Rudy Thurston, COO, Omnifuse

MM
Did you generate the DVS content? Or was that coming from DVS?

RT
It was Ignition’s business model to acquire the sole licenses from many of the action sports companies for mobile content. So they were the licensees of all of that content.

We provided the software mechanism that allowed the contextual serving up of the content meaningful to the user as they were navigating through the taxonomy of the site.

MM
Before you go there, Rudy-it seems to me that in creating a content commerce opportunity within a community, it means that the content has to really be woven into the fabric of that community.

RT
Absolutely. Like I said, one of the things that was interesting in our case study of icelounge.com-the first time we turned banner ads on, on the site, we got completely killed. We were getting death threats. It was just an absolute failure.

Here we were thinking, “Okay. We really want to start to monetize this community.” We’ll just throw some banner ads at it.” We worked with Tribal Fusion and integrated their ad system into our ad system.

MM
That would be an ad-serving system?

RT
Yes. Into our community software. It was great. It worked just perfectly. You talk about nailing out of the box, the first time. Then the users just revolted. They just absolutely hated it.

“Why are you selling me underarm deodorant?” We took it down within one day. It was that bad.

MM
If I understand you right, when you plugged in an ad network-in this case, it was Tribal Fusion-but that network then goes out and finds advertisers to generate ads that then get dynamically served into your site-based on some metadata profile of the user.

RT
Sure.

MM
Your users came back and said, “This isn’t part of my tribe.”

RT
Right. This is so far away from what I want to be seeing on my community. If you don’t get it out of here immediately, we’re going to go somewhere else.

MM
So this kind of gets to a deeper-almost social-issue. Which is to say that the community… Their social identity and who they consider themselves to be had now included membership. Not just membership in the community, but almost a company-ownership of it.

RT
Absolutely. A very big and important part of establishing a community is that identification. The personalization of it at every level. It’s the most important part of building that vibrant community.

MM
There are probably two dimensions of it. One is relevant content-relative to the tribe and the activity of the tribe. Then the other dimension of that is personalization. Is that a fair characterization?

RT
I would think that’s a very fair characterization.

Let me complete my ad story, because the story gets a lot better. We came back after about 6 months, licking our wounds from that experience. We came back to the community-this specific skateboard community. This time we came back with ads that were little video vignettes provided by skateboard shop owners showing their products. These videos were primarily skaters that the shop sponsored demonstrating products they sold. All things action-sports-centric.

We launched that, and they loved it. They thought the content was so relative. They didn’t mind that it looked like a commercial. They just really enjoyed the content.

Again, a huge success. Most of the skate shop owners that bought these ads were able to demonstrate real bottom-line results from the ads displayed on the community. So much so, that we doubled the revenue that we were generating from the interstitial ads in that 6-month period of time.

MM
Would you explain just for a moment what you mean by an, “interstitial” ad?

RT
Yes. An interstitial ad is one that’s served up prior to viewing some sort of content on the site. If you were to look at ignitionsk8.com site right now and were to click on a video-before that video pops up in the player, you’ll be served up an interstitial ad.

MM
Is that sometimes called a pre-roll?

RT
It could be a pre-roll. Yes. In our case, we’re using the term “interstitial” just because of the way we sell the ad to a company. This is all in the past. There’s a little bit different philosophy on the site, now.

But when we were selling the interstitial ads, we were using that term very specifically. Because we wanted to make a differentiation between a standard pre-roll and an interstitial being something that was more contextual.

MM
Got it. So it was part of the story.

RT
Yes.

So the first time, we failed-and the second time, we were very successful. That led to us selling this site to the mobile content provider, and then working with them to create four additional verticals for all the specific action sports. They’re using our technology platform for that.

MM
On the second time out-when you went to vendors and/or shops that were part of the community-for the most part, we’re talking about… I won’t call them “amateur,” but we’ll definitely call the “low-production-value videos. They kind of had the home-movie, home-video flavor to it.

RT
Absolutely. One of the reasons why we picked skateboarding as our primary targets is that skateboarders are natural videographers. They’re always out there taking videos of their friends doing tricks. They’re just natural-born videographers. They want to see how everybody else does a particular trick.

They’re going to tape themselves doing it. They’re going to review it and watch it. We needed to understand the dynamic of how rich media content was consumed and successfully embedded in the community.

Also, the technological challenges of uploading video and converting video to Flash, and doing all that good stuff-which we’ll get into later on.

MM
That reminds me of a conversation I had with a VP of research at MTV in Europe. He called these things, “Games of Cool.” It was all a matter of how well you played this particular game of cool.

Again, in your skateboarder community, you’ve got one dimension which is just plain skill. Quick, cool moves. The other one is, of course, what you look like in terms of both the hardware and the shoes, the look, and “How do I make myself look like that?” Therefore, a member of that community.

RT
Right.

MM
There are really two dimensions. One’s skill and the other one’s basically “cool” identity. That lends itself perfectly to video.

RT
Yes. It does. Those two dimensions are identifiable characteristics for commonality within communities.