In A.M. Rosethanl’s 2006 obituary in the New York Times, Robert McFadden explains of Rosenthal’s tenure as managing and executive editor:

By the end of the 1960′s, The Times, despite a distinguished journalistic history, had a clouded future. Its reporting and writing were widely regarded as thorough but ponderous. Revenues were declining, profits were marginal, circulation was stagnant, and some studies said The Times might be doomed in the age of television to join a dozen New York newspapers in the elephant graveyard.

Mr. Rosenthal’s objective, often stated in memos to the staff and in public comments, was a delicate one: to forge dramatic changes in The Times, to erase a stodgy image with a new look and to improve readability and profitability — all this while maintaining the essential character of the newspaper.

Many innovations during Mr. Rosenthal’s tenure are familiar components of today’s Times. He expanded the weekday paper from two to four parts, including separate metropolitan and business news sections, and inaugurated new feature sections for weekdays: SportsMonday, Science Times on Tuesdays, the Living section on Wednesdays, the Home section on Thursdays and Weekend on Fridays.

Critics said the feature sections undercut The Times’s reputation for serious reporting, and some called articles on gourmet cooking and penthouse deck furniture elitist in an age of homelessness and poverty. But defenders said the sections usurped no space from regular news and brightened the paper’s tone. The innovations, highly popular with readers and advertisers, were copied by many newspapers across the country.

Mr. Rosenthal also redesigned most of the Sunday feature sections; started suburban weeklies for New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island and Westchester County; and began a series of Sunday magazine supplements that focused on business, travel, home entertainment, leisure activities, education, fashion, health and other subjects.

The Sunday innovations drew a similarly split critical reaction — defended as stylish and colorful, disparaged as distractions from important news. But most were also popular with readers and advertisers, and the supplements became sources of large advertising income.

Travel and living sections broke the mold, bringing a new type of content to the Times, and they continue to be extremely popular content sections today. Similarly, Animals is a new kind of leisure content of this era.

For millennials (18-34 year olds that make up 60% of the BuzzFeed audience), a generation born of and native to the web, animals, memes, and web culture are the equivalent of a Travel Section. And just as people wonder at how BuzzFeed can break political, technology, and sports scoops adjacent to adorable animals, so too did 50 years ago people wonder how The Times could have such lighthearted fair as Travel and Cooking adjacent to “real news.”

BuzzFeed actually evolved in reverse, starting with leisure content, albeit a different type of content, and then moved into hard news.

When thinking about Leisure sections, I’m reminded of the phrase “don’t yuck my yum.” As tastes and interests in leisure content change, it’s striking to see the same concerns raised yet again, as the formerly “too light” categories of content like Style or Food, become mainstays and new categories of “too light” fare emerge. It’s the cliche of our parents’ parents saying The Beatles and Elvis are noisy rock, only for our parents in turn to criticize Nirvana. I can only imagine my children’s rock.

Every generation has it’s own pop music, every generation has it’s own Travel Section. The new hard news is hard news. But the new Travel and Fine Dining sections are: animals, memes, animated gifs, and a wide range of social, emotional content that serves as a way for people to express their feelings to one another on Facebook and Twitter. And the new network is the social web.

[Thanks to Les Hinton for pointing me to this obituary and excerpt in response to my query about the rise of sections like Travel.]

In being part of a team that’s building a company there will always be a long list of opportunities and tasks. That you should pick the most important ones and focus is obvious. A harder state to obtain is to not let the things you aren’t focusing on bother you.

Saying a process, particular marketing material, project, or product can wait and not let it bother or distract you requires an enormous amount of self control. Choosing everything, doing everything is probably the most comfortable state for most entrepreneurial people.

The progression I’ve noticed is: the desire to do everything, the decision to say no to many things and focus, the discomfort with the unchosen, followed finally by the liberation of focus.

And surprisingly, even with that focused list, unforeseen opportunities and challenges will require tackling and so again more things must be unchosen. It seems no matter how much you narrow and focus, each day you must whittle and focus still more.

The only caveat to this is teamwork and dividing and conquering. A common focused mission, but teams or individuals that tackle things independently. I always look to have fewer people in meetings or on teams, myself included.

Scale in the absence of defining “scale in what” is like an all you can eat buffet – it sounds enticing in concept but often makes no practical sense. Worse, depending on what’s on the menu, it can badly upset your stomach. For example, who would wants to buy an all you can eat buffet, only to find out it’s an oyster buffet – they’re bound to be bad oysters. Caveat emptor.

Just as very few goods are purchased online (roughly 13%), making online conversion to purchase impossible, so too is the quest for scale a red herring. Very few campaigns or budgets can come close to exhausting the reach of even a small or mid-sized publisher with a few million uniques.

What’s more the quest for scale often comes at the expense of asking the vital question: scale in what? The core concerns of the meal, or campaign, should be: is it of adequate size to satiate, does it fulfill your demand for quality, and does it delight the senses.  These questions effectively answer brand, audience, and ROI.

