Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram

In this week’s Signal: Vanity Fair on Kevin Systrom; What if machines finally ran the world?; get back to your quick, dirty, scrappy roots; Eric Schmidt on the morality of data collection; interactive ads that enable viewers to interject their own media; data, not content, is king; digital marketers should swear off the “B” word; brands are relying less on agencies and more on publishers for content; how to be a great CMO; John Battelle discusses his take on Google Glass; and more.

To the links …

The Money Shot (Vanity Fair) Kara Swisher reports on Kevin Systrom’s wild ride from the suburbs of Boston to becoming CEO of Instagram, and on what really happened when Facebook bought his company for $1B last year. A long, but worthy, read.

How Algorithms Will Dominate the World and How We Can Beat Them (B2C) Jean Pascal Mathieu recently attended what he calls an “absolutely terrifying conference” presented by the MIT Media Lab’s Kevin Slavin, who discussed how algorithms and machines are progressively taking over our lives. Slavin outlined a series of examples to support his theory, concluding that we shouldn’t be afraid of machines, but rather realize that they are only truly powerful when humans are involved.

The Importance of Quick and Dirty (Inc.) Jason Fried, co-founder and president of 37signals, wants startups to know that an obsessive focus on quality can be a bad thing. When creating a quick-and-dirty demo for your own company, for example, don’t focus on perfecting it, rather just see if it will work. “A company gets better at the things it practices,” he writes. “Practice quality, and you get better at quality. But quality takes time, so by working solely on quality, you end up losing something else that’s important—speed. … Startups should embrace their scrappiness, not rush to toss it aside. The ability to run with scissors is a blessing, not a curse.”

Google’s Eric Schmidt On Data Privacy: The Internet Needs A Delete Button (FC) On May 6, at NYU’s Stern Business School, economist Nouriel Roubini grilled Eric Schmidt about Google’s evolving role in personal privacy. Roubini described a future when we might embed technology into our bodies to track our health or consumption patterns, claiming that Google Glass is a step in this direction. Schmidt disagreed with Roubini’s assessment of things to come, saying, “I think you’re describing a world of tracking which I think is highly unlikely to occur, because people will be upset about it in the same way you are. Governments won’t allow it, and it’ll be bad business.” But what about the moral issues surrounding data collection? “This lack of a delete button on the Internet is in fact a significant issue,” added Schmidt. “There are times when erasure [of data] is the right thing … and there are times when it is inappropriate. How do we decide? We have to have that debate now.”

Chute raises $7M led by Foundry Group, Unveils Ads, a Platform Adding Real-Time Media Into Banners (TNW) Chute Ads, a new service from media sharing startup Chute, is designed to allow brands to serve interactive ads that enable viewers to interject their own media. Starting with Conde Nast Traveler, banners can be placed on the network that allow photos and videos to be added in real-time. For example, Nike might have a stock image featured on Conde Nast’s network of sites, and invite viewers to upload their own images to fit the campaign. TNW reports that advertisers who are interested in utilizing a Chute Ad will be able to select from one of several formats. All brands will need to do is provide a skeleton design and Chute’s service will overlay on top of it.

Unseating a King: At Meredith Corp. Data, Not Content, Reigns Supreme (Audience Development) According to IBM, humans create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily. About 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. That number doubles about every 40 months. Liz Schimel, EVP and Chief Digital Officer at Meredith, believes that data has performed a coup and ousted content as king. In this Q&A, Schimel details Meredith’s data collection and implementation strategy and the various ways her team is using data to support the growth and development of both existing and new products. “Both the king and queen are extremely important,” says Schimel, “but we feel like we can’t be great at our core business of creating great content and amassing scaled audiences without depth of expertise on the data side.”

Digital Marketers Should Aim For Influence, Not Branding (Ad Exchanger) Adam Heimlich of Razorfish believes that digital is not a continuation of the old method of media influence. “People who know branding can plainly see that search, display and social ain’t it. …It’s time for digital marketers to admit that top advertisers’ focus on traditional media for branding is a data-driven decision,” he writes. “We’ll serve our interests better by asserting that new media influences people in a new way.”

In Content Era, What’s the Role of Agencies? (Digiday) Agencies are finding that many brands are relying less on them and more on publishers for content. That said, what are we to make of the agency role? “Let’s be honest,” writes Giselle Abramovich, “agencies aren’t the best choice for content creation. That’s not what they’re all about. Authenticity also comes into question. After all, having someone create content on your behalf isn’t exactly being authentic and real.” In addition, brands are finding that it’s proving to be less expensive to create a full-service team internally.

How To Be A Great CMO (Forbes) Michael Lazerow, CMO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, knows what takes to be a great CMO in today’s age of social, local, and mobile. Lazerow, who will speak at the CM Summit this month, sold his last company, Buddy Media, to Salesforce.com for $745 million. Here are his eight tips to help CMOs become truly great in this age of SoLoMo.

###

40+ CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. (Recently added: Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann.) Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent.

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

###

Is Google Glass First of Many Mobile Alternatives? (Bloomberg) Our own John Battelle discusses his take on Google Glass, OpenCo New York (May 22-23), and the New York tech scene with Cory Johnson on Bloomberg Television’s “Bloomberg West” (Video). Battelle’s OpenCo is “a mashup of an open studio tour and a business conference, with the vibe of a music festival.” The idea behind it is to identify and celebrate innovative companies by ‘opening up’ the traditional conference model and getting people out into the cities, walking from company to company to soak up the culture and see founders in their native environments.

