by Jacqueline Koch | May 16, 2017 |
By Janinne Brunyee
While listening to the speakers pitching their startups at the first ever Seattle Female Founders Alliance Founders Showcase last week, I had an important realization: I was much more captivated by the pitches that were framed by the speaker’s personal story. It wasn’t that these speakers had a better business idea or go-to-market strategy. It was just that I found myself leaning in a bit more, paying closer attention and emotionally investing in their success.
And that reminded me why I co-founded a firm that is committed to the art of storytelling. Each presenter had a specific call-to-action in mind: find an investor, attract high talent employees, drive sign-ups. The speakers I connected with understood what they needed to do to inspire action: unite an idea with an emotion. And the best way to do that is to tell a compelling story.
Here are a few of the stories told by female startup founders to a captive audience at The Riveter, the new co-working space in Capitol hill built by women, for women.
Give in Kind
The unexpected and unfathomable loss of a child was the seed that grew into Give in Kind. Founder and CEO, Laura Malcolm said even though she and her husband were living far away from their families and close friends, the outpouring of help was almost overwhelming. “The challenge was that because they didn’t live locally, our loved ones didn’t know that there were thousands of services near us that could give us exactly what we needed.” Instead, she said, they sent flowers and money – to the value of $8,000 – when what the couple really needed was house cleaning, childcare and meals.
Malcolm pointed out that whether it’s a cancer diagnosis or a sick child in hospital – everyone is touched at some point by personal hardship. That’s when Give in Kind comes in.
“We are working to make it easy to do everything that matters,” she said. “Give in Kind is a single solution platform that lets people lend a hand from anywhere.” The company calls it “crowd-caring.”
By partnering with service providers like Cleanify.com, Uber, Rover.com and Blue Apron, users can send the help that’s needed where it is needed. They can also set up registries of the items and services that will have the most impact.
Genneve
As a woman of “a certain age” Jill Angelo is on a mission to start a movement that will affect half the population: helping women navigate the big M: menopause. ‘Menopause is not often spoken about and when it is, it has a negative connotation,” said Angelo. “As a woman on my own perimenopausal journey, I realized that I have a passion for women’s health and development,” she said.
Research revealed that menopause can be life-changing for women who also happen to have a lot of spending power. “One in three women experience unpleasant effects and they are willing to spend $25B a year to get relief.”
Angelo looked at the solutions and providers that are typically available to women heading into menopause and midlife. “Typically, you go to a OBGYN. But, more OBGYN’s are retiring than are graduating,” she said. As a result, women in menopause are turning to other providers including nutritionists, physical therapists, urologists, endocrinologists etc. Angelo also found that most of the online resources were dated.
So, she decided to step up to create Genneve.com, a digital platform for women heading into menopause and midlife.
“It’s time to bring transparency to the market. We are disrupting the traditional word of mouth women use the build their network by connecting women directly with providers, community, content and products.”
Invio
In 1999 when everyone was worried about Y2K, Cassie Wallender first met Dema Poppa. Fast forward to 2015, Cassie was a senior manager of Product Design at IMS Health and Demo was running medical trials at Redmond-based Olympus. “Dema told me that this mainly involved collecting data and that he was frustrated by the quality of the data collection process,” said Wallender.
Why? The data was collected on site by doctors before being transcribed into a database for the trial. Then the data had to be verified by monitors to ensure that it was transcribed accurately. All this data was stored in large three-ringed binders.
Wallender says that each clinical trial required that monitors had to travel to each site every 3 to 4 weeks – resulting in thousands of trips. The problem was that even with third party verification, transcription errors were still happening. The pair discovered that each year, $6.8B is wasted on this process.
The breaking point came when the FDA changed its regulations to allow a new verification process. Wallender and Poppa decided to seize the opportunity to build the tool that Dema wished he had when he was running clinical trials – a tool that would finally eliminate all those three-ring binders.
Invio is a cloud-based platform for remote source document verification which reduces travel requirements by 70% and increases the verification process by 95%. “With Invio, the verification process goes from two months to two hours,” she said.