Why simply ask, “is the buffet unlimited,” and be left meandering back and forth along the display of chafing dishes hoping for something that you can keep down.

I’m increasingly seeing smart brands and agencies execute social advertising programs that are banner free that exclusively use BuzzFeed Story Units and our distribution into Facebook Sponsored Stories, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and other social ad platforms. Our creative services team does all the work to make the assets and content perform on our platform. In just as many cases, other publishers will be involved as well. There’s no need to buy banners or low performing inventory for they sake of an additional security blanket of “scale.” The products put in these “scale security blankets,” such ‘welcome’ screen ads and even tv commercials, often provide false scale security, perhaps in need of a “scale discount factor” given banner blindness and time-shifted viewing where people skip the commercials, or just ignore them.

Scale needs to walk hand in hand with product. If the ad product isn’t any good, the scale is pointless. Similarly an awesome product with no audience is equally worthless.

With social content at scale there is much greater engagement, earned media, and sharing. It can stand on it’s own in achieving scale, perhaps even deserving of a multiplier due to high engagement as opposed to a discount factor. Further this is a meal that completely fills the stomach and leaves you feeling good.

According to Forrester, around 9% or 10% of retail occurs online, and that number will only grow to 11% by 2015.  Since people really don’t buy any groceries online with some exceptions (myself being one with Freshdirect in NYC), the number goes up a bit  to 15% in 2015 with consumer packaged goods removed.  That gives you a sense of just how much commerce sits concentrated in snacks, soda, prepared meals, condiments, vegetables, etc.

A massive amount of product research and learning happens online, but the actual purchase typically happens in the physical world. In fact, as more and more of our media consumption moves to the Internet, the place we learn about products will increasingly be the web.

Mary Meeker (Kleiner Perkins) released this great chart of media consumption at the end of May:

Desktop internet currently consumes 26% of our media time and mobile currently takes 10%.  (Notice the under-allocation of advertising to mobile.)  Taken together Internet represents 36% of media consumption, just shy of TV at 43%.  The Internet will increasing be where we are exposed to new products, but even by 2015 we’ll be buying most of our products in stores.  I think on mobile this will be even more true, where you’ll learn about a nearby business offering something you want and just go to it. No wonder Square just raised $200 million at a $3.25 billion valuation- buying stuff in stores is not dead! You can even ask Apple.

Further, consumers typically need to be exposed to countless advertisements and educational messages before they buy.  No one wakes up, Googles “Cellphone Model X” and buys it with a single click, with no prior research or messaging.  That’s fiction.

So when a marketer is looking at key performance indicators for an online campaign, they need to ask about how much of their product is actually transacted for online.  In most cases, at least 85% of the time they are driving towards offline conversion.  At BuzzFeed for a product that converts offline we look for several key KPIs as part of a social advertising campaign:

1. Consumption of the branded social content via paid media (typically our custom Story Units and their click through rates)
2. Social Lift: How much is the content shared to generated views via social or “earned media”
3. Social Brand Lift: When we survey people about their purchase intent in three groups: unexposed to the social ad, exposed via paid media, exposed via social; do we see large and lifts in intent between the unexposed and paid, and the paid and social.

For most marketers, and those who have purchased television, this is all old hat.  However, for generalists and those working on an offline converting product for the first time, the first chart in this post may help to convey that the reports of the death of offline commerce are greatly exaggerated.*

For example, here’s a mobile story unit for Bing running in BuzzFeed’s iOS app:

The CTR’s and engagement on our mobile units are as strong and often stronger then the already high (10x to 20x IAB units rates) CTR’s we see on desktop.  The same has been true of Facebook’s mobile sponsored stories.

The specs of the new iPhone 5  are 1136×640 pixels versus 960×640 on the 4s.  That means a pixel increase in length of 18% as illustrated in this BuzzFeed tech post by John Hermann:

The means the above the fold just got longer.  And likely mobile native monetizers will be able to fit an additional above the fold unit, in the river, while maintaing the same levels of user enjoyment and experience respect.

Further, the new iPhone’s LTE speeds should be double what we see on 3G as illustrated in this Apple graph:

Your speed will no doubt vary, but these phones are going to be MUCH quicker.  People will be able to load, consume, and share content much faster on the new iphone, another boon for mobile monetization.  This is even better for social advertisers and social advertising platforms, because people will be able to share content more quickly.  The Facebook integration further adds to this ability.

So more above the fold, more quickly.

Social advertising requires new types of creative and processes, and the rise of television is a good example of how advertising changed with the advent of a new medium.  I asked on Quora how the advertising industry adopted to television, and Rick Webb recommended The Mirror Makers by Stephen Fox; the television section in this 1984 book is intriguing for how closely it could be used to describe the move to social advertising.

In 1949, television advertising was $12.3 million.  By 1951, it was $128 million, a level that took radio 16 years to hit. (p.210)

Fox, again writing in 1984, states (all quotes are from pages 210 to 214):

For Madison Avenue, television meant a new kind of advertising with its own technical problems.  Dozens of big clients switched agencies to find creative departments adept at the new techniques.