This Video Of One Half-Second Of High Frequency Trading Is Insane, Terrifying (HuffPost) A new video by the research firm Nanex shows one half-second of trading in just one stock —Johnson & Johnson. Representing more than 1,200 orders and 215 actual trades occurring on May 2, the video illustrates the rise of high-frequency trading robots over the years, providing the first clear look at what those robots are doing every day, all day, now that they control more than half of all market volume.

Publishers: Beware of Easy Money (Digiday) When Criteo approached Vivaki to buy their inventory through a Criteo network, Marco Bertozzi, Executive Managing Director and EVP of EMEA at Vivaki, was prompted to think about the sales policies of publishers. Criteo has created a good business according to Bertozzi, “but they got there through persuading publishers that they should sell to them quality impressions, in some instances first look, even above direct and brand channels at a low cpm vs those direct channels but high vs the RTB market. …Problem is that they buy a lot of it and need to get rid of it and so they want other people to buy it from them, whether that’s trading desks, ad networks or DSPs.” Is it time to ditch the flat cpm and embrace the auctions and private marketplaces? It sure is, says Bertozzi.

EBay Plans to Share Its Users’ Data With Brands Faces Perception Issues (Adweek) Following a similar move by Amazon, eBay will soon start letting brands build out audience segments using its wealth of shopping data so they can target ads to consumers on non-eBay sites. Ebay has been building its advertising business for years and has recently made a key hire. But the question remains, will the typical eBay shopper be as valuable to an advertiser as someone who pays full price at Amazon?

Betaworks’ Vision For the Future of Online News (Mashable) Seth Fiegerman talks to Betaworks’ CEO John Borthwick about the company’s goal to create an ecosystem of media products that improves the way readers discover and consume content online, and about what a 21st century media company really should look like. Borthwick “eventually settled on a few fundamental principles for such a company,” writes Fiegerman. “It would be data-driven. It wouldn’t need to own all the expensive assets that traditional media corporations do. It would be more focused on distribution, but not tied to a particular method of distribution. It would be, [in Borthwick’s words], a ‘loose federation of pieces.’”

Ad Tech’s Got a Business Model Problem (Digiday) Michael Greene, director of research and marketing strategy at Audience Science, a data management platform, believes that the biggest problem in digital advertising is broken economics, and that it’s an issue only marketers themselves can fix. “It’s convenient to push the blame for digital advertising’s ills onto the supply side, and certainly publishers need to be accountable,” he posits. “But for many of the biggest sources of waste in digital advertising today – from bot traffic to frequency overload – advertisers are the only ones capable of enforcing rules across all publisher and inventory sources.”

Has Big Data Made Anonymity Impossible? (MIT Technology Review) Patrick Tucker discusses the privacy legislation introduced by the European Union in 1995, which defined “personal data” as any information that could identify a person, directly or indirectly. Because the amount of data created each year has grown exponentially, he believes that the definition “encompasses far more information than those European legislators could ever have imagined—easily more than all the bits and bytes in the entire world when they wrote their law 18 years ago.” Today, modern data science is finding that nearly any type of data can be used, much like a fingerprint, to identify the person who created it.

Aereo, Citing Tweets and Conference Calls, Fires Off a New Legal Salvo at CBS (ATD) Peter Kafka provides the latest on Aereo’s legal battle with CBS over the issue of unauthorized streaming of copyrighted television programming. Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia will be at the CM Summit, May 21-22 in New York City, to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.”

Digitas And HuffPost Attempt ‘Real-Time’ Native Ads (Ad Exchanger) Earlier this month at the Digitas NewFront, Huffington Post executives said they would offer their native advertising content distribution system exclusively to the Publicis Groupe interactive shop’s clients. “More than ever, we see that brands want…to respond and react and reach a specific audience in real-time,” Travis Donovan, Huffington Post’s executive products editor, told Ad Exchanger. “This is for brands that want to be relevant within the moment. I don’t think any other publication – with the kind of mass audience that Huffington Post has – ever made it so easy to do that until now.”

Marketing Technology LUMAscape (Shildeshare) The marketing tech world, illustrated in one big slide.

5 Brands Winning at Pinterest (Digiday) According to a new study by Digitas, the top integrated global brand agency, and Curalate, the only marketing and analytics suite for Pinterest and Instagram, 70 percent of brand engagement on Pinterest is generated by users, not brands themselves. But of the brands that are on Pinterest, some have figured out better than others how to make use of the social image-gathering site. This piece covers the top five.

Tech writer Paul Miller is back online. (Photo Courtesy of The Verge.)

In this week’s Signal: Tech writer Paul Miller is back online after leaving the Internet for an entire year; Yahoo fights for advertising dollars; Microsoft’s new Windows Phone campaign; a look at the “Anti-Cyberhate Working Group”; Digital Newfronts and the evolving nature of media companies; Flipboard to help publishers monetize; welcome to The Retargeting Era; Reddit’s Erik Martin talks advertising; and more.

To the links …

I’m Still Here: Back Online After a Year Without the Internet (The Verge) One year ago, tech writer Paul Miller left the internet. “I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was ‘corrupting my soul,’” he writes. But he discovered he was wrong. “I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the Internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the Internet was ‘doing to me,’ so I could fight back. But the Internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are.”

Yahoo Announces New Ad Formats: Mobile-Friendly Native Ads And A Big ‘Billboard’ On Its Front Page (TechCrunch) Mike Kerns, Yahoo’s Vice President of Product and Media,  wants you to know that the company is committed “to investing in new advertising experiences.” As part of the Digital Content NewFronts, Yahoo is hoping to bring in more advertiser dollars with two new units that were announced early last week. The first units are Yahoo Stream Ads — sponsored posts that show up in a stream of content (across desktops/laptops, smartphones, and tablets), including the news stories in the new Yahoo mobile app. The second unit is a bit more traditional — a  “billboard” that sits on top of the Yahoo front page for an entire day.

