Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

BermanBraun’s Mom.me Enters the Crowded Parenting Space, Offering “Mass With Class”

In an interesting new entry into the highly competitive online parenting space, Santa Monica, Calif.-based BermanBraun is trying to use a mix of high-brow design with an ethos of casual hip and a simple content focus for a new site called Mom.me.

“We think there are ways to speak a lot more eloquently to this audience,” said Anne Marie O’Neill, editor of the site that recently launched. “It’s been conceived as a lifestyle site for moms who happen to be parents.”

It has a lot of competition, of course, including from Disney, which recently acquired the hipster parenting blog platform, Babble Media. And there are many others, too, such as Johnson & Johnson-owned BabyCenter, NBC’s iVillage, Parents.com and CafeMom.

But the Mom.me approach is trying to differentiate with a variety of social and other tools, including offering personalized ways to get only curated content based on the age group of a child.

“This is a group that grew up with the Internet and they are comfortable there, but are also sophisticated,” said O’Neill, who was formerly deputy editor at Time Inc.’s Real Simple magazine. “We think of Mom.me as mass with class and are trying to be very modern and realistic about parenthood as possible and talk to moms as we talk to each other.”

Mom.me is also the first big site launched on the Whiskey Media publishing platform, which BermanBraun acquired in March.

And it is the first time the multimedia production company is not using a big portal connection for its distribution, making it BermanBraun’s first wholly owned and operated site.

The company has previously worked with Microsoft’s MSN on the celebrity site, Wonderwall, as well as a women’s style site called Glo. And it also inked a deal with AOL for sites on pets, men and weather.

But, this time, it has created the site as part of an advertising partnership deal with Starcom MediaVest Group and a content and distribution arrangement with Demand Media.

“This is a different model, using a whole bunch of traffic drivers,” said Lloyd Braun, co-CEO of the firm. “We are going to do this with a number of key categories we want to go after.”

Procter & Gamble is the founding advertiser for Mom.me.

Here are some screenshots of the slick site, including a very fabulous slideshow on, well, baby poo — which I did not think could be done with such class:

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik