The opening reminded me of Airwolf (remember that?!) for some reason - big snazzy neons and big eighties keyboard noises. There are some big newspaper noises here too, so it’s probably quite apt.
Bob Benz, VP and GM of interactive at Scripps, gave a gorilla-orientated talk with some great insight into keeping focused on new challenges. This all started with a “gorilla in the room” video - we were all concentrating so hard on how many times a basketball was passed around a busy group of people that hardly anyone noticed a large gorilla walk through them all. (Hardened conference-goers bear with me - the gimmick did the job.)
So how do you deal with disruption in your markets? How do you deal, for one, with Craigslist giving away what you’ve been charging for? Benz’ answer was to establish a $1.5 million entrepreneur fund 18 months ago, taking its cue from VC in Silicon Valley. Benz said VC is basically “placing bets on interesting ideas” so this is a way of investing in the best ideas in the company. Each Scripps newspaper can submit requests for funding for new innovations, and it’s telling that the aim of the fund is to add 20-30 percent to the bottom line within five years - that’s $75-100 million dollars.
“More than 90 percent of successful new ventures start off following the wrong strategy,” said Benz. It’s important to start simply with a rational and calculated approach, limiting fixed-cost investments. “Be patient for growth but impatient for profit. Most entrepreneurs don’t work for long in the red.” He also said it’s important not to shame people for making mistakes. “Invest a little, earn a little, learn a lot.” He’s quite candid that most ideas that come out of the newspaper are “pretty pedestrian” and involve trying to do an online version of something that worked in print - and that doesn’t work because it doesn’t come from a consumer standpoint. “The first round usually involves senior execs and some of them don’t even use the internet. I want kids in those workshops and people under 30 - and I’ll look for people in the company that already have that light in their eyes.” He said he can cultivate ideas from these people and feed those back into what he does. And that comes back to the gorilla again - if you see him, you can capitalise on him.
A couple of Scripps projects: The Javaplum email newsletter for a community in South Florida has a small subscriber base but “insane” click-through rates of 40 percent on links, clearly delivering local news in a way that worked for the readership. Also, there was no local TV in Naples so Scripps launched an hour-long local news vodcast. “This is us looking at the internet as an opportunity and not as a threat,” he said. “You can look at Craigslist and Yahoo and cry in your beer - which I’ve done - but you get nowhere. You have to start looking for opportunities to attack, and think like those blokes in successful venture capital and start ups.”