Category Archives: Learfield

“New App Lets Banner Ads Listen, Remember, Respond”

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In the late 90’s I played a small part in our company’s early efforts to get on “the information highway.” We went all-in on an idea called AdActive. Proving, once again, that nothing ever dies on the Internet, I found the following on ClickZ. (1998)

Straylight in Seattle launched AdActive, a software product that allows existing banner ads to provide advertisers information on end-user brand perceptions, letting marketers target future messages based on individual responses.

Designed to support one-to-one relationships between customers and companies, AdActive works with a Web site’s existing ad delivery system or network to extend the traditional banner ad, the privately held company said.

Users are offered a number of options to tell advertisers what they think of the product or brand being presented without being taken away from the content they are viewing. AdActive then records the response so that it can be aggregated to provide detailed brand/product perception reports and used to more effectively target future ads.

“AdActive allows Web sites to realize new revenue by giving advertisers the ability to interact directly with consumers,” said Allen Hammock, technical director for Straylight’s AdActive Product Group. “Advertisers will also be able to look at what people think about their brand and products while giving Web surfers the ability to actively shape their online ad experience without registering or giving up their online anonymity.”

AdActive features a response bar, a small footprint Java applet, allows an individual to pass along positive or negative responses to an ad, contact an advertiser directly or even cancel an ad from being shown again.

The app gives advertisers the ability to respond to individual consumer brand perceptions with new advertisements or to refocus their efforts on consumers who chose not to respond at all.

AdActive is designed to work with NetGravity’s industry-standard ad delivery system, AdServer. The software is priced in a tiered structure based on a site’s traffic and computing resources.

Newsletters

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I try not to long for “the way things used to be,” but it’s difficult. Newsletters, for example. In the late 80’s we sent a monthly newsletter to affiliated radio stations. One page, front and back. Typed, photocopied and mailed (took 4 days to reach some stations). Because the space was limited, one gave thought to what to put in and what to omit.

Facebook and Twitter accounts replaced newsletters long ago. That’s not right. Email replaced printed newsletters. So little thought goes into what we “share” these days, why bother?

O. Kay Henderson on Meet the Press

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Friend and former coworker O. Kay Henderson was on the Meet the Press panel this morning. Kay is the news director of Radio Iowa, a state radio network I helped create back in the late 80s. Kay’s first job out of college was reporting for the network. A few years later I had the good sense and good fortune to promote her to News Director. Nobody knows more about Iowa politics than Kay. [watch on YouTube]

O. Kay Henderson: On the campaign trail. Again.

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Tonight’s PBS Newshour featured a segment that included an interview with my friend and former co-worker, O. Kay Henderson. I’ve known Kay for 32 years and — coincidently — she’s mentioned in 32 posts on this blog. I think I can safely say there is no one alive today that knows more about politics in Iowa than Ms. Henderson. It’s the only job she’s every had. She started covering politics while she was in college and came to work for Radio Iowa when she graduated and has been doing it ever since. [watch on YouTube]

Learfield, IMG College finalize merger

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“The merger of Learfield and IMG College is complete. […] Combined, Learfield-IMG College owns the multimedia rights to 55 of 65 schools in the Power 5 conferences and more than 200 schools in all, giving one company an unprecedented bundle of rights to sell in the college space. […] The merged company is believed to be valued at more than $2 billion.”

— Dallas Business Journal

I left a note on your desk

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Found this note among my few remaining paper files. Always feels a bit strange to find a piece of typescript even though I used a typewriter for 20 years. I wonder how this bit of history would be preserved today. The note would almost certainly be digital. A text message (IM) or an email. No reason for anyone to print it so if they kept it at all it would be one of thousands (millions?), lost in a cloud. One might argue it will have a longer digital life but something is lost. [Bob Priddy remembers Mary Phelan]

Tom Boman, VP Operations, Learfield Sports

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Tom Boman is Vice President of Broadcast Operations for Learfield Sports. He and the people that work with him are responsible for all of the game broadcasts and coaches shows for many of the top colleges and universities in country. He’ll be overseeing broadcasts for 130 schools this fall.

Based on my 40 years in and around radio, I’d say sports play-by-play announcer might be the most coveted — and hard to get — job in broadcasting. And Tom knows as much about what it takes to land one of those jobs as anybody. If you’ve ever wanted to be a “sportscaster” or know someone who does or if you just like listening to sports on the radio, you might enjoy this interview. It runs 20 minutes.

Portable cassette recorders

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Came across this old photo (circa 1988) today and was — once again — struck by the gear we used. This is Lisa Wolfe, a reporter for The Missourinet.

The Radio Shack recorder is jacked into the Shure mixer which is wired into the big cart deck and the phone. So a reporter recorded audio from the phone (with a push-to-talk button in the hand piece); they then dubbed the audio bits they wanted to carts which they carried into the studio for newscasts. When they went into the field they unplugged the cassette recorder.

There were better recorders available but they were all much more expensive than the Radio Shack model which was damn near disposable. The problem was the buttons. Using the recorders as the did (endlessly starting, stopping, fast-forwarding, rewinding) trashed the buttons in no time.

The early SuperScopes (by Marantz) were good but every time they came out with a new model with more features, the buttons got flimsier and flimsier. And the recorders got more and more expensive. And they were nearly impossible to repair. So… Radio Shack.

Thinking back on those days, it occurs to me the cassette recorder was — in some ways — the laptop computer of that day. In the sense that it was our main tool for creating the content of the day (for us): audio.

Of course you needed a radio station or (in our case) a network of radio stations. But we sort of took that for granted.

ACT! and Reflex

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In the late 80’s I was doing affiliate relations for about 120 radio stations (in Missouri and Iowa). I had a card for each station in a Rolodex on my desk. Using a typewriter, I packed as much information on each card as possible. Station manager, program director, news director, address, phone, fax (few if any email addresses in ’87). By my right knee was a file drawer containing manila file folders for each station. This would contain copies of all correspondence; notes from phone calls and f2f visits. It was a paper world. The portable version of the Rolodex was a page with as much of the info as could be crammed on a sheet of paper. (Columns: City, GM, PD, ND, Address, Phone, Fax, etc)

I had a computer on my desk but I don’t recall when I moved from DOS to Windows. But somewhere in here I was using Borland Reflex, a flat-file database management system for DOS. It was the first commercial PC database to use the mouse and graphics mode, and drag-and-drop capability in the report formatting module.

I used Reflex as a ‘customer relationship management’ program before there was such a thing (that I knew of). I was in heaven. I sorted and searched and generated reports. I used one field for notes (every phone call, letter and in-person visit).

Sometime around 1987 I was visiting Bill Weaver, the GM of KFRU in Columbia, MO, and I must have mentioned my little database. Bill showed me the program he used to manage all of his contacts: ACT! I was smitten! Did all the things I hacked out of Reflex but so much more. I immediately bought a copy and became insufferable to my co-workers.

While attending COMDEX in 1992 (Chicago), I saw what I believe was the first Windows version of ACT! $500 but I had to have it. Bought it on the convention floor.

I lived in ACT! for many years after. Probably well after Outlook took over the company network. Grown men were reduced to tears when they were forced to give up ACT!