Verizon's Sad Attempt To Woo Millennials Falls Flat On Its Face

from the hipster-grandpa dept

We've noted repeatedly how Verizon really wants to pivot from stodgy, old protectionist telco to Millennial-focused media and advertising juggernaut as it makes a broader push for a greater slice of online advertising markets. Company executives apparently believe this is accomplished by ceasing network fiber upgrades, attacking popular consumer protections, repeatedly violating consumer privacy, and gobbling up failed 90's internet brands like Yahoo and AOL.

Except Verizon's hip new brand revolution hasn't been much to write home about.

It technically began with the launch of a doomed "news" website named Sugarstring that imploded after writers revealed they couldn't talk about net neutrality or mass surveillance. The company's acquisition of Yahoo was also plagued with issues, from Yahoo's mammoth, undisclosed hacking scandal to revelations of the company's wholesale spying on user e-mail accounts for the government (not that this latter issue bothered Verizon much).

At the heart of the effort was Verizon's Go90 streaming video service. Launched in 2015 alongside mountains of hype, the Millennial-focused effort avoided using Verizon's brand name for obvious reasons. Unfortunately for Verizon, the service was quickly and repeatedly derided as "a dud" by Verizon's own media partners. In just a few years the effort saw repeated layoffs, and despite several efforts to bring in top talent and relaunch the service, the company this week finally acknowledged that the service will be headed out to pasture:

"Following the creation of Oath, go90 will be discontinued,” a company spokeswoman said in an email. “Verizon will focus on building its digital-first brands at scale in sports, finance, news and entertainment for today’s mobile consumers and tomorrow’s 5G applications.”

Representatives of go90 have begun informing content providers about plans to end both the go90 brand and the video streaming app by July 31, online magazine Digiday reported earlier on Thursday citing four sources familiar with the situation. It said go90 will return shows and content rights back to its production partners. Verizon has spent about $1.2 billion on Go90 since its 2015 launch, Digiday reported, citing two sources.

That $1.2 billion would have gone a long way in upgrading those aging, taxpayer-subsidized DSL lines Verizon refuses to upgrade across numerous states. Meanwhile, Verizon's other video efforts have hit some roadblocks as well. The company recently quietly backed away from plans to launch its own live streaming platform, hinting it would likely now be partnering with an existing, unnamed industry player instead of trying to actually be creative, innovative and disruptive itself. This whole actual competition thing is hard.

Needless to say, a generation of being a government-pampered telecom monopoly left Verizon ill-prepared for its marketing and media gambit, and the company's own incompetence and lack of innovative DNA have made for rough sledding early on. The company's history is now littered with failed efforts to actually be innovative and disruptive, including the Verizon app store, its video joint venture with RedBox, and numerous other "me too" initiatives under the discontinued VCAST brand.

Verizon's struggles with head to head competition explains why the company consistently feels the need to tilt the playing field unfairly in its favor, as the company's decade-long attack on net neutrality makes painfully clear.

Filed Under: competition, go90, innovation, millennials, video
Companies: verizon

Verizon Claims Its Millennial Ad Pivot Has Been Slowed By Its Breathless Dedication To Consumer Privacy

from the okey-dokey dept

So we've noted repeatedly how Verizon really wants to pivot from stodgy, old protectionist telco to Millennial-focused media and advertising juggernaut. The company desperately wants in on Facebook and Google advertising cash, and apparently believes this is possible by ceasing network fiber upgrades and gobbling up failed 90s internet brands like Yahoo and AOL.

Except Verizon's brand revolution so far hasn't been much to write home about.

Verizon began its pivot with a short-lived website that imploded after writers revealed they couldn't talk about net neutrality or mass surveillance. The company's acquisition of Yahoo has also been plagued with issues, from Yahoo's mammoth, undisclosed hacking scandal to revelations of the company's wholesale spying on user e-mail accounts for the government (not that this latter issue bothered Verizon much). And Verizon's Go90 streaming video service, the cornerstone of Verizon's effort, has been derided as "a dud" by Verizon's own media partners.

Needless to say, a generation of being a government-pampered telecom monopoly left Verizon ill-prepared for its marketing and media gambit, and the company's own incompetence and lack of innovative DNA have made for rough sledding early on. Verizon, for its part, has been stuck trying to explain to investors and the media why things aren't going particularly well. Kind of amusingly, Verizon Executive Vice President Marni Walden last week tried to claim the problems were because Verizon is breathlessly dedicated to consumer privacy:

"For the first year, we’ve worked on bringing Verizon data into AOL. Candidly, that’s been slower than I’d like it to be, and you’ll see us accelerate that this year. The reason for that is around privacy and transparency for our customers."

