Free Rise

Last Friday was my final day consulting with Wells Fargo. In two weeks, I’ll be starting a new gig with Google.

Specifically, I’ll be responsible for the product marketing of YouTube and Google TV Ads, and I’ll be situated at the YouTube campus in San Bruno.

I’m terrifically excited about the opportunity, which is pretty close to my ideal position. I’ll miss working in the City, but I’m also beyond relieved not to have to commute to the South Bay daily. The actual start date may be affected by the imminent appearance a new baby in the house.

Thanks to everyone who’s sent their warm wishes. Job hunting in 2009 was hard.

I never finished Catcher in the Rye.

I had brought Salinger’s great work on a trip to the USSR in the summer of 1990, a few weeks before my senior year of high school. Some time in the last days of the trip, we visited a family who lived in one of those horrifying Soviet concrete-block tenements in Moscow. The family’s 13-year-old daughter did all the translating for us. She had big, sad eyes, but she made it obvious how thrilled she was to be chatting with Americans in her school-taught English.

The trip to the USSR changed my life and my outlook on the world. In Leningrad, I was bombarded with offers to trade rubles for anything I had. My Walkman, my pants — how many times did someone offer to buy my pants right off my legs? In Moscow, I saw economic decline transformed into disaffection with Gorbachev, even as he earned international acclaim and made Perestroika and Glasnost part of the global vocabulary. In Tblisi, Georgia, I saw a satellite state dominated by organized crime. Our hosts were some of those Orwell would have called “more equal than others.”

But it was in that apartment in Moscow where I caught a glimpse of a younger generation that was coming to understand its responsibility to find a different way.

So before I left her apartment, I snuck into her room and left my copy of Catcher in the Rye on her desk.

J.D. Salinger, RIP.

Conan O’Brien, last night: “NBC announced they plan to lose $200 million on the Winter Olympics next month. Folks, is it just me, or is that story hilarious?”

NBC’s talk show lineup was doomed from the start. Its failure was less of a surprise than AOL-Time Warner, Terrell Owens’ tenure with the Cowboys, or Olestra anal-leakage potato chips. And the disaster is unrelenting for NBC, now with every personality on NBC — and CBS — taking shots at the cellar-dweller of the legacy broadcast network division.

This isn’t just a FAIL. It’s an EPIC FAIL. Let’s count the individual failures at work, and see what we can learn.

1. A failure of imagination. For its supposedly radical yet retro concept (a nightly talk show in prime time), The Jay Leno Show concept was shockingly conservative.  It assumed that America wanted to sit back and watch the same guy do a show every night, because that was the late night model for the prior 50 years. Now as NBC tries to fix its mess, it’s sticking with this conceptual model. How about moving Leno back to The Tonight Show and letting Conan host a prime-time variety/sketch show two nights a week? How about trying out something — anything – that’s really different? The times demand innovation.

2. A failure to think about competition. At 11:30pm, a talk show has traditionally competed with other, similar talk shows, news, and syndicated reruns. The 500-channel environment and DVRs didn’t change that so much. But 10pm is still called “prime time” for a reason. It’s a place to showcase top-quality content that grown-ups watch on their couches, and against that, Leno interviewing sit-com actresses looked like piffle.

3. A failure to understand the customer. The ratings at the end of a late-night talk show is a fraction of that of the beginning of a show. After the initial monologue and comedy bits, people tend to bail out, flip around, or just turn it off and go to bed. At 10pm, audience retention is critical, since affiliates make all their money at 11 on the local news. And the real reason why Leno is being kicked out of the 10pm slot is because his show’s format didn’t retain its audience, thus killing NBC affiliates’ 11pm news ratings.

4. A failure to consider revenue. Tina Fey declared a few years ago that working in broadcast in the ’00s was like working in vaudeville in the 1960s. The old model has been disrupted by technology and choice — four networks, replaced by hundreds of networks plus iTunes plus web video plus DVDs plus on-demand, ad infinitum –  but the new models produce revenue, too. An hour-long drama can cost millions per episode, and failure is expensive. But success is also richly rewarded via syndication, DVD sales, and international rights. The Jay Leno Show is cheap but low-margin, and most episodes are nearly worthless the minute after it airs.

5. A failure to think downstream. The Leno-to-10pm move was in part a move to retain Conan O’Brien, who had toiled for more than 15 years at 12:35am. But with Leno sucking up the A-list in prime time, Conan got left with the B-list. A Friday episode of The Tonight Show used to mean a top draw. But a few weeks ago, their Friday lead guest was Jeff Garlin, a funny guy but not at the level you’d want in that slot.

