Every Day is A NEW DAY

Yesterday Highline Stages was abuzz with complaints about the unorganized lines and long elevator waits (#smwelevator was even trending among attendees). It seems the organizers did something about it, however, because today things are organized! And judging by the commentary I hear as I wait in line, people are noticing. I also received two emails from SMW organizers last night warning me about the sessions they anticipate to be popular and reminding me of the first-come, first-serve basis. Hats off to Crowdcentric for the fast turnaround, that’s admirable.

Upworthy’s Real Mission

My first session of the day was a keynote presented by Upworthy CEO Eli Pariser. He walked us through Upworthy’s mission, business model, and the surprising things they’ve learned since launch—like quality content is more important than numbers.

One point from this keynote to consider when reporting video analytics is measuring the effectiveness of our video work by what Upworthy calls “attention minutes” versus number of views. Analytics that tell you how long you’re keeping people’s attention means more. The only thing number of views really tells you is how many people pressed play, and even that can be bought and skewed.

Pariser also discussed his thoughts on why the majority of content that’s being shared and absorbed across the web is the kind of stuff that’s “not so important” (i.e. that video of the breakdancing goat you told your cousin about). Upworthy’s stance is that people do really care about the important things going on in the world, but that the media does a bad job at making it interesting enough to warrant a share, which is precisely what they’ve set out to disrupt.

In closing, Pariser announced that Upworthy will ask its readers to help choose content in 2014. Initial results of what that will look like will be posted within the next couple of weeks.

Man vs. Machine: Advertising’s Epic Battle for Human Attention

This session was a fun, very interesting debate on the future of advertising. Here are the highlights.

• Botnets that return false impressions to advertisers (yes this is a thing and a real problem) are the greatest threat to the industry; it’s fraud
• $100 billion is spent in digital advertising a year—$30-40 billion in banner ads alone, and approximately half of them are not viewable; fraud estimates are something like 10-30%
• In advertising, we’re competing for attention; In digital, we’re hoping for just one half of the ad to be viewed for one second
• Google is leading the way in online advertising, and they are encouraging the industry to follow suit and buy on viewability
• People are paying to avoid ads; as subscription services like Spotify and Netflix become more and more popular, advertising as we know it will deteriorate
• If we had the choice to avoid the annoying disruption, wouldn’t we? The system is changing because behaviors are changing