nextMadisonAve: A Free nextNY Community Conversation on the Future of Digital Advertising
With Microsoft now rumored to be buying 24/7 Real Media, the arms race is at full throttle. For nextNYer's, the question of "Where will I be working in five years if I want to work in online advertising?" becomes more interesting everyday.
I'm sure these topics will be covered at the Future of Online Advertising conference, but if you don't have a $995 to drop and you're looking for something a little more conversational, check out nextMadisonAve, next Wednesday, May 9th, at 6:30PM (22 West 27th Street Bet. Broadway/6th - 6th Floor).
nextNY's "Community Conversations" are done in the round (or rectangle, if we're in a conference room) and are an open forum for discussion for the up and coming members of NYC's digital media and technology market. We invite prominent thought leaders to help lead the conversation, but they're very participatory.
So, if you want to meet with other digital media entreprenuers and professionals to talk about where the advertising and technology market is converging (other than in investment banker wallets) please join us! RSVP Required on our wiki (just click edit and add your name).
Also, if you know of anyone you think would make a great conversation leader for this event, we have some outstanding invites, but I think we'll have an additional slot or two open. Please let me know at charlie.odonnell@gmail.com.
More Subway Thumbing
I'm listening to Silversun Pickups on the N train home my blogging class. I would have biked home, its a beautiful night, but I seemed to strain an abdominal muscle last week and nicely aggrevated it at the gym on Sunday, so I won't push it...at least not until my two softball games at the end of the week.
The train is a bit empty now...it's 10PM. Ther girl down at the other end of my bench seat has a tattoo on the back of her neck. I don't mess with neck tats. Neck tats always trump arm tats. I think the order, from most to least hardcore is face, neck, arm, back, leg. The guy across from her has no distraction devices... No iPod, no book, no nothing. He's just sitting there, looking around, reading subway ads. Nineteen people in this car... Six have iPods. Apparently, market penetration is like 30 percent, so we're a pretty average bunch.
I hate typing on this Treo. My thumbs keep bumping into each
other. Pacific Street. One iPod on, one iPod off. Equillibrium is
maintained. I wonder where everyone gets their music. The girl across
from me has abandoned her SAT Test Prep book for a paperback of
"Starter Wife". For some reason, it's got Deborah Messing on the
cover. Is this a movie coming out? This N train is a fancy new
one...with easy to read electronic displays of the wrong station coming
up next. 36 Street. Dragula by Rob Zombie. I thought of naming my
car Dragula, but what's really the point of a car name other than to...
Ok, speaking of idiocy, the guy over in the next car just walked off
the train with his bike and just biked down to the end of the platform.
A subway platform is like the last place I'd bike around. That's got
all sorts of dangerous written all over it. It is freezing in this
car. I seem to be sitting right under a vent. Getting up... Train
traffic ahead of us...at this
time?? Liars...unless it's the money train or the garbage
train. Switching at 59th Street....Depeche Mode...World in My Eyes.
If I had a hernia, it would be a big painful protrusion, right? I
wouldn't be able to stand up straight, right? On the R train. I don't
envy suit wearers.
Power Dynamics and Perception: Perhaps it's not the choir that you are preaching to
When you're talking passionately about a product or service, it's interesting to consider the power dynamic of you and your audience. Where you respectively sit in terms of the "haves" and "have nots" can go a long way to how your audience perceives you.
Think about the following scenarios:
You're talking to someone about your business who isn't in your field and has no experience with it.
They either don't understand your product or don't try to understand it, and the exchange is dismissed. When they don't understand your market, you dismiss their confused reaction. "You wouldn't understand the problem because you're not our target audience." You forget that the laws of logic apply universally and so, even to someone who isn't familiar with your field, you should always attempt to speak with sound logic even to outsiders. Not everyone needs to find your service useful, but they should at least understand why someone else would.
You're talking with peers
This is the blogosphere. You're talking to others who totally get your space and see the world from the same perspective. Your passion is admired and even contagious. The feedback you get from peers encourages you to keep walking the walk and talking the talk... and you quickly forget that not everyone drinks the same Kool Aid that you do. Getting unbiased perspective here is incredibly difficult.
You're talking with someone who needs something from you
This is what happens when you're a VC.
Mets up, Yanks down... See how everything evens out for me?
The Mets are in first and the Yanks are in last.
Really, would you have it any other way?
The Yanks have already had nine different pitchers start games, including Darrel Rasner, Jeff Karstans, and Chase Wright.
haha
(Sorry.)
You know what the best part of this is? The Yankee MVP and frankly, the MVP of the whole baseball universe was A-Rod. He's batting .355 with 14HR and 35 RBI after 23 games. In 1968, I think that might have qualified for the Triple Crown.
