Execs admit plenty of missteps in new media world

By Paul Thomasch

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Executives at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia took great pains earlier this year to make certain the company's redesigned Web site looked flawless before rolling it out to the public.

After all, this is a media company whose magazines, books, products and programs feature ideas about attractive and tasteful lifestyles. Why not a beautiful Web site?

"That was a big mistake," Wenda Harris Millard, the company's president of media, said this week during a panel discussion at Advertising Week. "We put beauty before utility."

She said the front page, with its video player and jazzy graphics, included only about five links to actual content, "so the things people were looking for couldn't be found."

The mistake, she said, was in failing to understand that "when the reader or viewer or listener becomes the user, what she's looking for is much different -- at least initially."

Indeed, many executives attending the fourth annual Advertising Week conference admitted that they had misjudged exactly what consumers want these days. Figuring that out may be the advertising and media industry's top challenge, they said.

One reason is that consumers today can afford to be more demanding. They can choose among television, radio and magazines, or skip those altogether in favor of video games, music downloads and text messaging.

Today's audience also depends less on media companies for the entertainment itself, executives pointed out. User-generated content like a friend's video or a stranger's blog may suit a consumer's taste more than a film, TV show or song offered by a major corporation.