ChasNote

ChasNote Has Moved to a New URL

2006-07-03T08:25:00.001-07:00

ChasNote is now located at http://chasnote.com. Even easier to remember!

Tivo-Proofing "Lost": Product Placement Turned Inside Out

2006-05-20T15:40:00.000-07:00

All sorts of good stuff waiting for me at PVRBlog after falling two weeks behind on my reading! Such as:

"Tonight's [May 3] episode of Lost -- a show already so deeply embedded with secret signs and clues -- will feature details about the episode sprinkled within ads themselves. This is both brilliant and frightening. I can't recall wanting to watch commercials other than the annual Super Bowl but tonight I'll actually refrain from hitting the FFWD button so I don't miss anything."

Matt hopes this kind of Tivo-proofing won't become too common, but one thing I like about it: It forces marketers to think hard about what the content-makers are doing to engage with the content-consumers. If you want to join the conversation, you have spend some time listening! As Matt points out, "it must take tremendous planning to have every company with a commercial to film it featuring some tidbit from the show."

Warner Bros Offers Streaming Rights to Affiliates

2006-05-20T15:20:00.000-07:00

Matt Haughey at PVRBlog reports on some good news for local TV affiliates and viewers who prefer to watch the digital versions:

"Warner Brothers is offering online streaming of their sitcom reruns to their affiliate stations. This is a big move as other networks have chosen to sell or stream shows directly to viewers, bypassing the local stations. Also, it's great to see networks offer fans ways to view older episodes they might have missed, which until now could usually be found online from less-than-legal avenues like bittorrent and usenet."

And, who knows, serving your customers what they want may even be good business.

Everyone's a Copywriter with Modem's "Rant" Banner

2006-05-17T06:39:00.000-07:00

A year ago in a letter to the editor at the NY Times (link, reg req), I argued that agencies would never support a TV ad model that required them to create hundreds of discrete creative units -- one for each micro-target -- for every campaign:

"Sure, the concept of targeting ads to tiny clusters of TV viewers, 300 households at a time, holds a certain appeal to marketers and consumers (Jon Gertner, April 10). But here's the rub: This kind of ad targeting requires dozens if not hundreds of 30-second commercials for every single advertising campaign, each spot racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in video-production costs. In other words, creative costs could quickly outpace the media costs to place those spots on the air."

Two months ago, working with a few blog authors, Microsoft's agency (IPG's McCann SF) figured out one way to do it efficiently, online anyway. They pointed these authors to the product's brochure site and let them each develop ad messages for their own readers (ChasNote 3/8/06). Art directors stealing a page from Silicon Valley's "distributed computing" playbooks! Or perhaps a Napsterization of ad creative, where content and server power is a shared effort. One blogger-copy ad drove a 60% improvement in click-through rates over the standard agency banner.

This past week, Stanford-based Modem Media (part of Digitas) took distributed creative a step further: Rant banners. These are ad units that create a conversation not just between a brand and individual customers, but among a community of customers all sharing with each other their experiences related to a particular brand, product or service. The banners feature a rolling thread of reader posts, like a group IM chat.

As Mark Galley, Modem's VP / Creative Director, describes the first batch of rant banners for IT-jobs site Dice.com, the ad units are "a place where IT folks can vent to the world about how much their job 'sucks' (to use their language). Beyond that, it’s just flat-out entertaining to not only post as many comments as desired, but to read the endless amount of rants from other techies in similar situations. All that adds up to a ton of time being spent with the brand."

You can't beat that for engagement marketing. And it's highly endemic: The particular conversation at a site, since it's literally written by that site’s readers in their own voices, takes on the tone and personality of that community. There's a safety valve, too. When someone posts a new comment, he or she sees the comment appear immediately in the banner, but in fact this instant-gratification process is a local one. I see my own "rant" right away, but I'm looking at a version of the banner cached locally in my browser. Before my comment shows up in the conversation that is viewed by other readers across the web touched by the campaign, my comment is vetted by Modem's content filter to strip out inappropriate language or reference to company names.

Three days into the Dice campaign, the performance data is still being compiled. But the early signs are promising. Most people who have posted rants so far are posting multiple times, so time-spent will be the metric to watch. And personalized posts such as "Katie, are you there? Are you seeing this?" suggest that Modem and Dice have built an ad experience that their customers want to share with their friends. That's more than just cool.

New Yorker Doesn't Get "Me Media"

2006-05-14T20:52:00.000-07:00

In the May 15 issue of the New Yorker, John Cassidy can hardly contain his distain for the young entrepreneurs behind Facebook.

After acknowleding the site's enviable loyalty metrics ("Two-thirds of Facebook members log on at least once every twenty-four hours, and the typical user spends twenty minutes a day on the site," he tells us), Cassidy seems to feel an obligation to belittle its magic formula: "Ultimately, though, the success of sites like MySpace and Facebook may have less to do with the opportunities they provide for self-expression than with peer pressure." He cites Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia, who argues "there's a certain lack of purpose to just hanging out in public, and it's hard to justify it if you don't have a lot of free time."

I wish instead he had tracked down a few media executives for the article. (VC Jim Breyer is quoted as saying that the Washington Post Company's chairman, Donald Graham, "thinks of [Facebook] as a next-generation media business," but that's about it.) There are probably many sociology professors (among others) who would argue that television only exists because everyone in the world has too much free time on their hands. Ditto the movie industry. Ditto the video game industry. Ditto book publishing, minus guide books, school texts and self-help manuals. But there's usually something positive to be said when a media enterpreneur creates a product that captures the attention of 8,600,000 people (two-thirds of Facebook's 12.9 million monthly uniques, according to Media Metrix) for 2 hours 20 minutes a week. Let alone a product that has them interacting with other college kids rather than, say, half-comotose on the couch watching The Real Housewives of Orange County.

Another thing that bugged me: While New Yorker writers usually leave out transcription conventions to indicate stutters, regional accents or spoken pauses such as "um" and "ah" between words, Cassidy quotes co-founder Dustin Moskovitz with the blemishes left in: "We had, like, a kitchen table, which we sat around. We had our laptops there, and we, like, hammered away." Gosh, those Harvard drop-outs who have built a company that the world's top VCs value at $500 million are practically illiterate!

(Disclosure: Dustin is my wife's cousin.)

BlogHer Network Launches

2006-05-13T08:17:00.000-07:00

MediaPost reports on the launch of a new network of leading writers that cater to female readers, BlogHer. Regarding their model --

"If they choose, participating blog publishers can refuse to carry a particular advertiser. They may also carry ads from other networks, but BlogHer is insisting that its advertising be the only graphic media advertising on a partner publisher's blog.... Participating bloggers retain their own URLs, traffic, and communities, and agree to publish according to editorial guidelines."

-- I think it's a brilliant approach. Though it sounds kinda familiar!

Searchblog Readers on AdWords & AdSense

2006-05-10T16:36:00.000-07:00

Battelle posted news (Searchblog) that, earlier this week, he launched his first AdWords / AdSense program promoting a real service, FM's new media planning interface. Perhaps it's no surprise, his readers lit up the comments line. What did surprise me is how much his readers -- the gurus and wizards of the search marketing world -- still DON'T know about how Google's ad programs work:

"I have wondered for a long time why Google doesn't provide more transparency with its click data. Your content click reporting issue occurs with site targeting as well. Not sure if they are consciously hiding the information from advertisers or just don't have the tech to push this data out."

The person who wrote that comment did put a winking emoticon after that last line. Of course Google "has the tech" to push out that data; they apparently don't want to.

The Press on FM's Self-Service Platform

2006-05-04T12:46:00.000-07:00

AdAge: A key part of the platform is a new do-it-yourself planning tool that will allow companies, especially small ones, to plan, create and execute ad campaigns across Federated's blogs. Referencing Wired editor Chris Anderson, he said, "You're not going to market in the 'long tail' if you have to find every site that's a part of it. We act as a filter for that."

Boing Boing: Federated Media head honcho John Battelle just announced that the beta of FM's killer self-service ad platform is now live! You can browse ad inventory on BB, Fark, Digg, and dozens of other blogs in the FM network, check out demographics, come up with an ad plan, and then hit the buy button right then and there.

AdRants: We took a test drive and found the planning tool very easy to use providing easy selection of blogs based on segmented audience profiles and demographics gleaned from readership surveys. Individual sites, groups of sites or all sites can be included in the buy, flight dates can be set and IAB standard creative units can be selected. Federated media claims its collection of blogs can deliver 70 million monthly page views.

More coverage at FM's site.

FM Launches Self-Service Platform for Advertisers

2006-05-04T06:22:00.000-07:00

Last night at 9pm FM announced the beta launch of a seach engine for marketers who want sort the leading weblog sites and place ad campaigns (in real time) based on content categories, audience demographics or available ad inventory: Federated Media blog.

For those of you who called me a media dinosaur after my post on the extreme visions of frictionless media buying (ChasNote 4/14/06), here's a step in the right direction!

Stuart Elliott: myAdvertising

2006-05-03T15:55:00.000-07:00

Disclosure: From 1999 to 2001 I worked at a company called mySimon, and in 2002 I spent an all-day offsite talking about "Tech & You" as a possible tagline for some parts of CNET, so I'm hardly impartial on the topic of all this myWhatever in ad campaigns these days. Silliness aside, it's a nod in the right direction -- toward conversational marketing.

Allen Adamson, managing director at Landor, as quoted in Stuart Elliott's column (NY Times, reg req), sums up the good and the bad:

"'Having it your way applies increasingly to all brands,' Mr. Adamson said, referring to the longtime campaign theme for Burger King, which has recently been revived. 'It's only natural that advertisers try to flag that they are more about serving up your brand on your terms."' But the trend carries a big risk, Mr. Adamson warned. 'The demand for customization and personalization is a moving target....If you're unable to deliver, if what you offer is really no different from everybody else, the claims will do more damage than good.'"

BW on Second Life: Virtual World, Real Money

2006-04-24T13:35:00.000-07:00

The cover story for Business Week's May 1 issue (link, reg req) is the booming economy inside MMPOG Second Life. The article gets at what makes Second Life so interesting, even though other MMPOGs are (for now) bigger:

"it's a stretch to call it a game because the residents, as players prefer to be called, create everything. Unlike in other virtual worlds, Second Life's technology lets people create objects like clothes or storefronts from scratch, LEGO-style, rather than simply pluck avatar outfits or ready-made buildings from a menu. That means residents can build anything they can imagine, from notary services to candles that burn down to pools of wax..... Besides, in one important way, this virtual stuff isn't imaginary at all. In November, 2003, Linden Lab made a policy change unprecedented in online games: It allowed Second Life residents to retain full ownership of their virtual creations. The inception of property rights in the virtual world made for a thriving market economy."

MediaPost on "Metablogs"

2006-04-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

MediaPost columnist Mark Naples took a look at FM's "metaweblog" concept in today's edition.

"Federated Media is among the companies that have designed a solution that could perhaps remedy this for blogs and their advocates. Federated's metablogs offer value to three constituencies. One constituency value set is directed to the readers who want a human editor to sift through dozens of selected content sources online & to surface the essential articles each day. A second constituency value set is directed toward advertisers who want their brands associated with the leading online voices, all through one place buying opportunity. A third is directed toward the individual weblog authors, who get the opportunity to forge relationships with new readers.

