 Live from the Mandalay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Insight 2014. Here is your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, welcome back to IBM Insight. We're here in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay. Tim Moran is here, he's the Director of Interactive at WNEP TV. We're talking analytics, we're going to talk Watson. Tim, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Dave, thanks, appreciate it. So we were just talking off camera about your background, your coder, you know, turned sort of interactive analytics guy, so let's start with WNEP. What's the focus of the network? Sure, sure, so WNEP TV is a broadcast television network that's part of the Tribune Media Group. The Tribune Media Group as a whole operates just about 62 television stations, countrywide. And along with that, we have a whole host of broadcast media websites that average anywhere from 200 to 300 million page views on a monthly basis. So we're developing a significant on-air and online marketplace that we can really help to try to just custom tailor messages to our viewership. So everybody talks about how you've got to be data-driven these days, how is media becoming data-driven? How has that changed in your observation and your career? Oh, it's data-driven in every way. So considering the fact that so much of what we do is going mobile right now, there's a big challenge in trying to figure the best way to present the proper amount of information to our mobile viewers that also makes sense when it's converted over to the desktop viewers. So we've got one story, we've got multiple different platforms to put it out there, and it can't be too long, it can't be too short, so we use analytics. So primarily we use Google Analytics and different tracking methodologies to try to take a look at what our ideal time spent on site is, if there's a lot of bounce or drop on various pieces of content, just to try to dive deep and figure out exactly why that's happening. So you essentially monetize the 200 to 300 million with advertising and it's sort of page view-driven primarily, so you've got to have huge numbers to compete in that business. In the past it was enough just to sell advertising based on page views. So now volume has scaled to the point that anybody can sell advertising on any website that they can start with GoDaddy. Selling this advertising in an intelligent way so that we can legitimately go back to our sponsors and our advertisers to say, okay, your investment was X, but we can help you attract the fact that your return on that investment was hopefully some order of magnitude greater. Yeah, so how transparent are you with your metrics with advertisers and with the broader community? Obviously advertisers want to see the numbers so you presume you share them. So what do you share? How do you share? Great, that's a great question. We share as much as we can and it's kind of a vague answer, it's really dependent on a case-by-case basis, but ultimately we need to know that the advertiser has an exact picture of what they're investing in. Are they buying impressions on a website? Are they running a behavioral targeting campaign with us where they can approach a particular demographic, say women 18 to 49 that have the desire to buy a car within the next 30 to 60 days. So we need to show them how we can deliver that on a case-by-case basis. So it's objectives-based really? You sit down with a client, what are you trying to, what's your objective, who are you trying to reach? And with 200 to 300 million uniques, I mean you've got pretty much any demographic. Well it's 200 to 300 million page views. A page unique is a certain portion of that. It's a subset of that. It's a growing audience and if you take a look at ComScore is a national ranking company for a lot of different verticals. ComScore ranks their top 15 every month in terms of which web properties are the most trafficked, which web properties have the most viewership. And it's always the Google sites number one, it's always the Facebook pages number two, Twitter's up there. With our aggregated traffic between desktop and mobile, we're a top 15 property worldwide. And most of your traffic is mobile these days or is it even mixed? It's really shifting towards mobile. Compared to three years ago where it was a much smaller percentage, now it's such a significant percentage. I'm not going to say it's the majority just yet, but it's going there. But it's trending in that direction. What about the user experience? I'm sure you guys have this conversation all the time. How do you optimize that? Do I download an app? Are you building in sort of native mobile, mobile first? I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit. Sure, absolutely. Whenever we have a new product that comes out and when I say a product that could refer to an app, it could refer to a microsite that's being developed for one of our stations. It needs to work on all platforms, it just has to because if it doesn't work on mobile but it works on desktop, it doesn't make sense. So we could start with our, and when I say desktop, I refer to just standard laptops. It needs to be responsively designed. So no matter what size device you're looking at our content on, it will scale to fit the device appropriately. And scaling means that it's going to scale the content and it's going to scale the advertisements to a layout that we've tested over a period of time and that shows, produces great usability results. Now we do have a suite of apps too. Each of our stations has at least one mobile app. And when I say one, that means both iPhone and Android, just about all of them have an iPad app as well. And there's definitely a lot of usability concerns there. Not so recently, but recently enough that the conversation is still relevant is discussion around flash video. So we couldn't necessarily play flash video in terms of our broadcast news stories on certain devices because it wouldn't work on Apple devices. So the stats in the analytics show us that there's enough of an audience there and it's that important to us to make that something that we take into consideration. So as a technology guy, I like to think in terms of the stack, right? And if you think about the media business, it's got whether it's infrastructure, you got tools to build on top of that, you got applications, and now you have this data layer. And then from there, you build up design and production and distribution and partnerships and so forth. How is that so-called stack changing? Are you like heavily leveraging the cloud? Are you using sort of, you talk about mobile apps, data, is this new layer? I wonder if we could talk about how that stack is evolving and transforming. Yeah, yeah. Availability, first