Category: The Conversation Economy

Thoughts on Ford’s OpenXC: In The Future, Brands With Open Data Will Win

Ford Open XCI spent today at the first-ever Boing Boing Ingenuity, a two-day hackathon cum “vaudeville show” – truly Boing Boing brought to life. It made me so proud to see the essence of conversational marketing at work – a major brand adding deep value to a community, an independent publisher realizing its dream of celebrating its voice and community through a unique event that built up online over many months.

Here’s the Twitter stream. It was really great. And the main insight I took away was this: Brands will soon have no choice but to become data (because we are all becoming data, after all). A car creates tons of data every mile it is driven, for example. Faced with this fact, how might a car brand respond? It could see that data as its private asset, put up fences around it, and make that data really difficult for the driver (and society at large) to access. Or, it could act like Ford did, and tack in the direction of openness.

Ford has created a platform called OpenXC that opens APIs into 50 or so data streams coming out of your car. On the first day of Ingenuity, teams of makers, hackers, and regular folks came up with amazing ideas that leveraged Ford’s innovative platform. For example, one team built an app that senses when a pet or child is in your car, then monitors the car’s internal temperature. If it gets too hot, this app can lower the windows, turn on the AC, and text the car’s owner. I mean, how cool is that?!

Read More
1 Comment on Thoughts on Ford’s OpenXC: In The Future, Brands With Open Data Will Win

SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER

Stay up to date on the latest from BattelleMedia.com

“Peanut Butter Cup Marketing” In A Few Minutes

I had a chance to stop by Bloomberg TV yesterday to talk about “content reachtargeting” and the larger secular trends driving digital marketing today. Here’s the video:

http://player.ooyala.com/player.js?embedCode=B5NzV2ZDrdczexo184RPR5GsjTqwfwXc&playerBrandingId=8a7a9c84ac2f4e8398ebe50c07eb2f9d&width=640&deepLinkEmbedCode=B5NzV2ZDrdczexo184RPR5GsjTqwfwXc&height=360&thruParam_bloomberg-ui%5BpopOutButtonVisible%5D=FALSE

Leave a comment on “Peanut Butter Cup Marketing” In A Few Minutes

Four Minutes on the Future of Marketing

Earlier this year I sat down with a videographer at the Bazaarvoice Summit in Austin. He asked me about the future of marketing, in particular as it related to data and consumer behavior. Given what I announced earlier this morning, I thought you might find this short video worth a view. Thanks to Ian Greenleigh for doing all the work!

9 Comments on Four Minutes on the Future of Marketing

Great Content, Meet Great Targeting (And Reach)

Today on the Federated site, I’ve posted a preview of something we’re working on for a Fall release. I’m cross posting a portion of it here, as I know many of you are interested in media and data-driven marketing.

It’s no secret that Federated Media has deep roots in content marketing: We re-imagined CM for the modern web eight years ago, and since then have executed thousands of content-driven programs with hundreds of awesome publishers, services, and brands. “All Brands Are Publishers” has been one of our core mantras since our founding. And each year we run the CM Summit, where the topic of native, content, and conversation-driven marketing across all digital platforms is dissected.

Back when I was first studying the intersection of brand marketing and technology – about the same time as The Search and the founding of FM – I started talking and writing about  “The Conversation Economy.” Its core theme is this: “In the future, all companies must learn how to have 1-1 conversations with their customers at scale, leveraging digital technologies.”

Read More
6 Comments on Great Content, Meet Great Targeting (And Reach)

Excellent Content Marketing: Dear NSA…

This short Slideshare deck, an extremely clever satire of the now infamous NSA slide deck, should be Slideshare’s marketing calling card. It’s a promotional gift to the service, timely, clever, and leveraging the product perfectly. If this ever happens to you, use it in your marketing!

Echoes of the Tide and Oreo executions that are getting such plaudits recently. Love it.

