Borrell Associates, Inc

There’s a video interview I want you to see.  It’s about 5 minutes and well worth the time of anyone trying to understand how to tackle the mobile advertising space profitably. It’s my discussion with Clark Gilbert, who will be keynoting our conference in Dallas this fall.

Clark was recently named CEO of Deseret Digital Media in Salt Lake City.  The importance of this appointment cannot be understated.  Since his days at Harvard Business School, Clark has demonstrated deep academic knowledge about disruptive innovation.  He and I initiated a joint applied research project when I started Borrell Associates, studying how companies like Knight Ridder, Tribune, Media General and Belo were tackling the disruptive forces of the Internet.  They were, we concluded, unwittingly following the disastrous path of tackling it with internal managers – something later to be called “convergence.”

But academia isn’t reality, and as I tell all my clients, people like Clark and me have the easy task of saying interesting and logical things – then leaving.  Implementation is far more difficult than it sounds.

Clark has left the academic world of Stanford, Harvard and Brigham Young to get his hands dirty.  And he’s already doing some amazing things at Deseret Media.

I traveled to Salt Lake City recently to visit his operation.  I left realizing that his operation is probably the most forward-thinking, results-driven local media company in America.  They manage a newspaper, TV station, and two radio stations.  They are already knocking the ball out of the park with KSL-TV’s KSL.com, which will wind up driving more online revenue (about 40% more in my estimation) than any other TV-online operation in the country.  They bought a mobile “deals” company and are about to buy a texting company.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing I noticed while visiting Deseret Media was the contrast between two different meetings of Clark’s staff.  The first meeting included about 30 people, all bright-eyed and eager – and completely in tune with my presentation.  (If any of you have seen me present, you know how challenging I can be with the audience.)  This was one of the only local-media audiences where, after 5 minutes, I realized I was going too slow for them.  Here’s the difference:  Not a single person in the room was a “TV person,” “newspaper person,” or “radio person.”  They all considered themselves employed by Deseret’s digital operations.  After the presentation, many of them hung around and asked questions.

The second meeting was with the same number of people, but all were from Deseret’s TV or radio stations.  The presentation was a bit more challenging and basic, and I got the sense that a lot of them were strapped for time.  As soon as the presentation ended, all but two of them left the room.   They had allotted their 90 minutes to a presentation on digital media, and had to go back to their main jobs. (I’m certain they are just as terrific at their TV and radio jobs as the digital folks are at theirs, just as I’m sure the digital folks are equally as lost about the attributes of legacy media as the legacy media folks are about digital.)

The contrast was amazing.  THIS, I thought, is why legacy media companies have been losing share to the pure-play companies like Yodle, Google, ReachLocal, Truvia, and so many others who have no other distractions.

Clark will be a very enlightening speaker.  His credentials have gone from being a brilliant academic mind, to a brilliant operator.  I think he’s going to help us all lead the way as mobile becomes our new local-media disruptor, and I sincerely hope you can sign up for our conference Sept. 27-29 in Dallas to hear him and the other top performers in mobile whom we’ve lined up.