I know that other blog aggregators have created similar systems. But Federated Media seems to have developed something that thinks it through more comprehensively from the buy side, the sell side, and the reader's side all at once."

Thanks for the plug, Mark!

Web Will Collect More Ad Revenue than Print Magazines in 2006

2006-04-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

That's the word from Merrill Lynch (AdAdge).

Jeff Jarvis: More on the Open Ad Marketplace

2006-04-16T14:45:00.000-07:00

Here is Jeff's reply to my note (thanks, Jeff!):

Chas,

I may be expressing this badly... and I certainly may be naive... but I do believe that such a system could instead improve the value and revenue for highly targeted and high-quality blogs and other media.

I think you are right when it comes to plain CPM and CPC advertising that can appear anywhere: Advertisers like Pay My Bills and Vonage, for example, tend to buy tonnage and judge those purchases soley on performance, right?

Up the food chain from that are branding advertisers who do want to appear on quality sites that are relevant. But I've heard from agencies that they find it difficult -- impossible, actually -- to put together a critical mass of audience that makes it worthwhile to make the buy in our medium as opposed to other media. The open system I'm proposing would make it easier for them to both find the right sites and get the apples-to-apples measurement they require.

At the top of the pyramid are highly targeted sites and here I believe the marketplace adds the greatest value because it allows advertisers to find the "perfect" sites for them and pay for them. They will pay for perfect and, at the same time, will find more efficiency because they found the ideal environments.

How does this affect networks? Well, again, I may be naive and you can tell me far better but I think that this allows networks to be more flexible and to provide one-stop-shopping to agencies: When you sell an advertiser on a specific flight and need to get more "perfect" inventory, you can do so -- but not be responsible for those added sites all the time. On the other end of things, if you have excess inventory (God forbid!), you can put it out in the marketplace.

This is not entirely a frictionless, rational, performance-based system -- though it is, that, too. Instead, this is an infranstructure for advertisers for higher value advertising and for advertisers to find the critical mass and metrics they demand in trusted, quality, endemic, targeted, and sometimes ad hoc networks of sites.

Or so I hope.

Is Frictionless Ad-Buying Good for Publishers?

2006-04-14T16:04:00.000-07:00

Jeff Jarvis's latest column for The Guardian (see BuzzMachine) proposes an "open ad marketplace":

"By doing this, we take the friction out of the ad marketplace: every blog is an atom and every ad campaign is a molecule that attracts the best. Thus both advertisers and media gain control and increase their effectiveness and their value. In this post-scarcity world, freed of the limitations of the page and the clock, you could argue that as no end of ad inventory becomes available, rates will only drop. But I also believe that advertisers will pay higher rates for the right sites that perform efficiently for them. Thus quality sites will earn more and advertisers will waste less. That is the value of openness."

I agree that media buying, selling and the metrics that inform them both are in need of serious improvement. Today most of the control is still in the hands of a few enormous media companies that don't have a vested interest in innovation or upgrading the current system.

But I don't think that a "frictionless" open marketplace benefits buyers and sellers equally. Much of the friction in today's model comes from the publisher side, ie, the content producers and their appointed media sellers. The folks who put their hearts and souls into a magazine or TV network or web site want to make the case to advertisers that the editorial product they produce, and the conversation it engenders, are unique. That uniqueness, they argue, deserves a premium. While an advertiser can find those same people -- say the few million people who watch The West Wing -- watching other shows or reading certain websites, there's extra value to reaching them when they're watching The West Wing. And making that case, god forbid, usually requires a bit of high-friction human contact.

Google has shown us that algorithms can work wonders for direct marketers looking to drive clicks at the lowest cost. Whether or not marketing algorithms can create the next Absolut, Starbucks or Nike, is -- to say the least -- an open question. Great advertising is about more than "efficient performance," and best publications do something that even the most thorough spreadsheets can't compute.

My worry is this: Create a frictionless, rational, performance-oriented marketplace for ads, and content quality and editorial innovation go down the drain.

Nearly $50MM in "Social Media" Advertising in 2006

2006-04-12T10:31:00.000-07:00

Research firm PQ Media is out with a report on ad spending in weblogs, podcasts, RSS and the rest of the "social media" platforms (from MediaPost). Is it me, or has MediaPost devised some annoying app that prevents cutting and pasting from their articles? In lieu of quoting the article.... PQ Media estimates 2006 spending will be $49.8MM, up from $20.4MM in 2005. Most of the 2005 spending -- $16.6MM -- was for advertising on blogs, which the report calls "the most mature of the user-generated online media segments."

GM's Corp Blog on Chevy Tahoe Epidode

2006-04-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

From Chevy General Manager Ed Peper's blog, a site hosted on GM's corporate blog site:

"Early on we made the decision that if we were to hold this contest, in which we invite anyone to create an ad, in an open forum, that we would be summarily destroyed in the blogosphere if we censored the ads based on their viewpoint. So, we adopted a position of openness and transparency, and decided that we would welcome the debate."

Forget Apple; GM is the darling brand among the bloggers this week!

Only 700,000 Total Podcast Users?

2006-04-07T12:08:00.000-07:00

Om cites a report by Forrester's Charlene Li (see Om Malik's Blog) that says podcast usage signifcantly lags podcast hype. In 2006, she predicts, about 700,000 households will regularly download and listen to podcasts.

While I certainly won't argue that the hype isn't outpacing the downloads, Li's figure on regular podcast users can't be right. Diggnation, the weekly program hosted by Kevin Rose and the gang from Digg.com, is downloaded 150,000 times a week. Amanda Congdon's Rocketboom has 150,000 viewers on a bad day.

Assuming it's the exact same people who watch every new episode of these programs (which would be a miraculous story of unprececented audience loyalty), that says 2 podcasts alone represent 43% of of total podcast usage in the world. Throw in The Dawn and Drew Show, and you're getting pretty close to Li's grand total users! I've got to believe there's a few more out there.

Chevy Spoof Ads: Unexpectedly Brilliant Move?

2006-04-05T09:57:00.000-07:00

First, GM's invitation to the world to "make your own" Chevy Tahoe commercial spawned a slew of Chevy-bashing spoof ads with copy such as "Our planet's oil is almost gone. You don't need G.P.S. to see where this road leads."

Then several prominent publications profiled the campaign as an unintended disaster. Like The NY Times:

"...the company was hoping that visitors to its Web site would e-mail their own videos around the Web, generating interest for the Tahoe through what is known as viral marketing. By the measure of Chevrolet Tahoe videos circulating the blogosphere and the video-hosting Web sites like YouTube, that goal was achieved. But the videos that were circulated most widely like the commercial that attacked the S.U.V. for its gas mileage, may not be what Chevrolet had in mind."

And CNET's News.com:

"General Motors did little in the way of damage control on Monday after a do-it-yourself ad campaign for a GM SUV was hijacked by critics of the company and thousands of negative ads flooded the Web."

But, finally, the consensus at many of the leading tech weblogs was, brilliant move, GM. Here's Scoble:

"It got me to think about Chevy all day long. I wasn't thinking about my Ford Focus and how it successfully went 25,000 miles (passed that point on Sunday without even a rattle). I wasn't thinking about the tax man. Or my next video I need to edit. No, I was thinking about Chevy."

And here's Mike Masnick at Techdirt:

"...it seems like perhaps GM understood what would happen a lot more than the so-called 'experts'.... GM is getting even more mileage from this campaign, and making it appear that they are more open to listening to those who disagree with them. Rather than reflecting negatively on GM, as the experts (and the reporters) would have you believe, GM actually comes out of it looking pretty good. So, it's questionable as to whether or not GM was 'slow to react' or if they are simply doing everything according to plan.

I kinda think GM was one step ahead of us on this one.

Comscore: Traffic Growth Shifts From Big Players to Blogs, Social Networking & Local Sites

2006-04-05T06:18:00.000-07:00

According to Comscore's latest numbers, traffic growth at the traditional biggies is slowing while the numbers are rising fast at blogging, social networking and local-content sites.

The Washington Post quotes Gary Arlen, analyst and president of Arlen Communications: "The growth in blogging reminds us the Internet is fulfilling its original promise about participation. This medium empowers users in such a way that they can do what they want and be heard."

ClickZ Likes Lovisa Tackleberry!

2006-04-04T20:01:00.000-07:00

ClickZ picked up the story about FM's virtual ad-sales office in Second Life. For the record, Lovisa Tackleberry isn't entirely made up; she's the virtual version of FM's real account manager, Lovisa Taylor.

Selling Ads in a Parallel Universe

2006-04-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

Before last Thursday, fifth grade was the last time I spent any meaningful time in an alternate universe.

In those pre-PC, pre-Internet days, hoofing it around the fantasy landscapes of Dungeons & Dragons required an active imagination and a crazy array of many-sided dice. When I've thought about new generations of virtual-reality games and my contemporaries who still play them, these 25 years later, I've thought that they are all, well, emotionally stuck in the fifth grade.

Then last week I sat alongside my colleague Lovisa as she opened for business FM's virtual ad-sales office in the Shipley district of Second Life. Second Life is the wildly popular virtual-reality community made by Linden Lab. By "wildly popular," I'm not referring to its reach (though, with 165,000 members, it ain't small). I'm talking about depth: The average member allegedly spends forty hours a month in world, as they say. Given that level of time investment, then, it shouldn't have surprised me (though it did) how much real money those players spend to enhance their experiences. Sources at Linden Lab tell me nearly 1000 Second Life members make a full-time living -- in the real world -- by selling services on the inside. Avatar and skin designers, virtual clothiers and real-estate moguls are among the in-world professional class. And as of last Thursday, when SL blogger Wagner James "Hamlet" Au sold us a plot of land and helped us hang a virtual shingle with FM's logo on it, you can add to that list "ad sales professionals." Mr. Au's New World Notes recently joined FM's portfolio of digital culture sites, and our new SL branch office is on the brink of its first transaction, valued at 13,500 Linden Dollars (the local currency), with one of the leading in-world fashion designers.

Relative to the L$3.3 billion financing round ($11 million to you and me, see News.com) Linden Lab closed last week from Globespan Partners, Jeff Bezos, Mitch Kapor and Pierre Omidyar, FM's first in-world deal is chump change. But it’s pretty darn exciting, to me anyway, to consummate my first-ever advertising deal in a virtual currency used by denizens of an online nation -- a currency that converts into US dollars in FM’s PayPal account. It brings me back to virtual gaming after a long hiatus, and helps me understand that concepts like Second Life aren't fun and games anymore, they're entertainment. And as we know from Hollywood, the NBA or the World Wrestling Federation, entertainment products that capture the undivided attention of large, upscale audiences are big business for advertisers and media companies -- even if they need to invent a new currency to cut their deals.

Meanwhile, John Battelle has yet to comment on virtual rooftop parties at our Second Life pad, but come by for a visit when you’re next in Shipley!

(Disclosure: Mitch Kapor and Pierre Omidyar are also investors in FM, and John Battelle is my boss.)

FM Now Accepts Payment in Linden Dollars

2006-03-31T22:18:00.000-08:00

It was a big week for Linden Lab, makers of the wildly popular virtual-reality game Second Life. First, they closed an $11 million financing round from Globespan Partners, Jeff Bezos, Mitch Kapor and Omidyar. (Disclosure: Kapor and Omidyar are investors in FM too.) I first saw the news at Fred Wilson's site. Second, in-world blogger (and recent addition to the FM family) Wagner James Au announced that FM's virtual ad-sales office opened for business in the Shipley district (New World Notes).

