Signal Austin Conversation: Marissa Mayer
Google announced deals and checkin incentives last week in Austin, I was the first to speak to Marissa live on stage. Here’s the interview:
The Signal Austin Livestream
I’m a bit late posting this, but the rest of the day is great, so here you go!
Enjoy!
Austin Signal: The Program
(cross posted from the FM Blog) In just a few days I’ll be welcoming 200 or so digital marketers to Signal Austin, the second edition of FM’s Signal conference series – regional, “mini” versions of our highly-acclaimed annual New York event. Our first Signal – based in LA – focused on content marketing. I’m proud to say it was both oversold and very well received.
This week’s Signal in Austin will focus on the impact of location in marketing. Given that Austin – home to the legendary SXSW conference – is where Twitter, Foursquare, and Gowalla all broke out, I’m expecting quite a program. To that end, I wanted to give readers a bit of a “curtain raiser” on what to expect for the day. As with all our shows, the conference is limited in attendance (we thought we’d cap it at 150, but nearly 200 are already registered) but we’ll be livestreaming it and putting the audio online as well.
Signal Austin will open with our a trademark one-on-one conversation. These are my favorite part of the show, perhaps because it gives me a chance to interview such interesting characters. You never really know what’s going to happen on stage (who knew that will.i.am was going to go meta?), but I prepare quite a bit in any case.
The first conversation will be with Robert Stephens, CTO of Best Buy and founder of the Geek Squad. I love opening with Robert because one of the themes I believe is critical to marketing in the digital age is a deep understanding of the role technology plays in how a company speaks with its customer base. You simply can’t execute “customer aware marketing” without shifting how your company understands and leverages information and information technology. Robert understands this innately. And of course, nothing’s more “local” than feet on the street, literally, who touch customers in store and in their homes.
After Robert, Brady Forrest, curator of the seminal Where 2.0 location conference, will introduce the concept of “Startup Ignite”, a special version of his Ignite format that he’s bringing to Signal. Throughout the day, we’ll be hearing from early stage location-driven startups hand-picked by Brady.
Following Brady, we’ll hear about the big news from Foursquare and American Express. It was supposed to break at our show, but someone leaked it to the Journal already. Sigh. Stuff happens.
Signal will be focused mostly on case studies, so after an Ignite we’ll hear from the CEO of Loopt, with a case study around the company’s work with Virgin America. We’ll then hear news from another hot location startup, Whrrl.
Next comes our second conversation of the day, with WordPress and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg. I’ve come to know Matt a fair bit over the past couple years and really like his point of view on things. WordPress, as most know, is the most successful and feature rich blogging platform on the market. He’ll talk about his point of view on local, as well as what’s ahead for his platform and his company.
After a break we’ll come back to hear from the CEO of GoWalla, the founder of JiWire, and the COO of SCVNGR – a murderer’s row of location-based startups, all of whom are doing real work and real marketing revenue. After another Ignite, we’ll hear a case study from Levi’s, and a unique POV on B2B from Spiceworks.
Once lunch is over, we’ll return to a conversation with Sean Finnegan, a senior marketing executive who recently took the helm as CEO of Geomentum, IPG’s hyperlocal agency with more than $2 billion in media billings a year. After Sean, we’ll hear from Microsoft, which has made local a key focus of its Bing search engine.
Andy Lark, a senior marketer from Dell, will then bend our concept of what “local” means with a case study around enterprise marketing. We’ll hear another Ignite, and then hear from the founder of SimpleGeo, another key location startup. After that we’ll hear from American Eagle, Yelp, and Archrival, which will present youth-focused research.
As we head toward the home stretch, we’ll hear from sponsor HP, which has made location a key part of not only its marketing, but its product strategy as well. After HP we’ll hear from Pepsi, then our final Ignite. Marc Ruxin, a pal and key man at Universal McCann, will lament the “death of touch”, and we’ll round out the day with a conversation with Marissa Mayer, who heads up location for Google.
Not bad for one day!
If you can’t make it to Signal Austin, make sure to visit the event page this Thursday. We’ll post the live link there for you.
A special thanks to all the staff and sponsors who make Signal possible. It’s really amazing to work with you all….
