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The next big thing will be a video webisodes channel for mobile devices. More and more today, you see people on trains and benches staring down at their mobile phones. If they are not typing or moving the cursor they’re watching movies.
Not everyone has time for movies. You might have 20 minutes of alone time on the way to a museum, club or ballgame. You’re LOLed out and don’t want to bother someone with another inane cell phone conversation starting out with “Hey. What are you doing?” The answer? Log on and find some video programming. It will start out as a single curated channel called Mo-Tube or something, containing short length “mobi-sodes” of 16-22 minutes in duration. After a while there will be more channels and programming segments, but it will start with a single new branded channel. Not necessarily serial in nature, these mobi-sodes will be designed to load and stream efficiently and, I’m guessing will be available via subscription. Aol, you feel me?
New Type of Programming.
This will be a new type of programming – not radio, not TV, not movies. Just little chunks of original and mashed-up programming that stimulate the viewer, fill some time and get the brain moving. Mobi-sodes. Coming to a device near you…in three years or less.
PS. I know someone will say the channel exists already, but if a tree falls in a the woods and no one is around….
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Tags: AOL, Mo-tube, Mobi-sodes, mobile entertainment, movies, webisodes, whats next, whats the idea, whatstheidea, youtube"
Tim Armstrong has a lot to do if he really wants to fix Aol, but he needs to start by hiring a chief talent officer. His executive suite — with all props and deference to those recently hired — has grown and become an enviable suite, but the big investment should be in Posters, original web content creators, not suits. Creative people, writers, videographers, style queens, humorists, and the politically angry. Aol must become more relevant to Teens, Tweens, Millenniums, Gen This & That, Boomers…and it has to start this quarter.
Don’t Wait.
Start the content strategy today. Hire Ochocinco. Hire Robert Scoble. Hire Kandee Johnson. Fab Five Freddy. Melting Mama. People with content game. Hire punk rockers before they’re famous. People burning with a point of view. People on their way up. A great talent officer will help today, but more importantly, will allow Aol to ride the ascent of future talent before it becomes expensive. As George Steinbrenner did when building the world’s most famous sports franchise, invest every penny in the players. This is not a markobabble post about teamwork, this rant is about players. Talent. Content. The right Posters will give you the inspiration to reinvent what content is. Don’t rely on an “innovation team” sitting in a San Diego corporate resort.
With the right web talent, ad sales will come. Ding dong, money at the door. Lined up around the block.
Get you first piece of talent this week. Celebrate it and start to build Aol momentum. Content is not an algorithm, it’s talented people expressing themselves through words, song, poesy and art. Peace it up!
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Tags: AOL, chief talent officer, fab five freddy, kandee Johnson, melting mama, ochocinco, robert scoble, Tim Armstrong, whats the idea, whatstheidea
Earnings reports hit yesterday for Apple and Yahoo and followers were, respectively, happy and disappointed. Apple is really kicking it selling phones, computers and tablets (What else is there, food?) Yahoo is sliding along, selling ads and content. Its revenue was up, but net revenue – revenue after it shares da monies with partners – down.
Carol Bartz, about whom I’ve written some good things, is at that place in time in her tenure as CEO where her performance and the company’s momentum should just about be judged. If not now, certainly in a quarter or two. So let’s table that for the moment.
What Yahoo Should Do.
If Apple is doing so well and Yahoo just gliding via cost-cutting and reorganizations then perhaps Yahoo should take a good close look at Apple custies (that’s bond trader for customers). The account planners at Yahoo’s agency Goodby Berlin and Partners might want to follow around Apple users for a week or so and see what kind of 1s and 0s are passing over their phones, Macs and tablets. Do Apple users intersect with Yahoo at all during the course of the day? And if not, why not? Apple users are worth studying.
Yahoo’s Competition.
Yahoo and Aol (not Apple) are competitors… both fighting for the same cheese. They share the same content strategy so I enjoy studying them. It’s still neck and neck, with a slight edge to Aol. But both need an idea. A powerful brand idea, dripping with beyond-the-dashboard consumer value. I’m waiting. Peace!
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Tags: Account Planning, AOL, apple, Carol Bartz, goodby berlin and partners, ipad, iphone, mac, whats the idea, whatstheidea, yahoo
Cambio is AOL’s first big bullet in the content strategy war with Yahoo. It makes me think AOL just may win this thing. I love Carol Bartz’s decision to go with the content approach for Yahoo, but still think her approach a bit too diffuse. They still possess a start page mentality over there – start page meaning, set your personal home page to Yahoo.
