PointAbout Featured on GCN.com

In an article titled, “Remixing Government Data,” GCN writes:

“PointAbout, a company that took part in both contests, has developed a common runtime platform for smart phones so it can build applications for its clients that work on any brand of phone. Getting involved in the contest was a good way to show off the tool’s capabilities, said Scott Suhy, PointAbout’s president.

The company submitted an application called iLegislator, which could be seen as a mini-encyclopedia of congressional representatives. It offers a wealth of information that can be accessed on the go and can even pinpoint the user’s location and identify which legislators cover that area.”

Version 1.8.2

I haven’t been too good at keeping the public up with our fixes. As we move to our new AppMakr.com system we hope to have a more systematic way of posting iprovements and fixes to our users.

To catch everyone up our Springboard upgrades and fixes include:

Additions

Full Camera and cameraroll picker functionlity

Camer cancel call back

web pane popout/secondary webpage slide up view

Fixes

Camera freeze on multiple use fixed

web popout “:” interpreter inurl fix

page freeze when returning to divice.init page using device ready call  back

PointAbout Wins Prize from Sunlight Foundation

PointAbout was notified today by the Sunlight Foundation that it was an award recipient in Sunlight’s “Apps for America” contest held in the Spring of 2009.  PointAbout’s entry was its “iLegislator” application that allows users to gain insight and information about their elected representatives right from the phone, including location-aware district representation information, real-time voting updates, Twitter feeds, contact information and more.  Details on the entry are available here.

The full award notification letter is below:

Yet another Android – Samsung

Googles Android OS is now available on the Samsung I7500. It will be interesting to see how the Androids breadth of exposure weighs against the Apples depth within the market on the AT&T’s service/iPhone Devcie. Hopefully this is yet another example of how standardization and open initiatives on commonly used systems is far greater for a brand then having full control and lack of transparency.

It is going to be an interesting to watch that match up of Google vs. Apple in the 3rd party mobile integration initiatives. If my sources are right Apple has about 50% market share on smart devices to Googles 6% and with other even more closed legacy system owning the remaining percentage the landscape so far has deemed the mobile market as kingdom over democracy………

PointAbout creates iBlob

PointAbout just released iBlob, an application that shows off the power of “HTML 5 Canvas” and the iPhone’s accelerometer.

App Description

A fun app for small children that leverages the iPhone accelerometers.

This app was originally written by Bjrn Lindberg who hosts http://blobsallad.se and is a great display of what you can do with HTML Canvas.

We took Bjrn’s code (with his approval) and produced this simple little fun children’s app where you can split the blog, press on the blob to turn him red (once red he’s no longer under the control of the accelerometers and you can push him around). Have fun!

PBS Interactive: New Website Launch (3 of 3)

Daniel Odio attended PBS’ new website launch preview session, which was another in a series of fantastic events created by Julie Perlmutter of the Web Manager’s Roundtable.  This video (3 of 3 – see first video here) was held for posting until the new PBS.org site was publicly launched this past Wednesday.

Here is the transcript:

[01:00:2] Our part of the project is funded by a very generous grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  We launched in the Fall in a soft launch.  We didn’t do any paid promotion apart from a press release until very recently.  So we launched September 2nd as a soft-launch, but we did, of course, link to the video portal from our home page.

So it immediately saw a great response because we already had an established audience that was coming who suddenly saw something playing and that became a big attraction.  We launched with about 60 hours of content.  For kids, our full episodes are about half an hour.  In some cases, a full episode is even shorter, like 15 minutes.  There are two 15 minute stories in one half hour.  That 60 hours actually means a lot of full episodes.  We also broke them down into clips so that we could tag them and organize them by themes and by curriculum areas with more flexibility.

[01:01:20] We currently have over 100 hours from 19 properties, but we’ve been evolving since September 2008.  We have two or three hours week and we have seen what we think is an amazing response right out of the gate in the first few weeks since launch.  We saw about one million stream requests per week in the first and second weeks.  We have already seen that response.  Because we weren’t doing any promotions then we didn’t see a rise in unique visitors to our site, but we did see our existing visitors coming back at a much higher rate than they had been coming back before.

We had a category of users that came back ten or more times per month; we call them the fanatics.  Some in the industry of analytics call them addicts, but when we are talking about kids that just sounds wrong!  So we call them the fanatics and those doubled between August and September 2008.  After we launched the media portal we could see immediately that kids who were already visitors were coming back a lot more.

[01:02:30] We have more than just our television shows.  The gold block on television is a block that airs on most  stations after school between three thirty and six o’clock.  It includes Arthur’s Cyber Chase, Word Girl, The Electric Company; the shows you see across the top.  We have other programs that are broadcast at different times and by different stations.

[01:02:54] We also have a few things that are “web only,” like the greens that you see right in the middle, that’s a web-only property.  So we’re trying to add things that are not on television so that there is extra content in here.

[01:03:09] Just to set this apart, we’ve had some, I think that our general audience group have had some challenges that we haven’t had, so I just wanted to say even though we use the same infrastructure, there were a few things that were easier for us to deal with content-wise.  We don’t have news so most of our content that’s in the library which allows us to schedule weeks in advance when we want to air everything.  So usually our play lists we don’t have to deal with something happening in the news to have the flexibility to cover it.  Although we do have the flexibility to add things besides what’s in the library, but we do plan way ahead.

[01:03:49] We currently distribute our players as a closed package so that gets us out of a whole lot of managing local content being inserted in the local portals for the video.  We give it to them as a closed thing.  It’s seen amazing response.  We’ve had over 60 stations implement the player on their own sites.

[01:04:13] Another difference that we are very focused on educational goals is our audience  of course the mission of Public Broadcasting for this huge group.  We are talking to six to ten year olds for whom reading, math, and science are very important.

[01:04:28] Speaking of which, part of the reason why we’re doing this, of course we want to engage the audience, and there is a shift to watch video online.  That’s a basic reason, but we are also hoping to stretch the surface of education goals and the educational reach of this programming by putting it in this new platform.  So by putting it online we’re making it available to kids whenever they feel like watching something.

Kids this age are often obsessed with one particular – (those of you who have kids might know this) that seven year olds tend to be very much into something.  It’s great that we have the programming that covers that.  Previously they had to wait for it to come around or for the teacher to have that on their schedule and show that on their programming.  Now if they’re super into lady bugs or dinosaurs or trains, they can actually find that programming and watch educational programming about that topic whenever they want.

[01:05:24] All along for www.pbskids.org have been working with the producers of the PBS kids shows to create interactive online activities that reach the same educational goals that the programming does on that.  For example, if we had an episode on air that was about fractions, we would work with the producer to create a game with fractions that went along.  All of that was already in the database so it was very low-hanging fruit for us to pick.  It was like: “Whoa!  Now we can put all this video online in one portal!”  As Josh said before, we also had video, but it was kind of fragmented into different property websites.

[01:06:03] Now we are thrilled to be able to associate the video with those games.  Now you watch the episodes about fractions, you can click on an icon right there and play a game that reinforces that educational goal.  That’s really important to us.

[01:06:21] Finally we are trying to push this beyond just watching.  We know kids are fascinated by games.  Every time we test and we ask them: “What would you like more of on our site?” It’s always games!  They always want more.  We have hundreds of games and they still think it’s not enough!  They still want more games.  So we are also trying to make the video into a game.  I’ll show that to you in a second when I demonstrate the site. Calling anything a game has an amazing affect.  It immediately gets 50 times the click-through rate.  I’m serious when I say 50 times.  It’s not exaggerating.

[01:06:55] Just a little bit about our work flow: our meta data standards are based on PBD which is the Public Broadcasting Dictionary for meta data so that it can be compatible with what others are doing in the public bypass community though we’ve added some kid-friendly words.  We will be adding more as they become clear.  So for example, instead of insects we can use bugs as a search term.  If you search for “bugs” you can see if any insects will come up.

[01:07:22] The program producers have been key partners in this.  They have all helped us by selecting clips from their episodes.  This is definitely not something we’ve done here by ourselves at PBS.  We have counted on our producers for a lot.  They have helped us select the content and they have also helped us with the meta data by entering their keywords in forms that we then enter into the platform that Josh described which is our computer management system.

[01:07:50] We have been digitizing all the content here so that’s helpful to them so that the producers don’t have to do it.  When we have something that’s exclusive online or new, it eventually gets to us by FTP or another means, but mostly it’s done in-house from the library.

[01:08:08] Now I am going to go over to the site and show you …

[Audience Laughs]

[01:08:29] So you come here if your mouse is not on the video it’s kind of muted a little bit, but then if your mouse goes over it [video plays] “…switch off that time control contraption thingy.  It’s time to” …

[01:08:58] This is our Earth Day feature that just launched this morning for Earth Day next week.  We change our “weekly peek” every week on Fridays.  When the player launches, as you can see, it launches in the channel tab.  We have those three tabs up there for navigation.  This is our peek of the week.  The important thing for us is it could be something family or it could be a new show or a new episode or a new season that we’re trying to push to the kids.

The other button that you see there: “Top  Ten” self explanatory.  Top ten is the clips  or episodes that have received the most votes that kids have selected as favorites.  “New” is what came out this week, and “Espagnol” is where we have episodes that are in Spanish so those are easily available by clicking there.

[01:09:48] Then you have a sampling of our channels.  Our channels are what Eric described as “The collections” in the general audience world.  We started out by calling them “Play lists, “ but the when we tested this with kids, they were like: “Play lists?”  We were wondering if they would get it and they thought play lists was something where you were making for your iPod.  We don’t know what you mean by “Play lists” here.  So we decided to call them channels and it worked well.  We think they get it.

We have a random six channels load here.  We also have a way for you to see all channels and we have a lot by now.  We add new channels frequently.  Some of these channels are very obviously tied to educational goals like we have a science channel or a math channel, but we also have channels that are just kid friendly channels like “Robot” or “Game Shows.”

[01:10: 45] Some of our favorites that I would like to show, and they load randomly.  “Gross” is one that is very popular.

[Audience Laughs]

[01:10:52] This age group is really into disgusting things so we try to capitalize on that.

