Octavianworld

Upcoming Talk: Carlson on Metrics (Minneapolis, May 23)

I'll be speaking at the "Carlson on Metrics" conference in Minneapolis (May 21-23, my talk is on the morning of the 23rd).  I'll be talking about "multi-channel marketing optimization".

Here's the premise:

• as people spend more time in digital channels, marketing dollars are following them
• this is challenging for marketers, since these channels are also much more fragmented (for example, we've gone from a handful of broadcast networks, to hundreds of cable channels, to millions of websites with embedded videos)
• there's a silver lining:  these channels are much more trackable, targetable, and testable
• but, in practice, this means a typical marketer is now faced with a fire hose of information to process from each of these channels
• so, what happens is that in most cases, firms end up "locally optimizing" their marketing spend within each channel
• this might have been fine if the typical "customer experience" for any given target segment was limited to a single channel -- say, physical stores vs. online storefront
• but, with channel fragmentation, the average "customer experience" through any given buying process now crosses many different channels -- see the infomercial, go online to research the product, ask a friend, go back to the site through a search engine to buy, and then maybe pick up in the store
• so, firms can't really afford to "optimize locally" any more -- they have to make sure that all these channels are working together effectively
• this is hard; it requires integration of data and coordination/ cooperation among functional organizations with separate, often different, and sometimes conflicting metrics, budgets, and cultures
• since it's hard, many firms are tempted by silver bullets: "If we build a data warehouse, the clouds will  part and the angels will sing multi-channel insights to  us."
• but in practice, such efforts often collapse of their own weight, and unfortunately it takes time to realize that prospect, since "If you don't know where you are going any road will get you there."
• there are ways to do better, and folks who have done better...

Hope to see you there, or hear from you about your experiences before, during, or after.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

The Revolution Will Be Televised (It Just May Not Be A Revolution)

I wrote in an earlier post about the logical math that would drive ad budgets away from "traditional" TV (broadcast, cable) toward online videos.  Here's a great article by Alan Schulman in yesterday's Online Video Insider on how traditional agencies are co-opting the online video ad buy in a way that may limit the evolution of the medium, and illustrates how my earlier post missed the point. 

DylanMessaging: Viral Genius

This viral messaging campaign by Ten4 for SonyBMG's release of a collection of Bob Dylan's music last fall was enormously successful.  I've always loved the original video, and harbored ideas of recording my own version of it at home to kick off various presentations I've given in the past, but hadn't pulled the trigger.  Then I saw this (via Scott Kirsner -- thanks Scott!) and was really impressed.  The mind races to all the other similar possibilities, though doubtless there are intellectual property issues that weren't a problem here.

Reminds me of another viral favorite, Mr. Picassohead

An Unevenly Distributed Future: MITX Internet Video Panel

Last night I went to a great MITX panel discussion at MIT on Internet video.  Scott Kirsner moderated a great and diverse group representing the media, CDNs, VC, and agency worlds.  Scott organized the discussion into three buckets:  how are users interactions with web video changing; how is the production side of the business evolving to enable new things; and, the "monetization" of all this.  Here are my notes, and a few ideas:

Expanded Awareness At AOL: MIHOO + eBay? And What About Amazon?

Dave Morgan is a shrewd operator.  In adding buyat to advertising.com, he expands what AOL knows about how surfing ties to buying.  As I wrote here, this expanded awareness of consumer behavior makes it possible to develop better targeting algorithms, raising the CPMs he can charge advertisers or helping him be more competitive at existing rates.

So if a smaller affiliate network like buyat makes sense for AOL, what about two well-known larger networks? 

For example, when does Microsoft add eBay to Yahoo!? Like Yahoo!, eBay's stock is down 30% from last fall.  The premium over the market price that Microsoft is paying for Yahoo! represents only about 5% of Microsoft's market capitalization, arguably leaving plenty of room for another deal of similar scale without stockholders getting nervous about excessive dilution -- and eBay's market cap today is only about a third bigger than Yahoo!'s was pre-MIHOO.  Amazon, with a market cap of $30 billion, is in essentially the same position. (And maybe since it's a neighbor of Microsoft's, it might make more sense?)

This idea isn't that radical.  Yahoo! and eBay already had a partnership.  Google gets the value too, though it hasn't made much progress with its own services, Froogle and Base.

