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Rashida Jones was worried that becoming active on Twitter might make her seem like she was “on caffeine and cocaine.” Meanwhile, CSI creator Anthony Zuicker definitely appeared to be—at least on lots of caffiene.

Jones, Zuicker and Tom Hanks (via satellite) were some of the boldface names turning up at Digitas’ fifth annual Newfront in New York. That show has become the centerpiece of a 10-day series of events dubbed the Digital Content Newfronts, which so far have featured upfrontish presentations from Hulu, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo. Unlike last year, none of the celebrity NewFront attendees outwardly begged for marketers to support their projects. Instead, this year the focus was on the quality of the content flowing online, and the confidence that Web video is poised to change the media business at large.

Here are some of the highlights:

• A charged up Zuiker presented a clip for Cybergedon, a computer-virus-gone-bad movie set to stream on Yahoo across the globe starting this September in 10-minute weekly chunks. The movie, tagged “This is the way the world ends … there is no esc,” is being sponsored by Norton Antivirus.

• Zuiker showed some slick images of his “diginovel,” an interactive full-length novel designed for tablets that combines elements of traditional books, graphic novels and touch screen games. He also gushed about Black Box TV, his new YouTube project featuring self-described “Hitchcockian” shorts. “I’m sick of the suits and the mularky,” he said of the pleasure of working outside the network TV world’s confines. “YouTube is an artist’s forum.”

• Speaking of YouTube, in spite of high-profile projects like Zuiker’s channel, YouTube isn’t aiming for mass hits. According to Jamie Byrne, YouTube’s global head of content strategy, the company is going for “mostly niche, small, underserved audiences.” For example, “we’re making a big bet on the Latino space,” Byrne said.

• While YouTube may not be swinging for the fences, Yahoo is. The company showed clips of the Tom Hanks collaboration Electric City, a 90-minute animated show which will be carved up into Webisodes on Yahoo later this year. “We’re looking for the first digital blockbuster,” said Yahoo video head Erin McPherson. “We’re looking for that Michael Bay or Jerry Bruckheimer of the Web."

• Regarding the criticism leveled at DCNF that a lack of digital ad scarcity makes them irrelevant, McPherson disagreed. “We’re not bound by time or space,” she said. “But scarcity is created by creating something big … a unique content experience.”

• One show featured at the event stood out for being unlike traditional TV. Rob Bennett, gm, executive producer, MSN, showed footage from Kid’s Kitchen, which incorporates video and gesture-driven functionality from Xbox Kinect. Kids watching the show can choose ingredients, and then virutally prepare dishes (like chopping tomatoes on screen using hand gestures) all while watching clips of celebrity chefs like Giada De Laurentiis prepping actual recipes.

• Bravo’s development head and on-air host Andy Cohen, along with Mashable founder Pete Cashmore and Vanity Fair senior writer Krista Smith, led an intervention, trying to persuade Rashida Jones (Parks and Recreation) to join Twitter. At first hesitant, for fear of her ego going wild or mean fan attacks, Jones eventually gave in. By the end of her session Jones had over 100 followers. "Oh snap, I just joined Twitter! Got convinced by my friends here at #NewFront,” Jones tweeted.

By 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jones had over 20,000 followers. Oh Snap is right.

Companies’ spend on online content marketing grew to nearly $16.6 billion last year, with video showing the strongest growth of all media measured. These stats come courtesy of a new study conducted by the Custom Content Council and ContentWise which was released this week. Survey trends…



Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Yahoo's packed-out Digital Content NewFront event included a plethora of new programming Wednesday afternoon, including a series from the creators of Broadway hit 'Rock of Ages' called 'Dancing With Myself.' The scripted show, set for 2013, will be a musical comedy featuring songs from the 1980's rock scene and is produced by RelativityREAL and 'Rock''s Matthew Weaver.
Wayne Powers, svp of North American ad sales, opened Yahoo's presentation with what might as well be the NewFront rallying cry: "Only Yahoo can deliver premium content experiences across screens and at scale." Ross Levinsohn, evp and head of global media for the Web giant, echoed that sentiment, asserting that "the conversation has changed from 'if' we should spend to 'how much?'"
Some of the new content was introduced with a series of comedy sketches including talent from the upcoming shows. For example, one sketche showcased some of the "trouble" Yahoo has had with creative types inhabiting its offices, such as
actress Judy Greer's predilection for living under one employee's desk.
Later in the presentation Levinsohn was subject to a "surprise" interview from Katie Couric. "A lot of people are getting into video," Couric fired at Levinsohn. "What makes you so special?"

