In Search Of A Better Media Experience

iPhone-6s-display-635x400

The clients of each company include many of the most prestigious news brands in the media industry. One works with the likes of The New York Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC News, and NewsCorp, while the second represents prestige publishers like Time Inc., CBSi, Hearst, NBC, Meredith, Vice, and Vox Media. Each, in its own way, seeks to help their clients improve their sites’ reader/viewer experience.

Yet, the companies couldn’t be more different in their approach and focus. Online publishers hire the first company to deliver brand advertising that melds seamlessly onto mobile devices where their content increasingly resides. They retain the second to ensure that the socially-driven news and feature stories they publish are grounded in facts. One’s focused on advertising, the other on editorial.

In this, the last post stemming from my visit last week to Dublin for the Web Summit, I caught up with the CEOs of Kargo and Storyful to ask about the value they respectively offer their prestige media clients.

kargo_expanded

Harry Kargman is founder and CEO of Kargo, a New York-based ad tech company that describes itself as “the largest mobile marketplace for premium brand advertising” whose mission is to “create mobile experiences that empower publishers, elevate brands and engage consumers.” As the decade-old Kargo honed down its focus to but a single channel — the mobile device — its fortunes have skyrocketed, making it one of ad tech’s fastest-growing players with an enviable client roster of blue chip brand advertisers.

We talked about ad blockers, and whether the auto-playing, intrusive video ad will accelerate their growth — to the detriment of both ends of his client spectrum. We also touched on whether smaller mobile screens pose even bigger challenge for brand advertisers and ad-driven publishers.

 

“It comes down to the consumer experience, which has really been the lost element to all of this [mobile advertising].” – Harry Kargman

Screen Shot 2015-11-10 at 6.30.40 PM

Rahul Chopra is CEO of Storyful, a NewsCorp-owned company on which many quality news organizations rely to ensure the sanctity of their editorial output. In an age when digital images, video and story narratives can so easily and purposely be manipulated, Storyful was born to help publishers separate fact from fiction.

The company is a discoverer/aggregator/publisher of social media-driven “stories worth telling,” and an increasingly vital verification service that combines cutting-edge technology with seasoned digital journalists to help its news-producing clients ferret out social content of dubious origin.

 

“Effectively what we’ve built is a social newsroom in a box that can do a lot of the back-end work to help journalists tell better stories.” – Rahul Chopra

Better, more accurate stories. Better, less intrusive advertising. Sounds like digital media nirvana to me.