In addition to the Samsung pact, Oath announced at this week’s Digital Content NewFronts 2018 that it will debut 10 new series on AOL and Yahoo properties.
The apps that will reside on S9 phones are Verizon’s Go90 video service, Newsroom from Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance.
The Galaxy integration is a “really important part of our statement to the marketplace about Oath as a mobile company. It’s a tremendous opportunity,” says Oath CRO John DeVine in this interview with Beet.TV.
“Millions of Samsung Verizon users will be carrying around those Oath brands in their pockets and it gives our advertisers a chance to get their ads into those apps.”
At its NewFronts presentation, hosted by actor Jamie Foxx, Oath announced three shows for mobile sports fans, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.
• The Rush, a daily sports show featuring “must-see” moments filmed both in vertical and horizontal format “so it gives the user a chance to really get the best of the mobile experience.”
• The Spin, offering insights and analysis on sporting events.
• Soccer Mom, in which soccer star Abby Wambach tackles everyday issues common to athletes and parents.
In addition, the Build Series is adding two new live daily shows: Build Brunch and The Build Up. Oath brand Makers will collaborate with Yahoo Finance on a new series titled Makers Money, aimed at helping women with their finances. It will feature Sally Crawcheck “talking about finance through the perspective of women,” DeVine says.
“We founded Oath and began Oath as a portfolio of brands. We’re going to continue to mine that garden of brands if you will,” says DeVine.
As it continues to invest in properties like Yahoo Finance, Huffington Post and Yahoo Sports, “Over time we may add to that portfolio as well. Those brands have a rich legacy and real trust equity built up with consumers and we think that matters to our advertisers.”
DeVine says one major focus of Oath is pioneering new ad formats that consumers will warm to. “We think clearly consumers want fewer adds, but they really want fewer bad ads.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>As Oath sorts out the DSP solution, “We’re very sincerely aligned with wanting to go from a Wild West to a real, trusted environment,” DeVine says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Annual Leadership Meeting of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “We want to have an open platform and an open ecosystem where we bring technology that as an advertiser and as a brand builder you can trust.”
Such an open system means advertisers can bring to the table their own data, validation and measurement so that “we’re not grading our own homework so that you as an advertiser feel comfortable with the ROI, the results and the delivery of your message to our universe of users.”
The unified DSP is based mostly on the BrightRoll code base “but it pulls in ad learn and other features of the ONE by AOL DSP,” says DeVine. “We’re cross-coding right now the features and functionality of both into the combined platform.”
As The Drum has reported, Oath hopes to have the unified DSP by the end of 2018, along with two ad exchanges—one for video and the other for mobile.
According to DeVine, Oath is working on establishing “a common interface, features and functionality” between its Gemini native platform and the single DSP “so advertisers have one plug-in, one place to go.”
What Verizon has invested in with its separate acquisitions of AOL and Yahoo is growth. In addition to consolidating Oath’s tech assets, “We also know that growth starts with our consumer relationship and so our energies are going very aggressively toward that consumer interface”
Oath’s mobile-first regimen was bolstered in late 2017 with the addition of live-streaming NFL games, a five-year deal that Recode estimates will cost Verizon more than $1.5 billion.
“On the advertising side, we’re going to continue to push on creative ad formats. We want ads to be great for consumers and advertisers,” says DeVine.
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“Build brands people love” is the mantra of the amalgamation of AOL and Yahoo that is Oath. Fittingly, the company has decided to share its “love” with advertisers and consumers at its love.com site. There resides a wealth of data from some 150,000 consumers in 13 countries to reveal what makes them love their most trusted brands.
“We love this opportunity of using what we have as an asset and let it be shared across the industry, and it’s something you’re gong to see more of,” says Tim Mahlman, President, Advertising & Publisher Strategy, Oath.
In this interview with Beet.TV at Oath’s first appearance at the annual CES confab, Mahlman explains the company’s mobile-first video push and how it intends to go big on such venerable brands as Yahoo. An example of the latter is the recently announced deal between Verizon and the National Football League. As CNBC reports, fans can live-stream playoff games on the Yahoo Sports app, a deal with the sports league that is pegged at more than $1.5 billion over five years.
“We still very much want to double down on properties like Yahoo and within that the Yahoo Finance property and Yahoo sports,” Mahlman says. “Those are still big, behemoth organizations that have massive followings, especially on the app ecosystem.”
Two themes Mahlman cites going forward are advertisers’ continued concern over ad-serving transparency and creating unique ad formats for consumers, particularly in the mobile video realm. As for the former, he says, “It really comes down to transparency and trust. It’s something we saw happen in 2017 where there’s been some turmoil.”