AOL, on the other had, spent enough time with Time Warner to learn a thing about packaging content. They probably own a camera or two and kept some producers and directors around, so by signing the Jonas Bothers and their music company to a deal with the new AOL online music channel Cambio, cranking up some new content quickly may be very doable. This is a transformative move. It may be the first real melding of music and new media we’ve seen; think Little Steven’s Garage (dot com) for kids. And, with a big, scalable company surrounding it.
AOL, BTW, should bring Little Steven and his garage over to the fold. No brainer. Why? Because he’s a great curator, a special personality and he has a loyal following. The radio doesn’t do his project justice. I like this move for AOL — and though Cambio may only be the learning ground for something bigger, it’s a great idea. Tim Armstrong is human, but he’s beginning to hit stride. Peace!
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Tags: AOL, Cambio, Carol Bartz, online music, Tim Armstrong, time warner, whats the idea, whatstheidea, yahoo
Slide 4 in Mary Meekers’s Morgan Stanley presentation entitled “Internet Trends 2010” shows the pace of mobile internet adoption. It compares iPhone/iTouch to that of AOL’s desktop, Netscape desktop and NTT docomo iMode; laying out growth by users, by quarter from launch.
iPhone’s Internet access tipped 86 million users in its 11th quarter – less than 3 years. Let’s just say the others never came close to coming close. (Check out the chart on slide 4.) Smartphone growth is hockey sticking. Motorola is starting to get it. HP bought Palm and should buy some corporate share. Blackberry is too big and too rich to fail, even though they’re getting a little paunchy around the middle. And we haven’t even started to talk about the software guys Google (after its trivestiture), Microsoft (drawing a blank) and carrier switch provider Alcatel-Lucent.
Ladies and germs, smartphones are the future of computing, commerce and community. They will dock next to monitors and keyboards, but they are the device. Think about the iPhone4’s new videoconference app. Wait for fingerprint apps, and galvanic skin response apps, sobriety apps…. Cool times, these. Marketers, put on your thinking apps (I mean caps), innovation awaits! Peace!
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Tags: alcatel-lucent, AOL, apple, blackberry, docomo, google, hp, iphone4, marketing, mary meeker, morgan Stanley, motorola, netscape, ntt, smartphone marketing, thinking apps, whats the idea, whatstheidea
Yahoo is buying Associated Media and its federation of 380,000 writers (Posters) who according to ComScore generate 16M monthly uniques. Yahoo is paying $100 million for the ability to advertise to Associated’s audience and the deal also includes some technology which allows for the monitoring and prediction of reader content proclivities. This is a big move for Carol Bartz, Yahoo CEO, and shows she is putting money into the content strategy.
I look at content portals like Yahoo and AOL a little bit like big retail malls. A good portal, like a good mall, has lots of tenants but there is always what is called an anchor tenant — a big store that draws in lots of people. In my view, this $100 million play is more about finding an “anchor” tenant (or ten) among Associated Media’s writers who will propel Yahoo’s numbers upward, rather than a crowd sourcing effort to generate mass. It’s like putting a seine net in the ocean to catch krill but finding some big fish. Yahoo needs next generation big fish. Big Posters. It’s a very expensive move, but should work for them. The portal story, IMHO, is about quality not quantity. But that’s just me. Peace!
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Tags: AOL, associated media, Carol Bartz, consumer generated content, Posters, whats the idea, whatstheidea, yahoo
Cisco and AOL both reported earnings today. Cisco, maker of Internet plumbing, had a very nice turnaround ; AOL posted its first profit since de-coupling from Time Warner – a penny a share. Not bad, all things considered.
Cisco Systems
If you follow Cisco you know they have invested in getting more people to push more bits over the Internet. Think Gillette getting people to shave their entire bodies. (Okay, bad analogy.) Cisco has pushed videoconferencing for years and not too long ago bought Flip the hot video camera company. The more digital info that goes over the net, the more routers and switches and stock Cisco sells.
