For Those About to Rock…Saluting RockPeaks.com

I recently checked in with Barnaby Marshall to talk about an exciting venture he’s been working on called RockPeaks.com Barnaby is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of the freshly launched search vertical that caters to true music fans. The idea of building a vertical search site is part of a growing trend in the online industry. Frustrated searchers are growing tired of the ambiguity and hit or miss content found on networks like YouTube and are turning to boutique engines that provide what I like to call a “mecca factor”.

Barnaby has been an avid music fan for as long as he can remember. For years he scoured indie music shops and record conventions for rare videos, but everything changed when YouTube came along four years ago. Suddenly this somewhat obscure passion became a huge mainstream social pastime, as massive amounts of uncirculated material began flooding the internet. The chaos and disorganization of the early stages of Web 2.0, motivated Barnaby to tame the performance video portion of YouTube by building RockPeaks.

Snapping up the title of “world’s largest database of live rock and roll video”, RockPeaks.com has taken full advantage of the explosion of performance video material circulating the web. In organizing the content and tagging it in such a way that users can quickly access specific content, the site truly fulfills a deepening consumer demand for higher levels of sophistication in search.

The site has launched with 5,000 clips ready to be reviewed, commented on and shared by rock fans across the globe. Almost 3,000 of those clips have live, active streams. Eventually the site will evolve into a community that will provide rich information on the content that has until now, been floating around with little to no context.


Much like Google’s mission statement (to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful), RockPeaks.com’s raison d’être is to tame the unruly world of video sharing. Keeping it simple, RockPeaks.com does not allow members to upload their own videos. This is one factor allowing the business to run lean.

Among the site’s features is a clip tracker that finds content that has been pulled from other sharing sites and provides its users with a petition mechanism to lobby for the authorized release of overlooked material.

Barnaby explained that part of the frustration with YouTube is that things get pulled all the time. Often they will pop up again later, but without all the original comments, number of views, rankings etc. This is incredibly valuable data. From an quantitative perspective, we can divide the number of days a clip has been posted by the number of views it has received to get a sense of what's hot on YouTube and from a qualitative standpoint, the user generated content includes true music fans’ commentary and in some cases, valuable data on the who/what/where of a clip, as well as opinions/critiique)

Barnaby describes the founders’ motivation behind RockPeaks.com as “…preserving history and celebrating those fleeting but wonderful moments where musical magic is made and sharing them with others, perpetually”.

The RockPeaks business model has three components:

Advertising

• They’ve secured a deal with one of Canada’s largest advertising networks to represent the site and they will be using Google AdWords in the short term as the fit for niche contextual messaging certainly exists on the site.

Affiliate Program

• A standard agreement with Amazon allows the site to generate commissions from their sales. Interestingly, the value of a digital download is 6 points higher than a hard CD purchase.

Content Licensing

• Content Licensing is a long-term potential revenue stream that will certainly be explored.

Looking forward to watching RockPeaks paint it black...

2009 IAB Canada's MIXX Canada Conference - Overview & Reflections

It was a stimulating day here in Toronto at the 2009 "IAB Canada's MIXX Canada Conference" which took place downtown at the Carlu. This year's event drew in hundreds of keen online marketers to hear some inspiring presentations on recent developments in online media.

I was fortunate enough to catch up one-on-one with all the presenters and will spend the next couple of days sharing some forward thinking from these individuals and the companies they represent.

Here's an overview of the day's agenda...

Inside the Obama Social Media Marketing Juggernaut

The event kicked off with Jascha Franklin-Hodge, the CFO and Co-Founder at Blue State Digital. Blue State Digital was responsible for Barack Obama’s online social media strategy. Jascha shared incredible insight into tools that were created and gave a good presentation of how tactics were tried, tested and optimized. It was a great overview of the fluidity of the social space and clearly demonstrated how influencers can be motivated to become not only supporters, but active advocates focused on a cause.

Adnetik – Havas Digital’s Trading Network – The Next Sea Change in Digital Marketing

Nathan Woodman, Global Managing Director at Adnetik talked to the crowd about a potential paradigm shift in the way we buy online media. Nathan discussed the value of users vs. the value of placements and how publishers and media strategists could re-evaluate their media buys. Following the behavioral trend, Nathan proposed a compelling argument for creating higher value media campaigns that are based on cost per acquisitions. The devil is in the details though and I’ll delve into this topic on a separate post.

Display Fights Back – ComScore’s Take on the Latency Issue

How refreshing to see a presentation that supported the Latency Issue (one of my all time favourite digital issues). Gian Fulgoni, Executive Chairman and Founder of ComScore delivered a rock solid case to re-consider the cost per click dilemma that has wreaked havoc on publisher inventory levels and has caused a clear devaluation of their media space. Gian’s presentation included the following fabulous diagram depicting the bulk (84%!) of the media exposure value as latent.


How else can we say "step away from the click"???

Slow Dancin’ with Doritos: BBDO’s Stufy in Brand Hijacking – Gone Right

Fernando Barbella, BBDO Argentina’s Interactive Creative Director delivered a fabulous presentation and case study. Fernando took us behind the scenes on a “movement” that was conceptualized for the Doritos brand. The golden nugget of the case study was how PepsiCo. allowed the movement to “high jack” its Doritos brand with great results. The slow Dancin’ case study deserves its own blog post and I’ll be elaborating on some really neat concepts I discussed with Fernando after the show.

