Babycenter's Jasmine Kim on the challenge of technology
with
Don Schechter
Jasmine Kim of Babycenter talks about the need to create business models that work, and the potential for the new world of online advertising to access new communities --- if marketers are willing to take risks.
Transcript: Babycenter's Jasmine Kim on the challenge of technology
One of the biggest challenges facing our industry is that there are so many new technologies. Video has been around quite some time but video podcasting, etc. It s really how do you create a new business model and everybody is scrambling to figure out is this a new model that we should completely switch to, is it an addition to an existing model that we know, are these additive technologies, are these completely new technologies which the entire business might pivot to. So I think that for example at Babycenter, Babycenter's content and service offering is very much…. There are a lot of How-to's that moms need at this very critical time when they use Babycenter, so there is a lot of really great video content. At the same time we tested all kinds of monetization models and it hasn't really stuck. And yet producing video content is really resources intensive. So you do leave your steak and potatoes, which has been your digital content and them move onto video, or… How do you balance your existing business model with these new innovations and do it in such a way that makes profitable sense for the company as well as give the relevant content offering to the users.
The Millenials, who are now probably in their twenties, they are the first generation who were born online. So a huge chunk of our offering had been these wonderful remarkably written emails. I m not so sure in this 8 years generation that the woman, the men, the soon-to-be parents, will they even read email, will they even have an email account, I have no idea. Will they only take things in a complete RSS feed, will they expect everything on mobile? So those are the kind of questions we constantly ask and try to figure out.
Personally, I don t think that there will be a decline in digital spending and let me tell you why. People might look at the top 100 bellweather blue-chip companies, and they might be a little bit more risk adverse to spend investments in something that is still unknown or not absolutely quantifiable. But I also think that especially when you look at digital spending on search and really 1-to-1 marketing that now the likes of Yahoo and Google have perfected, I just think that there is a whole segment of the economy that is not the fortune 100 that are still going to make up a huge chunk of the economy so I think that s going to be very robust. 10 years ago people spoke about convergence, but I actually think that now It s finally here.
I think that we are branded niche publisher, very similar to in 1940 when there were 3 networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, I think now you have the AOLs and the Yahoos. There's a whole… not even a long tail, a whole level or segment of what I call very niche content publishers and so our biggest challenge will be because of our scale and our scope, how much of these new innovations can we do to still be competitive and to be in-line with the AOL s and the Yahoo s of the world and the Google s of the world, but still actually create a profitable model that keeps our business going, and still deliver very niche deep content and product service offerings to our users, and that would be my challenge, that is actually my challenge.
