Pictured above are the crack team of staff from our Turner Digital Media Tech and Turner Sports Interactive teams as we relaunch the ad systems on Nascar.com today. I played a key role, bringing two dozen hot donuts (from Krispy Kreme, of course) and a humongous box of coffee. The launch went swimmingly, of course - this is a great team to work with!
Tags: adserver, advertising, migration, nascar, relaunch, turner
This year’s Admonsters excursion (to conference #17 to be exact) took me out to the environs of Albequerque and Santa Fe at the Hyatt Tamaya resort in Bernalillo, New Mexico. We decided to make this a family affair since very soon Amy will be on a no-travel regimen (due date is October 31, only 10 weeks away). Amy’s parents also joined us for a bit of R&R&Sam. To top that all off, Amy’s aunt (who is from Albequerque) and uncle came down from Denver - and their son Jonathan came out from LA. So all in all it turned into a little Handelman/Siegel/Gardenswartz reunion.
We had a great dinner with Bobbi’s 90-year-old father and the rest of the clan on Friday night, headed up to Santa Fe on Saturday along with 100,000 of our closest friends for the annual Indian Market and Art Show. It was a madhouse, but a great way to see the full scope of what the area’s artistans have to offer. One celebrity spotting, Curtis Stone of TLC’s Take Home Chef. Despite rumors of both Oprah and Dennis Hopper being seen around our hotel, neither was confirmed.
Check out this photo gallery of our time there.
Tags: advertising, Family, new-mexico, santa-fe, Travel
The conference was great. Kicked off with a keynote by Tarik Sedky, Chief Digital Officer at Young & Rubicam. He spoke quite earnestly about the truck coming down the highway, headed straight for the operational and technical aspects of all digital media - a rapid growth in demand for creativity and originality at all levels of publisher organizations. Check out gettheglass.com for one example he shared. And it turns out that Tarik did some time in Chatham County back in the day - he lived in Thunderbolt when he was working for Anderson Advertising out of Hilton Head on the Gulfstream account.
The first day of sessions focused on ad operations and video advertising, build v. buy for ad operations, motivating operations teams, rich media challenges and the like. Day two was all about the vendors, and I made some good contacts and renewed others. The final day was the most engaging, with less formal presentations that evolved into dynamic discussions on topics on widgets, mobile, and advertising issues in non-linear and AJAX environments. I’m looking forward to keeping in touch with new contacts.
Tags: admonsters, advertising, conference, santa-fe
You’d think I’d hear about this around the office, but instead saw this blogged by someone at Optaros, a vendor we use. My co-workers David Payne, Dermot Waters and Lori Adams are blogging the CNN.com Relaunch project. Check it out here. The comments are a great read.
It’s been a busy few days for us at Turner Broadcasting. Today, CNN.com took the wraps off a beta preview of their new design coming on July 1st (as reported earlier). Full disclosure - I work for Turner Broadcasting, and my ad services team has worked extensively on this project, but the views herein are my own. But as one blog put it:
Something strikes me as… different. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It looks cleaner. Brighter. Cleaner. Grayer. Whiter. Redder. Bluer. Nicer.
The blogs seem to have welcomed the new video treatment (no popup player, and now in Flash!), the Amazon-like ‘We Recommended’ feature, the intelligent use of Ajax, the tabbed presentation in stories highlighting multimedia elements and even, daresay it, the cleaner ad presentation. Some comments do opine for the ability to embed videos on user sites, however. I do think the new site embraces the spirit of Web 2.0, emphasizing the blogosphere on every story (via Sphere) and utilizing Topix for local coverage. Another very cool feature are the new Hot Topics pages, which are being autogenerated for pretty much any story, personality or subject you might dream up; here are a few examples: tuberculosis, Lindsay Lohan, Vioxx, and George W. Bush. As an added bonus, all of these are also available as RSS feeds, huzzah!
As with Gametap 3.0 that launched yesterday, my team has been working on the advertising portions of this project for many months. I’m encouraged to read in some blogs that the ads are less obtrusive, and on the technology side, we’ve really broken what I believe is new ground with some of the underlying approaches, especially around the new video players.
Please do check it out, and be sure to add your comments - there is a handy ‘+Feedback’ link on most pages, and the site wants to hear your opinion. More coverage of the beta can be found here.
Yesterday marked a major milestone for everyone’s favorite broadband gaming service. Launched back in 2005, Gametap was born out of the concept of doing what Turner Broadcasting has done for other businesses - acquiring rights to libraries of content, then programming that content in new and lucrative ways. Now, with yesterday’s launch, Gametap is adding to that subscription model by offering a rotating selection of free games to play from their web site, as well as simultaneous access to new releases (Lara Croft’s latest). There is now also a direct digital download service where you can download to own games. David Reid, Gametap’s VP of Marketing, sums it up this way:
It’s really hard to explain to someone what 900 of the greatest games of all time in one place means.
