Author Archives: JKNews

About JKNews

Jason E. Klein is an experienced media CEO and builder of digital and traditional businesses who has led two successful turnarounds. He is founder and CEO of On Grid Ventures, an advisory and investment firm in digital media, marketing, and information; a member of New York Angels and Harvard Business School Alumni Angels; and a mentor at several NYC-area “incubators.”

Mobile Alone Won’t Cut It

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E-commerce solutions which enable better consumer discovery, make shopping fun and worthwhile, and improve return on marketing investment for brands or retailers, are poised for growth.  I believe that the best solutions will take an integrated view to web and mobile, i.e., standalone mobile apps won’t cut it.  Here are some points to remember that emerge from Google’s new research study “The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior:”

  • 67% of shopping online is done multi-screen
  • 60% of smartphone use is at home
  • 79% of tablet use is at home
  • Only 30% of shopping on a smartphone is driven by search.  Hence an opening for an new approach to preempt Google from building a dominant approach to smartphone shopping.

Click here for a 34 page pdf of the full study.

Lowering Health Care Costs while Improving Quality of Life

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Best practices in health care — which I define as simultaneously reducing health care costs while improving quality of life — are often hard to find, but do exist.  The New York Times had a nice profile on Sunday of Bellin Health, a Green Bay health care system.

Low cost:  in the top 4% of hospitals holding down costs in the last two years of life, with spending per Medicare recipient 20 below the national average, per the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care.

High quality: among the best in the nation in preventing deaths and hospital readmission from heart attacks, preventing infections and pneumonia.
Read more in the article here on Bellin Health’s methods.  My point:  Analyzable data on health care methods, costs, and outcomes is essential to health care reform, and this is just one example of how it can work.

GeoStartup Placed hits the 1 Billion Mark

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Placed, a Seattle-based startup, is building one of the largest location-based databases around.

In July I noted that Placed is collecting 400 data points from 300 million locations (per CEO David Shim, as reported by Derrick Harris from GigaOM), i.e., a dataset of 120 billion elements each time it is updated.  Impressive!

Devindra Hardawar from Venturebeat reported in August 2012 that Placed recorded 1 billion data elements in 60 days, which says that Placed may have a long way to go to execute its plan.  In fact, at the current rate the Placed database would be completed by 2032.

In any event, Placed is up to something very intriguing, since it’s one of a few companies that are both “cleaning” location data (to fill out holes where GPS coordinate data is lacking) and adding a robust set of interpretative data (demographics, velocity, location characteristics, etc.) to enable marketers to have actionable intelligence.

In October 2012 the company launched Placed Panels to enable businesses to recruit their own “panels” of consumer participants to gather location data around their own unique interests.

Big Data and the Local Mobile Promise

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Local content and ad delivery continue to get smarter with more context around people, places and how they’re connected, says Michael Boland of BIA/Kelsey.

With smartphone penetration breaking the 50 percent barrier, there is an explosion in geo-data, and various alternatives are emerging to make sense of it.

One approach getting traction is to combine location data with “Big Data” on users (demographic, behaviorial, historical) and contextual data to help marketers extract more useful information.  Examples are Localeze, Sense Networks, PlaceIQ, Placed, Locu, Factual, Urban Mapping, and mobile local ad networks xAd, WHEREads, JiWire.

Read more here.  Are there other approaches possible?  A topic for another day…

October 22 update:  Mike Boland provides an update on the some of the players here.

 

The New Math of Content Creation

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The business model for creating original print content is broken, and the model for creating original web content is unproven.  But Jim Spanfeller, who had great success as CEO of Forbes.com, is making nice progess with The Daily Meal.

His recent results:  5 million monthly uniques after 18 months, the #8 food site in Comscore.

The math behind it:  edit team of 20, each turning out 6 stories per day = 120 stories per day; plus 700 special contributors posting weekly = 100 stories per day; plus user-generated content spurred by a rating system.

Next numbers: 10 million uniques by end of 2012 and aiming for 20 million after that.

The full story from Folio is here.

