the Internet you could create and distribute unfettered by corporate media citadels and go direct to the audience.
Jason VanBorsum is Executive Director of Director Digital Content Acquisition and Strategy at Sony Picture Television’s Crackle.com. Jason emphasized that Crackle specializes in releasing original episodic content onto the Internet. One can easily spend several evenings browsing dozens of shows in almost every genre. Crackle acts like a sort of farm league for programs, some of which may graduate to Sony Televison for “traditional” production and distribution. Jason emphasized that Crackle does not rely on “supersyndication” which he felt de-values original content too much. Supersyndication is the practice of publishing content on sites such as YouTube, Bebo, Veho and others. Although simply posting content on YouTube is enough to reach a about half of the Internet audience. Mr. VanBorsum could not reveal audience statistics on Crackle so it is left for me to speculate on how the audience for original entertainment online will shakeout. From viewing eps on Crackle, it is obvious that these are low budget productions. It is also obvious that there is an explosion of creativity and experimentation here, full of programming that gets a chance to find an audience that it would not get on traditional TV.
Anne White is VP of Content and Strategy & Development for the Premier Retail Network, which reaches an astounding 300 million people per week! PRN creates the in-store, AKA, out-of-home, TV networks that you see in retail chains including Best Buy and Wallmart. It was interesting to hear her talk about how content is developed for these networks and how precisely it targets shoppers with relevant content for their demographic and their shopping mindsets. Using IP, networked technology, shoppers can now interact with screens to get specific information about what they want when they want it. Programmers can instantly adjust content at the network, store, department and even the screen level! The classic example shown is rain gear goes on sale and is advertised the instant it starts raining! Sphere: Related Content
Friday, January 30, 2009
UCLA Media Tech Class Winter Quarter 09 Class #4
Guest Speaker Next Week
I am happy to announce that next Wednesdays guest will be Deedee Gordon founder and principal with Look-Look (www.look-lookmagazine.com) . This is an ethnographic market research company with a global network of over 30,000 “correspondents”, and a true innovator in trend-spotting. I think it relates to our topics because she focuses on youth culture and we can discuss her observations about behaviors and trends related to technology.
News
We discussed Piracy and if it really cannibalizes DVD and BD sales as much as the studios say it does. We also delved into how much digital downloading and streaming will impact DVD sales and how quickly. That thread was triggered by news of Netflix 45% quarterly earnings boost and why it happened. More “cocooning” during hard times? A bump from BD? A bump from Netflix deals for online delivery including via some Samsung TVs and via set-top-boxes. News form NATPE is that this was much discussed. Israel is posting clips of missile strikes to show how “surgical” they are. I watched some hair raising videos of other ops as well. Oh, and the Vatican now has a Youtube Channel too. There were over 27 million streams of the inauguration.
Lectures
History of Content
Mark covered the macro timeline from the dawn of radio through to broadcast TV, CATV and the multi-channel universe of today. As an aside, a fascinating historical novel on the dawn of radio and Marconi is THUNDERSTRUCK by Erik Larson. It really shows just how revolutionary the invention of “wireless” and the first transatlantic transmissions really were.
Trends Part 3
OK, I’m really almost done with the trends already. I got through how advertising is transforming to being hyper-targeted and budgets are shifting online at the expense of traditional media. Sphere: Related Content
I am happy to announce that next Wednesdays guest will be Deedee Gordon founder and principal with Look-Look (www.look-lookmagazine.com) . This is an ethnographic market research company with a global network of over 30,000 “correspondents”, and a true innovator in trend-spotting. I think it relates to our topics because she focuses on youth culture and we can discuss her observations about behaviors and trends related to technology.
News
We discussed Piracy and if it really cannibalizes DVD and BD sales as much as the studios say it does. We also delved into how much digital downloading and streaming will impact DVD sales and how quickly. That thread was triggered by news of Netflix 45% quarterly earnings boost and why it happened. More “cocooning” during hard times? A bump from BD? A bump from Netflix deals for online delivery including via some Samsung TVs and via set-top-boxes. News form NATPE is that this was much discussed. Israel is posting clips of missile strikes to show how “surgical” they are. I watched some hair raising videos of other ops as well. Oh, and the Vatican now has a Youtube Channel too. There were over 27 million streams of the inauguration.
Lectures
History of Content
Mark covered the macro timeline from the dawn of radio through to broadcast TV, CATV and the multi-channel universe of today. As an aside, a fascinating historical novel on the dawn of radio and Marconi is THUNDERSTRUCK by Erik Larson. It really shows just how revolutionary the invention of “wireless” and the first transatlantic transmissions really were.
Trends Part 3
OK, I’m really almost done with the trends already. I got through how advertising is transforming to being hyper-targeted and budgets are shifting online at the expense of traditional media. Sphere: Related Content
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