Take Back the Airwaves

No Authentic Stories, No Engagement

There were plenty of successful stories being shared at Netroots Nation – from fundraising to thousands of signatures getting secured for petitions.  One that quickly struck a chord with me was the story of 16-year old Karl Singer (@populista).  Karl talked about how he was able to raise over $65,000 for the Obama campaign in 2008 (when he was only 14 years old).  His formula for storytelling was short, but sweet.  Here are Karl Singer’s three steps for constructing your message:

1)     Tell the story of ‘self’.  In other words, tell your audience who you are and what your message is.  This gives viewers an introduction to both you and your mission.

2)     Tell the story of ‘us’.  By telling the story of ‘us’, you articulate ways this specific issue or mission affects the community.  This step demonstrates that you’re part of a community, which builds trust in the audience’s eyes.

3)     Tell the story of ‘how’.  By showing viewers how they can get involved makes your story more real and within reach.

Connecting and engaging with your audience involves building an authentic and meaningful story, and these three simple rules can help you do exactly that.

Democratization

These days, the words “internet” and “democratization” seem to complement each other very well.  However the words “advertising” and “democratization” are rarely seen together, especially at Netroots Nation.

On day 1, I presented some new friends at Netroots Nation with our LoudSauce concept to see whether those two words (advertising and democratization) would resonate.  Each person I spoke with reacted positively to a platform that enables people to come together as a group and purchase ad space for worthy causes.  What seemed to spark their interest was the bridge between social networks and mainstream advertising – a connection that is seldom talked about.

I suppose that’s a huge part of what Netroots Nation is all about – the constant drive to increase our capacity to communicate, whether it’s online or offline, and connect with each other in new, meaningful ways.

The Capacity to Communicate - New Methods and Resources

Our capacity to communicate has increased dramatically over the past few years.  However, the challenge to communicate effectively still remains.  Having access to quick and easy methods of communication hasn’t necessarily translated into effective, meaningful messages.  That’s partly why YouTube and C-SPAN hosted a panel entitled “make your own media”.  It’s amazing how many tools are available for organizations and individuals looking to increase their online marketing and advertising presence.  YouTube is offering its users innovative and cost-effective ways to integrate brand new audience engagement platforms for online advertisements.  For example, check out some of the cool new offerings by YouTube and CSPAN:

-YouChoose Toolkit: Federal and state candidates who want to leverage YouTube in their campaigns can apply to have their own YouTube Politician channel. This offering supports branding, longer videos, custom thumbnails, and includes the ability to track analytics.  You can also pay to add call-to-action overlays to videos, run their TV spots as in-stream ads in other YouTube videos and promote select videos as ads for search terms via promoted videos.

-CitizenTube: CitizenTube is a feed of the latest breaking news videos on YouTube.  The producers of this content are citizen journalists.

-CSPAN Video Library: They have an incredible library of free video dating back to 1987.  Check it out.  It’s a public service and, again, its absolutely free!

Hello LoudSauce community!

As Colin mentioned in his previous post, my name is Jay and I am happy to be the newest addition to the LoudSauce team.  It’s nice to be back at the Hub because I just got back from a non-stop and crazy weekend in Las Vegas for the Netroots Nation conference.  For those of you who are not familiar with Netroots Nation, here’s a summary of what it is (taken from the Netroots Nation website):

Netroots Nation amplifies progressive voices by providing an online and in-person campus for exchanging ideas and learning how to be more effective in using technology to influence the public debate. Through our annual convention and a series of regional salons held throughout the year, we strengthen our community, inspire action and serve as an incubator for ideas that challenge the status quo and ultimately affect change in the public sphere.

For each of the three days there were panels, speaker sessions, and networking events to attend.  The posts that will follow will highlight the main themes and key take-aways from each day.  Enjoy!

Welcome Jay, LoudSauce heads to Netroots Nation

Over the last few months, the LoudSauce team has been getting into the rhythm of daily life here in the Bay Area, connecting with friends from other social startups like the Extraordinaries, IndieGoGo, Blitz Bazaar and Kiva, and beginning early collaborations with folks at Adaptive Edge, Compostmodern, Designers Accord, Greenermind, SoCap, and the rest of the emerging community of the Hub Bay Area. 

