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media file 11.16.09 | Why all great digital firms will build or buy an ad network

Why all great digital firms will build or buy an ad network

On the Advertising Age site, ad network exec Todd Sacerdoti confidently forecasts the future for his profession. Just as all major digital firms have either built or bought some form of email, communications, or social networking technology to unify their customer base, so too will they build or buy an ad network to unify the commercial marketplace for these customers.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for November 16,2009:

Why “lean” is the future of innovation

Can innovation initiatives succeed in business environments that stress efficiency and effectiveness? Sure, write the editors of Knowledge@Wharton, because lean processes force innovators to size up opportunities quickly, and move on if there’s no clear path to success. Companies typically waste a lot of time and money on product development because standards and processes for accelerating the best ideas and killing marginal ones are often implicit or nonexistent. Lean innovation works because it subjects new ideas to feasibility and marketplace tests much earlier in the development cycle than is typical for more white-coat development efforts, with the result that the greenlighted innovation already has an existing following among staff and customers.

Why innovation efforts usually fail

On the Forbes site, growth strategist Peter Hartung explains why corporate innovation initiatives have such a dismal success rate. Easy, Hartung says: Innovation is an inherently inefficient, messy, and disruptive process; whereas most corporate innovation efforts strive for the efficient and effective use of capital to leverage and preserve existing revenue streams. Such wishful thinking leads to a predictable result: Not only does the innovation effort fail, but at the end of the process the organization often finds itself on a downward spiral, with no new growth opportunities in sight to offset declines in its core business.

Why innovation is the engine of green business

Innosight’s Strategy & Innovation site documents a discussion between Innosight partner Mark Johnson and sustainability consultants Andrew Shapiro and Lewis Perkins on how innovation is jump-starting and sustaining the green economy.

Will “augmented reality” change how we know our world?

On the Harvard Business site, management consultant John Sviokla argues that while “augmented reality”--the novel technique of layering digital content on top of ordinary reality--holds the potential to spark the next revolution in business creativity, further accelerating the digital transformation of traditional industries such as media, advertising, health care, and consumer services--it also has the power to ultimately reframe our relationship with such basic concepts as information, knowledge, learning, and memory.

media file 7.1.09 | Twitter’s rules for radical innovation

Twitter’s rules for radical innovation

On the Harvard Business site, Havas Media Lab’s Umair Haque describes ten operating principles that make digital phenom Twitter one of the most radical management innovators of 21st century so far. Among these rules: Ideals beat strategies; open beats closed; connection beats transaction; public beats private; and good beats evil.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for July 1, 2009:

Nine tips for jumpstarting innovation

When companies go on the hunt for innovations to drive growth, they often waste time scouring the last place they are likely to find it: their own back yards. Rather than try to dredge up new ideas from the heart of the enterprise, look to its periphery, say researchers John Bessant, Kathrin Moslein, and Bettina von Stamm in this Wall Street Journal report. Among the techniques that organizations can use to spot the future before it emerges: Scenario building; open innovation; tapping expert users; “deep dive” consumer research; creating online learning communities; and more.

Innovation: It takes a village

For organizations struggling to survive, let alone advance, Knowledge@Wharton has some advice: Build an “innovation network.” By tapping the expertise and resources of outside R&D partners, Proctor & Gamble improved its innovation productivity by 60 percent, resulting in over $10 billion in revenues from 400 collaboratively developed new products. Performance like this requires organizations to build new internal capacity to cultivate and manage productive external relationships, while simultaneously strengthening their internal R&D capacity to evaluate and incorporate potentially promising innovations.

AOL: The future of digital content?!!!

You heard it here first: AOL represents the future of successful, sustainable digital content publishing, says Silicon Alley Insider. AOL’s coming divorce from Time Warner will free it to do what it does best: Build flashy, inexpensive content sites around special-interest topics, then plug them into AOL’s online traffic fire hose. It’s a model that represents the digital version of yesterday’s magazine launch--only much cheaper, easier to tweak, and less troubling to kill if things don’t quickly work out. AOL has more than 300 staff members producing such sites and contracts with about the same number of freelancers. In the past six months, the company has hired more than 50 journalists from places such as the Associated Press, Washington Post, and USA Today.

