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Rather Than Share Your Location, Foursquare Wants to Suggest One
By JENNA WORTHAM
Two years ago, Foursquare was the star of the New York start-up scene. Celebrities and major brands embraced its mobile app, and companies like Facebook and Yahoo were eager to buy it.
Foursquare’s founders turned down those offers, convinced of its potential as an independent company. Since then, the buzz around Foursquare has cooled and growth has slowed, leaving it in the position of having to prove that its decision was the right one.
On Thursday, the company is expected to announce an overhaul of its application — one that Dennis Crowley, the chief executive and one of the founders, says is the truest vision of Foursquare, turning it into a recommendation service that could rival sites like Yelp.
But Foursquare must contend with the short attention span of mobile app users. Its efforts show how hard it can be nowadays for start-ups to sustain their early momentum and chart a course to mass-market success in such a rapidly changing industry.
“The nature of this game is that there is another idea or technology around the corner,” said Susan Etlinger, an analyst at the Altimeter Group who advises companies on how best to use technology. “Companies capture the public imagination. They become the center of attention. But it is very difficult to continue to offer an intriguing and valuable enough service for people.”
Mr. Crowley said that since 2009 the company had collected more than two billion pieces of data about where its 20 million users like to go and when. It can use that data to offer insights about particular venues, like letting a user know if a favorite restaurant seems less busy than usual, and therefore more appealing for dinner that night.
“This is our first stab at what we think you’ll find interesting,” Mr. Crowley said.
Foursquare has yet to generate any significant income, and Mr. Crowley would not offer specifics on how the emphasis on recommendations might help it do so.
Some Final Thoughts on a Booming Industry
By BOB TEDESCHI
Having covered the boom and bust of the e-commerce industry, and then the boom and bust of the mortgage industry, I’m exiting the mobile apps beat before I see death and destruction again.
App developers, you’re welcome.
Before stretching my journalistic legs elsewhere, though, I’d like to share a few closing thoughts about where the mobile apps industry might focus, if it hopes to stave off a bust of its own.
No. 1: Improve search.
Of the hundreds of thousands of apps on the market, at least 20 percent aren’t worth a glance, yet they constantly clutter the search results of Apple’s App Store or Google Play for Android. Better search engines would help users skip the junk and get to the good apps quickly.
If I type “baseball” into the iTunes Store or Google Play, for instance, I feel like I’ve landed in an Abbott and Costello sketch. In the Google and Apple versions of “Who’s on First?,” hundreds of search results commonly spill forth, with almost no guidance on where to go next.
If you search for baseball-related apps, you should be able to see only the most highly rated baseball apps in the media category, for instance, or in games. Google and Apple already know the app ratings and the categories.
Granted, Apple isn’t a search company.
But Google? During my search for baseball apps, I sorted the results by relevance, one of the two sorting methods offered. (The other is popularity.) I scanned the results, looking for the stellar MLB.com At Bat app, and gave up after I clicked through 10 pages of entries that Google deemed more relevant.
Of course, with so many user reviews being written by software bots, Google and Apple may not wish to rely too heavily on such reviews to determine search results.
Call that item 1(b) on the to-do list: Eliminate shills.
Because the search process is so flawed, users often have no choice but to visit the echo chamber of the Top Paid and Top Free charts, where companies with gigantic marketing budgets can muscle past more deserving underdogs.
This won’t kill the apps boom. Users will still get decent — and occasionally great — apps, and Apple and Google will continue to earn money as a result. The situation will, however, undermine smaller developers who make great software, but who can’t find an audience, and that’s a shame. No. 2: Fix the process of updating apps.
On my Apple devices, the App Store icon constantly includes a red tag in the top right-hand corner, denoting the out-of-date apps.
If you tap through to the updates page, and your page looks anything like mine, you see a mind-numbing list of tiny improvements, typically alongside promotional language.
Why not give users the option to accept automatic updates in the background for minor software upgrades and solicit their attention only for significant updates that involve privacy or security?
On Android, users may not even know if an updated version is available. I recently dug into the developer’s notes on the Pulse News app and found that I was using version 1.9, when Pulse is actually verging on version 3.0.
Again, an automatic update would be welcome, especially when these devices can detect Wi-Fi connections and download the software without eating into a user’s data allocation. If Apple or Google wants to alert me to a newly updated app, they can wrap its icon in a green border and let me check it out if I wish.
