Lloyd Braun is a one-man convergence story: He ran Disney’s (DIS) ABC, then Yahoo’s (YHOO) media group, and now makes up half of BermanBraun, which makes movies and TV shows and Web stuff.

Steven Levitan, meanwhile, makes good old-fashioned TV shows like “Frasier” and “Just Shoot Me.” But he earned digital bona fides this spring, when his hit show “Modern Family” used Apple’s (AAPL) iPad as a plot device in an episode that aired shortly before the gadget went on sale. Time to compare and contrast!

Liveblog

4:11 pm: Here are a couple clips from that aforementioned “Modern Family” episode. And now here are Braun and Levitan–”actual creators of content,” as Kara describes them.

4:11 pm: Levitan goes through his TV bio, which includes “The Larry Sanders Show,” which is awesome. All of you should go get the DVDs.

4:12 pm: Braun’s bio–started as a lawyer and had Levitan as a client. Then off to Brillstein-Grey, then Disney, ABC, two years at Yahoo, then hooking up with former Fox boss Gail Berman.

4:14 pm: Kara to Levitan–You don’t really care about digital, right?

Levitan: It’s changed little things, like how we share scripts and information, collaboration tools, etc. “But at its core, 90 percent of my job is still sitting down in a room full of people, and breaking stories…and that requires virtually no technology.” So interview’s done! Ho ho ho! Just kidding.

4:16 pm: Kara to Braun–What do you think? Has tech changed development of TV?

Braun: Nope, not really. Not at the pace you might think. People like Braun think of making TV shows. Digital pieces are things you think about if you have to think about them, and no one has time to think about them. Digital “is frequently a stepchild” to the television show. The marketing people do it.

But! In the future, TV shows won’t be TV shows. They’ll be brands. And TV will be a primary distribution model, but not the only one. That may be years off, but that’s where I think it’s going.

4:18 pm: Kara to Levitan–Does that sound right to you?

Not really. We talk about stuff we can do on the Web, and I spend a lot of time on the Internet. But I feel like fundamentally–I don’t know…when they come to us and say, “now let’s do some summer content” for the Web, I worry that it will drive people to the Web site and not the show, and it will make the show less good. And the Web stuff can’t be as good as the show, because it doesn’t get a full effort, because that’s what we use for the show.

4:20 pm: Kara–What about Twitter, etc.?

Levitan: Twitter’s interesting. When the show airs on the East Coast, and we’re on the West Coast, we hit Twitter, and watch people watching the show and basically in real time, laughing on Twitter. We get instant feedback about which lines work. “I think what it’s doing is bringing people back to watching television live. Because they want to be a part of that conversation….I see it as a wonderful companion right now.”

4:22 pm: Levitan–If you have a wonderful show and it’s working, it’s going to work. The digital stuff won’t make it work. But if you spend too much time on the Internet and take your eye off your show, “that’s the worst thing you can do.”

4:23 pm: Braun–Here’s the problem. Success for Levitan and everyone else is about the ratings the night the show airs. That’s the only metric that matters. So Steve used the word “dabble” to talk about the Web, and I felt the same way at ABC. But that isn’t what the full story is going to be for all of these shows. And if we think that way, we’re going to miss out on what the medium can do. We need to figure out “how to turn these different platforms into real businesses around these shows.” And until it’s your job to do that, you won’t.

4:25 pm: Kara asks about Hulu.

Levitan: It’s tricky. In the business, we often wonder, “How is this helping our show?” We’ve been asking for about six months, and we now think about two million people are watching our show on Hulu. That seems to be what successful shows get. I’m guessing, “because there’s very little transparency on Hulu.” Anyway, the problem is “we’re not getting any credit for that. Anywhere.” And two million viewers for us would be huge. That could really boost our ratings. And we don’t get money for it, either. “I question partially, the point of it, the ultimate wisdom of it….I know that what we do takes a significant investment on the studio’s part,” so if anything siphons that success away, why do that? “Television is about sustainability.” Lots of people can make one-offs, but to sustain a show, making 24 episodes a year, takes a lot of money and effort. It’s hard.

4:28 pm: Braun–Here’s the counter. You have to make these shows available on the Web, because people are going to get them anyway. It’s harder to steal the files, but not that hard. You have to condition kids not to steal this stuff. They think that it’s like drinking water. They think that buying music is like burning money.

4:30 pm: Now Kara wants to know about Yahoo (of course). What happened there, she asks Braun. Can the media and tech sides really not function together?

Braun: I learned a lot there in two years. But yes, all of the big portals are technology companies. They don’t really get media. And media people don’t really get technology. My media friends can’t tell me how Google (GOOG) makes money. They don’t understand search ads vs. display ads, etc. It’s never been explained to them. I was in the same position when I went there.

Once I got my sea legs, after about six months, “it was very difficult to evangelize ‘here’s what it should be.’…I couldn’t get it across in words.”

4:33 pm: Kara asks Levitan if he can imagine creating a hit for the Web?

