Moving On (And Looking For New Opportunities)
February 27, 2012
Photo: Bernat Casero
After almost six years and a long, thought-out decision process, I’ve decided to leave Needium (i.e. Praized Media Inc.), the company I co-founded in 2006.
What a journey it has been!
- Creating our original concept and prototype in 2006
- Signing our first customers in 2007
- Raising our first venture capital money in 2007
- Executing our first pivot to enterprise products in 2008 (when the credit crisis struck the world)
- Constant product innovation between 2006 and 2012
- Executing our second (and successful!) pivot to Needium in 2010
- Seeing advertiser and revenue growth in 2011 and 2012!
After beta testing Needium in 2010, we brought in help to structure and scale operations/sales. We now have a dozen resellers (including very large media sales channels) and I feel I can leave in confidence that the company will continue to grow and prosper.
There are many people I’d like to thank for the incredible journey this has been for me:
- First and foremost, our customers, the people who pay for our products. We built Needium for them. They will be in good hand with the team in place.
- Our employees (past and present), especially the dev team (most of whom have been with the company since the beginning). Loyal and dedicated.
- Our investors, who have trusted us since 2007, through hell and high water.
- And finally, to Sylvain Carle, my co-founder (who is also announcing his resignation) and brother-in-arm. I will miss his daily presence dearly.
My last day will be Friday March 2nd 2012. After that, I will take a few weeks off but, as a next step in my career, I’m looking for international experience. I’d like to work in Europe or in the United States as a senior exec in a media/Internet company (large or small). I bring with me solid experience in product management, business development, Internet strategy, social media and management. You can see my LinkedIn profile here and you can reach me at sprovencher AT gmail.com. If you think I’d be a good addition to your team, don’t hesitate to contact me and we’ll discuss!
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Et maintenant, en français:
Passer à autre chose (et à la recherche de nouveaux défis)
Après presque six ans de travail et une longue réflexion, j’ai décidé de quitter Needium (i.e. Praized Media inc.), la compagnie que j’ai cofondé en 2006.
Quel beau voyage au cours des 6 dernières années!
- La création de notre concept et prototype original de Praized en 2006
- La signature de nos premiers clients en 2007
- La levée d’une première ronde de financement en 2007
- L’exécution de notre premier pivot vers le modèle “entreprise” en 2008 (lors de la crise mondiale du crédit)
- Le développement constant de produits innovateurs entre 2006 et 2012
- L’exécution de notre second pivot (un succès!) vers Needium en 2010
- La croissance du nombre d’annonceurs et des revenus publicitaires en 2011 et 2012!
Après les tests bêtas de Needium en 2010, nous avons amené du renfort pour nous aider à structurer et accélérer les opérations et les ventes. Nous avons désormais une douzaine de revendeurs (incluant des grands groupes médias) et j’ai le sentiment que je peux quitter avec confiance : la compagnie va continuer à croître et à prospérer après mon départ.
Je désire remercier plusieurs personnes qui ont fait partie de cette incroyable expérience:
- D’abord, nos clients, les gens qui paient pour nos produits. Nous avons bâti Needium pour eux et ils seront en bonnes mains avec l’équipe en place.
- Tous nos employés (présents et passés), et en particulier l’équipe technique. La plupart d’entre eux sont avec nous depuis le début, loyaux et dévoués.
- Nos investisseurs, qui nous ont fait confiance depuis 2007, à travers vents et marées
- Et finalement, Syvain Carle, mon cofondateur et frère d’armes (qui démissionne aussi). Sa présence quotidienne va me manquer.
Le vendredi 2 mars 2012 sera ma dernière journée. Après cela, je vais prendre quelques semaines de vacances. Pour la prochaine étape dans ma carrière professionnelle, je cherche une expérience à l’international. J’aimerais travailler en Europe ou aux États-Unis comme cadre supérieur dans une compagnie média/Internet (grande ou petite). J’amène avec moi une expérience solide en gestion de produits, développement des affaires, stratégie Internet, médias sociaux et gestion générale. Vous pouvez voir mon profil LinkedIn ici et vous pouvez me contacter à sprovencher arobas gmail.com. N’hésitez pas à m’écrire si vous croyez que je ferais un bon ajout à votre équipe!