Some will say another deal soon is practically impossible, because integrating Yahoo! will consume Microsoft.  I believe that's a red herring.  The value in the MSFT/ YHOO deal will be created by a better advertising capability: better reach, better data, better targeting.  It won't come from integrating media properties.  If you believe this, it suggests that this is where the integration focus should be.  This  simplifies the integration challenge, and allows Microsoft to turn its attention to the next move.  Also, the current economic circumstances favor further consolidation, especially in a market (digital marketing) with longer-term fundamentals (growth, returns to scale) that remain strong.

Memo to MIHOO: A Modest Proposal for The Next Step

There are three ways an ad network can compete:  better reach, better data, better analytics.  Know more people, know more about them, know what to do with that information.  Jeffrey Rayport noted yesterday in MarketWatch that recent consolidations in the ad network business have made it a game that "only the mighty can play."  Meanwhile, Danny Sullivan wonders in Ad Age whether the Microsoft-Yahoo combination will be enough to catch Google, even if they can pull the integration off.

So here's an idea, borrowing from a time-honored software business strategy most recently exploited by Facebook when it opened up an API to its "social graph" (also inspired by recent fiddling I've done with the IBM Many Eyes project).  MIHOO should provide a way for "third-party algorithm developers" to query its combined data hoard of users and their clickstreams.  That way, they can "unleash the power of open-source algorithm development" by letting the unwashed mathematicians of the world back-test their ideas for getting consumer X to respond to offer Y in context Z.  Of course, this would come with a price: when you go to run your algorithm on the MIHOO network to "monetize" it, MIHOO takes the gross cut to the network and pays you, the algorithm developer a royalty.

Symbiotic way for MIHOO and the little guy to take on big GOOG.  Lots of problems with this to be sure, starting with privacy (even though it already "is", can data be further anonymized to make it tough to infer my personal clickstream?).  And, as a practical matter, can MIHOO expose a data warehouse that could take mass pounding from the world without slowing to a useless crawl?  Further, would it be worth it?  There is a diminishing return to finer and finer targeting ideas, after all.  As for the competitive risk -- that people will get insights on MIHOO's data set that they can deploy on some other network (Google's or otherwise) perhaps there is a way to abstract the data being queried until a promising algorithm can be "optioned" by MIHOO.

Granted, it's a bit out there... but work with me people, or help me find the fatal flaw.

Domain Farming: This Is Clever

From Seth Godin:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/10/farming-domains.html

Neat.  What other domains have this potential?  Sure beats simply parking them.

PRSA Boston Panel October 30: How To Make Friends and Influence PR Plans

I'm participating on a Public Relations Society of America panel run by Jack Jackson at Bentley College on October 30.  Hope to see you there.

Branded Readers

Reading news and blogs through an RSS reader has been great for me.  I can get through a lot of stuff in very little time:  I'm guessing I'm 4x as productive going this route.  (I've tried a few different readers -- FeedDemon, Thunderbird, Newsgator, and I'm currently using Google Reader, with mixed results.)  Despite the clear benefits of these tools, few people outside my friends in tech use them.  I've been wondering why, and what opportunities the answers might mean.

Digg for Marketers

Via Bill Ives's post, Marktd.  Inevitable I guess.  Would be better if I could filter the RSS feed with one of the tags provided for each item.  Or, did I miss how?  And, could benefit from the "Mark As Spam" button for users or volunteer managers.

One Social Graph To Rule Them All

It seems not a day goes by that I don't get an invitation to connect with someone on one social networking service or another.  It's all very flattering, but it's getting really hard to manage, especially as many of these services don't syndicate well, or at all.

In an ideal world, I could connect and interact with people and groups from a single interface.  Of course, different providers of these services would feel very differently about this.  Smaller ones would love to have this outlet as an alternative to almost-certain obscurity.  Bigger ones say, "I already got one, it's my world, and my users are just living in it, thank you very much."

Via Caroline Meeks and TechCrunch,  I just finished reading  Brad Fitzpatrick's August 17 essay, "Thoughts on the Social Graph".  Brad does a very good job of laying out the problem to be solved and how to go about solving it.  Better yet, he and friends are actually working on it.  With Google behind him, this is pretty serious.

Still, I wonder if it's a bridge too far.  Prediction:  with agents like Jonathan Miller and Ross Levinsohn at Velocity now out there trying to aggregate interesting web properties into networks with the minimal reach necessary to make them interesting to advertisers (i.e., moving them up from the AdSense basement I live in), we'll soon see "federated" APIs based on these individual properties' collective social graph emerge.  Why?  Because doing so will make it more interesting for advertisers to build their own versions of "Facebook applications" on top of these social graphs. 

