AOL's Peter Rivera on Branding and Interactivity
with
Don Schechter
Peter Rivera talks about the importance of being able to distill a brand promise down into interactivity, keeping the user hooked, and his concern for flawless execution.
Transcript: AOL's Peter Rivera on Branding and Interactivity
I see the biggest challenges that are facing interactive marketers over the next year as really being where their audiences are. What s happening is that basically there is a big diaspora -- they re moving all around the web and they re finding content wherever it may be because there s just so many micro-niche publishers that are emerging and those are valuable customers. They are not necessarily going in the same numbers to one large place that we had all grown accustomed to -- "if you build it they will come" type of mentality. They re everywhere. So what we really need to do is make sure that we have the right platforms to be able to find those customers and be able to deliver the right advertising and marketing to them where they may be, and then pull them back into the brands overall. So it s like casting a line out and being able to actually bring them in-- teasing your content. That implies the second potential big issue which is how do you atomize your content. Many of these larger organizations have not yet mastered the idea of how do you distill your brand promise down into interactivity that could then be distributed out onto the web where that audience is in order to be able to reel them back in. So those I think are the most significant challenges and I think that that innovation has to happen fast. It s not an industry known for very quick movement but I think that behaviors are changing so quickly that companies need to be able to realize that and make sure that they are really staying ahead of the curve there.
The challenges facing our business over the next six months simply around engagement, increasing engagement. When we get a consumer into one of our experiences in AOL programming or within the AOL Network we want to make sure that people are being exposed to the breadth and depth of offerings that we have and to continually provide a what s next opportunity for them to continuously see more and more of what we have in our overall offering. Right now there are occasions where people will come in and we re not necessarily leveraging them across the network in the best way possible. That is exactly what we are focused on right now, is creating that value and increasing the amount of engagement. We measure that by pageviews, by how many pageviews are occurring on the site and that is just a key metric that we look at each and every month to make sure that we are actually trending in the right way. That is what I do as the Director of Experience across the AOL Programming Network, is to make sure that once we have someone in, that they are seeing content and experiences that they truly want to interact with and that we re maximizing the time that they spend with us. We hope that they are going to see things that will bring them back in again in the future.
I believe more firmly in interactions being the language of the web as opposed to messages per se. So I think it s definitely up to the agencies and the content partners to help large brands distill down the essence of what makes them syndicate-able around the web and to as I was mentioning before cast those lines of experience in and bring those people back to the experiences that they own.
What keeps me up at night is pretty simple actually. I think we have the right strategy, we have the right idea of what we need to be able to do. It s around flawless execution. Our standards are very very high and we have a lot to do, there s just no question about it. So making sure that throughout our programming offering we re doing the best that we can to make sure that these experiences are amazing, crossing our T s, dotting our I s, making sure that when people arrive they are seeing a whole new bar for what we have to offer. That literally is what I worry about each and every night, is making sure that as people come in they just see that, wow, there is something really amazing happening here in this work. I think flawless execution is the best answer to that question.
