Why I'm so excited...

It’s been about a month since Motors.co.uk joined the Manheim family, and life has certainly been busy.  Now that I’m trapped on a long train journey, I wanted to take the opportunity to express how and why I’m so freaking excited about the future.

My appetite has been particularly satiated having watched physical auctions at the Leeds site over the last 2 days.  It really brought home the vision of integrating Motors.co.uk into the Manheim product set and the opportunity to create something unique for the UK automotive industry.

There are a number of work streams underway to identify and prioritise the development opportunities available to us – we are in a lucky position to have a large number of ways to build value together, but the trick to the success of the acquisition will be addressing the points in the right order.

We have a self-fulfilling path to success.  At a high level it’s not particularly complicated (or secret) and here’s how I see it:

• Integration with Manheim can help increase exposure of  Motors.co.uk in the dealer community
• A site with more advertising dealers creates a bigger pot for investment in building audience, which will build response for advertising dealers
• More response means more sales for our dealers
• Increased audience means better data that Motors and Manheim can use to help inform our customers about stock and pricing
• Enormous number of product development possibilities for reporting, transferring data, unifying systems that either significantly reduce dealer effort or improve ability to understand business performance
• Greater profits for our dealers .  QED

It is easy to ask “so what is the vision?” but the reality is that this hasn’t changed for either business - helping dealers to maximise profitability.  This was the driving force before the acquisition, but united we have many more tools to execute this.  As such, much of life is business as usual as we pick off the opportunities one-by-one.

From a Motors.co.uk perspective, the overriding theme of conversations is how we can make the site as efficient as possible in generating valuable response for advertising dealers.  This has two enormously exciting strands: 1) optimising the consumer journey on the site (making the site as enjoyable to use as possible) and 2) developing further products (or integrating existing products) to provide dealers with the tools to improve their business.

The vision also fits with AutoExposure and CAS whose products have a great fit, providing further depth to Manheim's product portfolio as well an opportunity to link systems and provide packages of enormous value to dealers.  Each of these businesses have products that are smarter than the average bear, and they're about to get smarter.

At this stage, I appreciate that this sounds like brown-nosing, non-descript, management guru waffle – but trust me it will become real.  Watching the cars line up in the lanes at Leeds, the above is clear, obvious and kid in a sweet shop exciting! 

ps - for insight into another team that are handling an exciting acquisition, have a look at Felix's blog on the EvenBase acquisition of Job Rapido.  Like the Motors/Manheim tie-up, I know that there is no way of ever conveying the amount of work (performed by many good friends of mine too) that will have been undertaken to complete the deal.  Good luck chaps!

Lent and the jeopardy of online journalism

For lent I gave up my holy trinity of websites - BBC, Daily Mail and Guardian - in the hope that I'd be opened up to a world of unhidden treasures.  I was mostly disappointed and believe it shows us to be at risk of increasingly poor content

I worry that the “free” nature of content on the net is reducing the quality of content we have access to.  The costs of good journalism against the paltry financial rewards of display advertising seem to make it an inevitability that without an understanding parent, you can end up like Richard Desmond and not bothering about online at all.  As someone who adores the internet and its breadth of content, this scares me.

I was unsure if my own consumption of online articles skewed this view.  My overwhelming sources of news content came from BBC News (and Sport), Mail Online and Guardian, to the point that I was compelled to give them up for lent and try and find new sources of enjoyment on the net.  The internet has the potential to offer you almost every piece of knowledge in the world, I shouldn’t be restricting myself to the football gossip on BBC Sport.

However, I do think that each of these sites are able to offer the experience they do through unique funding routes:

• BBC – with licence payer money, this site is effectively subscription based , with some advertising on non-UK IPs.  For speed of delivery it is unrivalled and it does offer “value for money”, though I do wonder whether people would actually pay for it if pushed in a form other than unjust (and poorly distributed) tax of the TV licence.  Despite being a heavy user, I also believe the existence of the BBC exacerbates the problem of content on the net.  Why would you pay when the BBC offers quality, free content (and free of advertising)?
• Daily Mail – competing on scale by trying to attract global brands with traffic to rival MSN, Yahoo etc, and also having the starting base of content written for the paper.  It should be stated that the viability of this has yet to be fully seen, but I’m pleased someone is trying.  It’s easy to be snobbish about the celebrity gossip, but I LOVE celebrity gossip.  
• Guardian – massively heavily staffed paper, trying to compete on the global level but has a parent who has a mandate to ensure content of this nature is in the public domain.  It is by far the best site for in-depth opinion and coverage of the media industry.