comScore: The State of the Local Search Nation
December 13, 2011
On day 2 of the BIA/Kelsey ILM 2011 conference, Gillian Heltai, Senior Director at comScore presented a series of interesting data points to attendees:
- Total online searches grew 9% year-over-year to exceed 19.3 billion searches in September 2011
- 2.8 billion of those searches were “local” (a growth of 9% from last year). Local searches growth is decelerating
- IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) searches are down 20% year-over-year
- 1.7 billion click-thrus to directories and regional/local content sites were generated from search in sept 2011
- Top organic search terms by click-through rates: driving directions, white pages, yellow pages, maps, los angeles
- 10% of US display ads are locally targeted
- 3 of every 4 mobile subscribers own a device with GPS capability
- Over one third own a smartphone
- Mobile search usage grew 25% year-over-year with 26% penetration in September 2011
- Search is the top activity of mobile browser users. Social networking is second.
- 88 million mobile subscribers access local content on a mobile device, up 28% from a year ago.
- Nearly 40% of mobile users access local content on their device in September 2011, compared with 75% for smartphone owners
- 16.3 million smartphone owners scanned a QR code, 43% in a retail store, 42% from a product packaging.
Bob Pittman on Brand Building
December 13, 2011
Bob Pittman, CEO, Clear Channel Media Holdings (and MTV co-founder amongst other accomplishments) was the opening keynote speaker yesterday morning at the BIA/Kelsey ILM West conference in San Francisco.
In a search engine marketing world, where many people think brand advertising is dead, Pittman presented a compelling integrated marketing model (loosely based on the AIDA model) that shows brand building is key to generate sales. It goes as follow:
o Arouse a consumer’s interest in a product/service (through big reach and passion)
o Remind them of their interest until purchase (via reach and frequency)
o Allow them to research the product/service (via interactive apps with scale)
o Let them effortlessly find where to buy the product/service (dealer locators)
o Let them hear advertising messages when in the buying mindset
o Reinforce their purchase decision – retention
o Encourage and facilitate word of mouth – (via viral marketing and social media)
He also explained that brand is the thing that happens when consumers are predisposed to buying your product and have stopped comparison shopping. That’s also an interesting insight.
In San Francisco Next Week for the BIA/Kelsey Conference
December 9, 2011
Next week, I will be attending the BIA/Kelsey ILM West conference in San Francisco. As always, they’ve put together a great line-up of speakers. Here are the presentations/keynotes I’m most looking forward to:
Day 1: Monday, Dec. 12
- The opening keynote with Bob Pittman, CEO, Clear Channel Media Holdings. Always interested in hearing from radio station executives, curious about their Internet strategy.
- The interview with Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor at the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital. I want to know what she thinks of “local” and “local/social”. I am also curious about her point of views on local traditional media’s Internet strategy and execution.
- The unveiling of the “Wave XV” of the Local Commerce Monitor. Always a lot of exciting data points.
- The “New Wave of Local Lead Generation” panel
- The “Facebook Next: Leveraging the Platform for Local” panel
Day 2: Tuesday, Dec. 13
- The special comScore Research presentation on “The Data on Local Usage”
- The presentation from Court Cunningham (CEO at Yodle), on “The Top-Level View on Local Sales”
- The afternoon keynote with Matt Idema, Director of Monetization Product Marketing at Facebook
Day 3: Wednesday, Dec. 14
- The fireside chats on Local Media Transformation with Mok Oh, Chief Scientist, PayPal and Bo Fishback, CEO and Cofounder, Zaarly
- The last panel on The Future of SoLoMo
You can get a special $200 rebate if you signup with the discount code SEB
If you want to connect at the event (or in San Francisco), ping me at seb AT needium.com
As I get prepared for two exciting days at London’s sold-out Local Social Summit 2011 this week, BIA/Kelsey just released an early taste of their latest U.S. Local Media Annual Forecast.