No. 3: Allow greater parental controls.
If, 20 years ago, Google or Apple introduced a new television service or device that included thousands of pornographic channels, and then they marketed the product to children, you could imagine the outrage that would have generated.
Mobile devices are the younger generation’s TV sets, yet our new-age broadcasters deliver pornography and other potentially objectionable content to the devices without giving parents an easy way to reliably block that content.
As it now stands, parents who care about shielding their children from adult content on their mobile devices need a manual, an hour or more of free time and continued vigilance against apps that offer a portal to the open Web.
Even then, parents need some luck.
Every app has an age or maturity rating to help guide consumers, but developers — not Google or Apple or a third-party ratings service — rate their apps. For various reasons, developers don’t always choose the correct age rating. Apple reviews the developer’s ratings before publishing the app, but in some notable cases that has not stopped inaccurate ratings from appearing.
Wikipedia’s app, for instance, is rated appropriate for people of “low maturity” on Android and for 4-year-olds on Apple. Such children might have a hard time stumbling onto the app’s pornography portal, but slightly older children would find it easily, and they’d discover content that some parents would consider inappropriate for them.
Will this sort of issue threaten to bring the apps economy to a halt? No. Could it diminish the quality of the apps experience for some consumers?
Possibly.
With money flowing so freely into the apps economy, companies like Google and Apple have little incentive to spend on anyone’s wish-list items, let alone mine. But it can’t hurt to ask.
Besides, now that I’m stepping away (though the App Smart column will continue) and taking my boomtown curse with me, they may owe me something.
A ‘Mad Men’ Debut for a Behind-the-Scenes Player
By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
TURN, a Silicon Valley company, works with advertisers to target digital ads by determining likely demographic attributes — but not actual identities — of consumers as they land on Web pages. Its software instantly calculates whether to display ads likely to be relevant to computer and mobile device users, like a diaper ad to mothers.
It is, in other words, a fairly esoteric business-to-business enterprise, one of interest primarily to marketing and advertising executives. And when it comes to promoting itself, Turn has, ironically, eschewed advertising. Instead, the company sponsors events at conferences like Advertising Week, the annual gathering in New York, and others that draw marketing executives.
But now Turn is going prime time, with a commercial that will be shown on June 10 during the season finale of “Mad Men,” the popular AMC show created by Matthew Weiner about advertising set in the 1960s.
Directed by Michael Lehmann (“True Blood,” “Heathers”) and set in the same era as the show, the commercial opens with a shot of an office, where a man fixes a drink for a stunning blond woman, and they clink glasses and embrace.
The office door opens. A woman who resembles a young Jacqueline Kennedy enters, apparently the man’s wife, draws a pistol from her pocketbook, and shoots. The bullet moves through the office in extreme slow motion, and its trajectory is unclear — will it hit the man, the other woman, or neither? — because the camera pulls away at the last moment.
“In 10 milliseconds, Turn delivers your ad to all the right online audiences with deadly accuracy,” says a voice-over. “Never second-guess a decision — at least not a business one.”
Viewers are directed to a microsite by Turn that will feature alternative endings to the ad.
The campaign is by the San Francisco office of Gyro. After the television commercial runs Sunday, online ads that promote the microsite will appear on Web sites including those for Advertising Age, Adweek, Forbes and MediaPost. The budget of the campaign is estimated at just over $500,000.
“I’m a b-to-b marketer, so generally TV is not something I would use in my mix,” said Paul Alfieri, vice president for marketing of Turn, using the shorthand for business to business.
Turn often works with clients who are adapting television commercials for online and mobile campaigns, and the new campaign finds the company doing so on its own behalf, and in a way that may resonate with those clients.
“We want our customers to understand that we build great software, yes, but we appreciate great creative, too, and it’s important for us to respect creative and do great creative,” said Mr. Alfieri. “We’re drinking our own Champagne.”
•
According to data provided by AMC, “Mad Men” viewers age 25 to 54 are 34 percent more likely than the general population to hold executive-level jobs, although the data does not indicate their industries.
When advertising on the show, numerous brands, including BMW, Clorox and Canada Dry, have all set commercials in the same era. In 2010, Unilever ran commercials on “Mad Men” for six brands — Dove, Breyers, Hellmann’s, Klondike, Suave and Vaseline — in the style of the show. Afterward, Unilever reported that viewers were less likely to fast-forward past the ads because many, naturally, mistook them for the program.