Everyone makes such a big deal about Captain Derek Jeter, but for my money, A-Rod is the best shortstop on the team. Captain Derek wouldn't come to A-Rod's side last year when Rodriguez was struggling and he added to preseason controversy by saying a chilly "We get along on the field" or some garbage like that. Derek, I think it's time for you to embrace the guy who is carrying your patchwork overpaid team on his shoulders.
Jeez... How's that Kris Benson trade looking now? John Maine is 4-0 with a 1.35ERA. In fact, the Mets have a team ERA of 2.74.
No Bradford? No problem. Submariner Joe Smith hasn't given up a run yet.
Ya gotta believe... in April.
links for 2007-04-28
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Hey... I love three blocks down from here and pass this house everytime I walk to the train!
Cool NYC Apartment for Sale
No, not mine... this place belongs to a friend. Tell him I sent you...
Twitter Strikes Again
So last night, I had a late meeting and I wound up in Union Square at 10PM having not quite eaten yet. I really don't like eating alone and so I figured I'd just give Twitter a shot.
Me: Anyone hungry near union sq?
Avi Karnani, two minutes later: I'm walking back from the office, through union sq right now actually, looking for food.
The most bizzare thing is that its the second time that Avi and I have met up this way... and it's the only two times we've met. We meant to try to connect at SXSW and it didn't happen... but not too long after, I twittered that I was going to a nextNY bar outing and he just happened to be in the area. I bumped into him in the bar, only to find out later that it was my Twitter that brought him there.
I think the key to Twitter's geolocation capability is the broadcast model and its simplicity. I didn't need to have GPS going or post cross streets or anything... and Avi didn't need to identify his location either. Twitter doesn't know the difference between "union sq" and "peanut butter" but an actual human in NYC clearly knew where I was.
Twitter still needs to figure out group features and ways to market this to localized groups of people, which this works best for, but b/c I'm lucky enough to have lots of techy friends using it in the same area, I'm finding it very useful.
Web 2.0 LolCat
Andrew made this based on #5 of the Web 2.0 Sucks List... Hilarious! I love LolCats.
nextNY Social this Friday at Coppersmith's
If you're looking to meet up with other up and comers in the NYC digital media and tech scene, drop by Coppersmith's after work this Friday.
April 27th… Coppersmith’s 6PM-9PM
793 9th Avenue (bet 52nd/53rd).
Top Ten Reasons Why Web 2.0 Sucks
- The finger pointing culture of fear will always dominate a culture of openness. Media
thrives on taking people down and creating a general fear of the worst
possible outcome. Whether it's trying enact anti-MySpace laws or
firing everyone who says a dirty word or two, until we hold our noses
and fully embrace freedom of expression in this country, we're going to
hold back the real potential of the internet as a medium of
conversation and open exchange. Everyone will be too scared to publish
anything thought provoking for fear of being stoned by glass house
dwellers.
- The thinking, not just the building, has gotten small and lightweight... Too many people building features, not applications, or, gasp, companies. People are confusing design with innovation. Just because you add AJAX and rounded boxes to something does mean you have innovated.
- Web 2.0 hasn't even come close to breaking open the carrier choked mobile world. E-mail and WAP? That's what I'm paying unlimited data for? Come on. We can do better than this.
- Web 2.0 is a conversational vacuum. I'll prove it. Unless you live in the Valley, walk outside your door and try to find a Twitter user... You've got six hours. Go. Trust me, we're talking to ourselves. (Don't get me wrong... I really like Twitter... We just need to remind ourselves about how close to the edge we all are out here.)
- Spelling and grammr (beta) have gone to hell in a handbasket. I'm in ur domainz, droppin' ur vowelz.
- M&A Wack-a-mole stopping innovation in its tracks... Dodgeball, del.icio.us, MyBlogLog... Some of the most innovative startups have been swallowed into the black holes of big companies, abruptly halting their innovation paths. Unless we get some more robust business models, some more risk seeking entrepreneurs, maybe a real IPO market, most of Web 2.0 is going to wind up becoming the corporate walking dead of long forgotten or poorly understood acquisitions. Consumers suffer when entrepreneurs won't make a go of it on their own and make a bigger impact on their online experience. (Pleasant exceptions being the Office-like apps at Google...)
- Content licensing is still a bottleneck. Web 2.0 is all about people and sharing, two things that music and video content owners don't seem to be big fans of. For now, much of what we share is illegal or user generated. Freely shareable stuff probably makes up about 2% of the millions of hours of content ever created professionally. I'd like to blog a clip from the A-Team... Not only can I not access it easily, I can't clip it easily, and I sure as hell can't publish it legally. Yet, no one current monetizes it on the web, so it just sits and collects digital dust.
- The really juicy data will always remain locked up... I'd very much like to be able to share my purchases, particularly restaurants, at my own discretion. Of course, that data is at Mastercard, and I think I'll start wearing "I love the RIAA" shirts before Mastercard starts creating personal RSS feeds or APIs for users to take their own financial data to various applications. The same with my credit history. I need to sign up for lots of junk mail to get a credit report... and don't even get me started on my own medical history.
