Media Dojo

Archive for January, 2010

I arrived in Munich last night after an exhausting/exhilarating week in London. Two presentations about media futures to Associated Northcliffe Digital and A&N Media put me through the paces. Associated NorthCliffe Digital connects with 40% of the UK population through a portfolio of  240+ premium websites whilst A&N Media reaches 60% of the population across print, online, TV and mobile. Hands down, there is no better training than to present your ideas in front of a small audience (25 for one meeting and 7 at another) with serious responsibility over outcomes. Both audiences were tough but fair in their questions and comments. I can’t go into data/specifics of the presos because of confidentiality agreements but the remit was to explore a media world in which demand chains ruled supply chains and in which media had become a platform game rather than a publish and distribute game. I hope to drill further into those twin memes with some other clients on the idea of coming out with public research and data later this year.

In the meantime, it’s Welkommen Deutschland! First time I’ve been to Germany. My hosts are Hubert Burda Media, which is one of Germany’s largest diversified media groups. I’m attending their invite-only Digital, Life and Design (DLD) get-together. It’s the first time I’ve attended. Expect some posts in the coming days…

Mobile app stores are in the midst of an algae bloom. Gartner is throwing out (throwing up?) numbers suggesting 4.5 billion downloads in 2010, $6.2 billion in global revenue, and 82% of all apps being free to the consumer. A multi-billion $ paid market off 18% of the available inventory would get most anyone hot under the collar.

That said, the new opportunities have created nearly as many headaches. Remember the giant pain in the ass just to format mobile content for multiple devices? Well, you can blow that figure up by several orders of magnitude once you kick in all the new engagement models with various calls-to-action. Then, think about the various app store policies for uploading, approval and distribution. Make no mistake. This is a much better world than the days when deck placement made or broke companies. At the same time, we’re playing for real money now.

We spoke with Goldspot Media, one of the newer players out there trying to bring some order to the app store chaos on behalf of creatives in publishing and marketing shops. Goldspot offers a web-based drag and drop studio called miApp that enables that fabled write once/distribute everywhere on any device for any app store. For the one-pager on Goldspot’s corporate vital stats, check out the MD Tear Sheet_Goldspot Media.

I caught up with Srini Dharmaji, Goldspot’s founder and CEO, just before taking off for Europe to talk about how this model plays out in the realm of mobile video advertising.

Media Dojo: What’s the end-game for Goldspot Media?

Srini Dharmaji: What we are trying to take to market is a video ad network for mobile applications, focusing strictly on mobile apps across the board for smartphone platforms. Our main objective is to enable mobile applications to do more than just work on display oriented mobile content pages. We are launching an ad network that is focused on delivering in-app mobile video advertisements.

MD: How does this work in practice?

SD: The idea is that so far video adverts were being rendered only as video content. The ad is spliced into the content stream in whatever sequence the publisher and marketer agree. This is part of the paradigm of manipulating pages of content but it does very little to add to the experience of a mobile video application. We’ve come up with some mobile app native formats, such as that the video ad will play while the application is starting up. So while the page is loading the video ad is overlaid on top. The app publisher might also split some of the screen real estate in which part of it is used to render the ad while the video application is displaying the content or asking the user to take some kind of action. The key thing here is how well and fast you render the mobile video ad.

MD: Staying on the business side before we dive under the hood, how are you taking this to market?

SD: Publishers, brands and agency creatives join the video advertising network and part of that includes access to the drag and drop design studio called miApp. We give them a set of APIs that unlocks the interactive assets they want to add to their original video content. The content originators then use the studio to add pre/post/mid rolls, in-stream ads, shrink & surround ads, overlays, animated Gifs, ad bugs and so forth to their source content. The two points to remember is that A.) control over everything from concept to deployment can stay with the creative person and B.) once they’ve decided on what they want, they can one-click deploy to any smartphone device across all app stores.

MD: Fair enough, now let’s talk performance. How do you make your video ads work better than what’s on offer from the usual suspects like an Admob or Millenial Media?

SD: The difference is that the big ad networks stream the video ads from the network. We place the ads on the device using what we call opportunistic downloads. So when the device is connected to Wi-Fi for example, we download all the campaigns that are running for the month. So that ads are sitting on the device ready to go. If you look at the latency improvement by using this method and our APIs, by the time an Admob video ad is rendered by Tap Tap or some other mobile video game, you need to wait between 10-15 sec depending on the bandwidth. In the time it takes for Admob to pull the stream from the cloud, Goldspot will have already played the ad.