"You weren't supposed to be this tough on me," Levinsohn laughed. "Can we check the script?"
Not everything went according to plan however. A jokey send up of "New York" by Jay-Z lost steam halfway through, and Violent Femmes singer Gordon Gano had to deal with some feedback as he performed "Blister in the Sun."
"I gotta say that might be the all-time world's record for not singing along to that song," Gano said wryly about halfway through. The audience responded with cheers (and singing), and Gano closed to loud applause.
"Who rolled one to that song?" Levinsohn asked after Gano left the stage. "This is being videotaped," Powers reminded him.
Levinsohn also indulged in what is fast becoming a digital video pitch mainstay: stealth YouTube bashing, roughly a week before YouTube's scheduled and much anticipated upfront event. "I enjoy watching cats on skateboards chasing laser pointers as much as anybody; we're shooting a little higher than that here," he said.
 

Vevo, like everybody else in the digital video space holding upfronts this week, wants those mythical, magical TV dollars. Unlike some other companies in the space, they might be able to make the best case of anybody.

During a slick upfront presentation (or Newfront, to be more precise), Vevo unveiled six news series, including a bizzare scripted comedy. But the company—a joint venture among Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Abu Dhabi Media—mainly spent its time on Tuesday touting its impressive reach and broadcast quality content, while rattling off an stunning set of statistics.

Vevo now reaches 250 million unique visitors globally each month, according to comScore. The music video hub expects to deliver 36 billion views this year. Execs claim that Vevo reaches a whopping 22 million 18-49 unique viewers a week, while Katy Perry videos alone deliver a TV-esque 3.2 million 18-49-year-olds in a given week. According to CEO Rio Caraeff, Vevo reaches one in four women on the Web, 9 million Hispanics and over 6 million African Americans.

“Vevo is the number one music platform on the Web, period,” he said. Or as famed record producer and X Factor host L.A. Reid put it, “Vevo has been more impactful that MTV ever was.”

There’s little doubt that Vevo is a staggering success. But it certainly helps matters that upon launch the site's content was installed as the default search result for music video queries on YouTube. Even today, it’s still an open question how much that relationship, which is said to be in jeopardy, is responsible for Vevo’s success—and whether the majority of music fans know Vevo’s brand yet.

But during the upfront soirée, the company took pains to emphasize Vevo’s growing ubiquity, with the underlying message being “we’re not just about YouTube.”

Indeed, Vevo is distributed on AOL, Yahoo, Xbox Live and some CBS properties. The company is also heavily integrated with Facebook, while amassing a significant mobile presence (mobile streams have increased by 1,000 percent over the past year).

“We don’t box our content in,” said David Kohl, Vevo’s evp, sales and customer operations.

Kohl rattled off some impressive stats of his own. Vevo has run campaigns for 700 advertisers since it launched in late 2009. Kohl claims its video ads—which account for just two to three minutes of Vevo’s hourly streaming time—boast a 90 percent completion rate. And unlike most YouTube ads, “our ads are not skippable,” he said.

Besides looking to diversify its distribution (and lessen its reliance on YouTube), Vevo wants to move beyond being the home of short video snacking. A recent redesign was aimed at getting users to stick around longer by surfacing more relevant content while users stream videos. Plus, Vevo is rolling out more long-form series.

On the docket for the coming year are Busk or Bust, a reality singing competition produced in conjunction with Shine, as well as Hear Me Out, a dating show where couples are paired based on musical tastes. Also in the works is the reality profile series You Play Like a Girl, which will showcase young female musical talent, and Sound + City, which will highlight the music scenes in cities like Nashville and Portland.

Lastly, and most memorably, Vevo executives unveiled Strange Island, a surreal scripted series produced by some of the talent behind the Nickelodeon preschooler hit Yo Gabba Gabba. Strange Island, described as Flight of the Concords meets Glee, will feature a group of wannabe music stars living on a bizarre island.

On Tuesday (Apr. 24) AOL looked to maximize the attention the Digital Content NewFronts—a string to TV-upfront-styled events—have been receiving over the past couple months. Case in point: the portal used its event to announce not just new content but also new properties including a cross-platform video hub, iPad and mobile apps and even a fantasy league.

AOL chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong didn’t make an appearance until late into Tuesday’s event, but when he did show up on stage it was to announce the AOL On Network, underscoring the video platform’s importance to the company’s strategy going forward. The product was born out of AOL’s acquisition of online video distribution company 5min Media in September 2010 and is overseen by former 5min cofounder Ran Harnevo who serves as svp of AOL On and manned the bulk of the network’s presentation.

The AOL On Network consists of 14 channels siloed into verticals such as News, Entertainment, Tech, Parenting and Travel. The network will stream videos across the Web on various non AOL sites, as well as through mobile and tablet sites and apps as well as  connected devices like Google TV and Yahoo Connected TV. Harnevo said during his presentation that AOL has partnered with 11 connected device manufacturers including Samsung, Sony, Roku and Boxee.