Sorry, there’s no way to save the TV business

On Advertising Age, Internet analyst Henry Blodget explains the coming demise of the TV business--broadcast, network, cable, and satellite--with brutal simplicity. TV execs are reliving the same delusion that newspaper execs held onto through most of the last decade, when revenues were holding up despite dire predictions to the contrary. And the same phenomenon that ultimately doomed the newspaper business is about to visit the TV business: the complete breakdown of every distribution barrier protecting historical margins and profits, and a surge in abundant, accessible, free TV across the global Internet.

It ain’t free--it’s a steal

Trendspotter Malcolm Gladwell takes Wired’s Chris Anderson to task in this New Yorker review of the latter’s book, Free. While Anderson asserts that digital technology inexorably drives all products “made of ideas” to a zero price point, Gladwell comes to a different conclusion: “Information wants to be free” is a useful meme for content distribution powerhouses like Google and Amazon, but it is neither an inevitable outcome nor one supported by trends in industries other than media that are being transformed by digital technology. Case in point: the drug industry, which is using digital technology to produce ever-more specific compounds for increasingly targeted markets, at ever higher price points. Meanwhile, YouTube--the avatar of Free--spends over $260 million annually to license commercial content, essentially to make a market that otherwise does not exist with its free, user-generated fare. In other words, the problem with Free is that consumers know exactly how to value it.

Why media brands stumble globally

Advertising Age explores the reasons why globalization has not yet swept the media market to the same degree as in other digital industries--computers or cell phones, for example. While consumer product firms have a natural disposition toward building consistent brand identities over time while simultaneously tweaking products and pitches to specific markets, media companies either give too little attention to branding (relying instead on a hits-driven marketing strategy) or bring a bias or agenda that doesn’t travel well across borders. To be successful globally, media brands need to develop a broad, international appeal that comes from focusing on shared human and social values; and combine that appeal with content fine-tuned to specific audiences. Among those doing it well: Bloomberg, CNN, People, Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Economist.

It’s time for a “slow marketing” movement

Think “slow food”: ingredients grown organically and prepared with old-fashioned love, attention, and technique, resulting in undeniably superior appeal, taste, and value. Now think “slow marketing”: brand building that puts the customer first, strives for credibility, and sustains long-term relationships. It’s not a throwback to a time gone by; it’s an approach demanded for success in the digital markets of the future. So writes Nielsen’s Peter Blackshaw in this column for Advertising Age.

media file 7.23.08: US media firms baffled by global growth

U.S. Web Sites Draw Traffic From Abroad But Few Ads

The Wall Street Journal reports that US-based web sites are facing huge growth in traffic from overseas, but few have even begun to figure out how to take advantage of this latest product of globalization.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for July 23, 2008:

China: Web use accelerates, e-business still lagging

VentureBeat reports on new figures showing that, while China's Internet user base has ballooned to over 230 million, that huge number still represents only 16 percent of its total population; and only 25 percent of users currently shop online.

Twitter: Made in the USA, growing faster overseas

VentureBeat reports on Hitwise data showing that Twitter's market penetration and usage rates in the UK and Japan are outpacing those in the US.

Google Approaches 70 Percent of U.S. Searches in June 2008

Hitwise reports new search engine traffic figures that show Google now commands close to 70 percent of the market in the US. In the UK and Australia, Google owns more than 87 percent share. Google has been taking share from #2 Yahoo and #3 MSN.

Spending on online advertising surpasses TV, report says

The LA Times reports on a study by media research firm Outsell forecasting that online ad spending will grow 12 percent to $105 billion in 2008, surpassing TV spend when advertisers' web site development spending is included in the mix.

Corporate Social Networks Are A Waste of Money, Study Finds

ReadWriteWeb reviews a study by Beeline Labs revealing that a majority of corporate social networks analyzed were massive failures in driving user engagement. Main reasons: Heavy-handed approaches to branding and extremely weak social value propositions.

Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?