Levitan: It doesn’t make sense to do it. During the writers strike we all talked about it, and Joss Whedon made that great “Dr. Horrible” short, but he pulled in lots of favors and leveraged his brand. He got there by working in conventional entertainment. There’s not enough upside for us–“the money, the payoff, the audience, is still at the end of the day, in traditional media, right now.” I have friends who do stuff for “Funny or Die” or YouTube. But it’s a hobby for them. There’s no way to make real money. Seth MacFarlane’s deal with Google, I don’t really know what that was.

Kara: Me either.

4:35 pm: Braun says this is the problem–the creators don’t see a business on the digital side. We’ve been attacking it the wrong way. It’s not about creating webisodes, etc. The way to do it is to get a massive audience coming in every day. A viral Will Ferrell video generates five million views, but there isn’t one to come see the next day, so what? So our question is, “how do you bring brands to life” on the Web. It’s not necessarily scripted television. We’ve done a terrible job educating creative people about this. [Alt theory: People who write funny sitcoms and good dramas don't want to "bring brands to life" on the Web, even if there's some money there. But then again, if there's real money...]

4:38 pm: Levitan: Everyone who tried to monkey around with the Web during the strike, either because they had money and could afford to do it, or because they didn’t have anything else to do–they’re all back writing for TV.

Questions & Answers

Q: Talk some more about Twitter. Can you use it as a promotional tool?

Levitan: [grudgingly] Yeah. Sort of. But really, it’s a feedback tool. When something strikes a chord, we really get a sense of it.

Kara: Would you ever take suggestions from the Web–changing endings, etc?

Braun: Sure. But that’s a stunt. It doesn’t move the needle.

Q: Wenda Millard asks Braun to talk about Wonderwall and Glow, two sites he helped create for MSN.

Gets 12 million uniques for Wonderwall, five million for Glow. These are mass audiences. So we’re programming for 15 million uniques. Add the politics site we’re launching and we’ll get to 20 million. Not users, people. And a billion page views. The question is, how do you program to that?

Kara asks Levitan if he sells ads on his Web site.

Levitan: We don’t have a Web site. ABC puts it out.

Greg Coleman [it's the ex-Yahoo session] asks Braun about…I’m not sure. I think it’s about creating good stuff that he didn’t do at Yahoo. “I love Lloyd Braun.” [Hrm.]

One interesting point from Braun: At big Web companies–or at Yahoo, at least–it’s hard to focus on display, with 50 percent margins, when you can focus on search, with 80 percent margins.

Q for Levitan: Why don’t you make cool stuff for mobile?

Levitan: Here’s the problem. I love technology. I love it more than 98 percent of people in television. And I came into it with a genuine desire. I was grabbing domain names before I turned in that ["Modern Family"] script.

The first thing that happens is, you have to do a show. That’s a big job. It can be 18 hours a day. So then to go, on top of it, let’s do that funny thing for mobile–and we’ve done it; we put a funny music video on the Web, it was an enormous amount of work, no one got paid, and at the end of the day, you go, “we think it helps the show, but the system right now is not designed to promote these things, to nurture these things.” If we got ratings from Hulu, at least we’d get a benefit from that. Or the ABC iPad player. We have no clue how many people are watching on that app, and the people who sell that show don’t get credit for that.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

It’s more than a little ironic that the new “Glo” Web site–a highly stylized women’s lifestyle destination MSN debuted just after midnight today in partnership with Hollywood’s BermanBraun and Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S.–will likely be one of the online media sites that shine best on the new Apple (AAPL) iPad.

Even though it was conceived before the tablet was announced and currently uses Apple-barred Adobe (ADBE) Flash in its headline rendering (soon to be adjusted), Glo is actually more aimed at upending the notion of what makes a good women-focused Web site.

With a vertical sweep, simple clean lines and a swoosh navigation bar, it’s the kind of new Internet sensibility informed almost entirely by touch, feel and–especially–visual elements.

And while it has a decidedly glossy magazine tone, Glo is also heavily laced with tools such as online scrapbooks and is strongly social, with deep links into Facebook and Twitter.

Of course, since it is a Microsoft (MSFT) property, Glo also was required to make copious use of its Bing search engine, links to which are constantly present and mostly useful.

Glo is the second dramatic site designed, created and run by the Los Angeles-based production company run by former Yahoo (YHOO) media chief and well-known television exec Lloyd Braun and his business partner, Gail Berman.

The first was a very different kind of celebrity site, Wonderwall, whose consumer engagement metrics have pleased advertisers so much that MSN ordered up another one aimed at fashion, decor, relationships and beauty.

“Obviously design plays a huge role in all we do,” said Braun in an interview with BoomTown yesterday. “We think there is an enormous opportunity to create content and program in a very different way.”

Braun said the site was trying to approximate the “endorphin release” that occurs when women get a new fashion magazine in their hands.

Berman agreed. “There is something very powerful about the connection you can establish with a magazine that has not yet been replicated online as well,” she said. “We are aiming to have a true voice to reach this kind of level of emotional connection with our readers.”

