strategy

Despite plenty of conversation and posturing, we're a long way from regulations or even standards for a "Do Not Track" registry as pushed by the Federal Trade Commission.

If "Do Not Track" were to come about, would that be the end of many of the ad targeting forms we have seen evolve on the web, in email marketing and elsewhere on the Internet?

I doubt it.

Geographic targeting gets better with each new consumer conversion from proxied dial-up accounts to broadband. If you visit a site using home DSL, cable or fiber access, or use the mobile web via a 3G or 4G connection, chances are the broadband Internet provider sends along a host name that at least reveals what town you're in, if not what part of town. This targetable -- though not personally identifiable -- bit of information goes to the site even if you use a browser that successfully anonymizes you and your computer.

I have not shared much here about my new role leading Cordillera Interactive. I have wanted to, but had very little time to share stories of our rapid progress on this blog.

This week, we have something I'll pause to shout about.

Back in spring, we started a project to update the designs and underlying HTML/CSS architectures of our TV station.com sites. We named the project Operation Tune-Up.

Starting yesterday, we moved Operation Tune-Up out of the lab and onto its first site: KRTV.com in Great Falls, Montana. We still face a couple more days of inevitable debugging and clean-up work. But you can see the effects of Tune-Up on the KRTV.com home page, story pages and most index pages.

Thanks to Joey Martin, CI's senior director of operations, and his folks nationwide (with a special hat-tip to Neil Wagner in Billings, who also provided the terrific graphic design) for a successful launch!

We wanted big improvements in three key elements of the site user experience, and we think we got 'em:

• Site pages, especially the home page, load much faster. That, alone, justifies the project.
• Site content is easier to find.
• Stories are easier to read.

KTVQ.com in Billings is on deck for Tune-Up, and we'll start that launch process as soon as we winnow down the clean-up list for Great Falls. All Cordillera station.com sites get their own Tune-Ups before the end of the year.

Would I invest our limited resources in a Web tune-up if I felt the Web were dead? Maybe not, but I don't think it matters. My objectives in any interactive redesign project roll up into two main principles:

1. A redesign should make the next redesign faster and easier to execute. At some point, the pace of user interface innovation on the mainstream/consumer Web may begin to slow, but for now, the end of one design project still seems to signal the beginning of the next. So we have to cut the time and resource requirements to keep up.
2. A redesign should make it easier to collect, store and distribute all kinds of content assets using today's, and tomorrow's, communications forms. Get it from anywhere, anyone, anytime. Put it anywhere, with anyone, anytime. Seems simple, really isn't, but we should push to make it simpler with every project.

If we succeed at both of those, and the Web does die, we're still OK -- ready for smartphones, tablets, car-dash systems, home media centers or virtual carrier pigeons. Whatever we learn along the way, we can and should share with our paying customers -- advertising clients.

Hope you like the new KRTV.com!

Terry Heaton posted a gem about how his sometimes-brutal advice for media can be perceived as "too critical":

One of the first essays I wrote on this journey was called “Is TV News Giving Away the Future?” I published it in May of 2003 and got a lot of heat for criticism of third-party ad networks running TV station websites. When I look at the “false assumptions” published then, most are still in play today, and there’s even a new wrinkle in the concept: Most media company groups now function themselves as third-party ad networks, so a central thesis in my overall philosophy — that third-party ad networks work for the good of the network but not necessarily for the good of the properties on the network — has been ignored completely.

Heh. Terry, they may say you're too critical. We certainly do not agree on everything (disclosure: Heaton works for AR&D, which counts my company as a long-time client, so we've had our share of give-and-take). But I'd say the "too-critical" tag reflects an industry that has embraced too much political correctness about its current and future state. Sometimes street fights settle more than leather-chair exchanges of P.R.-speak. I'm certainly tired of companies trumpeting "slowing declines in advertising revenue" as if they'd found a cure for the common cold.

Heaton's post recounts his argument that "the flexibility for revenue growth is at the property (local) level." It would seem to favor high local autonomy for interactive product roadmaps within media conglomerates.

I'm not sure I would say it's the flexibility as much as the touchpoint opportunities that matter locally.

Much of the flexibility to win at street level comes from focus, from strong signal with low noise. I believe that means using the power of a larger company to consolidate strategic, tactical and operational responsibilities for product lines where they have common threads across many local deployments. You know, economies of scale.

Let local teams adapt product lines to meet local needs, sure, but not just for the sake of being different. Oh, if only I had back every dollar the companies I have worked for have wasted the past 15 years allowing local Webmasters to write bespoke content systems, or commerce systems, or cute-baby-photo-rating systems, in miserably unsustainable isolation. And the multiples of those dollars spent to migrate, convert or wind down the inevitably disappointing results.

Meanwhile, the iPhone looks and works much the same everywhere it is sold (subject to quality of AT&T's service, natch). So does Microsoft Word. So does Google. Local variations in these technology products almost surely represent far less than 10 percent of the overall user experience. Last I heard, the companies that provide those products are doing OK in all our communities.

In short, the more efficiently a conglomerate uses its product resources, the more it can spare for customer relationships, those touchpoint opportunities.

