Brian Grey Blog

Yikes!  I haven’t posted on this blog in over two weeks.  What gives?

No, I haven’t been on an extended vacation, though it is fair to assume that the Grey Family trip to Mexico has been postponed for Summer 2009.  Looks like that trip to the water park in Santa Rosa is back on the docket!

Consider the last two weeks as a combination of being pretty busy meeting with interesting companies and people in the digital media space — all of which I can’t really be blogging about now can I?  Well, I guess according to the new Twittersphere world we live in, maybe I’m supposed to be life streaming everything I do in real-time?  Sorry, I have to draw the line somewhere — some stuff has to stay behind the firewall brother.

Ok, so what is on my radar these days?

Healthcare. I ran across another article today that pegs healthcare related spending in the U.S. at more than 17% of GDP and the expectation is that eventually it will account for the biggest slice of the economy.  Everywhere you look you can’t help but notice how overweight on average people are in this country and how much TV advertising bombards us with visual images of some of the most unhealthy and outright disgusting food options.  This is a topic that everyone should put on their short list of priorities to help address — starting with their own health.  Exercise more, eat less — starting now!

Sports. April was a great month.  Baseball starts — and the visuals strike me that the economy may be impacting attendance.  The pictures of all those empty seats at Yankee Stadium behind the hitter is a stark reminder that not everyone can afford literally hundreds (or thousands) of dollars to watch a ballgame.  On the flip side, the NFL Draft reminds us that in some instances sports continues to be immune to the macro economy.  Seems a bit incongruous that in a city where an entire industry is dying a slow death their team commits almost $42 million to an unproven quarterback.  Nice message Detroit.

Digital Media Business. I’m loving the never-ending game of musical chairs in the digital media space.  AOL makes the latest move as new CEO Tim Armstrong exits Greg Coleman (one of my former bosses when I was at Yahoo!) from his job running Platform-A after basically 3 months.  Then there’s News Corp. — bringing in Jon Miller as Chief Digital Officer and a new management team at MySpace.com, starting with a new CEO, COO and CPO.  Yahoo! and MSN have been active as well — even swapping some players so to speak.  Eventually all of the moves will be a net positive for the digital business.  Once all the new management teams get settled in they will be anxious to make a mark — and the fastest way to do that is through acquisition.  So if you are running a start up, keep your head down, build your audience and get profitable if you can.  A big media company may come knocking later this year.

Silicon Alley Insider’s post today (find it here) about the pending reorg at AOL’s Platform A group under the leadership of newly hired Greg Coleman (one of my many former bosses at Yahoo!) highlights how the pendulum continues to swing back and forth in the world of digital media.

At every stop I’ve made where the focus has been around building an audience and then selling advertising to that audience (of all flavors, standard media, sponsorship, performance based, etc.), the pendulum always swung along two axes.

On the sales axis the constant tug is between deploying a sales organization that is built around the “best athlete” theory in which any sales exec can sell everything that you create — all the products and audiences — versus creating a specialized sales organization built around the notion that domain expertise and experience generates bigger deals and better margin than the aforementioned structure.

Think of it this way — what is more valuable, selling a lot of remnant (e.g. email inventory) at a low eCPM or selling a fraction of a ton of specialized audience content at a higher eCPM.  The answer is simple math — getting to the optimal number is less trivial when you are trying to mesh different sales skill sets with the fact that you want to minimize confusion out in the marketer and agency landscape.

Of course, the holy grail in the equation above is targeting and yield optimization — and every day that goes by gets us closer to a world where it won’t be so much an “either or” scenario.

At the same time the head scratching is going on in the sales organization, the product and programming teams are also scrambling to get in front of how digital media consumers continue to evolve their media consumption habits.  Do you roll out a general “portal” product approach with a consistent brand and monetization look & feel in the name of supporting that scalable sales organization, or do you create specialized consumer experiences tailored to different demographic and psychographic audience characteristics that will pump up your engagement metrics?

AOL’s MediaGlow efforts are taking them in the direction of breaking up the cyberborg portal programming model and replacing it with a confederate states approach of individual brands with unique audience characteristics.  It will take some level of expertise on the sales side of the house to sell the value proposition of these unique properties to agencies and marketers.

So it would seem part of Platform A’s reorganization has to support this effort by creating teams that can sell specialized audience “sub networks” and a separate team (or open ad network approach) that enables marketers to then get the broader reach they need in the non-premium tier of inventory that AOL can make available across their entire audience network.

Again, the tidal wave of targeting will ultimately come to the rescue!

But in the meantime, the good news for folks in both the sales and programming corners of AOL it would seem is that 1) both jobs should only continue to get more fun and interesting as they move in this narrowband programming direction that both users and marketers are craving and 2) in Greg they’ve certainly got a guy who has lived through the swinging pendulum for many years.

Finally got around to the upgrade last night (ok, early this morning). The install went pretty smoothly (at least so far). I had hoped to use the WP auto upgrade plugin or the one-click scripts upgrade tool that my web host offers, but realized both of those options would be sub optimal to doing a manual upgrade.

Nice thing now is that future installs come with one-click upgrade built in to 2.7.

I am just getting going on the new UI, but I like it already! The QuickPress module is pretty handy. I am sure the more I bang around on the dashboard I’ll come up with some feedback for the WP crew.

One of the plugins I do want to play around with is Buddy Press that just came out with the 2.7 release. As WP expands beyond a blog publishing platform, I can really see them evolving to become the “dashboard” that I have been looking for to corral all of my personal communications and publishing activities — across my social graph.

The other feature I will be looking for is a way to auto publish a status update with a Tiny URL of each of my latest blog posts through my Twitter account so those that follow me on Twitter can be prompted when I have an updated post.

Speaking of cool features, how great would it be to have a single place where I can drive all of this versus having to bounce across 10 browser tabs in FireFox?

I’m not convinced closed end solutions being offered up by Microsoft Windows Live at home.live.com or AOL via Bebo will be complete enough to make it worth my time because they will always feel limited in terms of the services that I can plug in?