Highlights:
- Total local advertising revenues for 2011 will be $135.9 billion, down from the $136.2 billion it forecast earlier this year
- Traditional media segments such as Yellow Pages and newspapers are experiencing the largest downward revisions
- U.S. local online/digital advertising revenues will rise to $23.3 billion in 2011, compared with $22.3 billion predicted earlier this year
- Local online/ digital advertising revenues will be 17.2 percent of total local advertising revenues in 2011, up from the earlier forecast of 16.4 percent. By 2015 that share will increase to 25.4 percent, up from the 24.7 percent originally predicted
- The overall local media market will grow slowly over the next five years, at a compound annual growth rate of 1.7 percent, reaching $149.4 billion by 2015
The rest/details of the forecast will be revealed at their next conference ILM West 2011, in downtown San Francisco, December 12 to 14. I will be attending the conference. BTW, I just reserved my hotel using Hotwire and I found a 4-star hotel within walking distance for $109/night. See you there!
Twitter and the Local Ecosystem
November 2, 2011
I recently shared with a potential Needium partner the volume of local tweets we’re indexing daily in major (and some smaller) North American cities.
US/Canada:
Atlanta, GA: 709,427
Austin, TX: 116,756
Calgary, AB: 60,603
Cary, NC: 153,315
Charlotte, NC: 171,001
Chicago, IL: 712,399
Cincinnati, OH: 110,975
Columbus, OH: 221,920
Commack, NY: 116,145
Creve Coeur, MO, 43,829
Denver, CO: 172,762
Des Moines, IA: 28,702
Fort Lauderdale, FL : 118,670
Indianapolis, IN: 224,871
Laguna Beach, CA: 58,186
Long Beach, CA: 113,404
Los Angeles, CA: 1,126,143
Miami, FL: 509,411
New York (Metro): 2,746,757
Ontario, CA: 59,705
Phoenix, AZ: 230,260
Redondo, CA: 66,490
San Bernardino, CA: 36,799
San Francisco, CA: 354,707
St. Louis, MO: 255,415
Tampa, FL: 125,341
Toronto, ON: 546,470
Vancouver, BC: 173,340
Washington DC: 551,126
West Palm Beach, FL: 31,665
Europe:
London, UK (Central): 60,128 (more than 1M tweets per day when you index the greater London metro area)
Paris, France: 346,197
Remember: these are tweets PER DAY per city. As you can see, those numbers are quite impressive and we’re just starting to scratch the surface in terms of implicit geo-location. We’re adding new geo-clues like neighborhood names, points of interest, foursquare check-ins, etc. to help us increase that volume. And we’re slowly getting to a point where our community managers know what’s going in specific cities and neighborhoods.
As I wrote earlier this year, “With more and more people joining the service, Twitter will discover that its real utility is at the local level. Twitter will become the often-wished for democratic and commercial local space we’ve been expecting since the beginning of the Web. Citizens/consumers, merchants, politicians, and news sources/journalists becoming an intrinsic part of the same communication and relational system.” That’s even truer today as more people are joining Twitter (100M montly active users at last count), people use it more (250M tweets a day) and they geo-localize themselves more.
And yesterday, I was happy to see that people are starting to notice. Read what smart VC Dev Khare wrote yesterday:
Dev is probably using crude tools (maybe Twitter Search?) to retrieve the info and he’s starting to see “local” value. Imagine when we’ll be able to surface that information in a much more substantial way!
The same day, Mark Suster (a VC who invested in Twitter) wrote “We Have Only Scratched the Surface of the True Value of Twitter. Here’s What You’re Missing“. He starts by explaining that there’s more to Twitter than “what am I eating for lunch?”. As my readers know, I wrote a whole presentation on “why you should care what @joepublic had for lunch” but that’s another story…
Mark goes on to talk about Identity, Object Communications, Predictive Data, and Augmented Data. A couple of quotes stood out for me:
“I believe that Twitter is becoming the most interesting and predictive dataset in the world and that every large company (and many small ones) will consume the Twitter stream in order to gain insights, determine actions to take and gain competitive advantage.”
“The future of data interpretations will be augmented. We will look at both the steam and the “meta stream.” We will want to augment with: location, demographics, affiliations, authority by subject area, gender, topical interests and a whole lot more.”
That’s it. That’s what makes Twitter such a powerful communication tool and even though, as the Wall Street Journal writes this morning “Web companies often upend industries but they can labor for years to fully make money on their revolutions”, social networking revenue is growing (eMarketer predicts this morning that “Worldwide social network ad revenues will surpass $8 billion in 2012 and approach $10 billion by 2013″) and will rocket past many online ad categories. As for Twitter, I believe they will find monetization success through local advertising. It’s too good an opportunity to pass.