Boost! Collective is a story-driven marketing and communications firm. We work collaboratively to discover, write and tell powerful stories that drive authentic engagement.
by Jacqueline Koch | Feb 24, 2017 |
By Jacqueline Koch
Hans Rosling, unlikely storyteller that gave data a soul and a mission
Want to understand climate trends, ocean acidification, HIV and the global disease burden, economics or pandemics? Hardly a day goes by without a mention of big data and the promise it holds. Even for those us who are daunted—the volume, complex statistical formulas and the labyrinthine spreadsheets—can understand the essential role data plays in revealing the mysteries of the world we live in. And it’s for this reason the passing of Hans Rosling is such a tremendous loss.
Best known for transforming statistics and data into colorful, dancing bubbles choreographed seamlessly across a screen, Hans Rosling, Director, Gapminder Foundation and Professor, Global Health, Karolinska Institutet, was a pioneer and unexpected storytelling master. Crunching numbers and assembling statistics, while expertly harnessing new techno-color data display technology, Rosling had a gift. And he deployed it for crafting a fantastic tale, complete with an engaging narrative arc to explain global issues such as child mortality, poverty, vaccines and income disparity. His passion for a “fact-based world view,” was matched by an off-beat sense of humor. Quirky meets convincing, he made us all fall in love with data and statistics, his bubbles and with Rosling himself.
Rosling didn’t consider himself optimist or a pessimist, but instead a “very serious possibilist.” Well known for a number of TED talks and featured in a BBC documentary for the “Joy of Stats,” Rosling created a considerable library of compelling videos. They were his megaphone.
In one TED talk he defends the washing machine as the game-changer in the industrial revolution. In another, game-show style, he and Bill Gates discuss childhood vaccines as the “demographic party trick.” Moving away from high-tech data display and bright bubbles on a screen, he managed to explain population growth using IKEA boxes. Creative and always wildly gesticulating, Rosling’s capacity to entertain—making numbers fun—was limitless. And while it may be a noble effort to try explain his videos, it’s not worth it. They generally fall into one category: “Just watch, you’ll see what I mean.”
When I saw my first Rosling video, I was hooked. It was in the midst of the Swine Flu outbreak in 2009. Hysteria, fanned by shrill media headlines, grew exponentially day by day. While only 31 people died of Swine Flu, more than 63,000 had died of TB during the same 13-day period. Guerilla style and with his laptop video web camera rolling, Rosling set red bubbles in motion, migrating across a globe. His goal: to open our eyes to both an unwarranted public health panic and recognize a far greater global health foe, TB. In the video, Rosling coined the term “news per death ratio” and chose an ironic title —“Swine Flu Alert”— to open our eyes to painful truths about our relationship with media. Watch it, you’ll see what I mean.
While Rosling was a nerdy and captivating storyteller, his bubble stories were anything but cursory. Consider his take on the worldwide advances in maternal and newborn health. In one global health summit, he explained how these issues are shaped by a plethora of converging factors: fertility rates, investments in vaccines, improved nutrition, family planning, per capita income and access to electricity. Following the narrative arc, beginning, middle and end, and magically marching backward and forward across the decades, he built in a villain—the lack of infrastructure—and a potential hero, the mobile phone technology.
Rosling’s charisma flowed only from the power of animated graphics and great imagination, but also his personal crusade, “How not to be ignorant about the world.” Fellow TED speaker, Brené Brown said “Maybe stories are just data with a soul.” In any case, it was certainly Rosling that gave data a soul.
Boost! Collective is a story-driven marketing and communications firm. We discover, create and tell the powerful stories that drive deep engagement with your audiences.
by Jacqueline Koch | Sep 20, 2016 |
By Jacqueline Koch
There are hopeful signs that the web publishing industry is finally waking up to the perils of clickbait and bad online advertisements in general. A look at ad blocking figures alone reveals a sector that has been hitting the snooze alarm for too long.
A 2015 Adobe and PageFair report found 200 million monthly active users have adopted ad-blocking technology globally, costing publishers US$22bn in blocked advertising revenue in 2015. In 2016, the figure is estimated to nearly double to $41.4bn. Hello online content providers! It’s time to embrace the new day.
“Consumers’ tolerance for annoying, disruptive, irrelevant or offensive advertising is waning rapidly,” writes John Murphy, VP of Marketplace Quality at OpenX writes in the Huffington Post.
He urges publishers to take stock of the negative impacts of bad advertising and suggests a new tack: look at the next frontier of digital advertising by embracing ad quality. Digital advertising, he writes, “is at an inflection point where its future hinges on all players in the ecosystem implementing and upholding higher standards for ad quality.”
