Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

Earlier today, while reading Google’s response to the Gmail outage, a little “Sign up for Gmail” text link had caught my eye. I know it is an editorially selected link rather than a target ad, but it reminded me those complaints from advertisers who don’t want their ads (display or text ads such as Google AdSense) to show next to certain types of objectionable or sensitive content, for example an airline ad on a page that talks about a plane crash.

So what do you think was the CTR on this text link and what was Gmail’s sign up process conversation rate for those that were brave enough to click?

Preface: This post is about a 55 years old dude who for the past 30 years has been defining and shaping the Israeli alternative rock scene. If you like alt-rock but don’t speak Hebrew yet, Fortis is a very good reason to learn the language…

Last week, eight years since his last studio album, Rami Fortis released his new album which I finally put my hands on. And he did it like no else would – a magnificent triple (!) album (“because in 2 years the format of a disc will extinct…”) full of the good old Fortis sound and many brilliant tracks.

Judging from the video below it is the best show in Israel these days. I just wish he will have a mini US tour and visit Los Angeles as part of it.

Watch in HD. Despite the poor sound quality you can feel the energy pretty well. The lighting is great as well.

Consumers are consumers no matter what online service or product they use. Once we use a product and like it, we are emotionally attached to it and become very passionate about it. This has not changed for years, but in current days, we (the consumers) have powerful tools such as blogs, twitter and facebook, to express ourselves quicker, louder in order to make a change.

Seeing companies make a (stupid) decision and then revert back as a result of users protesting against it using all sorts of social media applications is a pretty common thing in the online world. The last example was Facebook and its T&C fiasco. Seeing more an more big offline companies acting the same way is a nice surprise for me.

Take these two sentences:

“We underestimated the deep emotional bond they had with the original packaging. Those consumers are very important to us, so we responded.”

“I feel it’s the right thing to do, to innovate as a company. I wouldn’t want to stop innovating as a result of this. At the same time, if consumers are speaking, you have to listen.”

If you think they were told by Mark Zuckerberg or another executive of some popular web company you are wrong. They were said by Neil Campbell, president at Tropicana North America, who is about to announce today, according to the NYTimes, that Tropicana is going to scrap the new packaging and return to the old one. Why? Because we , including myself on this blog, complained about the new design and asked for the old one.

Just like Wheeler & Katz wrote in their book “Brand Atlas, Branding Intelligence Made Visible” : “Stay customer centric. The best brand decisions can only be made with the customer’s needs and experiences in mind. See the world through the eyes of your customers.”

So, I applaud to PepsiCo for listening to its loyal customers and acting fast. I can’t wait to see the good old carton, with orange & straw, in stores.

Last May I posted about the unbelievable achievement made by my long time favorite Israeli basketball club – Hapoel Holon. This is part two of the story.

Shortly after winning the Israeli 2008 championship the future of the team looked very dark. Miki Dorsman, the owner/manager/coach left the team, the budget for the 2009 season was unknown and the the entire squad moved on to other teams.

A few weeks before the current season began, the club somehow managed to resurrect itself. A tiny budget was formed, a young coach, Dani Franco, was signed, and a squad of  fairly unknown players was assembled. The fans had one hope – that the team would not fall apart and drop to the second division.

Well, apparently, this club has something else that is worth a hundred times more than superstars earning millions or experienced coaches. It has a big heart. And big heart is what wins big games.

Last year, it was Malik Dixon who scored the winning shot only four seconds to the end of the Israeli championship game against Maccabi Tel Aviv, one of the most successful basketball clubs in Eurpoe. It was Holon’s first championship title, and Maccabi’s 2nd lost of the title in 34 years.

Last night, in the Israeli Basketball Cup final against the favorite Maccabi Haifa Heat, the drama was even bigger. With less than a second on the clock, and Haifa leading 68-66, the seasoned Brian Tolbert scored an amazing three-pointer with the buzzer to give Holon a 69-68 win. It was the team’s first cup title ever.

Take a look at this great video, shot by one of Holon’s fans, to experience the drama and the excitement after the victory. Holonia plays in yellow, Haifa in green.

Holon is now holding “The Double” (when a team wins both champoinship & cup titles at the same season), and if you want to make an analogy to the high tech/venture capital environment, this is like seeing a serial entrepreneur building two companies on very little seed money, and scoring two huge home runs, one year after the other. And as a fan, I am as proud and happy as a share holder could be from these liquidity events.

