Digital Quarters

I’ve been quiet on my blog recently, which – as you may have guessed — is an indicator that I’ve been particularly busy.

Over the last several months, I’ve been out talking with leading media industry executives about the challenge we face in making digital media as successful as its analog predecessor.  We can all name the roots of the challenge:  the explosion of supply online, and the ease with which consumers can move from one property to another.  We are now living with the results, including an extraordinary number of websites for users to choose from, and a challenge for publishers in getting and holding consumers’ attention and advertisers’ dollars.

While I’ve been on the road, 35 smart and talented people at Wetpaint have been working to address these challenges head-on:  by inventing a new business model for digital media.  A new model that uses technology in the most disruptive way at the core of the publishing business. Beyond just taking friction out of the workflow, my team has designed new advantages  that can reduce the costs of content creation and audience recruitment by a factor of 5-10X vs. benchmark publishers, all while offering greater appeal to consumers and advertisers alike.

This weekend, we  launched the first version of our publishing platform, with our first media property built on it: Wetpaint Entertainment.  For consumers, it’s a breakthrough user experience – full of glossy photos, fun and interactive, and social to the core.  For advertisers, it’s a rich, engaging, and premium context in which to reach core target audiences – the same audiences, in fact, that they already target with network TV buys.

But for the 35 of us at Wetpaint, it is far more:  it is our first milestone in our mission to revolutionize media.

An audacious goal, isn’t it? Let me explain.

What Will Leading Media Properties Look Like?

In the four years since we launched Wetpaint, we’ve seen plenty of innovation in digital media.  User-generated content, video, and social media have all risen from small fancies to widespread prominence. Meanwhile, we’ve experienced the rise of content distributors, such as Google, Facebook, and Huffington Post, to unexpected levels of audience and influence.  But all the while, the precious core segments of the publishing industry – news and magazine publishing – have been suffering layoffs, closures, and an increasing sense of irrelevance under the pressures of the new digital playing field and amidst dwindling audience and advertiser interest in their brands.  And with the specter of doom around the corner, no one has come up with a true replacement for their withering business model.

The question for us as an industry is (with a nod to Tim Armstrong, the CEO of Aol, for phrasing it):  Who is going to be the Time Inc. or Conde Nast of the digital future?   And, more importantly, how?

The answer is not so-called content farms, such as Associated Content or Demand Media.  Content farms may be a valuable tactical business, but they do not produce leadership, loyalty, or destinations – much less brand premiums.  Nor is the answer Facebook or Flipboard or Twitter. They are great conduits for content and attention, but they rely on content creation happening elsewhere – with few exceptions, the best they can do is surface what’s created on other platforms.

The answer is that the next generation of publishers must still create quality content – but they have to create it far more cheaply, or their business model won’t work. The editor-intensive newsrooms of The New York Times and Time Inc. are not models for a digital future; but neither is the Huffington Post, with its heavy reliance on an unpaid squad of volunteers in far-flung places.

The new leader will be defined by three key advantages:

• By creating consistently outstanding content (as judged by the audience) – without the burden of producing content the audience doesn’t value, thrown like so much spaghetti against a wall.
• By distributing content conveniently wherever and whenever consumers want it - taking full advantage of mobile, video, SMS, Facebook, email, Google, and more to meet the consumer on the consumer’s terms, not the publisher’s.
• By creating user experiences that are so compelling that they build destination brand value – realizing that most content is now a mere commodity just seconds after being published, while experiences are ownable.

When these three strategies perform in tandem, one can uniquely publish with high velocity, low cost, outstanding reach, and most importantly, earning huge consumer loyalty – all of which accrues not only to the metrics on a spreadsheet that indicate a healthy business, but more importantly to a brand premium that builds results year after year.

A Platform With Which To Create Leading Titles

And if a publisher were to possess a platform that can repeatably produce such titles, they would have golden egg after golden egg in the form of media titles that can serve one audience after the next.