One of the main objectives was to see if there was anyone out there capable of providing the consistent breadth that the above 3 covered.  In short the answer is no.  Each of them is peerless in their specialities, but there are certainly gaps – primarily in opinion driven essays.  None of the alternatives were able to compete with the above 3 for timeliness of delivery which was my single biggest frustration.

-      Main sites that filled the void:

• Huffington Post  – Worth visiting for the guest blogs alone.  The news is shockingly light and rather too SEO heavy to make it easy to read.  However, I have greatly enjoyed the blogs on the site – in particular Greg Jenner whose narrative on history and application to today has entertained and challenged (check out this piece).  This is an excellent forum for politicians, celebrities etc to use and whilst I enjoy it, I’m often disappointed by how little they have to say (eg Gordon Brown’s thin efforts ) 
• Independent – The antisocial Facebook integration worked! I was frequently led to the site via articles other people read.   What’s more, I began to follow on the basis of specific friend’s readings.  What surprised me was how good some of the opinion pieces on sport were.  The news was bit disappointing though…
• Telegraph – I believe the Telegraph slightly squandered the opportunity to corner the “opinion” market with excellent columnists who say what they think, but the site seems to have tried to pic up the battle with Mail Online (and will lose) by going picture led.  This site is always worth a visit when Boris Johnson has submitted an article (think what you will of his political profile, but he is an outstanding journalist – with the quality of argument that is lacking on the internet).  Enormously disappointed at how slow the site was to update with news (and sometimes crash) 
• Economist – This is slightly cheating as I have full access as a subscriber (goes against the aim of seeing what you can get for free), but it’s so good that it’s worth a mention.  As a result of my exile, I spent significantly more time enjoying the site across print, iPad and online and enjoyed it.  Though I do wish they’d have a sports section… 
• New York Times - Visiting the site shows you why British newspaper sites are performing so well in the US, the layout is really poor and incredibly text focussed.  However, it benefits from some brilliant journalism with articles of depth and breadth of coverage.  Here are two articles that I read in one day on the site, great variety and both entertaining:  http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/travel/rock-cruises-bright-spots-for-the-cruise-and-music-industries.html?pagewanted=all and http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/nyregion/leyland-e-george-lets-his-mixtapes-do-the-preaching.html.  Carefully choose your articles on this site as you can only view 10 a month before the paywall comes up which feels a bit ridiculous outside of its core market – but I also acknowledge I offer them minimal commercial value, which makes me wonder if they should make such a big deal about not losing the mantle of world’s largest newspaper, after isn't it just a regional title? 

I was disappointed that I didn’t find myself drawn into a hidden world of quality blogs, though in part this was filled by Twitter which has opened my eyes to the content created on the net more than any site – do not get me started on Google News, it is dire.  Twitter has been a constant source of interesting information and links to new sources, though it was surprising how many times the links of interest were to my forbidden sites.  The only escape into blogs came from Guido Fawkes (my current Twitter favourite) and Back of the Net which is useful for providing both score updates and amusing comments on the big football matches.

So lent is over, I’m already sick of chocolate and I still haven’t been back to the sites I banned myself from.  I don’t feel less well informed (except on transfer gossip) and, in all honesty, I have probably spent less time reading articles on the internet.

My eyes haven’t been particularly opened, I knew about all of the above before and would be an occasional visitor to each, which either means I am crap at finding things on the net or there simply isn’t much out there.  What’s more, I continue to believe that the quality of online journalism will only deteriorate as it’s difficult to see how the economics can justify the investment.  The Huffington Post provides the most hope as it has approached things from an online only route, but even then relies on its status to attract relevant contributors.  I fear that like many traditional newspapers, the world of online journalism will require a few more philanthropists (or, more cynically, rich people looking to have a voice!).  

Blogs can quickly be made to sound important, but the reality is most of them are a bit rubbish really … I’m sure you’d agree with that!