2 Comments on Excellent Content Marketing: Dear NSA…

The Full First Day of CM Summit, In One Place

Thanks to our sponsor Google, we got the full first day of last week’s CM Summit, featuring Fred Wilson fresh from the Tumblr deal, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann, and about 20 speakers in between for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!

Leave a comment on The Full First Day of CM Summit, In One Place

Behind the Banner, A Visualization of the Adtech Ecosystem

I’m very proud to announce “Behind the Banner“, a visualization I’ve been producing with Jer Thorp and his team from The Office for Creative Research, underwritten by Adobe as part of the upcoming CM Summit next week. You can read more about it in this release, but the real story of this project starts with my own quest to understand the world of programmatic trading of advertising inventory – a world that at times feels rather like a hot mess, and at other times, like the future of not only all media, but all data-driven experiences we’ll have as a society, period.

I’m a fan of Terry Kawaja and his Lumascapes – Terry was an advisory to us as we iterated this project. But I’ve always been a bit mystified by those diagrams – you have to be pretty well steeped in the world of adtech to grok how all those companies work together. My goal with Behind the Banner was to demystify the 200 or so milliseconds driving each ad impression – to break down the steps, identify the players, make it a living thing. I think this first crack goes a long way toward doing that – like every producer, I’m not entirely satisfied with it, but damn, it’s the best thing I’ve seen out there so far.

Read More
6 Comments on Behind the Banner, A Visualization of the Adtech Ecosystem

Reporters Need to Understand Advertising. But Should They Be Making It?

(image) I know that when I do write here, I tend to go on, and on – and those of you who read me seem to be OK with that. But sometimes the best posts are short and clear.

That was my thought when I read Journalists Need Advertising 101 by Brian Morrissey, writing in Digiday last week. In fewer than 500 words, Morrissey issues a wake up call to those in journalism who believe in the old school notion of a Chinese wall between editorial and advertising:

What’s crazy is journalists seems almost proudly ignorant of the business of advertising. …it’s time journalists take a real interest in how advertising works. I’d go even further. It’s time they get involved in making it. Hope is not a strategy, as they say, and it’s better to deal with the world you live in rather than the world you wish you lived in.

Read More
4 Comments on Reporters Need to Understand Advertising. But Should They Be Making It?

Portrait of Twitter As A Young Media Company

Last year I predicted that Twitter would become a media company. However, I focused mainly on the new “Discover” functionality, and I probably should have gone a lot further. In this piece, I intend to.

So I’ll start with this: 2013 will be the year Twitter starts to create, curate, and co-create media experiences on top of its platform. I hinted at this in my brief coverage of Twitter’s Oscar Index (see Twitter’s Makin’ Media), but allow me to put a bit more flesh on the bones.

So what might one make from the fact that your platform captures hundreds of millions of individuals declaring what’s going on at any give time? Well, let’s break down some of the signals in all that supposed noise. As I’ve written over and over and over in the past several years, Twitter presents a massive search problem/opportunity. For example, Twitter’s gotten better and better at what’s called “entity extraction” – identifying a person, place, or thing, then associating behaviors and attributes around that thing. This (among other reasons) is why its Discover feature keeps getting better and better. Another important signal is location – Twitter is increasingly focused on getting us to geolocate our tweets. A third signal is the actual person tweeting – his or her influence and interest graph. Yet another signal is time – when was the entity tweeted about?

Read More
56 Comments on Portrait of Twitter As A Young Media Company

Facebook Is No Longer Flat: On Graph Search

A sample Graph Search result for the query “friends photos before 1999.”

By now the news is sweeping across the blogosophere and into the mainstream press: Facebook is doing Search!

Well, not so fast. Facebook is not doing search, at least not search Google-style. However, the world’s largest social network has radically re-engineered its native search experience, and the result is not only much, much better, it’s also changed my mind about the company’s long term future.

Read More
53 Comments on Facebook Is No Longer Flat: On Graph Search