Digital’s Intimate Relationship Between the Brand and the Consumer. Interview with Turner’s Nick Johnson

As Nick Johnson, Turner’s SVP of Digital Ad Sales Strategy, Turner Ad Sales, launched into a career in advertising right out of college, he soon came to the conclusion that, he confessed, “Media was not the right place for me.” His lack of enthusiasm for agency buying led to a complete change in lifestyle – a move back to Asia where he spent his formative years. 

Leaving the agency in the early 1990s and moving to Japan, he joined a joint venture between Grey advertising and Daiko. “That in itself was fun, but what became my career epiphany ultimately was the launch of Netscape,” which gave Johnson a greater choice of English language content in real time in Japan. “I didn’t know what that would become, but I knew that I wanted to get involved in digital,” he concluded. And the rest is history as he was hired as one of the first digital account executives at CNN almost 20 years ago.

I sat down with Johnson and asked him the following questions:

Charlene Weisler: What are the major changes in the digital landscape since you first started?

Nick Johnson: When I first got into the business at CNN, digital was very nascent. It was a rigid advertising environment at that time with limited video inventory. In fact, when we started launching video, we built it as a subscription business, which I think slowed the growth of video overall as it was expensive to serve. As there were a lot of companies competing in the space, it wasn’t easy to turn on an ad server. There were five of them and you had to figure it out. 

Today you are dealing with high levels of addressability, massive distribution opportunities, video consumption and growth, and new platforms that are launching almost every day, many of which have high consumer options and levels of video as well as ad inventory. There are also layers of complexity to ultimately get the right ad to the right person. But I think we are at an important inflection time in the industry, where this non-traditional video consumption is happening very quickly and people are getting comfortable watching video in different environments.

And too, the advent of branded content, native and now this notion of building off channel distribution of both your video content and branded content is light years away from where we were 20 years ago. 

Weisler: What aspects of digital are evergreen and non-changing?

Johnson: Since the beginning, the consumer experience is very direct. You can either keystroke in a URL or discovery through search. But the relationship across time is a very lean forward one, involving active participation, hands on keyboard and mouse, as opposed to a passive one where you choose to watch a show and lean back. I think the relationship between the brand and a consumer digitally is very intimate.

Weisler: What do you think will be the next big digital incarnation?

Johnson: Active consumption of this content in these new distribution channels is big. The volume of content being consumed through OTT is huge – it is something that has gotten very big very quickly. We are spending a lot of time wrestling it to the ground and developing strategies to super serve our customers. Branded content is another initiative we are focused on. We are seeing a lot of interest in that today.

Weisler: Talk a bit about measurement - what metrics do you use?

Johnson: It is everything from leveraging our data solutions to identifying the best audiences. Standard measurement is important for validating who and how we reach consumers and whether we are delivering the right numbers. Platforms’ viewability. There are so many that address different parts of the value chain. We are focused on all of them.

Weisler: What is the prime focus for this year?

Johnson: A big focus for us is leading in the marketplace in terms of branded and native content. We have some great internal assets. For CNN, we have a brand studio called Courageous, which is winning awards and our engine for creating all of that branded content. And we have a social agency in-house called Launchpad, which we use to deliver that branded content both off and on channel with socially informed data. Getting organized around the wave of consumption that is happening around OTT is also priority. Attention on our social and mobile brands is another. Also, turning programmatic from a back office function to a consultative offering. 

Weisler: What is CNN digital's long term strategy?

Johnson: It’s very much about taking advantage of this brand that we have. We have had a big moment in the spotlight in the last eighteen months around the election and adding to that is the hard work that Jeff Zucker and his team have done building a great consumer destination. Our audience has gotten younger and is very engaged. Our goal is now to take advantage of all of this to grow and disrupt the business over the next five years. 

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Human By Design- A Conference on Augmentation

Courageous, a brand building studio providing cross platform native content for CNN, HLN and Great Big Story, hosted a conference this past week called Human By Design in conjunction with client Square Enix whose video game Deus Ex features human augmentation. “Mankind becomes divided between those who are augmented and improved with technology and others who are in an unadulterated state. Conflict ensues. These issues are bubbling up today,” stated Otto Bell, VP & Group Creative Director, Courageous. 

Expanding on the issues raised in the game, the Human By Design conference focused on a more detailed appraisal of augmentation - The moral questions behind it, the possibilities, pitfalls, legalities and current and future global and individual applications. What we have historically thought of as augmentation is shifting. With advancing technology, augmentation is more than what porn stars may do to enhance their appearance. Augmentation now includes all forms of technology and biogenics ranging from chips, medical devices, bionics and genetic modification, for example.

What is Augmentation?

Some define augmentation as improving what is already good and healthy in our bodies. "Wearing eyeglasses to improve your vision is reparative," explained Dr. Arthur Caplan, Director of Medical Ethics at NYU School of Medicine who added, "Augmentation adds capabilities to currently well-functioning areas like lasik surgery that improves ones eyesight to 20/10 - beyond the normal range."

But others disagree on that fine distinction. "Augmentation is catapulting us into a new era of humanity," exclaimed Erica Orange, EVP and COO Future Hunters, "It is giving us superhero powers, making us stronger, faster or gives us a pill to extend our lifespan. We have already been living augmented lives with prosthetics for example. And it has accelerated in recent years with programmable microbes and symbiosis."

Ethics of Augmentation

It is staggering to think about how augmentation can and will impact our lives … and how quickly it will happen. We are only limited by our imagination and we are currently experiencing an exponential rate of change that is outpacing our human understanding of it. According to Orange, "We now have modular biology- self defined, manufactured and unique - where we will be able to mix and match our own biology. There will be plant-able memories, restarting active memory, transplantation - organic and genetic transplants, synthetic DNA. We will see a head transplant in 2017, mind controlled skeletons, age reversal pills, virtual immortality. But there are privacy, ethical and moral implications,” she warned.