[Audience Laughs]

[01:10:58] Another one that is very popular is about dogs; kids really love dogs.  So you can click on that channel and then it will load there.  It doesn’t pause the video per se so it’s not playing, it does still continue to play as you’re surfing around and choosing new things.

[01:11:15] Another way to get to the content of course is through the shows which is what the users really want.  They gravitate towards what’s familiar.  Even at this age we know that the preschoolers really go for the characters.  They see the characters almost as their friends. So if a preschooler were looking at our site, they would choose Clifford.  They think that they’re really going to play with Clifford and watch Clifford.  At this age they’re a little bit more flexible and exploratory.  Kids in general are more exploratory than adults when surfing the web.

[01:11:46] The shows of course is what they know from Television, so we have our talk shows load randomly at the top and then other ones low randomly at the bottom.  Here we have some things that are not on television that are extras.

[01:12:00] Just quickly in each of the videos we have some contextual buttons down here that appear that helps them go from a clip to the full episode of that particular ….. this is not a good example.  This is sort of our promotions stuff.  But if you’re watching a clip of something that has a full episode associated with it, you can go to that full episode from this page.  You can also see if there a Spanish version of a clip, it will appear at the bottom also.  So here you see this button is what I mean for the full episode is right there.

[Video Plays]

[01:12:41] Down here [video plays] you can watch this if you want.

[Audience Laughs]

[01:12:40] I can play all of it!  Down here we have something Eric’s computer is not localized to any stations, but one thing that’s very important for our stations it that we show when it’s playing in their market.  So you can click here and choose your State and Territory.  I’ll just say that we are from California.  Just for giggles.  OK.  Well this is I don’t know what that problem is, but we can figure that out later.  It’s something internal.

[01:13:24] Here at the top we have the things that are important to us like “Ratings,” for example.  We tested it on kids and they didn’t understand the stars very well.  Like they tried to click on one star and then the second star and of course the minute they click on one star they’ve rated it one star and they were frustrated by that.  They didn’t really understand what ratings meant.  We turned it into a trophy. You can say: “I like it” and give it a trophy.  It’s five stars or zero stars.

[01:13:54] “Related Games” is what I mentioned to you before.  It’s where these games are directly related to the clip that’s playing.  They target the same educational goals.

[01:14:14]  Clicking on “Full Screen” makes it big.  Kids were confused with “full screen” and “full episode.”  They thought it would be the whole length of the screen or the full episode was the whole screen and so it says big so they can understand what that is.

[01:14:27] Then there is one thing here that’s very important for PBS which is closed captioning.  It’s very important for us to make things accessible to most possible number of kids.  Kids, a lot of them didn’t understand what that was.  They experimented with it and then they figured it out very quickly and then they were happy to have that.  One little girl said: “That’s great because then I can turn the volume off and keep watching after my Mom has told me to go to bed!”

[Audience Laughs]

[01:14:52] So it was like a way for them to get around the system!

[01:15:57] One thing that I wanted to show that I mentioned before is that we wanted to stretch the educational media.  We are very excited about this; we recently launched this games tab.  This is something that we wanted to do for a really long time which is make the video really interactive.  We actually didn’t really know when we first started this project how we were going to do this, so we approached Adobe who are the makers of Flash to say: “How can we do this with Flash video?”  They put us in touch with a company called Panash who makes this product that’s meant to display advertising over video.  We used their products to create these educational games.

[01:15:36] So I’m just going to give you one example.  So the videos were already in our system and we worked with the producers of each of these programs to create the games that would go over each of those videos.

[01:15:51 – 01:16: 34 Video Plays] “On your mark, get set, fetch!” ….

[01:16:42] Sylvia: So you have to guess.  This is just an example.  You are trying to do what the characters are trying doing which is to pack the boxes of chocolates.

[01:16:51 Video Plays]

Sylvia: This is a little “I Love Lucy” reference here.

[01:16:53 – 01:17:13 Video Plays]

Sylvia: All right.  I’m going to go back to the Power Point.  Sorry!

[Audience Laughs]

[01:17:20] But this is all live and you can definitely play it on your own.  I challenge you to play the hard version which is very hard.

[Audience Laughs]

[01:17:31] One thing that was surprising to us was that the kids expected the videos to start playing on “load.”  This is something that when you saw Eric’s demo, it doesn’t happen on those sites.  When you go to You Tube it doesn’t start playing, but especially the younger kids, they would sit back and wait for something to happen when they clicked on the video.

[01:17:52] Finally, what’s next for us is we are soon going to do another round of visibility testing; looking at the site overall and how the games integrate videos.  We are also looking into doing some more refined tracking.  We have some basic stats, but we found that the video analytics are still evolving and we following that very closely and trying to get as much information as we can about our users.  Of course we are always looking into doing more games because that’s what they want.  We also sent out an RFP and we are in the process of selecting producers to do new content that’s made for the lab.  So we have already filmed with all that in mind; trying to create games and make it attractive from the get go.

[01:18:37] We are also looking into letting them create their own play lists and share with friends.  This is something that doesn’t come naturally to six through eight year olds.  We know it’s something that our engage team is doing a lot in the adult side of things, but kids have to be coaxed a little bit or pushed to create and share things.

[01:18:55] User generated content is another thing that we really want to explore.  We tried before, but our experience has been that when you say: “kids, send this survey here,” they really don’t.  They sometimes have access to video cameras, but it’s mostly with parents or teachers helping them.  So we’re exploring ways in which stations can help their local audiences send in videos so they will come through stations and also match up to something we are exploring and trying to figure out if it makes sense for our audience and producers.

[01:19:25] So that’s that!

[Audience Applauds]

[01:19:34] Gary: If I can get Josh, Eric, Sylvia, and Angela to join us up front here … we’re going to have a change to take some of your questions.  I think you’ll join me in saying: “Wow!  We had a showcase today of what can be done in this.”  One thing that struck me Sylvia was you said: “The kids just love games and 50 times more usage.”

[01:20:00] Sylvia: Oh yes!  So those videos that I showed that have the game overlays, the month before we launched the games layer when it was just called a video inside the play list, it had about 2,000 stream requests.  After it was called “games” and placed under the games tab it had 112,000 so just by calling it a game and putting it under games.

I think it shows that the average click-through to the games is amazingly higher.  We also saw that with the homepage where kids are being sent to the www.pbskidsgo.org we are seeing a big spike in traffic on our home page.  While the video is really interesting, we’ve had games for a long time, but we’re also seeing a spike in the games page and a considerable spike in the video page, but not as high as the home page and the games.

[01:21:16] Gary: The interesting part, and maybe this is about games being so universal, but we’ve been doing a project recently with sites that senior citizens visit, and games are the aim for most of those also.  I don’t know where PBS is putting it’s games on.

[01:21:30] I want to start with one question because what we saw here was phenomenal for a media organization and that is there is such a fight going on right now with what’s called: “alternate delivery needs.”  They don’t have the rights to show it on broadcast or cable networks and there’s a lot of fights online.  You think about library material and other archived material, but have you thought where does it stand?  What’s PBS’s stand or stands of your producing companies about putting stuff online that they want to monetize or get on the air?  Angela, do you want to start that?

[01:22:03] Angela: Yeah.  I’d be happy to answer that.  Structurally what’s interesting is we do have a relatively new administration here at PBS.  Our President and our Chief Content Officer made some significant changes to our structure when they first came on.  One of those changes is that instead  of having just television green light programs, we have what’s call the Content Matrix Team which, of course, also has to have an acronym.  The goal of that team is to make sure that representatives from all platforms are reviewing new proposals from producers.

[01:22:37] So where possible, at the outset, we’re trying to have conversations with our national producers about how they can reach new audiences on all these platforms.  We do believe that at this phase of the industry that it is a virtuous cycle.  Online is not amortized.  It is not deteriorating or taking away from television and we’re seeing some of that pathway.

[01:23:03] That said, there are certain projects that we approach on an experimental basis, and there are challenges that everyone faces in terms of media rights acquisitions.  So for Masterpiece, for example which Eric showed you, we don’t have rights and perpetuity to stream Masterpiece online.  We have a different audience proposition for that which is that they can come for a week after the broadcast and watch it during that period and then because of our co-production agreement with the BBC we sunset that and go to the next episode.

[01:23:32] So it’s not easy.  There certainly are huge challenges, but we’re trying, where possible, at the outset to have those conversations with our producers.

[01:23:42] Anybody else on that?  Eric.

[01:23:45] Eric: Angela touched upon it.  We work with the producers if there are some streaming rights so even if our goal is to get full episodes streaming video we seek to provide on the web exclusive content, there may be some  flexibility with them so that we are able to get certain types of content.

[01:24:12] Gary: The next question I want to ask is about optimizing the experience here.  At some of the session of this group we’ve talked about mobile media and there is obviously mobile is where it’s at these days.  Are you doing anything in your web content to optimize it for mobile handsets or other access devices?  I guess that’s less important for kids or maybe not!

[01:24:34] Josh: Right now we’re primarily focusing on the video in the web browser experience.  We think that’s where the most audience is for this digital content is.  Sylvia, maybe you can talk a little bit about how you guys are distributing PBS Kids on iTunes and other platforms as well.

[01:24:52] Right our benches prove has an iTune presence and we are of course also being mindful of trying not to compete with them or television.  In our case there was a simple decision about leaving things up for a little while and then taking them down.  Because we have all those associations and all those educational goals that are related, we also have a project for our education group where they’re planning to tie lesson plans to all of these videos.  That becomes a problem because once teachers begin to rely on that, then if we take it away then that’s not really serving them.  That’s a challenge that we face that we’re looking at.

[01:25:30] In the mobile area, we are doing trial studies.  Two or three years ago with Sesame Workshop provider/producer, when we gave cell phones to parents of children at three and four years old and we sent them parenting tips to teach them literacy skills and also sent them all the alphabet.  There is a song for each letter of the alphabet for that.  So there is the letter “C” which you all remember well, everyone knows with Cookie Monster and so on.

So the parents would get a tip from Maria and would hand the cell phone to the child to watch.  It was very successful.  The kids did learn from that and it was mostly with low income families that we did that.  There were some challenges because the parents still see the phones as something  expensive and not for children to play with.  So for our audience there is a little bit of that.  In the case of six to eight year olds for www.pbskidsgo.org, people still don’t have cell phones of their or their parents are a little bit mindful of letting them play with the cell phone.  We are watching that carefully.