At this inflection point is a dizzying scramble to shore up revenue streams across global publishing and Murphy’s advice is all but impossible to ignore. Moreover, the shift from desktop to mobile continues its inexorable march forward, shrinking real estate and placing an added premium on space.
Is there a quick fix? No, but there is a common thread: relevance. And it is pushing publishers and ad tech companies alike to abandon the false promise of high click through rates and investigate meaningful forms of engagement, content monetisation strategies and improving ads.
Mea culpa and crawling toward relevance
For many, the mark of a new era was ushered in at the 2015 Guardian’s Changing Media Summit, when Upworthy’s cofounder Peter Koechley issued an apology for the media site’s sensationalised clickbait headlines.
“We sort of unleashed a monster,” Koechley said. “Sorry for that. Sorry we kind of broke the internet last year. I’m excited going forward to say goodbye to clickbait.”
Upworthy, known as an online media juggernaut, suffered a significant drop in traffic in the wake of Facebook’s clickbait crackdown. Moving to a native advertising model, frequently embraced as a friendlier form of advertising, and channeling more resources to video, Upworthy topped 200 million views on Facebook in January.
Koechley’s new tack appeared to have worked: “We will do it by sharing powerful stories that put you in someone else’s shoes to help you see the world in other people’s eyes.” In so many words: We stop tricking you with bombastic headlines.
Including ad tech in the ecosystem
Fast forward to 2016 and media and news organisations continue to discover new ways of monetising content while engaging their consumers. However, the next frontier of digital ads is a two-way street and moving forward cannot rest on online publishers alone. Ad tech companies also have to innovate.
“There’s a fair number of options to monetise content sites,” said Kerstin Gibson, VP and General Manager of Search for Infospace, pointing to Outbrain, Taboola and Google AdSense as examples. “We tested everything out there and there just wasn’t an option that brought together both monetisation and relevancy.”
Gibson pulled back the curtain on Infospace’s recent launch of LinkFuel, a contextual advertising platform that uses content from the entire page to display highly contextually relevant linked search ads from the Bing Network.
“We started out with a product that looked like Outbrain,” Gibson explained, “But our model morphed. We then coupled our search technology with the Bing Network to serve ads that are directly relevant to the content on the page, which ultimately delivers more revenue for publishers.” LinkFuel, Gibson added, is strengthened through intelligence gained from powering 2.2 billion Infospace searches every month to identify the best performing keywords.
According to Gibson, LinkFuel performs best for publishing sites that have deep verticals in health and money, as well as tech, home and auto. “We figured out what works. We see that the terms are more relevant and that is why we can deliver a better user experience.”
It may hurt, but it’s good for you
There will always be a challenge to managing the tension that exists between monetising a limited amount of space, while preserving the user experience. However, in a recent Forbes article, Eric Eichmann, CEO of ad tech firm Criteo, sees the rise of ad blocking as an unexpected win in the publishing industry, specifically for ad tech.
“While this may mean even more consolidation in the future, those companies that are willing to disrupt the status quo of digital advertising by delivering consumer-centric experiences will survive and thrive in a world where consumers hold all the power,” he writes. “And, as online advertising continues to improve and deliver value to consumers, there will no longer be a need to block them.”
by Jacqueline Koch | Aug 29, 2016 |
Niantic’s release of PokémonGo, the new free-to-play app, which uses familiar cartoon characters from the 1990s, has been taking the world by storm. While the negative articles pile up bemoaning the cellphone generation’s continued obsession with their mobile devices, positive conversation around the new phone game is slow to trickle in. But one unexpected proponent of the game has cropped up: small businesses, desperately in need of advertising.
The basics of its success
PokémonGo’s concept is fairly simple and extraordinarily similar to geocaching, the satellite-mapped treasure hunting activity that started in the early 2000s. Basically, you download PokémonGo as an app to your smartphone, and the app randomly generates Pokémon (animated creatures famous from the television show) onto a satellite map of your surrounding area. These Pokémon can then be caught by swiping your finger across the screen to “catch” them. While producers at Niantic are reticent to give any gameplay directions on how to interact with the game, it seems that the primary objective is to “catch them all”; and the higher level your Pokémon, the better.