To help that along, as part of the deal with MSN, announced in December, magazine giant Hachette–publisher of Elle, Woman’s Day and Elle Decor–is providing content and editorial expertise to Glo.

There will be seven “packages” a day, with access to archival content too.

Like Wonderwall, Glo will aggregate original, Hachette and third-party content from a variety of partners, but have a voice that new Executive Editor Anne Weintraub–who has been online director for Elle magazine–called “inspirational and also aspirational” and with a heavy dose of imagery.

Instead of the unusual horizontal design that scrolls like Wonderwall, though, Glo goes steeply vertical, although still using a plethora of images and a deeply visual sensibility to attract the eye.

“We are trying to grab the reader in a different way, through linear narration,” Weintraub said in an interview yesterday. “And we also want the women who read it to feel that they are one step away in terms of aspirations, that we reflect their reality on a really good day of theirs.”

The business plan, of course, is advertising. The companies said MSN will lead the advertising sales efforts along with HFM U.S. on selected accounts, with JCPenney, Vaseline and Fox Broadcasting Company (think “Glee” and you get the demo being targeted) as inaugural advertisers.

“Advertisers have been looking for premium content opportunities online and they really are not there in this important space compared to what’s out there in print, for example,” said MSN U.S. head Scott Moore. “Like the celebrity category, we see a lot of room to grow by offering something different and of higher quality.”

Todd Anderman, SVP for Digital Media at HFM, which already has Web sites for its well-known magazines, noted that the company was in uncharted territory. “This is a new brand for all three of us,” he said.

Here are some screenshots from today’s debut (click on the images to make them larger), as well as the full press release below:

MSN, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. and BermanBraun Unveil Glo, a Premium Online Lifestyle Destination for Women

New site features an innovative design that creates the feel of a magazine experience on the Web for women seeking style, beauty and lifestyle content.

REDMOND, Wash.; LOS ANGELES; and NEW YORK–April 6, 2010–MSN, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. (HFM U.S.) and BermanBraun today announced the launch of Glo (www.Glo.com), a lifestyle site that focuses on style, beauty, living and relationship content through a uniquely engaging and dynamic experience. Glo provides users with everyday inspiration and practical ways to attain their best life. It combines the imagery and feel of a magazine with the appeal of a dynamic site such as WONDERWALL, to offer an online destination that is neither traditional Web nor print, but a unique escape for women on the Web.

Glo utilizes a unique vertical scrolling method, a feature that is exclusive to the site as an online lifestyle destination. Glo presents its topics daily with a fresh and in-the-know perspective, filled with glossy, full-screen photo galleries, videos, and unique features. Glo features original content from its editorial team, HFM U.S. properties, MSN properties and relevant content from popular lifestyle sites including Sugar/Sugar Entertainment, LimeLife, Modelinia, Remodelista and more. Key features of Glo include the following:

• Scrapbook. This feature allows readers to save a custom page of their favorite images and ideas from the site, just as if they were tearing them out of a magazine.

• Sharing tools. Sharing tools are included on each page and allow readers to share articles, videos and more with friends and family via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook and Windows Live.

• Bing integration. Bing, the new generation of search from Microsoft, is deeply integrated throughout Glo. Bing is a decision engine that offers a faster way to make more informed choices.

• Facebook. This feature allows customers to comment on articles and videos they see on Glo using their Facebook login information.

• Full-screen photo galleries. Glo is loaded with visually compelling, full-screen photo galleries, covering a range of topics that are better seen than read, such as the best shade of red lipstick and chic body art.

The design, programming and operations of the new digital brand will be spearheaded by BermanBraun and HFM U.S. Glo is accessible at www.Glo.com, as well as through the MSN home page, editorial programming across the MSN network, and across HFM U.S. online properties.

MSN will lead the advertising sales efforts along with HFM U.S. on selected accounts. Major brands such as Vaseline, JCPenney and Fox Broadcasting Company have signed on as inaugural advertisers.

“We are very happy to be partnering with MSN on the launch of the Glo Web site on behalf of the Vaseline® Aloe Fresh lotion line,” said Srini Sripada, marketing director, Unilever Skin Care. “Our goal is to communicate the light, refreshing sensory benefits of the line, and we believe that Glo provides a unique opportunity to reach women who are looking for light, fresh content. We are excited to be engaging in this endeavor.”

Anne Weintraub, who has held various positions at ELLE including former online director, has been appointed as the executive editor of Glo. She has deep editorial experience running online lifestyle experiences dating back to 1999 when she was the founding editor of Beautyjungle.com. Weintraub also worked as a beauty editor at Vogue, and as a freelance journalist for magazines such as InStyle, Harper’s Bazaar and Self.

Women spend more time online looking at lifestyle content than any other category, with 68 percent saying that going online is a great way to relax and 45 percent marking it as the most peaceful part of their day.1 For MSN, lifestyle is among the most popular content categories, reaching more than 8.2 million unique users a month. MSN will offer Glo in conjunction with its lifestyle portfolio, including MSN Lifestyle, Delish and MSN Health & Fitness.

