Media Industry Veteran Bill Wise Joins MediaBank as CEO June 1, 2010
Posted by Bill in Digital, Online Advertising, online marketing, Outdoor advertising, Press Mentions, Technology, traditional advertising.add a comment
Shift Happens… November 3, 2008
Posted by Bill in Digital, traditional advertising, video.1 comment so far
This is an incredibly thought-provoking video… interested if this excites or scares you– let me know.
Silicon Alley 100 List October 31, 2008
Posted by Bill in Online Advertising, online marketing, traditional advertising.add a comment
“As we approach the end of another year, we’re once again pleased to present the Silicon Alley 100, our annual list of the entrepreneurs, investors, executives, and technologists who are making waves in the New York digital business community.
Last year’s No. 1, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, has had his jersey retired (but we commend him for once again blazing entrepreneurial trails by doing away with annoying two-term rules). Union Square Ventures’ partner Fred Wilson, who hates lists like this, has deservedly taken his place.
Congratulations to this year’s winners and a hat tip to the impressive cadre of other folks we didn’t have room to recognize. As always, a huge thanks to our readers, whose votes and voices helped shape our second annual SA 100, and to our advertisers and sponsors, without whom we wouldn’t exist.”
Are Ad Exchanges Solely for Spot-Market/ Remnant Inventory? April 6, 2007
Posted by Bill in Auction-based media, exchanges, Google, Microsoft, Online Advertising, Online Auction Tips, traditional advertising.1 comment so far
The eBay Media Marketplace (“EMM”) has received much hype the past bunch of months. According to a MediaPost article, this past Thursday that hype came to a screeching halt when the Cable television Advertising Bureau–which holds the keys to launching the broadcast auction system–said the EMM was a permanent no-go. The trade group’s opposition was based on two points:
1. The eBay functionality was flawed, and
2. The system wasn’t in step with the new age of media buying, where the focus is on complex multi-touch point deals, not peddling and purchasing spots.
CAB head Sean Cunningham said his members reviewed a pilot of the system for some weeks. They found that its infrastructure fell short in making the intricacies of end-to-end buying and selling better. Cunningham said it was “evidence of someone developing a system in eBay that, despite the best counsel of top buyers in the business, was just not getting the scope of this business in terms of both current and future practice.”
So this raises a few questions…
1. With all the hype over DoubleClick’s entry into the “Ad Nasdaq” world, will anybody be able to move this marketplace concept up market?
2. Was broadcast simply not ready for their ecosystem to be turned upside down and embrace auction-based media?
3. Is premium inventory, regardless of channel, simply too personal and relationships and media buying too complex to make the evolutionary switch away from upfronts and personal negotiations?
4. Is an auction platform built simply for spot-market, remnant, or turn-key/ non-creative ad inventory?
For the eBay Media Marketplace to make it, I believe the market first needs to figure out a solution for a Premium Online Ad Exchange. For that to happen, it has to be driven by a Media company with a huge online presence, powered by a technology which embraces auctions but respects the old-school inventory forecasting and expectations on campaign delivery. All eyes have to be on Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! before they go onto eBay…
What Search Can Learn from the Aqua Teen Fiasco February 5, 2007
Posted by Bill in Outdoor advertising, Search Marketing, traditional advertising.1 comment so far
You probably already know the facts by now, but I’ll give them to you anyway…
To promote its late-night show Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Cartoon Network placed light-up signs of one of the show’s characters in surprising but noticeable spots throughout several US cities. Boston was one of those cities.
In Boston, terrorism-suspicious passersby saw the signs placed in sensitive areas—like bridges and overpasses—and called the police. Cartoon Networks, which is owned by Turner Broadcasting, neglected to mention to the police that they had put the signs up. Mayhem ensued.
Bomb squads came out. A major highway and a portion of the Charles River were closed off. The two men who placed the signs were arrested. And now the city of Boston is calling for heads to roll at Turner, and for Turner to foot the $750,000 bill for the day’s antiterror precautions.
Something like this was bound to happen, as the public has long been on tense relations with outdoor marketing. Mini Cooper’s supertargeted opt-in billboard campaign, which displays birthday wishes and other extremely targeted greetings to Mini drivers, has been criticized by driver safety groups as a distraction. An LA billboard for shoe inserts was removed over complaints around its tagline, “Shoe-icide is not the answer!” In San Francisco, a “Got Milk” outdoor display was yanked after groups took issue with the smell (it smelled like cookies).
Outdoor advertising is a lightning rod, for the very same reason that it’s so powerful. Outdoor and out-of-home advertising weave themselves, literally, into your life’s landscape. They’re with you when you look out from your car window, when you’re waiting for the bus, or when you’re in the elevator. They integrate brands into your life.