If you look at it from a marketing standpoint, the big networks are taking a high quality video ad from a brand and re-encoding it to play for different bit rates depending on whether the device is tuned for an EDGE, 3G or Wi-Fi network. I’m not sure if I’m a brand and I’ve just spent many tens of thousands on creating that high quality video ad that I want a technology limitation to butcher the quality of my ad. That is something we believe is a big negative as far as rendering ads as it’s done today.

MD: For the moment, let’s take the secular growth of mobile media and advertising as given, where will the new markets and new devices arise?

SD: Rather than talk about specific devices, let’s look at the more broad use case in which you have networked devices which aren’t mobile phones. If you think about something like iPod Touch, which has sold many more units than iPhone, it’s not always in contact with a Wi-Fi network. Chances are the demographic playing the game might be a good candidate for an advertiser but s/he’s not connected to the network. What do you do? Because we’re able to render and download adverts to pre-cache them on the device while connected to Wi-Fi, we can then show the adverts when the user is offline. There are already some standards brewing for offline decoding on the advertising content for networked devices that deal with sporadic connectivity. We think that’s a major growth area.

MD: Certainly a lot of moving parts. Last question then. How do you define success?

SD: All the publishers care about is show me the money. All the brands care about is show me the engagement. You’re dealing with two different animals here. The way I define success is make the whole ecosystem happy and sustainable.

I’m in London and Munich over the next couple of weeks. London is a special pleasure as my wife and I lived here for four years during the early 90s. Our daughter was born in St. Marys hospital in Paddington.

Things are very busy now…aside from the Mobile Augmented Reality work done for GigaOm Pro, this coming Monday (18 Jan), I’m scheduled for 90min in front of the 25 or so managing directors of Associated Northcliffe Digital to talk about secular shifts in consumer media markets caused by convergence. AND is the largest premium website publisher in the UK, with about 1/3 of the adult population checking in as uniques each month. It’s been a hell of a task to work on a preso up to that level. I appreciate the confidence of Richard Titus and Dan Taylor to let a humble researcher comme moi arrive at the start of a 2 day executive away meeting to stir up the pot. After the presentation, I’ll re-work some of the material for posting here.

I’m also finishing off the Media Dojo Cloud Computing for Media opus during this week in London. It will weigh in about 65-70 pages and will include four scenarios about the media world in 2020 plus a technical overview of cloud computing specifically targeted to media and marketing professionals. I’m working with Laura Urban Perry, a Seattle-based designer to insure that the visual layout is congruent with what I hope to say. That damn Avatar movie has raised the bar for all of us.

Of course, no trip to London would be complete without dropping in on my old martial art training buddies. So if I get a fetching shiner above or below an eye, I’ll be sure to post a picture.

Following London will be Deutschland…my first time. I’m going to Munich to attend the DLD Conference. The speaker line up is world class and it’s got a similar vibe as the Monaco Media Forum in being invitation-only, small crowd, low key and high powered—just the way I like it.

Expect some posts and interviews over the coming days as these events fall into line…for right now, however, I’m going to crack a beer and watch Hulu…9+ hours in British Airways can do that to a person.

Hope everyone had a good new year….back online with mobile and cloud computing posts.

I’m kicking off the new year with the mobile AR report for GigaOm Pro. This was a bear because the sector remains very raw, with the first consumer applications having launched only in the past year—barely. Right now, the action in the sector revolves around getting better location accuracy as well as improving the performance of mobile AR browsers for iPhone, Android and certain flavors of Symbian and WinMo. Make no mistake, mobile AR is another battle between Apple and Google for real estate. In the case of mobile AR, the ultimate real estate play is in the location data and metadata that can be annotated with media, advertisements, maps and host of other digital bling.

My personal opinion on mobile AR? Very experimental and raw so make sure that whatever media or marketing budget you put into it is clearly marked EXPERIMENTAL. That said, if mobile AR pops as a consumer app, it will have a huge effect on mobile search because it obviates a lot of need for keywords and other parts of the fixed web we’re trying to shoehorn into mobile. Small wonder then that the Android universe and Google are looking very close at mobile AR. We’ll know a lot more by summer. In the meantime, I want to thank the mobile AR interviews for this piece including Layar, Metaio, Mobilizy and Zehnder. Keep an eye on these guys.

The report is over at GigaOm Pro.

Here’s the official summary:

Mobile augmented reality (AR) brings computer-generated multimedia into an end-user’s literal field of vision. It merges real-time digital information with the user’s perceptions of his or her immediate physical surroundings. The mobile AR user simultaneously experiences physical reality and digital media consumption. This report looks at the growing mobile AR ecosystem, from the technologies and trends supporting its development to the applications, players, and business models driving innovation. The report includes a forecast for the number of mobile AR–capable devices, summarizes existing revenue forecasts for the nascent market, and leverages three in-depth case studies to demonstrate the intersections between markets, technologies, and companies in emerging applications.