Hey, here's an idea! When pitching your women-oriented company to a panel of investors and experts, why don't you make fun of fat chicks in the process?
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)SAN FRANCISCO--Let's not kid ourselves. Nobody was expecting the audience at the TechCrunch 50 event to be full of women. That's just the reality of Silicon Valley, notorious for its boys-club culture (and plethora of complaints about how hard it is to find a girlfriend).
So it was undoubtedly a challenge for two of the start-ups pitching to TechCrunch50's all-male panel of industry insiders in Tuesday morning's "Subscription & Commerce Marketplaces" category. They were offering the first look at companies that are geared toward a demographic that's just about the opposite of the conference's audience: women, and not necessarily tech-savvy ones.
The pitches from the two companies, high-end invitation service Cocodot and personal-finance resource Learnvest, couldn't have been more different.
First up was Cocodot, which was founded by former MySpace exec Shawn Gold. At MySpace, which he left about two years ago, Gold served as senior vice president of marketing and content. Which means, basically, the guy knows how to pitch. Cocodot, he said, has a very fine-tuned demographic. "The target is women, who really create 90-plus percent of events," Gold said, showing off the service's slick interface. It's an event planning service that aims to make online invitations an acceptable route for high-end events. There's another start-up, Pingg, offering a similar angle, but Cocodot hopes to court brands, PR firms, and corporations as well as individuals throwing parties. And it hopes to particularly target weddings--for which online invitations are still pretty verboten.
Gold, well-dressed and energetic, was clearly aware that his target demographic wasn't going to be found in the room. He demonstrated the site by sending a Cocodot greeting card to his wife that depicted two overweight women with the caption of "Does this card make my ass look big?" (Um, classy) and added at the end as an appeal to those present, "If you give Cocodot to your wife or girlfriend, you will definitely get lucky."
I'm all for a little levity, especially when we've all been sitting in the same overheated room for a half-day listening to one presentation after another. But Gold's pitch was frankly insulting to both the women who he hopes will use the service, as well as to the predominantly male audience with its assumption that the only way they could possibly understand the aim of Cocodot would be to put a fratty, "Dude! Get laid!" spin on it. Which is too bad, because Cocodot looked pretty darn cool, and the judges agreed. One of them, Google's Bradley Horowitz, said, "I don't want to like this" but admitted that "I could easily see this taking off" among the Hallmark crowd.
The next presentation, though flawed, was a breath of fresh air in comparison.
The CEO of Learnvest, a petite twentysomething blonde named Alexa von Tobel, was one of only a few female CEOs pitching companies at the entire two-day event. Her company, an online personal-finance compendium, is "designed to fill the enormous, gaping hole" between financial self-help books and expensive financial planners for hire, she explained.
"Our core audience is women, an audience historically ignored and underserved in this topic," von Tobel said. Learnvest lets members build up profiles for personalized personal-finance advice, set goals, and earn points and badges in a game-style format by accomplishing goals, helping other members, and offering feedback to the company.
Von Tobel was clearly nervous as hell, especially when the reception from the judges was less positive than she may have expected. Several of them were skeptical of the game-like format, wondering if it could really be applied to something as private and serious as personal finance.
"I could easily see guys I know wanting to be a level-19 ninja," judge Bradley Horowitz said. "I don't know anyone who wants to be a seventh-degree debt removal expert."
Another judge, Digg founder Kevin Rose, concurred. "It's going to be really hard to get people to admit that they're in debt and put that on a profile."
They make a very good point. But von Tobel had done her homework, armed with statistics from Harvard Business School studies about the lack of personal-finance resources for young people, especially women, finishing college and entering the workforce under mounting tuition debt.
"It's not taught in schools, it's not taught in colleges, (and) there's really no good resource online," she said. The judges remained skeptical of Learnvest's game setup, but von Tobel's well-informed rebuttal earned a round of unsolicited audience applause.
(Which, in a sense, is really too bad, as though it meant the TechCrunch50 audience was surprised to hear a young, well-dressed blonde offer such a coherent response.)
Conference organizer Jason Calacanis--who is the CEO of Mahalo, a start-up that targets an audience that isn't necessarily tech-savvy either--seemed to be aware of the fact that maybe Learnvest needed some feedback from outside the all-male judge panel.