Microsoft Creates an Apple vs. Samsung Wedding Fight for Its New Windows Phone Ad (Verge) In a new minute-long spot that’s due to air soon in the U.S., a wedding reception is interrupted by Apple and Samsung fans. The ad is positioned in a way to show off the third-place position of Windows Phone, and offer it as an alternative. Microsoft is clearly hoping that this campaign will help boost lagging US sales for the all-important smartphone market.

The Delete Squad: Google, Twitter, Facebook and the New Global Battle Over the Future of Free Speech (New Republic) One year ago, Stanford Law School hosted a meeting that may help decide the future of free speech online. Attended by roughly two-dozen people, including a group of tech executives in charge of their companies’ content policies, the discussions concluded with the attendees passing a resolution for the formation of an “Anti-Cyberhate Working Group.” Writer Jeffrey Rosen has dubbed this group “The Deciders.” Because of his work on the First Amendment, Rosen was asked to join the conversations, along with other academics, civil libertarians, and policymakers from the U.S. and abroad. Although he can’t identify all the participants by name, he can (and does in this piece) describe the general thrust of the discussions.

Digital ‘NewFronts’ to Face Higher Expectations (AP) The talk of this year’s Digital NewFronts is of both the great progress of digital entertainment and unrealized promises. Since last year, the industry has come a long way. “Netflix’s first major original series, ‘House of Cards,’ proved that streaming video can compete with the most prestigious cable programs,” writes Jake Coyle. “Google’s YouTube rolled out its 100-plus funded channels in a bid to bring higher quality videos (and thus advertisers) to its platform. One of the biggest TV stars, Jerry Seinfeld, launched a handsome Web series, ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.’ But some of the digital series touted last year have disappointed. … Naturally, growing pains are inevitable, especially when so much is changing so fast. The wide array of NewFront presenters this year exhibits the evolving nature of media companies.”

Mike McCue Wants Flipboard To Be The Home Of Brand Advertising For Mobile Publishers (TechCrunch) Flipboard is a popular app that enables its users to create their own magazines. But more than just a place for publishers to distribute and curate content, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue wants the app to enable publishers to better monetize their content by creating a place where brand advertisers can buy beautiful, full-page ads.

How Much Retargeting is Too Much? (Digiday) Jack Marshall discusses “The Retargeting Era,” the current time in which “many users find themselves chased around the Internet by just a handful of brands at a time.” Retargeting makes perfect sense, he asserts. “The biggest weakness of display versus search is display doesn’t have very good intent signals. Someone who has shopped at an e-commerce site like Zappos — that’s a much better signal than the fact she is reading an article about fashion. The problem is that before long the Web could find itself dominated by retargeted ads and little else.” In this piece, he talks about his experiences, and also reveals what some civilians think about retargeted advertising.

Behind Reddit’s Ambivalent Embrace of Advertising (Digiday) Reddit does not take network ad buys, it employs only two ad sales reps, and it routinely turns down campaigns from advertisers it believes do not mesh with the site’s culture. These are luxuries most ad sellers do not have. Reddit general manager Erik Martin sees this as a simple risk-reward scenario. “Yes, we could turn on network advertising and make a ton of money right now,” he argues. “But we would be undermining this community and this amazing social platform we built up.”

###

40+ CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. (Recently added: Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann.) Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent.

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

###

Where Brands Will Spend in Social (Digiday) Last Tuesday, Digiday released its“Brand Investment Report 2013,” the first report in an ongoing series that will look at key drivers, obstacles and benchmarks that reflect how Fortune 1000 companies and their CMOs are navigating the increasingly complex digital marketing ecosystem. According to the report, which was conducted in Q1 of 2013 and is based on primary and secondary research, social is unsurprisingly the top area of focus for brands.

Online Ads Can Now Follow You Home (WSJ) A number of companies are trying to better pinpoint mobile users’ online activity with new software and techniques they say could help advertisers track users across devices. This emergence of cross-screen marketing, according to WSJ’s Spencer Ante, “is one of several new forms of technology aimed at solving a fundamental problem with mobile ads: It is harder to target people on smartphones than on PCs.”

15 Alarming Stats About Online Publishing (DIgiday) With so many publishers vying for users’ attention, building audiences and generating revenue from those audiences is harder than ever online. Feast your eyes on some of the issues they face.

3 Steps to Create Authentic Branded Content (iMedia Connection) You can’t create authentic branded content without first determining what ‘authentic’ means. But even then, you can’t control whether or not readers will view sponsored content as authentic, and whether or not they will share content with friends. What brands can control, though, according to writer Steve Kondonijakos, is “strengthening the fundamentals that put them in a better position to produce compelling sponsored content and increase their chances for an authentic outcome.” Here are his tips on how a brand can achieve that result.

Dark Google Vexes Publishers (Digiday) Many publishers have seen a drop in search traffic, while their share of referrals from social has risen. The drops in search is an analytics problem, caused by “dark search” or “Dark Google,” a technical issue caused by certain browsers blocking websites from tracking exactly how users arrived there. According to digital agency Rosetta, the two biggest sources of dark search right now are Apple devices running iOS 6, and some recent versions of Firefox. But publishers aren’t suffering alone. Dark Google is a huge problem for marketers, too.