[01:26:38] Gary: But there are still fanatics!

[01:26:40] Sylvia: Right.  They are the ones who really want the videos on the cell phones!

[01:26:45] Gary: I have a lot of other questions, but I’m sure you do also.  So if anyone just wants to their your hands.  We’ll start over here please.  Please identify yourself and tell us where you’re from.

[01:26:50] Audience Member: I’m assuming that most of the video traffic is going to PBS as opposed to other stations, is that correct?  The question is regarding the relationship between PBS and the member stations around the country and how the stations feel about the role in intermediating that relationship.

[01:27:25] Angela: So from their perspective and our perspective this is actually quite a step forward and what I mean by that is previously stations didn’t have access to this video content, so one of the goals was to unlock this warehouse of videos so that stations could have access to them on their local experiences.  So really it would have been easier to build a system that just had a video portal experience on www.pbs.org and that’s not how we approached it.

We really approached it as an infrastructure to support local station streaming as well as National streaming.  There will probably be more connections among and between that as we go.  But at this early stage I think this was something stations told us they wanted.  So that’s something that’s unique to the last couple of years, they really said: “Hey, we know online video is important.

We’re interested into venturing into this phase.  We’re all trying it and we would like some digital leadership to help achieve scale and efficiency.”  The hope is that this will unlock some potentials and possibilities on their sites as well.  We’re starting to see some great experiments at the local level where their streaming video and incorporating experiences.

[01:28:35] Gary: Other questions?  Over here please.  Identify yourself.

[01:28:38] Audience Member: I’m Josh with the National Science Foundation.  One of the requirements of the Federal government is that we follow certain standards, so I was wondering since you’re doing close captioning as well, is that searchable in terms of the keywords?  Is that also accessible, for instance, if I go to Google and I type in Parthenon, is it possible that that video will be embedded?

[01:29:06] The question is about compliance and use of meta-data for search purposes specifically if you go into Google and type “Parthenon,” would this video show up?

[01:29:18] Josh: So we have worked quite a bit on search engine optimization site which is by the site structure and the architecture of the site which is very search engine friendly although it’s something that is an evolving process as we continue to integrate.  With closed-captioning we have the ability to incorporate closed captioning with the videos as you saw with the kids presentation and the general audience site too.

Those transcripts in terms of them being searchable, we will make them available if the producers provide a transcript we will make them available on the site.  I think it’s something that we’re moving towards and making it more search engine friendly to have those transcripts be crawled or be able to go to that specific place in the video where so and so was talking about “X.”  So I think those are things that we’re thinking about, but are not necessarily features yet.

[01:30:14] Gary: Next question.  Over in the back there please.  Identify yourself.

[01:30:16] Audience Member {inaudible}

[01:30:30] Gary: The question is about what kind of metrics and analytical methods are you using to guide the program decisions?

[01:30:34] Eric: I can talk about that and then Sylvia.  So for our website tracking we’re using Google Analytics.  It’s a rather complicated setup for Google analytics, but that’s what we’re using for page briefs.  For video usage we’re using a combination of the statics we gather from Limelight which is: band width and delivery as well as the stats that we gather from the platform.  Although we are always seeking to improve our ability to better understand our audience.  We are right now working with some other vendors to select another solution to provide more information on video usage.  Sylvia can probably talk to that.

[01:31:21] Well we have about eight months now of the portal being live.  We are paying very close attention to what’s the most popular from week to week.  We are just beginning to see that influence our  content decisions.  We do align very closely with television so we have to keep a close watch there and if it’s up for renewal we might look at how well it’s doing.  If it’s being watched both on television and on here.  We can also see which episodes are more popular than the others.  We have made new play lists on our channels based on an interest that we could tell was prevalent, i.e. dogs we knew right away was very popular and it became right away, it’s own channel.

[01:32:13] Angela: I was just going to add to the question about local which is not related to analytics.  When I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation about partnerships; it’s always very hard when we’re representing so many groups to get into depth, but I think it really does bare saying that: we do have a Stations Services Group here.  They are small.  Their job is really to work with local stations both to analyze their needs and requirements and also learn from the local stations.

So before we went about developing this approach with predates a lot of people on this panel, we actually did a station tour.  We met with a number of stakeholders and national producers and what you see here incorporates a lot learnings from the news and public affairs player which was developed by Frontline and News Hour and WMET which was working on the early stages of a video player.  So one of our goals was not to reinvent the wheel, but to learn from various stationed experiments and life it up into something that could be repackaged for locals.

[01:33:15] Gary: Angela wanted to come back to a Josh answer in the previous one and that was you talked about working with Limelight networks.  In your remarks you talked about you architecturing a lot of the work here.  I just want to see if you elaborate a little bit on your relationship with vendors.    How much did you do here and how much was done with the vendors by and wide or the platform with the other companies that you use.  What role do you have internally, in other words, how much control do you have to serve on this or how much to rely on the vendors to guide you on these things.

[01:33:48] Josh: That’s a good questions.  We do work with vendors and we’re also developing more in-house capabilities.  In some cases, to kick off the project or even the design of these sites, we’ve been working with vendors and we lead the Project Management here with vendors and then eventually develop the in-house capabilities and have that project handed off.

But one of the things when I said: “This has been a transformative project, in many ways is that I think it has transformed our thinking here to think more about the product development process from beginning to end and also including Q&A and testing, including source code and version control and all of the pieces of software product development and application development for the web.  It’s something that we are gaining greater expertise with here.  So we do work a lot with vendors, but then it’s a collaborative relationship and I think over time we’ll be developing more products in-house as we have greater expertise with the whole life cycle.

[01:35:00] Sylvia: In the case of the kids portal, we did a lot of the work in-house actually.  The designs were all done in-house and we did work with a few different companies as I mentioned Panash for the overlay games.  We worked with a company in Seattle called Cypress Consulting who built the back end of our player, but all the design and content management is all done in-house.

[01:35:21] Gary: OK a couple of more questions.  We have time.  Way in the back.  Identify yourself.

[01:35:24] Audience Member {Inaudible}

[01:35: ] Gary: This is a variation of an early question about what’s the relationship between GBP, the Great Boston Producing Company TV station and PBS.  Whose customer is it for what might be the same content?

[01:36:16] Audience Member: {Inaudible}

[01:36:] Gary: It’s an elaboration of: where do I get that content if I have a favorite show from my favorite home-town public station?

[01:36:45] Angela: So this is a key point to reinforce and that is what you are seeing here is the National Experience which is extended to local station websites.  So WGBH and the Pilot stations here can create this experience with modifications appropriate for their audience on www.wgbh.org.  A really key part is that we have turn key and multiple sponsors for our stations.

[01:37:08] Gary: Who gets credit for the clicks?

[01:37:10] Angela: One of the key things is that we’ve developed a complicated metric system so that if National Producers need to show traffic in order to meet their goals they can do that.  We’re public media.  This isn’t about aggregating traffic for credit.  It’s about bringing traffic to the system as a whole and that’s one of the key pieces of this is that there weren’t many insights or audience insights or traffic insights in the previous systems.

Hopefully this will provide that at a scalable level.  I want to encourage folks who have questions about the National/Local relationship to talk to Kristin Calhoun and the Stations Group who will be in and out of here afterwards.  There was a lot of deep thinking that went into how we could leverage that relationship and a lot of conversations frankly at all levels with the stations about how we could work together on that.

[01:38:03] Gary: OK.  Yes.  Identify yourself please.

[01:38:06] Audience Member {inaudible}

[01:38:15] Gary: The question is how many work at PBS Interactive and what are the skills sets that they bring to this?

[01:38:20] Angela: I have to confess that I don’t know the exact number.  I can tell you it’s small relative to other media organizations coming  from MTV and other places so on the content side which I can speak to – I can’t speak to technology and design.  On the content side when I first came here we had three positions for 800 sites.  So that gives you an idea.  We have more than that now but it’s less than 15.  So we’re not talking about huge hoards of folks.

We’ve been fortunate in that we’ve been able, to speak to your skill set question, to hire people who are really utility in-fielders here.  We’re too small to have a waterfall approach to development where you can be purely editorial or purely HTML or purely design.  I feel very fortunate that we have people who can span a number of different skills in their everyday job duties.  We can certainly get back to you about the exact numbers in the department.

[01:39:26] Gary: OK, one last question: two hands at the same time so we’ll take them both.  Over here please.  Identify yourself.

[01:39:33] Audience Member: {inaudible}

[01:39:48] Gary: The question is are you going to incorporate any of the features of Kids Go into general sites.  Just take the microphone.

[01:39:54] Eric: Actually that is a good point and that’s one of the things you didn’t see on this site and that is that there is a lot of community features other than sharing with the e-mail functionality.  That’s something that’s planned, but it doesn’t exist yet.  We’re working with our PBS engage for guidance on adding the best type of community engagement experience for this site.

But again, because this is a very flexible solution, I think we’re going to see experimentation by stations and producers and other types of sites that may incorporate more of those or experiment more with those community features.  We will be learning from that and bringing those features into our site.  This is a very iterative development process as Angela said evolving to more of an actual developing process.  This is the first version.  It doesn’t have all of the features that we want in there.  But we’ll be adding features as we go and as we learn about our audience.

[01:41:12] Angela: When Eric demonstrated what other users are doing.  That, to us, is a step forward because audience insights are driving some of the programming possibilities so whether it’s the top ten viewed programs or you go to the home page of www.pbs.org you can see the most searched terms.  It’s really interesting for us because on any given day, Harriett Tubman is still a top search term and that’s great to know that that’s what our audience is interested in.  So we’re taking those steps.

Jamie and her team have been actively engaged in the video launch process.  One piece of feedback we got and I actually feel strongly about too is we didn’t want to go out the gate with an engagement strategy that wasn’t relatively sophisticated.   You know?  We think that the content is high quality and a lot of parts of the www.pbskids.org site we are engaged in experiments where there is a live chat with Bill Moyers which we did a couple of months ago which was really successful.