ReadWriteWeb describes how firms doing business on the social web are building new capacity to facilitate communication between themselves and their external stakeholders.

Where Do the Best Ideas Come From? The Unlikeliest Sources

Advertising Age reports on a study by consulting firm Prophet that the most innovative companies develop broad-based "inspiration networks" that tap into the best ideas of their stakeholders.

Recognition is the Reward

In this post for AlwaysOn Network, Flybridge Capital Partners' Jeff Bussgang discusses the huge explosion in volunteer-driven open source projects around the globe, and ask what motivates so many to offer their talents to corporations for free.

Yahoo! Opens Up Search Technology

Yahoo has announced Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), a set of APIs that allows third-party developers to create custom search applications and mashups using the Yahoo search platform.

media file 7.9.08: Social nets the new global battleground for civil rights

Bourgeois Anarchism and Authoritarian Democracies

First Monday researcher Felix Stalder argues that social networks have spawned two conflicting phenomena that threaten to ignite a global battle over civil liberties: an expanding number of loosely organized, informal online groups in pursuit of social change, on one hand; and a heightened regime of covert surveillance by democratic governments around the world, on the other.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for July 9, 2008:

AOL offers services in 4 Latin American countries

Reuters reports that AOL has expanded its reach into Argentina, Chile, Columbia, and Venezuela, bringing to 25 the number of countries in which it currently operates.

Publicis Forms “Open Source” Ad Network

paidContent reports that French agency Publicis Groupe has formed an internal online ad network comprised of its four major global media partners--AOL, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft--with the goal of closely coordinating its campaigns across these platforms.

France To Tax Mobile, Internet And TV Revenues To Fund Public Broadcaster

paidContent reports that in 2009, France will begin taxing commercial Internet, mobile, and broadcast services, with revenues to go to the country's publicly supported media.

First English-Language Sunday Newspaper Launched in China

WARC reports on the launch of China's first English-language Sunday newspaper, to be published in Shanghai, that country's largest city, with a population of over 20 million.

The Wall Street Journalist

BusinessWeek reports on the WSJ's managing editor Robert Thomson and his ambitious strategy to turn the brand into a global online media power. A key element of strategy: micropayments.

Pew Research Center: Assessing Globalization

In this article for the Harvard International Review, Pew's Andrew Kohut reports that average citizens around the world embrace the concept of globalization, although it has greater currency in poorer nations versus wealthier ones.

media file 7.7.08: Social nets spawning a new era of global social enterprise

A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution

Havas Director Umair Haque writes in his Edge Economy blog that the next wave of business innovation will come from tapping the power of social networks to organize the world's main social and economic functions and thereby produce global social change.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for July 7, 2008::

The next step in open innovation

The McKinsey Quarterly discusses "distributed co-creation": a development paradigm in which partners, suppliers, and customers are directly involved in creating new products and services, and share in the rewards of those efforts.

Collaborative Filtering: Lifeblood of The Social Web

ReadWriteWeb looks at how a philosophy pioneered by Amazon.com is shaping the social web. The "Wisdom of the Crowds" and the "Law of Large Numbers" are two core memes that make the social web decisively superior to any expert-driven media environment.

Creative Commons Launches Global Case Studies Project

Creative Commons announces the launch of the Case Studies Project, a global community wiki showcasing successful implementations of the organization's intellectual property licensing system by CC copyright holders worldwide.

Three Obstacles to a Truly Global Conversation

In MediaShift Idea Lab, Global Voices' David Sasaki reports on the Global Voices Summit, where over 200 media activists discussed the primary barriers to creating truly global online community. Top barrier: censorship.

Another "Chinese YouTube" Raises Monster Cash

Silicon Alley Insider reports on youku.com, a Chinese video sharing site that has raised more than $80 million in venture funds, mostly from US firms, and has somehow avoided the censorship death grip stifling other similar Chinese sites, such as 56.com.

In Iran, blogging web could get you killed

iafrica.com reports that a bill has been introduced into the Iranian parliament that extends the death penalty to the crime of "establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy," as reportedly stated in the bill's text.