Let's take an example.  Let's say mythical new age ad network "Travelamigos" goes out there and rolls out a bunch of small travel social networks.  People who use these networks are more likely to find and connect with buddies if they are connected across all relevant networks, not just bilaterally, so they'll find such a capability useful and be more likely to join the underlying services.  Advertisers will have a larger, better-connected user base not just to sell ads to, but also to develop services for.

For large media firms, who currently control and are expanding their own "social media" properties, aggregating and exposing such a "social graph API" would also seem to be a natural progression.

LinkedIn: Facing Reality

Many of us have been wondering for a while when LinkedIn would get around to opening up its API so others could take advantage of its networks of registered users to build applications  that could be spread virally through those networks.  Facebook has stolen a march on LinkedIn, first by allowing anyone to create a group, and most recently by exposing an API to allow others to develop applications that use its registered user base and networks -- or what they call the "social graph". 

Facebook applications have taken off like wildfire, and with this initiative Facebook has raised the "platform ante" beyond where Google, Amazon, and Yahoo had it (i.e., rich APIs and data sets to query through them, but limited networks of users) for anyone aspiring to build a large-scale web presence.  My favorite Facebook app, which I think best (most simply) demonstrates what Facebook has made possible, is the "Friend Wheel".  When I look at mine, I realize how many friends I still have to introduce to each other!  (Maybe what I need is a Facebook app that implements "graphic friendship" ideas...)

Now there's speculation about LinkedIn getting with the program.  Folks fret about whether the LinkedIn UI could handle the weight of a bunch of apps.  That's a red herring, IMHO.  Based on the relative rate of connection requests I've been getting in the last few days (4 or 5 to one in FB's favor), it would seem LinkedIn has no choice. 

But what's even more compelling about what Facebook's done, and why the imperative for LinkedIn is even more urgent,  is the economic opportunity it creates.  Everyone in the network can now make informed choices of apps to place on their profile pages, and a smart platform player will ultimately do a three-way rev share -- some for the member, some for the app developer, and some (ok most) for itself.  It will be interesting to see how soon Facebook gets around to this.

Beyond The Click-Rush Climax: Content As The Once and Future King

Following last week's post, this week's news:

AOL buys Third Screen Media, WPP buys 24/7 Real Media, and now MSFT buys aQuantive for an 85% premium (congrats to my old Razorfish friends).

VLCK's out there if you have, oh, $4B lying around.   However, I'd be surprised if we saw another 2x deal, since it takes a lot of cash and a big market cap to absorb that kind of dilution.  OMC's a possibility given the logic of the WPP-24/7 deal, though it would be a more complicated deal, and like WPP, OMC might be tempted to look "deeper in the draft".

These moves by the big portals clearly raise the stakes for the big online publishers.  Not only do the portals control how traffic gets to them, but now they control even more of how ads are placed on them.

The Great Click Rush of 2007

Ad networks are hot, and in many cases highly-profitable businesses right now.  On the heels of Google's snapping up DoubleClick for $3 billion, Yahoo! bought (the 80% it didn't already own of) 4 year old  online display ad exchange Right Media last week for $680 million.  So, a logical question to ask is, who buys whom next?

Video Search Part II: ScanScout

A week ago I had lunch with Waikit Lau, president and co-founder of ScanScout (http://scanscout.com).  Waikit, whom I got to know when I was at ArsDigita and he was part of the http://photo.net team a few years ago, describes ScanScout's video analysis technology like this (this is the shareable version): 

Think Viral, Act Tribal Part III: "Dissecting Numa Numa"

Last Thursday morning I attended a MITX Digital Marketing Series presentation titled "Dissecting Numa Numa: A Critical Analysis of Viral Video Content", given by Jeremi Karnell of One to One Interactive, Professor Jeffrey Bardzell of Indiana University's School of Informatics, and Dr. Carl Marci, Chief Science Officer at Innerscope Research.  The questions considered (my version):  why did this amateur work go as "viral" as it did, and how (well) can neuroscience help us predict viral media propagation?

Think Viral, Act Tribal, Part II: What, Why, and How Memes Propagate

A while back I wrote down some ideas about viral marketing prompted by a meeting with an entrepreneur who was having some trouble executing a campaign.  Today, I came across a really interesting research paper, "Memes and affinities:  cultural replication and literacy education", by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, presented in November 2005 at the National Reading Conference annual meeting.  The paper is here: http://www.geocities.com/c.lankshear/memes2.pdf.