We have mostly post-moderated commenting on producer sites which is really exciting.  We’re seeing that the audience can be trusted and that they can leave very smart comments.  So we’re doing a lot of experiments to see what works and what’s smart and then hopefully we’ll incorporate the best of that into this experience.

[01:42:27] Gary: Wow!  We had a lot of information today.  I think you’ll agree with me.  This has been a showcase of a real view of a media company is doing in this environment.  We’re going to wrap it up now, so I hope you’ll join me in thanking the team from PBS.

[Audience Applauds]

[01:42:51] And finally you get to see Julie and the tiara for some wrap up announcements, so Julie, it’s all yours.

[01:42:56] Let’s thank Gary as well.

[Audience Applauds]

[01:43:04]  Let’s hear a round for the people actually your great contribution actually pays enough to get us some catering and some entry fees, but I could not do my work without sponsors.  That’s actually how I generate my income so if you like what you see then you really need to help out and befriend people from Live Element, Aquent, Limelight.  Help them out.  Give them your referrals, get to know them and they’ll be here to support the Round Table.

[01:43:33] Next what’s coming up next – more wonderful things.  You will all get an announcement about this: we launch our international globalization series with: The Web Is Global, Why Aren’t You?  Our host is the State Department and our speakers will be the State Department will be talking about their diplomacy efforts worldwide and the temporary congress as it is launching at this very moment in Paris, the World Digital Library and there are some other things that we’re going to show to you and if you’ve ever been to the State Department I assure you we will go to great lengths to get the security done to get you in to the most fabulous place.

Also coming up, I can’t announce a lot but I can tell you that we will be doing a web analytics series on broad based analytics of streaming video and audio.  So I’ll be in touch with you about that.  Web analytics – Washington is meeting next week at the Mayflower.  That’s an informal networking group.  Ann runs it.  You’ll be getting the announcement if you want to be more involved with analytics.  It’s just networking and meeting everybody in the field.

These are the things that we need.  We’ll be doing a Linked In follow-up, so we’ll be launching the conversation and we hope that  you all will engage.  So they’ll be asking to probe for content.  We need to keep this operation going, so we need sponsors so the people we’re looking for are the vendors that you use, you trust, and you feel that other people would want to know them and know their services.  We need presenters.  I hope that in some way this inspired you to go back to your organizations and say: “You know we could do this too.”

We need venues.  If you have a venue that you would like to donate, we make it very easy for the organization.  Was it easy PBS?  Did you find it easy?  We have a little system and it pops up like a little carnival tent and it is really a show on the road.

I want to thank you all for coming and making this such a special experience.  Thank You.

[Audience Applauds]

Now our gift cards!  Each person just choose one and this is for the audience.  Matt Habercamp, Washington Post Digital.  Josh, National Science Foundation.   Grace Cunningham,  Community IT innovators Cathlene Charter with Creative solutions.

Julie: OK everybody, adjourned.  Have a ball!

[Audience Applauds]

[Audience Converses]

PBS Interactive: New Website Launch (2 of 3)

Daniel Odio attended PBS’ new website launch preview session, which was another in a series of fantastic events created by Julie Perlmutter of the Web Manager’s Roundtable.  This video (2 of 3 – see next video here) was held for posting until the new PBS.org site was publicly launched this past Wednesday.

Here is the transcript:

[30:13] Another sponsor today is Live Elements.  It’s a Virginia company that provides business-friendly content management systems and social network products, as well as design services to ensure that websites and social network communities are not only functional, but successful.  Live Element helps choreograph sites, launched keeps communities engaged, and ensures that content remains relevant and valuable to users.  From Live Elements we have: Rob Houstic and Maggie Swarengon.  Rob and Maggie please stand up and wave your hand.

[30:51] Again, thank you to our sponsors.  Returning to why we’re here today.  I also want to mention something else that’s new right now with the Web Managers Round Table, and that’s the online group on Linked In.  How many of you have seen the notice already about that?  Great!  Most of you have gotten it.  I won’t read the URL for it, but it’s a Linked In URL group.  You’ll have an e-mail about that.

[31:16] The whole idea here is that  we come up with such good ideas and we have such nice, but fleeting meetings here, or where ever we meet from time to time, every month or so, here is a way for the group to continue the conversation from your desk or from your handset at anytime.  If you are not a member of the group yet, look for that link and follow it so you can join the discussion on the event.  You can start talking as soon as later this morning and this afternoon about what we hear today about online video.

[31:50] Let me just mention just a moment about how we got here today. Some of you who have been long-time attendees of these web round-tables we have addressed the issue of online video from time-to-time.  We thought it was time for an update.  When we brought the idea to a number of people we wound up with PBS and boy did we get an earful!  It was such a good idea!  Plus Ginger always said: “Let’s just do the whole thing as a showcase of what PBS is doing with its online video environment.

[32:21] There are a lot of other online things going on based on how quickly this even sold out.  We know that we are going to be returning to the topic.  I welcome it and truly welcome an other ideas or suggestions.  We actually have an awful lot to cover in subsequent events of online video.

[32:40] Just to reinforce what you are obviously already aware of by your presence here today, online video is such an important part of not only media and entertainment and educational organizations like PBS or the commercial network services like Hulu and of course You Tube, it’s so much becoming part of the enterprise experience.  I’m seeing it in a lot of examples for shareholder and stakeholder communications, employer communications, and even many sites in commercial sectors are doing: “do it yourself” or “how to do it” videos as part of the online experience.

So we’re going to see more of that just as the data points.  Some of you may have seen Nielson’s figures that came out in the last couple of days of online video streaming.  Of course it’s very much driven by You Tube and Hulu and those, but the numbers are just staggering; 9.6 billion video streams during the month of March.  That’s up 9% from the previous month, but almost 40% from March one year ago.

[33:41] So we’re understanding how people want to watch video online.  We’re going to see a number of examples here this morning and we’re very happy again that PBS is willing to be so candid and share and tell us about a project that no one else will be able to see until next week.

[33:59] Again, our plan is that our I am going to introduce the speakers and Angela has done a great job of pre-introducing our three speakers for today.  So I’ll just remind you who you’re going to hear for the next 45 minutes or so.  Joshua, Eric, and Sylvia will each give a presentation.  Save your questions until the end of all the presentations.  We’ll all gather up here and have a little dialogue with you so we can follow up with some other questions.  We’re going to try to get out of here pretty close to 11:00 am or 11:15 am as a target time and obviously we’ll be around for a little longer after that if you have any further questions.

[34:31] So, having gotten that out of the way, let me just turn immediately to hear it from the experts who came here to share the wisdom today.  We’ll start with Josh Kinburg who is, as Angela explained, is the Director of Video Project Management for PBS Interactive.  He has been working in this field for quite a long time for a guy who is so young in the business.  Josh, we’re going to let you start out.

[35:09] Josh: Hi!  I’m Josh Kinburg and as Gary said and as Angela said, I’m  Director of Video Project Management for PBS Interactive.  I came to PBS a little over six months ago.  My background is that I’ve been in startup’s focusing on podcasting, RSS distribution of video, Video search, and sinking to mobile devices and mobile phones and iPods and stuff like that.  So I have a background in online consumer video destination sites before coming to PBS, but it’s been a real treat since I’ve been here.

[35:41] I work primarily on product management and sort of back-end underlying architecture that powers the whole video systems and it powers various types of videos and applications for different types of content.  Then I also focus on one of the applications that we’re building that’s a consumer destination site for general audience video.

[36:01] So a little bit about PBS as Angela mentioned: we’re very, very different than other broadcast networks because we have over 300 member stations and those stations have a lot of autonomy.  It’s not the typical affiliate model like you would see with ABC or NBC.  It’s a very different model.  We’re extremely diverse and distributive.  We have over 300 stations.  We have extraordinary breadth of content.  We serve a lot of different communities and a lot of different needs.  If you see PBS here in this area, it’s WETA or Maryland public television.  But if you go somewhere else in the country, it’s a very different PBS experience.  So people don’t necessarily realize that when they think about PBS.

[36:46] The way we think about content here typically when we talk about content it’s either kids or not kids and everything that’s not kids is general audience.  Those are some of the terms that we use and throw around..  PBS interactive – that’s where the group of us here work.  We design, develop and support online products and services for PBS and we serve the needs of our stations and our audiences.   So in many ways we are developing sites for audience-based PBS, but really our major customer is our stations.  We also provide guidance and best practices to the broader systems of stations and producers.

[37:33] So up until PBS really didn’t have a unified video strategy.  It was kind of every station, every producer, wanted to do videos on their own.  That led to a real lack of standardization, different video formats, inconsistent user experiences, and really kind of siloed brand properties.  Where, you know, the stuff that you go and see on Frontline’s website really didn’t draw traffic or point to Nova’s website or Antique Roadshow’s website or some of our other major properties’ websites.

[38:08] One of the things that we were trying to think about is: how can we get cross-promotion amongst our different brands and properties?  So when we think about our video solution, we’ve called it: “a Comprehensive Online Video Ecosystem.”  That’s kind of our internal code word that nobody understands and it has an acronym called “COVE” because we like obscure acronyms when we talk about things like this internally.  Really COVE is this architecture infrastructure work flow that we build upon to create various rich online video experiences.

In many ways this has been  a transformative project for this organization and one way it’s brought a lot of new people onto PBS.  A lot of the people that we work with probably most folks have been here maybe a year or less that are working on this project.

[39:00]  It has also required a lot of cross-department and cross-organizational collaboration.  It’s been probably one of the most ambitious projects we’ve done here at PBS.  In many ways it has transformed us into thinking about what we’re doing at PBS Interactive which is building products and services.  Whereas before I came on (I don’t really know this, but before I was here) I’ve heard that we were kind of more reactive; building one off-sites for different shows, different programs, and different events, but we weren’t really thinking about things as building products and services for our constituents.

[39:39] So the components of this system that we’ve built – we’re working with several different vendor relationships as well.  One of them is with a company called: “The Platform” which again is a great confusing name because we talk about our video platform and there is a company called: “The Platform” that we work with.  The Platform’s Seattle-based company is owned by Comcast now.  They provide a very, very powerful and flexible video asset management system that really is the backbone of a lot of our video applications.

