Save Signed Formula with airSlate SignNow

Save signed formula

and for our final keynote of the day we present Jim Bank off CEO of vox media wow it's a much younger guy up there buddy he looks good hiya Ron thanks I know I'm the last one I know you've put in a great and probably long day and I will talk and then get you going with some cocktails and I promise not to delay the cocktails so thank you I am em Jim Bank off as you can see up there and I'm going to talk a little bit about attention driven storytelling this is a conference about consumer attention and my goal here is to talk about the company that I've helped to build vox media the company I run and in doing so not really I'm not here to like pitch our company or anything but I am here to kind of talk about what made us successful so far in capturing consumer attention and so as I go through it my goal is to really give some strategy but then some concrete examples on how to build a modern media company and I think a lot of these are applicable to building brands building on content building any type of consumer attention in a digital age and I and I always put this forward with humility it's not meant to be a prescription by any means but it is meant to share insights and take with them from them what you will want to start off by explaining how we view the evolution of online media because I think it's relevant context for the discussion three phases the first phase i call porting to the web and many of us live through this phase where great media brands great brands more generally started to put their stuff on the web and they had some mixed results there were some great brands that were part of this era in fact we're in the building of one of the greatest media brands that kind of took their newspaper articles and just put them on the web and when they did so I think there were some problems on this was an era of analog dollars translating into digital pennies and there was a lot of frustration on the part of great brand media brands great publishers and that they couldn't find a business model but not only could they not find a business model they couldn't find a creative model they weren't exploiting the medium for what it was they weren't exploiting data consumer feedback etc and the result was an era that didn't really scale great brands great content but created for another purpose another medium the advertising to was created for another medium fast forward to the second phase which I affectionately called the race to the bottom and I can use some harsh more harsh words as well this was an era of a lot of crap and it was you know we I think a lot of the lot of companies realize hey producing online content has a different economic model it's creating good content though is expensive so what are we going to do about it well let's do a whole lot of unpaid internships let's do a whole lot of SEO arbitrage let's do a lot of reverse engineering of what makes thing go viral so that we can in a pretty cynical way cheeping the content increase the distribution and hope for a business model well people caught on consumers caught on they didn't give it their attention advertisers caught on and realize we don't want our brands to be associated with this type of content and so while you saw a lot of crappy advertisements surrounding a lot of crappy content it didn't really scale whereas phase one did it I'm sorry I didn't really sustain whereas phase one didn't scale phase two really didn't sustain we got a lot of traffic in a hurry but no real brands were built that we're worth up you know we're meaningful in phase three I think it's a combination of the two and by the way you know I affectionately put our websites up here but it's not really about vox media they're great companies both legacy media companies and new media companies that are embracing this new wave and this new wave captures the best from the first part in the second part from the first part it means brands matter it means programming for a new medium really matters it means creating new form factors for new devices really matter programming for the device for the platform are going to be essential but so is great storytelling as it always has been and so is understanding how new media works and taking a lot of the things that we've learned from leveraging data leveraging platforms and applying it to great storytelling so that it builds sustains and it scales it's an era that brings back brand where brand matters again vox media were embracing brand not only as we create our own brands but as we partner with other brands to help them grow theirs and gain attention on their own in their own right so with that as contacts let me talk a little bit about what our company is who we are a lot of people haven't heard of vox media because really it's the parent company for eight different media brands i have them listed here we range from sports and SB Nation to technology with both the verge more of a consumer technology brand and more recently recode which is more of a business technology brand either the world of food rack the homebrew love at home in real estate curb I'm sorry curb the home of design and real estate racked and shopping and fashion polygons and gaming and box comm one of our newer ones that we launched and has grown to be the number one media brand procom score in politics and general news so we've had a lot of great success generally the fastest-growing in each one of these categories you can see our numbers here the the theme is attention and I'll talk a lot about capturing attention across platforms our goal is to really program wherever there is relevant audience and if you were creating a new media company when we were five years ago you would start by building a website as we did and our websites have grown tremendously we now touch 165 million consumers every month worldwide but you want to end there you would program wherever they are and of course that means today all the all the platforms that think everyone in this room programs to whether it's Facebook or Twitter or snapshot certainly the big digital platforms but increasingly we're not limiting ourselves to digital platforms we recently signed the big agreement with NBC Universal where they made a big commitment in terms of investment to our company investing two hundred million dollars but beyond that we have an operating agreement and I think there will be collaborations