Beyond the informal collaborative spirit that seems embedded into the culture here, it’s also great to officially bring on another member of the LoudSauce team this summer, Jay Majithia, who flew all the way from Singapore for his summer break at the leading global business school INSEAD (where I attended a few years ago). 

Jay comes to LoudSauce from a career that started doing media and technology advisory work PricewaterhouseCoopers, then took him to what many might call the global media capital of the world, Mumbai, to help a Sony subsidiary go digital with their content.  Along with some non-profit experience with Be the Cause, Jay decided to fly out to San Francisco to jump in at the ground level with the LoudSauce team. We’re happy to have him, and his primary focus for the summer is guiding us through Steve Blank and Eric Ries’s Lean Startup process for Customer Development.  It’s already made a huge difference in the way we’re thinking of our customers and will continue to help refine our model as we prepare to begin sharing the alpha version of our product later this year.

Netroots Nation + LoudSauce = Launch Campaigns?

More exciting, Jay is flying to Las Vegas tomorrow to participate with the good people of Netroots Nation, which has become the leading yearly conference of netizens working to transform the United States using media and technology in innovative ways.

While much of conversation may be focused on electoral politics, with so many great people and organizations looking for innovative ways to reach new audiences, we hope that some will want to use LoudSauce to help crowdfund the buying of advertising space for the most inspiring projects.

If you want to reach Jay, he’ll be responding via @loudsauce on twitter.

What We Learned from WeMedia & SXSW

It’s been a few weeks since returning from WeMedia and SXSW Interactive, both of which were great experiences and a fantastic way to welcome us back to the United States from London. 

Preparing for WeMedia & SXSW

Over the past few weeks, between conversations with people and agencies at the intersection of digital strategy and sustainability, the LoudSauce team team has been preparing for the WeMedia PitchIt Finals in Miami, and talking with potential partners and supporters of LoudSauce, a new social way to buy ad space for your favorite causes.

WeMedia is gonna be the best opportunity we’ve had so far to share our vision for LoudSauce, and receive feedback and coaching from experts in the areas of venture funding, social entrepreneurship and media. We’ll have some workshops with the judges and the other finalists, which should be collaborative and helpful for everyone, and then on Thursday morning we’ll each have 10 minutes to pitch our venture to what I hope will be a room full of media innovators, producers, funders and fans.

Crowdsourced Creative Partners

Over the last few weeks of preparation, a few key new learnings have emerged. First, I had a conversation with James Sheratt, the CEO of the crowdsourced creative service Adhack. Since I have always seen LoudSauce as a compliment and not a competitor to crowdsourced creative sites, I had researched sites like 99designs, Crowdspring, and Zoopa. We even experimented with 99designs to create the LoudSauce logo (which I got a lot of flack for from my designer friends).

After talking with James, he made a clear distinction between the contest driven services like 99designs, where everyone works and only one person gets paid, and Adhack which partners buyers and creatives for each job, paying designers along the way variable to their input along the path to a particular piece of creative. I think the Adhack model is more sustainable and will attract better talent, recent partnerships with major agencies like Crispin, Porter & Bogusky and DDB are a good sign. I’ll continue to talk with James about how LoudSauce and Adhack could partner on one of our campaigns in the coming months.

Gathering the Best Existing “Good” Ads

Secondly, I have discovered the amazing quantity of social TV and print ads already online at the Ads of the World archive. While it needs to have better filtering for ratings and issues, the public interest collection is the strongest I’ve found to date, and hopefully we can partner to offer Ads of the World users an opportunities to “Go Loud” once the LoudSauce service is up and running. I will be talking with someone from the AdCouncil later this week to see if they would be interested in leveraging the LoudSauce community to help extend the life of their ads, which they already get placed for free across the United States.

The Google TV Revolution Begins

Lastly, and perhaps most exciting, I spent some time digging into the new Google TV Ads service, which is already starting to revolutionize Television advertising. Not only does the service make targeted TV Advertising drastically more affordable for small businesses and nonprofits, but they also partnered with Spotmixer to make it easy and affordable ($150) to make a reasonably professional 30 second ad that can be submitted. It seems like some small and medium sized businesses have already taken advantage of the service, but (as usual) non profits and social groups have yet to jump on board.

