by Jacqueline Koch | Jun 22, 2016 |
By Christopher Ross
Publishers have always known that quality, original content is the undisputed king for engaging and maintaining a relationship with readers. It’s a fact that’s been a cornerstone of the publishing industry for decades.
But what if a reader wants to dive deeper, to explore beyond the featured content and know more about the props in the story or the pictures, or even more about the surrounding scenery? What if the reader wanted to purchase elements found in the narrative? Welcome to the world of shoppable content, where a reader can enjoy content, while seamlessly creating a personal shopping list.
Shoppable ads
Shoppable ads are one manifestation of how the online retail experience is being advanced by technology. A key element to the technology its ability to eliminate barriers so a reader can move about a site without unnecessary new tabs or excessive extra actions. Even for the digitally savvy consumer, the movement between multiple platforms presents real barriers to shopping for items in the content. It is right to assume consumers care little about platforms but to stay engaged, must be able to move seamlessly across them. In a recent Guardian article, titled Rise of shoppable content will change the face of advertising, Simon Hathaway stated “technology is resetting [our] expectations of retail and transforming shopping behaviour. We are getting used to being able to click on a product image and go into the buying process. Soon, we’ll expect to be able to buy any image we click on – and be frustrated if we can’t.”
Shoppable content
The challenge to create a seamless shoppable content solution between platforms is especially problematic on mobile devices where consumers are increasingly leaning but the technology is less accommodating. One such solution comes from Zumobi, a Seattle based tech firm that aggregates a client’s multiple sites into a single mobile destination. Zumobi transforms a brand’s content from multiple sources, such as social media channels, video platforms, product information and content management systems, into a dynamic “flipboard like” mobile destination, dubbed a microzone. It enables shoppable content where readers can purchase items found in the microzone.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Jun 14, 2016 |
By Jacqueline Koch
“We’re hacking into the audio and visual systems of your brain,” director Chris Milk and co-founder of virtual reality company, Vrse said to The New York Times just over a year ago regarding virtual reality projects. “A major part of journalism is painting people a picture of what it was like to actually be there. With this, the audience actually feels like they are there.”
In the year that followed, it became increasingly clear that VR is pushing its way beyond the realm of sci-fi and gaming and into the mainstream. A few VR highlights over the last 12 months also indicate that Milk’s take on the relationship between VR and journalism, while complex, is crystalising. Immediately after introducing Sundance audiences to the Millions March in NYC, a VR journalism broadcast venture between directors Chris Milk, Spike Jonze and Vice News, Milk marched onto Davos to debut Clouds Over Sidra. The groundbreaking collaboration with the UN used VR to highlight the life of a Syrian girl in a refugee camp.
Fast forward to November. An unassuming cardboard box—Google Cardboard—lands on 1.3 million US doorsteps in tandem with the Sunday New York Times. More recently, dispatches from the 2016 Sundance Film Festival describe the ‘boom’ in virtual reality, augmented reality and immersive films that include an extensive line-up of documentaries.
For the researchers, scientists, investors and engineers who have spent decades attempting to push VR across the finish line, this may look like the victory lap. On the sidelines, there are those cheering and eager to seize the storytelling opportunities this technology brings. Yet among them there are many—particularly from the newsroom—that are grappling with the implications of an emerging and highly elastic platform transforming to an established platform.
Merging the Newsroom onto the VR Superhighway
There is a balance to be struck between the unparalleled potential of a highly compelling storytelling format and the practicalities and many implications that arise from a platform that spans diverse genres. At the same time, it’s time to lead, follow or get out of the way, according to Robert Hernandez, of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. In his 2016 media forecast published in the Neiman Lab, the Harvard-based media innovation report, he asks, ‘Do news orgs get in early and risk the tech not working out? Or should they wait and let others define VR journalism and risk being left behind, again?’ His answer: Both.
The question then is, how? While journalists and media organisations are eager to get behind the wheel, there is broad consensus that there are no rules of the road. Taking practicalities and logistics into account, VR demands innovation, expertise, bigger budgets, flexibility and longer production lead time. The price of admission is going down, and Hernandez, echoed by others in the industry, cites 360-degree video as ‘the low-hanging fruit of VR’. Partnering with universities leading the charge and tapping into fresh student talent also may serve as a practical and efficient onramp to the VR track.
The New York Times has committed strategy and resources to make VR a viable journalistic tool. Their earnings released on February 4, showed net income of $52 million for the fourth quarter—a 48 percent increase over the same period in 2014—may point to efforts paying off.
‘We believe that our strategic approach—to rapidly build out new high value propositions for marketers in branded content, mobile, video and VR—is paying off,’ said Mark Thompson, the company’s chief executive said in an earnings call with investors.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Jun 9, 2016 |
By Steven Wise
TechCrunch Disrupt is the preeminent forum for startups that crave visibility with investors, potential partners, the technology press, and anyone who wants to be in the know about what’s hot in technology. The event is held three times per year: in NY in the spring, in San Francisco in the fall, and in Europe toward the end of the year. The most anticipated component of the event is the Startup Battlefield, where companies get to make a six-minute pitch then answer six minutes of questions from a panel of judges.