The need for more engaging formats is necessary to prevent consumers from shutting out ads altogether. “If we don’t take amore proactive approach on it, we could see ourselves in a much different situation.”
Mahlman believes that video needs to be “democratized” and “ubiquitous” because there’s no accounting for public taste. However, the caveat for publishers is the risk of going it on their own for video production. “If you try to produce the content on your own and you don’t get the engagement, it’s a heavy cost,” Mahlman adds.
]]>Oath Chief Revenue Officer John DeVine spends much of his time at events like Advertising Week in Manhattan explaining how all of these assets are coming together, along with the melding of the teams and culture of AOL and Yahoo.
“We are consolidating the ad stack to make it ultra simple for our users,” DeVine says in this interview with Beet.TV while attending the Advertising Week festivities.
To help communicate all of the changes under way, Oath in late September launched a global brand campaign called #BuildYourBrand, which spans nine global markets and underscores the company’s differentiators across mobile, video and data for advertisers, publishers and partners, according to a news release.
Oath is a portfolio of more than 50 media and tech entities that Verizon accumulated with its acquisition of AOL and more recently Yahoo. According to DeVine, the company knows it needs to be “consumer first” when it comes to content.
“We have a beautiful garden of properties. We’re going to continue to grow, water and nourish and build that garden for consumers,” says DeVine.
Implicit in the choice of Oath as its own brand name is being open not only about the various consolidations apace but also how the company will operate going forward, given the delicate relations between brands and the digital ecosphere.
“We believe that programmatic advertising can be done with trust and advertisers can maintain control of their brands while they’re journeying into the programmatic space,” he adds.
Among other tactics in the mobile space, where 70% of Oath’s users interact with the company, Verizon plans to share hashed ID’s from its subscriber base for targeting on any AOL or Yahoo property, as well as for media bought through its platforms, AdExchanger reports.
Given its big footprint on the buy side and sell side, Oath is keenly aware that marketers aren’t going to let up on their demands for more open digital dealings.
“Advertisers are not happy with the way they’re being served. They’re not happy with the trust and transparency. At Oath we’re leaning directly into that,” DeVine says.
]]>Along the way, the industry has gone from an open-bidded marketplace where it was “a bit of spray and pray and hope you get good impressions and good audiences” to a much more refined way in which to transact media, Norton explains in this interview with Beet.TV.
The state of the programmatic world will be explored this month at the DMEXCO advertising and media trade show on Sept. 13 and 14 in Cologne, Germany.
Norton, who is Chief Business Officer and President, Revenue at Condé Nast, has a deep background in the digital space. It includes three years at Google as National Sales Manager and nearly seven at AOL, where his last position was Global Head of Media Sales.
Much of his role at the venerable magazine publisher is figuring out the best ways to leverage the efficiency of programmatic but “still be able to deliver against the great content and audiences that Condé Nast provides.”
While traditional agencies have driven the trend toward programmatic, primarily from an efficiency standpoint, their clients have not sat by idly. Condé Nast increasingly sees individual advertisers become more educated on such aspects of the business as header bidding.
Like other publishing mainstays, Condé Nast draws a distinction between itself and digital powerhouses like Facebook and Google by stressing trusted audiences and brand-safe environments.
“What Condé Nast offers is the ability to find that efficiency from a transactional standpoint but yet still be able to, in a programmatic setting, ensure brand safety and viewability when it comes to video,” Norton says.
He cites fashion and luxury marketers as among those whose storytelling has evolved from basic print spread placements to vehicles like short films.
“What we like to think of ourselves as is rooted in quality content and brand safety through trusted journalism but the ability to be really flexible in the way those brand stories get told.”
This video is part a series that examines programmatic from both the seller and the buyer perspective. It is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>And it’s probably not going to get much easier going forward, Reed explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
“I think we’re going to learn some things over the course of the next year that are really surprising,” says Reed. “We know that consumer attention us dropping every time we turn around. We have less attention span than a goldfish. We’re not getting any better.”
The implications are profound because “as we start to look at ad formats, we’re going to have the expectation that those ad formats need to be shorter and faster to grab attention.”
The need for speed will ultimately rest on the shoulders of creative because they won’t be thinking of “that anthem 30- or 60-second unit that they used to build but how do I build something that’s fast, gets to the point and engages instantly.”
On the subject of data and walled gardens, Reed is asked whether her agency gets everything it needs from Facebook. “Does anyone get the information they need from all of the walled garden partners?” she says with a laugh. “No. Certainly not.”