To put these events in context, FM's virtual office is on the brink of its first transaction, valued at L$13,500, with one of the leading in-world fashion designers. That other bit of Linden Lab news is worth more like L$3.3 billion. But it's pretty darn exciting -- to me anyway -- to consummate my first-ever advertising deal in a virtual currency used by denizens of an online nation (population: 165,000), a currency that converts into US dollars in FM's PayPal account.

Meanwhile, Battelle has yet to comment on virtual rooftop parties at our Second Life pad (here's a direct portal), but come by for a visit when you're next in Shipley!

Making User-Generated Content Safe for Advertisers

2006-03-31T14:29:00.000-08:00

As young, upscale consumers spend more time with user-generated content at sites like Facebook, MySpace, Boing Boing and Digg (and less time watching TV or reading magazines), advertisers are eager to market themselves on these sites. But for certain brands, especially those accustomed to well-regulated media environments, it can be quite a leap.

Fox, the new owners of MySpace, are hoping to make that leap easier by top-down advertiser-friendly content filtering. From MediaPost:

"...perhaps most importantly to advertisers, the company has added resources to monitor the site's mass of user-generated content. Advertisers have been reticent to experiment with MySpace since the content can be risque and, in some cases, offensive. News Corp. now reviews 2 million images a day and has removed 200,000 profiles it felt included 'questionable material.' Still, Levinsohn said, the content is practically infinite with 66 million profiles, making it impossible to inspect it all.

'It's not for every advertiser, clearly,' Levinsohn said.... [But at the same time:] 'We're turning very much into a youth marketing company.'

The risk, of course, is that this approach may damage the credibilty of the service to its millions of members. The financial liability of that situation is far greater than the lost revenue from a handful of conservative advertisers who need another year or two to remember that -- as they've always done -- they need to take their brand messages to their customers wherever those customers choose to hang out. And sending a corporate parent to chaperone the dance might turn away some of the cool kids that advertisers most want to reach.

Conversation with Sam Whitmore on Blog Advertising, Endemic Creative & Editorial Decision-Making

2006-03-24T10:01:00.000-08:00

From Sam Whitmore's Media Survey:

Leading bloggers need help selling ads, negotiating deals with bandwidth providers, and the list goes on. From a business standpoint, there’s a ton to do and no time to do it.

For a piece of the action, Federated Media Publishing (FM for short) is more than happy to ease bloggers’ pain. FM vice-president Chas Edwards, a sales veteran of TechTV and CNET Networks, explains. His words help clarify just how quickly “tech blogging” has become “tech publishing.”

Hear Chas in his own words on the SWMS Tech Media This Week (13:29) podcast, which is now posted.

Click here to listen to the conversation: Tech Media This Week podcast.

ARF Defines "Engagement" Metrics (Sort Of)

2006-03-21T10:51:00.000-08:00

“Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context,” says Advertising Research Foundation Chief Research Officer Joe Plummer in AdAge. Hmm, catchy but kinda vague. But certainly a move in the right direction. More from AdAge:

"Greg Smith, exec VP-media insights, planning and analysis at Aegis Group’s Carat Fusion, said that gross rating points-based analysis not only doesn’t show the full-picture, but it actually leads to certain kinds of marketing communications that aren't measured in its terms to sometimes get short shrift. Two examples he cited were search marketing and consumer-generated media."

Battelle in Forbes: "High-Quality Blogs and High-Quality Audiences Engaged in Talking"

2006-03-18T14:25:00.000-08:00

Yesterday in Forbes, Battelle answers questions on what makes our little company, FM, special:

"I believe very strongly that we've seen an evolution of online media, and that authorial voices are breaking out and should be supported. There is a new model emerging where the author is in charge, and it's our model to support them. I'm not going to wave my hands and say 'old media is dead,' not at all; I'm just saying that there is another model that is evolving where the head of the spear are high-quality blogs and high-quality audiences engaged in talking."

iMedia's Ad Networks Crib Sheet

2006-03-15T13:23:00.000-08:00

iMedia just published their 2nd installment of its "Ad Networks Crib Sheet" round up. Here's the summary on Federate Media.

Today's ChasNote, Brought to You by JP Morgan Partners!

2006-03-15T12:57:00.000-08:00

Today FM announced the completion of a Series A funding round headed by JP Morgan Partners. More at FM's weblog.

Can Authors Acknowledge Advertisers & Still Be Credible?

2006-03-11T15:30:00.000-08:00

A VC author Fred Wilson, whose site is a member of FM's network, recently took Sonos onto his site as a sponsor, and then -- gasp! -- he told his readers all about the deal (Fred's post). The sponsorship includes 120x600 ad banners as well as a "sponsored by" wrapper around Fred's "In Heavy Rotation" music list. Full disclosure: As FM's sales guy, I'll get paid commission on the deal.

Pamela Parker, in a story for ClickZ, honed in on the fact that Fred asked Sonos to send him their product to try out, and he promised his readers he'd blog his thoughts after he does. "But what if he finds it crappy?" Parker rightly asks. Since Fred himself accepts (or declines) any prospective ad campaigns before they run on his site, and since his site is so closely aligned with the brand of Fred Wilson, I'm guessing he'd be honest, if polite, and not accept future business from Sonos.

A point that ClickZ did not pick up is that Fred gives away his ad-sales revenue. From Fred's post: "Most of my readers know that I donate all the revenue that this blog generates to non-profit organizations and the money that Sonos pays for this sponsorship will go to FM, who will take their cut, and the balance will go to good causes. I am not doing this for the money." That policy, it would seem, puts Fred in a fairly unimpeachable position with respect to talking openly about advertisers on his site.

But the broader question is still open: Can journalists talk openly about advertisers on their sites without breaching the trust of their readers?

My post congratulating Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin on her transparent review of an advertiser's service (ChasNote 12/14/05) received some spirited feedback. (Thanks for writing, my spirited friends!) It seems to me, though, the answer is yes. If a cable network loses credibility with a viewer, that viewer has hundreds of other choices one thumb-click away; if a website does the same, that site's readers have millions of alternatives, listed one after another on Google results pages. Technorati indexes more than 30,000,000 weblog sites alone. If a site stops delivering on the promise that attracted readers in the first place, it couldn't be easier for those readers to abandon the site. And as reader-authors (them bloggers) and other online publications find less credible content at that site to which to link, the Googlejuice dries up, and it becomes harder for new readers to stumble upon that site. Among those 30,000,000 blogs there are undoubtedly a bunch of bad apples and squirrelly journalists. But all 30,000,000 of them are up against a self-policing system that may, in fact, have more teeth than old-school editorial committees.

Google Selling Demos Along with Keywords

2006-03-09T11:03:00.000-08:00

According to Battelle's sources (reported on Searchblog), Google AdWords customers can now buy paid-search clicks based on demographic profile as well as keywords. The demo data will come from the Comscore/Media Metrix panel so I'm assuming demo data is only available for sites with more than a few hundred thousand uniques (if you're a publisher using, say, AWStats -- your server logs would need to show 500,000 monthly uniques or so). And given that Comscore built its panel by offering a browser-accelerator app, its respondents may skew toward low-bandwidth home users. But still interesting to see where this will lead.

The Secret to Successful Blog Marketing

2006-03-08T10:00:00.000-08:00

Check out my guest column on MediaPost!

Commentary

The Secret to Succesful Blog Marketing: Invite 'Em Into A Conversation

by Chas Edwards, Wednesday, Mar 8, 2006 6:00 AM EST

In 2001, I was involved in building CNET Networks's "engagement marketing" programs. In the early days, engagement marketing meant convincing prospective customers to provide contact info so that the vendor's sales reps could go have a "conversation" with them.

Successful marketing on Weblogs today--and on traditional sites as they begin to imitate the participatory nature of blogs--means a different kind of engagement. It requires that the conversation begin at the first point of contact between the brand and the consumer.

Inviting consumer participation is the stock-in-trade of Weblog authors, and it's what has driven the enormous popularity of the top Weblog sites. Exceptional, proprietary content (think ESPN.com) or meaningful personalization (think myYahoo) certainly engenders loyalty. But so does inviting readers into the content experience--and publishers can accomplish the latter even without the editorial and product development war chests on hand at Disney or Yahoo. Reading group blog Boing Boing, you'll notice that most posts end with "thanks, so-and-so!" It's a publication created as much by its readers as by its four editors. Those four editors, meanwhile, have attracted 2.2 million readers! Given the sense of ownership those readers-slash-contributors feel, perhaps it's no surprise that when Boing Boing surveyed them, more than 80 percent of them reported to reading the site once a day or multiple times a day.

And once readers get the participation bug--when listeners are given a chance to talk-- they can't seem to stop. Across a dozen sites affiliated with Federated Media, including GigaOm, 43Folders, Wi-Fi Net News, TechCrunch and Gadgetopia, 60 percent of readers publish their own sites. It's hardly a leap of faith, then, to assume that great online marketing campaigns need to do the same.

Hey, if the pundits and journalists can give their readers a turn at the keyboard (gasp!), surely marketers can do the same--especially if there's a scalable way to do it.

Conversational marketing doesn't need to mean staffing a 700-person call center to hold up your end of the conversation. Here are a few examples of simple, scalable and highly effective advertising conversations.

Lenovo figured laptop buyers would have a greater inclination to buy a product they had a hand in designing. But instead of flying wannabe industrial designers to company headquarters at Raleigh, N.C., Lenovo set up a site that allowed buyers to vote for the color (black or titanium?) on the next line of ThinkPads. A small but significant step toward conversational marketing: the company gave its customers a mechanism to talk back. As I write this, 183,394 people have voted so far.

Hotel Web site Quikbook ran a static 150x60-pixel GIF ad on Boing Boing with some custom copy, "A directory of wonderful hotels," to play on Boing Boing's tag line, "A directory of wonderful stuff." It was an effort to tell Boing Boing's readers that Quikbook wasn't "targeting" them based on their "demographic profile." Instead, with a single line added to their banner, they were asking to join the unique conversation already in progress on the site. So when one of Boing Boing's readers--Xeni Jardin, also one of Boing Boing's editors--had reason to try the service, she blogged about her satisfying experience. Quikbook's servers had a workout that day!

Enterprise-search vendor FAST Search & Transfer invited its customers into a face-to-face conversation--for those willing to pay $600!--at its FastForward conference in Miami. One of the featured speakers was John Battelle, Federated Media's CEO, but more significantly in this case, the author of Searchblog. Given that many readers of GigaOm, TechCrunch, TechDirt and especially Searchblog have participated in online conversations with John, FAST included John's name in the ad copy that ran on those sites. An invitation to talk to John in person! According to Julie Ginches, FAST's senior director for PR and analyst relations, "the blog campaign pushed the conference over the top. Not only did it sell out the remaining seats, it also created the groundswell among the industry leaders who brought enormous energy to the event." In addition to paid sign-ups, the campaign brought 700 visitors to the conference information site.

In the works: A leading software vendor has enlisted several authors at FM's B2B sites to help write advertising copy that will spark a conversation with their readers. Now we're talking!