6. A failure to plan for failure. The current ad-libbing on the part of NBC execs reveals that they never considered what to do next if Leno’s show were to underperform. It’s easy to cancel Knight Rider and find something else to fill its slot for a few weeks. But Leno occupies five hours of prime time, and even after returning from Winter Olympics programming next month, NBC simply won’t have enough content in the pipeline to deliver an audience to advertisers. Meanwhile, the treatment of O’Brien (and his Late Nite replacement Jimmy Fallon) makes NBC look like a network that doesn’t know how to handle its talent. Now who would choose to run a show there, over another network?

A year from now, this controversy will seem distant. Leno will be on at 11:35. Conan may be on at 12:05, or he may be launching the Late Night division at Fox.

But NBC will still be in fourth place.

It’s not exactly a thought piece, but the Wall Street Journal published my letter to the editor today.

The letter is a radical moderate’s response to a particularly offensive op-ed by the Hoover Institution’s Shelby Steele (”Obama and Our Post-Modern Race Problem“) last week. His thesis was that those who supported Obama’s candidacy in 2008 (and 2007) were gullible victims of a race-redemption narrative, and since the election Obama has proved his cluelessness and worthlessness by enacting policies that are not consistent with the Hoover Institution’s preferences.

Here’s the edited and abridged version of my letter as they published it:

It’s appropriate that Mr. Steele focuses on the old scourge of political correctness, as his op-ed offends me deeply. Simply, I don’t like being called stupid. On behalf of the tens of millions of independents and moderates who supported Barack Obama for president in 2008, may I invite Mr. Steele to demonstrate a little respect for our judgment? We knew what we were doing.

The 2000s were a lost decade of underplanned, unbudgeted, and disastrously executed wars that may never end, and debt-fueled economic activity that proved illusory when the bills came due. Median wages declined, health-care costs soared, and trade and budget deficits became unsustainably large. We Obama voters understood that the next decade would require a radical change of direction. No other candidate for president demonstrated such a predilection for change. We had two years of non-stop exposure to make up our minds about this.

Mr. Steele laments that Mr. Obama is not Ronald Reagan, whose “principled” and “individuated” legacy includes massive government expansion, an unpaid for military buildup, and cementing a culture of spending far above what taxes brought in. George W. Bush, whether he followed President Reagan’s principles or not, got similar results without any meaningful economic progress.

Certainly, those of us who voted for and continue to support President Obama disagree with some of his policy choices to date. But I don’t suppose that Mr, Steele accepts that we’re capable of such nuanced thought.

Eric Meyerson

San Francisco

Last weekend, the wife and I strolled to the Verizon store in the Mission and picked up his-n-hers Motorola Droids, Verizon’s first smart phone with Google’s Android OS.

So far, they’ve been great. Web surfing and Gmail are delightfully fast, and call quality is excellent. (Most importantly, we haven’t resigned ourselves to the black hole that is the AT&T mobile network.) iPhone and BlackBerry owners have known this for years, but it’s a remarkable experience to walk around with a pocket-sized computer far more powerful than the tower case that sat under your desk just a few years ago.

As I was surfing the web this morning, I spotted this ad on the Knowledge@Wharton ad. And I was kind of blown away.

Within a standard 300 x 250 display unit (what we called an “L-REC” at Yahoo!) is a feed of punchy editorial links about the Droid. Scroll down, and you’ll see what looks like dozens if not hundreds of posts from news sites, magazines, and blogs. Topics include:

• Positive reviews of the Droid
• Upbeat news about the Droid launch
• Top apps for Android devices
• Downbeat news about the iPhone, including viruses and developer disaffection with the Apple App Store
• Information about the Droid Eris, HTC’s lighter version

All the links click to the original articles, with a toolbar to Tweet or see more.

The display ad hits on a number of strong points:

• It’s targeted
• It’s interactive
• It gives me a choice of compelling content to click
• It lives on beyond the click
• It encourages me to share
• It includes links to add this Droid feed to Facebook or Twitter

What could be better about it? A few things. If I weren’t already interested in the Droid, I wouldn’t be drawn to it, or bother to scroll. I also suspect this ad wouldn’t test well on a site where people weren’t coming to engage in the act of reading. I can also only see two headlines on the first screen, and the gray-on-black scrollbar could be more obvious.

But in general, it’s great to see such a compelling and innovative ad that so precisely built for an audience and an experience. More, please!

“The web is not TV.”

It sounds obvious enough, and yet how many video ads do you see online that appear to be shoveled directly from cable? The 15-second video spot has become the de facto standard.