On a positive note, she believes the caretakers of the gardens “have actively taken an approach to say that they are willing to try to find a solution with all of our clients. It’s going to take time.”
Nonetheless, the clock is ticking. Reed thinks that in the next year or so Facebook and its ilk might have to get more magnanimous and “figure out how to give data back to the advertisers in order to be able to truly address ROI, or it will significantly affect their investment levels.”
In the meantime, new players are emerging all the time that could become the next Amazon, Facebook or Snapchat. “Let’s not forget that AOL was the behemoth many years ago, and now they’re starting that resurgence again with Oath,” Reed observes.
This video is from The New TV Ecosystem Leadership Forum at Cannes Lions 2017, presented by FreeWheel. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Oath is a portfolio of more than 50 media and tech entities that Verizon accumulated with its acquisition of AOL and, most recently, Yahoo. It’s hoping that its “ton of quality brands” from Yahoo’s news and sports franchises to Huffington Post, TechCrunch and others will represent a trusted port for marketers in a sea of not always reputable options.
“We’re really excited about the reaction we’re getting to the Oath name and the Oath brand and the Oath value proposition,” says DeVine as the company made its debut at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
Oath is hoping that the perception of trust will be a big differentiator.
“When you put the trusted brands, the trusted data and the trusted distribution together, we think there’s really an opportunity that the marketplace is looking for to build brands with trust,” says DeVine, who served in the Navy before founding and leading McKinsey & Co’s B2B/B2C Customer Experience Practice. He joined Yahoo four years ago.
Mobile, video and content marketing are keystones of the company’s strategy. “We think brands will be built on the mobile device,” he says. “Oath is investing in building out quality video ad supply but also really innovative ad positions that let marketers and let brand builders get their brand out in video.”
At Cannes, DeVine is inspired by the work he’s seen in virtual and augmented reality, 360 video and holographic advertising, among other things. “It’s just great to see the innovation that’s happening.”
He also perceives a desire on the part of marketers to change the way they engage with consumers on their phones. Not just a “one-way, interruptive ad protocol but something that’s really much more interactive and two-way.
“So I think the creativity that’s happening there around the mobile device and the way to bring brands through the phone is really energizing.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s Coverage of Cannes Lions 2017. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>AOL has just turned on self-service capability for the supply-side platform inside its AOL ONE digital advertising offering.
It makes it easier for small-scale app developers to sign up and start taking ads from hundreds of demand sources they can select.
Whilst AOL ONE has traction with big app publishers, this self-service platform is “built for developers launching their first app”, the company says.
“Many app developers and publishers use upwards of 15 different pieces of technology,” Matt Gillis, SVP of publisher platforms at AOL, tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’re trying to simplify that and give them one.
“They want their hands on the keyboard. Publishers can log in to the platform, set up all their own placements, download our SDK and work with us to monetise their sites and ads.
“It enables transparency and controls for app developers, to understand who the advertisers are that are advertising in the product, give them brand safety controls to ensure the ads running in the apps are what they want their customers to see.”
Gillis claims 20 new app publishers signed up to the platform on launch day, three days ago. Amongst them is Glu, maker of the Kardashian series of mobile games.
The move to self-serve gathered pace this week when Time Inc’s Viant acquired Adelphic, a self-service mobile ad platform serving the demand side of the equation.
]]>“Any eyeball in the U.S. that watches video has access to a Condé Nast video,” says Joy Marcus, EVP and GM of Digital Video, Condé Nast Entertainment.
Aside from its own platforms, Condé Nast distributes on all the obvious platforms, sometimes with non-obvious results. “We cannot believe it but it’s true. The AOL.com home page does really, really well for us and some of our brands,” Marcus says. “Most recently we’ve done an arrangement with Pinterest for GQ content, which is super interesting,” Marcus adds.
She believes we’re seeing a “hockey stick moment for video advertising,” rising from around $9 billion this year to between $20 billion and $23 billion in the next five years. One reason, according to Marcus, is that television is now growing in viewership “and lots and lots of money is still being thrown at TV. I think that video is incredibly well positioned to begin catching some of that money.”
With a direct-sales approach, Condé Nast sells out of its video inventory “and more,” Marcus observes, noting that the company has first sales right with almost all of its syndication partners. “That’s a model that we have really stuck to our guns with.”
Condé Nast already sells display ad space programmatically and is testing programmatic for its video inventory, according to Marcus. “I think you’re going to see a more full blown programmatic video program from Condé Nast in 2017,” she says.
