In the second panel, Social Media Meets Marketing, moderator Jimmy Guterman sat down with:
- Simon Assaad, co-CEO of Heavy.com,
- John Battelle, Chairman Federated Media
- Shawn Gold, SVP MySpace
- Tina Sharkey, Chairman BabyCenter
- Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO Denuo and CIO Publicis Media Group
Simon Assaad is extremely well-viewed, respected and thought of in the advertising and publishing space. He and his co-founder have positioned Heavy.com as an uber cool and hip place to reach the 18-34 male demographic. I’m in the target market yet I do not really frequent the site, but millions do, and advertisers and investors are have taken notice. Heavy.com raised $20M which is a whopping amount of money for a site in its category.
From 2000-05 I helped build the largest men’s online lifestyle site which sold for 27 times the invested capital for $13.5M. Heavy.com positions itself in the broadband entertainment space, a market that saw iFilm sell to Viacom $49M. At the other extreme Youtube sold for $1.65B, so it’s not surprising to see Assaad steer his ship away from content creation to aggregation, which is what increasingly makes up the site’s content. Regardless, Heavy.com has pioneered many “beyond the banner ad formats.” As such, it wasn’t surprising to hear Assaad say that the Web is different, but in the initial decade, we have had a tendency to try to frame things a tad too much in terms of traditional media, which distorts the value of the Web. He has successfully managed to lead Heavy.com into crafting radically different ad formats. For that he and his team get a lot of credit, and the site manifests the “content is advertising / advertising is content” trend.
Next up was John Battelle, whose position that niche audiences need a new ad model is right on. As Chairman of Federated Media, which reps many industry leading blogs, he’s preaching the “conversational marketing” mantra, stressing the need for experimentation and addressing the reality that the lack of time to get the message out is the main challenge he faces in the marketplace. There’s “no algorithm for conversations,” and that is an admission that scaling is harder beyond search, in display / banner ads, the next growth area of online advertising.
Shawn Gold was previously the Weblogs Inc. head of sales, and is now MySpace in the same role. Both are great platforms, but these also present enormous challenges with mainstream and traditional advertisers.
The site’s value proposition is clear, however, as evidenced by a recent case study with X-Men.
- X-Men had 2.6M friends after it created a profile on MySpace.
- 15% in exit poll said they went to see it due to MySpace.
- 50-50 split between men and women, the studio credited MySpace.
Of note, Myspace’s main page reaches 30M uniques. Which led to a comparison to the site’s reach to YouTube.
Picking up the baton, Assaad added “YouTube does 1.5B video streams a month, Comcast did that in one year on their on-demand” channel. If that number is true, it does say a lot…
There was also talk of live events, marked with the Live 8 event that pitted AOL versus MTV, which set the stage for Tina Sharkey, CEO of Babycenter.com: ”I was watching MTV and they were reporting everything but the concert, I was effectively listening to what the announcer thought was cool, what he wanted to talk about, simultaneously I was watching it on AOL and got to see what I wanted to watch.” That simple anecdote does explain the user-appropriated trend that has caught fire in the past few years, while user-generated gets most of the media’s attention.
AOL was not the content, “it was the enabler, the interface,” she added, and it did a great job easily outshining MTV, the previous generation’s music messiah.
While all speakers impressed, the shining star was Rishad Tobaccowala. Tobaccowala engages the biggest advertisers, and he offers a more pragmtatic perspective on things: “advertisers are not stupid. They want to embrace the Web,” but they need guidance and accurate facts, all obvious things, but things that are sometimes forgotten in a rapidly evolving media.
Prime time beats YouTube’s top 6 clips, so traditional advertising will not disappear, though online advertising will complement it. The “key in the market is moderation. Ask yourself: ’How does this fit with other things they do,” how can you give incentives for people to change their buying patters.
Assaad maintains that the “Web will drive TV more than TV will drive Web, due to broadband.” With the interest over video came the issues that made YouTube such a success, and the apprehension advertisers have in advertising alongside UGC: There seemed to be a need to balance “between control and facilitation… marketing is becoming faciliatation,” adding that the Web is more about marketing than advertising, especially in the areas of social media.
And it’s hard to talk about social media without talking about Second Life, with Guterman arguing that there are more marketers on SL than there are people… “what gives?”
Battelle reminisced about some of the similarities between SecondLife and TheWell, which consisted of a “devoted group of people who are going to inform the future of the online world.”
Sharkey interjected that “Cyworld is more important” than Second Life, referencing the Asian social network that is poised to clash with MySpace in North America.
Tobaccowala took it one step further: “I tell [marketers] to stay away, 90% of SL is press release induced, how is this going to help you sell and make money…” a comment that drew applause from the crowd.
Questions from the audience focused on the subscriptions vs. ad sales debate for publishers, to which Assaad candidly admitted: ”we had [a subscription strategy] earlier, but I was too yound and too stupid to know better,” I agree that online advertising will trump subscriptions, and Assaad put it quite succinctly. “Literally millions of free options, so subscription does not make sense, ads won’t solve everyone’s problems, not by a long shot…” but he seemed to hint that advertising is so lucrative at Heavy.com that subscriptions need not apply.
Tobaccowala did introduce a new term: “World of crapacopia” that he took from Ze Frank, which I will write on some more later.
Subscribe:
April 26th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Ash - thanks for covering the conference in such depth! It’s a great boon for those of us who couldn’t attend. Looking forward to reading more of your insights from the event.