Category: Random, But Interesting

The Internet Roars At Cannes Lions

This past week I attended the Cannes Lions, one of the advertising industry's most prestigious and well attended events. The premise of the event is to celebrate excellence in advertising, marketing and communications, but given it attracts more than 10,000 folks in a business which celebrates Don Draper as…

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This past week I attended the Cannes Lions, one of the advertising industry’s most prestigious and well attended events.

The premise of the event is to celebrate excellence in advertising, marketing and communications, but given it attracts more than 10,000 folks in a business which celebrates Don Draper as an icon, I think it’s fair to say that the Lions are as much about drinking and networking as they are about awards. According to hotel staff, the attendees of the Lions drink three times more than those wimps from Hollywood who come for the Film Festival earlier in the summer. (And, for whatever reason, the drink of choice is Rose. If I never see another pink glass of wine, I’ll be the better for it…)

This was my first Lions, though I’ve been asked to come for the past two. I thought I was being invited because of my role in the marketing world, but after four days in Cannes, I’ve come to realize that it might have just as much to do with my role in the Internet world. Because if there was one clear and consistent theme to this year’s Cannes Lions, it was this: the baton has been passed, and the show this year was pretty much driven by major digital brands.

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My, My, Time Does Fly

Over at the Federated Media site, I've posted an appreciation of the company I started in a garage six years ago this week. FM came about because of my work on my first book – it was through the study of search's impact on media and markets that I came…

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Over at the Federated Media site, I’ve posted an appreciation of the company I started in a garage six years ago this week. FM came about because of my work on my first book – it was through the study of search’s impact on media and markets that I came up with the idea in the first place. Which means, in a pretty direct way, it was attributable in part to the musings here on Searchblog, and to your responses to those musings. 

FM is great success by any metric now, so I wanted to briefly say thank you to all of you who still read me here, and know that I will be writing a lot more in the next year or so, thanks to a new book project soon to be announced. 

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Web 2 Map: The Data Layer – Visualizing the Big Players in the Internet Economy

On the left hand side are eight major players in the Internet Economy, along with two categories of players who are critical, but who I’ve lumped together – payment players such as Visa, Amex, and Mastercard, and carriers or ISP players such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. … Now, before you rip it apart, which I fully invite (especially those of you who are data quants, because I am clearly not, and I am likely mixing some apples and watermelons here), allow me to continue to narrate what I’m trying to visualize here.

As I wrote last month, I’m working with a team of folks to redesign the Web 2 Points of Control map along the lines of this year’s theme: “The Data Frame.” In the past few weeks I’ve been talking to scores of interesting people, including CEOs of data-driven start ups (TrialPay and Corda, for example), academics in the public dataspace, policy folks, and VCs. Along the way I’ve solidified my thinking about how best to visualize the “data layer” we’ll be adding to the map, and I wanted to bounce it off all of you. So here, in my best narrative voice, is what I’m thinking.

First, of course, some data.

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Facebook’s Carolyn Everson: “We’re one percent done on our ad products.”

When Facebook announced it had convinced Carolyn Everson to leave Microsoft to head sales at the pre-IPO social networking giant, a few eyebrows lifted: Everson had only been at Microsoft for nine months, and was recruited there by CEO Steve Ballmer after he watched her work to integrate an…

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When Facebook announced it had convinced Carolyn Everson to leave Microsoft to head sales at the pre-IPO social networking giant, a few eyebrows lifted: Everson had only been at Microsoft for nine months, and was recruited there by CEO Steve Ballmer after he watched her work to integrate an important deal between Microsoft and MTV, where she previously worked.

While Microsoft could not have been pleased it lost a key sales executive, at least Everson was going to a friend of sorts: Microsoft owns a chunk of Facebook stock, and has been busy leveraging Facebook data into its upstart search engine Bing.

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The in.imit.able will.i.am: Embracing Brand As An Artist

Next week will mark the third time in one year that I've interviewed Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am on stage, and each time it's gotten better. If you're coming to CM Summit, you're in for a treat. Will is in New York for a benefit concert in Central Park,…

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Next week will mark the third time in one year that I’ve interviewed Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am on stage, and each time it’s gotten better. If you’re coming to CM Summit, you’re in for a treat. Will is in New York for a benefit concert in Central Park, and he’s stopping by to chat with us along the way.

I’ve found will.i.am to be a rare bird – a massively successful commercial artist who embraces brands and marketing as part of his work, instead of a distraction from his work. He reminds me of another William – William Gibson, an author who natively embraces marketing as part of a narrative, finding signal in the work of branding, rather than noise. And no one can argue with Will’s street cred, his philanthropic work is a model for all celebrities. Not to mention, the dude is director of innovation at Intel. Intel!

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Reimagining Yahoo!: Chief Product Officer Blake Irving

Yahoo! It's our industry's favorite puzzle. On the one hand, it's one of the largest sites on the web, on the same size and scale as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. On the other hand, it's not growing very quickly, revenues are flat, and investors have been calling for CEO…

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Yahoo! It’s our industry’s favorite puzzle. On the one hand, it’s one of the largest sites on the web, on the same size and scale as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. On the other hand, it’s not growing very quickly, revenues are flat, and investors have been calling for CEO Carol Bartz’s head with increasing regularity. The company has failed to find a “hit” that redefines its value proposition in a world driven by hits like Twitter, Foursquare, and Flipboard. What’s a nearly two-decade old industry legend to do?