that come out of that where you'll see us programming on their platform to as we currently do with a brand say like recode on CNBC so our goal is to create relevant programming for audiences wherever it makes sense whether it's over the top whether it's on linear or whether it's on our own websites and when we do that we touch an audience with well over 300 million every month it's not just about a big audience of course it's about a focused audience we tried to occupy the space of being a little more affluent a little bit more educated our content reflects that by I think having a by being a little bit you know we position it in our self as being a little bit smarter and smart is in the eye of the beholder of course but what we mean by that is that we're not just going for traffic we want substance and when you click on it we want you to feel like you've had a great experience sometimes that could be something quick and fun or sometimes it could be a 10,000 word investigative piece but we're gardless of whether it's a quick fun little jiff or regardless of whether it's a long-form beautiful award-winning story we want it to be a good experience and we put a lot of emphasis on that and I think as a result we're able to target and engage the kind of audience that we want of course influence drives attention to and I have some quotes here but again part of that is how do you do quality at scale how do you be both big enough to be relevant but also be high enough quality to be relevant and that's a truck tricky thing to manage and I think for the rest of my talk I'm going to give you some insight into how we manage it the first thing we embrace is talent and voice and the greatest way to drive attention in our minds is to have great voices who are communicating with an audience or with consumers or with people and I have some of the faces that make up our company but what each of them have in common we started off in sports blogging and we went out and we we found the best web native voice for every single team in sports topic in North America and we empowered them with a platform but what they all had in common was they not only knew their subject matter inside and out but they were able to communicate with and engage a web audience to get a web it's attention in really specific ways they knew how to work the web not necessarily great at a newspaper article column not necessarily great as a radio talk show host nor a TV commentator but really good at understanding the web and you can draw a straight line through from that first sports blogger through people like Ezra Klein who runs our box comm site Amanda clewd who runs our eater site marques brownlee who is one of the biggest YouTube stars what they all have in common is their voice they passion about their subject matter and they can bring that passion to bear in terms of engaging big audiences around the topics that they care about combined voice with platform and it's not enough just to create great content and put it up on a website nor is it enough to put it up on facebook or any other platform we consider ourselves largely to be a technology company that is in the business of building media brands and so we have our own platform and I'll show you some examples of how it works after this but we're inspired by some of the other great platforms that I have up here on the board Facebook is you know the most powerful platform out there in terms of sharing Netflix being a platform of course for film entertainment or Amazon a platform for e-commerce we view ourselves as a platform for building brands for building media brands and for working with partners that are looking to build their plan but that's a that's an important distinction from say a one-off website that is launched or one-off media company our goal is how do you do this again and again and again in our case we do it with our eight brands and we're growing them and we're now in the business of working with marketers and brands to help them leverage our platform so that they can grow their brands and grow their consumer attention and really you need technology to do that well it's not enough just to put something up you might have a one-hit wonder but the question is how do you sustain how do you have a repeatable success and that's what we're looking to do just like these great platforms have if talent is part one platform is part two what wraps it all together is culture and culture enables you to grow as an organization and culture is probably an overt used and kind of ambiguous word but it's the most important part of our company we consider our culture to be a hacker culture where hacking meets storytelling and we all know about hacking as a Silicon Valley reference you have you know in tremendous success stories like Mark Zuckerberg that didn't ask for anyone's permission just went and built the thing and change the world when they built the thing well we view ourselves as hackers in a storytelling context and now we're as you know when I was a kid you had to work really hard at the school newspaper to hopefully get an internship at the regional metro daily and if you were really successful maybe one day you can you know work in this building and start off at the copy desk and hope to work your way up well obviously those rules have changed and now we have people who just take the medium into their own hands make things tell stories and there's a whole lot of bad stuff out there but on the on the top and the cream skin there's a whole lot of great stuff and we view it as our business to find the people who are creating the great stuff and support them with platform with a business model with reach and distribution best practices and sharing across everything that the other ones are learning so that we can help them all be successful and help them achieve their goals of communicating and capturing the attention of a large audience so let's not you know done with the strategy part let's start to get specific about the platform that we've created it has a name it's called chorus chorus does a lot of different things course like singing in the chorus box you'll see a theme around voices and enabling voices and voices coming together to collaborate and that's why we called it chorus chorus does a lot of things one of the things it does particularly well is to give a deep dive around analytics and we like to say that we are not so much a data-driven