Signal LA Livestream
Twitter hashtag is #SignalLA, here’s the livestream:
Signal LA: The Curtain Raiser – Tim and Arianna Open A Sold Out Show
Tuesday marks the launch of FM’s Signal conference series, where we focus on one topic, one day, in one city. For our first event, in Los Angeles, we’ve always had a great lineup, but recent events have certainly made it even more timely.
The event has been sold out since last week, but given the weekend’s news, I’ve convinced our events director to allow people to register at the door. It will probably be standing room only, but it’ll be a great show. The focus, appropriately, is on the role of content in marketing.
We’ll begin the day with Arianna Huffingon, who just last night announced the sale of the Huffington Post to AOL. Joining Arianna will be AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, who is making a surprise visit so as to outline his $315 million vision for combining the two entities. I’ve interviewed both onstage, but not together. Should be a good discussion.
We’ll then pivot into a Case Study from the newly public Demand Media, and then a conversation with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. From there we’ll dive deeper into the content strategies of both AOL and MSN, hear Case Studies from Gatorade and Moxie Interactive, learn about some of the most promising
startups in LA, hear from YouTube on branded entertainment, and American Express on OPEN Forum.
And that’s just before lunch. When we return, we’ll hear from the CMO of Adobe, who I’ll be interviewing. After that is a Case from the irrepressible Jason Calacanis, a Case from Toyota, an overview of Intuit’s massive gamble last month (they bought out thre
e hours of prime time programming), Cases from Appsavvy,Yahoo, and Slideshare, and then a conversation with Peter Guber, a Hollywood legend who’s just coming out with another major book.
After Peter, we’ll hear a Case from Facebook, and then we’ll close with a conversation with will.i.am, who will be fresh off his Superbowl performance with the Black Eyed Peas. That’ll give us something to talk about.
Even though the event is essentially sold out (I’m told we can sell only a couple dozen tickets at the door), we are working on livestreaming it so that everyone can join the dialog. Check the FM events page for more on that later in the day.
(cross posted from FM blog)
The Signal Weekly: 1.14.2011
Most of you know by now that I do a short summary of the day’s news over on the FM Blog. This year I’m going to try to do a Friday summary of the week’s Signals here on Searchblog. Here’s the first of the year:
Monday Signal: The CES-less Hangover
Tuesday Signal: Murdoch and Jobs and Verizon, Oh My!
Weds. Signal: Do We Have a Quora Yet?
Thursday Signal: Internet By the Numbers
Friday Signal: Enjoy You Some Weird.
If you want Signal each day, sign up for the email newsletter on the site (top right), or grab the RSS Feed.
Have a great weekend!
Predictions 2011
In
the eighth version of my annual predictions, I’ll try to stay focused and clear, the better to score myself a year from now. And while I used the past two weeks of relatively fallow holiday time as a sort of marination period, the truth is I pretty much just sat down and banged these predictions out in one go, just as I have the past seven years. It works for me, and I hope you agree, or at least find them worth your time. So here we go:
1. We’ll see the rise of a meme which I’ll call “The Web Reborn” – a response to the idea that mobile and apps have killed the web as we know it. In fact, we’ll come to realize that the web is the foundation of nearly everything we do, and we’ll start to expect, as consumers, that all our service providers honor and build in basic principles of “web friendliness” – data portability and user-controlled identity most important among them. Call it a return to the original principles of “Web 2.0″.
2. Voice will become a critical interface for computing (especially mobile apps). This is just not true now, but in a year’s time, there will be a handful of very popular apps that are driven by voice, and in particular, by weaving together voice, text, and identity.
3. DSPs (Demand Side Platforms) will fade into the fabric of larger marketing platforms. In the end, DSPs are the handle by which we understand the concept of technology-driven ad networks. And those have been with us for over a decade. Exchanges, DSPs, SSPs, etc. are all important, but in the end, what matters is that advertisers have scale and efficiency, and consumers have control.
4. Related, MediaBank will emerge as a major independent player in the marketing world, playing off its cross channel reach (outside of digital) and providing an alternative to the conflicted digital platforms at Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. I could imagine a major tech or telco player trying to buy MediaBank as the world realizes that marketing is, in essence, a massive IT business (among many other things).