[40:13] We have a video transcoding facility that we’ve established here in our Media Operations Center.  That’s what “MOC” stands for.  All of our National content is encode and transcoded in this facility.  That facility also does encoding for Video on Demand and iTunes and Hulu and other destination sites and other video platforms and applications.  It doesn’t just serve web video although that’s what we’re particularly focused on.

[40:43] Another of our partners is Limelight Network which is one of our generous sponsors for this event.  We’ve been working with Limelight as our storage and CD provider.  One of the great things about the relationship with Limelight is we’ve been able to build a relationship that allows various local PBS stations to participate in that relationship too.  So we’re able to get a very favorable rate for them by negotiating with scale.

[41:13] One of the other goals of this project was to provide very flexible options and solutions for different video experiences that can live both on www.PBS.org and on station websites and on other websites as well.  So it’s a very, very flexible system and serves a lot of different needs across our organization.

[41:33] Just to visualize this Comprehensive Online Video Ecosystem and things that are powered by COVE, at the top.  As I said, we’re building this architecture, but we’re also building some of the major content site destinations that are built on top of this architecture.  So at the top there is PBS video which is our general audience destination site which Eric will give you a down low of in a moment.  PBS Kids Go which is a kids video portal which Sylvia will give you a down low of after this.  Then there is also other applications that may be specific to stations or producers or special events.

[42:18] Then looking at the bottom, the stuff that we do in-house here we have a whole video content team that Eric is a part of and Matt Gram over here is director of video content and they really work with our producers and acquire the content and help them encode it and prepare all the data and images and standards and really communicate guidelines of best practices.

[42:40] ]We do the video encoding in-house here at the Media Operations Center and we provide services and support.  Limelight Networks is our video hosting and CBN provider and platform who manages all the meta-data and business rules.  We have a custom publishing work-load that we have architectured with the platform.

[43:00] Some of those other experience just to give a real quick example, the Electric Company recently premiered a new version of the Electric Company that’s all updated and really cool and kind of hip-hop influenced.  Their video on their website is powered by this system.

[43:17] American Experience which is a great documentary series their website is powered by this underlying platform.  An example of a station site is: “Oregon Experience.”  It’s part of Oregon public broadcasting and they do great documentaries and their videos, again are powered by this system and recent large multi-part series produced by WNET channel 13 in New York is “Make ‘Em Laugh” which is a documentary series on the history of American comedy.   They also use this platform.

[43:49] So we’re going to talk next about our general audience video portal.  Eric is going to talk about the high-level goals to really showcase the breadth and depth of full-length PBS content.  This is a full-length experience.  One of the trends that we’re seeing clip sharing and short clips on You Tube are very popular, but recently we’ve seen trends going more towards long-form video with obviously Hulu leading the way, and other broadcast destination sites.

[44:28] But really we’re seeing trends moving to more long-form experiences.  We want to showcase our content in this way.  We really want it to increase  video activity engagement on our site.  One of the top things that people are searching for and clicking on looking for, and before now we didn’t really have a unified experience.  We were sending them off to different sites with inconsistent experiences.  Again, this is a product that serves very flexibly needs.

[44:56] So just to give you a sense of some of the programs we’re launching with.  The goal of this is that eventually it will have everything, everything.  PBS has one of the largest archives of content.  When you think about our different local stations and the amount of content that they have – we really have so much content that it’s overwhelming.  That’s the goal, is that it will have everything.  But we’re launching with some of our most well known iconic properties and brands.

[45:27] To begin with there is over 100 hours of content and some of the names you probably know.  Eric is going to talk more about that.  He’s really kind of the Managing Content Editor of this site in many ways.

[45:43] We’ve also collaborated with a lot of stations to give us guidance and feedback.  This has been a real collaborative project throughout.  We’re working with 14 pilot stations and they range not only are they in different regions across the Country, the have different varying resources.  Some of them like 13 in New York has a lot of technical resources and others may not even have a website.  We have to serve these varying needs across our stations.  So we have a group of pilot stations that have provided input and collaboration throughout this process.

[46:21] I’m going to turn turn it over to Eric Freeland to give us a little demo and talk more.

[Audience Applauds]

[46:36] Eric: Good morning everyone.  So Josh just gave us a really great overview about how they infrastructure is going to support the system here.  What I’m going to do is really jump into it and show you how it all works and give you a sneak peak at it.  We’ve been working for more than a year on this, so a lot of hard work has gone into this.  Going into even more detail on it, I just want to start to show it to you.

[46:59] Again this is a sneak peak of the site as well.  So you guys are probably about the first large group to see it outside of PBS.  Here we go!  So this is the video portal and you see how it loaded up on the page.  You can kind of see that there are a lot of unique features on the page.  The first thing that’s going to catch your eye is the program carousel here in the middle which is truly the center piece of it.  It really allows us to do a lot of different things.  The design of it really shows the cross-brand promotion that Josh talked about.

[47:49]  If you’re a fan of the surrogate program, let’s say it Frontline and you come to the portal, you’re also going to be exposed to the other programs in the portal.  You’ll see Antique Roadshow.  You’ll see Masterpiece, you’ll see Nature.  So that’s really going to expand what viewers will see when they come to visit the site.

[47:57] The other unique thing about the portal is that it has a really unique and easy to use design.  We think that it really shows off the breadth and depth of PBS programs.  Through user testing we’ve heard the participants come back to us and say that they really liked the design because it really seemed uncluttered and it wasn’t overwhelming for them to come in and start trying to navigate and figure out what is in the portal.

[48:26] So I’m just going to try to click through on this Nova stack and give you a sense of what’s in here.  Inside this stack is a collection or a stack of Nova programs.  You’re going to see what we have out there and what’s available.  So you can see how easy it is to navigate.  One of the really neat parts about it is you can click right off this stack and it takes you to the video.  Again, there are a lot of different features on this page.  I’m going to skip pass the initial messaging and click on the overlay here that takes it to the full-screen so you’ll be able to enjoy our high level video end code.  It should load up any second here.  It’s beta.

[Silent 49:14 – 49:21]

[49:22] Eric: Any second now!

[Audience Laughs]

[49:29] Eric: Here we go.  I’m just going to be quiet for a minute.  I’ll let you guys get a sense of how the video portal plays.

[49:34 Video Plays] … window of time that gives birth to Western ideals of beauty, science, and art …. democracy.  To immortalize those ideals which will become the very symbol of Western Civilization.  The Parthenon.  It was physical embodiment of their values, of their beliefs, of their theology that remains for us a powerful ….

[50:10] So you kind of start to get a sense of the video and how it plays.  It’s a full-length episode and it’s something that we’re really proud to have and it’s something that I think is unique as web-users turn to the Internet to catch up on missed programming and also explore different types of programming.

[50:28] I’m going to go back to the video page now and there are some really unique aspects of the video page.  One of the things that you’ll notice is that there is this time-line here.  Because most of the programs are about an hour long or maybe even longer, we’ve “chapterized” the programs.  So with the meta-data we have broken it down into sections.  So if the viewer comes to the site and they are interested in the Parthenon, but they’re only interested in certain parts of it, they can navigate through it to find which parts they want to watch.  Or if they started watching it and got pulled away, they know that they can come back a couple of hours later and pick up on chapter three.

[51:06] There are some other unique things about the page that helps us build engagement with the viewer.  You may see this overlay that keeps popping up.  This overlay has a couple of really neat features: you can share it with social networking tools.  You can put it on your face book.  You can also take the embed code and put it on a blog.  You can e-mail it to a friend and then if the DVD is available on www.shoppbs.org you can go there and purchase it if you like it a lot.

[51:34] The other integral part of the of building your engagement is down here in the “Learn More” area.  This area really provides a way for people the to dive deeper into the content that we have on the page.  You can go back and this will take you to other sites; the program sites and hear from a historian who talks about fifth century architecture.

Then also you can go to a slide show where it shows the line drawing and reveals the tools and techniques of ancient craftsman.  Another cool link here is especially for in the classroom.  Teachers can come here and they can incorporate this video into their curriculum and we provide lesson plans for them.  Then further down the page is just more links to videos within the Nova program.  So there is a lot of different things on the page and a lot of really great things for people to come and explore.

[52:40] The other thing that I want to show you is a different view of the video portal.  It’s similar to what loaded up in this program carousel and now I’m going to take you to the collection carousel.  The collection carousel is pretty unique.  It’s not necessarily being done by many people out there right now.  These are similar to the program page.

PBS programs are available and can be viewed through this, but each stack card has been editorial curated, which means that we’ve hand-picked them based on high-level topics and also timeliness.  So you see that Earth Day is the one that’s front and center on the page right now.  We’re queuing that up for our launch next week.

[53:23] There are a number of different collections here as well.  There is the Obama Presidency.  We’re tracking the first 100 days of the Obama presidency and then within that section are programs that focus on that.  If you’re interested in Ancient World, we just started watching one of those programs that’s featured in this collection.  Then also Going Places.  It’s a travel collection.

I can dive a little deeper into this for you.  Click on the program page.  You can see that the stack that you saw in the carousel corresponds along with it when you go to the program page.  You can see the programs that are available.  You have this Violent Hawaii and this is a nature program that focuses on Hawaii.  There is a Frontline program: Young and Restless in China, New Orleans which comes from American Experience.  Ireland which is another nature program.

[54:08] So what’s really unique about this is it’s again that cross-brand promotion with all the PBS programs.  Prior, as Josh eluded to, it focused on individual web pages, this broadens it out.  People can come and see them in very different ways.  So if you are interested in these key areas you can come and find them and there you have it.  It’s all in one place.

[54:30] Another feature on the page that we’ve worked really hard on is the search mechanism.  Then also the taxonomy that works on topics and tagging them.  You notice on the page here that you can browse by topic.  These are high-level topics that we have decided on.  Our tagging and taxonomy is based on two levels.  One is a high-level which you see here.  We picked subject areas that we think a lot of the content will fall into.

[54:58] If we click on History (it will que up in just a second.  Here we go.)  You see all the programs that have History as part of its taxonomy.  Again it ranges across all of the programs that we have on the portal.  Then you see it broken down and filtered on a different level here on the left side.  This is the second level or the sub-level tagging that hones in on even more key areas.  So if you’re interested in more key areas like 20th Century History or United States History, you can click on that area.  Then you’ll find things that only relate to the United States.  Then you can dive down even deeper, and this is through our key word and tagging process to just finding something about Presidents.  So if you’re interested in History, United States History, and Presidents, you can find all this information here.