Canadian Interactive Futures Roundtable

This was one of the more interesting roundtables I’ve watched here in Canada. The main discussion revolved around the economy. All panelists seemed bullish on the online media expenditures in Canada citing that they are either stable or not decreasing at the same rate or degree as was feared...yet.

Some highlights included:

Maura Hanley, Managing Director of Mediacom, one of the largest media buying agencies in Canada, commented on overall media budgets remaining relatively flat but shifting to online. Later in the discussion Maura talked about the huge amount of unpaid media that is starting to appear on the scene. I didn’t get the sense that she felt threatened by this but I did wonder about how this non-monetized media translates into a media planners margins and how it might effect the ways in which the clients compensate the agencies.

Dawna Henderson, President and CEO at Henderson Bas, pointed out that larger consulting firms (McKinseys of the world) are slowly starting to appear in the online space as high-level strategy competitors. I thought this was interesting as it somehow reflected the level of complexity that is required to develop effective online strategies. Award winning agencies can take pride in the fact that a lot of what they do is rocket science - (ok - that's a bit of a self indulgant stretch).

When the panel was asked about the apparently sparse start-up scene in Canada, Jason Sikora, Vice President, Web at Lavalife Corp. named a couple of great home grown brands like eye-return and points.com as real success stories that have a lot more exposure in the US than they do in Canada. Other panelists commented on the migration of Canadian talent to Silicon Valley as it has historically been easier to secure venture capital there.

I think I pushed a button when I asked about whether the publishers were starting to feel a shift in onus to provide bigger picture strategy to advertisers. I have personally reflected on this question for a while as I hear more and more publishers and ad networks going directly to the clients with offerings.

Dominique-Sébastien Forest, General Manager Digital Media and E-Commerce at Canoe Inc - Quebecor Media very passionately answered this question. According to Domenique-Sebastien, some of the best case studies he’s seen, have come out of publisher-developed strategies. He seemed to feel strongly that agencies have become a little complacent about doing the heavy lifting and that the publishers need to step in more and more these days.

Taking the discussion to a higher level, Tomer Strolight, President at Torstar Digital and Chairman at IAB Canada, commented on how publishers are charged with the task to innovate highly scalable product offerings that operate within the new eco-system (social networks etc.). He talked about the importance of creating repeatable, high value propositions to advertisers and suggested that this strategic challenge may be one of the factors that are driving higher level consulting firms to join the landscape.

In summary, here is my humble list of the day’s take-aways:

1. Metrics have reached a new level of sophistication – we are on the verge of buying on a qualitative level. If publishers and advertisers buy into the new generation of media valuation, it may save a lot of inventory headaches and drive revenue. Think "bidding on the user - not the media space".
2. Agencies are going to start feeling more pressure from new competitors and a growing trend from publisher mandates to innovate and sell directly to the advertisers.
3. The concept of “letting go” is starting to evolve into hi-jacking scenarios like the one presented by Fernando for Doritos. Many case studies are starting to pop-up on this. Skittles' recent flirtation with Twitter is another example of brands attempting to let go (some more successfully than others).
4. Giving influencers tools to advocate your brand appropriately like the Obama campaign is hot.

I'm sure that I'll think of many more as I process the information from the day's event.

Stay tuned.

Spilling the Skittles...Skittles Goes Social

It's always been hard to nail the point behind CPG websites. I think it'll be interesting to see how Skittles' new social site plays out.

They've decided to use Twitter search as their landing page. So now, all Tweets are updated live and are visible to the consumers visiting the site (for what reason, I'm not sure yet).

This must be part of a bigger strategy. I can see some neat promotional strategies arise out of this - contests etc. It's a great bridge to mobile media.

I'd love to see the back-end of this and how the data is being collected (who really owns it) and used. It seems like a great way to develop a CRM database very quickly.

I wonder if it would have been possible to just create a page or section on a bigger website that could have accommodated Twitter as a feature rather than the focal point and only offering on the site.

Either way, the brand has received a lot of publicity through this stunt. This is one of those cases where being first puts you on the map. Kudos to the team for putting it all out there.

Now let's see what happens when people get over the rainbow...

Girl Disrupted...Local Pick Opportunity

I’m all for the Local Picks application on Facebook. I thought it fit in 2007 and I still think it fits today.

However, being a bit of a media snob, I did feel a little let down by a recent notification in my profile. Local Picks had a great opportunity to gain some interaction and I think they blew it.

It’s important in any media initiative to show consistency in messaging and give audiences what you’ve promised in your call to action.

So clicking on the notification to see the new restaurant in my area should bring me to the new listing no?


What a great opportunity to ask me if I’ve been there and liked it. Heck, I might have been motivated to rate it as well.

Instead, I was sent to a generic landing page that has done two things:

1. Disrupted my Facebook user experience as I wasn't really looking for a place to go (I was interested in seeing what new place in my area was listed).
2. Not delivered on it's media message.
   

Users are fickle and competing applications are anything but scarce (especially in the local search category). This was a great example of an opportunity to stand out from the crowd AND get user interaction that was not fully realized.

Maybe the next notification will be more fulfilling for both the user and the directory.

Just a follow up note... Here's the message on my profile telling all my friends what I've (allegedly) been up to :