My team has been working with Gametap for several months now integrating advertising into both their new and improved web site as well as their new lite and existing deluxe player. It’s been an exciting project - it’s always fun to do work where it involves gaming! And did I mention that there will soon be a Mac client too - said to be by late Summer according to one of the Joystiq articles! Woohoo!
More coverage here:
Tags: advertising, gametap, Gaming, Mac, turner_broadcasting
A colleague has pointed out that our hometown Atlanta Journal Constitution (free registration required) has a more in-depth story on Pipeline moving to a free product. Read ‘CNN’s Pipeline will Stream for Free.‘
In a story in today’s Wall Street Journal (free content) today that focuses on a new CNN initiative with Internet Broadcasting, a Minneapolis-based company that publishes the web sites for 70 local television stations, CNN has secured rights to use local stories from these affiliates, and will in turn provide content to them. As part of the deal, CNN is also taking a minority equity stake in the company. But an interesting tidbit can be found in the last paragraph of the article:
This summer, CNN also is planning to roll out a redesigned Web site that makes all its live and archived video content available free, shifting the subscription model to an advertising model.
And yes, my team has been working tirelessly on this effort for the last six months or more. I believe it’s a game-changer - the product formerly known as Pipeline (reviewed by PC Magazine at launch as ‘the most impressive video offering the Web has ever seen’) is moving to a free model, and when news is happening, I can’t imagine anyone not turning to this product if they don’t have direct access to a television but are online.
The article also talks at length about how much local market online advertising has grown relative to the overall interactive business, something on the order of 200% v. 70% over the last few years according to eMarketer stats cited in the story. This deal helps CNN in this area, and ideally increases traffic (and advertising rates) for both properties. By way of comparison, the article points out that IB has an audience of 13mm, versus CNN.com’s 27.9, and Yahoo and MSNBC.com’s 33.1mm.
Tags: advertising, CNN, internet-broadcasting, journalism, msnbc, news, Video, yahoo
Meant to post this a while back. I was in San Francisco for the recent Ad:Tech Conference. This was the view from the hallway of my hotel- an amazing panorama from the Golden Gate Bridge (far left, out of frame) to the Transamerica Building, Coit Tower, Alcatraz and the Bay Bridge (far right, out of frame). A truly amazing view. The show was excellent as well, and I spoke to some very bright folks involved in the burgeoning ad business. DoubleClick was showing off their Exchange product and new logo (very Web 2.0 green), there were more ad networks than you could shake a stick at, and video ad syndication plays were everywhere.
Tags: advertising, Photography, san francisco, Travel, Video, web2.0
So the news broke earlier this week that everyone’s favorite broadband gaming site, Turner’s very own GameTap is expanding their offering to include free-to-play games in an ad-supported environment. You can guess that my team has been actively working on this project for a while. It’s pretty exciting. Much like the varying levels of ‘membership’ on services like Xbox Live, GameTap will offer non-paying, non-registered users access to some games, playable from a light-weight version of their ‘grandaddy’ client. General Manager Stu Snyder (who was just promoted yesterday to a new role as executive vice president and chief operating officer of animation, young adults & kids media in addition to his GameTap role) said it this way in the Business Week story:
“With 2 to 3 million uniques per month, we realized we weren’t monetizing that many uniques to our website,” he says. “We kind of looked back and said, ‘gee, we should [offer an ad-supported version].’ Also, our demographic was looking for an easy way to play games without making a huge time commitment or financial commitment. So we figured why not have all options for all gamers?”
Other content becomes available with a free registration, and users can graduate to the full product and 800+ games with a full subscription. We have also been working to support an ad-supported version of the large range of video content previously only available in the full client known as Gametap TV. I think this ad-supported model has some real legs! Coverage of the project has been widespread, from Business Week, Ars Technica, Kotaku, and the San Jose Mercury News.
Tags: advertising, Gaming
Although it’s a somewhat soft launch today (shhh - don’t tell anybody), the Turner Broadcasting new venture I mentioned a few months ago when the splash page was posted has gone live today in all it’s UGC and comedic goodness. Get in there, check out the funny stuff (quite a bit NSFW), register and make some friends (I’m JoeBobATL). There are bits of coverage by members of the team (What do I know?), on Fark.com (one of the providers of content, and a great destination on it’s own) and by another one of the content providers, Olde English. Do check out this goofy woman-on-the-street vid (Making Friends by Chelsea Peretti) and the hilarious Sodom and Gomorrah by Brad Neely, pictured above in this screenshot from the launch. My team was involved in the advertising technology for this - and we’re pretty proud of how this came out. Share and Enjoy!
Tags: advertising, ugc, Video, web2.0