“Lifestyle is one of our top content priorities because of its popularity among consumers and advertisers, and Glo is a great addition to our lifestyle portfolio. The launches of the new MSN home page and WONDERWALL have shown us the importance of delivering visually compelling and innovative designs and how quickly we can attract millions of customers using the distribution power of MSN,” said Scott Moore, regional partner executive producer, MSN. “We’re excited to build on our successful partnership with BermanBraun, adding the category branding expertise and panache of HFM U.S. to deliver a compelling new lifestyle experience on MSN.”

“Following our successful partnership with MSN in bringing WONDERWALL to the celebrity entertainment space, we are thrilled to be partnering with Hachette and MSN to create Glo–a new and unique lifestyle brand. We believe the innovative design and distinctive tone of Glo will excite both the online audience and our advertising partners,” BermanBraun partners Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun said in a joint statement.

“Like all publishers, we are exploring different ways to deliver content onto all platforms,” said Alain Lemarchand, president and CEO, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. “We are very excited about creating a Web-only brand with an original voice that fills an open position in the marketplace. Our collaboration with our two outstanding partners MSN and BermanBraun has been a rich one with each team bringing distinct strengths and voices to the project.”

MSN will announce a new deal with BermanBraun–the Hollywood production company run by former Yahoo media chief and well-known television exec Lloyd Braun (pictured here) and his business partner Gail Berman–to create, design and run an online lifestyle site aimed at fashion, decor, relationships and beauty.

The new site, still unnamed, will launch in the first half of next year.

As part of the deal with MSN, magazine giant Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S.–publisher of Elle, Woman’s Day and Elle Decor–will provide content and editorial expertise.

BermanBraun Interactive and the Microsoft (MSFT) portal already jointly operate the Wonderwall celebrity news site, which was launched earlier this year.

Wonderwall, which is largely run by BermanBraun, has become one of MSN’s more vibrant and successful properties.

Launched last February, the site now reaches 9.5 million monthly unique users on average, racks up more than 225 million page views a month in the U.S., and holds the top rank in engagement–measured by page views and minutes per visit–among celeb sites.

Using an unusual horizontal design with a scrolling “wall,” a plethora of pictures and a deeply visual sensibility, it aggregates content from a variety of partners, but also use a small staff of editors to differentiate it and give it “voice.”

After seeing Wonderwall for the first time, I wrote that “I was struck by the site’s arresting visual design, particularly the easily interactive wall, which has what I can only call an ‘iPhone’ feel combined with a flipping-through-a-magazine tone.”

But, in an interview yesterday, Braun said the new site will be totally different in its design and sensibility.

“We could not be more thrilled about how Wonderwall has gone,” he said. “[But] the design of this [new] site will be very ambitious and there is no similarity….It will be a different type of experience.”

MSN U.S. head Scott Moore said that Microsoft is eager to take “the [BermanBraun] partnership a step further.”

Noting that MSN had been more successful with outside partners creating content, Moore said that the portal has the kind of traffic to allow that original material to thrive.

“This model has worked well for Microsoft over the years,” he said, further noting that “diversity” was a key element in spurring innovation in MSN’s programming.

Said Todd Anderman, SVP for Digital Media at HFM, which already has Web sites for its well-known magazines: “When we look at the market, we see an opportunity to create a new brand.”

While MSN is selling the ads, as with Wonderwall, BermanBraun and HFM will also be part of the effort.

Moore would not discuss financial considerations of the deal, which was first cooked up six months ago, only noting that “everyone has skin in the game.”

But Braun said he was certain of success if the group sticks to making online content special. The site will use content that is original, from HFM and also from other partners.

“If we frame content in a certain way, people are going to click and be engaged,” he said. “It’s a terrific creative challenge.”

What’s perhaps most interesting here is the hard push for a unique editorial product, in contrast to the more aggregated approach of Yahoo (YHOO) and the new thrust by AOL–which will spin off from Time Warner (TWX) next week–aimed at creating content guided by search queries and consumer intent.

In any case, there are lots of roads in the competitive online content space.

Here’s an video interview I did with Braun right before Wonderwall was launched, as well as the press release for the new venture below it:

MSN, BermanBraun, and Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. Partner to Launch New Online Lifestyle Experience

REDMOND, Wash., LOS ANGELES and NEW YORK–Dec. 8, 2009–MSN, BermanBraun Interactive and Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. (HFM U.S.), publisher of ELLE, Woman’s Day and ELLE DECOR brands, have partnered to launch a new online lifestyle experience focused on style, beauty, relationships and home décor. The new site, which will launch in the first half of next year, will present a wide range of accessible content in an aspirational and innovative visual package. The design, programming and operations of the new digital brand will be spearheaded by BermanBraun and HFM U.S. MSN will lead the advertising sales efforts along with HFM U.S. on selected accounts.