If you too are trying to crack the code on "conversational marketing," join me at OMMA Hollywood, March 27-28, and bring your own war stories to share with me. I'll be on the "Marketers as Publishers? How Client-site Video, Gaming and Podcasts Impact the Media Mix" panel, Monday March 27, 4:30-5:15pm, hoping to listen as much as I talk!

Chas Edwards--who blogs at ChasNote.com--is vice president of sales & market development for Federated Media, a network of independent Weblog sites, including Digg, Fark and Boing Boing. He will be speaking at OMMA Hollywood, which will be held March 27-28.

iPod Viewers: One Commercial Is Worth $1.99

2006-03-07T11:11:00.000-08:00

From AdAge: 72% of prospective iPod users will watch a 30-second commercial if the sponsor picks up the $1.99 fee for the download, according to a study by Frank N. Magid Associates. After the initial PR glow fades, though, will advertisers continue to pay $1990 CPMs?!

Jarvis: Small Is the New Big

2006-03-03T21:54:00.000-08:00

Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine rants beautifully about the disconnect between big advertisers & the consumers they want to reach:

"The public is valuing new media much more than the old, but the advertisers still value the old. Most every newspaper and in many cases TV networks and magazines have much larger audiences online, but the revenue for their old media properties remains much higher because the advertisers and agencies still value the old and the safe. They want metrics. They want control. They want guarantees. This, in turn, makes big publishers and producers play it safe because they don’t want to mess with the cash cow. And that means that advertisers miss the opportunity to reach a larger, younger, smarter audience in the new medium, which is — supposedly — what they’re dying to do. And that means that big media companies now face competition from a thousand Rocketbooms and a million Gawkers. That allows a TRM [the winning bidder on Rocketboom's first ad auction] to come along and snatch away an opportunity from the big, lumbering giants. That is why small is the new big. Small be nimble, small be quick, small jumped over the conglomerates."

What he said!

Wash Post: Blog Chatter is Canary in Coalmine

2006-03-03T21:10:00.000-08:00

Today's Washington Post discusses blog comments as an unfiltered early warning system for consumer trends:

"The comments are particularly valuable for measuring customer sentiment because they're gut-level and spontaneous. 'Internet word of mouth is extremely important,' said Steve Rubel, a marketing expert and senior vice president at Edelman public relations. 'You see what the most vocal consumers have to say about you and about your competitors -- and they're saying it without necessarily knowing you're watching them.'"

BuzzMetrics scoured user comments on behalf of ConAgra & tipped them off to the end of the low-carb diet phenomenon. That's over?! Boy, what a relief.

Alexa Stats on FM Tech Blogs

2006-03-03T11:22:00.000-08:00

Digg & TechCrunch have been on a tear. Boing Boing's been no slouch either, given the size they'd already achieved by a year ago.

Are We Really Tuning Out the Ads?

2006-03-02T06:23:00.000-08:00

One ad campaign on Boing Boing right now (using 125x125 GIF creative) is hovering around a 1% click-through rate. That's is between 10 and 20 TIMES the average CTR for advertisers in that position, and, according to some media-buyer friends, perhaps 20 to 100x the industry average.

So it got me thinking: If we're all as good at tuning out ads as we say we are, how could one advertiser see such vastly superior click-through results? Sure, this campaign features attractive, scantily-clad female models, but how would we know that?

I wonder if ad banners are making an impression after all.

Blogs v. Other Sites: Getting Harder to Tell Them Apart

2006-02-19T08:39:00.000-08:00

Reporting on David Sifry's latest "State of the Blogosphere," The NY Times points out,

"that it's becoming hard to tell what is a blog and what is mainstream media. Mr. Sifry calls Boing Boing a blog — and so it is. But it also does some original reporting, and has professional journalists on its staff. And oddly, Mr. Sifry calls Slashdot, a technology site with material created mostly by users, a mainstream site. Meanwhile, more and more mainstream media sites are blogging. In the end, users are most likely drawn to sites for the quality and trustworthiness of the material presented."

Yo, Corporate Bloggers: The Unvarnished Truth Is Gonna Leak

2006-02-15T14:21:00.000-08:00

Reading FT's interview with Bill Gates (I read it at Searchblog), the topic is China. But when Gates says,

"The internet overwhelmingly makes information available. It is not possible to block information, it is just not. You can make it so that the average person who just clicks on popular websites, with no extra effort, certain things don’t show up there. But in terms of actually blocking information…"

which is great advice for corporate bloggers. What's the point in spinning & hyping when a dozen credible alternative sources of information are listed on the same search results page?

Today's MediaPost talks about the benefits reaped by corporations who let their staff bloggers speak (at least some portion of) their mind:

"Pete Blackshaw chief marketing officer at buzz-monitoring firm Intelliseek, said that [Microsoft blogger Robert] Scoble likely has the authority to be quite controversial, given how helpful he's been to the company's PR efforts. 'Robert Scoble is a one-man counterpoint to the argument that Microsoft is a close-minded, evil company,' he said. 'Even if you believe he crossed the line on this, he's still such a net positive for Microsoft.'"

Well said.

New York Mag on A-List Bloggers

2006-02-13T16:27:00.000-08:00

New York Magazine (Blogs to Riches) explores why the top blogs tend to remain the top blogs -- the "power-law distribution" phenomenon brought to the web. "Internet studies have found that inbound links are an 80 percent-accurate predictor of traffic. The more links point to you, the more readers you have." Or, at least, the more links that point to you, the more publishers and bloggers trust what you have to say (see ChasNote 8/3/05).

But take your eye off the ball (or stop publishing new content for a few days) and those inbound links start to dry up, say three Top 100 bloggers, Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post), Peter Rojas (Engadget) and FM's own John Battelle (Searchblog).

Other noteworthy excerpts:

"Gawker even claims to turn away advertisers that are too low-rent; the site's ad manager boasted to Mediaweek that it takes no Ford or Chevy ads because 'we hate American cars' and no pharmaceutical ads because 'our readers are healthy and beautiful.'"

"As [NYU instructor Clay] Shirky puts it, 'The Boing Boing thing is, they have more readers than Wired and yet they have a part-time staff of five. That's the new math.'"

For the record: GM has been running ads lately on Boing Boing (an FM partner site), and we'd be happy to take ads from Ford or Chevy!

Bob Greenberg on Marketing to "Millennials"

2006-02-13T11:31:00.000-08:00

Reading yesterday's NY Times article on Bob Greenberg, I couldn't help thinking that Mr. Greenberg probably had some really smart things to say about marketing-as-a-conversation. But the article printed only a handful of kind of obvious soundbites, such as: "It's not about linear communication, and the millennials understand that; it's about symbols and icons and you click here and you click there and you control it.... Corporations have to create products that people want and customers are going to help them make that decision — and that means quality, imagination and transparency."

Google Steps Up Magazine-Ads Program

2006-02-10T14:44:00.000-08:00

Google is now selling ads in 28 consumer magazines, including full page display ads (AdAge). AdAge asks, "Because an advertiser can easily place his own ad, doesn’t the program kick media buyers out of the process?"

Based on every conversation I've ever had with buyers of AdWords & AdSense, this development will create more media-planner jobs. The jobs at risk, in my humble ad-sales-guy opinion, are those in the sales department at every magazine in the land.

Verizon CMO: $1BB in Tradition Ad Placements Didn't Buy Happiness

2006-02-09T09:13:00.000-08:00

According to AdAge, Verizon CMO John Stratton is not happy about the traditional approach his agencies & marketing partners took to spending his $1 billion last year.

"Mr. Stratton, who controls a budget of more than $2 billion, exhorted agencies to take action: 'Your clients are in trouble. They are looking to you to save them.' He said the ad inventory that has been sold for the last 50 years 'no longer works,' and marketers 'have started to figure that out.' In the process, 'your clients will fire, hire, fire, and hire agency after agency ... seeking someone –- anyone! -- who can help them perhaps on where to go next.'

Verizon Wireless is among those seeking solutions. 'Last year I spent well over a billion dollars buying space, time, air, hits and clicks across a multitude of mediums,' Mr. Stratton said. 'So if you’ve been selling me this stuff, you probably need to know that I’m not perfectly happy. And I’m not alone.'"

MSNBC: Monthly Online Ad Revenue Sometimes Beats Cable Channel

2006-02-08T08:54:00.000-08:00

From The NY Observer:

"At MSNBC, the MSNBC.com Web site sometimes earns more in monthly ad revenue than the cable channel does, said Kyoo Kim, the site’s vice president of sales."

When Nobody Wants Product Placement

2006-02-01T12:32:00.000-08:00

From AdAge:

Even with 6,800,000 people receiving newspaper-supplement Relish and a publisher willing to sell brand mentions within editorial content, the publication had no takers in its first issue. Dick Porter, president-CEO of the Publishing Group of America (Relish, American Profile), doesn't seem worried. I mean, with good old reach numbers above 6 million (actual readers is likely less than that), what's there to complain about?

Well, the last line of the AdAge story suggests Porter has one worry: "The sooner we get the consumer totally engaged with the brand the better."

I guess product placement inside a publication with 6,800,000 disengaged readers just isn't worth much.

Thomas Hawk on Digg

2006-02-01T09:10:00.000-08:00

Thomas Hawk, another author who recently joined FM (Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection), says he's experienced the Digg Effect: "Having had several of my articles appear on Digg, Slashdot and Boing Boing all three, I can personally attest that Digg is moving traffic these days on par with Boing Boing and Slashdot." (FM Signs Digg)

He reports that Digg has 140,000 registered users and 4 - 5,000,000 daily pageviews. That jives with numbers we're seeing too.

Is Digg the New Slashdot?

2006-01-27T06:43:00.000-08:00

Given that Digg just signed on with FM, I sure hope so!

But since I'm partisan on the topic, I refer you to Jason Kottke. His January 12 post, "Digg vs. Slashdot (or, traffic vs. influence)," provides an interesting case study on the difference between reach and importance. It's worth reading the whole thing, but here's what I came away with:

--Alexa stats show Digg gaining on Slashdot in terms of reach (Alexa combines pageviews and unique visitors), but Slashdot still has nearly twice (1.8x) the reach of Digg

--Both sites have enormous power to move traffic around the web. When Digg posted a link to Kottke's site for 3 hours (between 11pm Saturday & 2am Sunday, not exactly prime time), they sent 20,000 people to Kottke. When Slashdot picked up the same link (Sunday afternoon) and posted it for 24 hours, it drove over 84,000 visitors to Kottke.

--Influence, ie, the ability to light the match on the forest-fire that spreads across the web, isn't the same thing as direct audience to one's site. "I'm pretty sure that the person who submitted this link to Slashdot got it from Digg or at least from a site that got it from Digg. Bottom line: if the iPod thing, which is several months old, hadn't been Dugg, it would not have appeared on Slashdot the next day."

Bottom line: Slashdot's still bigger, in conventional terms. But Digg -- in this example, anyway -- reaches more people.

Comcast Inserts Product-Placement in VOD

2006-01-18T12:36:00.000-08:00

New Balance product placement in VOD Exercise TV programs won't ruffle any feathers -- it's a perfect match. But product placement alone won't pick up all of the ad-revenue slack created by commercial skipping. Nor does it offer much for the marketer that doesn't have several million dollars to throw at each media partner. From today's NY Times.

