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Berens: Speaking of concrete…

Coffin: Yes.

Berens: You have a rosy vision of the future in 2006. Transparency is the biggest challenge. Just on the day to day level, what are the things that you could say to the world? "Here are the things that we are working on;" or, "here are our biggest concerns;" or, "If you approach us in this way, you will get more results. You can optimize your engagement with an ad network." What are the biggest day-to-day challenges of your job?

Coffin: Well, I mean, the biggest challenge, Brad, is that still the preponderance of ad dollars go to a handful of websites at the top of the Internet food chain, right?

Berens: Sure.

Coffin: And, that is broken. The biggest challenge for my clients, the publishers I represent, and for countless publishers out there is growing the sense of believability about all of this new stuff. I think that we geared ourselves up for it a long time ago.

If you look at the history of media -- and I don't care whether it is cable television, or FM radio, or one of my touchstones, as I have often explained to people, USA Today. The Wall Street Journal introduced four-color into its newspaper twenty years, practically to the day, after USA Today broke that four-color barrier in the newspaper category. That is how long it takes.

Berens: Sure.

Coffin: The change, the evolution is generational. And, by that timeline, we are halfway into what amounts to the start-up period of the internet economy. So, our challenge is to keep that value proposition of being able to reach people -- the right person, in the right place, at the right time -- front and center, and not allow ourselves as a company, or as an industry, or certainly as a network category, to be distracted by short-term value added benefits like pop-ups.

Pop-ups emerged as something interesting that sold a lot of ads for a couple of years until it became destructive. The same can be said of all the other ancillary advertising sales solutions and gimmicks, if you will, that have taken the place of, or been substituted in the short-term for, what is essentially the value proposition of the marketplace. And, that is the chance to reach people, again, when they are most predisposed to what you are trying to say to them, and eliminate media waste. 

All of that value is caught up with believing that your messages should be on thousands of media outlets, not six. And, if you step back and you look at the internet space, and you are admiring of the fact that you are going to be on the major portals and half a dozen other websites, and if this is what represents your internet plan, then you have failed to grasp the long-term benefit of this marketplace.

Certainly, you have failed to align yourself with what consumers have understood since the beginning of the internet space -- what was in it for them -- which is the chance to eliminate waste in their media lives.  When what they want to understand is lactose intolerance in children because they have got one, they can go online and they can get that data, and there are probably dozens of blogs where they can share stories. And, if you are trying to reach that community, do it there. Not one place….all of them, if you can afford it. So, believability continues to be the biggest obstacle to success online. But that is not just us. That is everybody.

Berens: Sure.

Coffin: Do you want to start really siphoning off TV dollars? That is what we have to come to terms with. We have to be able to think in terms of tens of thousands of media platforms, not two and a half dozen, because the scale of that will never matter enough, you know, if we think of internet media the way we have thought of TV media. The scale of that will never matter over the long-term.

Berens: And, the other thing is that we have -- in terms of scale -- more channels than are conceivable right now with cable TV, it is still utterly dwarfed by the amount of websites that are out there.

Coffin: It is utterly dwarfed. If you are like every other consumer, if you are like me when I sit down in my family room at the end of a long day and start surfing through cable television, what confronts me every time that I am doing that is, "why am I paying for all of this? I use three of these channels." Here is a station that I have never been to and am never going to. And yet, it is being fed to me through this tube. 

The internet solves that problem for me. I understood that in 1995, along with everybody else. "Oh, I get it." In other words, "I can be in control here -- of when, and how, I consume the information I am looking for."

Berens: This is the promise land of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV)

Coffin: That is it. And -- back to your other question -- I absolutely sign up to the fact that there are smart people out there who are pushing this through other devices, that can be mobile, creating an even more convenient and timely platform for consumers to be able to act as their own editors and cobble together their own networks.

Well, I mean, the biggest challenge, Brad, is that still the preponderance of ad dollars go to a handful of websites at the top of the Internet food chain, right?

Berens: Sure.

Coffin: And, that is broken. The biggest challenge for my clients, the publishers I represent, and for countless publishers out there is growing the sense of believability about all of this new stuff. I think that we geared ourselves up for it a long time ago.

If you look at the history of media -- and I don't care whether it is cable television, or FM radio, or one of my touchstones, as I have often explained to people, USA Today. The Wall Street Journal introduced four-color into its newspaper twenty years, practically to the day, after USA Today broke that four-color barrier in the newspaper category. That is how long it takes.

Berens: Sure.

Coffin: The change, the evolution is generational. And, by that timeline, we are halfway into what amounts to the start-up period of the internet economy. So, our challenge is to keep that value proposition of being able to reach people -- the right person, in the right place, at the right time -- front and center, and not allow ourselves as a company, or as an industry, or certainly as a network category, to be distracted by short-term value added benefits like pop-ups.

Pop-ups emerged as something interesting that sold a lot of ads for a couple of years until it became destructive. The same can be said of all the other ancillary advertising sales solutions and gimmicks, if you will, that have taken the place of, or been substituted in the short-term for, what is essentially the value proposition of the marketplace. And, that is the chance to reach people, again, when they are most predisposed to what you are trying to say to them, and eliminate media waste. 

All of that value is caught up with believing that your messages should be on thousands of media outlets, not six. And, if you step back and you look at the internet space, and you are admiring of the fact that you are going to be on the major portals and half a dozen other websites, and if this is what represents your internet plan, then you have failed to grasp the long-term benefit of this marketplace.

Certainly, you have failed to align yourself with what consumers have understood since the beginning of the internet space -- what was in it for them -- which is the chance to eliminate waste in their media lives.  When what they want to understand is lactose intolerance in children because they have got one, they can go online and they can get that data, and there are probably dozens of blogs where they can share stories. And, if you are trying to reach that community, do it there. Not one place….all of them, if you can afford it. So, believability continues to be the biggest obstacle to success online. But that is not just us. That is everybody.

Berens: Sure.

Coffin: Do you want to start really siphoning off TV dollars? That is what we have to come to terms with. We have to be able to think in terms of tens of thousands of media platforms, not two and a half dozen, because the scale of that will never matter enough, you know, if we think of internet media the way we have thought of TV media. The scale of that will never matter over the long-term.

Berens: And, the other thing is that we have -- in terms of scale -- more channels than are conceivable right now with cable TV, it is still utterly dwarfed by the amount of websites that are out there.

Coffin: It is utterly dwarfed. If you are like every other consumer, if you are like me when I sit down in my family room at the end of a long day and start surfing through cable television, what confronts me every time that I am doing that is, "why am I paying for all of this? I use three of these channels." Here is a station that I have never been to and am never going to. And yet, it is being fed to me through this tube. 

The internet solves that problem for me. I understood that in 1995, along with everybody else. "Oh, I get it." In other words, "I can be in control here -- of when, and how, I consume the information I am looking for."

Berens: This is the promise land of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV)

Coffin: That is it. And -- back to your other question -- I absolutely sign up to the fact that there are smart people out there who are pushing this through other devices, that can be mobile, creating an even more convenient and timely platform for consumers to be able to act as their own editors and cobble together their own networks.

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