In addition to the distribution network, AOL has created an online hub AOL On, launching the site on Tuesday. The crux of the site is that it will comb through AOL’s library of more than 320,000 videos and curate “the most relevant,” as a company press release put it (echoing Yahoo's launch last fall of the video hub Yahoo Screen).

While some sort of programming would seem to be a basic function of any video distribution site’s home page, AOL will brings celebrities into the curation mix, with the likes of Heidi Klum, former Entourage star Adrian Grenier and fashion designer Rachel Roy culling and sharing playlists. As last year’s expensive acquisition of the Huffington Post proved, AOL is big on playing Internet tour guide. “The Internet needs to be programmed, and good programming comes down to incredible curation,” Armstrong said on stage.

AOL’s svp and head of sales strategy, marketing and partnerships Janet Balis told Adweek that brands, or talent acting on behalf of a brand, will be able to curate content on the network. As far as traditional advertising goes, brands and their agencies will be able to buy inventory on the network by channel or by audience (as identified by first-party and third-party data providers), and Balis said those buys will span all of the network’s distribution platforms.

Not that Armstrong turning away from content. AOL showed off a slate of new original video series from the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Sex and the City producer Amy Harris, Marie Claire editor and Project Runway judge Nina Garcia and partnership with Michael Eisner’s studio Vuguru. The company will also air a talk series starring Twitter cofounder Biz Stone interviewing high-profile names like President Barack Obama. And keeping with curated approach, AOL has developed “New Hollywood Films,” which was developed by Emmy-nominated producer Christine Vachon and will feature digital short films directed by young celebrities such as Elizabeth Olsen (sister of Ashley and Mary-Kate) and Kevin Jonas of the Jonas Brothers.

The AOL On Network—and the content it’ll feature—was hands down Tuesday’s big news for the New York-based digital media company, but Armstrong and co. had a few other things up their sleeves. Balis teased ur + 1, a social gaming platform disguised as a fantasy sports league. When the product goes live during next year’s awards season, users will be able to create rosters of celebrities and gain points based on the level of coverage the celebs receive from AOL’s properties. Users will need to refresh their teams every seven days, but will have strong incentive to do so. Prizes will include events as an AOL Music Sessions performance in a fan's backyard.

But AOL left it to Arianna Huffington herself to show off its new mobile apps. Not surprisingly she started with the iPad app “Huffington.” (the period is included). Huffington Post executive editor Tim O’Brien will spearhead the tablet magazine, which will  aggregate content from HuffPo’s 66 sections that publish 1,500 stories per day—all in a format designed to capitalize on the iPad’s lean-back experience. “It’s the difference between a one-night stand and a long getaway,” said Huffington in comparing the content sites and the app. Balis added that AOL will be working on a custom basis with brands to create ads for the app and that those discussions are in their early stages.

“We’re looking at very creative ad insertions that will be throughout the magazine. It starts with as simple as a fully glossy, what we might call a digital full-page, all the way through fully interactive applications with 360-degree views of products and information,” Balis said.

Huffington also mentioned the Huffington Post Streaming Network which is scheduled in June but didn’t offer any new details before the president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group started in on the division’s new mobile app. That product, dubbed, GPS for the Soul, goes live in two months. It will read users’ heart rates, blood pressure and breathing rate, and then will prescribe measures users can take to reduce stress, such as playing music, displaying family pictures or leading breathing exercises.

Finally Huffington talked about dedicated sections that will be scaled up so more brands can use it to upload content related to causes with which they want to be identified. As an example, she pointed Global Motherhood, a section launched earlier this year with Johnson & Johnson focusing on pregnancy and childbirth.

Here’s a rundown of AOL's new original series:
- “Digital Justice” —A five-episode, real-life CSI running on the AOL On Tech channel and HuffPost Crime hosted by U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Terry Schappert, who looks at the technology used by various crime prevention units

- “Tiger Beat Entertainment” — An Access Hollywood for teens launching on AOL’s teen site Cambio.com this summer and is executive produced by Jennifer Lopez

- “Next Door Hero” — Reality series set to premiere this summer on AOL.com, AOL On and HuffPo, Hero will spotlight average Joes and Janes who’ve done things like save a school bus full of children (true story, not a cliché)

- “Little Women Big Cars” — Ensemble comedy from Vuguru premieres May 7 on the AOL On Parenting channel with a cast that includes Amy Yasbeck, Ed Begley Jr. and Antonio Sabato Jr.