company because great stories can't be dictated by data but great stories can be informed by data so we'd like to consider ourselves when we're doing our best to be a data informed company and some of the data that informs us you know it ranges you know you obviously have data about your audience and I think a lot of marketing attention is focused on data about audiences less is focused on data about content and what you see behind you is a screen capture of some data about content so we have really good information about what people are searching for what people are sharing by season you know this started out in sports where we knew frankly down to the hour what people were going to be where they're going to be paying at their attention you know obviously right now it is football it is World Series but you'd be surprised you can probably glean information about nearly everything except for maybe who's going to win and sometimes you can probably figure that out but you can go down to what day of the year are our baseball athletes most likely to tear their labrum you know there's a lot of data when you dive into it not only applicable to sports but applicable to all the categories in which we operate and as a marketer that data in terms of where there is consumer attention and when it's happening is really critical because we find that you want to time the stories that you tell as a marketer to where there's going to be a receptiveness to consumer attention so again you want to use the data to inform strategy a more cynical view is when you use the data to drive strategy and you say it doesn't matter what our story is we're just going to tap into wherever there's trends those tends to be the things that don't work great stories work but great stories are often informed by the timing in the data so we seek to provide that of course optimization and testing is critical so this is a tool called optimize that we use and if you have a great story to tell you want to make sure that it gets in front of the right audience at the right time so we develop tools for that and this next phase shows you know how we test things and you can see some mobile site experiments that we did it and on the right talks about conversion across different creatives whether it's photo imagery whether it's headline writing whether it's lead writing we're not going to change our stories to get the highest click through but we are going to make sure that those stories reach the right audience and it's not just about doing a be testing it's about doing multivariate testing across different segments groups because what might entice me to getting you know my attention for a given story isn't going to entice someone else and so we look across hundreds if not thousands of different segments groups and can optimize imagery and headline writing and other things based on what works for that particular segment as we define it and those are always changing we're always optimizing so that's another important part of how data informs the platform of course it's not just on our websites it's across platforms to and what you're seeing here is a screenshot of what I just showed you before but how it works on facebook and how it works on Twitter and eventually how it works on snapchat and I think ultimately how it will work on over the top broadcast platforms as well from longer form storytelling so we need to have a very distributed approach to what we do and part of programming to multiple platforms is understanding how audiences are consuming on those platforms and understanding how you can capture their attention the words you use the imagery you use so that you can ultimately get their attention with your brand and the story that you want your brand to tell I understand there a lot of marketers here and so you might be thinking yourself okay that's great what does it mean for me you know you've built this media company well i think you know it's know you know you know better than i know that your audiences are shifting to digital you need to capture their attention in digital and you're probably here because you already are very good at doing that you know we specialize in working with marketers and I think like a lot of great companies we thought to ourselves well what is a business that we can get in to support our journalism and storytelling to that is kind of consistent you know the history of advertising is not one that we necessarily liked it was often interruption model as opposed to a value-add MA all and we decided early on to take our talents and our platform as storytellers and help marketers who are looking to do the exact same thing that we are looking to do which is capture consumer attention so everything I just showed you we basically made available to marketers who are looking to tell their stories and we promote those stories on our own websites but we also promote them across digital whether it's on facebook or other social platforms or whether it's on other websites that are consistent that have the audiences that our marketers are looking for and we believe that bold beautiful integrated advertising when done right actually works well there's a lot of discussion right now in the advertising world about ad blocking and about loading and performance and I'm glad that there is because I think that discussion is really a discussion about good advertising and good storytelling versus bad advertising and bad storytelling and the truth is the web has confused the two you'll see a lousy add-on halau see website sometimes you'll see a lousy add on a good website it will diminish the value of that experience not just on a website but on a mobile app or anywhere you know the same can be said for magazines or television it has to be good and we're really committed to making it good and I think there are a lot of other entities that are as well including advertisers including other publishers including platforms browsers etc and I'm really excited to have this discussion as an industry about what it's going to take to make marketing good we have some really specific opinions on that it's going to start with advertising that is additive to the experience it has to load fast it has to be creatively strong it has to tell a compelling story it has to be relevant to its audience and it has the leverage data to make sure that it's relevant to its audience it's to tell a great story these are the things that we