- A lot of powerful people don't participate. How many VC's out there fund widget companies without having a blog or a MySpace profile? Any Sony bloggers out there? What about brand managers that want to do Second Life campaigns without ever having been inside. How about my elected representatives? They get out there and kiss babies during election time, but how many blogging elected officials are there? (And not watered down campaign blogs... actual blogs written by the actual people.) We could do great things if we weren't so segregated into a small group of people punch drunk on Kool Aid and a great deal of people who've never even heard of Kool Aid.
- MySpace is the most popular social network. Seriously, is this the best we can do? Spam, hacking, viruses, one song at a time, and no developer network or API? Facebook is such a better product, but it's really pretty limited as a self expression tool. Plus, neither really comes close to being able to be my digital home on the web as much as my blog is.
This fucking blog will now be blocked by ScanSafe
Think of ScanSafe as a kind of enterprise NetNanny for Web 2.0. They just came out with a report that paints the blog world as a seedy hangout for foul-mouthed pornmongers.
"ScanSafe's Monthly "Global Threat Report" for March 2007 says that up to 80 percent of blogs host offensive content, ranging from "adult language" to pornographic images. The company suggests that businesses should be aggressive about preventing users from accessing some or all of this material. And of course, they'd hope that you'd use their products to do so. ScanSafe says that it discovered the "offensive" nature of blogs by analyzing more than 7 billion web requests coming from their corporate customers."
I don't think professional people need a piece of technology to prevent them from seeing a dirty word here and there. If your employees are accessing truly inappropriate content at work, perhaps you should beef up your screening not in the web browser, but in your HR department. Just a thought...
iPod Killed the Radio Star
It's really interesting to see how Arbitron is positioning the statistics on digital radio it just came out with, specific to the effect of portable media devices.
So here's the first stat:
Fewer than one in ten report less over-the-air radio listening specifically due to time spent with their iPod/portable MP3 player.
Phew! Ok radio execs... you can all rest easy and breath a collective sigh of relief... oh... wait...
While 70 percent of Americans age 12 and older do not own an iPod/portable MP3 player, and an additional 15 percent report the device has had no impact on radio listening, nine percent say they are listening to less over-the-air radio... Radio sees the most impact on listening from iPod/digital audio player owners age 12-24.
Ok, hold on a sec. So, if I'm reading this correctly, 30% of the people who own portable devices are listening to the radio less, and that impact is largest among the 12-24 crowd?
Well, that's kind of a different animal isn't it? What happens when these 12-24 year olds grow up and get replaced by another generation listening to the radio less?
To me, this represents a clear trend that should make radio execs worry.
Terrestrial radio is that it isn't net native, and frankly, neither is the iPod. In other words, neither really takes advantage of all the things the web enables you to do... discover music, connect to others with the same interest, observe, remember, and publish your own interests. That's what creates the opportunity for services like last.fm.
The big advantage that the iPod/iTunes combo has is that iTunes gets right in the stream of your consumption with monetization. You're listening on iTunes, you want more music, and its just a click away. Have you ever heard a song on the radio and wanted to own it. It's nearly impossible. You either need to wait for the DJ to come on to tell you what was playing or you start playing "guess that tune" with your friends. Clearly, radio needs a compelling reason to bring you to their site to do more than just listen to a webcast... There's a really interesting opportunity for radio stations to leverage the brand they have created on air, the personalities they promote, and their ability to monetize music to encourage music related engagement on their sites... but what does that look like?
I'd be interested to hear from anyone involved with the broadcast radio industry on this.
Green NYC?
So Mayor Mike is trying to get the city to go green by instituting the same kind of anti-congestion tax that is currently in place in London, where cars are charged for entrance into the heart of the city during peak hours.
Why?
Try driving in the city during rush hour. That's why.
Hey, I'm a car owner in the city and I'm the first one to say that this is a great idea. We all need to be using public transportation more... cars are bad for the environment... and the city is too crowded. Some people are saying that this tax will hit the working class, but you know what? The working class takes the subway. The only people I know who drive into the city during rush hour are the rich suburbanites. Stand outside a midtown parking lot during rush hour in the morning and look at the cars... they're Porches, Mercedes, etc... No family Trucksters here. I'm all for it. Bike to work!
Also, friends of mine who work for various political campaigns are saying on good authority that Bloomberg has decided to run for President in 2008. I hope so. I love anti-politicians, and he's not some old money rich guy... he's an entrepreneur... a self made guy. What he lacks in personality, he makes up for in business savvy and I think its about time someone starts running this country with a little logic and practicality. I'd vote for him.
Doritos Fight... Killer Online Advergame
This new Fight for the Flavor Campaign from Doritos has a fantastic two-player boxing game with bags of Doritos.
Check it out and feel free to challenge me... I'm ceonyc.
Does anyone know who built this? What agency?