Aereo Says Broadcasters Bluffing on Cable Threat (Bloomberg) Chet Kanojia, CEO of Aereo Inc., challenged CBS Corp. and News Corp. to follow through on threats to go off the air and switch to cable to prevent Aereo from retransmitting their shows without permission. The two networks would be sacrificing billions of dollars in ad revenue by making the switch, Kanojia said. “The reality is, they want to get paid twice, and Aereo is just an excuse to articulate that business strategy,” Kanojia said. “Good luck to them.” It will be interesting to see how all this plays out. Kanojia will be speaking at the CM Summit…

Peter Thiel: Twitter Will Outlast the New York Times (CNN Money) Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, argued with Marc Andreessen, creator of the Netscape browser, over the future of Twitter at the Milken Institute Global Conference last Monday. “New technologies are being used to send pictures of your cat halfway around the world,” Thiel said. “We’ve talked ourselves into thinking that throwing cats at birds is the best we can do. We can do more than that.” Andreessen disagreed, comparing Twitter to the printing press and claiming the technology is a fundamental breakthrough in how humans communicate. He also admitted that he feels a bit of schadenfreude seeing the recent struggles of the New York Times as the Internet cuts down on its print profits.

Six Current and Six Rapidly Expanding Trends Marketers Should Focus On (Rishad Tobaccowala) “The future of marketing will be bright,” writes Rishad Tobaccowala, board member of the Wharton Future Of Advertising Project and an advisor at Greycroft Ventures. “Now all of us marketers have to be bright enough in learning, re-inventing and collaborating to remain relevant and truly unleash this potential!” Here are six forces that he believes are driving the future.

Microsoft’s new ad campaign: “Your Privacy Is Our Priority.”

In this week’s Signal: Microsoft is all-in on privacy; the democratization of media; the RebelMouse mashup; riding shotgun on the native ads bandwagon; Tumblr launches mobile ads; IAB’s “Traffic of Good Intent” task force; an interactive look at some of the world’s largest and most interesting data sets; OpenCo celebrates innovative companies; is real-time marketing really real?; great content strategy must-haves; and more.

To the links …

With New Ad Campaign, Microsoft Bets The Farm On Privacy Issue (Ad Exchanger) Microsoft’s new ad campaign, “Your Privacy Is Our Priority,” features TV, radio, print and online ads that create an emotional connection based on the idea that even heavy sharers need some personal privacy. “Through modern tracking technologies such as cookies and beacons, a site could share your browsing history with others,” says the voiceover in one TV spot. “Microsoft is finding ways to give you more control over things you want private. That’s why we’ve added protection in Internet Explorer and included Do Not Track with the belief that one day it too will give you more control.”

The Platform Media Era (Digiday) Digiday spoke with John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks, a collection of tech and media startups, about the biggest trend he sees in the industry — the democratization of media. Borthwick discussed how media companies are addressing consumers’ shortened attention spans and how “big data” falls into the overarching theme of the democratization of media. He also talked about what the next 12-18 months could look like for digital media.

Rebel Mouse Adds Interactive Twist to Online Publishing (Upstart) RebelMouse is beginning to generate some buzz by targeting everyone from individuals who want a mashup of all their social media accounts to major publishers looking for new ways to interact with readers (and please advertisers). The company’s leader, Paul Berry, describes his project as a “technically ambitious” bridge that spans the “gap between Tumblr and WordPress.”

What’s the Fuss About Native Ads? (Monday Note) Frederic Filloux takes on the ensuing Web vs. Native controversy, which he calls “a festival of fake naïveté and misplaced indignation.” Native Advertising is just another term for advertorial, and publishers have been in a constant the tug-of-war with their sales teams — the people who want ads to appear next to editorial content to provide good “context.” In this piece, Filloux focuses on legacy media brand Forbes. Forbes has not only jumped on the native ads bandwagon, but also industrialized the concept by creating BrandVoice, which allows marketers to connect directly with the Forbes audience by enabling them to create content (and participate in the conversation) on the brand’s digital publishing platform.

Tumblr Launches Mobile Ads Today In Big Revenue Push (Ad Age) In a big about-face for a company that once publicly eschewed advertising, Tumblr launched mobile ads last week, placing ads that look and feel like regular posts on the blog network. Users of Tumblr’s iOS and Android apps will see up to four ads per day. The ads will be differentiated with a dollar-sign icon with beams shooting out of it, just as they are in the two existing placements.

IAB to Rally Industry Against Bogus Publishers and Bots (AdWeek) The Interactive Advertising Bureau has established a task force called “Traffic of Good Intent” (TOGI) to take on the robots and shady characters who are stealing millions from advertisers. Task force leaders are our own John Battelle, who has blogged extensively on the rise of fraud in the online ad industry; and Penry Price, president of the data-driven ad targeting firm Media6Degrees, which has also been vocal about weeding out unscrupulous publishers.

Speaking of good intent …

We’ve Seen This Movie Before…On Traffic of Good Intent (Battelle Media) In light of his seat on IAB’s “Traffic of Good Intent” task force, John Battelle provides a history lesson on fraud, from click fraud in the early days of search to how it has migrated to the open ecosystem of programmatic display today.

Suspicious Web Domains Cost the Online Ad Business $400m Per Year (AdWeek) Mike Shields continues his coverage of ghost sites —“seemingly innocuous content pages responsible for massive amounts of traffic on various ad exchanges but exhibiting little evidence of actual human audiences” — by unearthing still more suspect publishers. Experts say it’s impossible to catch all the offenders, especially since many are said to originate from outside the U.S. So, containment, Shields believes, is the more realistic goal.

Information Revolution: Big Data Has Arrived at an Almost Unimaginable Scale (Wired) “The past two decades have seen a nuclear explosion in the collection and storage of digital information,” writes Joanna Pearlstein. “In 2012, 2.8 zettabytes — that’s 1 sextillion bytes, or the equivalent of 24 quintillion tweets — were created or replicated, according to the research firm IDC.” There are hundreds or thousands of petabyte-scale databases today, and Wired has compared their size to what existed two decades ago. Here’s an interactive look at some of the world’s largest and most interesting data sets.