[56:00] The other search mechanism that we have is the search field that we have here at the top of the page.  So if you come to it and you want to look for something; let’s say you’re looking for the Environment, you hit search (it’s a Beta.  It worked this morning!)

[Audience Laughs]

[56:24] All right.  [silence] There we go.  Oops!

[Audience Laughs]

[56:38] There we go – Environment.  Fantasic!

[Audience Laughs]

[56:40] So again we have a lot of environment programs that are being prepared for our Earth Day launch next week.  On this page you see more programs on the environment, but you also see a cross-pollination of what we have on the portal.  Then you also see that you can filter down again through the way we keyworded and tagged it on the left side.  If you’re only interested about stories on the environment in California, you can find those here.  So you have the Nova Ocean Animal Emergency and The Big Energy Gamble.

[57:16] These are really some of the main key portions of the video player.  The other thing that Josh touched upon is the need for us to serve PBS stations.  We’ve done that through providing a similar player to this that carries a lot of the same functionality as what we’re doing here.  I’m going to bring up a slide for you here in just a moment.  This is what the portal will look like for KCPT in Kansas City.  As you can see that it carries a lot of the same functionality as the National portal.

What’s unique about this is that it’s customizable.  You can see that the station customized it by having its banner at the top of the page.  You can also see that it has provided some local programming.  You see the front stack here is uniquely Kansas City.  It’s along side a Frontline card..  So that’s something that stations are really looking forward to since a lot of their staffs don’t have the manpower or the wares to go about using something of this nature, so we’re supporting them with that.

[58:25] One of the things that we’ve found out as well is that as other networks are taking some content away from stations online, we’re actually pushing it to them.  So this is a unique product for stations to have.  Over the next couple of months we’re going to be going to Alpha stations and it’s just going to get bigger and bigger.  The other unique thing about this is that if a stations shares their local content of their portal, other stations within the network can then pull from it and share it amongst their viewers as well.

[58:59] This is the portal and hopefully next week you guys can check back and see and experience it for yourselves!

[Audience Applauds]

[59:13]  I will introduce Sylvia now.  Sylvia is with our PBS Kids Go player.  I can even help her out and get her qued up to go.

[Silence]

[59:30] Sylvia: So I’m here to tell you a little bit more about the video experience for kids.  We have been alive out there for a little while.  Our portal is designed for the PBS Kids Go audience which is our brand for children six to ten.  For our school age brand we have another brand which is the pretty well known older brand which has been out for longer; PBS Kids which is familiar to many of you who have kids.

[59:59] Our “Go” brand, PBS Kids Go, launched in 2004 and it’s for kids who are in school, elementary school age, and they can read.  So this is a crucial thing for us when we are designing an experience because it’s a big deal when they can read versus being all iconic.

PBS Interactive: New Website Launch (1 of 3)

Daniel Odio attended PBS’ new website launch preview session, which was another in a series of fantastic events created by Julie Perlmutter of the Web Manager’s Roundtable.  This video (1 of 3 – see next video here) was held for posting until the new PBS.org site was publicly launched this past Wednesday.

Here is the transcript:

[Audience Converses 00:00 – 13:30]

[13:31] Angela Morgan-Stern: There are still a few seats if people would like to get settled.  We want to respect your time and get started at 9:30.  There are some seats up here.

[Silence 13:40 – 13:50]

[13:51] Angela Morgan-Stern: Thank you everyone very much for coming today.  I’m Angela Morgan-Stern.  I’m Senior Director of PBS Interactive focused on general audience content which in our world means: non-kids, non-parents, non-teachers.  That short age range from, I guess 14 – 104.

[14:10]     We’re so honored to have you here.  It really is a huge pleasure to have so many esteemed colleagues from throughout the area make the trip over to Chrystal City just to come here about our latest experiments and projects, so thank you so much.

[14:25] I want to first do a little bit of house keeping, and you’ll get more information later, just to say thank you so much to Julie and to Gary.  Particularly to Julie who really organized this entire even as most of you know her and know her operating mode.  But she really put this whole thing together and we’re so honored to have been asked to present.  So thank you to both of you very, very much!

[Audience Applauds]

[14:54] And our team Amy Broke, who is here in the corner had a huge hand in making sure that you all knew where to go and had what you needed and that the event was pulled off with whatever it needed to be pulled off with, and Eric as well.  So thank you so much to both of you internally for doing that.

[Audience Applauds]

[15:15] This really is a slightly unusual day for us in the sense that what we’re going to show you today is actually not launched so the reason that I bring that up is here at PBS we believe in presuming trust and trusting our colleagues so we’re extending that principle to you.

[15:32] We actually have an embargo on what we’re going to show you until Wednesday, at midnight; it’s a press embargo.  So if you could just keep that in mind as you go through the presentation we would really, really appreciate it if there wasn’t any photo taking or video.

[15:46] We don’t think it’s such a hot topic that you’re going to be e-mailing your friends about it, but it still would be helpful for our own sanity to just keep that in mind as you go through the presentation, know that you are among the first audiences to see what we’re going to present to you today.

[16:00] We really want to respect that Wednesday embargo.  That’s particularly on the general audience side when you see some of the kids stuff which they’ll be able to present.  There is a little bit more flexibility.  So we will all trust that that’s going to be the case in this room, so thank you so much.

[16:16] So what we’re hoping to do today is give you a little bit of a glimpse into the early stages of a project that we hope to launch next week.  We’ll have a few people who will come up and walk you through various stages of: why, how, what, and when.  Obviously since we’re at the beginning stages, there are still some learnings that we’re hoping to collect over the next weeks.

[16:40] What we’ll be presenting is the result of a number of partnerships and back room work.  PBS, as most of you know, is not a top-down organization.  We are really a federation of member stations and a partnership among all of our nationally esteemed producers, and that makes for a unique process and  unique underlying principles to everything we do.  That will come through in some of the presentations and hopefully, that will parallel some experiences of folks in this room because I think others here have experiences working in unique organizational structures.

[17:14] What we sought out to do what we conceived and brought this project to fruition is to create something for the underlying needs of all of our constituencies.  Those constituencies being primarily our audience, but our member stations as well and our partnerships and memberships in national producers.

[17:34] So that was really important to us; that we produced something that was: unique, scalable and answer the needs of our constituencies.

[17:43] Just to give you a sense of who will be speaking with you: Josh Kinburg, Eric Freeland, and Sylvia Lovato are three of our team members.

[17:52] Josh is a recent hire who is now Director of Video Product Management.  He came from Odio and Fireant and he’s really taking this product that you’re about to see to the next level.  He’ll walk you through some of the functionality and some of the thinking behind the underlying structures.

[18:10] Eric Freeland who we stole away from the Associated Press.  Eric helped oversee the start up of their online video network and he, along with a small team, has been working really closely with our community of producers from Nova and Frontline to Wood Workers Workshop and This Old House to make sure their product represents their brand and answers their needs and that we’re doing the best job that we can do to present depth of quality and breadth of content.

[18:37] Sylvia Lovato who has been at PBS Kids for some time and is the Director of PBS Kids Go.  She came to us from Brazil where she was a producer at Terra Lycos.  She is really going to show you some fun stuff.  That’s why we’ve put her last because Kids is always the most fun part to follow.

[Audience Member Laughs]

[18:55] Some projects that build off of the underlying infrastructure that we’ll talk about today, but are specifically aimed at the kids audience with some educational aims.

[19:04] So that’s who you will hear from today.  I thought that I would just spend about five minutes walking through a little bit of context around PBS so you can situate this project in our environment and then I quickly hand it over so this won’t be long at all.  I’m not a fan of Power Points at nine in the morning, so you’re all spared!

[19:24] In terms of housekeeping, Gary did remind me to let you know that the bathrooms are right there.  So feel free.  The event will go until about eleven o’clock and will include time for Q&A.  So we’ll speed you through some presentations that will get everyone thinking and discussing and hopefully prompt some conversation that will continue after this session as well.

[20:00] So I just have about four slides to show you.  This is my favorite quote: “The fates lead him who will.  Him who won’t, they drag.  I like to show that internally because I think like most of you; change is very hard and it’s very hard to educate those internally and just for ourselves to go with the flow.  This is actually a quote that my boss at MTV kept on his wall.  I worked at MTV networks before this and helped with the launch of Overdrive which was their video portal at the time.

I just think it’s funny that he actually learned the quote by watching Bill Moyer’s interview with Joseph Campbell where he is quoting Seneca, a Roman Philosopher.  So we can see that there are commonalities among all media organizations; MTV, PBS, I can write a book later on all the commonalities, but I think we’re all facing similar questions and challenges and these are our early attempts to answer some of those.  I’m sure you all have your own coping mechanisms …

[Audience Laughs]

[21:01] … for challenges that we face.  So I came to PBS about two years ago along with a whole suite of new folks, including my boss and some others and over the last couple of years we’ve been fortunate as a result of a number of factors including frankly the organic nature of the web and our success on Search.  Our producers have created such content-rich sites over time.

Web traffic really has been growing for www.PBS.org.  We saw that, for example, in 2008 on the www.PBS.org, it was up 20%.  In terms of unique monthly’s and on the kids side, it was up 47% which is pretty significant.  We’re happy to talk about the hard numbers later, but for us it was a relatively big deal that, among other things, we were listed last year as the number one broadcast site among our NBC, ABC, CBS peers the most weeks of the year.  So for us that’s pretty significant because it really shows that online we were gaining, earning, and capturing this audience at a level that we hadn’t been previously.

[22:13] When we delve into the demographics information we saw that, interestingly, www.PBS.org was indexing for 35 – 44 year olds.  Which, as some of you may know, is young for PBS, so when we say we’re reaching a younger audience, that’s what we mean.  Many people ask us: “Well isn’t that because the overall Internet  population is younger?” and that’s not why.  We’re actually over indexing for the Internet population and similarly on kids which Sylvia can speak to, they were over-indexing for 2 – 6 year olds and 2 – 11 year olds.