I was extremely disappointed to hear that Hulu was forced by their content partners to turn off Boxee support. Here’s a situation which turned from a win-win-win-win case to a loose-loose-loose-loose one:

• The networks (NBC, CBS, FOX and others) lost empathy & credibility. If they think this move will drive people back to the TV they are wrong. This is exactly the type of shortsightedness that got those content providers into the downslide they’re facing today. They have to realize that there is a big generation out there that is not going to accept to a walled garden approach, loves services such as internet TV and boxee for them was the access point to those services.

• Hulu is trying to come out good from this situation, but at the end of the day, they have cooperated and agreed to the networks’ mandate.

• Boxee users, a growing passionate community of early adopters with lots of influence, loose because they won’t have access to great shows that are available on Hulu. However, these folks are going to participate in the battle actively and use every social media tool to protest and try to get the situation back to where it was.

• And Boxee, well unfortunately, they are going to loose active users. They are probably not going to loose the users love and support, but since the biggest content provider users had consumed is no longer supported, there will be less reasons for people to login into and use Boxee daily.

But if anyone think this is going to last forever, he is wrong. I predict it is just a matter of time and plenty of discussions between the executives of these three companies (with some help from investors as well) until we will be able to enjoy Hulu on Boxee again.

Because nothing beats the users.

Yesterday this blog & I reached some pretty encouraging milestones:

Milestone 1- My previous post, about Outbrain’s round B, was my 200th post since I began blogging almost 2 years ago. Who would imagine that would happen so fast?

Milestone 2 - The same 200th blog post made it to Techmeme and that was the first time my blog was featured on the popular tech news aggregation service.

Milestone 3 – My 198th post about Tropicana’s terrible re-branding was mentioned in this FastCompany article about Pepsi’s logo redesign. That article has been sending tons of new traffic to my blog. It was the first time a post I wrote received over 1000 unique page views in one day (to be precise, 1127 UPV on 2/11/2009).

I wonder what would be the next one?

Several months ago Josh Kopelman announced a small side project called FundingSleuth. It is a free service that lets you track SEC filings made by US private companies and email alerts whenever different forms are filed, including form D that indicates sell of equity or capital raise. I decided to test the service and defined alerts for a few companies I had in mind – makers of widgets I use on this blog, companies of friends, competitors and a few others.

Unfortunately, due to the economic climate and the sharp decline in VC investments, I have not been getting any alerts from FundingSleuth for a long time. The last one was sent to me on 12/24/2008 and did not bring good news at all. It was when Eyeblaster, a company co-founded by my friend Ofer Zadikario, withdrawn the S-1 form and canceled its IPO.

But last Tuesday, 2/3/2009, I received an alert from FundingSleuth about Outbrain, makers of the blog ratings & recommendations widget that I use on this blog (readers – please use it and give me feedback) and like the fact it is starting to act as a traffic acquisition tool too. A quick look at the SEC website showed that the company filed form D on 2/2/2009. I was curious to know the details about this round and so I sent Yaron, Outbrain’s CEO, this short email:

From: Jay Meydad
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 6:01 PM
To: Yaron Galai
Subject: Do you deserve a MAZAL TOV?

http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001454938&owner=include&count=40

From his response, I could tell he was surprised, very surprised:

On 2/4/09 7:10 AM, “Yaron Galai” wrote:

Wow – you are good!… do you actually go over all these filings, or did it show up on a Google Alert?…

Well – confidentially – yes, we do deserve a mazal tov… Details soon. Please don’t spread the word though yet… Thanks.

I did not say or post a thing of course, but was very happy to:

1. Hear that a company I like its product & team raise money during this tough climate
2. See that FundingSleuth can provide some positive news for a change
3. Be the first to find out about this scoop
4. All of the above

A week passed and yesterday Yaron sent me another email with the Round B announcement press release:

On 2/10/09 1:46 PM, “Yaron Galai” wrote:

Jay – FYI – as you were the first one to catch this, here’s the press release we’re doing tomorrow. Thanks again for not publishing it so far!