Brands Get Nervous About Data Ownership (Digiday) Because CEOs are now frequently being asked what their big data strategies are, and CMOs are being pressured to turn the volumes of information their companies collect into business insights and smart marketing strategies, brands are starting to panic and to question where their data lives, who has access to it, and what exactly it’s being used for. Many are turning to their agencies with concerns that their data is being used in ways they didn’t approve and perhaps don’t fully understand. One of the things adding to the anxiety is that data is a very broad term that can mean just about everything.

How Do You Make a Dent In The Universe? On Being An “OpenCo” (John Battelle) John Battelle writes about the idea behind OpenCo. “At the core of the OpenCo idea are innovative businesses that are rethinking industries and trying to make their own particular dent in the universe,” he explains. In the past decade, Battelle and his co-founder Brian Monahan noticed the rise of a class of companies that are about more than making money or finding an exit —they want to make some kind of change in the world. OpenCo’s mission is to identify and celebrate those companies by ‘opening up’ the traditional conference model and getting people out into the cities, walking from company to company to soak up the culture and see founders in their native environments.

###

35 CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. (Recently added: Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann.) Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent.

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

###

The Real-Time Marketing Myth (Digiday) Digiday’s Brand Summit was held early last week, and marketers in attendance agreed that people often focus on the flashy outcomes of social media rather than the long, hard labor of raising the metabolism of marketing internally. “The real struggle brands face isn’t tweeting; it’s organizing,” writes Giselle Abramovich. “When you think about it, real-time marketing isn’t real time at all, since companies are planning ahead to prepare for any anticipated conversations that may happen around an event or even a post that a brand makes.”

6 Essential Truths and a Piece of Advice for Content Strategy (ClickZ) Federated Media’s digital and print content strategist Mary Gail Pezzimenti discusses the six must-haves behind a great content strategy, focusing on producing quality content and distributing it to the right, most passionate audience.

Why Brands Struggle with ‘Real Time’ (Digiday) Digital media is moving faster than ever and lots of brands struggle with responding quickly, especially at the pace of platforms like Twitter. Deciding when to act on events is tough but can be extremely rewarding. Digiday spoke to Cecelia Wogan-Silva of Google’s independent ad agency relations team; Sam Niburg, Sr. Associate Brand Manager, at Campbell Soup Company; and others about the things that hold them back from operating at top marketing speed.

Fast Company Puts Twist on Advertiser’s Content (Crain’s) The fast-growing trend of content marketing is taking a new turn with a content partnership between a Fast Company website and the advertising and marketing agency Ogilvy & Mather. Starting next week, Ogilvy will have its own microsite connected to Co.create, the business magazine’s stand-alone entertainment, technology and marketing website. The Ogilvy channel—to be called Content & Pervasive Creativity—will feature videos and blogs supplied by the agency’s executives and clients around the subject of content marketing, says Chief Marketing Officer Lauren Crampsie.

How To Steal Some Of Microsoft’s 76% Ad Tech Market Share (Ad Exchanger) Last week, as part of Ad Exchanger’s “Data Driven Thinking” series, Chris O’Hara, Chief Revenue Officer at NextMark, discussed Microsoft’s impact in the ad tech space as it pertains to Office tools, specifically Excel. Excel has been powering digital media planning since its inception. “While innovative companies have challenged the dominance of these systems in the past, early efforts fizzled,” according to O’Hara. “The complexities of modern digital media planning, combined with the reluctance of agency planners to change their behavior, have hindered innovation. Looking at past and current “systems of record” for media buying, it’s no wonder planners are scared of change.”

Google’s terms prevent third-party Google Glass developers to serve ads to users.

In this week’s Signal: No ads on Google Glass; authenticity is the first casualty in the social media war; Twitter allows advertisers to target; Is it time to make critical distinctions within the Native Matrix?; Data is a hardcore business imperative; Google’s human strategy to combat impression fraud; CMOs are preparing for the digital revolution; Target’s content strategy behind “A Bullseye View”; Is AOL back from the dead?; and much more.

To the links….

Google Bans Devs From Serving Ads on Google Glass (Mashable) Early last week, Google released its Google Mirror API, which lets third-party developers begin building applications for Google Glass. In the terms of service for the API, Google states clearly that developers cannot serve ads to users, or even sell user data for advertising purposes. The company also notes that developers cannot charge users for apps, raising questions about how developers will be able to monetize their services on the platform.

The Rapidly Diminishing Authenticity of Social Media Marketing (ETB) Augie Ray, Director of Social Media for a Fortune 100 financial service company, posits that in the social media war for fans, authenticity was the first casualty and the weapons deployed were sweepstakes, giveaways, contests and social game freebies. “According to the social media gurus, people who fanned a brand would be signalling their authentic affinity for it,” he writes, “and this genuine expression of brand love would ripple through trusted relationships in social networks, multiplying awareness and purchase intent from one consumer to the next to the next. This is not what happened for most brands, because most brands did not start with the most important thing: Fans with authentic affinity. No one benefited from the fact marketers used inauthentic means to amass meaningless fans.”

Twitter Tool Allows Advertisers to Target Tweets (CNBC) As part of its plan to work on new tools to make its ads more effective and boost advertisers’ ROI, Twitter announced on Wednesday that advertisers can now target tweets based on the keywords in them and on the keywords in tweets retweeted or replied to. For example, if someone Tweets about liking a new album from a favorite band, the venue hosting that band’s next performance could target that Twitter user— with a link to buy tickets—based on their location and their conversations about the album.

