美国在线 世界需要移动数据与广告的联姻

In a memo to employees after announcing that Verizon Communications would buy his company for $4.4 billion, Tim Armstrong, AOL’s chief executive, offered a rhapsodic hymn on a single subject: mobile.

在宣布威瑞森电信(Verizon Communications)将以44亿美元（约合273亿元人民币）收购其公司以后，美国在线(AOL)的首席执行官蒂姆·阿姆斯特朗(Tim Armstrong)在写给员工的备忘录中，对一个主题表达了热情的赞美：移动业务。

The future of nearly all media, and consequently the future of nearly all advertising, he said, is about our phones. “If there is one key to our journey to building the largest digital media platform in the world, it is mobile,” he wrote, by way of explaining why AOL, a company known for its news and entertainment sites and its dial-up subscribers, was merging with a cellphone carrier.

他说，几乎所有媒体的未来，进而包括几乎所有广告的未来，都与我们的电话有关。“如果说我们在通往打造世界最大的数字媒体平台的道路上有一个关键因素，那就是移动业务，”他写道，这也解释了为何以新闻和娱乐网站以及拨号上网业务著称的AOL，会与一家移动电话运营商合并。

Mr. Armstrong ended his memo, which was otherwise puffed with jargon indecipherable to many outside the world of advertising and media, with a clear message that could double as the catchphrase of his entire industry: “Let’s mobilize.”

阿姆斯特朗的备忘录里充斥着行话，对许多广告和媒体行业以外的人而言难以理解，但他在末尾传达了一条清晰的讯息，这条讯息也可以作为他所在的整个行业的口号：“让我们移动起来。”

His words — and the deal with Verizon he just helped engineer — are just the latest corporate reaction to a staggering shift in the way people across the globe get their news and entertainment. Over the last couple of years, we have collectively decided to use our phones to reach the Internet more than we ever used our computers to do. And like a horde of aggrieved vultures that has just seen its carrion spirited away to some other part of the savanna, the tech and media business is equally panicked and excited about the vast possibilities for making money from the shift.

世界各地的人们获得新闻和娱乐内容的方式正在发生剧烈转变，他的话——以及他参与策划的与威瑞森的交易——只是企业对这种转变做出应对的最新一例。过去几年，我们集体决定用手机上网，所用的时间比我们以往任何时候用电脑上网的时间都多。就像一群忿忿不平的秃鹫，目睹属于自己的腐肉被转移到稀树草原的另一个地方，科技和媒体行业面对从这种转变中获利的广阔可能性，是又惊又喜的。

At the moment, except for Google and Facebook — which together control more than 55 percent of the $42.6 billion worldwide mobile ad market, according to eMarketer — few companies have managed to navigate the transition from desktop computers to phones. The shift has shaken up just about everything for everyone, such as Internet portals like AOL and Yahoo; carriers like Verizon and AT&T; and eCommerce ventures like Amazon. Some industries — music and newspapers among them — were just figuring out the switch from physical media like CDs and print to the web. But the switch from the web to our phones is happening even faster than the transition away from physical media, and in many ways it is more profound.

目前，除了谷歌(Google)和Facebook——据eMarketer的统计，这两家公司控制着价值426亿美元的世界移动广告市场的55%——只有少数几家公司能很好地掌控这种从台式电脑到手机的转变。这种转变几乎改变了所有人的一切，例如AOL和雅虎(Yahoo)等互联网门户网站、威瑞森和AT&T等运营商，以及亚马逊(Amazon)等电商企业。有些行业——其中包括音乐和报纸——还在摸索从光盘和印刷等实体媒介向网络的转变。然而，网络朝手机的转移发生得更快，而且在许多方面也更加深刻。

As Benedict Evans, an analyst at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is fond of pointing out in a presentation he calls “mobile is eating the world,” the smartphone industry is now shipping nearly three times as many devices as the personal computer industry did at its peak. Smartphones have led to more consumption of media than we had ever thought possible; we spend just about half the time we’re not sleeping glued to some kind of screen.

风险投资公司安德森-霍洛维茨(Andreessen Horowitz)的分析师贝内迪克特·埃文斯(Benedict Evans)在被他称为“移动业务正在吞噬世界”(mobile is eating the world)的演讲中热情地指出，智能手机行业目前的设备出货量几乎是个人电脑行业巅峰时期出货量的三倍。由于智能手机，人们对媒体的消费超出了我们以往的想象，我们把非睡眠时间中的大约一半都用在了盯着某种屏幕上。

Phones bring novel technical and user-interface challenges, some of which account for Verizon’s interest in AOL: How do you display an interesting ad on a tiny screen? On an interface fragmented by apps, how do you figure out who users are — and how to serve them with the best ads — as they switch from games to mobile web browsers to social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat?

手机在科技和用户界面方面带来了新的挑战，其中有些解释了为何威瑞森会对AOL有兴趣：你如何在一个小屏幕上展示一个有趣的广告？在一个被各种应用搞得支离破碎的界面上，你的用户正在从游戏切换到移动网页浏览器，再切换到Facebook、Twitter和Snapchat等社交平台，这时如何认清你的用户是什么样的人——以及如何为他们提供最好的广告？

The rise of smartphones may also bring about something deeper — what could be an existential question for the advertising industry, the business that funds most of modern media.

智能手机的兴起或许还会产生更深远的影响——这对于广告行业可能是个关乎生死的问题，而该行业是大多数现代媒体的资金来源。

“The question I came to when I started working on ads is, ‘Are ads even relevant now? Do they even make sense on mobile?’” Andrew Bosworth, who heads Facebook’s advertising engineering division, told me in a recent interview.