So we were seeing some exciting trends which we interpreted to mean the online audience and the television audience were not exactly the same.  There was certainly some overlap.  We certainly see that after key programs people were coming online to find information or to delve deeper, but we were in some ways capturing new audiences which was exciting for us.

[23:00] Then one of the projects that we undertook when we first came here was something called PBS engage.  I just wanted to throw a slide up here as a shout-out to the PBS engage booth which will be at the back of the room after the presentation.  This project was funded generously by the Knight Foundation and the Ford Foundation as a stimulus for PBS to really provide more two-way communication to its audience.

So the challenge being that there was a perception that there was a super highway coming out of PBS and a bike path coming in.  How could we evolve that model so that we could learn from our audience, we could change, we could be more nimble and we could evolve into a better public media service organization.

[23:46] So as part of that, we had the opportunity to do a lot of experimentation to talk to our audience more often and actually engage us and put this presentation together for you.  So it’s part of our efforts to be more involved in the community.  So when we talked to that audience, it became very clear that they were very interested in online video.  I don’t think this will be new for many of you, but we receive a number of comments ranging from: “You’re wonderful.”  “I’ll give you money if you put on my video.” “Please, is there anything we can do? ”  I think my favorite one was: “Dear Sir or Madam: I really love Masterpiece.  Would it be helpful if I put it on You Tube for you?”

[Audience Laughs]

“I’m willing to lend my services.

[Audience Laughs]

[24:30] So anything ranging from people who want to help us to folks who say: “Stop being stingy.” “Don’t deceive yourselves.  We’re not going to wait forever if you don’t put online video up.”  Now for the sake of full disclosure, PBS has been streaming video for a long time.  Frontline, if many of you watch it, has been doing some really innovative things over time; leading people from on air to online.  We’ve been trying to offer full-quality, full-length, online video for sometime, but it really hadn’t been pushed as an initiative in a way that the audience was very aware.

So when we surveyed the audience they were aware that there was online video on NBC, CBS, or other outlets, but they really didn’t know what was available to them and it hadn’t been presented in a way that they could access immediately.

[25:18] So that’s really the setup.  The couple other points I wanted to leave folks with: what you’re seeing really is the early stages.  Part of the reason I showed engage is because our hope over time is that we merge some of our engagement efforts with our video efforts.  I think the long-term vision for this is that we really are creating media for the people, by the people and the audience is shaping the ultimate product and the programming.

So even though you won’t see that as a core push for this particular phase of the initiative, I think over time we’re really interested in not just user generated video or audience interaction, but also thinking about how would should evolve the public service media model to incorporate people’s new ways of interacting and their expectations.  So that’s something that we’re really excited about for the future is new initiatives that are enabled.

[26:16] What we’ll show you today is really focused on what we’re doing on www.PBS.org.  We have a number of partnerships with You Tube, with Hulu, with other digital distribution providers, and we’re happy to talk about that after the session, but we really want to focus on what was a push to create a back-end system that would enable all kinds of experiments for: our producers, for www.PBS.org/proper and for our stations.

So what we’ll show you may look snazzy on the front-end, but what we’re excited about is really what’s happening on the back-end which is a platform that can enable all kinds of experiments moving forward.  Whether it be partnerships with out colleagues at NPR or public media organizations or partnerships with other folks or original content or station experimentation.  We’re more excited about what’s behind the scenes than what you may see today, but that was really the challenge in moving this whole ship forward.

[27:10] So I guess with that, are there any questions to begin?  If not I will hand it to Gary who I think is going to set us up before we get into the meat of the presentation.  So thank you all very much again for coming.  We really respect your time, digital media professionals are the busiest in the industry so we’re really honored to have you spend some time with us today.

[Audience Applauds]

[27:35] Gary: Well thanks Angela and thank you for the great introduction.  At this point you usually see Julie Perlmutter up here, but we have so much to do today.  She wouldn’t let me borrow her tiara, but I will make some of the housekeeping announcements.  Again, as far as people standing back there, I think there is a few seats spotted in here so if you can raise your hand if there is a seat near you, maybe we can get a few people to sit down and be comfortable because we’ve got a lot to go through in the next hour or so.

[28:07] Thanks to PBS for being our host and I’ll explain in a moment how it is we got here.  Thanks Angela and also to Jamie Swain and David Brock who really orchestrated all the details for such a great moment we’re having here.

[28:30] The more important part is that we really want to thank everyone for being here on such an interesting topic that we’ve dealt with a couple times before.  I also want to thank our sponsors who have helped make this possible and I hope you’ve had a chance to look at their table tops out front in addition to the PBS engage one.

[28:50] Let me mention our sponsors for today.  We’ll start with Aquent, Inc. founding sponsors of the Web Managers Round Table and the worlds largest creative intelligence marketing staffing firm helping organizations find and hire talented professionals on a freelance contract try before you hire and permanent basis.  We have several people from Aquent here today so if you could, just raise your hands and say: “Hi.”  They’re all in the back.  Do you want to stand up for a moment?  Jason Erickson, Kristen Jones, Ann McDermit, Grace Mudderick, and Chris Woodbridge.  Thank you for your long-time sponsorship of the Web Managers Round Table.

[29:32] Another sponsor of today is Limelight Networks, our content delivery partner.  They work with more than 1300 entertainment  government software technology brands including PBS.  Working with a platform to deliver online experiences to global audiences.  Limelight’s proven network shows it’s passion for service to provide customers with confidence with everything delivered online, every user, every time.  From Limelight Networks today, if you could stand up: Robin Blocker, Corry Vale and Tom Shoemaker.  So we say: “Hi there!”  Thank you again to Limelight Networks.

Carol Kruse, The Coca Cola Company, at Ad:Tech on Mobile Strategy

Daniel Odio was at Ad:Tech and attended an excellent AKQA session where Carol Kruse, VP of Global Interactive Marketing, was ruminating Coke’s successes and challenges in online search (see video #2) and mobile strategy, which is below:

Here is the transcript:

People are online, they’re listening to music, they’re on Twitter, they’re on Face Book, they’re on You Tube, they’re talking to their friends.  How do you get that person?  How do you get that mass appeal? The question is is mobile an enabler or is it a barrier?  So it’s a barrier, no doubt, especially if you’re targeting teens.  They are not spending their time through traditional media.  So it’s actually a barrier.  How do you turn that into an enabler in a way that’s acceptable to consumers?

So I’m not a fan of mobile advertising because I don’t think people want advertising on their mobile phone.  So how do you not disrupt their experience and how do you enhance their experience?  We talk a lot about enhancing.  Not disruptive advertising, but enhancing advertising.

So any of you who sell mobile advertising I’m sorry I don’t mean to offend you.  I think click throughs are pretty good, so we do do some of it.  That said, we’re trying to focus on: How do I enhance that mobile experience?  How do I do something that engages the consumer in a positive way and they’re not pissed off that you put an ad in front of them.

Prior to WWI, our CEO said: “There will be an icy Coca Cola within the arms reach of desire of everyone.”  And then in WWI it was: “Within an arms reach of desire, a nickel for a Coke for every guy.”  So WWI actually expanded our global reach because there was that commitment to be able to get an ice-cold Coke for five cents no matter where you are in the world.  It single-handedly globalized us.  It was really meant to do a good thing for the soldiers, but it helped us along the way.

So if you’re saying “within an arms reach of desire” what else is always within arms reach of desire?  It’s a mobile phone, right?  Every teen, every young adult, their mobile phone never leaves them.  So if you want to reach a consumer at point of purchase, how are you going to reach them at point of purchase?  You could do a tent pole sign or you could use your mobile phone, right?

If you want to reach them in venue, in the stadium, on a college campus, how are you going to reach them?  Mobile phone.  So we’re looking at how can I use the mobile phone as a way to influence our consumers in a really, really acceptable way?

You can’t use this data, sorry guys because we bought it.  What we looked at is the size of the bubble is the size of our markets as far as our business.  What you’ll see is that mobile penetration – this is your Internet penetration, this is your mobile penetration.  You will see that when you look at India and China, some of our key markets, they are all moving and increasing their mobile penetration.  They’re not increasing their Internet penetration.

So for a company like ours, how are we going to reach these people through 2010 with low Internet penetration?  We better figure out mobile.  So we are doing a lot around learning mobile.  How do you get people across awareness with consideration and loyalty?

We’re spending a lot of time learning that – awareness and trials.  Is it in venue?  Is it in store?  Are you capturing people at the point of decision?  Or are you just using mobile to learn about 500 calorie or the 10 calorie version?

Consideration, again, at that point of sale, how are you influencing?  Certainly purchase, and then loyalty and web programs.  So all of our loyalty and many of our interactive programs have a website and a wapsite.  We all know that, right?  It’s kind of like you have to do it because you have to have a mobile prescience, and what we find is our engagement is really high.  People who engage via mobile phone, it is much higher than Internet only.  It’s just getting those people to think about using their mobile phone.

So the program we did with Q&A was looking at through the viral mobile program.  So I send a mobile greeting card to you.  We have a lot of fun assets: Santa Claus.  I don’t want to shatter anyone’s image but prior to the 1920’s Santa Claus looked like everything.  Sometimes he had a green coat on and a white coat.  Sometimes he was thin and sometimes he was heavier.  Sometimes he had a beard sometimes he didn’t.   There was no common depiction of Santa and then the Coca Cola company hired an artist named Sunbloom to depict Santa.  And I think you all know these ads with Santa and a bottle of Coke.

Well, the campaign was so successful, that Santa now wears a red (surprise surprise!) jacket and pants because it was a Coca Cola ad.  Santa now always has a beard, he’s always a little plump.  There is a common depiction of Santa now and that was really based on Coca Cola’s ad campaign.  Sorry to shatter people, but that is true.  That’s the price of commercialism.  It’s incredibly successful advertising, the association with Santa and Coke.  Polar bears is the same thing.

So what we did with AKQA is we took some of these amazing assets and we said: “Let’s send mobile greeting cards.”  Especially for teens and young adults.  No offense, but who is going to write out a Christmas card and send it to your friends in this day and age?  No one.  So we did these mobile greeting cards, really nice designs.