The Native Matrix (CJR) Felix Salmon takes a stab at drawing useful distinctions between popular terms like content marketing, sponsored content, native advertising, and even brand journalism. Who writes brand material? Was it commissioned by the brand itself, rather than any editor? What happens when content is syndicated? “Trying to draw these distinctions is always going to be a bit silly and futile,” Salmon writes. “Ultimately, they’re all different flavors of the same thing: attempts by companies to get consumers to read things which the company in question, or its executives, wants those consumers to read. There are lots of different ways of trying to skin that particular cat, and none of them is easy. In fact, trying to get consumers to read anything at all, in a world where those consumers are faced with almost infinite choices, has never been harder.”

5 Mistakes Publishers Make With Data (Digiday) Digiday asked industry leaders for their take on what many publishers miss when diving head first into the data-drive media world. The rookie mistakes include tasks such as not knowing where your data is, hiring to the wrong people, and parsing data improperly.

Secret To Google’s Ad Quality Edge: Human Review (Ad Exchanger) Fraudulent ad inventory spawned by bot traffic or browser plug-ins that manipulate ad space on a webpage is often dumped on real-time bidding exchanges, creating a burden of responsibility on the operators of those marketplaces to clean things up. Google, widely regarded as the standard-bearer of policing ad fraud, includes in its strategy a manual review process involving the efforts of hundreds of people. According to the tech giant, those people “review web pages, test our partners’ downloadable software, and prevent ads from showing on sites that violate our policies. Depending on the severity and persistence of the offense, they may stop ad serving on that page or site, or across the publisher’s entire account.”

The Rise of the Digital CMO (HBR) Should CMOs and all marketers be shocked to learn that when it comes to marketing spending, analog still outstrips digital by a factor of three to one? “Sure,” writes Jake Sorofman, “an ample pile of dollars can be attributed to big spending on a few analog media channels, like Super Bowl ads, for example. But I would suggest that there is something more fundamental happening behind the numbers; something lurking in the very nature of digital marketing and what it asks of leadership and what it means for accountability.” Some CMOs are preparing for the digital revolution by filling the gap between expertise and authority; others are afraid of the digital disruption — or exhausted by what it will take to convert digital resistors in the executive suite.

Target’s ‘Show Don’t Sell’ Content Strategy (Digiday) Eighteen months ago, Target began publishing its online magazine called “A Bullseye View.” The site tells the stories behind Target’s products, events, partnerships and other happenings at the company, and now gets about 100,000 unique visitors each month. One thing it doesn’t do: pitch products. The site instead adopts the old journalism mantra, now co-opted by public relations: show, don’t tell. Target’s digital agency, Group SJR, writes the content for the site, and the company’s PR has editorial meetings once a week to discuss what’s going on at the company.

AOL’s Second Life: Reinvention as Media Company (The Economist) AOL’s Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive whose first job was running a small newspaper in Boston, has tried to turn a flagging dial-up internet firm into a content company. Among the properties AOL owns are TechCrunch, a tech-news site; Patch, which provides local news in America’s richer cities, among others; and the Huffington Post, the fourth-most-widely-read news site in America. Armstrong is the company’s biggest individual shareholder, so he has an incentive to do right and has done much to revive a firm that others thought dead. But after just one quarter of growth, is it too early to tap the kegs?

Can Silicon Valley Re-Invent Customer Service? (Washington Post) Customer service is increasingly becoming a premium offering rather than a core offering, and it’s time for that to change, says Dominic Basulto. “Almost without exception, companies have attempted to replace expensive customer service representatives with cheap bots, or even worse — to require the consumer to do the job that customer service workers once did,” he writes. “In many cases, companies no longer even advertise a 1-800 number to contact them — once you’ve signed up as a user, they really don’t want to talk to you ever again. It’s become increasingly clear that if there’s a sweet spot out there for Silicon Valley innovators, it’s using technology to restore ‘service’ to ‘customer service.’’’

###

35 CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. (Recently added: Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann.) Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent.

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

###

Brands Give Over the Social Reins (Digiday) To build followers and position themselves as experts in their markets, some brands have given over the reins of their social media accounts to people outside of the company. For example, AARP let a member takeover the company’s Instagram account last week. Gail Dosik, a Baby Boomer who recently started her own custom cookie business, was given the reins for a day. But is it a good idea? Trusting someone to speak on behalf of the brand is never easy, because the brand is held accountable. That’s why Ford, for example, claims it has never and would never cede control. “Our social accounts are part of the system that is responsible for Ford’s reputation,” said Scott Monty, global head of social media at Ford. “From a legal or regulatory standpoint, not to mention what the SEC might think, it would be incredibly irresponsible of us, a public company, to turn over control of our accounts to non-sanctioned individuals.”

Who’s Winning, iOS or Android? All the Numbers, All in One Place (Time Techland) If you want a clear idea of how the world’s two dominant mobile operating systems are doing, you need to consider lots of data points. Harry McCracken has gathered results from a bunch of studies, focusing on information that’s relatively fresh, and offering some key competitive questions and answers.

Inside Weather’s Data Bet (Digiday) Weather Company, a data company with a media business model, is working with advertisers like Home Depot to serve ads based on intent derived from weather conditions, current and predicted. Weather CEO David Kenny believes weather data is as good of a predictor of intent as search, and, when harnessed correctly, it can signal to advertisers what and when messaging will resonate. “Weather is a path to something else,” Kenny believes. “Most people that are checking the weather are planning something. They’re planning their weekend, they’re planning a trip, they’re planning the day.” The good marketers, he added, are building algorithms around what their consumers are likely planning based on the location they’re in.