Syndicate This

In the post right before this one, you will see a widget for this blog I created using Goowy Media's yourminis service.  You can help make me famous by embedding it in your blog.  Or, you can install it on your desktop (you need to have Adobe's Apollo player first -- that's their cross-platform desktop equivalent of the Flash player for web browsers) , and wait patiently for it to alert you of my latest big idea.  Or, you can ignore my widget but check out many more useful ones people have built using Flash 8 and the yourminis API.

You Heard It Here First: "SGM"

From the Weak-Attempt-at-Punditry-Department, here's an attempt to coin a term for hot new theme to track:  "Subject-Generated-Media", or "SGM" for short.  It's inspired by Red Sox ace pitcher Curt Schilling's blog, 38pitches.com, which is simply brilliant.  I've learned more about pitching reading Curt's posts than I picked up in the past 30 years of being a fan.  Curt is a terrific writer, and he brings out the best in his friends, too.  For example, here's a recent comment on this post, by former Sox Kevin Millar, whom Curt fanned quickly in a recent spring training game:

Well I must say that Curt is right on with the curve ball talk.I have been ragging on his curve ball for a few years and today he called my bluff.

1st ab he shook 3 times and I had a feeling he was shaking to the curve ball but still didnt have the balls to sit 1st pitch curve ball on Schilling. Then, I did call time out, telling Tek “What the hell is Schill doing shaking to the curve ball?”, and bam! sure enough here came this hanging curve ball (Curt: I beg to differ, the first one wasn’t hanging) I watched for strike 1, and couldnt pull the trigger. Then schill came back with another (Curt: which I did hang) whiched I pulled foul (Curt: into the vendor selling lemonade, which for anyone sitting along the 3rd base dugout knows is no surprise, Kevin hooking a pitch foul) and yes he threw the 3rd one in a row which I layed off.

I then had a feeling he was going to throw all curve balls to me, as pedro martinez did to me the 1st time I faced him last year and i struck out on 4 in a row. But Schill caught me guessing and struck me out with a heater in.

So all the trash talking I did to him and all the text messages I ragged him with, he got me and I couldnt look at him after the AB, even though i wanted to laugh

Kevin (Curt: I can hook a fastball better than anyone but Sheffield) Millar

Bazaarvoice Reviews: Another Good "Structured Collaboration" Example

A lot of marketers these days are asking themselves how they can take advantage of "consumer-generated media" ("CGM").  The knee-jerk association for the term is with bboards, and more recently blogs and wikis.  I've suggested in the past that providing such "unstructured" publishing vehicles as a starting point for productive interactions online is often not very helpful.  A more sophisticated approach offers means of contribution where what they're for and how to use them (both to contribute and consume information) are more self-evident.

The Sound And The Fury: 2006 US Ad Spending, By The Numbers

Just came across this summary of 2006 US ad spending from TNS Media.  It's striking that despite all the talk about online advertising's growth, Spot TV still outgrew it on an absolute basis, and TV as a whole is still outgrowing overall ad spending as a whole by 25% (5% vs. 4%, led by Spot and by the growth of Spanish language advertising). 

Advertising on the web is great, but having seen services like Spot Runner and Visible World, and related vertical efforts, TV may not be dead for a while.  Of course, as content from each begins to flow to each, and with mobile to spice things up further, perhaps the category definitions are becoming less useful anyway. 

This is a rear-view perspective.  While 2006 may have been the year of online video on the conference circuit, the ad models for this medium haven't yet been really worked out (though there are some interesting ideas out there), and both advertisers and media players are still "organizing for digital"  buying and selling.  So I'd expect the shifts everybody's been hyping to accelerate somewhat this year.

Of course, this is one summary, among many that might report the numbers differently, and it would be interesting to compare them to each other, and with what the leading prognosticators have been saying...

SMS: Simplicity Makes Sense

Last week I attended a MITX panel discussion, "What's Now in Mobile: The Capability of Today's Wireless World".

It's the best of times and worst of times in mobile marketing.  We're at the front end of an "amazing" new age of capabilities, with video, location-based services, and so much more.  At the same time, the ecosystem's development is hindered, as Nellymoser founder John Puterbaugh put it (referring specifically to mobile video), by "dozens of content formats, hundreds of [differently-configured] networks, and thousands of phone types."