BermanBraun and MSN, earlier this year, created and launched Wonderwall.com, which has become one of the top celebrity online news destinations reaching an average of 9.5 million unique users and 225 million page views a month in the U.S. since launch. Wonderwall.com has proved to be popular with advertisers and has achieved substantial success, compelling MSN and BermanBraun to extend their relationship and bring in HFM U.S., which has deep experience in establishing women’s brands on multiple platforms. The new lifestyle site, similar to Wonderwall.com, will be distributed through MSN and promoted on HFM U.S. Web sites and magazine properties. MSN will lead the advertising sales effort along with HFM U.S.

The lifestyle online category currently reaches an average of 100 million people every month, which is more than half of the online audience in the U.S. MSN Lifestyle is highly successful, averaging 7.3 million monthly unique users and 86 million monthly page views over the past 10 months. The new site will be designed to appeal to the highly valuable adult female audience, ages 25–49, building upon the existing MSN audience. This category of users is increasingly spending more time online and looking to the Internet for information on a range of topics. Adult females online are valuable to advertisers, as they tend to be affluent, educated and married with children, and drive many purchasing decisions for their families.

“Lifestyle is one of our top priorities because of its growing popularity and strong appeal to the adult female audience and advertisers that wish to reach them. We see a great opportunity to expand on our current lifestyle offering by delivering a new experience that is unique to the broader lifestyle category,” said Scott Moore, U.S. executive producer, MSN. “We’re excited to build on our proven model with BermanBraun, adding the category branding expertise and panache of HFM U.S. to deliver a compelling new lifestyle experience on MSN.”

“HFM U.S.’s vision is to build strong leading brands,” said Alain Lemarchand, president and CEO, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. “We believe that the strengths within our relationship are complementary, and together we can create an online destination that will be a unique and compelling experience for women.”

“We are thrilled to be in business with a world-class partner such as Hachette,” said principals Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun. “We look forward to building on our relationship with MSN and creating an innovative and unique lifestyle experience.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091208/exclusive-msn-inks-another-deal-with-wonderwall-creator-bermanbraun-for-online-lifestyle-site/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20081219/lloyd-brauns-not-going-to-take-it-anymore-i-am-not-an-umbrella-thief-and-hes-not-actually/ http://allthingsd.com/20081219/lloyd-brauns-not-going-to-take-it-anymore-i-am-not-an-umbrella-thief-and-hes-not-actually/#comments Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:16:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=7876

There it was again–like the gnarly ghost of Christmas past–in the Los Angeles Times this week. But this time Lloyd Braun wasn’t going to take it anymore.

The object of his ire was dropped right in the middle of a blog post on how Yahoo was “reversing its Hollywoodification” with–egads–no more reserved parking spaces for top execs at its Santa Monica offices.

The Times said the new rule “signals a stark new era of austerity that overshadows the elimination of the last vestiges of the corporate culture war spurred by the hiring of former Warner Bros. chieftain Terry Semel and ABC’s Braun.”

Knock, knock, L.A. Times! Because that war is actually still raging at Yahoo (YHOO)–although the parking spaces carry little symbolic weight anymore at the company, which has much bigger problems to solve these days.

But even more unusually, the piece also abruptly dropped in old allegations the newspaper had included in a devastating story in November of 2005 by Chris Gaither about Braun and Yahoo’s media push at the time, titled “Can Yahoo Sign on to Hollywood?”

It was noted in the post as an aside:

(Braun also converted a conference room with a patio into his personal office and requested a corporate jet for the Santa Monica office. Oh, and there was the time he reportedly took an umbrella without paying for it from the Yahoo store on a rainy day and then asked the clerk who requested payment: ‘Do you know who I am?’ He later explained that he just wanted to make sure the clerk knew he was good for it. But we digress).”

Digress is right, because it turns out, the bulk of those juicy anecdotes about him in the new blog post and the old story actually don’t check out, after extensive reporting BoomTown had done previously and this week too, talking to a range of key execs at the company at the time.

Thus, when I saw the Times post this week, I contacted Braun (pictured here) and sent him the link. He quickly responded via email:

“I am not an umbrella thief–and I promise I never will be. I never once asked for a corporate jet. I was and continue to be a big fan of Southwest Airlines. And I certainly never engaged in any kind of office construction while at Yahoo.”

Braun–who now runs his own online and traditional media production company called BermanBraun in L.A. with Gail Berman–also said he had immediately asked the Times for a correction of the blog post, as he says he did three years ago when the original story ran.

Times Business editor Sallie Hofmeister, whom I also contacted (but who was not in charge at the time of the 2005 piece), said the Times was looking into the situation and wrote in an email to me:

“The story we published in 2005 was a reflection of the sentiments within Yahoo at the time. We worked very closely with Yahoo on the story, so the company’s top management had every opportunity to challenge our reporting. After the story ran three years ago, neither Yahoo nor Lloyd requested a correction and no correction ran. What you hear from people today probably would be different than what they would have said three years ago. Lloyd is long gone and so are the tensions of entertainment’s invasion at Yahoo. People’s recollections also change. Enemies then are friends today.

“As for blog post, we strive for accuracy and when people in our stories take issue with our coverage, we take them very seriously.”

