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Mike Troiano is the CEO of matchmine, the Boston-based media discovery platform provider that delivers personalized media recommendations across online applications and devices. Mike is a proven entrepreneurial leader with a track record of success at the intersection of new technology and broad consumer adoption. He was the founding CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Interactive and Brandscape; the President of Nasdaq-listed systems integrator Primix Solutions, and the General Manager, Interactive for mobile transaction processing pioneer m-Qube until that company was sold to VeriSign in May, 2006.

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FYI: Sponsoring Content, Context Are Not the Same

Written on
Jul 2, 2008 
Author
Mike Troiano  |
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FYI: Sponsoring Content, Context Are Not the Same

On a typical day I read the The Boston Globe, The New York Times Opinion Pages, articles from Esquire, Salon and The Atlantic, whatever’s on TechCrunch, GigaOm, Mashable, Guy Kawasaki’s and Chris Brogan’s blogs, Valleywag, Fake Steve Jobs and The Bloggess. I scan another 90 or so sources of news, almost every day, looking for the information I need to help my business, understand my world, or just improve my day. And I do it all from a single site, powered by Bloglines, which you can see for yourself right here.

The Bloglines reader (like many other applications) takes the RSS feeds that virtually all content owners now provide and integrates them into a kind of information stream you can dip into with a single click. Each can be scanned at a glance, or read in its entirety without leaving neat stacks of all the other information you’re trying to get through on any given day. A decent RSS reader takes you from sipping your information through a straw to sucking it up like a shop vac. Sure, there’s an aesthetic tradeoff. You lose the formatting, fonts and images that art directors agonize over. In essence, you lose the boutique.

You also lose most of the ads. It’s turned out that free media wasn’t really a marriage of Content and Advertising. It was a ménage a trois of Content, Advertising, and Context. And if anybody was married, it was the Advertising and the Context. The Content had its fun then blew out of there like a French flight attendant on a Cleveland layover.

Feedly is significant because it dramatically enhances the value of removing Content from its native Context. It reduces the aesthetic costs of its predecessors with better design and enhanced usability, and dials up the practical value with features that let you more intelligently prioritize and sort information across sources. It responds to the preferences implicit in your own reading behaviors, and even those of the people you identify as friends in other services. That’s right, in other services. No Facebook “friending” games, no address book search, no spamming your Aunt Lala along with the guy you interviewed once two years ago. You give it your username in whatever services you like, and it learns what you like and whom you know directly from them. Wow.

Now, I’m not saying all this in itself proposes an existential threat to advertising. Feedly may become just another Context when it inevitably accepts advertising (perhaps one with a treasure trove of targeting data). And you’ll recall that the engine of the RSS revolution is the technology’s ability to drive additional traffic into the content boutiques, and thus generate more impressions. There are also copyright issues to be considered, though still active debate over where those lines should be drawn.

What I am saying is that Feedly is another data point in what seems to be a kind of assault on the Context in which advertising has traditionally thrived. More and more users are zipping through the commercials on Tivo, abandoning print magazine subscriptions with full page ads in favor of digital content sources with comparatively pathetic online ad units, and dumping FM radio and its incessant interruptions in favor of iPod streaming and commercial-free satellite. Users not only want content, they increasingly want control of the context in which that content is delivered. And technology is giving it to them. Responsible marketers ignore these trends at their peril.

So what can you do about it? Well, start by diagnosing your level of exposure. Consider putting together a quick pie chart of how your current ad spend breaks down between dollars spent in “Context” and dollars spent in “Content.”

The latter includes sponsorships and some promotion, product placement and integration, PR, whatever you spend to engage your targets in the various online communities and social networks, and finally (of course,) the creation of original content.

If the slice of pie that represents all that looks roughly suitable for a French flight attendant, you might need to get smarter about all this Web 2.0 stuff, and dial up the level of time, energy and resources you apply to promoting your product and building your brand within as opposed to around content people care about.

If you don’t, you might just find yourself in Cleveland.





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