Showing Posts From Media
Virtual Influencers - From Cartoons to Deep Fakes
Studio71 Germany has recently launched not one but two virtual influencers and they’ve done a great job with the implementation and marketing around this project (disclosure: I am the global CTO of Studio71). I’ve been thinking about it a lot and on the one hand this idea of a “fake” or “virtual” influencers comes and goes over the years and every time it comes back we all like to pretend that it’s a crazy idea.
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Hacking the STLToday Paywall v2022
Here we are again. STLToday, the website for my hometown newspaper the St. Louis Post Dispatch, has updated their paywall and, as is tradition, it’s time to take a look, see what they did, and offer suggestions so they can make it better. In short, let’s hack the STLToday paywall.
Read morePaywalls are OK, but Dumb Paywalls Aren’t
I have hacked the paywall of my hometown newspaper’s website, STLToday.com, two or three times now. The first time came with more fanfare than I expected and the subsequent times have been more quiet, but each time I get some version of this pushback: Look, I understand this point of view.
Read moreA Mention in Variety
I’m late on this on the blog, but after a few years of working in entertainment and two years of living in Los Angeles, I got my first name drop in Variety. A few weeks ago, we were talking internally about the entanglement of buyers and sellers and products and platforms, when someone wondered aloud about how many different ways there are to sell branded content in the market.
Read moreTechcrunch Gives the Finger to Journalism and Kicks Newborn Puppy While Slapping Your Mom
In the latest segment in the endlessly long syndicated program entitled “Every Thing is On Fire at Journalism’s House” we have Techcrunch writing an article about the new but only Wednesday mid-day level news of Amazon Web Services launching the DocumentDB service. I’ll let you guess what the title of this article, written by Federic Lardinois, is running in a (formally) respected tech news source.
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Context Powers Brand Safety at Studio71
Have you heard about the brand safety concerns on YouTube? Maybe you’ve heard it described as the “Adpocalypse”? Even if you haven’t caught wind of the madness over the last 12 months, surely you understand that anything mixed with “apocalypse” isn’t a good thing. As is common in “whatever-pocalypse” situations there was a fair bit of freak out, but Studio71 went to work!
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Speaking at the Variety Big Data Summit
My career in technology has taken me to some interesting places over the last 10+ years: St. Louis (less interesting), Mountain View, Jerusalem, New York, San Francisco, and Beverly Hills, but this last trip to Beverly Hills was the first time I got to speak at a Hollywood event. I recently had the opportunity to be on a panel at the Variety Big Data Summit, and it was…well, I’m pretty sure I’m officially a fancy media executive now.
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A Follow Up on the STLToday Paywall Story
Yesterday’s post about how to bypass the weak STLToday.com paywall has gained a fair bit of traction over the last 24 hours. Here’s the story on the Riverfront Times (the alt newspaper in St. Louis). Before this gets further out of hand I wanted to address a few points that I didn’t hit in my original blog post and weren’t in the RFT article:
Read moreSTLToday’s Paywall is Weak
I’m originally from St. Louis, and in fact spent my last few years in St. Louis working with and taking on the media in one form or another. I’ve since moved on and no longer concern myself with the day to day craziness of St. Louis’ bizarre media scene…but I do like to check up on the sports.
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