"We have a number of women in the audience," Calacanis said, standing up and turning around to poll them on whether they'd want to try Learnvest out. Of course, not many hands went up. But that's to be expected when the audience is easily 75 percent male: every woman I could see had her hand raised.
The lesson? If you're pitching a women-focused company to a roomful of Y chromosomes, insulting the target audience--however absent they may be--is still pretty darn tacky. At a start-up pitch conference, the presentations need to be smart, well-informed, and above all, any pitch that's reliant on marketing to a niche demographic has to show that it takes that demographic seriously.
And don't assume that the guys are going to be too dumb to understand the straight sell, either. There doesn't always have to be a get-laid angle. At least I'd like to think so.
Could an initial public offering be on the way for the highly ambitious Glam Media? The Valley-based advertising and media company has hired a new chief financial officer, Stephen E. Recht, who was the CFO of photo-printing site Shutterfly when it went public in 2006.
Recht replaces Ernie Cicogna, a co-founder of Glam. Cicogna will remain with the company as executive vice president of Glam Partners and general manager of the Glam Publisher Network.
"(Glam) has perfected a unique media business model and established itself as the leader in vertical content networks online," Recht said in a release. "I'm looking forward to the opportunity to contribute to the company's continued upward trajectory."
That could mean a few things: on one hand, an initial public offering, but on the other hand, Glam could have recruited him simply because it needs to make more money. With an advertising recession looming and talk of dot-com doom spreading all over the Web, Glam could just be getting down to business. For obvious reasons, a financial crisis isn't the greatest time to go public; Glam is also rumored to have gone through a round of layoffs earlier this fall.
That said, Glam (and its colorful CEO, Samir Arora) is known for its audacity. The company first made its name as an ad network on fashion and celebrity gossip sites, before branching out into everything from eco-living to African-American lifestyle to the luxury market. It's raised an astonishing amount of venture capital, has stocked its executive ranks with veterans of both print publishing and Silicon Valley, and was at the center of a rumored billion-dollar buyout offer.
Depending on whom you talked to, that buyout offer was either a fake rumor started internally to drum up Glam's market value or a savvy pre-IPO move. And that's the bipolar perception of Glam in both the tech and advertising sectors: some think it's the future of the industry, whereas skeptics see it as a big, drawn-out case of pride before a fall.
But now it looks as if there's one ex-Shutterfly executive who's betting on the former.
Glam Media, that digital-ad company that keeps expanding beyond its original base of celebrity gossip and fashion, has launched a new section: Glam Luxury, targeting high-end brand enthusiasts and the ad dollars that love them.
At launch, the headlining advertiser is (you guessed it), Swarovski, the jewel manufacturer that spawned a zillion awful iPhone cases.
So far, there are 35 participating sites geared toward affluent audiences that have agreed to be part of Glam Luxury and run its ads in exchange for some perks, like syndication in a Glam e-newsletter and access to a revenue-sharing video platform. Among the third-party sites are BlackBook.com, Travels in Taste, and Luxique, as well as existing Glam participants such as Apartment Therapy and Refinery 29.
It might seem a little bit silly, even tasteless, to be launching a luxury brand ad network in the face of a serious economic crisis, but Glam's stance is that Glam Luxury should actually help. Pinpointing audiences still willing to splurge on jewelry, handbags, and vacations, the company said, will be financially efficient and ultimately help profits.
"Glam Luxury is more relevant for luxury marketers than ever before," Joe Lagani, Glam's vice president of brand sales, said in a release. "The words, images, and thoughts that surround a luxury brand must reflect the current times, with a speed and adaptability the high-end marketer requires. Glam Media provides marketers with the right audience, environment, and reach, and enough flexibility to change with marketplace dynamics."
But perhaps in a sign of economic belt tightening, Glam hasn't hired a new "editor" for Glam Luxury, as it has with new content areas launched in the recent past. Instead, Glam Living's editorial director, Erika Lenkert, will oversee Glam Luxury as well.
Lemondrop, one of AOL's new sites. Do you miss making out, too?