Steffan Postaer, executive creative director of Gyro San Francisco, said the agency was not trying to replicate the show in the Turn commercial.
“Let’s not just try to do a parody of ‘Mad Men’ — that’s already been done,” said Mr. Postaer of the guiding principle for the campaign. “What we wanted was something grander, and we elevated everything, including the lighting and the set design.”
Striking more of a noir tone than the show, the commercial also took cues from films including “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential,” Mr. Postaer said.
•
Abbey Klaassen, editor of Advertising Age, noted that another online ad company, Undertone, recently advertised on “The Pitch,” an AMC reality show that features ad agencies, but she was unaware of a similar instance on “Mad Men.”
“If you were to pick one television show to advertise on to try to reach the greatest density of advertisers and marketers, ‘Mad Men’ is probably a good bet,” said Ms. Klaassen.
“That said,” she continued, “it’s surprising to see a company whose bread and butter is highly targeted digital advertising buy a mainstream television show, but I think surprising is probably what they’re going for here.”
Barbara Lippert, who was a longtime advertising critic for Adweek and has for four years written the Mad Blog about “Mad Men” for MediaPost.com, said ads that appropriated the era of the show generally missed the point.
“You’re not recreating a time in history, you’re working off of this incredibly meticulous vision which is inside Matt Weiner’s head, which is impossible to do,” Ms. Lippert said.
But after reviewing the new Turn spot, she said it was “clever,” not only in its execution but also in the buzz it is apt to create.
“The really smart thing that they’re doing is that they can milk it for publicity because it’s such a meta thing,” she said, referring to the fact that it is an advertisement about advertising on an advertising show.
Turn will be targeting specific types of consumers — in this case marketers — and measuring the response to the campaign, just as it does for clients. In a few weeks the company will issue a marketing study that, beyond how many viewed the ads, will measure how many queries from potential clients it spawned.
“Traffic and eyeballs in this day and age,” Mr. Alfieri said, is not as important as how many customers the ad delivers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/business/media/turn-which-helps-target-ads-will-run-its-own.html?scp=1&sq=A 'Mad men' Debut&st=Search
By JENNA WORTHAM
Two years ago, Foursquare was the star of the New York start-up scene. Celebrities and major brands embraced its mobile app, and companies like Facebook and Yahoo were eager to buy it.
Foursquare’s founders turned down those offers, convinced of its potential as an independent company. Since then, the buzz around Foursquare has cooled and growth has slowed, leaving it in the position of having to prove that its decision was the right one.
On Thursday, the company is expected to announce an overhaul of its application — one that Dennis Crowley, the chief executive and one of the founders, says is the truest vision of Foursquare, turning it into a recommendation service that could rival sites like Yelp.
But Foursquare must contend with the short attention span of mobile app users. Its efforts show how hard it can be nowadays for start-ups to sustain their early momentum and chart a course to mass-market success in such a rapidly changing industry.
“The nature of this game is that there is another idea or technology around the corner,” said Susan Etlinger, an analyst at the Altimeter Group who advises companies on how best to use technology. “Companies capture the public imagination. They become the center of attention. But it is very difficult to continue to offer an intriguing and valuable enough service for people.”
Mr. Crowley said that since 2009 the company had collected more than two billion pieces of data about where its 20 million users like to go and when. It can use that data to offer insights about particular venues, like letting a user know if a favorite restaurant seems less busy than usual, and therefore more appealing for dinner that night.
“This is our first stab at what we think you’ll find interesting,” Mr. Crowley said.
Foursquare has yet to generate any significant income, and Mr. Crowley would not offer specifics on how the emphasis on recommendations might help it do so.
Some Final Thoughts on a Booming Industry
By BOB TEDESCHI
Having covered the boom and bust of the e-commerce industry, and then the boom and bust of the mortgage industry, I’m exiting the mobile apps beat before I see death and destruction again.
App developers, you’re welcome.
Before stretching my journalistic legs elsewhere, though, I’d like to share a few closing thoughts about where the mobile apps industry might focus, if it hopes to stave off a bust of its own.
No. 1: Improve search.
Of the hundreds of thousands of apps on the market, at least 20 percent aren’t worth a glance, yet they constantly clutter the search results of Apple’s App Store or Google Play for Android. Better search engines would help users skip the junk and get to the good apps quickly.