In October, the company “planted a big stick in the ground with VR,” unveiling a series titled Invisible in collaboration with director Doug Liman and other Hollywood luminaries. “Our players now have been modified to include 360,” says Marcus. “We have exceeded our expectations in views.”
This interview is part of our series “The Road to CES,” a lead-up series in advance of CES 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from the series here.
]]>“A lot of people have asked why AOL, why Yahoo,” Jacob says in an interview with Beet.TV. “We are the supply chain while AOL and Yahoo are on the demand side of things. We’re the tech organization.”
Noting the importance of being able to dynamically insert ads into live or linear video feeds, Jacob says VDMS has welcomed joining with other companies’ technology.
“We have been known in the industry to actually be agnostic to whom we’re integrating with,” says Jacob, citing the likes of DFP, FreeWheel and SpotX. “We continuously focus on how can we enhance the technologies that these service providers actually provide. Our integration with AOL and Yahoo is just at the beginning.”
In less than three years, VDMS has grown to nearly 1,200 people. This expansion has occurred amid constant change in the adtech space as all manner of companies try to adapt and survive.
“The providers that have services such as FreeWheel have taken notice that in order to stay relevant, they need to be playing with companies such as Verizon and VDMS,” Jacob says.
Describing as “super smooth” the company’s existing ad decision integrations, Jacobs adds, “We’re looking into potentially building our own sometime in the future, which is why the acquisitions of AOL and Yahoo happened in the first place. We’re very excited on where we can take this over the next couple of years.”
]]>On the eve of FreeWheel’s annual client summit in Europe, Beet.TV interviewed Yu about the company’s plans involving the QA side of the tech business. “The problem we’re dealing with, especially on the technology front, is it’s no longer making a platform to satisfy one or two customers. It’s satisfying a lot of customers and also at the same time making the platform extendable in the future,” says Yu, who first connected with co-founders Jon Heller and Doug Knopper when all three worked for DoubleClick.
In line with its founding intent to practice Agile development, FreeWheel is adopting a trend in engineering that has developers doing more testing work while delivering working software on every iteration.
“A big change we just made at freewheel is that for the next three years, we’re going to gradually remove the QA function as a function group,” Yu explains. “Everybody will turn into a developer not only just implementing code for the future but also coding for testing as well.”
That’s a major shift in the sense that “nobody has tried that with a large-scale BtoB technology platform yet. But are making that movement and it’s going to keep me very excited for the next couple of years,” says Yu.
FreeWheel’s customers include the largest media and entertainment companies in the world, including AOL, DIRECTV, NBC Universal, and Turner in the U.S., and Sky and Channel 4 in Europe. Anticipating the needs of these companies as they try to unify their audiences and monetize content across desktop, mobile, OTT and traditional STB devices means always being one step of those needs.
“To me, it’s not as critical to actually know every single customer’s demand because you need to anticipate their demand will always change,” Yu says. “You need to be able to have a platform that can adapt to any demand the customer wants.”
Which is where the nautical analogy surfaces. “If you build a platform and you’re not flexible, you cannot not meet the demand and it’s going to become a bigger and bigger ship you cannot turn around,” Yu says.
We spoke with Yu at the recent FreeWheel European summit in Cologne presented along with StickyAds.tv. Please visit this page for additional videos from Beet’s coverage.
]]>That seems to be the rationale at AOL, whose content division is now taking a stronger role in making ad formats that don’t piss off its readers and viewers.
“People are pushing back – we’re taking that very seriously on the AOL side,” AOL content and consumer brands EVP and president Jimmy Maymann reveals in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We’ve actually created a whole new team and moved it over to my side of the house.
“Before, we worked on ad experiences more on the tech platform side of the house. But, at the end of the day, we need to have it closer to the content experience, the consumer experience, so that we create things that are more in line with the overall experiences we create.”
In June, AOL announced a reorg in which Tim Mahlman, the founder of AOL acquisition Vidible became president of AOL Platforms, a new role responsible for advertising technology and data products, built by 1,400 engineers, product developers and sales and client service leads. Maymann’s new team was not detailed at the time.
Maymann’s content division publishes The Huffington Post, Makers, TechCrunch, Engadget, Moviefone, AutoBlog, AOL.com, and MapQuest. His new team sounds like an acknowledgement that ad-tech has become too disconnected from the content that consumers want.
After a frenetic few years in which the industry has debuted programmatic sales, mobile formats, video ads, advanced, data-driven trading practices and more, both publishers and ad buyers are staring in to the abyss.