So do I.

Thus, it is long past time to set the record straight and put to bed a fable of raging Hollywood high-handedness–with too-good-to-be-true-because-they’re-not, clichéd lines like, “Do you know who I am?” and filched umbrellas.

Why bother looking into it at all these years hence? Well, for one, it is just not fair for inaccuracies about Braun to remain, complete with a never-die life on the Web and a nagging perception that he was some digital version of Ari Gold from “Entourage.”

But, more importantly, the struggles at Yahoo back then have everything to do with what is going on now. And that is a company culture at war with itself about what it is and should be.

I have, in fact, been collecting string on Braun’s alleged escapades for years, mostly from Yahoos. I was fascinated since, like a game of telephone gone awry, those who worked with Braun closely and would know, told a different story from some of those in Sunnyvale, who might not.

That did not stop many there from telling various stories about Braun, almost none of which were accurate when I actually followed up.

Because of that, I started to look very closely at Yahoo to figure out why such fallacies went unchecked about him and later, about an ever longer string of departed execs.

But let’s start with what was clearly true in that 2005 piece, which began with another parking kerfuffle and a hissy-fit email from a new Yahoo exec, recruited from Fox, threatening to tow “someone” who parked in his assigned place.

It was a classic opening, trying to show in an anecdote the clash that was going on at Yahoo at the time.

And it was an apt one. There was indeed a lot of resistance to the decision by then-CEO Terry Semel, who was pushing Yahoo as a media company.

To do it, Semel hired Braun–a highly successful Hollywood figure (think being key to initiating and developing “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” and you have a good idea of his stature)–to pull it off at a big new and splashy office complex in Santa Monica.

Thus, the lines were drawn by some at Yahoo HQ, where execs mostly work in cubicles and where a we’re-all-equal ethos prevailed among some of the techie old guard especially, at least in their skewed perceptions of themselves.

(Guess what? They do work in cubicles, but some Yahoos in Sunnyvale are more equal than others.)

Still, back in 2005, it was easy to make an ebullient, brash and sometimes abrasive entertainment exec like Braun into a tidy little caricature and mock the idea of his task.

And who was hired to make new and innovative kinds of online programming hits, much as Braun had on television so well.

There is no doubt there were tensions. The Times story began focusing on the level of distrust, which in my estimation–I also was watching Yahoo closely at the time–was mostly from the tech side and mostly without interface with those in Los Angeles.

But, as Gaither noted correctly:

Yahoo’s ability to blend the cultures, milking each for what it does best, will be key to reaching its ultimate goal: to build on its success as the most visited destination on the Web by leveraging the links between content and the technology used to create and deliver it.”

Unfortunately, the Times story then launched into a series of really broad clichés about Hollywood versus Silicon Valley, using the typical “conspicuously expensive car” in LaLaLand versus the “energy-saving” one in Geekville.

(Again, my experience is that the tech folks always seem to have Porsches too, much as many Hollywood slickies drive Prius hybrids.)

The story went on to talk about the arrival of Semel, whom Gaither reported was seen as not as Hollywood at first as was expected by some wary Yahoos. He then got to Braun, who apparently was.

That’s where the problems come in, first by making it seem as if Braun was responsible for the pricey lease for the new Santa Monica offices at the Colorado Center.

Actually, according to top execs like Dan Rosensweig–Braun’s direct boss–as well as sources close to Semel and many other execs involved, that facility’s planning was directed largely from Sunnyvale, as most such projects are.

Braun did give an interview when the lease was announced, but was in no way the driver of the building’s renovation, which was actually being done by the company Yahoo rented the space from.

Next, came an assertion that the execs in Santa Monica got “Hollywood-style perks,” pointing out that Braun had “converted a conference room with a patio into his personal office. He also reserved a parking space close to the elevators for his car.”

Well, Braun did have a reserved space, which was no real crime to my mind, and which was actually not particularly close to the elevators.

How do I know? I have walked Braun to his car in the parking garage, which is about as nonluxurious as it gets, as opposed to Yahoo HQ, which used valets.

More importantly, Braun converted no office space and was assigned a temporary office elsewhere during the renovation, according to a panoply of execs and workers at Yahoo, such as Rosensweig, Jeff Weiner, Scott Moore and sources close to Semel.

It was a good office–after all, Braun was the boss of the Media Group.

And while both offices did have patios, the large outdoor spaces were also kind of dingy, especially compared to the manicured lawns of Yahoo HQ. And the patios were accessible to many parts of the floors, as I noticed on my many visits.

(As an added note, after the renovations were complete, Braun’s official office was not by any means fancy and was very standard in its drone-like look.)

The worst part was the next line: “Yahoo’s top executives drew the line when Braun asked for a corporate jet,” which was followed by a stunning quote by Semel.

It read:

The reaction was basically, ‘No,’ said Semel, who does not ask Yahoo to foot the bill when he flies to Northern California in his own private plane. ‘A lot of the more traditional media companies are doing their best to scale back on some of the perks and put the investment into the products and the consumers.’”