Project Apollo's $6 Billion Test

2006-01-05T07:16:00.000-08:00

Unilever joins P&G, SC Johnson and 3 other companies in a test of Project Apollo, Arbitron and VNU Nielsen's joint venture to track media consumption beyond TV watching (AdAge). Together these marketers will spend $6.2 billion in measured media spending this year. The relatively small Apollo research panel, though, limits the brands who can learn from this pilot to those with enormous marketing budgets:

"Because impact from any given ad or marketing vehicle tends to be relatively small, a 6,250-member panel may provide data useable only for the biggest brands used by a substantial portion of U.S. consumers, said Mike Hess, director-global research and consumer insights, of Omnicom GroupÂs OMD."

More on Apollo, portable people-meters and TV's micro-targeting future: ChasNote 4/13/05.

More Unexpected Blog-Advertising Benefits

2006-01-03T16:43:00.000-08:00

GapingVoid's Hugh McLeod (via AdRants) talks about brand goodness that isn't measured in effective CPC or PR chatter among bloggers: "what Macleod calls The Porous Membrane, the wall between internal brand conversations and external consumer conversations."

"The simple fact that the wine [being advertised] was out there and was being blogged about became part of the story telling sales process. As the sales force went out to supermarket buyers and importers, there was a new, different and exciting story to tell. Additionally, a retail outlet is far more likely to take on an increased inventory if it knows the product is getting talked about. The mindset is that if they're talking, they're more likely to buy."

I couldn't agree more with Steve's description of blog marketing done right:

"A big budget brand campaign is a briefly-worded, single-messaged megaphone approach. Not much can be forced through that megaphone and what is forced through is often misinterpreted. A blogging campaign throws the megaphone on the floor and picks up the martini glass creating a cocktail party at which people talk to people normally in a language unencumbered by pointless brand blather."

F500 Bloggers

2006-01-02T08:57:00.000-08:00

Check out the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki to see which big companies are active bloggers. Coming soon: Stock-price tracking to see if there's a correlation between an openness to frank, accessible dialog about your brand and the financial performance of your company.

The Importance of Tags

2006-01-02T08:23:00.000-08:00

Jeff Jarvis provides a succinct explanation of the role tags will play in the next generation of internet applications (BuzzMachine):

"The web is about connections and the value that arises from them if you enable people to collect and communicate. In the old, big, centralised, controlled world of media, a few people with a few tools -- pencils, presses and Dewey decimals -- thought they could organise the world and its content. But as it turns out, left to its own devices, the world is often better at organising itself."

FM #2 on Blog Network List

2005-12-21T09:10:00.000-08:00

BlogMedia, Inc., has started tracking leading blogs & top networks of blogs based on audience size, Google PageRank, Technorati in-bound link counts, etc. Their stated mission is to "look at various ways to track and rank the performance of the many blog networks dotting the landscape today. It's our goal to be the most comprehensive source of metrics and analysis for the blog network world."

I'm thrilled to see Federated Media at #2! Here's the full list: Blog Network List

Viral Marketing Done Right

2005-12-14T13:39:00.000-08:00

Back in September, Steve Hall at AdRants wrote about an odd viral campaign for a Dutch newspaper (AdRants post). Steve didn't know what the Dutch newspaper's message was, but he called the "viral" part a success -- because the editors at Boing Boing linked to the story. Ie, edit coverage by Boing Boing equals a viral home run.

Today, Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin kicked off another viral success story (Xeni's post), this time for a brand that wasn't pulling zany stunts in order to "go viral":

"I haven't done this before, but wanted to share a personal anecdote involving one of Boing Boing's sponsors -- Quikbook.com. Recently, I needed to find a hotel room in a *totally* sold out city at the last minute. I had no luck with the travel websites and bucket shops I usually turn to for hotel booking. Just when it looked like a $900/night janitor's closet at the Podunk Craquehaus was my only option, I remembered the Quikbook ad on Boing Boing. I clicked tentatively, ended up booking a great room at an impossibly sold-out upscale hipster property -- at a really nice discount off the rack rate. I'm absolutely planning to use them again. Also, Quikbook smells nice and has great hair."

Unlike most wanna-be viral campaigns, Quikbook used plain old advertising. They did make an effort to let Boing Boing's readers -- an audience which, obviously enough, includes the site's 4 editors -- know that their ad didn't end up on the site by accident: They played off Boing Boing's tagline by referring to themselves as "A directory of wonderful hotels." Not exactly a ground-breaking marketing tactic, but rather one that has been working wonders for over 50 years.

Nor did they disrepect the journalists at Boing Boing with requests for editorial coverage in exchange for ad dollars. They just bought an ad on the site and used the real estate to tell Boing Boing readers exactly what they do. No viral gimmicks and no sleazy tactics.

Meanwhile, Quikbook's web servers are overheating right now because Xeni pointed the 2 million people who read Boing Boing (and another 1.3 million who subscribe to Boing Boing's feed) to their site with an unsolicited rave review.

(Disclosure: Federated Media, my employer, handles ads sales & other business stuff for Boing Boing.)

Print Newspapers: "21st Century Equivalent of Running a Record Company Specializing in Vinyl"

2005-12-12T08:46:00.000-08:00

That's the word from Andrew Gowers, the recently departed editor of The Financial Times (see AdAge). But the digital editions alone don't make enough money yet to support the current news-gathering infrastructure at conventional newspapers, so the worry -- at least according to the journalists who write about the situation for their conventional newspapers -- is that quality, hard-hitting journalism is headed for extinction.

Advertising Age executive editor Johan Bloom, however, includes the perspective of Rafat Ali, a veteran of both print and online publications, who points out that while the organizational structure at conventional newspapers won't survive the Internet, quality news journalism certainly will:

"The answer more likely lies in a wholesale shift in the journalism model and mind-set. Rafat Ali, who runs Paidcontent.org -- a site devoted to new media models -- is an advocate of this Journalism 2.0. In the world he describes, editors would stop wasting resources by ordering reporters to re-create existing stories, instead accepting that part of the role of their news sites is to aggregate the most relevant content regardless of its origins. That would free up time for news reporters to dig up genuinely original stories -- aka, er, news! Pay structures and cultures would encourage journalists to be more entrepreneurial."

Yahoo Buys Delicious

2005-12-09T17:02:00.000-08:00

Mike Arrington has the scoop at TechCrunch.

Taken together with Yahoo's acquisition of Flickr earlier this year, this deal is another step in Yahoo's march to regain some mojo in search. They're betting that user-generated content tags will deliver better search results than Google's index of Web's link structure.

I bet they also plan to integrate these tags with their ad server. One day soon, the collective brain of the Internet's users will create highly targeted ad rotations.

Podcasters Dawn & Drew Quit Day Jobs

2005-12-09T07:12:00.000-08:00

According to The San Jose Merc, Drew Domkus is making enough money from ads in "The Dawn & Drew Show" that he quit his job. Congrats, Drew! I hope there will be more where that came from. The gang at "Mommycast" is also putting up big numbers:

"Virginia moms Paige Heniger and Gretchen Vogelzang began 'Mommycast' -- a show about the joys and travails of motherhood -- in March. The pair has quickly become podcasting stars, drawing hundreds of thousands of listeners a month and appearing on national news shows."

"In November, the duo announced what is perhaps the most lucrative podcasting marketing deal to date -- a 12-month sponsorship agreement with Dixie paper products, worth more than $100,000."

Product Placement, Right Into Kids' Imaginations

2005-12-07T21:25:00.000-08:00

In June Nickelodeon-parent Viacom bought Neopets for $160 million -- $6.4 million per member. That's a lot of money. But since 80% of those members are under 18, Viacom has plenty of time to recoup its investment. From Wired's "The Neopets Addiction":

"For Viacom, the main draw is the site's advertising model. In a world of TiVo, pop-up blockers, and satellite radio, where it keeps getting harder to reach people with ads, Neopets collapses the boundaries between content and commercials. Many zones in the vast make-believe world, like the Firefly Mobile Phone Zone, are sponsored by companies, and there are branded games like Nestlé Ice Cream Frozen Flights and Pepperidge Farms Goldfish Sandwich Snackers. Tyler likes to play McDonald's: Meal Hunt, in which he searches for lost McNuggets. Jana Gagen, his mom, says they've been taking more trips to the real-world McDonald's ever since Tyler started racking up NeoPoints in the restaurant's online game. 'We go to get the Neopets toys,' she says. The tie-in merchandise comes with Happy Meals.

Neopets calls its model 'immersive advertising' and hypes it in a press kit as 'an evolutionary step forward in the traditional marketing practice of product placement.'"

Mag Industry: Let's Stop Fudging Our Numbers

2005-12-07T14:46:00.000-08:00

When I present advertisers with readership numbers from server logs cross-referenced by ad-server counts, I get these "yeah, whatever" nods. Like they'll believe my numbers when I have certified, audited numbers like traditional magazines have. But I'm not sure I want certified, audited numbers like that! In AdAge today, MPA chairman Jack Kliger calls for more transparency:

"With the industry’s largest player, Time Inc., currently cooperating with federal authorities investigating impropriety in circulation practices, Jack Kliger, Magazine Publishers of America chairman and president-CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., called for the industry to clean up its act.

More on print circulation inflation:

The Newsday scandal in their own words. An excerpt:

"But the operation was a sham -- an elaborate ruse orchestrated by some circulation managers to fool auditors investigating claims that Newsday had fraudulently boosted its circulation, according to Newsday's independent home-delivery agents who participated in the scheme and two others who are familiar with it."

Sally Falkow (Sally Falkow's WebsiteContentStrategy) connects the practice of fluffing print-circulation numbers to the shift in media spending to the Internet:

"NewsDay has admitted that it had inflated its circulation by about 100,000 copies on weekdays and Sunday for the 12 months ended September 2003; Hoy's circulation was inflated by 45,000 copies during the same period. Parent Tribune Co. has set aside $90 million to reimburse advertisers who paid for fraudulently inflated circulation.... Online ad spend has been up eight week in a row. In the fourth quarter of 2004, online advertising reached a new high of $2.7 billion, according to independent research conducted by Pricewaterhouse Coopers for the Internet Advertising Bureau. This steady climb was further supported by strong Q1 2005 earnings from Yahoo and Google, indicating a solid resurgence for online advertising. Seems to me these might be connected."

Not a bad guess.

On-Demand Commercial Watching

2005-11-30T22:08:00.000-08:00

Now, this is cool -- but will it work? Tivo is working on models for on-demand commercial watching. Here's the story at AdAge. The unanswered questions:

"But just what product or service categories will cause consumers to seek out information in a TV format? That’s one of the key questions the group is trying to answer. Also to be determined is the design and function of TiVo’s user interface; the service’s pricing; and what sort of data viewers are willing to divulge to marketers from whom they’ve received content."

Math Behind Eye-Catching Ads

2005-11-29T13:42:00.000-08:00

Two USC engineers have developed a scientific model that does the math on visual-communications elements that rise above the noise & catch viewers' attention. See David Pescovitz's Boing Boing post, "Mathematics of Surprise".

From the USC press release:

Analyzing such a stream, researchers can isolate stimuli with visual attributes that are unique in the mix by breaking down the signal into "feature channels," each describing a particular attribute (i.e., color) in the mix. Such features are called "salient." Itti himself previously developed a measure of saliency.

A parallel analysis performs similar operations, but does so over time, not space, looking for new elements suddenly appearing. This approach is said to model "novelty."

My highly unscientific interpretation: Refresh your creative often!