Of course, this will change. In their formative years, television ads were basically radio ads with visible narrators. It wasn’t until viewers and marketers became comfortable with the new format that commercials became more like little movies.

Today, some brands with reputations for innovation are exploiting the interactive and creative possibilities of online advertising, especially video advertising. But those still seem to be the exceptions.

My friend Phil O’Neill, director of analytics for VideoEgg, had such a perspective in an essay he scribed for MarketingWeek UK, titled “The Golden Rules of Online Video Advert Design.” His golden rules boil down to three design principles.

1. The web is not the same as TV: Ads should be rich, interactive, and “push-pull.”
2. Clarity is key: If the UI is confusing, users won’t bother.
3. Creative content, creative delivery: If it’s not compelling, users won’t stick around and won’t remember it.

These seem obvious. So why, in these adolescent years of web video, are they so often ignored? Think about that next time you see (or place) a 15-second pre-roll.

Today is a big day for those who struggle to read.

Intel is launching a product called Reader, a new gadget that photographs text in the wild — anything from a cookbook to an interpretive sign at an art museum — and reads it to the user via a pleasant voice sim. It’s hard to believe that nobody’s ever thought to mass-market this kind of product before, given the millions of people around the world who must live and cope with learning, reading, or sight disabilities.

My good friend Ben Foss led the team that brought this to market. He himself is dyslexic and has dedicated his career to helping others who struggle with our text-dependent information economy. Most of us have a hard time imagining how difficult our lives would become if disabilities made it tough to read. Ben writes on Intel’s Healthcare blog:

It is important to remember that a central experience of a disability, and especially a learning disability, is loneliness.  It was a lonely feeling to have to leave class in third grade, and head to a special room to sound out words while the other kids had reading groups. And adults feel lonely as they worry that people might find out they do not have any books at home and that they cannot read the text off a power point slide in a meeting.

(Full disclosure now: Besides being long-time friends with Ben, I’m also recently a director of a separate not-for-profit entity that holds conditional rights to the Reader technology.)

Here’s Ben demoing the Reader. It’s really remarkable what it can do. Big congratulations to the team at Intel who, via this small technological miracle, will help create the difference between dependence and independence for million — tens of millions — of people around the world.

This morning, NASA successfully crashed a rocket into our one and only moon, with the primary purpose of seeking signs of water. (The secondary purpose was being able to call a crash “successful” for once.)

Some people complained about our space agency defacing the pristine, untouched lunar surface. Those people are silly. Besides, more than 10 years ago Mr. Show predicted far, far worse.

It’s a lousy time to be in the world of television. Until the broadband video boom of the mid-2000s, TV was the primary entertainment, information, and infotainment medium in the world. Now? It seems a bit like a low-function technological relic, like a cassette player.

Live TV depends on two revenue streams to support itself: commercials and subscriber fees. The former is threatened by time-shifting (Tivo and DVRs), the latter by DVDs. And both are being eaten by web video. Granted, the networks earn revenue off authorized web streams and DVDs, but at returns that define cannibalization.

Imagine you’re the head of programming for a network. How would you compete? If you’re NBC, you plan for a leaner future and perform the equivalent of downsizing, replacing your 10pm drama hour with a cheap talk show. You’re in fourth place, after all, and a whole generation of young adults came of age in a time when “broadcast” meant nothing more than “the low-number channels on cable.” You gotta do what you gotta do to get more eyeballs on your channel, no matter whose eyeballs they may be.

But if you’re running a nichey cable network, your goals are different. Take FX, which runs edgy, young-adult-oriented dramas and comedies. Much of their audience has probably moved most of their video viewing to their laptops, and many of the remaining TV viewers (such as yours truly) watch their programs on DVR and skip commercials.

How does FX fight this? They tease. And they compete.

This is a quick snapshot of a promo FX ran last night during the season premiere of its dark sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It promotes a “COVERT SCREENING” of something that’s unavailable on web video outlets. Later promos teased about sexual and violent content, and also promised “you only get to see it once.”

Since I was watching Sunny on DVR, I only caught the first 30 seconds. It’s some kind of anime show. Tivo called it “To Be Announced,” and you know what? It only showed once.

So FX created an event that only people who watched Sunny live could enjoy. It’s all Gabbo-style hype, but it’s an also a direct admission that television is desperately trying to bring people back into their living rooms, by any tactics necessary. Good luck with that.

Last night’s episode of AMC’s Mad Men, the best episode ever, was “brought to you by DirecTV.”

DirecTV, which claims to offer “more of your favorite channels in HD than anyone,” does not carry AMC in HD.

Ironic, eh?