Facebook广告工程部门负责人安德鲁·博斯沃思(Andrew Bosworth)在近期的采访中告诉我，“当我开始着手处理广告时，我所遇到的问题就是‘现在的广告有用吗？它们在移动设备上还有意义吗？’”

After all, phones give us perfect information about everything wherever we are, so why would we ever fall for ads, he wondered? “I step off a train in New York City now, I do not want for an ability to find anything. I have information about everything,” Mr. Bosworth said. “So if all information is indexable and searchable, then what purpose does an ad serve?”

他感到不解的是，毕竟无论我们在哪，手机都会为我们提供各种信息，为何我们会相信广告呢？“我在纽约下了火车，我不想寻找什么。我拥有一切信息，”博斯沃思说。“因此，如果所有信息都是可索引、可搜索的，那广告有什么用呢？”

In that world, Mr. Bosworth said, advertising is valuable only if it provides direct meaning to customers — if, when you pull out your phone in New York City and check Facebook, the phone knows that you’re looking for food and presents you with an ad for a restaurant that cuts through the clutter of all your potential choices, instead giving you a recommendation that is tailored specifically for you.

博斯沃思表示，在那个世界中，广告只有对用户具有直接意义时下才是有价值的，当你在纽约拿出手机，查看Facebook的时候，手机知道你在寻找食物，并为你呈现一则餐厅广告，使其在各种潜在的选择中脱颖而出，而不是为你提供量身定制的建议。

In other words, in a world in which we all carry phones and can get accurate information at any time, ads have less leeway to cajole us into doing something we might otherwise not have done.

换句话说，我们如今都有手机，而且任何时候都能获得准确的信息，广告已经不太可能吸引我们做一些我们可能不会去做的事情。

“It’s expensive to get an ad in front of the right person,” Mr. Bosworth said. “If someone spends money to get an ad in front of you that’s not right for you, they’re punished for it.”

“向正确的受众投送广告是一件成本高昂的事情，”博斯沃思说。“如果有人花钱向你投送广告，而你不是这种广告的受众，他们会因此受到惩罚。”

Instead, ads now consult vast databases of personal information, and they rely on sophisticated pricing mechanisms, merely to suggest one option out of many thousands that may appeal to us.

广告现在会诉诸大量个人信息，依靠复杂的定价机制，然后从数千个可能会吸引我们的选择中选出一个，提供给我们。

People in the ad-tech industry said that in buying AOL, Verizon’s immediate goal may be to marry its data about customers to AOL’s capacity to serve ads to increase this sort of relevancy.

广告技术领域的人表示，从收购AOL来看，威瑞信目前的目标可能是将其客户数据与AOL的能力结合起来，提供广告，增加这种相关性。

“I think AOL was a little on their back foot on mobile,” said Ari Paparo, chief executive of an ad technology company called Beeswax. He added that the most successful companies with mobile ads tended to be those that knew a lot about their customers — that explains why Google and Facebook, which have close to perfect insight into what we do online, are such powerhouses.

“我认为AOL在移动业务方面有些处于不利境地，”技术公司Beeswax首席执行官阿里·帕帕罗(Ari Paparo)说。他还表示，在移动广告业务上最为成功的公司，往往是那些对用户非常了解的公司，这就解释了为何谷歌(Google)和Facebook会如此强大，它们对我们的网上活动有着几近完美的洞察。

With Verizon, AOL may be getting a similar trove of data. Through its cellular network and its various broadband offerings, Verizon can help AOL figure out lots of details about a user who lands in an app whose ads are powered by AOL’s ad services. Is the person male or female? How wealthy is she, and what are her broad interests?

并入威瑞信后，AOL可能会获得同样珍贵的数据。威瑞信可以通过蜂窝网络和各种宽带服务，在使用AOL广告服务的应用中了解用户的细节信息。用户是男是女？她的财务状况如何，以及她都喜欢什么？

“When you put these two sides together, it could potentially help them serve you better ads, and serve you ads in different places,” said Eric Franchi, co-founder of Undertone, an ad technology company.

“把这两个方面结合起来，可能会有助于它们为你提供更好的广告，在不同的地方向你提供广告，”广告技术公司Undertone联合创始人埃里克·弗兰奇(Eric Franchi)说。

Yet Verizon’s bet on AOL is hardly guaranteed to play out in the way the companies intend. This is both because of the general difficulties associated with any merger and because the industry AOL is going after is in a state of constant flux. Nobody really knows what will work in the larger business of funding media through ads on these new devices we’re carrying around.

然而，威瑞信对AOL所下的赌注，不见得一定能得到如愿以偿的结果。这是因为任何收购交易都存在的一些难点，也因为AOL所从事的领域处于不断变化的状态。从更大范围来看，用我们随身携带的新设备上的广告来供养媒体的方式能够奏效，没人能给出答案。

“If you’re a media company and you see that more than 50 percent of all mobile ads are going to Facebook and Google, you need to really recheck your assumptions about how you’re going to compete,” Mr. Paparo said. “To that extent, I think this is an effort to be competitive — to have some ability to just compete.”

“如果你是一家媒体公司，看到超过50%的移动广告都投放于Facebook和谷歌，那你真该好好想想自己对如何竞争的认识是不是出了问题，”帕帕罗说。“从这个意义来说，我认为这是一项增强竞争力的举措——就是努力拥有一些能够参与竞争的能力。