Aol
This is exactly the approach Aol needs to take. Aol makes money on advertising so it needs to create content that makes more eyeballs and fingers go to their sites. Right now that means hiring great writers, videographers, creative people and buying and adding to the fold well-trafficked sites. Better content, better audience numbers. But Aol is not really thinking out of the box yet. It needs to come up with content types that haven’t been done. As the Brits might say, they need to be more inno-vit-iv. How about an easy to use, easy to read email device for the AARP crowd? Or an educational games for infants? Or a remote home automation portal that lets you turn on lights from the street? Aol is still thinking in 2 dimensions, a la a publisher. Like Cisco, Mr. Armstrong needs to feed the beast. Let’s pick it up!
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Tags: AOL, cisco systems, flip video camera, Tim Armstrong, time warner, whats the idea, whatstheidea
Google built a business, quite well I might add, on perfecting search and search usability. They funded the business with advertising. The brand play was not to be the world’s greatest advertising platform (something Yahoo and AOL didn’t understand), it was all about search.
Back in the day (last week, hee hee) Google search was all about the Web. Finding things digital. This week, it’s about seeing and searching for digital things in the physical world. So mobile apps and navigation are the rage. Google hasn’t led the way here, Apple has, but Google wasn’t first in search either.
What’s next?
What’s next is search for physical things in the physical world. Call it worldwide inventory. What is worldwide inventory and how will it work? Not sure, but this cantaloupe sized brain of mine says it may have to do with barcodes. Now you can’t put a bar code on an $11,000 hip replacement in Mexico (You can’t?) but you can put one on a $12.00 case of Honest Tea with torn labels. The ability for mankind to find real things, in proximity, with their smart phones is what Google will be doing over the next decade. And that hip replacement or $6,000 valve bypass in China will be something worth searching for. Stay with search Google — it will soon be atop Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs.
Worldwide Inventory may sound like a Pearl Jam song but it’s an Eric Schmidt song. Peace!
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Tags: AOL, barcode, eric schmidt, google, Honest Tea, maslow, mobile, worldwide inventory, yahoo
Aol. and Yahoo have both finally figured out that good content begets readership, viewership, referral, and participation which begets — the same. These two seminal online brands will be dooking it out for years to come. They both took different paths to get here and both have CEOs with unique perspectives, but the battle should be fun to watch. Coke and Pepsi, AT&T and Verizon fun.
Armstrong vs. Bartz
My bet is on Aol. Tim Armstrong hitched his ride to a rising star (Google) and got that success smell on him — but I think he created some of that smell with his focus and good leadership. Carol Bartz’s career advanced by good blocking and tackling and good business decisions, something Yahoo hadn’t had for a while prior to her arrival. Yahoo made lots of decisions, just not with a solid brand idea driving them. Until proven otherwise, I’ll give Mr. Armstrong the edge and write it off to “derring do.”
Ad dollars are moving online, no doubt, but those in the know will tell you the lion’s share are going to Google thanks to AdWords and their direct-to-consumer, DIY, analytics-powered ad model. As Aol. and Yahoo re-create their online brands and lead the market in the generation of original content (paid and contributed), search will stay a powerful, lucrative utility, but won’t be the best way to find good content. That will be the domain of Aol and, hopefully, Yahoo. Peace!
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Tags: AOL, at&t, Carol Bartz, coke, google, pepsi, Tim Armstrong, Verizon, whatstheidea, yahoo
AOL announced today they will be introducing a new logo. It will include a dot at the end of the letters Aol, which will appear using initial cap “A”, lower case “o” and “l”.
That’s the post. That’s all I learned. See you tomorrow.
(Okay, okay, I learned a little more than that, but had to read between the lines to do so.)
AOL has a product strategy, which I’ve known for a while thanks to new CEO Tim Armstrong. It is “AOL is the place to be for the best online content, period.” Mr. Armstrong articulated this strategy early on in his tenure. It’s tight and smart.
What they don’t have at this time is a brand strategy. Had they a brand strategy they wouldn’t have only talked tactically about the mark in their announcement. To wit (from an article by Stuart Elliot in the The New York Times today):
“The period in the logo was added to suggest confidence, completeness.”
“The AOL dot is the pivotal point for what comes after AOL.”
“An advertising campaign to promote the new look is being considered — as is the role to be played by AOL brand character known as the running man.”
You feel me? All tactics (hat) no brand strategy (cattle.)
Changing the logo was a good idea, but doing so after articulating the brand strategy and brand planks is way more sensible. Peace!
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Tags: AOL, Brand Strategy, new york times, stuart elliot, Tim Armstrong, whats the idea, whatstheidea
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