and foremost, is one of the major considerations of any business of our nature. We just always need to be there. There can never be any down time or any outage. Recently we partnered with WordPress VIP, which partners that powers such things as like the NFL blogs. A lot of tech crunch. Silicon angle. Yeah. Okay, yeah. Yeah, exactly. We use WordPress, I mean, why not? Perfect, and you know what? It always works. Their technology's always there, so that's the foundation. That's where all of our content is stored. Video, we use different partners. It depends on basically what the video product is that they'll determine which partner we have. Either if it's pre-recorded video or if it's live streaming video, that's the equivalent of watching our broadcast station. Then the next layer in this stack is the advertising overlay. So the advertising overlay is also a very critical component because that's what makes it work. That's what makes it possible for us to invest in these technologies in the first place. So with this advertising layer, we need to start becoming more intelligent in the ways that we take a look at the effectiveness of campaigns, just the way that our audiences respond to these campaigns. And that's part of the reason why I'm here. Just learning about IBM Watson and cognitive thinking and everything that can be provided tool-wise to us that we could take advantage of. I saw a demo of Watson this morning and I forget the name of the company, but the gentleman typed in to this analytical engine that he had, do school buses cause cancer? And within a fraction of a second, Watson not only had an answer, but it had supporting material behind it. So I found out that while school buses produce carbon dioxide emissions, that there's probably a very small chance that children will get cancer from school buses. So yeah, exactly. So the stack is evolving in terms of, it used to be enough to serve those ads, but now we need to understand them and make them better. So talk a little bit more about that. You're excited about Watson. Everybody knows Watson from the standpoint of healthcare and then certain other use cases that are emerging. Talk about how you potentially could see using a platform like Watson. Oh my God, I mean, we can use Watson. Just from the past, while I got here last night and I learned a little bit about Watson last night and then there were two sessions I sat in this morning besides the keynote. So just from that brief exposure, I used to think there was going to be this huge barrier entry in terms of using Watson. Like Watson seemed like it was this technology that was only going to be available to the biggest research hospitals or government installations, things like that, major customers that are used to using this advanced technology. But it's not the case now. IBM has really brought this platform. It's brought this tool, Watson, this intelligence to the masses, if you will. So we can use this in terms of analyzing our advertising data, just trying to make our campaigns work better so it not only provides a better result for advertisers but also for our viewers but then go a step further and say, Watson can also take a look at any data that we would give to it regarding the analytics of our websites and help us to be able to potentially fine tune our content delivery, what types of content we have that we're presenting to our viewership, what they respond to the best, what they don't respond to to really help to drive an increase in the quality of user experience. So how would it work? You would load up Watson with all kinds of data and then it would sort of learn and sort of autodidactic over time, it gets smarter. And then who interacts with Watson in theory? Would it be the business users? Or do you need a sort of data jock layer like you might with Google Analytics to a point? I mean users can use Google Analytics as well but to really get value out of it you might want to have somebody who really knows how to flex the muscles of Google Analytics or Watson. How do you see that evolving, organizationally? Organizational, you will have to have a tech layer there to implement it. I mean that's just fact but you don't need that research institution level tech layer in place. So it seems to me from what I've heard recently is that you develop a set of data and you give it to Watson and a lot of the time in the past used to be when setting up data warehouses or any type of data reporting, talking about and defining the schema, defining the data sets and things like that. Well you don't need to do that necessarily with Watson. You give Watson your data and it contextualizes this data and it builds its own schema so that it can organize and analyze this data in ways that best suits its architecture, if you will. So in any event, the people ultimately that would be using Watson to answer your question just about anybody. I mean you could type natural language into a Watson command prompt if that's the type of Watson product you're using and it gives you an English answer. So that notion of different schema model, different mental model for schema because today your schema is largely determined by Google Analytics, whatever it can and can't do. It's a whole different mindset that we're talking about with Watson. And the data, I mean data will come from all over the place but data will still come from Google Analytics or Omniture or whatever package that you use for your analytics suite. I mean there's any number of them out there but it's taking that data and acting on it in a way that makes sense. I mean there's so much data that we produce. I mean you can look at this data till you're blue in the face. It's just not humanly possible to analyze and understand all of the data that comes out of these different suites of products. Well, Watson can help you do that. Right and so, okay so I as a business user could interact with Watson. Are you worried about that? Sort of opening up the floodgates of queries and or is that something that you have a specific objective to try to catalyze? I don't think that you should be worried about it just because if you are then you're not looking at it the right way. You know you should be excited about this tool and excited about what it can do for you. I mean I don't work for IBM so don't make this think that it sounds like an IBM commercial but that's mostly the reason that I'm here is to learn about this product and the more that I hear about it and the more I learn about it, it's just exciting. I wonder if I could ask you about engagement as a metric. Sure, certainly page views, time on site, bounce rates, all those wonderful things that you get out of Google Analytics which content is driving the most interest in terms of viewership. How about