If I type “baseball” into the iTunes Store or Google Play, for instance, I feel like I’ve landed in an Abbott and Costello sketch. In the Google and Apple versions of “Who’s on First?,” hundreds of search results commonly spill forth, with almost no guidance on where to go next.
If you search for baseball-related apps, you should be able to see only the most highly rated baseball apps in the media category, for instance, or in games. Google and Apple already know the app ratings and the categories.
Granted, Apple isn’t a search company.
But Google? During my search for baseball apps, I sorted the results by relevance, one of the two sorting methods offered. (The other is popularity.) I scanned the results, looking for the stellar MLB.com At Bat app, and gave up after I clicked through 10 pages of entries that Google deemed more relevant.
Of course, with so many user reviews being written by software bots, Google and Apple may not wish to rely too heavily on such reviews to determine search results.
Call that item 1(b) on the to-do list: Eliminate shills.
Because the search process is so flawed, users often have no choice but to visit the echo chamber of the Top Paid and Top Free charts, where companies with gigantic marketing budgets can muscle past more deserving underdogs.
This won’t kill the apps boom. Users will still get decent — and occasionally great — apps, and Apple and Google will continue to earn money as a result. The situation will, however, undermine smaller developers who make great software, but who can’t find an audience, and that’s a shame. No. 2: Fix the process of updating apps.
On my Apple devices, the App Store icon constantly includes a red tag in the top right-hand corner, denoting the out-of-date apps.
If you tap through to the updates page, and your page looks anything like mine, you see a mind-numbing list of tiny improvements, typically alongside promotional language.
Why not give users the option to accept automatic updates in the background for minor software upgrades and solicit their attention only for significant updates that involve privacy or security?
On Android, users may not even know if an updated version is available. I recently dug into the developer’s notes on the Pulse News app and found that I was using version 1.9, when Pulse is actually verging on version 3.0.
Again, an automatic update would be welcome, especially when these devices can detect Wi-Fi connections and download the software without eating into a user’s data allocation. If Apple or Google wants to alert me to a newly updated app, they can wrap its icon in a green border and let me check it out if I wish.
No. 3: Allow greater parental controls.
If, 20 years ago, Google or Apple introduced a new television service or device that included thousands of pornographic channels, and then they marketed the product to children, you could imagine the outrage that would have generated.
Mobile devices are the younger generation’s TV sets, yet our new-age broadcasters deliver pornography and other potentially objectionable content to the devices without giving parents an easy way to reliably block that content.
As it now stands, parents who care about shielding their children from adult content on their mobile devices need a manual, an hour or more of free time and continued vigilance against apps that offer a portal to the open Web.
Even then, parents need some luck.
Every app has an age or maturity rating to help guide consumers, but developers — not Google or Apple or a third-party ratings service — rate their apps. For various reasons, developers don’t always choose the correct age rating. Apple reviews the developer’s ratings before publishing the app, but in some notable cases that has not stopped inaccurate ratings from appearing.
Wikipedia’s app, for instance, is rated appropriate for people of “low maturity” on Android and for 4-year-olds on Apple. Such children might have a hard time stumbling onto the app’s pornography portal, but slightly older children would find it easily, and they’d discover content that some parents would consider inappropriate for them.
Will this sort of issue threaten to bring the apps economy to a halt? No. Could it diminish the quality of the apps experience for some consumers?
Possibly.
With money flowing so freely into the apps economy, companies like Google and Apple have little incentive to spend on anyone’s wish-list items, let alone mine. But it can’t hurt to ask.
Besides, now that I’m stepping away (though the App Smart column will continue) and taking my boomtown curse with me, they may owe me something.
A ‘Mad Men’ Debut for a Behind-the-Scenes Player
By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
TURN, a Silicon Valley company, works with advertisers to target digital ads by determining likely demographic attributes — but not actual identities — of consumers as they land on Web pages. Its software instantly calculates whether to display ads likely to be relevant to computer and mobile device users, like a diaper ad to mothers.
It is, in other words, a fairly esoteric business-to-business enterprise, one of interest primarily to marketing and advertising executives. And when it comes to promoting itself, Turn has, ironically, eschewed advertising. Instead, the company sponsors events at conferences like Advertising Week, the annual gathering in New York, and others that draw marketing executives.