Tech Crunch Disrupt NY 2016 took place last month and didn’t disappoint. As usual, the startups that got the coveted Battlefield slots represented a wide variety of categories. Several related to health and wellness (like WaterO, next generation water purifier and ArtVeoli, a hardware start-up using algae and microfluidics to produce oxygen and freshen indoor air). Others related to the Internet of Things (IoT), like Lumenus, which integrates electronics and LEDs into smart-clothing, and Spinn, an internet-connected centrifugal coffee maker. We’ll take a closer look at some of the hot new companies worth checking out.
New ways to create and manage content
TimeLooper promises “immersive time travel technology [that] enables tourists to experience destinations at key moment
s in history through VR videos on smartphones.” While visiting popular tourist destinations, consumers download the TimeLooper app to their smartphones, which they place into an inexpensive holder, similar to Google Cardboard.
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TimeLooper content partners will create short augmented reality (AR) films that recreate an historic event that you can watch in the place that it happened. For example, look around at the 1666 Great Fire of London while visiting Tower Bridge Museum or watch the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall as you stand at the site in Germany.
TimeLooper envisions a freemium content model where some AR videos will be available for free while many others will cost a few dollars, which they split with the tourist destination operators. They also plan to generate revenue from native advertising (imagine a Coke billboard in the Berlin Wall video).
Laugh.ly was one of the “wild card” startups presenting at Disrupt, meaning they were selected by a vote of the conference audience and TechCrunch editorial staff. Essentially, they want to be the Pandora app of comedy. Laugh.ly already has over 400 comedians onboard whose material will be distributed through the app. Consumers can enjoy playlists based on artist or themes (e.g., jokes about in-laws) and can share playlists or specific jokes with friends. The app creators made a point of explaining this is not just a comedy content play. Their vision is to expand to other forms of spoken word entertainment and they’re building proprietary technology for indexing and searching content in audio files. The app is available to consumers at no cost but those willing to pay $7.99 for a monthly subscription can enjoy the service ad free and can download content.
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Botify Is designed to help digital marketer control how Google understands their websites. They claim that Google’s search bots ignore 35 per cent to 55 per cent of web pages across various commerce verticals like travel and classifieds. Webmasters at beta customers including Expedia, eBay, Airbnb, and Time Inc., have all used the Botify tools to analyse which pages are not getting crawled by Google, so that they can redesign their site structure to improve coverage.
Botify reports sites have been averaging a 35 per cent improvement in Google indexing within the first 6 months of use. This Paris-based startup completed a $7.2 million series A funding round and will offer the tool through a SaaS subscription model.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Jun 4, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
Four-year-old AwesomenessTV is on a mission to create a global media brand targeted at Millennial women between 16 and 24. What started out as a single YouTube channel founded by television producer Brian Robbins, with US$5m in funding supplied by YouTube, has grown into a multi-channel video network with 90,000 YouTube channels and over 3.3 million subscribers, a talent management service, a record label, movie studio and much more. The company was acquired by DreamWorks in 2013.
According to chief digital officer Kelly Day, the key to their growth has been developing close relationships with the biggest talent in the digital space – often found on YouTube – to create high quality video content that is distributed across a wide range of platforms.
According to Day, in the early days of YouTube, the key to success was creating a massive amount of content that could be discovered when users searched for key topics. This allowed the company to quickly grow from a single YouTube channel into a multi-channel network that allows fans to create their own content.
But content creation is deeply embedded in AwesomenessTV’s DNA, so moving from YouTube to creating a feature film (which went to top of the iTunes chart) at the end of 2014, was a natural fit.
Today, AwesomenessTV is making episodic television-type content as well as feature films for a wide ranges of platforms. Two movies, currently in production, should enjoy a wide theatrical release.
Meeting the millennial audience where they are
The focus has been on developing other platforms rather than awesomenesstv.com including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Day pointed out that the youth audience already spends all their time on social channels so building the brand there made sense. “We built the brand in the places we knew they were spending time,” she said.
At launch, there was almost no focus on Facebook because, at the time, teens were abandoning Facebook for Twitter and Instagram. Today, this trend has reversed and now Facebook has become a much bigger focus.
Content strategy
“We believe in content as marketing,” said Day. “We invest in creating original shows or at least cuts of original shows that are unique to each platform.” Most episodes are between 5 to 11 minutes long and can be packaged into 22-minute segments. Most videos for Facebook are less than a minute and for Instagram, they are under 15 seconds. Day said the company has dedicated teams who work on each platform. “We invest in people and content, not buying media,” she said.
About 40 per cent of traffic comes from new content and the rest comes from archived content. Day explained that because YouTube is so search driven, you get traffic forever.
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