Niantic, started as an internal Google project, has succeeded in large part because of its connections with parent company Google. Proprietary access to GoogleMaps technology allows the game to seamlessly show up-to-date local mapping which helps its augmented reality experience feel clean and ![]()
immersive. The game has done phenomenally well, quickly breaking records both with iOS and Droid devices for most downloads. The game currently has 100 million users across the globe since its release at the beginning of July.
The in-app purchase with a surprising effect
PokemonGo currently brings in US$10m in daily revenue, mostly from in-game purchases. One of the most lucrative purchases is what is called a “lure.” After buying a lure, the owner can place it on a Pokéstop (a geographic location marked as a hub in the game), increasing the spawn rates of Pokémon in the area. While there have been issues reported with lures being placed as bait for armed robberies, lures are meant as a benefit for players, and now, local economies.
Pokéstops are placed at random by the game at notable geographic locations; monuments, parks, public buildings and in some cases memorials. This encourages people playing the game to get out of their homes and go for a walk, some people venturing so far that they have to call for an Uber to get home. But in urban areas, Pokéstops mean more foot traffic and more foot traffic means more business.
A new kind of advertising
With so many people who might otherwise not be out and about, local urban businesses have seen a huge boost in incidental sales, and companies that invest the $10 to put a lure on their nearest Pokéstop for 24-hours can sometimes see that increase in business multiplied hundredfold. As an example, the Denver Zoo recently invested $380 in lures over a weekend period and saw a $58,000 jump in sales from PokemonGo users alone.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Aug 15, 2016 |
By Jacqueline Koch
Take a peek at recent headlines describing the state of the media today. Most likely you’ll find scant good news amid the reports buzzing of radical change, job cuts and that 60 per cent of US newspaper jobs have vanished in 26 years. It’s feels a little like staring into a dark abyss. On the heels of these grim updates, the appeal of native advertising intensifies, a shiny object glittering in a mucky pool of disorienting uncertainty…
So the recent newsflash from The Associated Press should have been of no surprise: The global news network is taking the plunge, jumping into the deep sea filled with agencies and marketers, and will begin offering a full range of digital advertising services. In offering digital advertising services, the AP becomes a full-service agency called AP Content Services. This new business will provide subscribers with an inventory of sponsored written, video, photo and interactive content to integrate alongside its news service.
This latest development from the hallowed halls of global newsgathering adds to an ongoing conversation—and questions—around the promise and peril of native advertising, which has vociferous supporters and detractors. One key question is how best to wield this double edge sword that has the potential to carve out new revenue streams for publishers, yet threatens to whittle away at their journalistic credibility and risk their readers’ trust? And what other opportunities are emerging in this new epoch of publishing.
A confused customer amid rapid growth
According to a study released late last year by Adyoulike, worldwide spending on native advertising will soar to over $59 billion in 2018. This terrific growth rises in tandem with a threefold increase of IP traffic predicted over the next five years. This signals an anticipated surge in content demand, sponsored content included. Yet many industry analysts maintain that native advertising remains in its infancy and the technological tools to truly monetize it have yet to be fully developed.
These growing pains are afflicting publishers and their audience alike. A 2015 Contently study found that 62 per cent of readers believe a news site loses credibility if it runs articles sponsored by a brand. On the flip side, while publishers may wrestle with the consequences of merging church and state—the unholy union between editorial with advertising— the same Contently study found that even when an article is labeled as sponsored content, readers remain confused. “Consumers often have a difficult time identifying the brand associated with a piece of native advertising, but it varies greatly, from as low as 63 per cent [on The Onion] to as high as 88 per cent [on Forbes],” the study noted.
As readers remain clearly perplexed and suspicious of the blurring of the line between news and advertising, brands and publishers should take note. As native advertising evolves and blazes a path forward, it prompts other questions: Does this weigh in favour of those with big budgets only or can this scale for the smaller businesses?
According to Purch president Antoine Boulin in a recent Digiday article, for native to deliver performance, “the publisher must put forward an enormous amount of front-end efforts to produce high quality content that meets marketer requests and drives traffic to it, and still, the direct link to ROI can remain murky.”
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by Jacqueline Koch | Jul 20, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
As the publishing industry continues to face the impact of the unstoppable digital transformation, one organization has found a formula for success that allows them to pursue their passion for long-form narrative content.
Brooklyn-based Atavist is in fact two companies in one. The first is The Atavist Magazine, an eight-time finalist for the National Magazine Awards and the first digital-only magazine to win for feature writing. The second is the Atavist self-publishing platform. This enables creative individuals and organizations to produce beautiful and shareable stories, attract new audiences and build business around their work—all without knowing a line of code.