Battelle in NYT: Building a Better Bubble

2005-11-18T15:55:00.000-08:00

Check out John's op-ed in the NY Times. I sure hope he's right! To this line, however, I want to add some thoughts:

"Recall that the demise of Web 1.0 was predicated in large part on the collapse of the Internet advertising business -- people were spending millions buying billboard-like ads that, it turns out, nobody was paying attention to."

The enormous flood of venture capital into early-stage start-ups certainly led to some stupid ad spending. Oh my, was there stupid ad spending! In 1999 I was at mySimon, a shopping search engine site. We sought to raise $13 million to invest in our technology and to expand our product and sales teams. I kid you not: the VCs wouldn't give us $13 million -- we had to take $25 million, because, they told us, we needed marketing dollars to launch ourselves as a consumer brand. (I would argue that in mySimon's case, our investors were right. But that's a longer discussion.)

The point is, there was too much money being spent too fast, and it led to tremenous waste. Some of those investment dollars and ad budgets enabled the launch of indisputably hare-brained business ideas. Others, some with good business plans, spent money unwisely because they felt the urgency of the mythic "first mover advantage." Others got suckered into round-trip AOL "investment" deals, which pumped the ad marketplace with dollars Eliot Spitzer might call, um, illegal.

When the wasteful spending didn't return revenues or profits quickly enough, investors stopped funding the ad-spending circus. I'd argue that the collapse of internet advertising in 2000-2002 had more to do with investors sobering up, and less to do with whether or not website visitors were paying attention.

Finally: TV Spots Catered to Our Short Attention Spans

2005-11-17T14:53:00.000-08:00

From today's Ad Age: Belgium's OneSecond promotes their "one second" breath mints with one-second TV spots.

NPR's "Changing Face of TV" Panel

2005-11-16T13:58:00.000-08:00

Today on NPR the "Talk of the Nation" gang discussed The Changing Face of Television. Panelists included: David Kiley, marketing editor for Business Week; David Zaslav, president of NBC Universal Cable; and Anthony Zuiker, creator of the CSI programs. One exchange in particular suggested that denial is alive & well in TV land. (I don't have a transcript, so I'm paraphrasing.)

TOTN: "If you're going to launch an entertainment franchise like CSI, don't you need a scheduled, promoted, prime-time TV launch to create audience momentum?"

AZ: "Well, yes. Big entertainment programs will always start with broadcast TV."

Hmm. That seems like a silly thing to say, here in late 2005.

43Folders: Blog-Loyalty Trend Continues

2005-11-16T10:10:00.000-08:00

Survey results from Merlin Mann's 43Folders readers are in, and we have another example of off-the-charts audience affinity. Sixty-eight percent (68%) read the site daily or more than once a day. When I combine these loyal reading habits (content "consumption") with their content "contribution" habits -- 60% or Merlin's readers publish their own blogs and 63% post comments on other blogs -- I'm convinced the two are connected.

(Thanks, Seth, for helping me make the connection! See ChasNote 10/26/05.)

Other noteworthy 43Folders reader-stats for tech marketers: 42% are computer professionals or engineers and 93% are asked by friends & colleagues for tech advice.

Mossberg's Favorite Blogs

2005-11-16T09:02:00.000-08:00

WSJ tech columnist Walt Mossberg lists his favorite blogs, WSJ. Engadget, Slashdot and FM's own Searchblog made the cut. Congrats, John!

Big-Butt Advertisers Spent $94BB in 2004

2005-11-15T22:40:00.000-08:00

According to Ad Age's Global Marketing Report 2004, the top 100 advertisers spent nearly $100 billion in 2004. "That tally represented growth of 12.1% and the highest vista for the top marketers since their 2.6% decline through year 2001." P&G, GM and Unilever lead the list.

Yup, let's expand the media business down the long tail, but let's not ignore the biggies in the process.

Blog Loyalty: Another Data Point

2005-11-15T09:01:00.000-08:00

Last week Gadgetopia (a site associated with Federated Media) polled its 100,000 readers. The skew toward tech professionals (53% IT pros or engineers) and tech influencers (91% are asked by friends & colleagues for advice about technology) isn't surprising, though it is a bit more pronounced than I guessed going into the study. More impressive to me, though, is the loyalty among these readers: 77% read the site at least once a day, 77% have the site bookmarked, and 70% subscribe to the site's RSS feed.

This blog-affinity business (see ChasNote 10/26/05) is starting to look like a trend!

Blogs Waste 551,000 Worker-Years; AdAge, Much Less

2005-11-02T08:19:00.000-08:00

AdAge has uncovered the secret explanation to stagnating US productivity: We're all reading blogs instead of working.

If you REALLY want to waste some time, though, try accessing the article on the AdAge site. First I had to register, and then the site asked me to purchase "pay points" to buy access to articles. Pressed for time -- what with all the blogs I have to waste time reading -- I skipped the points-buying process.... Yet I somehow gained free access to the article.

Key findings:

U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs....About 35 million workers -- one in four people in the labor force -- visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks -- blog readers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.

Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, blogs have become the favored diversion for “office goof-off time,” though he notes it’s hard to segregate blog time since blogs often bounce readers to professional media sites.

I'm imagining myself sitting around with the boys, just laughing our heads off at all the silliness we find in the blogosphere. Sites like Dane Carlson's Business Opportunties Weblog, Steve Hall's AdRants, Glenn Fleishman's Wi-Fi Net News or Jeff Jarvis's BuzzMachine. If the boss comes -- Quick! -- click on a link to a site published by a big media company!

Big-Butt Metrics for the Long-Tail World

2005-10-30T16:33:00.000-08:00

Check out Jeff Jarvis's post on audience measurement at BuzzMachine. He makes the point that traditional panel-based and survey-based methods, which ain't perfect even for mass media (see ChasNote 8/29/05), really fall apart when they attempt to count audiences at niche publications:

To get apples-to-apples numbers for those other, older, major media, advertisers rely on allegedly representative samples. But you can never get a sample big enough to deal with the mass of niches.... they’ll never get enough knitters to measure the knitting bloggers. They can measure a few of the biggest bloggers. But that’s not what this medium is all about.

His second (perhaps more important) point is that the blunt instruments of reach and frequency (bare-bones quantity metrics) ignore qualitative aspects of audience behavior that would give advertisers greater insight into suitability of various ad environments:

This isn’t just about collecting and verifying audience and pageview numbers — and demographics and behavior — though all that is important. This is also about collecting data that can be collected only in this medium of the people and gives us unique value: authority, influence, conversation-starting, relationships, loyalty, engagement.

The gang here at Federated Media whole-heartedly supports the effort to build new measurement standards! When I brought up "big butt advertisers" on the panel last month, I meant not only that lots of niche publishers create meaningful mass when they band together; I meant also to remind us online publishers that the big-volume ad spenders (beautiful big butts, in my opinion) will demand that we work on their terms, providing performance metrics that are as much Broadcast 1.0 as they are Web 2.0. What's great about Jeff's recommendation is that it includes enough from the old-school (authority, influence, loyalty and engagement) to build a credible foundation onto which we can add some new fangled blog metrics like "conversation-starting."

ChasNote RSS Feed Enabled

2005-10-28T20:48:00.000-07:00

ChasNote is ready to plug into your very own news aggregator! I haven't yet figured out how to post one of those fancy orange buttons on the site, but click here for the ChasNote RSS feed. Or type "http://chasnote.com/wp-rss2.php" into your RSS reader. (Thanks, Andre!)

How to Beat Back the Bloggers

2005-10-28T14:45:00.000-07:00

Forbes offers tips to companies on how to fight back against the blogs (reg req): "Attack of the Blogs".

Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It's not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can't even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory.

How is it that these obscure crazies -- these bloggers -- who post lies to home-cooked websites no one visits have so much dang power?? I'm starting to wonder if these unstoppable brand-bashing bulldozers are, in fact, terrific platforms for introducing & enhancing those very same brands. If you agree, CALL ME! No, seriously. Get in touch via Federated Media's site.

For more insightful (and funnier) commentary, check out Xeni's post at Boing Boing, which begins, "Won't someone please think of the corporations?"

Rishad T on Trading Demos for Passions

2005-10-27T17:26:00.000-07:00

Check out Business Week's piece on SMG's Rishad Tobaccowala, "Hey, Advertisers, TiVo Is Your Friend". His secret to success: "abandoning consumer demographics in favor of targeting buyers' passions."

Loyalty Created by Taking, Not Just Giving

2005-10-26T11:05:00.000-07:00

Seth Godin presents an interesting theory on the connection between personal cash investment in an organization (say your alma mater) and loyalty to that organization, "Ben's Insight". Even if the dollar amount is insignificant, the act of taking someone's money increases his or her loyalty to you.

Yale wants Ben Stein's money so that Ben will be inclined to do the things that Yale really wants: send over great students, hire graduates, talk up the school and maintain its place in the pantheon of liberal arts colleges. And donors are far more likely to do that than disconnected alum.

I would extend this concept to non-cash contributions as well. In my days at CNET, we saw that readers who posted comments or user reviews (investments of time and ego) became more frequent visitors to those sites. Loyalty to the leading blog sites, which bring their readers even more deeply into the content creation process, seems to support the theory as well. More than 80% of Boing Boing readers and 75% of Searchblog readers report to reading those sites at least once a day. Once a day! On a webcast panel last week, Pajamas Media's Vik Rubenfeld shared similar stats for two of their politics sites: Little Green Footballs, where 75% claim to read daily, and Roger L. Simon's site, where 57% do.

This pattern, if it holds, means that citizens' journalism has much more to offer media companies than just cheap content.

Separating the Blog Stars from the Blog Dogs

2005-10-24T22:06:00.000-07:00

The title of a recent Gary Stein post made me laugh, "Are Blogs the Ad Inventory Solution?" Poor old blogs -- the butt of every joke these days! When Gary takes his tongue out of his cheek, he offers up some sound advice: Amidst all the hype around blogs, all 19-odd million of them, it's crucial to separate the stars from the dogs before you invest big ad dollars in them:

the write up of the sale of WebLogs, Inc to AOL has BusinessWeek writing about blogs as fantastic source of ad inventory. Advertisers might take heart in this fact, but the existence of blog ad inventory should be taken with a huge dose of caution by advertisers, and their decision to advertise needs to come down to one critical factor: quality.

TV Commercials for iPods

2005-10-24T21:30:00.000-07:00

Rafat wonders when TV-style commericals will make their way onto iPods (PaidContent.org):

For now, ABC, which is providing TV show downloads for it at $1.99 an episode, says that won't be the case. But skeptics don't believe it. "TiVo and satellite radio were not ad-supported but they are loosening their guidelines to accept ads," said Brad Adgate, research director at Horizon Media. "It really depends on the finances of Apple."

While Apple may own the decision in the short term, I'm guessing on-demand mobile video will proliferate beyond iPods, and the content providers (have you heard this one before?) will trade the pay-per-view model for widespread, ad-supported viewership. Yup, podmercials are coming.

When Does a Blog Become an "Online Publication"?