So far, it has been a summer when the reality has hit – according to multiple data points, consumer ad blocking is rife, and publishers are beginning to accept that audiences hate some digital ad practices so much, they want to opt out entirely.
How they respond will be fascinating. Maymann says already-introduced formats like in-steam ads, native ads and branded content have already begun to help give better consumer experiences. “But we need to push it even further,” he says.
“AOL used to really push the boundaries – three or four years ago, AOL produced the Devil unit, which ended up becoming an IAB thing. We want to get back to that mojo.
“We need to take that baton again and lead again. The industry needs to do more in that space.”
This video part of “Beyond the Pre-Roll: the Transformation of Video Advertising,” a series produced at Cannes Lion 2016, sponsored by ConvertMedia. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That means advertisers, too, must catch up to deliver messages across multiple platforms, a panel debate convened by Beet.TV heard:
“Fifty percent of inventory is now off desktops and laptops,” said FreeWheel’s Smith, whose company recently formed the Council for Premium Video. “If you want to be premium inventory, you have to look at it from a cross-screen standpoint now.”
The consumer viewpoint was an observation echoed by AOL’s Fenn: “They think, ‘I want my content when and where I want it’,” he said.”
So, how do marketers pull off that trick? Most want to, but getting there may be harder. “A lot of them aren’t ready yet to have different creatives across different devices,” observed Tremor’s Baum.
So, discovering the right size of ads to fit on to different device contexts, even for the same consumer, is critical.
AOL is due to publish a two-phase piece of Nielsen research aiming to help marketers, incorporating a matrix advising on the appropriate video ad length for different circumstances plus advising on best practice for creative ad optimization.
AOL’s Fenn pointed to recent Facebook efforts, encouraging advertisers to place logos and key messages earlier in what, ultimately, should be shorter video ads. He said there are three challenges to multi-screen ad buying:
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
This panel was moderated by MediaMath CMO Joanna O’Connell.
]]>The publisher has a host of productions on the go, but Maymann says appetite is voracious.
“When people log on to the internet, a third of what they do is watching online video,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Right now, when I look across our properties, we are at 20%, that means we are under-indexing.”
As well as videos on its existing roster of content sites, AOL these days also has a raft of original commissions, unveiled last to advertisers April in its NewFronts event. But, this year, Maymann says more video money will be put back in to the blogs that are part and parcel of AOL’s stable.
“We’re bringing investment back in to the brands,” he says. “We’re still doing originals but it will be HuffPo originals or TechCrunch originals. We’re doubling down on the properties we have to audiences we have – trying to create deeper video experiences and shows within those brands, rather than trying to create something on top that needs to attract a new brand. Thats where you’re really going to see investment dollars flow in
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2016 sponsored by Adobe.
]]>“Verizon feels they have an oil field filled with valuable data, AOL has the rig to get that data out and make it valuable to advertisers and to customers,” according to AOL Platforms CTO Seth Demsey. “How do we use this data to make customers’ content viewing experiences better, more powerful?”
Demsey says: “We don’t have specifics to talk about yet, but that’s the general direction that we’re heading … Personalizing the internet, powering that with Verizon’s data.
“We tend to think about what we do in verticals – social, video, mobile, mobile video, display, rich formats, traditional, radio, outdoor, in-store. The reality is, we only live in a single world – weaned tooling, data, insights and actionable results to enable us to manage all of things together in one complete world. The Verizon data is a powerful enabler of connecting the real world to the digital world.”
TechCrunch reports AOL CEO Tim Armstrong this month defended reported plans for Verizon’s involvement in AOL ad data usage.
]]>Also in the interview he speaks about recent acquisition of AOL by Verizon.
This video is part of a series from DMEXCO, presented by Mediaocean. Please visit this page for our other videos.
]]>It didn’t work out so well. In fact, the newspaper he launched with a friend, “Beginnings of Boston,” targeted at 20-year-olds in Boston, hit the rocks. Armstrong tells Beet.TV that remains his biggest career setback – but one he learned the best business lessons from.
“At one point, since we really didn’t know what we were doing, and we were starting from scratch, I was 23 years old hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt,” Armstrong tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I financed it all myself. I sold my car, my mountain bike, my surfboard, and used all my credit cards, and taught myself how to program.
“The business almost went out of business. What seemed like a crushing amount of debt and failure made me make a decision about whether or not you give up or keep going.”
In the crucible of that crisis, Armstrong realized the enduring value of hard work.
“I remember reading the Boston Globe one morning at the depth of the lowest point,” he adds. There was an article about how handicapped people overcome adversity. There was a quote I used to carry around in my wallet for years that said, basically, the world doesn’t owe you anything, you have to get up every single day and continue and prove yourself and grow.