But now Turn is going prime time, with a commercial that will be shown on June 10 during the season finale of “Mad Men,” the popular AMC show created by Matthew Weiner about advertising set in the 1960s.
Directed by Michael Lehmann (“True Blood,” “Heathers”) and set in the same era as the show, the commercial opens with a shot of an office, where a man fixes a drink for a stunning blond woman, and they clink glasses and embrace.
The office door opens. A woman who resembles a young Jacqueline Kennedy enters, apparently the man’s wife, draws a pistol from her pocketbook, and shoots. The bullet moves through the office in extreme slow motion, and its trajectory is unclear — will it hit the man, the other woman, or neither? — because the camera pulls away at the last moment.
“In 10 milliseconds, Turn delivers your ad to all the right online audiences with deadly accuracy,” says a voice-over. “Never second-guess a decision — at least not a business one.”
Viewers are directed to a microsite by Turn that will feature alternative endings to the ad.
The campaign is by the San Francisco office of Gyro. After the television commercial runs Sunday, online ads that promote the microsite will appear on Web sites including those for Advertising Age, Adweek, Forbes and MediaPost. The budget of the campaign is estimated at just over $500,000.
“I’m a b-to-b marketer, so generally TV is not something I would use in my mix,” said Paul Alfieri, vice president for marketing of Turn, using the shorthand for business to business.
Turn often works with clients who are adapting television commercials for online and mobile campaigns, and the new campaign finds the company doing so on its own behalf, and in a way that may resonate with those clients.
“We want our customers to understand that we build great software, yes, but we appreciate great creative, too, and it’s important for us to respect creative and do great creative,” said Mr. Alfieri. “We’re drinking our own Champagne.”
•
According to data provided by AMC, “Mad Men” viewers age 25 to 54 are 34 percent more likely than the general population to hold executive-level jobs, although the data does not indicate their industries.
When advertising on the show, numerous brands, including BMW, Clorox and Canada Dry, have all set commercials in the same era. In 2010, Unilever ran commercials on “Mad Men” for six brands — Dove, Breyers, Hellmann’s, Klondike, Suave and Vaseline — in the style of the show. Afterward, Unilever reported that viewers were less likely to fast-forward past the ads because many, naturally, mistook them for the program.
Steffan Postaer, executive creative director of Gyro San Francisco, said the agency was not trying to replicate the show in the Turn commercial.
“Let’s not just try to do a parody of ‘Mad Men’ — that’s already been done,” said Mr. Postaer of the guiding principle for the campaign. “What we wanted was something grander, and we elevated everything, including the lighting and the set design.”
Striking more of a noir tone than the show, the commercial also took cues from films including “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential,” Mr. Postaer said.
•
Abbey Klaassen, editor of Advertising Age, noted that another online ad company, Undertone, recently advertised on “The Pitch,” an AMC reality show that features ad agencies, but she was unaware of a similar instance on “Mad Men.”
“If you were to pick one television show to advertise on to try to reach the greatest density of advertisers and marketers, ‘Mad Men’ is probably a good bet,” said Ms. Klaassen.
“That said,” she continued, “it’s surprising to see a company whose bread and butter is highly targeted digital advertising buy a mainstream television show, but I think surprising is probably what they’re going for here.”
Barbara Lippert, who was a longtime advertising critic for Adweek and has for four years written the Mad Blog about “Mad Men” for MediaPost.com, said ads that appropriated the era of the show generally missed the point.
“You’re not recreating a time in history, you’re working off of this incredibly meticulous vision which is inside Matt Weiner’s head, which is impossible to do,” Ms. Lippert said.
But after reviewing the new Turn spot, she said it was “clever,” not only in its execution but also in the buzz it is apt to create.
“The really smart thing that they’re doing is that they can milk it for publicity because it’s such a meta thing,” she said, referring to the fact that it is an advertisement about advertising on an advertising show.
Turn will be targeting specific types of consumers — in this case marketers — and measuring the response to the campaign, just as it does for clients. In a few weeks the company will issue a marketing study that, beyond how many viewed the ads, will measure how many queries from potential clients it spawned.
“Traffic and eyeballs in this day and age,” Mr. Alfieri said, is not as important as how many customers the ad delivers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/business/media/turn-which-helps-target-ads-will-run-its-own.html?scp=1&sq=A 'Mad men' Debut&st=Search
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