(Credit: AOL)After letting them gestate in beta for a while, AOL has formally launched two new "lifestyle" sites: entertainment blog PopEater and quirky women's lifestyle title Lemondrop. They're the latest in a series of original blogs that AOL has rolled out, from men's site Asylum to Web meme blog Urlesque, adding to the titles it absorbed when it acquired the Weblogs Inc. network.
Lemondrop is cute, fluffier than Jezebel but a little bit edgier than anything you'd see in the squeaky-clean Sugar Inc. blog network. When I loaded it up, the top story was a rant called "I Miss Making Out," and further down was a gallery of sexy fictional murderers in conjunction with the recent news that the slasher flick American Psycho will be adapted into a stage musical.
As for PopEater, AOL already owns a phenomenally successful entertainment site, TMZ.com, so a new one may look a bit redundant. PopEater, however, looks like it's more Entertainment Weekly than Us Weekly, focused more on how the fall TV season's faring than which celebrity is staggering drunk out of which West Hollywood nigthclub.
But more importantly, both Lemondrop and PopEater are geared toward tasty advertising demographics: young-ish, media-savvy women with enough time on their hands to read entertainment blogs. Like all other AOL properties, their ads are served by the company's Platform-A technology.
AOL is pitching its sites as prime space for advertisers: traffic numbers for these "programming sites" hit an all-time high in August, according to ComScore.
Women's blog network Sugar Inc. has made a surprise move: it's giving users access to its platform so that they can create their own blogs. The San Francisco-based company made the announcement through a post on its tech blog, Geeksugar.
The new system, called OnSugar, promises a "sweet and simple" alternative to services like Google's Blogger and Six Apart's TypePad. Powered by the Drupal open-source platform, it will give bloggers free access to Sugar's tools for creating multiple kinds of posts: regular text posts as well as photo galleries, polls, quotations, videos, and the like (yes, this is a bit like Tumblr).
OnSugar bloggers can also take advantage of shopping widgets from the Sugar-owned ShopStyle, take a cut of the sales, and use images from Getty Images for free. They can also have Sugar import existing blogs on Blogger, WordPress, or TypePad into the OnSugar platform.
This is surprising, given the fact that the industry trend has been to create an ad network to pull in publishers, not a blogging platform. Sugar, which already has loads of user accounts through its social network, TeamSugar, will not be serving any ads yet but rather will let bloggers use the ad network of their choice. That includes the ad network of Glam Media, which is typically talked about as a Sugar competitor.
Glam Media, the female-oriented advertising and blog resource firm that has stirred both conversation and controversy in Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue, plans to announce on Thursday a "channel" for blogs geared toward African American audiences.
Called Glam Black Life, the new content area joins existing channels like fashion, beauty, entertainment, family, and the most recent addition, "wellness." Like the others, Glam Black Life serves ads on blogs that have been accepted into the network, and see their content featured on the Glam.com homepage and e-mail newsletter. And like other Glam niches, Black Life is headed by executives with backgrounds in traditional media: director Tamera Reynolds, a former executive at Honey magazine, and ad sales chief Asten Morgan Jr., a former sales executive at television network BET.
The debut advertiser for Glam Black Life is automaker Lexus, and a number of sites that cater to African American women have signed on as network members, among them Afrobella, YBF, and The Blay Report.
Glam remains a topic of contentious discussion in tech and advertising circles. It's partially a reaction to colorful and ambitious founding CEO Samir Arora, partially due to executives' insistence that they aren't running an "advertising" company, and partially because there still isn't full industry confidence in its business model--a professed old-media approach to content on the Web.
But it's undeniable that the company has seen an impressive trajectory over the past year: a steady stream of press releases have announced $85 million in venture funding, acquisitions, international expansion, and executives plucked from Google.
Glam Media has continued its international expansion, appointing former DoubleClick and Excite executive Yukihiro Yamamura as CEO of its Glam Japan division. Glam Japan hasn't actually launched yet, but is slated to go live later this year.
Yamamura had been head of DoubleClick Japan previously, and before that he had been CEO of Excite Japan since 1999.
