Category Archives: digital media

August 29, 2012 · 9:53 am

You Carry A Tamagotchi, Honestly.

Anyone remember the Tamagotchi?  They were a late 1990’s phenomenon – digital handheld pets.  The owner had to care for them on a daily – maybe even hourly – basis or they’d die.  Not a fun experience for either the owner (generally a child) or the parent.

I was reminded of the constant care and feeding required by those things this morning as I booted up my phone and found nearly a dozen app updates that needed to be installed.  That, of course, was after I updated a half-dozen yesterday.  Don’t get me wrong – some of the updates contained wonderful enhancements to the app and were very welcome but way too many were either bug or security fixes.  In fact, if you own a smartphone, notice how often you get an update followed within a day or two by another.

Having worked on a few mobile apps, I know how hard it can be to catch everything in QC.  We’re not going to have the Android vs. iOS chat now but even in a closed system like iOS there are multiple versions in multiple devices and the updates come fast and furious.  Using the mobile web and web apps is better although various browser/hardware/OS issues still make testing hard.  At least the user doesn’t have to do any updating though.

The real issue for me is that I’m not sure there’s enough thought or care given to the constant update issue.  Some apps will do a partial release – they think if a button was bigger it would get better results so they push an update to some of their users to test it.  Other apps decide to change the permissions (to get more of them and more data) on their installed base knowing that most people don’t look at that when they install the update.  Still others move features behind a pay wall.  Obviously security issues need to be fixed immediately, but a logo change can certainly wait until a big release, right?

Way back when in the early web days the dream was for a universal browser looking a web sites – no client side activity at all.  Now in mobile it’s gone back the other way – dedicated client-side apps have replaced the server activity.  Maybe it’s that apps are a closed world – I’m not shopping Barnes & Noble while I’m in Amazon’s app.  But there’s got to be something other than grown-up Tamagotchi worlds living on our smartphones.

Thoughts?

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August 28, 2012 · 9:47 am

Twitter And The API Decision

You might have read or heard about the Twitter brouhaha last week.

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

No, not another politician sending pictures of his undies.  Twitter announced that they are going to restrict the use of their API and due to that a bunch of companies are going to have big problems.  While I realize that this entire discussion might be a bit of inside baseball for you non-tech business folks, I think the decision Twitter made is instructive no matter what business you’re in.

Basically, Twitter announced a bunch of restrictions on the number of times an application can access the Twitter stream.  You can read the details on Twitters developer blog but suffice it to say that anyone who makes a traditional Twitter client – Storify, Echofone, TweetBot, etc. – is going to have some issues.  These folks compete with Twitter’s own app (both the regular Twitter client and TweetDeck, which they own) for ad dollars and part of what Twitter announced was the division of the Twitter world into four quadrants.  One of those is “consumer engagement” and while Twitter is trying to encourage competition and business building for analytics and B2B, it wants to ” limit certain use cases that occupy the upper-right quadrant.”  In other words, restrict anything that interferes with their ad-supported business model.

I understand why Twitter is doing this.  After all, it’s their data (even if the users are creating the content).  However, I think they’ve got it backwards.  Rather than protecting themselves in a very difficult, competitive area (ad sales), maybe they should have focused their revenue efforts on the folks who are making money themselves (the analytics and other B2B guys).  They’re saying they welcome development on their platform as long as it avoids their core revenue model, which is consumer experience enhanced with advertisements.  In my mind, setting up a bigger toll booth in front of the folks who remarket the data for large fees makes more sense.  It’s the Willie Sutton rule – go where the money is.  Twitter has no competition when it comes to the folks using their data to drive their product while there is plenty of competition in the ad world – Twitter isn’t yet a “must” buy.

That sort of decision-making comes up in many businesses from time to time and I think a long look at what Twitter chose is instructive. What do you think?

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August 20, 2012 · 10:38 am

Racing To The Bottom

I was speaking with Don Antonio this morning.

English: digital hub Català: digital hub

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

He’s a media maven who’s an incredible resource to me both personally and professionally. We were chatting, as we do from time to time, about the state of affairs in digital media and the topic of pricing came up. One needn’t think very long about how buyers and sellers interact before the realization that there’s a horrible misalignment of goals out there.  No, after 30+ years in the media business I’m not shocked that agencies want to buy things less expensively while sellers want to grow their revenues and maintain “rate card integrity.”  But it feels different now – let me explain.

It’s always been about the client – the advertiser – and getting results.  The problem now is that there’s no reasoning with a machine.  Real time buying, trading desks, and other “innovations” just push down CPM’s (which is why a lot of premium sites won’t deal in this space).  Meanwhile, a well thought out integrated promotion can’t get sold and activated because it doesn’t fit any models.  Many newer buyers (and sellers) learn  the tools but don’t understand the business.

Another thing.  comScore in particular (they sell the software) and others in general are making a big thing about not counting digital ad exposures unless there’s proof the ad was in a visible part of the page.  Nice idea – why pay for an ad that the user never saw even if it was displayed.  The problem for me is this – no other medium is doing that.  Oh sure – TV and radio can prove an ad ran – now let’s see the proof that even though the set was on someone was in the room and paying attention.  Magazines do research this but I’m not sure it’s used in rate negotiation.

We’re racing to the bottom, as The Don put it.  We use tools that drive down CPM’s and we impose delivery standards that make us work harder than any other medium to get paid.  I know – complaining isn’t a pretty way to start the week, but what are we thinking?  Your thoughts?

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