Together with Nicholas Thompson, a Senior Editor at The New Yorker and Jefferson Rabb, Atavist’s CTO, co-founder Evan Ratliff put his experience at National Geographic, Wired Magazine and The New Yorker to work to sketch out a new approach to long-form narrative content that is based on an innovative take on design and storytelling. The result: The Atavist Magazine.
Design + Storytelling
“Each story is a creation of its own and is meant to be an experience. We have pioneered this form of long-form content where each story includes video, GIFs and big imagery.”
The magazine covers topics of general interest ranging from “Zombie King”, Emily Matchar’s exploration of author William Seabrook who introduced the zombie cadaver—the walking dead—to the American imagination before sinking into obscurity to “Whatsoever Things Are True”, the result of Matthew Shaer’s ten-month long investigation into the aftermath of a crime that happened 39 years ago in Chicago.
The team publishes one story each month, attracting between 10,000 and 20,000 readers. “We are known for long stories that are hard to do and that is why we have won awards and have been nominated for Emmys for our video-based work,” Ratliff said.
Advertising free zone
The magazine does not carry advertising and according to Ratliff, this is the reason that their stories enjoy higher than average reader engagement. “If you tell an engaging story, people will read it on their phones and their laptops. Everything does not have to be shorter and faster,” he said.
“We have stories pitched to us or we will go and find them. Either way, we spend months with the writer to make sure they can get inside the story.” Ratliff says sometimes there are stories that the team just wants to do – especially international stories. “It is a very purpose-driven organization. Even so, we have to lure our readers in and our stories have to feel like movies,” he said.
Earlier this year, The Atavist Magazine carried a serialized story about an international drug dealer which was the result of two years of investigation. Penned by Ratliff with help from Aurora Almendral and Natalie Lampert, “The Mastermind” chronicles the story of Paul Calder Le Roux, an international crime kingpin turned government informant who was apprehended in Liberia in 2012 after a six-year investigation by DEA agents. “The Mastermind” was released shortly after Le Roux’s dramatic appearance in a Minneapolis courtroom on March 2, 2016.
“This time, we released this story in serialized form with one installment released each week.” Ratliff says it took a week to produce each installment. “We are much more akin to a production company in some ways—but we meet a monthly deadline,” he said.
A self-publishing platform for long-form narrative content
What makes this magazine possible without having to turn a profit is the income generated by the Atavist self-publishing content platform.
Ratliff said that the impetus for creating a publishing platform was born out of the absence of commercially available solutions capable of producing the kind of rich experience the team wanted to deliver. “When we launched, there wasn’t software that would allow us to do the type of design we wanted to do. So, we built a CMS and started selling it to others.”
In essence, the Atavist platform allows someone who is not a designer to create something that looks professionally designed. This includes easily adding multimedia to projects by dragging and dropping blocks of video, sound, slideshows, charts, maps and Instagram and Soundcloud embeds to really show the whole story.
Today, a number of organizations are using the platform for a variety of reasons. United Airlines, for example is using it to build and publish Hemispheres, the online version of their inflight magazine. Stanford University’s Engineering school is using it to create a magazine-like version of their prospectus.
“Our clients are often at the intersection of journalism and activism,” said Ratliff. Most clients are using it for long-form content, whether that is for corporate reports or journalism.
Revenue model for long-form narrative content
As far as the business model is concerned, The Atavist Magazine is available via a subscription. A metered paywall allows readers to access three stories for free before a subscription is needed to gain more content. “We option a lot of our stories for movies, which provides another revenue stream,” said Ratliff.
And finally, there is the software platform that provides the main funding for the magazine. The Atavist self-publishing platform offers a variety of paid subscription options ranging from $8 a month, for small users, to $250 per month for larger organizations.
The idea of a self-funding magazine supplemented by its own publishing software is one innovative way that publishers can support their passions for narrative journalism while not being reliant on traditional ad revenues to succeed.
Atavist is one of the companies that participants of the 2016 VDZ Akademie Digital Publisher’s Tour visited in New York City this June. The Tour was co-organized by Boost! Collective.
Boost! Collective is a strategic messaging and story-driven communications firm. We help clients discover, write and tell powerful stories which drive engagement.
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