One exception is the Hanley Center, which has an amazing success story about what their Google TV Ad has done to the success of their business. Hopefully LoudSauce can help social organizations start using the service. At LoudSauce, we believe that many non profits and social causes will be similarly surprised by the amazing support and credibility they will receive through traditional offline advertising. For all of the criticism that digital folks (myself included) have thrown at the old ad model, it still is a great way to reach a big audience to create awareness.

For all the power of our social networks, the reality is that most people in the United States still have never heard of innovative projects like Kiva and Green for All. Imagine if Green for All could edit a 30 second or 1 minute version of their great “New Sound” video, and we could put it on TV during March Madness through Google TV Ads. Understandably, Green 4 All’s current funders would not appreciate “wasting” money for TV advertising, but what if we chip in to help make it happen?

According to Google, in order to make a reasonable impact, we would need to run an ad for 4 weeks, and spend about $750 per week. That’s about $3,000, or only 150 people giving $20 each. What do you think? Would you help make it happen?

LoudSauce chosen as Changemakers WeMedia Finalist

We just found out that our social venture LoudSauce, a social way to buy ad space for your favorite causes, was selected as a finalist for Ashoka’s WeMedia Changemakers Pitchit competition, which means I will be pitching on March 9-11th in Miami for a chance at $25,000 to start the social enterprise.

A little less than a year ago, during another yearly beginning of reflection, I engaged in an excercise to find a new name for the social venture I had been discussing over the past few years.  In 48 hours, a group of professionals and amateurs alike suggested names for a “crowdfunded media buying service for social enterprises,” and the name that emerged as the winner based on NameThis.com’s algorithms, was LoudSauce (suggested by non other than a previous Nokia client and hip hop karaoke master Dan Goodall. The excitement of the interest from friends and supporters was contagious, and we ended up applying to a few venture competitions including TechStars and Ycombinator, and found a developer in the Bay Area who was interested in joining as a co-founder.  We were happily surprised to be invited by Paul Graham and the friendly Ycombinator team for a final round interview in April, which perfectly coincided with a trip back to the US from London for my 10 year Duke reunion.

After one of the most efficient 10 minutes of communication I’ve ever experienced, they handed us a check to cover our travel expenses, and later that night we eagerly awaited their decision.  While the discussion during the interview had focused on the model - we showed an early prototype and were asked what kinds of causes would attract the most funding - the email from Paul gave us the main reason they chose not to invest.  He said they liked us and they liked our idea, but they felt that LoudSauce would be “open to criticism on the grounds that you were encouraging people to spend money on advertising instead of giving it directly to charities.” He wrote that advertising is criticized heavily anyway, and that as a for profit, we could be accused of channeling dollars away from solving problems and into advertising for our own profit.

While we understood his point, we were frustrated because we hadn’t discussed that during the conversation.  The appropriate causes that will benefit from LoudSauce are not causes like disaster relief in Haiti, which are well publicized and well served (at least initially) by current funding channels.  The right causes for LoudSauce will be those that groups of friends or networks think are under-exposed for certain target audiences (like the Atheist bus campaign in London).  We’re essentially developing the tool to automate what groups like MoveOn and Repower American have been using with their users already, so that the rest of us active citizens can fund ad campaigns that we think are worth focusing attention and investment towards.  For too long, many conscious people have understandably criticized advertising as largely trying to get us to buy more plastic stuff that we don’t need.  In many cities, some graffiti and murals seem to do a better job at providing a positive vision for communities than billboards and television. However, now it’s time to leverage some of the talented designers and culture jammers of our generation, and put our money where are vision is.

Over the coming few weeks, I’ll be working on my 10 minute pitch for the WeMedia PitchIt session in Miami.  If you have ideas about how you think it can be the strongest, please do let me know.  Thanks so much for your attention and your support.

LoudSauce intro video

Below are two short videos introducing the founders of LoudSauce, a new social way for people to buy ads for their favorite causes. Christie George and Colin Mutchler are currently based in London, and Tao Ge is currently based in the Bay Area in California. 

[Update] This was done in April of 2009 for our finalist interview with the Y-Combinator team.