The Rebooting Show

This week, I was joined by one of my favorite media entrepreneurs, Adam White. Adam has built Front Office Sports from a college project to the $10 million in revenue mark, with backing from Jeff Zucker's Redbird IMI.

Some of the topics we covered:

• Why investing in creative strategy is critical to break through with big brands.
• The “faces and franchises” approach.
• The limits of built-if-sold projects.
• The decision to put off subscriptions.

Adam Mendelsohn operates at the nexus of sports, media, business and culture. Adam is a longtime advisor to LeBron James and his business partner Maverick Carter. He’s a communications advisor to many athletes and companies. And he’s recently rolled out his own sports platform, OffBall, which is something of a throwback to a pre-algorithmic era where Drudge report and other curators reigned supreme.

We discussed:

• The genesis and vision behind OffBall, a new sports media venture
• The long-term impact of "The Decision" on sports media and athlete communications
• The shift towards human curation in content discovery
• The evolving landscape of sports journalism and brand partnerships
• The rise of women's sports and international leagues in the U.S. market
• The importance of storytelling and character development in sports media

This week marks an important moment in the history of digital advertising as the U.S. Department of Justice presses its case that Google is a monopolist in ad tech. 

The seeds of this case were planted in 2007, when Google bought DoubleClick, a critical piece of internet advertising infrastructure that was widely used by advertisers and publishers in running ad campaigns. With DoubleClick in the fold, Google methodically grew to dominate all phases of digital advertising by piecing together a full stack solution for ad tech, supplying the tools used to both buy and sell ads as well as the exchange used for transacting. And Google was the biggest source of demand for the exchange. The go-to comparison of this situation is if Goldman Sachs owned the New York Stock Exchange.

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke to Ari Paparo, a former DoubleClick executive and ad tech veteran who now runs Marketecture. Ari, in addition to being the funniest person in ad tech, knows the history. We go back in time to when the Google-DoubleClick deal took place, just as programmatic advertising was becoming a reality, and get into the weeds about why controlling the plumbing of digital advertising created an unavoidable set of misaligned incentives.

Scott Messer is founder of media advisory firm Messer Media and former svp of media at Leaf Group. Scott is in the weeds on the digital ad ecosystem, and he broke down the current state of play for publishers. We discussed why traffic declines are still the No. 1 challenge for publishers, why publishers are shifting from traditional monetization mechanisms, retail media as potential allies, and why “curation” is the latest hot new trend in ad tech, even if it sounds quite a lot like what ad networks have always done.

In a spotlight episode of The Rebooting Show, I spoke with Affinity Global CEO Lavin Punjabi for his view of how publishers adapt their affiliate operations. Affinity operates NucleusLinks, an affiliate operations platform that serves as something akin to Google Ad Manager for affiliate operations. Some takeaways:

• Many publishers are playing catch up. Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest internet business models, with its growth turbocharged by the ease and rise of e-commerce. Many legacy publishers were behind in adopting affiliate models, seeing performance ads as scraping the bottom of the barrel compared to impression models. “The biggest publishers in the world are scrambling to compete in this area that they kind of ignored for a generation,” Lavin said.
• Affiliate stresses silos. The entire idea of affiliate runs contrary to the notion of church and state. At one of The Rebooting’s dinners focused on commerce, I heard a large publisher lament how the editorial team would battle to control personal finance reviews rather than the commerce team. They were basically working against each other internally. "Some publishers it's the main thing, but for a lot of marquee publishers, it's a department, and they have to figure out where it fits because it's not really editorial, but it's not really sales."
• Dotdash Meredith is an anomaly. Dotdash Meredith is the manifestation of these worlds colliding, with the internet-native Dotdash taking over the legacy Time Inc publications. It’s telling that as publishers sound the alarm over AI, DDDM has weathered this storm and returned to growth. "They came from a commerce first angle, which is operated with CPS for a large degree. And then eventually with Meredith, which was CPM, they tried to find middle ground."