Foursquare Planning to Offer Check-in Data to Target Ads on Other Platforms (Ad Age) Foursquare has started pitching a new ad product that would use location and behavioral data to contextualize ads on other platforms. The product is still in development and will eventually allow advertisers to use Foursquare data to target ads purchased through ad exchanges or networks. “We are always looking at ways that could make our data more useful for advertisers and partners, while respecting the privacy of our user’s information,” Foursquare said in a statement. “We’re really excited about our 2013 monetization roadmap, and will provide more details when the time comes.”

As AOL’s Brody Resigns, Will Yahoo Build Ad Tech ‘Dream Team’? (Ad Exchanger) The mixture of Henrique de Castro, Yahoo’s COO; Brian Silver, the company’s VP of ad platforms; and AOL Networks CEO Ned Brody — who just resigned from that post —  as ad sales for Yahoo North America, sounds great on paper. But is it really? None are especially regarded as salespeople, writes David Kaplan, who in this piece focuses on Brody and on Yahoo’s ultimate approach to display advertising, an area it was a long-time leader in until being displaced by Google and Facebook.

And, while we’re on the subject of Yahoo …

Yahoo Joins NY Times And Hits Programmatic Wall (Ad Exchanger) Last Tuesday, Yahoo reconfirmed in its quarterly results that programmatic media has changed its business forever. The statement echoes comments made by The New York Times a few months ago, in which the publisher seemed to pin some of its display ad pain on programmatic. Now Yahoo faces a similar problem. For many large publishers, direct-sold inventory cannot support the CPMs of the past – especially if the content is relatively undifferentiated.

IAB: Mobile Ads Captured 9% Of Online Ad Spend In 2012 (Ad Exchanger) 2012 was another banner year for the online advertising space, with revenues up 15% over 2011. Mobile and digital video led much of that growth. Mobile ad spend grew 111% compared to 2011, the second year of triple-digit growth, accounting for 9% of total internet advertising revenue at $3.4 billion. Digital video revenue increased 29% to $2.3 billion, up from $1.8 billion in 2011. Total online ad spend for the year was $36.6 billion.

RTB Volume Doubles, CPMs Fall As Supply Outstrips Demand (MediaPost) The marketplace for exchange-traded media has doubled in the past quarter and has grown 184% over the past year, according to the latest findings by independent trading desk Accordant Media. The “Q1 Market Pulse” report found that RTB trading increased 98% since the fourth quarter of 2012. The volume of North American media impressions transacted via RTB auctions grew 85% over the fourth quarter of 2012, and 146% over the past year. The data comes on the heels of Tuesday’s release of the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, which showed that the greatest expansion of online advertising revenues is coming not from so-called “premium” display advertising publishers, but from biddable media sources such as Google, Facebook, and secondary premium transacted through programmatic exchanges.

Context Seen Impacting Awareness of – and Receptiveness to – Online Ads (Visual Loop)  Marketingcharts.com has graphed the the propensity to notice online ads, by environment (shopping, email, information, social media, video and gaming sites) and age (Gen Y, Gen X, Baby Boomers and Seniors), with the percentage of respondents indicating where they are most likely to notice an online ad.

Wired co-founders Jane Metcalfe and Louis Rossetto. (Photo courtesy of Louis Rossetto.)

In this week’s Signal: Wired’s 20^th anniversary; what viewers want from branded video; banner ads — creepy interruptions; AOL is automating everything that can be automated; Tumblr disbands Storyboard; OpenCo is headed to NYC with your help; Intel creates the TV service that you’ve always wanted; Google’s Star Trek computer isn’t just a metaphor; and more.

To the links…

How Wired Magazine Changed the Way We Talk About Technology (Adweek) Ted Greenwald gives an exclusive sneak peek at Wired’s 20^th anniversary issue. From ‘the beginning of the beginning,’ when Wired co-founder Louis Rossetto (and your humble editor) sensed that the encoding of information in 1s and 0s was going to change everything, to the ‘manifesto’ and investor pitches, to when the magazine found its voice and the world got Wired, it’s all in here. A fantastic read about the dawning of a legacy that’s still going strong.

Blurring Lines Between Video Ads and Content (Digiday) Today’s consumer is more receptive to storytelling than to product pitches. Not only should branded video tell a story that’s shareable, it should also take into account the many devices consumers will view it on. According to YouTube, video viewers are usually ages 35 and under, and this generation has a thirst for authenticity and participation. So when brands try too hard to be clever or cute, it hardly ever works.

And, since we’re on the topic of video …

Google’s Wojcicki: Pepsi Prank with Jeff Gordon is Future of Online Ads (Paid Content) A Pepsi-produced stunt-driving prank in which disguised racing star Jeff Gordon takes a car salesman for a harrowing ride was watched by 33 million on YouTube last month. According to Susan Wojcicki, a senior VP at Google, this shows how online ad-viewing is an increasingly voluntary experience, and how marketers are more dedicated to producing content people want to see.

Banner Ad’s Creators Dismayed By Its Current State (Digiday) Advertisers and agencies lament the lack of creativity typically given banners, which some see as on their way to becoming a purely direct-response tool. Digiday asked those involved in the creation of the first banner ad — an AT&T ad that ran on HotWired (there’s that Wired brand again!)  in October 1994 — for their thoughts on the state of the banner ad nearly two decades later. “Most [banners] aren’t serving value. They’re in the business of interrupting what you’re doing,” said G.M. O’Connell, founder of Modem Media, the agency that created the first banners. “There’s a limited creativity that’s been applied with what you can do with that space and the space itself is very limiting. On cellphones, it’s worse. Today these retargeting ads are creepy to me.” Don’t worry GM, it’s going to get waaaay better. 

AOL Unveils Its Supply-Side Platform (Ad Exchanger) AOL has launched its long-promised supply side platform, Marketplace. According to Allie Kline, AOL Networks’ CMO, “Everything we’ve been doing the past few months at AOL Networks is meant to give substance to the hype around programmatic tools for buyers and sellers. We’re more prepared to automate the things that can be automated.” Some believe AOL might be acting too late, but as a greater number of publishers appear ready to forge ahead in programmatic, AOL’s timing may be good enough.