We had to have a Latin American Christmas and needless to say they don’t have a lot of Polar Bears in Mexico!  So they have a little different visual ID than what we had in Europe and Korea.  But I can send mobile greeting cards to my friends.  My friends could then send mobile greeting cards to their friends and it was free.  We didn’t pick up all the telecommunications charges.  But it was a really nice way to help kids send mobile greeting cards; Christmas cards to their friends using Coke assets.  So I think they did a great job with that.

We leveraged a program that we had done in London for two years and it had been successful and so we then said to actuate, let’s really blow it out and I think it almost killed us.  But it was really amazing learning to see how a programs runs around the globe and what the learnings are in the different countries.

So that’s it I think that’s about it.

Carol Kruse, The Coca Cola Company, at Ad:Tech on Online Search

Daniel Odio was at Ad:Tech and attended an excellent AKQA session where Carol Kruse, VP of Global Interactive Marketing, was ruminating Coke’s successes and challenges in mobile strategy (see video #1) and online search, which is below:

Here’s the Transcript:

Carol: I am selling Search outside the U.S., but I am not selling search inside the U.S. I’m not selling somethings, but I’m always selling something. So I thought if I shared with you how am I selling things then?

Please keep this interactive. It’s after lunch, it’s nap time. Go through some really caffeinated, carbonated drinks. If you are thirsty, please go get a Coke or Diet Coke!

Ask questions along the way. I exited out of a couple of things because I have people who love to take pictures of slides. I think it’s OK, but I just really grasp for my selling presentations so you can see, and I’ll talk a little bit about it, I sell my couple words into the company.

It is a major project. For those of you who don’t know, it started as a loyalty program. It is a marketing platform at this point. It is our major marketing point for brand Coke and others. Just last Friday we crossed 12 million members and every single day there are about a million end codes entered on the website. That’s amazing! One million codes entered every single day whether it’s text in or on the website.

We all of the sudden, here we are a beverage company, and we have this amazing media project. I’m going to talk a little bit about how we sell this. We now have a micro-rewards program you can call “Coke-Zone.” We’ve got three going on in Japan and we’ve got Germany coming up.

So how do you sell a big program like this? This is a big project. I’ve used this slide or something like it numerous times. If you want to take a picture of this slide, fine! I don’t care.

[Audience Laughs]

Carol: It’s with our Senior Management that doesn’t live this day in, day out. What do I tell them? Well one is it’s a competitive landscape. There are more beverage products than there were ten years ago and they are sprouting up everywhere. The smaller beverage brands have to work harder and smarter. They can’t do the mass TV. So we have to be there in the trenches working with them. Trenches meaning online.

The second is the media landscape. We all know that there are so many touch points. How do you break through?

The third is we looked at many, many of your clients brands and the 80/20 rule applies. 80% of our volume is purchased by 20% of the audience. So how do you reach that 20%? Well perhaps we should reward that 20% for their loyalty. The switchers, people who, God forbid, sometimes buy Pepsi how do we get them to always buy coke? So then you’re looking at what we call “the occasional’s” so how do I influence you to buy more? That program sounds good; giving them an incentive to buy your product.

Then I call this roller coaster marketing; the episodic. We do OK because it’s the Summer promotion. Now we have back to school, now we have a holiday. We start from scratch which is ridiculous. You do all the cost to build some promotions, you collect some data, and you don’t link them together. So what we talked about is: get off this marketing roller coaster. Have an ongoing CSR dialogue with customers.

The other piece of information is that we have 567 websites around the world, that’s ridiculous. We sell products in over 200 countries, but 567 websites are unnecessary. Every little mico-site for every little thing. It doesn’t make sense so how do you create a marketing plot?

These are all building the story.

How about a marketing class?

And then finally, the pin codes. These are the codes under the cap or on the wrap. All around the world they’re all successful so why not just keep it and continue running and change peoples’ behavior.
So that was kind of our situation assessment of what we did with this.

Then we talk about: What are we going to get? What are the benefits. Volume is always good. I think we all want to get more volume for whatever service or product we are selling.

Brand love. We have a French man who is the head of the brand and he calls it “Brand Love!” And most American men will say: “Brand L-O-V-E!” It’s Brand Health for those of you who don’t know. So obviously when you have an image brand like Coke, peoples’ love for you brand is extremely important. So how we named this brand “Love.”

Media value – we have a website like I told you, 12 million people entering one million codes per day; that’s a lot of eyeballs. We’re up against MTV and CNN, it’s a compelling media platform. We are trying, but I will be the first to say that I don’t think we have done a great job selling ads. We are so far from our core competency, but programs like this are expensive. So why don’t we take advantage of this media platform we have? Why don’t we see if we can monetize it. Little baby steps are not going exceptionally well, but we’re learning.

And then finally marketing and productivity which is a nice way, I think we all know, of cost cutting, getting more for less. By bringing all of our marketing programs under one platform, we are saving a ton of money.

So these are the things I sold. Not only “My Coke Rewards” but numerous programs. So these are some of the touch points. What are we going to get? We’re going to get awareness. We’re going to get trial. We’re going to get frequency of purchase. We’re going to increase our penetration of people who are buying our products. Those are your classic marketing strategies and this program happens to hit all of them.

With some people it’s about awareness. If it’s Minute Maid or Power Aid. People may not be as familiar with Power Aid so they just default to Gatorade. Where other places we’re trying to say: If you drink Diet Coke, you drink Power Aid, but maybe sometimes you buy Tropicana in the morning. Well Minute Maid is part of this program. Why don’t you just try Minute Maid instead? So the switching case.

So we put those all together and we add a few intangibles. These aren’t the business drivers of brand Love save money, bringing in revenues, arent’ business drivers, but things like 52 week continuity. If you’re a brand Sprite and you have enough money to do 12 weeks of TV, what do you do for the other 40 weeks? If that isn’t one of the most compelling ways to sell digital, I don’t know what is.
I use that all the time. I’m like: “Let’s look at your media plan.” And I’ll see a little tiny box. I’ll say: “Where’s your continuity?” “Oh we have a one or two time frequency.” “So where is your continuity?” How about digital? How about search? All the way across. How about social media? All the way across. Now let’s link them together.

That has single handedly gotten the “Ah hah.” What do you do with the other 40 weeks? Let’s not focus so much on the 12, let’s focus on the 40 where you don’t have conversations with the consumer.

Cross selling – If you have products where you’re selling other brands, obviously introduce the person you’re talking to to other brands. For us, in-store is very important so we can get the same messaging in-store. So if you’re in the segway, you will see some micro-messaging rewards throughout.

That’s the top slide. I showed you that roller coaster. This when you actually build message continuity.

We spend a huge amount of money on strategic assets: American Idol, NASCAR, Smoothies. So how do you get more value out of those? Many of those tend to be for retail. How about getting a lot more leverage out of those investments? So now you’ll see: “The Final Four” which is prominently featured on My Coke Rewards and we get a lot of value with that at the trade level, at the consumer level, American Idol, we have it all in this one marketing platform. So another way to say we’re getting more value for an investment that we’re already making.

Then finally, a test we apply across markets. We are fortunate, we sell in 200 markets, we can learn in one market and actually reapply in others. You may be able to test and reapply across brands.

So these are all the things that we talk about with our Senior Manager with our brand managers to say: “This is why you have got to do digital.” “This is why you need to create a marketing asset or marketing platform.” So this is kind of what we did for My Coke Rewards.

Interestingly we started My Coke Rewards we had TV and American Idol TV, we had Friends, we had the media display advertising and we had to carry all that cost on the P&L for my Coke Rewards. So people were like: “You used American Idol to launch my Coke Rewards, that’s incredible!” and we’re like: “Yeah it’s great!”

Our TV was not driving traffic registrations. Our print was not driving the registrations. No doubt they created a buzz, they created awareness, but it was our Search. We started seeing that Search was actually driving the most traffic and registrations. Our media agency was doing it and they had a nice excel spreadsheet and they were doing their best.

But that’s when I said: “I think I need to find an SCM agency” because my media agency is unable to spend more money. It seemed like we could shift money from TV to something that’s working harder for us. So it was the technology that Edwardo talked about at the beginning; the multi analysis blending your keywords, your creative landing page, geo-mix.

All of a sudden we were going to take that TV budget that was killing us and knock that way down and divert all of our money to Search. So actually our only acquisition that we do now is pay Search for the search engine. That’s it. That’s the only thing we do to acquire consumers. We moved it all to Search.

So My Coke Rewards is really big as what people put into Google, but we had a lot around NCAA, Final Four, or Music Downloads or mobile ring tones. We do a lot around those key words. So if you’re interested in free mobile ring tones, here is the way to get it. If you’re interested in Final Four, here is the activation we’re doing. So we’re really expanded our Search to get a lot of the passion-based.

So what we did was, after we brought Search rep in, registrations went up 400%. All of a sudden we were able to spend a lot more money and our cost for acquisitions went down significantly.

So that was an amazing story, right? Increased our registration to 400%. Cost for acquisitions dropped less than half. The other thing is Search also helped us with our landing pages. CPG companies don’t actually know a lot about Search. Those of you from econ probably know how good it is to have a good landing page, but we didn’t. So they really gave us some great consulting on our landing pages and that increased our conversion rate I think by 26% – 35% so that we were converting so many more people. So getting a trusted partner who is an expert in this field, not only with the technology, but who would also teach us a lot about Search was really valuable for us.

So now Coke zone is like My Coke Rewards. In London I went over to help them with their program and they were like: “Acquisition, we’re paying so much.” And I’m like: “I’ve got the answer for you. You will save about 5 months of time and a ton of money. Just go work with Search. Do paid Search and you will get it. That’s what they’ve done is they’ve kind of reapplied what we had done in the U.S. So we were able to take that learning and reapply it in London. And educating folks about how important Search is for us.

So here is the cost for registration going down and the 30% increase in registration. So getting Search in and getting Search for My Coke Rewards, big sell. I mean I had to write a white paper three years ago about why we would want to do Search optimization. Three years ago! Crazy! But guess what? All of a sudden I read this white paper and I was like: “Oh, technology might help us, really!” So it’s the dumbest thing to do a white paper, but it worked in this instance.

Now how about Search for our brand programs?

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