But, top Yahoo execs have uniformly told me over the years and this week that such a request from Braun never happened.

What was actually occurring, again directed by Yahoo’s Sunnyvale HQ, was an analysis about whether the company should start a charter air shuttle for the many engineers in its Burbank facility, working on its then-Panama search project, and employees at its growing Santa Monica facility.

There could be up to 20 workers going back and forth north daily, and the Southwest Airline bills were getting high.

Thus, a look-see to determine if an L.A.-Sunnyvale shuttle for everyone was needed. But it was conceived as a less-than-high-end plane, essentially a puddle-jumper that left at 7 a.m. and came back at 7 p.m.

Braun thought it was a good idea to examine and told Rosensweig, who was in charge of looking at the charter idea. But Braun was not part of the consideration of it.

Ultimately, Semel nixed the idea as too costly, and Braun did not object.

Why Semel seemed to tell Gaither that is curious. But a person familiar with Semel’s thinking said he was only referring to an company shuttle for everyone and not a corporate jet just for Braun and his minions, as the story opaquely implied.

“The discussions over the charter had nothing to do with Lloyd,” said the person. “And he did not ever ask for a corporate jet ever.”

Rosensweig, Weiner and several other top execs at the highest echelons–many of whom did not get along with Braun–support this version, on the record.

“I never saw anything out of the ordinary or Lloyd playing by Hollywood standards,” said Vince Broady, who worked for Braun, after being brought to Yahoo by Rosensweig. “I mean, Lloyd is a colorful character, which makes people notice him, but the idea that he was more difficult than anyone else was overblown.”

There is no doubt why Braun would attract attention–he is very noticeable and had a long and bruising career in Hollywood, with lots of stories of his dishing it out. He’s a genuine character, indeed, but not really that unusual compared to others in the entertainment sector, except perhaps to some at Yahoo.

Thus, I have no doubt, though, that such a story went around that Braun did desire a jet of his own and that Gaither heard it told, just like this most incredible of anecdotes in the piece.

The infamous umbrella!

Here is what Gaither wrote:

Braun’s long career in Hollywood has led to some awkward moments and misunderstandings inside Yahoo–and provided gossipy fodder for critics eager to cast him as a technically illiterate egomaniac.

According to one widely recounted tale, on a rainy day Braun took an umbrella from the Yahoo merchandise store without paying for it. Then, when asked for payment, he reportedly berated the store clerk, asking, ‘Do you know who I am?’ In fact, Braun’s representatives say, it was an innocent question to ensure that the clerk knew he was good for the money.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said the umbrella ultimately ended up in a pool of umbrellas available to all employees.”

I could not, obviously, find the clerk to whom Braun allegedly said this. But I can say that there are free baskets of umbrellas for staffers all over Yahoo, and top execs like Braun can also buy them at company stores and just use their names as part of an account system.

And while I have no proof, the use of such a clearly hoary Hollywood phrase–“Do you know who I am?”–seems like it was simply made up to me by critics bent on making it a much better story than it was.

To be fair, Gaither does portray it as a “tale” that was circulating around Yahoo. But that probably should have alerted him that it was a very tall one indeed and not very reliable–a kind of digital urban legend rather than an actual event.

That’s why I would not have used it, without a much more explicit explanation that it was more an example of the tensions at Yahoo between the media and tech units than it was reality.

Perhaps worst of all was the impact of the piece, which forever cemented Braun’s reputation as a Hollywood-gone-wild exec.

Most interesting was that, according to both the Times and Yahoo sources, the company complained about the tone of the piece, but never asked for a correction.

Why? Sources familiar with Semel’s thinking said that he and PR execs thought it would cause more attention to focus on Braun, if they contested the piece, and it was better to just let it go.

It was probably a bad decision, given it was in the L.A. Times, which had a lot of credibility.

And, indeed, the high-profile Braun was later slapped silly by Valleywag, as the Times piece kept circulating within Yahoo. By the next year, Braun became one of the gossip blog’s first targets.

Valley–which knows a good character when it sees one and likes to poke and prod many, many such Silicon Valley-linked figures in mocking glee (with varying levels of accuracy)–even had a countdown to when Braun would be fired.

Because of this kind of thing, Braun said he tried to get Gaither to take another look at the stories about him, and met with Times editors to get them to make corrections.

The Times said Braun never formally asked for a correction and instead just complained about the story. To me, that is the same thing, but I am not privy to the Times’s internal corrections process, and Hofmeister declined to elaborate.

In any case, looking back, Braun told me this week the lack of support from Semel and Yahoo to fight the story was hugely disappointing and was the moment he realized he felt he would probably have to leave Yahoo.

Eventually, the feeling was mutual, as tensions escalated even further after the article appeared.

Braun–who had a particularly rocky relationship with Rosensweig, which is now patched up–was eventually pushed out in late 2006, after Yahoo moved away from its media focus to drill down in search.

That turned out to be a bad move, as Yahoo got its head handed to it by Google in search efforts. And it has since seriously been in tailspin in the wake of a series of jarring events.