On this week’s episode of The Rebooting Show, I was joined by Ana Andjelic,  a veteran brand executive and writer of the Sociology of Business newsletter. I wanted to try an episode with Ana because we focus on different ends of the media ecosystem. Among the issues we discuss:

• The internet’s impact on brands. “It forces you to compete on everything other than on brand. You compete on price, convenience, product recognizability, speed of your supply chain."​
• Product-led branding. “It’s starting with that iconic original product, using different wear stories, wear scenarios, different subcultures, to give it identity."
• Why DTC brands were really performance marketing companies. “A lot of brands, especially in the DTC era when money was free, thought they would build demand by buying Facebook ads, Instagram ads, search and so on."
• The limits of performance marketing. "Performance marketing is not going to build your demand. There needs to be something else that tells people to search for it or click on the ad.”

This week, we are wrapping up a series on The Rebooting Show that examines the role of product at a time of distribution and monetization shifts. The twin themes that emerged are that publishers are increasingly focused on direct relationships with audiences and are in a back-to-basics mode of focusing product resources on critical business objectives, which often rely on loyalty. And the looming question: How will AI be used to make these businesses more effective while not losing their distinctiveness in a sea of artificial slop.

Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP, discussed with me how AI’s impact on publishers’ day-to-day operations will be felt first and foremost on mundane tasks that end up eating up a lot of resources. The early efforts to embed AI within the publishing process were predictably ham-handed. Using ChatGPT to create AI slop is hardly innovative – and unlikely to be very effective. I’m very skeptical of creating much value out of using AI to churn out tons of aggregation newsletters, for instance.

The most immediate opportunities in the content process lie in areas like tagging, inserting links to related articles, testing headlines and the like. As Brian warns, there’s no point in using AI in a way that eliminates the competitive advantage of having a distinct voice.

Some highlights from our conversation:

• On the site as a requisite for an independent path: "If you want to be around in five years, I think so. Don't you like why would you has nobody ever learned that building up and like no offense to any of these, you know, what I call bastard gatekeepers that take your audience away from you."
• On where AI’s impact will be felt: "People probably overestimate the amount of things that AI is going to help them automate of what they do today. They underestimate how many things they're just not doing because it's so hard that AI is going to let them do."
• On AI’s use within the content creation process rather than creating content: "Some parts of that [process] can absolutely be handled by modern generative chat, GPT-style, LLM AI."​
• On distinctiveness in an AI era: "Be remarkable, No. 1. That's how you'll stand out from a sea of junk."
• On being product-minded vs a tech company: Publishers “should be product minded. They are creating a product for people to consume. They should have product talent. If you are the New York Times, you have a thousand product people. If you are somebody else, you have 10. But no, they shouldn't be a technology company."​

At the Media Product Forum earlier this month, I spoke with Gannett head of product Renn Turiano, Hearst Newspapers chief commercial officer Bridget Williams and Millie Tran, chief digital content officer at the Council on Foreign Relations. The conversation revolved around the shifting product priorities at publishers at a time when the weight of most publishing businesses is shifting from catering to the whims of platforms to a more independent path. That requires a change in focus to satisfy user needs, as well as the need to identify and serve various audience segments. We spoke about how all three organizations are tackling this. Thanks to WordPress VIP, which partnered with The Rebooting on the Media Product Forum.

At last week’s Media Product Forum, which The Rebooting held in collaboration with WordPress VIP, I had a discussion with Dotdash Meredith chief product officer Adam McClean and The Daily Beast svp of product Samantha Winkelman about their respective product strategies. While both owned by IAC, the publishers are at vastly different sizes, with The Daily Beast having three people in product to DDM’s 75. The connective tissue of both: A focus on audience needs.

In a session recorded at The Media Product Forum in NYC, Bloomberg Media global head of product Marissa Zanetti-Crume shares how the media organization takes an audience-focused approach to building products. Marissa highlights the importance of understanding user behavior, particularly the shift towards personalized, relevant content delivered efficiently. She shares insights on Bloomberg's recent homepage redesign, the role of AI in enhancing user experience, and the strategic decisions driving their product development.