Everybody has a wish list. Including chief technology officers.

Last week, we asked some of the media world’s leading CTOs about the biggest tech challenges they face. In a little flip of the question, we followed up by asking them what tech innovation are they secretly hoping for.

The answers range from improved analytics to connected TV and from monetizing content without using banners or display ads to having a standardized browser.

Brent Turner, CTO, MIT Technology Review
Analytics. Specifically, we need innovation around how we handle the aggregation of data and attribute that data to business results. While these are the same challenges facing marketers, media companies face the amplified problem of distributing our content across a highly fragmented world of devices, platforms and partners. There has been great innovation around reporting (especially real-time publisher-focus tools), but we do not have a centralized way to view our customer/audience touchpoints and understand the scope of our funnels. For example, we syndicate our content on NewsCred and Mashable, have an outpost on Google Currents, run multiple localized/multi-lingual versions of our site, and on and on. So then, how many people have really read a story we published? How many of those people go down our purchasing funnel and subscribe to our magazine? That is a huge, complicated problem to solve but one that will become increasingly needed as we publish in even more fragmented ways.