5. The Mac App Store will be a big hit, at least among Mac users, and may well propel Mac sales beyond expectations.
6. Related, Apple will attempt to get better at social networking, fail, and cut a deal with Facebook.
7. Also related, Apple will begin to show signs of the same problems that plagued Microsoft in the mid 90s, and Google in the past few years: Getting too big, too full of themselves, and too focused on their own prior success.
8. Microsoft will have a major change in leadership. I am not predicting Ballmer will leave, but I think he and the company will most likely bring in very senior new talent to open new markets or shift direction in important current markets like media/marketing/social.
9. The public markets will be surprisingly open to major new Internet deals, despite the current rise of “private IPOs” and the growing belief that the IPO process is broken. In the end, there’s just too many good reasons for public companies to be, well, public. (See Gurley).
10. The tablet market will have a year of incoherence. Apple will dominate with the iPad due to a lack of an alternative touchstone. Google will focus on providing a clear, consistent experience through Android for tablets and mobile, but it will take a third party to unify the experience. I don’t see that happening this year.
11. “Social deals” will morph to become a standard marketing outlet for all business, and by year’s end be seen as a standard part of any marketer’s media mix. Groupon will lead here, but nearly every major player will have an offering, often by partnering with leaders. I’m tempted to say Facebook will abandon its own Deals offering for a deal with Groupon, but I’m not sure that will unfold in one year.
12. Related, Groupon will fend off an acquisition by a major carrier, probably AT&T or Verizon. It’s possible they’ll sell, but I doubt it.
13. Facebook will decline as a force in the Internet world, as measured by buzz. The company will continue to be seen as Big Brother in the press, and struggle with internal issues related to growth. Also, it will lose some attention/share to upstarts. However, its share of marketing dollars and reach will increase.
14. Related, we’ll see major privacy related legislation in the US brought to the floor of Congress, and then fail for lack of consensus. But that will drive a significant shift in how our culture understands its relationship to the world our industry is building, and that’s a good thing.
I’d love to keep going, but I think those are the major ones, at least from my vantage point. Thanks for reading, it was a great year. I’m not going to make predictions about my own work this year, as I’ve got too much inside knowledge on that topic! Let me know your thoughts in comments, and have a great 2011!
Related:
Maybe I Was Right…
In my prediction #7 from last year: Traditional search results will deteriorate to the point that folks begin to question search’s validity as a service.
I gave myself a “fail” on this when I graded myself last week. But Anli makes a case in “THREE’S A TREND: THE DECLINE OF GOOGLE SEARCH QUALITY”.
As for 2011 predictions, I’m working on that right now, and hope to have them out later today.
Predictions 2010: How Did I Do?
Related:
2007 How I Did
2006 Predictions
2006 How I Did
2005 Predictions
2005 How I Did
2004 Predictions
Well, it’s that time of year again, time to see how well, or poorly, I did predicting events in the past year. This is my “keep myself honest” post, next week, I hope, I’ll post my predictions for 2011.
So how did I do for 2010? Overall, I’d say it was a mixed year, but by my score, I hit 7 of 12, with 3 pushes and two outright fails. A fair amount is open to interpretation, as we will see. To the results:
Prediction #1: 2010 will mark the beginning of the end of US dominance of the web. This is a pretty soft one to prove, but I think it’s certainly defensible. First of all, the “rest of the world” is growing far more quickly than the US in terms of Internet use, growth, and related development. In the broader economy, China looms large, and is already far larger than the US in Internet population. In terms of startups, I’d have to say we’re not there yet – the US is still the center of innovation, at least for scaled platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Groupon. But I only predicted that this would be the *start* of this shift, so I’d say the jury is out on whether I was right. But hey, Fred agrees with me…Score: Push.
Prediction #2: Google will make a corporate decision to become seen as a software brand rather than as “just a search engine.” I think this clearly happened in 2010. With both Android and Google Apps in the center of its strategy, Google and its partners poured hundreds of millions of dollars into building the Google brand to mean “an excellent software platform” and next to nothing (OK, one Superbowl ad) into the brand meaning “Search.” Score: +1.
