HIGH FIDELITY

On September 1st, I resigned my post as SVP of Digital for Prometheus Global Media (whose brands include Billboard, Adweek and Hollywood Reporter) in order to pursue an opportunity in the mobile technology space.

Friday was my last day, and inevitably, over the past two weeks, I’ve been reflecting on the people and brands I worked with, and what we got done together.

It doesn’t actually seem like yesterday, but a long time ago that Howard Applebaum hired me — ostensibly to revamp Billboard.com but in truth, as it turned out, because I possessed an extremely large (mostly useless) vocabulary and had a knack for fixing computers. At any rate, these past three years have been wonderfully productive, a time in which we accomplished a great deal:

In July 2009, we unleashed a new Billboard.com on the world — fully consumer, highly social and interactive, with music playlists and the full Hot 100 and Top 200 charts. Since then, total site visits have grown 200%, from 6.5 mil per month to 19 million. And we won a coveted ASME award for best website design in the process. This work wouldn’t have been possible without my team, as well as Bill Werde, Howard, Lila Gerson, and Jess Letkemann.

Also that year, we launched the first Billboard Chart API, which was later used to great effect by the New York Times, in the wake of Michael Jackson’s death, to create an interactive graphic detailing MJ’s chart rankings.

We made the unprecedented decision to digitize the entire Billboard archives, get Google to pay for it, and make them available to the world. Special thanks to the Billboard Charts team for helping make this happen.

We launched the first Billboard iPhone application — the Chart app — which has been downloaded over 300,000 times and made #5 on the iTunes top music apps list within its first week. Andrew Min brought this deal, Lisa Howard gave it crucial support (as she has done for so much over the past 18 months), and George White got it done.

In October, 2010, we finished in 3.5 months what normally takes 6 months – the complete redevelopment and relaunch of THR.com. In the ten months since then, total visits to the site have increased from 4 mil per month to 10 million, while pageviews grew 200%, from 7 million to 23 million. The vast majority of this growth came from search, google news, and social, spurred, in turn, by design and platform changes — proving that no matter how good your content is, it doesn’t matter unless Google and Facebook users can see it. 

For helping get THR.com done on time I thank Richard Beckman (who pushed me to hit a goal which no one believed possible), Gautam Gulliani, Alex Boyce, Reed Hallstrom, John Marchesini and Lindsay Powers.

Also in October, we launched the company’s first iPad app, offering individual issues of the beautifully redesigned Hollywood Reporter, as well as breaking Web content.

Most recently, in April of this year, we relaunched Adweek.com, probably the smoothest project I’ve worked on here, and great fun as well. Despite deep-sixing two other sites in the process (Mediaweek.com and Brandweek.com), traffic to Adweek.com in August 2011 was 101% higher than traffic to the three sites combined in August 2010.  Special thanks to Michael Wolff, Doug Ferguson, Nick Eckhart, Hillary Frey, and Jim Cooper for maintaining a sense of humor and focus.

In summary – to use a Billboard metaphor – you could say we brought these brands into the digital age. With a bullet.

None of this would have been possible without my team, my colleagues, and the support of the owners. For that, and for the laughs and the adventures, they have my enduring gratitude and respect.

I look forward to watching how the brands evolve digitally over this year and next, as I am sure they will.