Out With A Bang

For many an obvious reason – not least the fact that we now have Berkeley in common – this was well worth a ponder… the original article, just as much as the comments.

http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/06/what-i-recommended-to-publishers-in.html#comments

And as in the case of the lad from DoubleVerify, I’m loathe to stray too far into the technicalities of it all; I’m sure that there are a lot of very clever people doing a lot of very clever things behind the scenes.

Likewise I can get the idea – if the Visa registration process is, indeed, the simple analogy that Alan would approve of.

I guess it’s not a million miles away from a Tesco Clubcard scenario, either.

That once signed up, some ever-improving piece of ‘kit’ within the tills of Tescos (Beccles) keeps a beady eye on my spending habits; it notices when I switch from one washing machine powder ‘brand’ to another – and then duly sends me the Clubcard vouchers that fits with my spending habits…

By the same token, I presume that ViewPass will keep a beady eye on my reading habits; the pieces of content that I throw into my surfing ‘trolley’ on a daily basis and then send me the kind of advertising it thinks ‘fits’ with my reading interests.

The fact that it already has my age, gender and income status from the registration process will give the system a first information platform to work from; as it starts to de-cypher my reading habits, so it can then refine and re-tune the advertising that it despatches in my direction.

And if it’s very clever – and I would strongly suspect it is – going forward it can then aggregate me other pieces of content that it also thinks will suit my taste… ‘I saw you read this piece on the Denver Rockies, but have you read this…?’

‘No, I’d missed it… Jeez, thanks…’

And there’s the two-way bargain. You’re bombarding me with ever more accurately targetted advertising; in return, you’re saving me time and effort by bringing ever more targetted content to my door.

‘Good morning Rick, today I’ve brought you three articles for your perusal… and an advert for a 12-month subscription to ESPN…’

And that’s all fine. It was the same analogy that a Mike Phillips took from the article…

‘I buy some of the household groceries at Kroger. My wife buys the rest — also at Kroger. When she checks out, she gets coupons on the back of her receipt that correlate to her buying behavior.

‘I get different coupons because I buy different stuff. We’re both happy, and so are the marketers at Kroger. Ultimately, your tool would let digital news organizations transcend mass advertising and make money facilitating direct marketing…

I suspect that the challenge for Alan won’t be so much in the development of the kit; rather its unified and uniform adoption across a bunch of traditionally disparate, corporate individuals all of whom have ’silo’ as their default setting; ViewPass, of course, is potentially an elegant network.

Squeezing one into the other is the big challenge – in a sense, akin to persuading Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Asda, Lidl, et al to all sign up for the same ‘Clubcard’… a ‘uniform mechanism’, in Alan’s description.

At least he enjoys one, early advantage; that he is an ‘outsider’; he’s not one of the existing ‘Families’ trying to impose their ‘uniform’ answer on the cousins from Detroit, Vegas, Miami, etc…

But the same fear applies as to that of OfCom’s plans for ‘Local News Consortia’ here in the UK; that it will be like ‘herding cats’ getting them to agree to anything as cohesive and as, frankly, sensible as either a ViewPass ad solution or, together, pooling their resources to fill regional news slots on Channel Three on a uniform and unified basis.

It took little more than a month after that ‘Local Media Summit’ at the House of Commons before the BBC, OfCom and ITV were having a hissy fit at eachother; and with both Andy Burnham and Tom Watson out of the picture as the Brown Government implodes, you have to wonder what sort of momentum and genuine, political will is left within the pages of Digital Britain.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=285

But the other point of interest to ViewPass comes via the comments; that whilst Alan valiantly tries to bang the heads together of the ‘newspaper supermarket chains’ behind closed doors in some out-of-town Chicago hotel, so for the Mops and Pops corner shops and delis, there needs to be a different way of thinking.

As ever with the web, one size won’t fit all. The answers will have to come in all shapes and sizes.

You can’t, in short, impose the same answer on the Denver Post as you can on www.InsideTheRockies.com; just as you can’t find the same solution to the needs of both TrinityMirror Plc and www.london-se1.co.uk And yet all four are web publishers of merit and worth.

It was point that ‘Bob’ raised in the comments… ‘I wonder if it wouldn’t amount to creating two classes of web news operations – the elites such as Rupert, Dean, Gannett and their ilk, and the mom-and-pops, the community, small and medium chains…’

It touched on the same point that a Niel Robertson made with regard to Digg’s new venture into advertising… http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/03/told-you-digg-for-ads-coming/

Only the argument might be that you swap the words ’small advertisers’ for ’small publishers’ who, likewise, may have neither the time nor the inclination to sign up for a Kroger-like Clubcard; that they might not be a big enough ‘blip’ on anyone’s radar.

‘One of the challenges here is that to some extent the “price you out” model is a bit like Google quality score. While it has its advantages its extremely hard for a lot of small advertisers to keep up with.

‘AB testing means you have to try things and see what works. If you can get Digg QS’ed out you’ll be spending a lot of time managing things. Not always good for small advertisers who are time constrained…’

That all said, at least Alan’s having a go… trying to make a difference by offering a decent solution that ought, on paper, to be worth serious merit and attention from those it is designed to help and, ideally, save.

Quite what sort of attention span any of them have these days – be it this side of the Pond or the other – is the $64 million question.

Doing anything in ‘uniform’ , you fear, may well prove beyond them.