engagement? Is that something that's a metric that you care about, that you look at that advertisers care about? Absolutely, so how do you measure that? I mean engagement could be as simple as ones and zeros. Either somebody engaged with the content or they didn't but how do you define engagement? So an engagement could be a click on an ad or it could be somebody specifically going and reading a news story that you put out there but engagement could be looked at in the broader sense of the term in that maybe somebody just looked at an image on the screen. They visually engaged with something. Maybe somebody paused on a title of a news story when they were scrolling through a list and they hovered over that longer than any of the other stories. I mean, is that an engagement? You can call any number of things engagements but it's ultimately how we can use the data that's generated by any number of those things to then make the user experience tailored and that much more valuable to the viewer. Jim, what's your philosophy on social media? I mean, obviously you use social media. How do you use social media? Everybody's using it. Obviously it's a great distribution channel but there's nuances, the data. A lot of times the data's locked inside of whatever it's Twitter or Facebook, LinkedIn and you can get some data and metadata out of the API. There's other things that you can do. You can certainly buy data from data services which like Gnip, which now Twitter owns and others. What's your philosophy there and how are you using social media? Just philosophies around social media. I think they're always growing. So it's such an important part of who we are. It's such an important part of, pretty much should be any business at this stage of the game. Social media is a venue where we can connect with our viewers who may not necessarily see us over the air or through any of the other channels that we use. Now that being said, how do we analyze that engagement? Like you said, there's any number of tools that can help you to analyze social media engagement and also the value that your social media properties use and it's just a matter of, I mean a lot of them have these front ends and they're graphical and you could take a look at what people are interacting with and responding to but it's a tool. There's another tool in the bag. So how about your philosophy on, you mentioned earlier, live video content. You guys stream your TV shows, pretty much, so as a user I can just come in and watch TV. So we do it actually one of two ways. So we go the pre-roll video route, so that's where you're reading a story and you want to watch the video content that's associated with it. I mean, excuse me, not pre-roll video, the actual video short form video route. So you click play and it plays that little news clip and you see the story, you're happy with the content, great. We also do live streaming. So whenever there's, for example, a broadcast on air, you're always going to be able to watch that online either on a laptop, on an iPad, on a mobile device. In any location. In any location, through an app, through a mobile browser, it doesn't matter because if we start creating barriers where people can't find our content, oh, you can't get it through a mobile browser but you can get it through our iPhone app then you've already alienated these people and they're not going to go download the app. So you need to make it readily accessible to everybody. But a lot of TV operations put up barriers. I mean, as a user, I know this, I get frustrated sometimes. Now, maybe that's, maybe it's NFL imposed, for example, or, but you're saying you guys are pretty open about that. Now, I mean, if you're talking about an NFL imposed blackout, that's different. Yeah, sure. I mean, that's something that's out of control. You can't control that, right? The television network's controlled by- But others, I do notice that when you have to go through certain hoops, maybe you got to sign in, and that's okay, I'm cool with signing in, especially if I can use Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, but how do you adjudicate the hurdle rate to get in versus the openness of the platform to get the viewer? You sort of, sounds like you're lean toward more open. Well, you need to be open, at least in my opinion, and you always need to be evolving because what might be considered open today might be a huge pain in the butt tomorrow to somebody that's trying to get our content. Why do some media companies do that? I don't think they do it on purpose in a lot of instances. I just think that certain media companies are more advanced than others, but that's just like with any industry, any vertical. We're just fortunate to be able to have the backing of the senior management that allows us to be able to work to develop these technologies that help us to put our content out there as easily as possible for everybody. Yeah, so what do you see as the future of your business? I mean, obviously you guys do a lot of TV, but you also have, it sounds like written content. You've got editorial, you've got editors at the back end, chopping up video. Things are changing. Where do you see it all going? I think in terms of the context of what the folks watching us right now are probably interested in, just being data-driven. I think that it's so important to not only feel that you're doing your best job with the product that you produce, but to be able to, first of all, show that you're doing that through some kind of cognitive thinking application, but then also to use that same technology like in IBM Watson as a tool, again, to help cultivate and craft your message and how you get that to the people who want it. So last question, we're getting the hook here. You came out of the coder world. So young people out there, maybe coders, developers, interested in applying that, what advice would you give them? I'm a trained software engineer and I had gotten myself into media. What advice would I give them? I think that if you're starting as a young coder, if you're developing apps, if you're writing systems, it doesn't matter who you work for like I did, just immerse yourself in the business that you're in. Don't lock yourself in a closet thinking that the app that I'm developing is great and it could be and that's wonderful, but learn as much as you can about the business aspect of it too because not only will that help you grow as a professional, but I think that will help to better inform your development of those products. All right, we'll leave it there. Tim Moran, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Really a pleasure keeping you on. All right, keep it right there. Everybody at theCUBE will be back. We're at IBM Insight 2014 at Mandalay Bay, right back.