But injecting yourself in people’s lives is bound to rub some people the wrong way. Somebody’s bound to think your joke isn’t funny, that you’re creating a nuisance (which you very well might be), or that you’re engaged in a bomb plot. And there lies the conundrum of outdoor.
For those of us in search, there’s a cautionary lesson in this. Like outdoor, search is also built around injecting your brand into the ebb and flow of real life—as, at this point in the 21st Century, search has become one of life’s basic tasks. Until now, we search marketers have avoided the unpredictability that’s haunted outdoor advertisers, because our control over keywords lists gives us immense control over who sees our ad, and how.
And we still have that control. But at the same time, times are changing. Search is becoming more deeply integrated into other types of media, and different types of media are diverging in more directions every day. Keyword lists just aren’t the only factor involved in dealing with who sees a campaign. Suddenly, we all need to consider the unique problems of search traffic off of MySpace—or even, as David Berkowitz points out, from Second Life. And as contextual advertising evolves into search-based retargeting, part of every search campaign will involve display advertising on publisher sites.
Which means that, as search gets more sophisticated, search is weaving itself into many people’s lives in many different ways than it ever has. It’s becoming less like old-fashioned search, and closer, in some ways, to outdoor advertising.
As that transition happens, we’ll see a real turning point in the search industry. Those of us who are as good at understanding who’s looking at an ad, and how to relate to that viewer—by making one landing page for searchers off of MySpace, and a different one for searchers off of Yahoo! Financial, for instance—will continue to thrive as we always have.
But those of us who can’t relate to the newly-diverse search audience will face the same challenges faced by the outdoor industry in terms of dealing with the viewer they couldn’t have foreseen. And being in the online industry is going to make those shortcomings even harder to surmount, since clients are willing to forgive outdoor agencies for a lack of precision, but expect a lot more precision from online firms.
If you’re in the first group of search marketers, then you’re probably in a good place right now. If you’re in the second group, then you might want to really rethink your approach.
How Search Turned MTV Into MySpace January 21, 2007
Posted by Bill in Google, Search Marketing, traditional advertising.1 comment so far
For last week’s pronouncement that shook the new media world — but didn’t particularly surprise it — look to MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson. MySpace, Anderson informed German mag Der Spiegel, has “replaced MTV.”
The point is debatable. Between its acquisition of 10-million visitor RateMyProfessors.com and a rumored investment in social networking site TagWorld, MTV is clearly gunning for a return to empire. But at least for now, it does look as if the world’s sixth most popular site has stolen the lead from the suddenly presidentless MTV.
But the MTV versus MySpace competition is a bit more complex than just the old replaced by the new. That’s because MySpace isn’t as much the usurper of MTV, as it’s an evolution of MTV’s basic concept: a horizontal channel in which glamorous stars, the common folk, and the channel itself are all on surprisingly equal footing. And, like MTV, MySpace is a channel that’s built on reaching out to a youth generation who’s the first to have really grown up with a new medium. So MySpace hasn’t replaced MTV, as much as MTV has evolved into MySpace. And none of this evolution would have been possible without search.
Let’s start with MTV. MTV was first built around the ’80s generation, the first generation to really grow up with television — and even color television — as a given in the home. Their baby- boomer parents also grew up with TV, but the boomers often weren’t born into a TV household.
MTV also introduced horizontal media in 1992, when “The Real World” spawned reality TV a full 8 years before “Survivor.” And “The Real World” entirely changed the rules of how television works. Now, instead of a medium in which lofty stars appear on the screen while couch potatoes watch them, MTV’s invention of reality creates a model in which the stars and the mere mortals occupy the same space. MTV showed us how media can become horizontal. MySpace isn’t so different. MySpace is also built on capturing, and capitalizing on, the first generation of youth who’s grown up with new media — in this case, the Internet and mobile. In Anderson’s own words to Der Spiegel: “If you are 23 now, you probably started using the AOL Instant Messenger ten years ago. It’s totally natural for you to talk to your friends that way. A few years after that you started text messaging. I think the MySpace generation is these people who just have this experience. It’s perfectly natural.”
MySpace is also a truly horizontal medium, with everybody vying for the same attention: Madonna, Jamie Foxx, and the Honda Element all have to go head to head with your 12-year-old cousin to get noticed.
And so, again, while MySpace may have replaced MTV, it’s also just an evolution of the MTV model, brought online. Both MTV and MySpace gained success by providing young people with the opportunity to just be themselves, while understanding that technology had made young people “just being themselves” into something fundamentally different than it had ever been before. And they both did that while creating a new kind of horizontal channel.
It was search that allowed the MTV-MySpace evolution to happen. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman points out, search is the Web’s great flattening force: by offering a single window through which to jump to the Web’s billions of disconnected pages, search pulls the entire Internet together.