Bored With Web 2.0? Demand Change

ReadWriteWeb says that the developer community can beat "web 2.0 ennui" by building applications that harness the power of the social web to bring about social change.

media file 6.20.08: Friendfeed the next shiny object

Why FriendFeed (or Its Successor) Could Be the Next Google

Advertising Age columnist Steve Rubel admits that he suffers from SOS (Shiny Object Syndrome). Still, he believes that RSS aggregator Friendfeed could be the next big thing for marketers. The main reason: the rising role of online peer influence in setting standards of taste and consumer preference.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links daily as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for June 20, 2008:

BusinessWeek Gets You to Do Its Work

Advertising Age reports that BusinessWeek, following in the footsteps of This Old House magazine, is publishing an upcoming August 2008 issue with entirely user-generated content.

Technorati Launches Blog Ad Network, Technorati Media

TechCrunch reports that Technorati has launched Technorati Media, a blog-focussed advertising network designed to compete with Glam Media, Federated Media, and others in this superhot category.

Glam Media to Announce Acquisition

The Wall Street Journal reports that women's network Glam Media intends to purchase UK based ad network Monetise, in what it describes as a critical step in its effort to become a global media power.

Deccan Chronicle in talks for unit stake sale to NYT

Reuters reports that The New York Times is contemplating taking a minority stake in Indian advertising network Sieger Solutions, owned by Indian newspaper publisher Deccan Chronicle Holdings.

10 Mobile Social Networks to Check Out

ReadWriteWeb surveys the emerging field of mobile social networks, and tags 10 new services that include location-based online communities, music discovery engines, and more.

Nonprofit Blogging Resources: The Best Current Advice, Examples, and Experts

This article by Michael Gilbert of Nonprofit Online News provides a roundup of tips and resources for nonprofit organizations that are considering blogging as an aspect of their online communications strategy.

Spending on Happiness

Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge interviews a researcher whose work shows that people who give to others end up gaining a greater sense of well-being themselves as a result.

media file 6.12.08: mobile music mashup uses Android and Google Maps

Tunewiki launches location-based music network for iPhone

VentureBeat reports on one of the first new products for the "mobile social web": a location-based music network for Apple's iPhone and Google's Android mobile platform. The network taps the Google Map API to find songs other users nearby are playing.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links daily as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for June 12, 2008:

Is Wikinomics only for rich countries?

First Monday author Morten Rask questions whether the benefits of collaborative content creation are reaching the developing world, or if the same macroeconomic factors that separate rich countries from poor ones are operative on the social web, too.

Paul Steiger’s ProPublica Opens For (Non-Profit) Business

paidContent reports on the launch of ProPublica, a non-profit, public interest journalism venture that will produce nonpartisan investigative reports for free distribution via mainstream news outlets.

Facebook to be Britain's most used website

The Telegraph reports that Facebook is poised to assume the top spot in web site usage in Britain, surpassing Windows Live, Google, and eBay.

Key differences between web 1.0 and web 2.0

Two AT&T Labs researchers offer a taxonomy to objectively describe the web 2.0 phenomenon, and compare the features of popular web 2.0 sites, in this article published on First Monday.

media file 6.10.08: iPhone platform may spur explosion in hyperlocal media

Will 3G iPhone Help Push Geo-Based News?

MediaShift Idea Lab explores the impact of Apple's new GPS-enabled iPhone on the development of location-based online services, mobile social networking, and hyperlocal media.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links daily as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for June 10, 2008:

Federated Media launches analytics tools, gets new partners

VentureBeat reports that blog ad network Federated Media is launching a new web analytics platform that will permit marketers to track ad performance and reader engagement across social media sites. The platform will be extensible via an API.

Content Owners Make a Hash of Online Distribution

With digital rights management and other attempts to curtail content sharing having proven a bust, commercial content publishers have yet to come to grips with the new realities of the open media marketplace, says Internet Evolution blogger Jon Emmons.

Disney.com to Launch Family-Oriented Platform

Mediaweek reports that Disney is planning to launch a family-friendly social network this summer that allows parents to create profiles for the entire family and meet other families in similar life circumstances.