Fox could just as well be writing about the move to native ads and social content designed to be shared.  The technical challenges could reference the new Sponsored Story and Promoted Tweet formats (as well as BuzzFeed’s Story Units), and of course, the switching of agencies could describe brands bringing on digital and social agencies of record.

Fox continues:

TV messages seemed to work best when cool and understated….Given one advertiser and a show title bearing its name, viewers associated a favorite show with its sponsor and- because of a “gratitude factor” – would buy the products

This is precisely what we see in terms of “content gifts” and reciprocity in social advertising.  Whereas a banner just demands action in a vacuum, a social ad delivers a gift that expresses brand attributes or aspirations and asks for consideration in return. It also need not be heavy handed, consumers keenly notice the brand gift giver in a simple title or attribution.

And these early TV ads delivered information, one description of a Kraft ad:

Its decorous commercials emphasized recipes and and information about the product, with no hard sell or repetition.

Could be used to describe the work BuzzFeed did just this year for Kraft’s Mio Energy.

The section also describes how closely agencies and TV networks collaborated during these early days, reminding me of how we collaborate closely with brands, media agencies, and creative agencies to adapt and experiment with new, but scalable social programs.

You can almost always find a historically precedent for major transitions.  Such historic case studies offer up good learnings and often validate a new move.  Social, content-driven advertising is both new and old.  The great print ads of Ogilvy are evidenced in the content-driven advertising of today, and television was a richer medium that allowed for the creation of understated branding around content gifts.  What’s new in social is the speed of sharing and ability through these techniques to create word of mouth marketing at unheralded scale.  But I’m sure there are even historical antecedents in word of mouth, but that is for another post…

Here’s the 5 pages from the book.

Here’s the Quora thread:
Read Quote of Rick Webb’s answer to Television Advertising: How did the advertising industry adopt in terms of spend and processes to the invention of television? on Quora

The McKayla Maroney “not impressed meme” showcases the power of Twitter in allowing celebrities to interact with their own pop culture moments. These kind of water cooler moments have occurred around large televised events like the Olympics for decades but prior to Twitter, the central celebrity players lacked a simple lightweight way to respond.

Maroney was able to tweet out her own “not impressed” image with a sentence and an image upload, all using tools built into Twitter. Prior to Twitter, she would have needed to host a blog, sit at a desktop, create the post and find a way to get the word out.

Prior to blogging, she would have needed to hold a press conference or issue a press release, which would have made too much of the situation. So she’d have been left saying nothing or waiting for an interview to comment.

Twitter might not be a flying car, but it definitely changes celebrity and pop culture; it definitely has a big impact on how we directly consume content from entertainers and public figures. On the surface it’s not a huge leap from blogging, but in practice, its ease for anyone to post, its public nature, and its fully functional mobile posting experience make it punch above its weight.

Discussing Facebook and BuzzFeed mobile, social advertising with Andrew Ross Sorkin and Julia Boorstin.

There is big and recent trend in technology towards vertical integration. Apple has been doing it for years, but this started as a liability because it made it hard for the company to scale and give consumers choice.

Today it has become an advantage because it makes it possible to laser focus on consumer experience by making everything – processor, hardware, OS, and software all work together seamlessly. Google contracting with Asus on the Nexus 7 tablet, and Microsoft building the Surface tablet as integrated products are two big signs that vertical integration is the new standard for consumer technology. (This is to say nothing of Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility).

At Buzzfeed, we have proven that this also holds true in digital publishing and social advertising. We have have built our own CMS, our own realtime stats system, our own optimization algorithms, hired our our team of reporters, built our own ad platform, and integrated all the piece together into one product that works for our readers and our brand partners. Contrast this to most publishers who have a third party build each layer for them: the CMS is by one company, the stats by another, the related links by a technology vendor, the optimzation by another, etc. It is easier to build a site this way but it makes it hard to really control the total experience to make it great for consumers and brands.

When we first started offering social advertising to clients two years ago, there was some skepticism that people would actually share branded content. Now we have done hundreds of campaigns, and every single one has resulted in sharing and earned media. Not to mention third party research showing that social advertising on our platform far outperforms banners on brand lift metrics.

Our end to end approach is what makes it possible but skepticism was understandable given the state of the industry. Usually one agency creates the ad, another buys the media, a few publishers traffic it, another company measures the results, nobody sees the big picture, and good ideas get lost.

Working with BuzzFeed requires that everyone collaborate on an integrated campaign with creative, media, and measurement all tightly integrated. The results speak for themselves: CTRs that are 10x to 20x industry averages, earned media averaging 38% (median) to 58% (mean) most recently for campaigns concluding in Q1 (with a minimum budget level), and enormous brand lifts. Tight vertical integration isn’t just the future of tech, it is the future of publishing and advertising as well.