Incumbent local media do have the advantage of local direct sales relationships, as Heaton and Gordon Borrell have discussed, but they are based on the shorthand dialects of legacy media advertising. The keepers of those relationships -- sales account executives -- often recoil from introducing new products, a new dialect, into them. That's human nature. The legacy products remain easier to sell to existing customers, at higher gross dollar amounts and much higher margins than anything the "interactive department" can show.

All stipulated. We're great at problem exposition, right? So what's the answer?

Where many observers might argue the incumbent media entities need to fire up R&D arms that invent new products in all the current and emerging interactive categories -- and fast! -- I have long maintained our industry will lose if its bias is to build solutions internally (and lose faster if every local property tries to build "the next Google"). Instead, I believe we need to adapt our business development practices to a world full of partnership opportunities.

If pure-plays can invent and deploy the right product to meet a given marketing need of small/medium businesses, why must we insist we could build a "me-too" product better, or blind ourselves to the threat entirely until another chunk of market share goes away?

Almost every company that represents the pure-play revenue in Borrell's data will, or would, entertain reseller partnerships with incumbent local media, as an alternative to building its own sales forces especially in markets smaller than the top 25. Incumbent media can resell best-of-breed interactive and mobile marketing solutions profitably. Plus, the incumbents do still have significant distribution clout via their legacy, offline operations, and will for many years to come.

The sum remains greater than the parts -- as long as we don't stupidly expect things to stay that way without changing some of our behaviors.

If a local media operator can claim to sell products on par with best-of-breed marketing platforms, online and offline, then we shift the game back to differentiators that actually matter: our people, our relationships, our client service, our commitments to the communities in which we operate.

I wish I could say we have big leads in all those "human-touch" areas. We don't. Anyone who has ever tried to change frequency on a newspaper home delivery subscription, or called in to place a private-party classified ad, knows we do not exactly shine at customer service. But we have a more realistic chance of becoming the best on the human side once we equalize the technology race via partnerships. We have little or no chance if we choose to fight our battles on the technology front itself.

Jack Lail expands on Janet Coats' essay which asks the perennial question: as old business models erode, how do we pay for the craft of journalism? A key point:

"For journalism to work, it has to prove its value to the community it serves, and proving that value means attracting business revenue – whether through advertising, subscription, or underwriting by an audience committed to the coverage your provide. Likely, it will be a combination of all those things, and more."

No one talks much about what I call the "Girl Scout cookies" model.

Every year, seemingly everywhere, Girl Scouts sell cookies. They don't bake the cookies. They buy them wholesale and resell them at substantially marked-up prices, keeping the difference to pay for their activities. Everyone understands this.

Some Girl Scout troop activities might help the scouts learn how to bake -- thus, their activities have some tertiary relationship to the products. Still, no one expects the scouts to supply the cookies they sell, and most buyers rely on the consistent quality and selections offered by the institutional bakers who supply the scouts' fare. A new box of Thin Mints? Mmm. Overbrowned sugar cookies produced by Troop 43, offered in a Ziploc? Uh, not so much.

So why do business-model builders always seem to expect the products of journalism to be so intimately tied to business activities that support its practice? At this stage of the game, must we force people to pay directly for a journalistic product or adjacency to it?

No. Here's why:

• High-quality practice of journalism can create new brands or sustain old ones. (Note I do not say all high-quality journalism is practiced by the current crop of news media, nor will it be. Debate among yourselves.)
• Those brands can carry enough weight with institutional leaders and business proprietors to get them to hear a sales pitch, at least. From established brands, they might expect to hear a pitch encouraging them to buy an ad adjacent to news product.
• What is that ad if not a marketing service? And what are news media operators in the business community if not providers of marketing services? So why would we ever limit ourselves to selling marketing services in the form of adjacency to our news products? We can and should offer all the clever interactive tools and methods for business proprietors to get their messages of the moment in front of current and prospective customers.
• We do not have to build marketing products or services ourselves, nor do we have to find audience for every client's message next to our content. Like the scouts, we can acquire and resell these things. In the interactive universe, media companies with a "build-it-ourselves" mentality fall behind, and remain behind, the best innovators in any category. Meanwhile, companies willing to form reseller relationships can gain leverage from the best-of-breed in every category.
• Reseller relationships mean revenue shares, but in my experience, do not have to be loss leaders. Adding resale marketing services (low margin) to traditional ad adjacencies (higher margin) can yield a sum greater than the parts.
• Such a marketing business can grow to help pay for journalism without relying solely on the ad inventory surrounding news product.

Let's see if I can close this loop in one sentence.

High-quality journalism creates credible brands that can open doors for us to sell, or resell, robust marketing solutions to business proprietors, at enough volume and profit over time to sustain the practice of journalism as old models erode.

I never said it would be a great sentence.

I'm also not yet ready to guarantee this will work, but I'd rather try it than continue depending solely on the value of news adjacency, or before even considering consumer-paid news content.

We at Cordillera Interactive need a consumer marketing czar and have begun the hunt for one.

Note that we want this person to work out of Minneapolis-St. Paul, where CI gradually will establish its headquarters. Note also that the position combines marketing research, analytics and product development on behalf of our own properties with those same functions on behalf of our advertising clients. In other words, the person who gets this job will wear a lot of hats but also will have a lot of latitude to set strategy for overall user experience and ad campaign performance.

For the right person, this will be an extraordinarily cool job. If you think that's you, just follow the instructions behind the link to apply.