- “Fetching” — Vuguru-developed dramedy about a dog-loving woman written by Sex and the City producer Amy Harris that will premiere June 18 on the AOL On Relationships channel

- AOL is also developing a fashion-and-lifestyle makeover series with Marie Claire editor and Project Runway judge Nina Garcia; the series will run on the AOL On Style channel as well as Styleist, HuffPost Style and HuffPost Women. No premiere date has been set

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — drunk on power and app-pacified to the max, a pathetic unanimity in search of an argument, a raised eyebrow less than a real opinion… You get the idea; Keith Teare’s stellar Techcrunch post of last Sunday on Google’s earning call click problem seemed like a great place to continue a comment argument with @kevinmarks.

But lo and behold, it’s not Web or Apps but both. HTML5 may turn out to be the least relevant part of this refactoring of the world around mobile. Hindsight or HipSwitch or Turncoat, the names don’t matter but the services do. Some people (like me) will do anything to avoid searching for an answer, and apps are just what I am looking for: touch and tap services orchestrated via push notification and intelligent predictive caching. Or not.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek, @kteare

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Yesterday at New York Tech Day we met with quite a few great companies including Digital Ocean. These guys are pretty established in the cloud space. They offer OS agnostic cloud servers and are giving away some service space for free to NYTD participants and their minimum package is $5 a month. Pretty basic stuff.

But what they wouldn’t do for a TC mention! One of their employees, Mitch, explained that he was the in-office push-up master so we asked him to do 100 push-ups while we interviewed someone else from the team. Two minutes later and Mitch was done, the pitch was complete, and we all realized that we should all be doing pushups instead of startups if we want to look as beefy as Mitch.

Thanks, incidentally, Mitch, for being such a good sport.

It’s not often that you look at a Twitter stream and think, “This is really Pulitzer material.” But if you happen to be looking at the Twitter accounts of the Tuscaloosa News and its reporting staff, that would actually be the case.

This week, Western Alabama’s Tuscaloosa News was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting based on its coverage of the massive tornado outbreak that hit the region in late April 2011. The paper extensively covered the storm and its aftermath in its print and online versions, but that wasn’t all — its staff also used Twitter to report the latest on-the-ground details about the tornado, its damages, and rescue and cleanup efforts. And for the first time, the Pulitzer committee this year took tweets and other social media updates when awarding the breaking news prize.

Timing is everything when it comes to reporting, and in this case that was especially true. Just a few weeks before the storm hit, two young Tuscaloosa News staffers — web editor Brian Reynolds and reporter Wayne Grayson — had held a social media training class to encourage their coworkers to use things like Twitter. Not all of their colleagues were on board at the time, but once the tornado touched down the value of real-time social media became apparent to even the most skeptical Tuscaloosa News reporters — and fortunately, because of their recent training session they knew how to use it. So TechCrunch TV was happy to have the chance to talk to Reynolds and Grayson via Skype this week to learn more about their experience.

Watch the interview embedded above to hear about how some of Tuscaloosa’s old-school reporters first reacted to the idea of Twitter, what it was like covering the tornado and the devastation it left behind, how the Tuscaloosa News staff reacted after winning a prize that typically goes to the New York Times’ and Washington Posts of the world, and Reynolds’ and Grayson’s advice for encouraging others to adopt new social media tools.

Is Nielsen’s online measurement service ready for prime time? AOL thinks so—and is guaranteeing against Nielsen’s new Online Campaign Ratings.

While Nielsen’s gross ratings points are used as currency ­by the entire television industry, its online GRPs are generated in a very different way and then parsed so that they are, in the words of Nielsen’s Steve Hasker, “exactly comparable to TV.” That’s a claim that will be tested in coming months, as Nielsen and AOL push the new model to advertisers still casting about for a convincing measurement metric.

The tinkering will likely continue for agencies. A rep for GroupM, which is working with Nielsen on this project and another focused on multiscreen measurement, said, “There is still some work to be done before we adopt this as a standard for video buying.”

Both Nielsen and AOL are pushing toward a more TV-like ad model in order to gin up interest among television ad buyers, who the companies hope can be convinced to repurpose some of their mammoth TV budgets and spend on digital. “Television has continued to grow,” said Jason Krebs, chief media officer at rival Tremor Video. “Would it have grown more if there hadn’t been that increase in digital? Who knows?”

Soon, though, a lot of people will. 

Context is everything. Some mobile habits overlap, but there are significant differences in how consumers use their tablets and smartphones which marketers need to understand to effectively use the devices. Like portable personal assistants, smartphones accompany us everywhere. They tend to be used primarily for task-related activities, like sending email, going online and sending text messages, so text message and shorter ads have been successful in this environment. Tablets, meanwhile, are most likely to be taken out at home and used for long-term media consumption, so users may be more tolerant of longer ads as long as they don't get in the way of their media experience.

Infographic: Carlos Monteiro