What are the moral implications of augmentation? One might argue that genetically modifying a person is against nature. But what if we are able to modify genes to prevent ALS or other deadly diseases? We find ways to extend life but just because we can, should we? Will we become a society of haves and have nots as the costs for augmentation may be too high for many deserving people. Will some of this augmentation be used for nefarious or malicious purposes? What happens when it gets into the wrong hands? There was a consensus that it was important to create a meaningful dialogue around these issues.

The issue of individual vs societal rights can become cloudy when it comes to augmentation. “In one sense we shouldn't abridge individual rights, but there are no truly individualistic decisions. Our decisions impact others as members of a community. It has social implications. However, there is not a lot of controversy in therapeutic aspects of augmentation,” posits E. Christian Brugger, Cardinal Stafford Professor of Christian Ethics at John Vianney Major Seminary. But in fact, even therapeutic aspects of augmentation have their controversies and detractors as in stem cell research.

Applications for Media

One of the highlights of the conference was the impact that media can have on the acceptance and adoption of augmentation for consumers. For example, gaming that includes characters with bionic features creates a “cool factor” for young people who may need prosthetics. Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, Executive Art Director for the game, Deus Ex creates prosthetics for his characters that look like art. These designs are then adapted for actual use at Open Bionics, a company that builds prosthetics, to manufacture actual prosthetics from these gaming designs. Cathrine Disney, a college student born with a congenital amputation, faced a lifetime of poorly designed prosthetics, like hooks, that were not only difficult to use but also unsightly. She is now the first woman to wear the bionic Titan arm which was created by Eidos-Montreal and Open Bionics. “It is like a piece of art and it is very easy to use. I like to show it off,” she explained.

I believe that augmentation may even offer a possible opportunity for the industry through the Internet of Things. Our cars and home appliances will be all connected, so why not some types of augmentation? Some may offer unique data streams can be captured and added to our growing knowledge of consumer behavior. How scary is that?

The conference, which was live streamed on the gaming community Twitch, will live on as added content for Courageous, if you are interested in learning more. As the opening video stated at the conference, “Augmentation is about looking to the future and it is not a question of should we or shouldn't we. It is coming.” Indeed.

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com

The Art of Being Courageous. An Interview with Otto Bell

Otto Bell began his media career in the WPP fellowship program which spanned three years in three different jobs in three different countries, giving him a borderless view of the media landscape. 

Now as VP and Group Creative Director, Courageous, his responsibility is to create and manage a brand building studio that is the pipeline for native content for all of Turner’s properties across all possible platforms. This enormous effort, with currently forty projects completed since its official launch in June 2015, is, according to Bell, “growing at a fierce pace.” 

Located in Union Square in lower Manhattan, the Courageous enterprise currently boasts twenty full time employees from all media sectors and disciplines in a 12,000 square foot studio “We have 4k cameras, drones and cranes to create beautiful branded content,” explains Bell, “and employees with editorial backgrounds, Emmy and Morrow winning journalists from companies like Mashable, VICE and CNN, video producers, documentarians, storytellers, web designers and developers, etc, all in-house. We are fully self-sufficient and never outsource.” Courageous has hit an inflection point, Bell reports, to air fourteen programs currently in production from around the world. “And,” he adds, “We are currently shooting aerial VR in Pennsylvania.” Their productions are designed to be format agnostic with the ability to reside comfortably across any platform and media type. The question becomes, Bell says, “what is the right channel for the content we create? We find the unexplored angle for an advertiser’s traditional media buy.”

As part of its branded content effort, Courageous is producing a one day event called Human By Design, on August 3, 2016 at the Paley Center for Media in conjunction with client Square Enix to support the release of their video game Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. “This video game is set thirty years into the future but these are present tense problems,” notes Bell. “There is human augmentation and mankind becomes divided between those who are augmented and improved with technology and others who are in an unadulterated state. Conflict ensues” and, he adds, “These issues are bubbling up today.” 

This event brings together leading minds to explore the current state of human augmentation, trying to answer the questions of how to police this brave new world, how technology is shaping the human condition and what does it mean to be human. The event is divided into three panels. Panel one is a discussion of whether augmentation is a human right. Panel two reviews selective versus therapeutic augmentation – that which corrects a disease like the insertion of a microchip for Parkinson’s disease or condition like being able to walk while paralyzed as compared to a technological augmentation for cosmetic purposes only. Panel three, titled, The Future of the Far Far Next, will delve into the future of human augmentation and how we will get there. One of the results of this conference will be to “publish a code of ethics, independent of the game and of CNN from this brain trust of luminaries” according to Bell.

For Jon Grant, Senior Manager, Product marketing for Square Enix, “Creating Human by Design in conjunction with CNN’s Courageous studio felt like the perfect fit for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Video games stretch the imagination, and lead people to think outside the box – a quality shared with those leading the bionics industry. This conference is a big step for everyone involved as we broaden the overall awareness of bionics for the science, sci-fi, and Deus Ex fans alike.”

As opposed to the uncertain, somewhat pessimistic future of humans vs technically augmented bots, the future for Courageous looks bright. “We approach branded content with a compass and not a map,” explains Bell, who adds, “and we will succeed as long as the work we do meets our clients’ objectives with surprising, additive ways with their audiences. We want to do more to add to the public conversation as well as the marketing objectives of the client. Branded content can be great content.”

This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com