Instead of developing a relationship with just one site at a time — in the way that viewers watch one TV channel at a time — search turns the Internet into a single, unified Web. That puts all Web pages on equal footing, all Web pages at the mercy of the user, and all Web pages in direct competition with one another. (A similar point could be made about the effect of remote controls on TV, but search gives way more user control than remotes do, across billions of pages rather than just dozens of channels.) Search made the Web horizontal, and that horizontality enabled MySpace to use the Web to take MTV’s horizontality to a whole new plane.
This means a tremendous amount for those of us in search. If search is a driving force behind the new horizontality, then those of us in SEM — the first industry to make business sense of a horizontal universe — can drive unique value in the new horizontal world.
That’s also a challenge. As communications evolve — and search, and elements of search, become just one piece of a much larger media picture — SEM needs to turn its insights into ideas that can provide value, regardless of the directions that media take. And if we can’t make that happen, it won’t just be MTV that’s facing replacement.
* * *
(For a bit more on the future of search and social media, have a look at my recent interview with MarketWatch.
Welcome The Pubvertisers January 15, 2007
Posted by Bill in Online Advertising, Online Auction Tips, online marketing, Search Marketing, traditional advertising.add a comment
Last Wednesday, megapublisher Meredith Corporation (publisher of Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, and Parents, to name a few holdings) purchased interactive agencies Genex and New Media Strategies. It was an incredible deal for Meredith, as it brings advertising accounts like Honda, Unilever, Citigroup, ABC, Coca Cola, Ford, Sony, and AT&T under Meredith’s roof, and most likely onto Meredith’s magazine pages. It’s also a move that would have been utterly unthinkable ten years ago.
The Wall Street Journal’s Emily Steel puts it this way: “There used to be a clear division between media outlets… which sold ad time or space and ad agencies, which designed and placed the ads on behalf of marketers. One reason [for the division]: the potential for conflicts of interest if an ad agency owned by a media company was seen to be unfairly directing ads to its sibling media outfits.” But times are changing. Steel goes on to cite other examples of the new pubvertisers, including Conde Nast and Wenner Media, both of which have created in-house ad divisions; Gannett Media, which now owns interactive shop PointRoll; and Google, which has “expanded aggressively into ad sales.”
I think it’s Steel’s last example–Google, or, more broadly, the whole world of search–that’s the key catalyst in the pubvertising trend. That’s because search has placed a whole new level of analytics and transparency into the publishing world; and it’s this analytics-based transparency that makes pubvertising possible.
Why? Because advertisers would mistrust pubvertising in environments in which there’s little recourse for evaluating the agency’s suggestions. It’s only when good analytics can show advertisers when they’re being lied to, when they’re being led astray–and when they’re being offered sound advice–that makes it safe to take advice from a source that may have a conflicting interest. Analytics create transparency, which creates trust, which is the crucial element for pubvertising to get off the ground.
And it’s the search engines that are leading the way in both providing and leveraging this kind of transparency. From free keyword tools to human sales reps, search engines are kings in advising advertisers how to manage keyword spend. But while they’re pushing keywords, the engines also provide clear data on how those keywords actually perform. That transparency makes customers feel secure both listening to the engines’ advice on buying keywords, while purchasing those keywords directly from the engines themselves.
Of course, it’s obviously in publishers’ interest to have ad agencies in-house, because having an in-house ad agency places advertisers within immediate reach. Publishers know this, which is why pubvertising is a trend that will only grow. And to allow that trend to grow, publishers of all kinds will look to offer better analytics and transparency to make that pubvertising possible. I’m not just talking about the MSNs, Yahoos, and Googles of the world entering into an arms race to create better targeting and analytics. I’m talking about even the lowest-tech of ad formats getting into the game, as was the case when print classifieds joined forces with Google late last year.
This has serious ramifications for the future of the ad agency. As publishers look to beef up their analytics and transparency so they can get into advertising, ad agencies will have to beef up their analytics capabilities to get closer to the publishers they’ll need to work with–or be purchased by–to survive. That’s exactly what happened in the world of search, in which a transparent, analytics-heavy publisher model (the engine) gave rise to a new kind of transparent, analytics-heavy ad agency (the SEM firm).
And so as pubvertising shifts from yesterday’s impossibility to tomorrow’s new standard, look to a huge surge in the analytics-based publisher, the analytics-based ad firm, and clients who expect analytics-based transparency from both. Meanwhile, Madison Avenue firms who can’t keep up–because they can’t get up to speed with their data–will face a real uphill battle in the new ad world that looks more like the search world every day.
A Wise Search & Online Marketing Insider Tells All... 