Download Two Apps and Call Me in the Morning

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Will medically prescribed “Apps” cure health care ills, as this New York Times article suggests?  Increased patient compliance with physician recommendations has enormous potential to reduce health care costs and improve patient outcomes.  This is true in a wide range of areas, such as post-surgery recovery, maintaining a heart healthy diet, and physical therapy.  But, aside from consumer fitness and diet apps, this market is yet to evolve.  What’s needed in a winning “app”?  For starters:

  1. A multi-format approach, mobile and web, to reach the broadest range of patients, so just a mobile “app” won’t cut it.
  2. MD-administered controls, enabling tailoring for each patient
  3. A patient compliance mechanism, such as feedback back to a health care professional
  4. A system incentive for the health care pros to engage, such as reimbursement incentives (or penalties), or links to outcomes.

Click here for the article.

Yodle Challenges the Conventional Local Sales Wisdom

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NYC-based Yodle is perfecting a telemarketing approach to small businesses across the USA.  Yodle sells digital advertising solutions to 30,000 customers and generates about $130 million in revenue.  This post from Kelsey Group explains some of CEO Court Cunnigham’s methods:

Cunningham tells us that by analyzing the metadata around the call activity (call duration, outcome, etc.) it generates for customers, as regular analysis of nearly 150 million keywords has led Yodle to a number of insights that have led Yodle to make tactical decisions that defy conventional wisdom.

One such example involves the number of times a company can contact a sales prospect unsuccessfully before “burning” the lead. Yodle has determined from statistical analysis that it is possible to contact a record (sales prospect) considerably more times (more than 2X) than conventional wisdom suggests.

Cunningham also has a lot of unconventional things to say about sales effectiveness.

“Drive, persistence and optimism are the attributes that equate to success in a sales reps, and everyone knows that,” Cunningham says. “Yet most companies don’t interview for these attributes.”

All Geotargeting Methods are Not Created Equal

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IP targeting can place a user within about 1,000 feet, but more advanced tactics are needed to get a more precise location: Cell tower location, wi-fi  triangulation, cookies, GPS, location-based proximity networks, and of course user-supplied.  This post by Rob Friedman at Streetfight surveys the options.

3 Reasons to Look to the Angels for Start-up Funding

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From Inc. Magazine, here are 3 reasons why angel investors can help you build your startup:

  1. Operational Expertise.  Angels with operational experience, especially within your industry, can provide invaluable contacts and advice, and angel investors are almost always current or former industry executives themselves.
  2. Patience.  Angels don’t expect to get their money out within three to five years at some pre-determined rate of return. As long as your company is doing well, most angels are happy to let their investment “ride” for the long haul. For the most part, angels are patient, long-term investors.
  3. Valuation and Ownership. Angels will usually give you a better valuation and financing terms, allowing you to retain more of the equity and board control of your company. 

Read the full piece by Langley Steinert, CarGurus.com founder, here.

Local will be an increasing play for national marketers.

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I agree with Mindshare North America CEO Antony Young in this recent article for Ad Age: Major national and international marketers will invest the time and money to take advantage of multi-local marketing.  He reviews recent multi-local strategies from Walmart, L’Oreal, and Nike.

Some of his key points:

“It takes insight into local tastes, local demographics, local issues and local competitors to be relevant and win the consumer.  Organize national, act local is starting to get some traction.

The media are leading the way.  Media properties’ local targeting is increasingly offering more precision. Hyperlocal websites are providing local content and localized national advertising platforms by individual towns.

Most marketers will need a better payout to shift national dollars to local, posing a riddle for the media companies betting so much of their own money on a local strategy.  Data will have to be the compass for media sellers and buyers alike.  Mobile ad network xAd recently published data showing that locally-targeted mobile display ads deliver 5% to 8% click-through rates, compared to 0.6% for typical mobile display ads.

There’s no doubt that local will be an increasing play for national marketers. It’s what brands need to do to engage consumers and grow. However, it is going to be more challenging for marketers to execute and more costly and complex to orchestrate.”

Read Antony’s full piece here.