“It just hit me right between the eyes. I got up that morning and said, ‘Regardless of what happens, I’m always going to keep pushing forward’. It was a great lesson for me.”
Amid the turmoil of his early newspaper foray, Armstrong met with the developers of one of the first web browsers and quickly put all his efforts in to digital media.
Armstrong has spent six years at the helm of an AOL that has been spun out of Time Warner and, after flirting with Yahoo, has been sold to Verizon. That followed positions for Armstrong including running Google’s Americas business, directing sales at ABC/ESPN Internet Ventures and advising Greycroft Partners.
Throughout that time at the company, he has continued applying and spreading the lesson learned from that Globe article. “It’s been a real amazing thing to watch thousands of people at this company get up every morning and improve a little bit every day,” Armstrong says.
Now AOL has itself acquired mobile ad network Millennial Media, the latest in a series of deals designed to place it at the forefront of the fast-changing online advertising industry.
Armstrong’s motivation remains clear, however. “I’ve had one simple philosophy,” he tells Beet.TV. “I want to be really honest with myself about mistakes I’ve made.
“I have a personal mission statement I use in my life, which is about making as many people as I possibly can successful. That drives me.”
This interview is from Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries”, a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries,sponsored by Xaxis and AOL. Xaxis is a unit of WPP. Please find more clips from the series here.
Armstrong was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. The interview took place at the AOL headquarters in New York.
]]>“I’m seeing people beginning to pick up formats that were considered dead and reimagine them,” says Susan Lyne, the veteran media executive who previously ran AOL’s brand group and now runs its BBG venture wing.
“Five years ago, people were talking about magazines being dead. What I’ms seeing a lot of … are these gorgeous new magazines that have a very specific point of view, that are very thoughtfully received … and they’re charging $20 for them and they’re selling out. You’re going to see more of that.”
Lyne has been through a media evolution herself. Having once been managing editor of The Village Voice in the late 70s, Lyne created Premiere magazine for News Corp, co-headed ABC Entertainment, ran Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and then built Gilt Groupe in to a digital retail powerhouse.
In between, it was the loss of one of those high-profile jobs which shaped Lynes attitude to the rough and tumble of life in the industry she loves.
“My biggest setback was very public,” she confesses to Beet.TV in this video interview. “I was fired from a job running ABC Entertainment, which means running primetime, just a few weeks before we were announcing a schedule that included Desperate Housewives and Lost and Grey’s Anatonmy. I was excited about them … and I lost my job. I was furious, heartbroken, embarrassed.
“But I learned a few things from that experience. One was resilience – I could have sat there and wallowed in that for many, many months – my husband called me that nigh and said, ‘You have 24 hours to weep over this and then you’re going to get over it and think about all the things that you can do now that you couldn’t have considered 24 hours ago’. It was great advice – it did change my thinking about what had happened.”
These days, Lyne is busy righting a wrong – helping back women-led startups in a world where, she says, 93% of investment goes to the other gender. That comes in the shape of Built By Girls (BBG) Ventures, the seed investment unit she runs at AOL and which is billed as “the evolution of a media company as a platform for change”.
Change is the biggest disruptive factor shaping the entire media industry, Lyne reckons. “When you see new technologies emerging, that gives a whole new group of people to build businesses,” she says.
Just as she thanks her mentors for giving her the push she needed through her early career, Lyne thinks graduates today should seek a rewarding career in media.
“If you want to be part of the conversation … If you want to shape how people think about the world … go in to media; it’s a fabulous world,” she says.
Lyne was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. This video is part of a series titled the Media Revolutionaries, produced by Beet.TV and sponsored by Xaxis and AOL Please find the series videos here.
]]>Fresh out of a six-month stint in investment banking, after realizing the finance world was not for him, Armstrong talked a high school friend in to starting Beginnings Of Boston, an alternative newspaper targeting 20-something Bostonians.
“At one point, since we really didn’t know what we were doing, I was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt,” Armstrong tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “I financed it all myself. I sold my car, my mountain bike, my surfboard, and used all my credit cards. The business almost went out of business.”
The episode felt like “a crushing amount of debt and failure”. But one event turned things around, and made Armstrong the media leader he is today. What was it?
“I remember reading the Boston Globe one morning at the lowest point,” he says. “There was an article about how handicapped people overcome adversity. There was a quote I used to carry around in my wallet for years that said, basically, the world doesn’t owe you anything, you have to get up every single day and continue and prove yourself and grow.