"The appointment of Yukihiro Yamamura is a strategic addition to the Glam team as we continue to leverage the fragmentation of the Web globally," Glam CEO Samir Arora said in a release Monday. "With an accomplished background in online advertising and operations from DoubleClick and Excite Japan, Yamamura brings local expertise that will be invaluable as Glam Media expands its position as the leading vertical content network."
Flush with venture cash, Glam has been growing like crazy--hiring former Google sales executive Michael Adair as vice president of corporate development and finance, acquiring overseas properties to help fuel international growth, and launching new divisions.
Women's e-newsletter start-up DailyCandy seems like a better fit for Conde Nast than Comcast, but Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that the cable company has acquired it for $125 million. The blog wrote that Viacom had been in the running, too; a Viacom spokesman told CNET News.com on Tuesday evening that while the media conglomerate had been interested, it had never made a bid for DailyCandy and had dropped out in early June.
DailyCandy's demographic of trendy urban women is a niche that advertisers love, but it's still a higher price tag than many observers expected.
The company had already been acquired once, by former AOL exec Bob Pittman's Pilot Group investment firm. That was for about $3 million five years ago; DailyCandy now employs about 60 people and has published two books. It's the second e-newsletter that the Pilot Group has flipped this year, having sold the much younger "eco" publication Ideal Bite to Disney for around $15 million; the firm still owns a majority stake in slacker-dude list Thrillist.
Comcast has recently acquired Movies.com and contacts management company Plaxo.
This post was updated at 6:16 p.m. PT with comment from Viacom and 7:39 p.m. to clarify wording on the company's interest in DailyCandy.
One thing's for sure: Glam Media isn't letting that $85 million funding round sit around and ferment.
The latest of many announcements from the don't-call-it-an-ad-network media firm is that it has launched a "Wellness" division, opening up its ad services to sites in the health, fitness, and "green" niches.
With hippie food brand SoyJoy as a sponsor, Glam's Wellness channel has already ushered in about 20 sites that deal with "mind-body-spirit, empowerment, and a healthy planet," according to a release Monday. Among them are BeThree, Conscious Living TV, Ecofabulous, Low Impact Living, and Spaparazzi; two others, Natural Solutions magazine and Earth Pledge, will also contribute content to the Glam.com hub that the company runs.
Glam has been on a roll recently, with high-profile hires, acquisitions both domestic and international, and new advertising strategies that have left some thinking that it's the future of the ad industry and others wondering if it's just a big pink package of Valley hype.
But launching a health-and-living vertical, besides being the trendy thing to do, is part of Glam's planned expansion beyond strictly targeting women, something CEO Samir Arora alluded to in a talk at the EconAds conference earlier this summer.
Crunchy, Prius-driving yoga types are a fairly different demographic than the one most of Glam's current sections target: fans of celebrity news, fashion, beauty, and the like.
Next stop: Glam for dudes?
Glam Media has always insisted that it's not just an ad network, and an announcement the women's-focused media firm made Monday underscored that.
Glam has launched "Glam Today," a daily newsletter featuring a selection of content from the more than 500 sites in its network of independently run blogs that serve the company's ads.
"Glam Today surfaces and highlights some of the best content created daily by the professional publishers across the Glam network," Ryan Roslansky, Glam Media's vice president of products, said in a release Monday. "Glam Media's focus on packaging display advertising with relevant content extends is core to everything we do and extends to our premium e-mail products like Glam Today designed for publishers."
It's a five-day-a-week affair: Monday's newsletter will focus on fashion and shopping, Tuesday's on beauty, Wednesday's on "living," Thursday's on entertainment, and Friday's on health.
It's a bit surprising that Glam hasn't launched something like this before: for the parent company, it's another outlet for ads, and for sites in the Glam network, it's more exposure, as well as, perhaps, the cozy feeling that they're part of something more than a plain old ad network.
There are plenty of e-mail newsletters focusing on the women's market, though. DailyCandy has been around for years and is extremely popular, though it should be said that its newsletters focus primarily on women in select U.S. cities, and Sugar has a newsletter called (wait for it...) DailySugar.
Other popular online newsletters have primarily female readerships, like Vital Juice Daily and Ideal Bite (just acquired by Disney).