Those include: the sudden departure of Semel mid-2007; the appointment of Co-Founder Jerry Yang as CEO; a painful public struggle to redefine Yahoo; a botched takeover fight with Microsoft (MSFT); a messy proxy battle with Carl Icahn; a collapsed search partnership with Google (GOOG); a decimated stock price; a scarily declining graphical advertising market; wrenching layoffs; and the stepping down of Yang and the thus-far uncompleted search for a new CEO.

You get the idea.

More importantly, with the cutting off of its more vaunted media aspirations, Yahoo closed the door on possible innovative directions that could have made it more competitive now, as it continues to struggle to define itself.

One of Yahoo’s great strengths–and it still is–has been its content properties, which are the most popular, by and large, on the Web. Instead, stinging from the article and the fallout of it, the company retreated from pushing forward aggressively in media.

Had it not, I can imagine a host of stuff it might have done.

And, ironically, Braun is now working on an online project with Microsoft, a celebrity site that will debut early next year and use a lots of the concepts he worked on at Yahoo.

In the 2005 piece, Gaither quoted Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner as saying, in a Yin-Yang concept: “We’re often asked, “Is Yahoo a media company or a tech company?”

Sadly, that question never got resolved then and still has not today.

It almost makes one nostalgic for stolen umbrellas, controversial parking places, questionable patios and wrangling over corporate jets.

Almost.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081219/lloyd-brauns-not-going-to-take-it-anymore-i-am-not-an-umbrella-thief-and-hes-not-actually/feed/ 23 http://allthingsd.com/20080602/bermanbraun-will-make-both-msn-celeb-site-and-also-yahoo-lunacy-report/ http://allthingsd.com/20080602/bermanbraun-will-make-both-msn-celeb-site-and-also-yahoo-lunacy-report/#comments Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:45:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080602/bermanbraun-will-make-both-msn-celeb-site-and-also-yahoo-lunacy-report/

Lloyd Braun–the former Hollywood super-programmer turned Yahoo entertainment czar turned Hollywood and online programmer–has signed a multimillion-dollar deal to make an original destination site for Microsoft’s MSN portal, aimed at aggregating celebrity, entertainment and pop culture news, according to several sources.

With the still-unnamed site, MSN plants its own Paris Hilton flag in a very crowded field, which has numerous competitors such as People.com, PerezHilton.com, AOL’s TMZ.com, PopSugar.com and Yahoo’s OMG.

It is also interesting that Microsoft (MSFT), which has focused its efforts of late on its technology, especially related to online advertising and search, is making another foray into the content arena via MSN, where it has had mixed results in the past.

Ironically, Braun (pictured here) was the exec who green-lighted the OMG site, which aggregates celebrity-oriented content and has since become a big traffic success for Yahoo (YHOO).

The deal, which will be announced tomorrow, will be a joint venture with Microsoft and BermanBraun Media–an independent multimedia production company headed by Braun and also former Hollywood studio exec Gail Berman.

Braun left Yahoo under a cloud, after clashing with his superiors who had brought him in to make new online programming, as he is doing now.

But that has not stopped Yahoo from making its own deal with Braun, sources said, a much smaller effort to produce a daily “Lunacy Report.” The deal has not yet been announced, although it has been signed.

That online project will be focused on “weird news,” which is an amazingly huge driver of page views on Yahoo’s news site–almost 7%–featuring stories like one today about a man who was jailed for faking his own death.

The video-heavy “Lunacy Report” will have Vance DeGeneres, who is the executive producer of the HardlyNews online parody site and also brother of Ellen DeGeneres, as its host.

But the MSN deal is a much larger one, requiring BermanBraun to staff up, and it already has many former Yahoo employees involved in the project, sources said.

That’s because, akin to a regular Hollywood production studio, BermanBraun will be building both the front and back end using Microsoft technology. Both BermanBraun and Microsoft will be selling ads for the site.

But it is Microsoft that will be footing much of the multimillion budget for the site–to launch in early 2009–and will own it outright. It will get support on the main MSN page and also throughout the service.

Advertisers briefed on the project said the site is aiming for higher integration of branding than just simple display ads, looking for innovative ways in which marketing messages are integrated into content.

And it will be designed to be much more interactive to spur more engagement. In fact, the new site does not look like a typical MSN site, said sources who have seen it, with a highly stylized design and a wide range of applications.

Braun was reportedly pitching advertisers last week in New York, who said he described it as focused on the wider pop culture scene and not just on celebrities, which is an area of much user interest online.

It is not clear if PepsiCo (PEP) will be a major advertiser yet. BermanBraun announced a deal last July with Pepsi to support original entertainment content developed for online platforms.

The entertainment and marketing arm of the beverage giant has a “first-look” at BermanBraun online projects and has a chance to fund and sponsor original online content it produces.

What will be most interesting will be what happens to the new MSN site and OMG, if Microsoft and Yahoo do manage to strike a merger deal at some point, despite a failure to do so thus far.

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