“It hit me right between the eyes. I got up that morning and said, ‘Regardless of what happens, I’m always going to keep pushing forward’. It was a great lesson for me.”
In that moment two worlds, two very distinct possible outcomes, collided in Armstrong’s mind. What could have been a crushing humiliation that put him off media entrepreneurship for life instead become a learning experience that spurred him forward. “Success and failure are two sides of the same coin,” he now says, succinctly.
Armstrong, in fact, left his fledgling newspaper business headed to Seattle to join Paul Allen’s Starwave, an early internet content pioneer that built out ESPN.com and other properties.
But readers will score few points for recognizing, in Armstrong’s aphorism, some clear parallels with the venture for which he is now better known. Picked by Jeff Bewkes in 2009 to helm an AOL that was struggling to capitalize on its waning dial-up access heritage, Armstrong’s task, this time, was to stick around and reverse the company’s fortunes – this time, using his new-found resolve.
“AOL is a company that wasn’t doing well, it was at a low point,” he says. “Although a lot of people had given up on it, I looked at AOL as the largest brand in the world. Failure only takes you down when you give up. When you don’t give up, it’s a really powerful thing to learn in your life.”
Armstrong threw AOL a lifeline by choosing to downplay old-line business activities in favor of content, advertising and video opportunities. His mantra was “buy low, sell high”. If Verizon’s $4.4 billion offer for the company is anything to go by, that has been borne out.
So what’s next for Tim Armstrong after a sale to Verizon? He tells Beet.TV he takes most personal satisfaction from staying true to himself, and he advises companies that are doing well today not to decline the opportunity to shoot for a bigger prize tomorrow, in a still-growing market.
“As businesses get older, you tend to take less risks. I hope we take ever more risks in the future,” he says.
“There’s going to be billions more people connected to the internet. It’s hard to imagine things 100 times bigger, but I think we have to live in that world. Success is going to come from taking really substantial risks. Buy low, sell high.”
This post is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries“, a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. Xaxis is a unit of WPP.
Armstrong was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. The taping took place at AOL headquarters in New York.
]]>Always keep an eye on how she is changing. That’s the advice on how to thrive and survive in the media business from a veteran and a luminary who has shepherded TV networks, designer goods e-commerce sites and now a venture fund.
“I am always struck by how much has changed, not just in my lifetime but in the last decade,” says Susan Lyne, President of BBG Ventures at AOL, in this interview with Beet.TV. “The biggest shifts in consumer behavior have taken place as a result of smart phones and social networks and neither existed 10 years ago,” she says, adding that some of the biggest changes in the media business have occurred in just the last five years, considering the impact of personal devices and the Internet of things on media and advertising. “Keep your eyes on the consumer and watch what she is doing and be a part of it,” she says in her advice to newcomers.
Lyne offers this tidbit for what might come next — a resurgence in magazines. Consumers are starting to read them again, particularly those created for a so-called “narrowcast” audience. “Think about reimagining old forms and making them new again,” she tells us.
Lyne has had a long and storied career in media, having co-lead ABC Entertainment and helmed Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. She also built Gilt Group. During her time in entertainment and media, she’s mentored many young women and has also seen opportunities for women expand. “The year I graduated from high school, the most senior female at Time Inc. was a researcher. By the time I was appointed president of ABC [in 2002], four of the five people running entertainment networks were women. So that’s huge progress.”
However, there is plenty of work to be done, since most CEO positions at media firms are not held by women. “There still seems to be that barrier, Especially in digital media,” she says. That’s one of the reasons she took on her new post with in AOL, where she now leads a venture fund that is focused on women-led digital startups.
This is segment is part of Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries,” a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. Xaxis is a unit of WPP. Lyne was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital.
]]>Hayden also talks about the changing form factor for non-scripted programming, created for digital devices.
]]>“Corporations make a tremendous amount of profit from individual consumers giving their time, energy data and money,” Armstrong tells Beet.TV.
“The more that technology and the Internet Of Things comes in… you’re going to have the economics change a lot and the economy go in reverse… the individual consumer is going to get more benefit than corporations will get.”
Think of the classic Internet Of Things example – a fridge that knows what it needs to order. But extrapolate that idea to every conceivable consumer good.
“Instead of you going out to look for everything you need, those things will come to you – you’ll have a much better economic situation as a consumer,” Armstrong adds. “You’ll spend less time looking for things, you’ll get value from your own data. You’ll basically become more of your own profit center as a consumer. That’s a really big change. The economy’s going to come to the consumer.”
He postulates that this scenario will unfold in the next five or more years.