Today we launch the new Wetpaint Entertainment, operating on our first iteration of such a platform.  Our new platform is built on the idea that we can use technology and data from this morning to influence what we write this afternoon.  That the editorial art can be informed by data science.  And that with the fundamental changes of the last five years, we now have an environment abundant in data to inform what content will suit an audience – and empower publishers to write the content that audiences love, without chasing the red herring of ideas that sound good but won’t produce results.

While all that horsepower is brewing under the hood, what our audience will see is far simpler: whether on Facebook, on the web, or on an iPad, they’ll experience a beautiful site that entices them with rich visual imagery, fun experiences, and the most appealing content that completes their relationship with their favorite TV shows.

Today is the first milestone for Wetpaint toward a vision of revolutionizing media – for consumers and for the industry. Please, come visit and enjoy.

The following post appeared as a guest post at Mediapost on February 25, 2010.

A couple of weeks ago, I was privileged to be a guest for a breakfast with Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor and confidant to President Obama, while she was traveling through the Seattle area. Planning for her travel, Ms. Jarrett’s staff proactively reached out to Northwest executives and organizations to meet and discuss our challenges and ideas.

And Valerie did something remarkable: She listened. Her breakfast offered an important lesson for those of us in the media industry whose job is primarily around broadcasting our message to the masses: to listen truly and deeply to reality as it is, rather than how we want it to be.

On dozens of different topics, Valerie Jarrett took in every word, whether it came from supporter or critic. She demonstrated (in a perception-is-reality sort of way) that every voice she heard was bringing her not only perspective, but potential solutions. She pressed each opinion to understand it and to ask — directly — for the best ideas. She demonstrated she was taking those proposals to heart, and moreso, and taking them back with her to the White House to do the most important thing – take action.

The challenges facing the Obama administration are great: the fatigued healthcare initiative; the burden of extreme deficits; and a public that has been increasingly losing faith their change agent. And after seeing this inner-circle advisor open her eyes, ears, and arms to criticisms and solutions, I walked away inspired with the sense that they have a good shot of figuring it out.

And acting. The thing with listening is that it’s only useful if you actually do something with it — and she did. A favorite example from the morning: When Ken Myer offered an idea for the White House to host a robotics competition on the south lawn as a symbol of the importance of science education, Ms. Jarrett said right on the spot that she’ll make it happen.

Back in the media industry, how many executives make the time to meet with our constituents — both our supporters and our critics — just to hear what’s on their minds? Even moreso, how many of us really listen when we have the chance? What impressed me most about Valerie Jarrett was that whether they flattered her positions or not, she wanted to hear reality from every perspective, and embrace solutions.

Too often in our changing media industry, leaders aren’t facing the brutal facts, much less acting on them. We are facing rapid shifts in the way content is consumed and what advertisers want for their dollar. And what many publishers are doing is the opposite of action: it is hiding.

There is hope. I loved reading Kara Swisher’s account of how Carol Bartz hosted her most vocal critic in the company cafeteria to share her Yahatred openly with 600 employees. Summoning the beast to the inner sanctum was a clear statement to executives and employees to listen to their critics and hear challenging perspective, to take it seriously, and most importantly to act on it.

But at the same time, some old media companies just don’t want to hear it. I frequently see first-hand and hear stories from friends of how the biggest and oldest media companies are ignoring reality. One of the most striking examples was at last week’s breakfast. Frank Blethen, Publisher of the Seattle Times stood up and said into the microphone: “Contrary to popular belief, the newspaper business model is sound.” He might be the only person in America who thinks so. And if he does have the secret to solving the newspaper publishing mess, he must not be sharing it. But more than likely, he’s hard of hearing. Instead of openly listening for solutions to stabilize the business in the face of declining circulation, pages, and advertising, he is in denial. Too many from the biggest and oldest media companies are ignoring reality — and the results will be fatal for them.

For the future of our industry, may we be challenge ourselves to listen like Valerie Jarrett and Carol Bartz. Let’s bring in the toughest critics. Let them loose and have them take their toughest shots. For us, we can thicken our skins to take it, and be better for it. Focus on the criticism that makes us cringe, and use it to inspire new solutions. The more we see and hear reality – the more we invite it into our cafeterias for breakfast or lunch, listen to it, and ask it for ideas, the sooner we can innovate our way to success.