Brit Media Mammoths Mull Merger

WARC reports that United Business Media and Informa--two of Britain's largest business media companies--are in merger talks. The combined company would be worth close to $6 billion, making it one of the largest business information providers worldwide.

Facebook's China problem

Facebook has a China problem. But it’s not alone.

VentureBeat reported late last week on Facebook’s behind-the-scenes deliberations on how and when to enter the Chinese Internet market—now the world’s largest, with an estimated 230 million users. The key question in these deliberations is whether or not to launch a Chinese-specific version of its site or to proceed in that country with the one-site-fits all globalization strategy that it is pursuing in the rest of the world.

We think that Facebook has the right idea by taking an approach to globalization that is designed to create a single, unified social network that spans every country and market around the world. And in general, we think that this approach to media globalization will ultimately supplant the localization strategies that most global media enterprises currently pursue, due to the huge strategic advantage it will confer on any company that can pull it off.

So the fact that Facebook may be questioning this strategy with respect to China should give one pause. Why would you try to create a single, unified, global social network without including the largest Internet market in the world? The answer, of course, is politics. China takes a hard line on wayward political speech, and its tough tactics have caused a number of global media enterprises—Yahoo, most ignominiously among them—to block dissident sites and turn over information that has lead to the arrest and imprisonment of Chinese citizens for free speech crimes. A localized version of Facebook would keep it out of some potentially sticky situations that could trigger a showdown between the government and Facebook’s global user base—a worldwide protest over China’s Tibet policy, for example.

In even considering shelving its core strategy in China’s case, though, Facebook underscores a strategic weakness that all the leading US-based global media organizations unfortunately share. Despite the fact that they almost all uniformly harbor global ambitions and have some sort of globalization strategy, these companies seem to have given almost no thought to their role as global corporate citizens.

The evidence of this is easy to come by. Check out the published membership rosters of Business for Social Responsibility or the participant and stakeholder list for the UN Global Compact (the leading international initiative for corporate social responsibility), and US media companies are virtually not to be found. IT companies, management consulting firms, consumer product organizations—the top US companies in all these categories and more are to be found on these lists. But not media companies—neither traditional media firms like Time-Warner nor Internet pure plays like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook.

Whatever their reason, the fact that US media firms are not engaging with global institutions of corporate social responsibility means that they have little leverage in dealing with countries like China on matters of social justice and global social norms. And as a result, they are forced to consider courses of action that undermine their long term, strategic best interests.

As businesses in other sectors are proving, global corporate social responsibility institutions are creating critical mass around topics of global social importance, enabling firms to develop sane, consensus strategies for dealing with matters of environmental sustainability, consumer safety, and labor standards. These reduce risk and preserve firms’ legitimate strategic interests. If media enterprises want to enjoy the full potential of the global social web, it would make a lot of sense for them to start engaging with the global institutions that could help them to make that possible.

media file 6.2.08: Wen Jiabao has a Facebook page

VentureBeat reports on Facebook's challenges in entering the Chinese market. Among them: Whether to launch a Chinese-specific version of the site that authorities can censor, or pursue its one-site-fits-all globalization strategy there, too.

Chinese leader Wen Jiabao has a Facebook page

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture.

You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links daily as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

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media file for June 2, 2008:

Longtail, meet Fashion social networking

VentureBeat reports on Fashionspace, a UK-based social network targeting fashion professionals and fashion lovers in 120 countries.

GooTube

Forbes writes that Google's YouTube is now "the biggest television station on the planet." The article quotes JupiterResearch analyst Tulsiani: "A studio declining to do business with YouTube would be like a cereal maker not dealing with Wal-Mart."

Newspaper Online Local Ad Revenue Hits $2 Billion, More Than All Other Media Combined

Editor & Publisher recaps results from a Borrell Associates survey of online local advertising. Newspapers lead all other local media in grabbing market share, but are still losing ground overall to search engines and product sites.

Glam offers new video ad network, gets acquisition offer for $1.3B

VentureBeat reports on the Glam network's launch of GlamTV, an online video distribution and advertising network targeted to its global audience of 64 million women.