"We’ve got to make sure we don’t ever compromise that relationship with consumers, so we’ll do that in a very responsible way,” Walden continued. “But what we do know is that when you bring that kind of data, that rich set of data from Verizon into the platform, the result you get on targeted advertising is significantly better."

Just so we're clear: Verizon was caught last year actively modifying wireless user data packets to track consumers around the internet. It was tracking users and building entire profiles of customers for two years before security researchers even discovered it. The company refused to inform consumers this was happening, and refused to provide working opt out tools. And while Verizon was fined $1.35 million by the FCC for this behavior, these so-called "stealth cookies" remain in use -- and have since been expanded across the AOL empire.

This comes of course as Verizon has worked tirelessly to fight consumer privacy protections on every front, most recently in the form of the FCC's broadband privacy protections, which simply require companies be transparent about what they're collecting. Verizon has long proclaimed that privacy protections aren't necessary because public shame would keep the company honest (again though, the public was never told this data collection was even happening). AOL CEO Tim Armstrong also proudly declared that "the market" would keep the Verizon empire on its best behavior as it pertains to user privacy. Yeah, maybe.

Of course the real reason Verizon's marketing ambitions have been slow to blossom isn't Verizon's love of privacy, it's Verizon's inexperience in media -- and actual competition. In broadband, Verizon has been consistently allowed to ignore privacy (and any other consumer complaint) courtesy of a lack of last-mile broadband competition. Now Verizon's the pesky upstart in a new, unfamiliar market, where annoyed users actually have a choice in search, e-mail, streaming video and other services. It's frankly entirely unclear if the company has the competence required for the transition.

Filed Under: advertising, broadband, go90, millenials, privacy
Companies: verizon

As Expected, Verizon's Attempt To Woo Millennials Is Falling Flat On Its Face

from the hip-to-be-square dept

For years now Verizon has made it clear that it no longer wants to be in the fixed-line broadband business. Despite countless billions in taxpayer subsidies and numerous unfinished obligations, the company has all-but frozen serious fiber deployments. It has also been either selling off unwanted DSL customers to smaller, ill-equipped telcos (which which almost always ends poorly for everybody except Verizon accountants and lawyers) or has quite literally tried to drive unwanted users away with both rate hikes and apathy.

Instead, Verizon executives decided to try and transform the stodgy old telco into a sexy new Millennial-focused advertising juggernaut. So far that has involved launching the company's Millennial-targeted "Go90" streaming video service, spending $4.4 billion on acquiring AOL, trying to acquire the drifting wreckage that is Yahoo, and developing controversial stealth ad tracking technology to build covert profiles of customer behavior as they wander around the Internet.

Despite the company heavily marketing Go90, zero rating the service so it doesn't count against usage caps, and even giving away data to users that try the service, it has seen extremely limited adoption among Verizon's target demographic. Verizon has refused to release subscriber numbers for the service, and the Go90 app is slowly falling down both the Apple App Store and Google Play rankings. Things have been so underwhelming, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam was forced to admit to attendees of an investor conference this week that the company may have "over-hyped" the platform:

"It did get a little bit overhyped, and we contributed to that to some extent," McAdam said in a keynote appearance at the 44th Annual J.P. Morgan Conference. McAdam explained that Verizon's strength is in building networks, not necessarily developing popular content. "It's not exactly our strong suit," McAdam conceded.

Granted everybody not at Verizon knew that the company's attempt to magically make an old telco sexy for millennials would be a hard sell, especially given Verizon's long history of trying and failing to be content innovators. The company has long tried and failed when leaning outside of its core competency, whether that's operating its own app store, running a streaming venture with Red Box, or briefly operating a news website where authors were prohibited from talking about things like surveillance or net neutrality. Phone companies, after a generation of regulatory capture and "yes men" boardroom culture -- simply aren't genetically built for real disruption and innovation outside their core competency, no matter how many executives seem to believe otherwise.

McAdam then tried to walk back his comments a little, and tried to argue that Go90 isn't a failure, it's just a vision that's going to take a lot of time, and a lot of money (which won't be spent on networks), to execute:

"We've seen enough success to make us excited about continuing to work it... "Go90 is in a good spot from our perspective, we're going to continue to pursue it. But our expectations are realistic."

As a writer I generally love telecom investor conferences for the simple fact that for whatever reason, phone and cable executives still haven't figured out that the public can hear what's being said at them. What usually happens is a telecom executive will say something uncharacteristically candid, then the company's marketing department will jump in to try and spin the comments a few weeks later. As such it shouldn't be long before Verizon unveils a new marketing barrage that spins McAdam's comments and claims Verizon's quest to become sexy in the eyes of Millennials is going better than ever.

Filed Under: go90, marketing, millennials, video