A radiant journey to Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu at sunset: The photo really doesn't do it justice .... After negotiating and signing a groundbreaking deal with Yahoo! in April 2007, media industry executives Wes Jackson and Bob Benz retired to the Loon, their favorite Dallas watering hole, to celebrate the contract. The deal was large and complex, and ultimately it would result in more than 800 newspapers partnering with Yahoo! for employment, ad serving, search and content. It had taken months to bring the entire thing to fruition, months that involved long hours of tense negotiating and neglecting family and friends. Jackson’s efforts in the talks had become legendary among the newspaper executives who were involved, and his boss now was pushing him to take time off to recuperate. Jackson was usually reluctant to take any time off from work, but this time he was seriously considering it. And during the course of the evening at the Loon he managed to persuade Benz to accompany him on an epic trip to Machu Picchu in Peru. Things moved quickly from there, as they tend to do when Jackson and Benz are involved, and a few weeks later the two were standing in front of the incredible Incan mountain town of Machu Picchu while a guide snapped their photo. It was the trip of a lifetime. On top of the world: Wes Jackson and Bob Benz pose in front of Machu Picchu, an Incan marvel high in the Peruvian Andes. Their trip to Peru turned out to be the impetus for Radiant Markets.For nearly two weeks, Benz and Jackson toured Peru, visiting remarkable archeological sites, meeting the people and relishing the opportunity to step out of the daily grind of their media industry jobs. Maybe it was the dizzying altitude of Cusco or the pisco sours (Peru’s national libation), but the experience began to convince them it was time for a change. Time to do something bigger with the potential to have a larger impact than their current day jobs were affording. Jackson gave notice to the Belo Corp. shortly after returning to the States. He knew there was something larger that he wanted to pursue, but he didn’t have the specific framework yet. What he did have were several cocktail napkins from the Loon that sketched out a vision of how interactive advertising could produce better results for small to medium advertisers. It took Benz a little longer, but eventually he, too, quit his day job. He'd been reading Clayton Christensen’s work on disruptive technology, specifically The Innovator's Dilemma, and he was becoming progressively more convinced that it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to meet the disruptive threat of the Internet from within a traditional media company, even one as progressive as Scripps. Together, Jackson and Benz teamed up with several other traditional media executives in Maroon Ventures, LLC, a consultancy designed to launch new businesses and to connect traditional media with startups. Jackson brought along his cocktail napkins, and the Maroon Ventures partners helped hone a strategy that has become Radiant Markets, which has officially spun off of Maroon Ventures and is now an LLC. Today, Jackson and Benz are working to turn Radiant Markets into the ultimate online advertising solution for small and medium businesses. It’s the latest project in a decade of collaborations between the two, and they believe it will be game changing. For more photos from their Peru trip, click here. For blog posts Benz made during the trip, click here.