Prediction #3: 2010 will see a major privacy brouhaha, not unlike the AOL search debacle but around social and/or advertising related data. OK, maybe this was a layup, but wow, did this come true, in spades. Take your pick, was it Google’s Street View data collection? Or maybe Facebook’s half-year long meltdown, beginning with sharing all data with search, and ending with the Open Graph? (Not to mention Google Buzz!) In any case, privacy has become the center of attention in Washington, with multiple investigations and pending legislation all brewing, in particular around social and advertising data. 2010 will be remembered as the year privacy took center stage. Score: +1.
Prediction #4: By year’s end the web will have seen a significant new development in user interface design. Well, again, I think this one happened. Not only did Gawker “redefine” what a blog is, the rise of the tablet and touch interfaces, as well as shifts to gestural in gaming (Kinect) have shifted how the web is consumed and produced. 2010 was most certainly the year the web pivoted from boring old HTML to a new approach to user interface based on touch and gesture, not to mention voice (which is coming hard on touch’s heels). Score: +1.
Prediction #5: Apple’s “iTablet” will disappoint. I know, I know, it sure seems like I blew this one. But remember folks, the iPad did in fact disappoint, nearly everyone, when it was announced. It was pretty much universally panned for not having a camera, being the wrong size, being a self-contained universe that shunned the open web, Flash, etc. So in a way, I was right. Then again, the thing went on to be the biggest hit since the iPod, so I was wrong too. I’d score this a push.
Prediction #6: 2010 will see the rise of an open gaming platform. Alas, this did not happen. I thought Microsoft would open up Kinect, as the technology has massive potential. So far, it has not, and no one else has done anything either. Score: -1.
Prediction #7: Traditional search results will deteriorate to the point that folks begin to question search’s validity as a service. I think it’s hard to argue with the overall decline in search results as a core driver of web navigation. Social is clearly on the upswing, and in general, the rise of content farms and the stirrings of data wars between Google and Facebook have meant that search is no longer the presumed king of the web. However, I don’t think it got as bad as I predicted it would, so I give myself a fail on this one, but I predict I’m right here in the long run. Here’s more on why. Score: -1.
Prediction #8: Bing will move to a strong but distant second in search, eclipsing Yahoo in share. This happened, depending on who’s counting, and if you take the Yahoo/Microsoft search deal into account, it clearly happened. Score: +1.
Prediction #9: Internet advertising will see a sharp increase…and most predictive models are not accounting for this rise. I was right on this one as well. Not only did online spend eclipse newspaper spend, but online suprised most forecasters with significant double digit (14% at least) Y/Y growth. By comparison, overall ad spending grew just 3% in the US. That’s sharp by my book. Score: +1.
Prediction #10: The tech/Internet industry will see a surge in quality IPOs. Well, I thought this one would be a layup, and instead, it’s at the very least a push. We did have a surge in filings, but we did not see a ton of companies go public, though compared to 2009, one could easily call this year’s lineup a relative surge. It was the busiest IPO year (overall) since 2007, but we did not see action where we might have expected – from Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, or even companies like MediaBank. We did see important filings from Hulu, Betfair, Demand and Skype, but neither have made it out so far. In fact, I did make another related prediction: one, if not more will be withdrawn. That happened, just this month, with Hulu. I’d score this one a push.
Prediction #11: We’ll see a major step forward in breaking the man/machine barrier. I honestly don’t know if this came true. I do know that when machines can translate poetry, and the creation of synthetic life, the strong advances in gene sequencing, and the reprogramming of cells, we’re certainly making progress. I’m out of my depth here, so readers, did this prediction come true or not?! For now, I’ll punt and call it a push.
Prediction #12: I’ll figure out what I want to do with my book. Yep, I’ve figured it out. More on that early next year. Score: +1.
So, overall, 3 pushes, 2 fails, and 7 wins. That’s not a bad year. How do you think I did?
Signal LA Agenda Is Up
I’m pleased to announce that the preliminary agenda for our first ever Signal conference, Signal LA, is live and online. Signal is FM’s conference series highlighting one major trend in digital media and marketing, in one city, on one day.
First up is Los Angeles, Feb 8th, with a focus on Content Marketing. Check out the amazing lineup:
Register today, I expect this to sell out. I’m thrilled to be doing more of these high quality events next year. It’s going to be a lot of fun. And it doesn’t hurt that we’re doing Signal LA at the SLS Hotel, which is pretty much the best place going at the moment….