2005-10-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

A colleague recently asked me to define "blogs." Here's what I came up with:

The term "blog" (short for "weblog") is used to describe websites that are built on easy-to-use software platforms (eg, TypePad, WordPress, MoveableType or Blogger) that allow writers with no engineering know-how to publish their content to the web. One aspect of these platforms is that each new "post" -- an original article or a link to another site -- automatically appears at the top of the homepage, pushing previous posts down the page. So most blogs organize their content in chronological order (newest to oldest), rather than into features, sections or content categories the way standard online magazines do. But as blogs get more sophisticated and have deeper archives of content (see GigaOm or Gadgetopia) some have begun to categorize their content around topics. I'm guessing that a year from know we will have a hard time telling the difference between blogs and other online publications.

Jakob Nielsen's post on the top 10 biggest usability problems across the blogosphere (UseIt.com) has some great advice for blogs that are ready to make the move. He advises against several of the crappy UI features you see here -- chronological archiving that buries the best posts, calendar-only navigation, and, worst of all, "Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn't be taken too seriously."

Those of you reading this at chasnote.blogspot.com, please visit my more sophistocated alter-blog at http://ChasNote.com!

Tom Foremski Pitches for IBM Ad Dollars

2005-10-14T14:22:00.000-07:00

Tom Foremski argues in his SiliconValleyWatcher post that IBM should change their no-ads-on-blogs policy. Right on, Tom!

I'm not too worried about IBM's decision not to advertise on blogs because I'm certain that it can be changed.

Especially since IBM will, sooner than later, realize there is something much bigger going on, and that it has an opportunity to play a large role--maybe even a historic one--in helping to birth the new media.

It would take but a fraction of its massive marketing budget to help the new media sector find business models that work. And those models might look very different from today's models, based on advertising/marketing messages found in newspapers and magazines.

I would add that the new media sector is likely to find business models that work, whether or not IBM helps shape them. The question is, does IBM want HP, Dell and Microsoft alone to define those models?

BW's Jon Fine Launches Blog

2005-10-12T17:25:00.000-07:00

Jon Fine's On Media column has spawned a blog, Fine On Media. I like the headline for his post on The Journal's Saturday edition, Weakend.

A Craigslist Moment

2005-10-10T09:41:00.000-07:00

In his Times column today, David Carr says print newspapers need "an iPod moment," a disruptive technology that eventually revitalizes the industry it seemed destined to destroy. The problem for newspapers, as he sees it, is that reading them required your full attention:

"For all the print newspaper's elegance -- it is a very portable, searchable technology -- it has some drawbacks. A paper is a static product in a dynamic news age, and while every medium is after eyeballs, the industry has to take that quite literally. You cannot read this story while driving in your car -- which is how most of America commutes -- and you cannot have it on in the background. America is hooked on 'companion' media, a pet platform that sits in the corner and pays attention to you when you pay attention to it."

I disagree. The problem with newspapers is less about reader attention (too much required or too little paid) than it is about marketing efficiency. Local papers used to be the great communications platform for neighborhoods, towns & cities. As such, they enabled streamlined, one-to-one commerce by way of classified advertising -- the life-blood of the newspaper business.

So forget about an iPod moment, some innovation that entices more people to read print newspapers again. Yesterday I had a Craigslist moment, a taste of the service's dreamy community-connecting power. I hadn't purged enough old furniture before moving & found myself with a sun-bleached couch & a wobbly bureau that didn't fit in my new house. I couldn't track down a friend with a station wagon (to drive the items to Good Will), so I posted a classified at Craigslist in the "free" section. Forty-five minutes after uploading the ad, two young women hauled away the couch & bureau in their Subaru. Within an hour I was helping another guy take away my broken-down moving boxes. Service with a smile! It's only services like this -- not re-tooling its articles to be consumed as "companion" content -- that will save newspapers.

AOL Buys Weblogs Inc

2005-10-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

The gang at PaidContent confirms that AOL has bought Jason Calacanis's Weblogs Inc. No price tag announced. They also have this quote from Gawker's Nick Denton:

"The acquisition of WIN by AOL is exhilirating news, in many respects, most of which I shouldn't list here. For what it's worth, Gawker isn't for sale. The whole point about blogs is that they're not part of big media. Consolidation defeats the purpose. It's way too early. Like a decade too early."

Hmm. If consolidation defeats the purpose now, what's going to change in 10 years (when Gawker goes up for sale)?

ClickZ on Federated Media

2005-10-04T06:48:00.000-07:00

Zackary Rodgers in ClickZ compares Federated Media (my employer) with Philip Kaplan's AdBrite -- and talks about our common threat, Google.

"Battelle's Federated Media Publishing is sophisticated, services-driven and built for the A-list (to use a dirty word). We're talking BoingBoing and Om Malik. Very CPM.....

"Battelle's FMP is also about giving control to publishers, but the deals are one-off and the sites are cream of the crop. The list of bloggers he's working with -- whom he calls 'authors' -- reads like a roll call of the best and brightest in online tech and tech-influenced culture. They include BoingBoing, Waxy.org, Om Malik, and Matt Haughey-run sites Metafilter and PVRblog....

"'[Google's new site-specific ad model is] kind of a mash-up of Pud's and my idea,' said Battelle, referring to Google's tests. 'I think that's fine, and I think that keeps us honest, and I look forward to proving that the relationship that we create is more valuable. I don't take anything they might do lightly, believe me. I'm sure that if their ads perform better for all parties concerned than ours, people will use them. We'll see.'"

At least it was Pud and not Battelle who used the phrase "douche-baggy"!

WSJ.com: Rates Up, Relevance Down?

2005-10-03T16:10:00.000-07:00

If you can actually get readers to pay to visit your site, it must be just too darn tempting not to milk them for more. At least that seems to be the thinking at WSJ. But I don't get it. I thought Dow Jones spent all that money on MarketWatch because the paid gate at WSJ.com -- while generating substantial revenue -- locked them out (mostly) from the bigger opportunity in online advertising. And, because marketplace cred is necessary if your business depends on advertisers or readers paying you, the paid-content model, which prevents other news sites (especially blogs) from spreading your news because they can't link to your content, also limits your relevance among people who get their information via the Internet. Mike at TechDirt puts it well:

"It seems that the WSJ is caught in some sort of bind, right now. It wants to experiment more and join back in with the online conversation by doing things like having an occasional free story -- but the business folks are only looking at the bottom line and not the big picture. The reporting is still top notch in most cases, but the value may be decreasing as it doesn't allow itself to be part of the conversation."

Google's Block-by-Block Ad Targeting

2005-10-03T11:18:00.000-07:00

Glenn Fleishman at WifiNetNews on Google's motivation for providing free city-wide wifi for San Francisco -- super ad targeting that doesn't violate consumer privacy:

"They’re aiming to move more advertising dollars out of the devastated newspaper business in the city and suck more life from telephone book display advertising. National advertising in the U.S. comprised $45 billion the first half of 2005; local advertising, $26 billion. Because Google will run the network, they can deliver ads targeted to the city block for folks using their Wi-Fi network without knowing anything about the individual consumer, as it will be entirely based on the Wi-Fi network not consumer characteristics. I imagine Google views this as a massive experiment and money well spent."

Blog Ads Are Cheap, But Don't Overlook Their Importance

2005-09-29T07:09:00.000-07:00

From MediaPost's coverage of OMMA East:

"Brian Clark, the CEO of GMD Studios, recounted a campaign that his agency ran for Audi, titled 'The Art of the Heist.' Just one-half of one percent of the media buy budget, Clark said, was spent on BlogAds -- a firm run by panel moderator Henry Copeland, which sells ad space on some of the highest-trafficked blogs. Those ads, Clark said, ended up accounting for 29 percent of the traffic sent to the campaign's landing page."

It would be great news for the nascent blog-publishing industry if this meant that Audi's blog ads experienced click-through rates that were 58 TIMES better than other online ads. But it's more likely that Audi just paid BlogAds prices that were 2% of the rates they paid elsewhere.

But all this focus on efficiency & click-through rates misses the bigger point. Advertising isn't about reaching people cheaply, it's about reaching the ones that matter -- prospective buyers & people who might influence those buyers. And Clark made this point as well:

"If you're afraid of what users are going to say [in comments on the blog sites where you advertise], there are two strategies: You get involved in the discussion, or you stick your fingers in your ears and pretend it doesn't exist. People are talking about you whether you're listening or not."

As a veteran tech marketer once told me: Branding happens; the question is whether or not you want to have a role in shaping it.

Fake Blogs Are Hard to Pull Off

2005-09-28T10:12:00.000-07:00

With 18.5 million blogs out there fighting to attract the attention of the 50 million people who read them (or have *ever* read one), it's a competitive playing field to say the least. All 18.5 million of these blogs -- not just the other few thousand marketers who run TV campaigns or glossy print ads in national magazines -- are the competition faced by brands who launch blogs-as-marketing-campaigns. Given that the odds are vastly against marketers mining for viral-marketing gold in the blogosphere, I'd expect they would work harder to make these ad-blogs fabulous. But alas. MarketingVox reports on the latest fool's errand, this time at Mazda:

"Mazda's new blog-cum-viral marketing effort proved to be pretty lame, and its failures reveal one of the dynamics limiting large advertisers in their exploitation of new forms of marketing. The campaign takes an old set of video 'viral' ads that never became very popular months ago and attempts to rejuvenate them by creating a fake blog to tout them. Compounding the first failure (not understanding that a viral ad isn't just a :30 -- perhaps with a dirty joke or a flash of skin -- that gets streamed onto the internet) Mazda committed the same mistake with the blog."

Other highly questionable attempts include the Sparkle Body Spray Blog, where "the Secret Girls get real," and the Juicy Fruit Blog, a site that TechCrunch calls a "train wreck."

Viewers v. Agencies: The New Participation-Creation Movement

2005-09-26T14:06:00.000-07:00

I caught up my AdRants reading today, and scanning a week's-worth of posts over lunch makes all this viewer-created ad creative business seem like a trend:

AdCandy, "an exchange for people who think they have great ad ideas and marketers who think consumer-created ads are worthy of buying," AdRants.

Picture Marketing "enables marketers and event organizers to take pictures of people at sponsored events, trade shows, and retail locations. The online service then combines those photos together with survey information supplied by each person, to build a mini-advertising campaign around each individual's photo," AdRants.

Family Guy launches Stewie Live, a re-make of the Subservient Chicken interact-o-ad, AdRants.

All of this on top of last week's news on the Golden Geiko campaign (which is running on FM-partner site Boing Boing).

A Case for Newspapers

2005-09-26T08:46:00.000-07:00

In his NY Times column today, David Carr makes a case for the unique value print coverage of the news -- depth:

"The New Orleans story needed the big muscles of print journalism to gain custody of facts that seemed beyond comprehension. People could Google their way through the storm, but for a search engine to really work, you need women and men on the ground asking difficult questions and digging past the misinformation and panic that infect a big story.

"Newspapers are a civic good, especially right now, but they cannot function as a nonprofit. Make all the jokes you want about dead trees, a printed artifact that people pay to read and advertise in is an absolute necessity.

"On television, it always seems like Groundhog Day -- get wet, rinse, repeat. There is undeniably something compelling about Anderson Cooper standing in wind and rain in Galveston at 3 a.m. on Saturday as Rita blew ashore -- 'You feel very much at the edge of the world,' he said, blinking against the rain -- but that does not address the issues of governance, logistics, race and class that the hurricanes reveal. Those are stories newspapers tell well.

