1. Silicon Valley Norm Johnston Sep 23, 2011
Summary
Last week over 70 leaders from our North American Mindshare offices spent time in California with
Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and many others. Here’s a quick summary of the visit.
Content Wars AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft heavily competing in the premium content space, either
via their own original material or aggregating third-party assets. Each launching glossy magazine-
style tablet editions, although with new branding, e.g., AOL’s Editions and Microsoft’s Glo. AOL has
rediscovered their mojo with the Huffington Post acquisition. Key question is whether they can scale
it internationally; so far so good in the UK and Canada, with more markets on the horizon.
Pret-a-Portable Everyone is designing content, mainly in HTML5, so it’s easily portable across
multiple devices, particularly mobile phones and tablets as they begin to trump PC’s in online
consumption. Yahoo claims their sophisticated back-end infrastructure gives them greater
scalability and advantage in this area; could this be Carol Bartz’s lasting legacy?
The Social Web Everyone, except Facebook, made it clear that social is more than just Facebook.
There were many variations on the theme, everything from social content to social search. Content
publishers in particular are embracing social networks by weaving social tools and the graph into
their user experiences. The big exception is of course Google who are taking Facebook head on
with their Google + product. In fact, “Like” versus “+” may be this decade’s Coke versus Pepsi.
Lifestreaming Facebook announced a myriad of new features at F8, including two of interest. First,
the new profile page will provide a richer more emotional snapshot and data visualization of who
you are and your personal history, including a personal Timeline. Facebook also launched a “Like”
type feature that streams your actions with applications, e.g., notifying others when you are
“Listening” to Spotify, “Running” with Nike+, or “Cooking” with Kraft. Great hack of Facebook’s
technology and data that may prove too Orwellian for some. A full F8 debrief coming soon.
Splendid Isolation Apple march on with seemingly little concern for others. Of course it helps to
have nearly recession-resistant growth rates. Apple impressed us all with their unrelenting focus on
developing an incredibly strong albeit mostly closed ecosystem of superior products, sublime
software, and seamless experiences. In fact, their session was the only one without any technical
snafus! In the future, look for iAd’s in more markets and greater support for branded apps.
RTB ASAP Display advertising continues to be a big, growing business. While it’s clear that the
AOL/Yahoo/Microsoft exchange alliance is not fully baked yet, their intent to challenge Google’s
display ambitions is unmistakable. All would agree that exchanges, and in particular real-time
bidding (RTB) on display inventory (think paid search but for display), will become a much bigger
part of our business sooner rather than later.
Konnecting Kinect Microsoft has big plans for Xbox with multiple content deals, original
programming, and a new interface all aimed at making it tomorrow’s TV portal. Redmond is also
intent on augmenting the Kinect experience via new voice and image recognition features such as
NuAd’s (voice interaction with ad units) and brand/product recognition (e.g., earn gaming points if
Kinect senses a Pepsi in the room). Also look for extensions of Kinect technology to other devices.
Present Roll Big growth in online video, with tons of the usual statistics to back it up (e.g., 48
hours of video uploaded every hour on YouTube, 1 billion video views on Facebook). Lots of great
examples of YouTube posts, premium Yahoo channels, and Microsoft pre and post roll video ads.
However, the most interesting innovation is around simplifying and socializing live video streaming
and conferencing. For example, Microsoft is integrating Skype into Xbox while Google+ is helping
people hold multi-user live video Hangouts. In the future, brands may have some interesting
opportunities to use such technology for everything from branding to sales to customer service.