I’ve been called a baby in the digital media space, but at the ripe old age of 33, I remember not only life without the Internet, but also those dark days in the pre-cable era. In 1990, my father hooked up our 86/88 PC to a modem to communicate with the office. In the 90s I had a Prodigy account, raised hell on AOL chat rooms, helped my younger brother build a site on GeoCities and was broken up with more than once via email. I have been riding the digital media train for a long while, which is why my pride was stung when I realized had no idea what teletext was.
Because that is where PubForum Columbia Gorge keynote Martin Nisenholtz’s digital media narrative begins. It’s an honor to have him attend and address AdMonsters’ flagship event as he has been involved in and chronicled just about every major transformation in the digital media space. And lucky for our attendees, he’s on top of current shifts.
Teletext was basically a predecessor to web pages – a method for sending text and basic images (i.e., geometric shapes) to properly equipped televisions via telephone lines. In the US, broadcasters and news outlets began pushing out teletext services in the late 70s. Ogilvy & Mather were curious about the technology’s potential, and brought in Nisenholtz to consult as he had been a chief participant in an NYU-National Science Foundation research project on the technology. In 1983, Nisenholtz officially joined Ogilvy and founded the first digital imprint at a major advertising agency: the Interactive Marketing Group.
Although many large media organizations threw wads of cash at the technology, teletext never really caught on in the U.S., particularly with the Internet dominance of the PC. However, the knowledge that came out of teletext experiments would fuel the expansion of digital media in the years to come. Over time, the Interactive Marketing Group was merged with over divisions and reshaped to finally become OgilvyOne. And Nisenholtz would be recruited by The New York Times to launch its web presence, serving as CEO of NYTimes Digital from 1999 to 2005, when the digital operations were merged with print.
Teletext is the subject of the first chapter in the Nieman Journalism Labs’ Riptide report, an exhaustive oral history of the news’ digital revolution – or as the subtitle suggests, “epic collision between journalism and digital technology.” Based on more than 40 interviews with luminaries such as Sir Martin Sorrell, Arianna Huffington and Nisenholtz, Riptide presents a cohesive timeline of the birth and advancement of digital news.
Many of these events I witnessed and even reported on, but Riptide puts them all into glorious context. (Coincidentally, the project kicks off in 1980, the year I was born.) It’s a long essay, but well worth the time put in – perhaps it can be an enlightening beach read. One of the three collaborators who put Riptide together is Nisenholtz – so not only has he been a major player in the development of digital media, he’s also its biographer.
But Nisenholtz is not living in the past – when we chatted about having him speak at the 33rd Publisher Forum, he threw out the idea of focusing solely on Riptide as the project has been finished for about a year. Nisenholtz is still a senior advisor at the NYTimes and serves on the boards of a variety of media and technology companies. As a documentarian of transformations, he’s concerned with what happens next – particularly when it comes to the big media organizations that have survived the ride so far.
As a journalist, I’ve long loved writing about digital advertising technology – particularly from the publishers’ vantage – because this is central to the future of media. Publisher Forum attendees are integrating the technology and making the decisions that heavily affect the development of the space – which is why Nisenholtz is very much looking forward to taking questions and conversing with you.
The keynote will be in the form of an interview, but we hope to get the crowd involved quickly. After all, you digital revenue strategists are key players in the next major media transformation – the biographer needs to figure out where your story fits.