consumer web

That’s not entirely fair. Joe McCambley, founder of The Wonderfactory, a digital design firm, helped build the first banner ad back in 1994. It was a much-maligned innovation that grew like kudzu until it had all but overwhelmed the consumer Web, defining its look and economics for years to come.

Now the new rage is “native advertising,” which is to say advertising wearing the uniform of journalism, mimicking the storytelling aesthetic of the host site. Buzzfeed, Forbes, The Atlantic and, more recently, The New Yorker, have all developed a version of native advertising, also known as sponsored content; if you are on Buzzfeed, World of Warcraft might have a sponsored post on, say, 10 reasons your virtual friends are better than your real ones.

It is usually labeled advertising (sometimes clearly, sometimes not), but if the content is appealing, marketers can gain attention and engagement beyond what they might get for say, oh, a banner ad.

Mr. McCambley is wary. He says he thinks native advertising can provide value to both reader and advertiser when properly executed, but he worries that much of the current crop of these ads is doing damage to the contract between consumer and media organizations.

“I completely understand the value of native advertising,” Mr. McCambley said, “but there are a number of publishers who are allowing P.R. firms and advertising agencies direct access to their content management systems and allowing them to publish directly to the site. I think that is a huge mistake.

“It is a very slippery slope and could kill journalism if publishers aren’t careful,” he said.

He’s right. Publishers might build a revenue ledge through innovation of the advertising format, but the confusion that makes it work often diminishes the host publication’s credibility.

Of course, some publishers have already gone flying off the edge, most notoriously The Atlantic, which in January allowed Scientology to create a post that was of a piece with the rest of the editorial content on its site, even if it was differently labeled. They got clobbered, in part because handing the keys to the car to a controversial religion with a reputation for going after journalists was dumb.

“You are gambling with the contract you have with your readers,” Mr. McCambley said. “How do I know who made the content I am looking at and what the value of the information is?”

Given his somewhat oracular status, it comes as little surprise that when you go to visit this particular ad wizard in Manhattan, you take an elevator up to an empty entranceway with a single cord dangling from the ceiling. I eventually pulled the cord and a door opened to The Wonderfactory.

Once inside, you find out that Mr. McCambley is not some crabby editorial type putting the old gimlet eye on the necessary, but distasteful evil of advertising. All he ever wanted to do was make good content, and the banner ad is not Mr. McCambley’s only credential: The Wonderfactory has designed Web sites for National Geographic, Martha Stewart, Coca-Cola and The Huffington Post.

Part of his current skepticism is driven by his experience with those banner ads. Twenty years ago, most people got access to the Web through Internet service providers like Prodigy and CompuServe, which had a version of advertising but not the banners we have come to know and hate. In October 1994, HotWired, the digital version of Wired magazine, decided to create ads for the issue and ATT opted in. The ad invited people to click through — and they did, at the astounding rate of 44 percent versus the 0.1 percent rate that is now common. Users were then transported to a list of museums around the world to show that the Web could take you places.

At the time it was unique, but as time went on the approach became ubiquitous and cheesy.

“We were proud of that ad,” said Mr. McCambley. “But everything starts out good until we end up making it bad.”

Now he is both a fan and a critic of Forbes.com, which has been at the vanguard of the native ad movement.

“What I love about Forbes is that they have the guts to take risks, to experiment, but I think some of it is dangerous,” he said. “When you go to Forbes, you expect sound business advice and news, information that has been fact-checked and vetted. But what you get instead is a mix of staff content, contributor content and sponsored content. It’s hard to know where you are.”

Lewis Dvorkin is the chief product officer of Forbes and a veteran of both traditional and digital media publications, having worked at The New York Times, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and AOL.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/business/media/storytelling-ads-may-be-journalisms-new-peril.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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As a consumer, you hear a lot about the importance of maintaining a good credit score. Most often, that means your FICO score — the score developed by the company of the same name to help lenders evaluate the creditworthiness of a potential borrower. But it probably makes more sense to talk about your credit scores, plural.

That’s because other outfits produce credit scores, too — and FICO itself has many different varieties of scores, depending on the type of loan you’re seeking. In fact, John Ulzheimer, a credit expert, has worked with Creditsesame.com to create a snazzy infographic (which you can click on above, and then zoom in on) showing a total of 49 different versions of your credit score under the FICO umbrella.

That’s right, more than four dozen. Why so many?

FICO created the basic formula — the general purpose FICO, if you will — that is used to crunch consumer credit data for all loan types. The credit data is collected by the three major credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion) and analyzed by FICO to create a single, three-digit score. So there are three versions of the basic score, just for starters.

But FICO also has several other versions, customized for the specific type of loan in question — say, an automobile loan, a mortgage or a credit card. Each is also offered by the credit bureaus, under their own brands. And each version may have multiple releases, as FICO’s formula for crunching the data is updated. So you can see how the versions pretty quickly add up to nearly fifty.

All this can be confusing for consumers, Mr. Ulzheimer says, who may wonder. “Why is the score I get here not the same as what they get there?”

That issue is currently under review by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, because consumers may pay for a credit score from various consumer Web sites but get a generic FICO or other score, which may differ from the actual score a lender is using to evaluate their creditworthiness.

For now, the main point to keep in mind, Mr. Ulzheimer says, is that the same general principal applies to keeping your scores attractive to lenders: Pay your bills on time, maintain low credit-card balances and apply for credit only when you really need it, “not to save 10 percent at the mall,” he said.

Have you paid for your credit score recently? Did you find it useful?

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/why-you-have-49-different-fico-scores/?partner=rss&emc=rss

The Media Equation: Storytelling Ads May Be Journalism’s New Peril

Bucks Blog: Why You Have 49 Different FICO Scores

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