Now, I am sure some of the news sites and bloggers covering start-up companies and have a much bigger readership than my blog are more suitable to scoop a story about Outbrain’s $12M round B. I am also pretty sure they will fight to be the first to report and post the story exactly when the embargo expires (10am EST). I won’t try to take it from them. It is important they will do their job and break exciting stories like this one. So, I will follow and this is the reason I scheduled this post to go live 20 minutes after the embargo expires.

Bottom line, Mazal Tov Yaron & the team for closing such an impressive round at times like these. I am sure you will use this wisely to keep growing Outbrain and enhancing the product.

In stores next month or online. Looks amazing. I am sure it will sound the same.

I was buying groceries the other day when I noticed cartons of a new orange juice brand on the shelves. Well, it took me about 5 seconds and a much closer look at the package to realize that that was not a new orange juice brand. That was the re-branded Tropicana.

So, if it took me that long to recognize a juice that I have been buying for a few years, something was not done right. Let’s take a closer look.

The old cartons used to have a large Tropicana logo, in a thick and bold “tropical island” font. The logo was horizontally displayed above a strong visual element – a picture of a large, juicy, fresh orange with a straw stuck right into it. White was a dominant background color which helped bringing the logo and the image to the front. The combination was very powerful. Cartons were easy to recognize on the shelves from 20 ft away. The entire design screamed freshness and it felt like you are buying a product that was made from oranges that were picked moments ago.

In the new design, the Tropicana logo uses a much smaller and narrower font. It is also displayed vertically which makes it really difficult to read. The slogan “100% Orange” is what is displayed horizontally and feels as the brand name. In addition, the main visual element was changed to a photo of a partial glass (visual illusion?), full with orange juice. There is also very little white area, so less contrast and more blur of visual elements. And when you actually look at the juice, it looks as someone spent hours in Photoshop trying to remove any sign of pulp and freshness. Overall, the box looks synthetic and of a no-brand orange juice made out of concentrate.

And there is more. The pulp levels labels in the new design are so small and hard to read compared to the old design.

The last funny thing is the website portion. When you visit the Tropicana website, the new box is displayed only on the home page, while the “Juice Finder” page shows boxes in the goold old design (see image below in gallery). Even the PepsiCo site still shows boxes in their old design!

I find it hard to believe that a company as big as PepsiCo, which spends millions of dollars on branding and marketing, would  execute so poorly. How can you throw away years of brand & identity recognition among millions of customers and replace it with such a lame design? And how can you release a product and start a multi-million dollars marketing campaign without updating your website?

It looks like the folks on the branding team need to read some branding books & guideline.

Update (Feb 23, 2009): The new design is gone. The good old design is back. More here.

Tropicana Juice - Old vs New Design

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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC just launched a new exhibit called “State of Deception: The power of Nazi propaganda”. Beyond the live exhibit which I hope to be able to see in DC someday, it also has a Flash based web site which contains a fascinating multimedia collection with all sorts of materials showing the sophisticated propaganda that the Nazi party created in order to spread lies about its political opponents, Jews and the need for war.

Those materials include photos, posters, books, videos, sound recording, newspapers articles, paintings and drawing and more. All have commentary and are categorized under 7 different themes that demonstrate how well the Nazis understood topics such as mass communication, marketing & branding, and how well they used them in order to promote alluring ideas that appeal to the masses such as freedom, unity and prosperity, rather than pure hate.

The Themes and Gallery Search sections gives access to these materials from the years 1919-1948. In addition, there is an interactive timeline section which goes all the way from 1919 until 2008 and it lists major events around the world that are related to anti-semitism as well as genocide.

I find the timing of releasing this exhibit & website extremely important, especially in light of the recent anti-semic voices the are spiking as a result of the current economic crises, the recent holocaust denial statement made by British Bishop Richard Williamson (“There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies”) , and of course, the constant anti-Jews and anti-Israel speeches and announcements made by the leader of Iran, as well as other terror organizations such as Hamas & Al Qaeda.

This is by far of the most impressive website I have seen lately. Add to that the fact it is about such an important topic, that I have already selected it as my top website for 2009.

I highly recommend spending some time on the site, navigating through the different sections and reading the materials. It is important to remember what the Nazi’s did in Europe 60+ years ago and remind others, so it never happens again.

So, Share it, Bookmark, Digg, Twitt, StumbleUpon it, and use every other social media method you know to spread the word about this site.

Here is the link: http://www.ushmm.org/propaganda

ushmm.org - nazi propoganda exhibit - homepage

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