Well, bring in fresh blood, for one. The company recently hired Ross Levinsohn, formerly of Fox, to lead North America. Prior to that, it hired Blake Irving, formerly of Microsoft, to lead product. I’ve spent time with both in the past month, and one thing is for sure: They’re singing from the same song sheet. Both men are energized by the chance to leverage the Yahoo platform, and both are realistic as well – it won’t be easy, and it won’t come fast.

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Filmmaker Tiffany Shlain Declares Interdependence: The Internet Is Changing How We Think

One of the curveball sessions I'm most looking forward to at next week's CM Summit is with filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, whose recent documentary features "Connected" was selected for inclusion at Sundance (and many other prestigious festivals.) Today I jumped on the phone with Shlain, who has been a fellow traveler…

tiffany.jpgOne of the curveball sessions I’m most looking forward to at next week’s CM Summit is with filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, whose recent documentary features “Connected” was selected for inclusion at Sundance (and many other prestigious festivals.) Today I jumped on the phone with Shlain, who has been a fellow traveler since the days when I started The Industry Standard and she founded The Webbys. We’ve both moved on from those heady days, but find our work is once again interconnecting – “Connected” is an essentially optimistic but cautious story of Tiffany’s own life, work, and passions, in particular as it relates to her relationship with her father, a renown physician and author who spent much of his life searching for patterns in human behavior which transcended traditional boundaries of academic pursuit.

In short, the film is a call for all of us to move past our current frame of thinking, and to leverage the moment we are in to embrace a new philosophy – that of interdependence. The axis of this movement is the Internet, Shlain argues, and we have it within our grasp to leverage digital networks to solve the extraordinary problems we’ve collectively created through, well, collective creation.

Shlain was in a good mood as we began our conversation – she had recently learned her film had been picked up for national theatrical distribution in the Fall. That’s a big deal for a committed independent filmmaker, to be certain, but it’s also something of a quandry – theatrical distribution is “how films are normally done” and Shlain has plenty of unique ideas about how to get her work out into the world.

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Taking Twitter to the Next Level: President of Global Revenue Adam Bain

Twitter. It's our favorite conundrum here in Internet Media Land, isn't it? On the one hand it's changing the world and growing like crazy, with more than 200 million users who generate 155 million tweets a day. The services handles tens of billions of search queries a month, putting it…

adam-bain.jpgTwitter. It’s our favorite conundrum here in Internet Media Land, isn’t it? On the one hand it’s changing the world and growing like crazy, with more than 200 million users who generate 155 million tweets a day. The services handles tens of billions of search queries a month, putting it on scale with some of the most elite platforms in the world. However, only a fraction of its users are also active creators of content; most are readers and followers – and that’s where Twitter can be confusing*. If Twitter is to truly scale, it needs to become a more compelling media experience. Further, Twitter’s initial foray into advertising products, its “Promoted Suite” of services, are garnering some mixed reviews, mainly for a lack of scale, though the company tells me it engages with 600+ advertisers who have run 6,000+ campaigns to date.

The company is openly self critical of its shortcomings, and knows it has work to do to make its service less opaque and more valuable to both marketers and users (not to mention developers, who have been scratching their collective heads of late, wondering how best to create value in the Twitter ecosystem). In March the company welcomed co-founder Jack Dorsey back into an active product role, and just this week it acquired TweetDeck, a respected third-party developer which had created a custom interface for advanced Twitter consumers.

And perhaps no question has dogged the company more than this one: When and how can Twitter make money? The issue is further freighted by staggering valuations in the private secondary market, which have wrapped a multi-billion dollar valuation albatross around Twitter’s still slender neck. The successful IPO of industry bretheren LinkedIn and Yandex, and the expected success of Pandora only heighten expectations for the young company.

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Facebook to Take Lead in Display on Web? Hold On…

Today a big story broke across my news feeds: "Facebook set for display ad lead" says one typical headline in the Financial Times. It continues: Facebook’s large user base will make it the world’s largest online display advertising company by revenue this year, overtaking the comparable businesses of Google and…

Today a big story broke across my news feeds: “Facebook set for display ad lead” says one typical headline in the Financial Times. It continues:

Facebook’s large user base will make it the world’s largest online display advertising company by revenue this year, overtaking the comparable businesses of Google and Yahoo, according to analysis published on Tuesday. Enders Analysis, based in London, in a report on Tuesday, forecasts that Facebook will lift its advertising revenues from $1.8bn to $3.5bn in 2011, a rise of 95 per cent. At the same time, Google’s display business – which includes YouTube, the video site, and DoubleClick, its banner network – is expected to rise from $2bn last year to $2.6bn this year …

The comparison makes for great headlines, but I don’t really think it’s apples to apples. First of all, it excludes all of Google’s search advertising, which has been evolving quite rapidly towards a more “display” like look and feel. And secondly, it’s rather hard to tell the difference between Google search ads and Facebook “display” ads. After all, this is what Facebook display ads look like:

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Why Data Matters, Another Interesting Signal: Direction Requests

Greg Linden, a friend to the site back when I was writing the first book, is writing more lately, and he's got a great post about Google Maps data that highlights why we've decided to focus on "The Data Frame" for the Web 2 Summit this year. Greg notes…

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Greg Linden, a friend to the site back when I was writing the first book, is writing more lately, and he’s got a great post about Google Maps data that highlights why we’ve decided to focus on “The Data Frame” for the Web 2 Summit this year.

Greg notes that Google has a new signal to which it can pay attention, thanks to Google Maps. And while I’m sure Greg could have figured this out on his own, he didn’t have to, because some Googlers have already published their findings in a paper titled “Hyper-Local, Direction-Based Ranking of Places.”

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