"BUT with department stores consolidating both their operations and their advertising and with readers canceling the newspapers that land on their doorstep in favor of more instant gratification on the Web, big newspapers full of deep reporting and serious ambitions seem like dinosaurs at the beginning of a very cold age."

The Loss of TechRepublic's Bob Artner

2005-09-23T15:37:00.000-07:00

My friend and former colleague Bob Artner, VP of CNET's TechRepublic and the voice of CNET's B2B audiocasts, died earlier this week. A tribute to Bob's work at TechRepublic is on the site, Bob Artner, 1959-2005. A sad day.

Forbes on Podcast Money-Making

2005-09-22T07:50:00.000-07:00

From a Forbes.com article on podcasting revenue models:

"Stan Sorensenm, senior director of product management and marketing of Melodeo, believes there are four possible ways to monetize podcasting:

"-- Embedding advertising in the audio itself. Basically, this uses the traditional model of radio.

"-- Free and premium channels. This is how many content sites make money. There may even be subscription services, kind of like a magazine.

"-- An enterprise model. This would mean selling sophisticated products to major customers that would have special features, such as security.

"-- Advertising, which is currently the predominant approach."

Um, I recommend merging #1 (advertising) and #4 (advertising) into a single revenue line in the business plan before you talk to the VCs. I do agree that advertising is a valid income stream whenever large, upscale audiences tune in to quality programming. The trick is scale. One wonderful aspect of personal media is its ability to make public voices that aren't mainstream, which often also means smaller, more intimate audiences. Programmers who appeal to similar audiences will need to band together in order to deliver advertisers hundred of thousands of listeners at once. As for #2, though, I'd be surprised to see podcasts succeed with paid-by-consumers models where just about every other online content play, many of which are "kind of like magazines" today, has failed. I'm willing to bet the bulk of podcast revenue in the next 2 years will come from some variation of #3 -- corporate customers paying for professional content (especially if we include investors here), or B2B marketers who cover these fees by sponsoring podcasts aimed at corporate customers.

WSJ Stealing News from PaidContent?

2005-09-21T08:21:00.000-07:00

Rafat Ali accuses the WSJ of stealing his scoop -- again (PaidContent).

"The Wall Street Journal is at it again: stealing our story. The Viacom-iFilm deal, a story we broke on Monday night, has been picked up by the Wall Street Journal, without any credit. This is the second time in the last two months such a thing has happened."

Geico Ads Ask Viewers to Make Ads

2005-09-20T21:40:00.000-07:00

New Geico ad campaign plans to engage audiences by getting them to produce Geico ads. From AdRants:

"Jumping on the consumer-generated media trendlet, Geico has launched Golden Gecko, a contest in which people can submit 15 second movie trailers featuring the Geico Gecko. Geico isn't calling them commercials but the rules state all submissions become the property of Geico so it wouldn't be surprising if a winning entry did become a commercial."

Alarm Clock on Federated Media

2005-09-15T22:02:00.000-07:00

The buzz on Federated Media (my employer) from Alarm Clock:

"The smart money is that FM Publishing, while late to the blog network party, will make the incumbents squirm with some degree of envy. From the get-go, FM will have better editorial product than Weblogsinc and it will enjoy B2B payouts that Gawker Media cannot land."

Uh huh!

McKinsey: The Marketing ROI That Isn't

2005-09-15T20:13:00.000-07:00

Kurt Oeler pointed me to a great piece in the latest McKinsey Quarterly by David C. Court, Jonathan W. Gordon & Jesko Perrey, "Boosting Returns on Marketing Investment".

“. . . Real spending on prime-time television ads . . . has continued to rise, even as the number of viewers has plummeted (Exhibit 2). The spending patterns of the US automakers, which increased their marketing expenditures per car during the 1990s even as advertising became less effective and their collective market share declined, typify these trends. Marketing powerhouses such as P&G are also quite concerned. At the 2004 meeting of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, Jim Stengel, the company’s global marketing officer, said, ‘I believe today’s marketing model is broken. We’re applying antiquated thinking and work systems to a new world of possibilities’. . . . ”

Btw, Exhibit 2 looks like this: X. The audience for prime-time broadcast TV was around 45 million viewers in 1994; it dropped to about 25 million by 2003. Yet inflation-adjusted ad spending on those networks during prime time grew from $5 billion to $7 billion.

Not long ago I heard a marketing VP at Visa admit that TV advertising wasn't working nearly as well as it was 10 years ago, yet CPMs continued to rise. She griped that the networks had fewer & fewer viewers, but they charged more & more for each one. So Visa reduced the share of ad dollars spent on broadcast TV spots, from 95% to 75% of its total ad budget. The shocker to me is that Visa continued to invest 3 out every 4 of its ad dollars into something that wasn't delivering the goods.

Google's CPM Revolution

2005-09-06T00:44:00.000-07:00

Late last month, Google’s first print advertisers turned up in the back pages of PC Magazine (image) and Maximum PC, and with them Google inaugurated a shake-up in the media business as dramatic and fundamental as paid search was a half decade ago. This time they’ve brought their auction-style pricing model to an arena where performance can’t be measured in cost-per-click terms -- and CPM advertising may never be the same.

Clearly this is good news for media buyers, who now determine the value and set advertising rates themselves, eBay-style. And it’s good for print publishers in the short-term, who see Google’s print sales efforts as a glimmer of good news in an era of declining ad revenues. Ziff-Davis president Jason Young told the NY Times: "We're thrilled for PC Magazine in print to be presented to Google's fantastic base of hundreds of thousands of smaller advertisers." It’s outsourcing for back-of-the-book ad sales. Google’s self-service advertising platform, of course, does business with tens of thousands of customers much less expensively than live telemarketers can. As Battelle puts it, “this is free money for the publisher, and they probably love it” (Searchblog).

Jason’s counterpart at Conde Nast, Richard Beckman, is not so sure. “If you start selling an advertisement at a price that is not healthy for your profit margins, you can never really recover,” he told the Times. Yea, what’s the big idea letting customers tell you how much they value of your services?

I couldn’t disagree more with Beckman’s point of view. In my opinion, Google is in fact lighting the only pathway to recovery for publishers. For five years, magazine publishers have stubbornly maintained their traditional business practices and organizational structures (albeit with fewer people on staff) despite radical and obvious transformation among their customers. The Internet and digital media have closed the loop on performance tracking, measuring not only direct response (click through) but also ad viewership itself (actual impressions). Online marketplaces -- from Yahoo’s Overture and Google’s AdSense to recent upstarts BlogAds and AdBrite -- have perfected the dynamic pricing that’s always guided television’s spot market.

At some point, you have to face the music: The customer is always right. You can either set your own prices and keep dropping them until media buyers start returning your phone calls, or you can give those media buyers a more efficient platform to communicate what they think is a fair price. If that price doesn’t deliver the profit margin you’d like, improve your product or cut your costs. There’s nothing worse for the bottom line than telling your customers they’re insane.

(Also check out Gary Stein's "Why Google's Print Ad Experiment is a Really Big Freakin' Deal," Jupiter. Google's switchboards will handle calls to 800 numbers listed in the print ads: Very soon Google will know more than the publishers about how well their own readers respond to ads in their publications.)

CBS Wants Naked News

2005-09-04T15:31:00.000-07:00

What's CBS to do about their #3 position among evening news programs, still smarting from the "early retirement" of Dan Rather? CBS chairman Les Moonves thinks the revitalization of his network's news needs to steal some inspiration from the Internet's Naked News. From today's NY Times Magazine:

"On the one hand, we could have a newscast like 'The Big Breakfast' in England, where women give the news in lingerie. Or there's 'Naked News,' which is on cable in England. I saw a clip of it. It's a woman giving the news as she's getting undressed. And then, on the other hand, you could have two boring people behind a desk. Our newscast has to be somewhere in between."

Conde Nast Responds to Google's Print Plans

2005-09-01T06:54:00.000-07:00

"If you start selling an advertisement at a price that is not healthy for your profit margins, you can never really recover," says Conde Nast media group president Richard Beckman to the NY Times. What an odd point of view: Value determined by a yield manager in the back office, rather than by the customer buying the service. Hardly the free-market American way!

Meanwhile, the same article reports, "Google executives have said that they believe traditional media will ultimately emulate search engines by using an auction structure to sell ads."

Who are you betting on?

Google Adds Insult to Injury for Print Publishers

2005-08-31T15:08:00.000-07:00

As nearly every business or professional print publisher is beefing up its Internet presence in order to reclaim ad dollars that have gone online (see the latest news at MIT's Technology Review, Boston.com), Google has started selling print ads.

From CNET's News.com:

"The search king, which makes 99 percent of its revenue from Internet ads, is quietly testing the waters of print advertising sales, according to executives at several companies that have bought the ads. Google recently began buying ad pages in technology magazines, including PC Magazine and Maximum PC, and reselling those pages -- cut into quarters or fifths -- to small advertisers that already belong to its online ad network."

You optimists out there may say, Great news -- Google is boosting revenue for print publishers! (UPDATE: In fact it is. Battelle does the math at Searchblog.)

I say, Eek! Is Google's AdSense platform more capable of selling print ads than the account execs at PC Mag or Maximum PC? As someone who's built a career on the premise that my unique human capabilities captured a premium, this news makes me feel a tad redundant. On the other hand, it signals a leap forward for media companies when self-regulating systems (like those built by Google, Yahoo or eBay) create greater efficiency for both buyers and sellers of marketing services.

Media Measurement Is Bad Everywhere

2005-08-29T11:58:00.000-07:00

Joe Mandese in MediaPost reports on a new study by the Advertising Research Foundation that finds "none of the major media have audience measurement methods that are adequate for the way people use those media today."

Phew, we're not alone! In fact, the respondents voiced greater dissatisfaction with measurement tools for traditional media. "TV audience ratings, the subject of a number of controversies including a Congressional investigation, possible legislation and legal suits, is especially poor." Nielsen's TV ratings came under fire for, among other shortcomings, tracking only viewership for the programs, not the ads themselves. Radio's measurement standards (namely the paper-diary system) were called "relics of the past."

ARF's report lessens the frustration (if only a bit) I was feeling earlier this month as I compared NNR's and comScore's studies of blog traffic. One of the sites FM works with, BoingBoing, registered 849k unique visitors according to comScore but only 605k based on NNR's count. BoingBoing's server logs peg the monthly unique-visitor count above 1.6MM.

Japan's TV Ads: TV Ads Not Working

2005-08-28T17:06:00.000-07:00

Hiroko Tashiro's piece in the September 5 issue of Business Week (BW's Talk Show section):

"Throughout August, 133 Japanese TV stations are airing commercials to promote the importance of...commercials. Japanese advertisers, like those in the U.S., worry about growing use of digital video recorders, now in 15% of Japan's homes. By letting users skip ads, DVRs have knocked $489 million off the value of commercials to advertisers, says the Nomura Research Institute. To win back advertisers, the National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan named Aug. 28 TV CM (commercial) Day. In one spot, a singer Aya Matsuura works a puppet that says, 'Commercials are fun, aren't they?' adding, 'It's ventriloquism, so of course I'm made to say so.' Viewers, of course, may skip these ads, too."

Is this a joke? Does Japan's NACB think this will turn the tide on commercial skipping, and save those $489 million dollars from migrating to more effective media platforms? I don't know how Japanese media buyers are responding, but I question the wisdom of a month-long broadcast campaign that reminds them how much of their ad budgets are going to waste.