The Exchanges

Q Why build this though? I mean, those two things you just mentioned, I get all that just by following them on their Facebook page. I get it in my Facebook feed every morning.

A Well, I think, I think the question is, is how do you, I think what you're seeing, I mean, we can talk about Lacana, but let's just talk right now about what's happening in local media, which is, you know, we are losing audience. To the big, it used to be to the portals. It used to be the Googles and the search engine. Now it's to Facebook. People are engaging in content elsewhere. So now you're seeing a rapid shift. Now you're seeing a lot of paid models come in, subscription models. You're seeing people that used to want to invest in scale. I want a ton of audience. I'm going to get a ton of audience, and I'm going to make a half a cent on every one of them, and I'm going to have a decent business. So the model's shifting now. So like, I want to know who my loyal fans are. We want to know who really is engaged with us, and I'm going to ask them for some money to keep it there. And so what people are finding is, is hey, You can build a better pile of dollars by engaging closely with your most loyal listeners and readers than you could with just having, competing in the commodity of everybody's a portal, everybody is everything.

AI assessment note: “You can build a better pile of dollars by engaging closely with your most loyal”

Q Okay, so, so what should we focus on? Should we focus on your agency and how you're growing it, or on Lacana?

A Well, I think there's two things, which is as a professional, what I do is I help media companies grow and achieve success in an increased, increasingly, uh, um, difficult world. There are many ways to do that. So as a consultant, you want to say to a company, uh, how do we grow your audience? How do we deepen their engagement? How do we deal with shifting things in the marketplace like Facebook algorithm changes or Google? Um, so how, and how do we drive revenue? Fundamentally to that is you need a platform, and you need a smart platform. You need something that sits underneath you that takes a lot of the complexity out of running that business and allows you to achieve success with your business and your editorial aims. So my role as a consultant is manifested in Glacana, which is, maybe this is too erudite, but, uh, is that our platform really helps our customers, um, achieve success, um, by taking all the technology problems out of their business. So we handle all their infrastructure, all the Their product development all and basically make it very interoperable for them to plug and play different solutions.

AI assessment note: “my role as a consultant is manifested in Glacana”

Q these local apps, these, you know, every TV station thinks it's sexy to have an app, but how many times once it's downloaded does it actually get engaged within a week? Like zero. People don't go back into these things. I'm just curious. How you're thinking about taking these old media assets and allowing them to break through the noise of fake news and big headlines in these social streams.

A Well, uh, first of all, let's, again, as I said, let's talk more broadly than Lacana, because that's, uh, that's a, that's a business that's solid. It exists for a reason. Those stations need to have these platforms. They're not going away, and if you look at the numbers, and you look at those businesses, you know, they may not have, they may not make sense to you, but when there's a tornado coming, people do turn to their local news. There's a lot of reasons why they exist, and they're in great shape, and that's a great business, but in general, publishing broader, where my consulting practices lies, Is, is there are some really tough questions right now. Do you fold them? Or do you, you know, so let's, let's walk at the media broadly. You can look at a lot of companies now. How do they offset the challenges? Um, there is no magic bullet to the problem of media sustainability. Uh, you can just shut down, or you can keep trying to go in a direction. People either do that by developing new products, uh, trying to find ways to engage their community in new ways, going to paid models, um, doing better content that people actually want to come to that's differentiated. Or finally, a larger company, what, you know, you see in some other markets is, is they had invested. You know, 20 years ago, the Tribune invested in AOL, and that funded, you know, 20 years of innovation for the Tri…

AI assessment note: “People either do that by developing new products, uh, trying to find ways to engage”

Q that they can grow their software company by taking thought leadership in a certain category. So they go write a book, they go create a community. If they want to, if they want to start allowing their super fans to pay them literally tactically, how does this guy in orange County do it? Is it a website? What plugin does he use to collect the money? How's he do it?

A Well, you know, a lot of this is old shoe leather stuff, which is, and you do this with brands that want to create thought leadership. So if you take the same thing, I'll give you two perspectives for him. He walks around town and talks to everybody in the town. He gets out a hat. He says, you know, want to write me a check. He's just in the community, in a small community, in a place, working the street. Take my big SaaS company. What I want to do tomorrow with the Lacana is I want to take the leaders of my customers, and I want to sit them down to dinner with somebody who really knows what's going on, who can open their eyes and help them see the future a little bit. So if you take thought leadership, you know, it happens in different ways. It happens by being present in somebody's mindshare and producing a product or an experience that really engages them. I would say more and more, like, the product that experiences, engages right now is you can do a blog post, you You know, a Facebook post. We all have the drill of marketing tactics that we do, but there is nothing better than sitting down with somebody and teaching them something they didn't know, or showing them a direction that they didn't see, or enlightening them somehow, or actually saying, hey, I don't know the answer either. Let's work on it together. That's the kind of stuff that engages people. This is a tough ma…

AI assessment note: “a lot of this is old shoe leather stuff, which is, and you do this”