Tumblr Cuts Editorial Team (ATD) David Karp, CEO of Tumblr has announced the disbanding of Storyboard, its four-person editorial team. “The team’s mandate was to tell the stories of Tumblr creators in a truly thoughtful way — focusing on the people, their work, and their stories,” Karp wrote in a post on April 9. All four employees will be “moving on.”

But perhaps there’s more to the story …

String of Executive Departures Leaves a Leadership Vacuum at the Top of Tumblr (BetaBeat) The Storyboard layoffs are hardly the only departures Tumblr has faced over the past six or seven months. Rather, they’re the only ones that CEO David Karp has spoken about publicly. Sources close to the company, who requested anonymity, told Betabeat that a handful of high-level deputies have also quietly ended their tenure at Tumblr, leaving a noticeable absence around Mr. Karp where his leadership team should be. “It’s like the f*cking Argentinian government, people just get disappeared,” said one source. This news, combined with current financial concerns, leave some insiders puzzled at the board’s faith in Mr. Karp (not to mention it’s advertising model).

OPENCO is Coming to NYC, But Only If You Support It: Please Help Us!  (BattelleMedia) John Battelle and Brian Monahan, co-founders of OpenCo, have started an IndieGoGo campaign to raise funds for their OpenCoNY Festival. This “festival of innovation” will celebrate companies that embrace a set of values surrounding the concept of openness: open collaboration, open communication, open community, open company and open doors to you. Attendees will meet these innovators in their native habitat and hear about how they are trying to change the world, and why.  Battelle sees OpenCo as a movement. “The kinds of businesses we curate into the festival are literally changing the world, and this festival lets them open their doors to the public and share their knowledge with the community,” he writes. “We keep at least a third of the tickets free to the public, but we also sell tickets at various levels for those who want to ensure they get access to the companies they really want to see.” The OpenCo platform is coming to four cities this year – starting on May 21 in New York.

###

35 CEOs, CMOs, VCs and media leaders in two days of unscripted conversation. (Recently added: Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann.) Come to the CM Summit to join the conversation about “Bridging Data and Humanity.” New York City, May 21-22. The only conference this year curated by your faithful correspondent.

Also, if it suits your information consumption goals, sign up for Signal’s email newsletter or RSS feed on the Signal home page (upper right box).

###

Intel Cooks Up Future of TV: A Potential Mess for Cable (Ad Age) The TV service you’ve always wanted has been built by Intel, and it’s in the hands of a few secret testers at media companies and agencies. Intel established Intel Media to build an “over-the-top” TV service, joining streaming-video players such as Netflix and Hulu. Its service, however, will be the first to deliver a full array of cable TV channels over the Internet. The company has not announced a name, a price or a release schedule more specific than some time this year, but those who have seen it describe it as a significant advance over any existing cable or satellite platform.

Where No Search Engine Has Gone Before  (Slate) Farhad Manjoo, author and Slate’s technology columnist, has covered Google over the years and long assumed that the company’s Star Trek-like search engine chatter was meant as marketing. He never thought that the tech giant was really trying to build a machine as encyclopedic and humanistic as the all-knowing ship’s computer. But he’s now wondering if that’s exactly what Google is doing. So he went to there to interview some of the people who are working on the search engine. And what he heard floored him. “The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building,” Amit Singhal, who heads Google’s search rankings team, told him. “It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build — the ideal version done realistically.”

Sponsored Content’s 5 Biggest Hurdles (Digiday) From the basics of what it is to how it’s measured and how it scales to work for both publishers and advertisers, sponsored content, now commonly known as native advertising, has several hurdles to overcome. Digiday offers some key points (and counterpoints) around definition, scale, measurement, trust and relevance. Regarding the trust factor, Ben Kunz, VP of Strategic Planning at Mediassociates, reminds readers that “native, by its very definition, disguises the source. Anyone else who says otherwise is bullshitting.”

GM Returns To Facebook Ads; Will Super Bowl Be Next? (Forbes) Less than a year after General Motors‘ very public repudiation of the effectiveness of paid advertising on Facebook, the company is testing mobile ads for the Chevy Sonic. GM only came back to the Facebook-advertising fold after several months of wrangling with Facebook executives about ways to improve tracking of advertising results on the site and to boost its effectiveness.

Forget Data Transparency: Options Grow For Letting You Hide Your Data (GIGAom) Increasing concerns about companies’ collection and use of personal Internet user data have given rise to a few solutions, including a personal data locker where users would be able to store their own information and grant companies limited access, rather than abide by companies’ privacy policies. There’s also been talk of compelling companies to disclose the data they keep on consumers, even though it might be hard to understand and use. But, increasingly, others are simply opting out of the data revolution. As more companies dream up more ways to target consumers, and consumers become more weary of being tracked and targeted, better solutions to the privacy problem are likely to be presented in response.

Report: Teen Interest in Social Media Dwindling (TechCrunch) Though teens still consider Facebook their most important social network, Piper Jaffray, a leading investment bank and asset management firm, reports that the numbers are down regarding how many teens see Facebook as the most important social media website. Over the past year, the number of teens who deem Facebook as the most important social media site has dropped from more than 30 percent to just over 20 percent.

Why PC Sales Are In Free Fall (IW: Byte) The latest IDC report has some alarming news for Microsoft and the PC industry. Personal Computer sales are in free fall due to lack of hardware and software innovation. Not only has Microsoft Windows 8 failed to save the PC industry, the hated operating system has actually harmed PC sales.