Armstrong is celebrating six years at the helm of AOL this month. That followed positions including running Google’s Americas business, directing sales at ABC/ESPN Internet Ventures and advising Greycroft Partners.
Armstrong has a knack for starting new ideas. The Connecticut College grad co-founded a newspaper in Boston and launched IDG’s first online magazine.
So how would he advise tomorrow’s generation to make its mark? Using three simple rules, he tells Beet.TV:
This interview is from Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries”, a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. Xaxis is a unit of WPP. Please find more clips from the series here.
Armstrong was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. The interview took place at the AOL headquarters in New York.
]]>After all, six years after founding the online ad network Advertising.com with his brother in 1998, a 35-year-old Ferber sold the company to AOL for a hefty $495m.
Many a founder would have taken the opportunity to cash out after that kind of exit. But Baltimore-born, Stanford-educated engineer Ferber wanted to keep going – now he is taking as much pleasure from the bad times as the good.
“People on the outside would say it (Advertising.com) was my greatest accomplishment,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “But the industry changes and the fact we’re addressing the television convergence (with Videology) – it’s such a big opportunity, and I feel like it’s still early. And it’s much harder!”
Ferber got the idea for Videology whilst working for AOL after the acquisition, searching for ways to create an internet video content platform. That didn’t work out quite as planned but setbacks, says Ferber, are the lessons that make you stronger.
“The setback I had at Videology was the same I had at Advertising.com, which was an economic crisis,” he says. “March of 2000 was arguably the beginning of the dot.com implosion. Eventually, we had 9/11 in 2001. That whole time period was incredibly difficult. We lost 60% of our revenues in five months. It was a travesty.
“What I learned from that is, the only constant in life is change. The most important thing is how good are we at reacting to changing conditions, which will always occur.”
That is a belief Ferber – who has won several awards including Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year and Blue Chip Venture Company’s Chief Executive Officer of the Year – has carried over to Videology.
“The existing business model at the time – to aggregate content form the studios and put it out as a destination site for consumers – wasn’t going to work,” he says. “The economic crisis of 2008 wasn’t going to allow us to survive long enough to see that through. We pivoted. We changed course.”
Now the company is trying to help advertisers benefit from digital, targeted video advertising, and is moving to help TV ad buyers benefit from the convergence of TV and internet technologies. Ferber says the power of pivoting, and persistence, is clear.
“The most important thing is a positive attitude and determination. If I can persist and not get down on what’s happened … that was the single greatest reason for our success.”
This interview is from Beet.TV’s “Media Revolutionaries”, a 50-part series of interviews with key innovators and leaders in the media, technology and advertising industries, sponsored by Xaxis and Microsoft. Xaxis is a unit of WPP. Please find more clips from the series here.
Ferber was interviewed for Beet.TV by David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital. The interview took place at the Wynn Encore hotel in Las Vegas during the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2015.
]]>In this video interview, Marta Martinez, Global Head Video Sales at AOL Platforms, tells Beet.TV that the company’s videos are available on 166 devices…
AOL is making increasingly short-form video to meet mobile dynamics. We’ve gone from shows that are 10-15mins… we are launching a new show in two minutes … we are going to shorter-form, mobile-first vid experiences.
Martinez was interviewed at Beet.TV’s annual executive retreat by Nielsen Digital MD Andrew Feigenson.
The Beet Retreat ’15 was sponsored by AOL and Videology. Please find additional videos from the event here.
]]>Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, says that there will be an increasing “blurring of the lines” in the competitive set with tech companies including Facebook and Google — along with consulting firms and newer tech entrants like Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce.com.
David Bell, Chairman Emeritus of the Interpublic Group, says the agency executive of the future will be the “quant poet” – someone who masters both technology and creativity.
Looking at the future of media, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong sees a dramatic shift in the economics of the media equation which will be focused on the consumer. Irwin Gotlieb, Chairman of GroupM, sees a future where the granularity of census-level data will drive outcome.
These are excerpts of Beet.TV’s upcoming “Media Revolutionaries,” a series of 50 interviews with influential men and women in advertising, media and technology. Produced in the U.S. and abroad, the series will debut this spring.
The series is sponsored by Xaxis, a unit of WPP, and by Microsoft. David J. Moore, Chairman of Xaxis and President of WPP Digital, is the series’ executive producer and principal interviewer.
The interviews chronicle the transformation of media by the people who have played or will play essential roles. In addition to looking ahead, the videos will focus on personal motivations, challenges and accomplishments. It is the hope of the producers that the series will be a valuable chronicle of the industry to be shared for many years ahead.
]]>