believe in and these are the things that I'd like to rally our industry around because if it you're in this room chances are you believe in the same principles both as a consumer but also as a marketer or a publisher we have a unit of our company that's dedicated to working with brand marketers because we recognize that not everyone can be in the same business not everyone can build a platform not everyone can build an audience you know just as though I while we do great marketing we don't aspire to be in the automotive business nor the consumer packaged goods business we recognize that our brand partners have businesses to run and those businesses might not always include building your own data platform and building your own CMS and targeting capabilities so we work to help unleash their stories by using all the things that we've built in the platform that we've built and we're extending that not only on our websites but across other partner websites and partner platforms as well and some of the results here hard to see on a flat screen here but they're very immersive cross-device things this happens to be in our brand Eater that work closely with JPMorgan Chase but there are you know hundreds of examples where we sit down with marketers and say either via stories that we can help you tell or stories that you're already telling how do we make sure that we capture attention for those stories and that's what we're focused on doing with them making them beautiful making them bold making them travel across the web making sure that they're not only viral but viral in the right way viral in a way that doesn't compromise who you are as a brand that enables you to tell your story and do it in an efficient and data informed web AB should sing and this is a this is the behind the scenes of our advertising platform because we we realized early on that every brand is a snowflake everyone has to be unique and that creates a scale challenge how can you both have unique and scale how can you tell an individual handcrafted story but do it in a way that you can test a thousand different creatives do it in a way well where no two brands are telling the same story with the same imagery with the same creative thought that goes into it every every request for proposal that I see says we want something that is unique and never done before some of you might be writing these proposals and but we also want it to be tested and high-performing well you know those two things don't always go well together but we've used technology and workflow enhancements to make the storytelling process in the testing process as efficient as possible so that we can do custom at scale so that we can run and test thousands of campaigns and do so as efficiently as possible what we're never going to be able to replace is the human creativity that drives these ideas but when it comes down to actually producing assets to testing those assets we can use technology in our advantage to our advantage so that we can be as efficient as possible to create customized stories but do so in a way that is efficient that is cost-effective and that is robust and scalable and this is behind the scenes of our platform hymnal that allows us to do that some examples of how the creative ultimately looks it could be you know in a more native format here on the left here you see a Snickers campaign that is you know pretty simple one the 10 most satisfying life moments that was put together by targeted to a gaming audience on our brand polygon but you also see a deeper story by land rover that was created called the vanishing game and a whole kind of interactive storytelling device that had multiple episodes heavy on video heavy on kind of gameplay so whether it's something as simple as a list like 10 most satisfying life moments or something as complex as an interactive game that tells a story we want to find a wide variety and a wide palette of storytelling devices to engage and capture attention and then we want to display it in a beautiful way and i only put this one up there because you know there's been a lot of negativity around the ad banner and rightfully so you know you can't expect to create attention with a small ad banner that people's eyes glaze over we introduce big bold beautiful units to help be vessels for the storytelling that we want to do and what we found was not only did it perform better you know in terms of some of the more traditional kpi's whether it's click-through or intent to purchase or whatever it is but it also made our audience happier and those two things you know should logically go together you would think Oh a bigger advertisement is bad but it's not if it's done well if its quality creative if it's tested and if it's relevant to our audience now translate that it's easy to show you a beautiful picture on a big device like a laptop it's harder to do that on a mobile device but we put every bit as much effort and obviously mobile is where the growth is it's where the opportunity is and so it's where we've been really focused in terms of finding those high impact high attention-grabbing units as well and so again this is a little bit you know this is not meant for me to talk to you about why we're interesting per se but it is meant to tell you hey don't compromise when you're telling a great story don't force that story to be distributed in a little text link don't force it to be distributed in a banner ad be proud of it create great content and then distribute it in bold ways and I think what you'll find is you'll capture consumer attention and it'll if it's a quality story if it's an engaging story that's targeted in the right way you'll get the audience and then measure it of course and reiterate this is when you work with us this is like an example of the feedback loop that's a real time feedback loop so we can optimize on the fly so that we know what the performance is this is an example of a native placement performance and we can understand in real time how it's working so we can optimize and make sure the campaign is and I'd say the same thing goes for whatever you create use the data to your advantage so that's it my time is up and I want to make sure to end in time keep my promise about the cocktails I'll be out there for a little bit if you have any questions and you know thank you for your attention thank you for a great day everyone now please join us downstairs for some post-show cocktails