Before the presentations I had a chance to talk with Toshi Uchida, a director at Fidelity's e-business Wireless Group.  Toshi's comments before and during the talk, emphasizing simplicity as crucial to application development in this medium, provided a useful counterpoint to the  hype about mobile.  Among the insights: 

• "aftermarket" application installations on pc's are hard enough for most people; on mobile devices they're well-nigh impossible today, even on a relatively powerful device like my BlackBerry 8700.  (I've added Google Maps and the Gmail client, but browsing web pages is so slow and visually painful that I don't readily experiment as much in this medium as I'd like to.)
• unless they are highly-motivated power users, like traders, most people just will not deal with complexity in mobile application interfaces. The mobile context is just too crowded with other stimuli, time-constrained, size-constrained, and "semi-conscious" to accomodate anything higher than a brain-stem -level assumption about user focus.

This has left me wondering a lot lately about SMS and how to take better advantage of it, since everyone has the capability these days on their phones, unlimited-use plans are now cheap and getting cheaper, and it's really easy to use.  Although Pew reported last year that more than a third of US cell phone users use SMS, very few people I know seem to take advantage of SMS as a service interface, such as Google's (46645), or this impressive array offered by Bankinter in Spain. 

Looking at Bankinter's services, it occurred to me -- when was the last time I saw an SMS cheat sheet posted by a vendor in a public place?  Maybe the answer is to introduce user guides into print advertising, or billboards?  Where's the laminated, business-card-sized, double-sided helper for my wallet?  And, for vendors with whom I have an account, perhaps a refund or partial subsidy (in the spirit of pre-paid postage on business-reply envelopes) of any SMS charges I do incur in using those services?

Related:  this excellent article by Sim Simeonov on the mobile tech stack.

"In Their Tribes", Or, "How Do You Handle 10,000 Tech Maniacs' Votes?"

Dell  got a lot of press recently for launching its new Digg-knockoff "ideastorm" site (http://dellideastorm.com) for receiving and prioritizing customer feedback on its products and plans.  Right around the same time, The Wall Street Journal pointed out that on Digg itself, there's an extreme power-law distribution among contributors:  one guy, "Stoner", accounts for 13% of posts that got voted onto the Digg home page recently, and only 30 of the 900,000 registered users account for a third of Digg home page posts.  The bias that such extreme concentration can create is immediately apparent on the ideastorm site:  Linux (or more-generally, open-source)-oriented suggestions account for 18 of the 30 highest-rated suggestions on the first two pages of the site's list.

Set up this way, where so many "precincts" vote in the same general pool, voting sites like ideastorm can quickly alienate folks that don't have time (or money) to organize support for their ideas. Erick Schonfeld's post, here on Rojo, suggests what sites like these need is a "trustworthy reputation system" where people can disclose more fully who they are and who, if anyone is paying them to place stories there.

I come to a different conclusion.  I believe voting sites, like other forms of "structured collaboration", are best managed in subgroups, defined by shared interests, and coordinated through active moderation by volunteer "editors" -- much as Wikipedia has evolved.  From direct experience in managing a social bookmarking application, I can foresee (in fact we've specified) several specific administrator-defined (subgroups, categories, recognition and networking opportunities for volunteers) and user-defined (e.g., tags, profiles) mechanisms to make this work. 

On ideastorm, which takes the trouble to tell you how many people have endorsed a particular person's (in this example, Gautam's) idea, it would be especially useful to publish a page that ranks submitters by the number of endorsements from unique others.  These listings might include links to these submitters' profiles (including addresses for blogs if they have them, or perhaps at least bios).  Dell could then draw its volunteer moderators via further screening of this pool, maybe offering a piece of equipment or some public recognition as a thank you for assiduous moderation. (Reddit provides a stats page that's sort of like this, though its "karma"-based rating -- explained here -- isn't particularly intuitive, to me at least.)

More generally, I think there's lots of room for "shades of gray" models between "fully-edited" and "fully-user-generated" content that would provide more transparency about how members of a group promote submissions.   Think in terms of "concentric circles of delegated moderation", where trusted insiders recruit trusted outsiders from a pool of folks who have demonstrated passionate, constructive participation.

Gotuit: Video Search, and its Implications

A couple of weeks ago I had breakfast with Patrick Donovan, and old colleague from when we worked together in the early 90's at a Lexington, MA consulting and software development firm called Symmetrix.  These days Patrick is VP of Product Development at Gotuit Media.  Gotuit provides technology that allows users to "deep-tag" a slice of a video they look at on sites like YouTube and Metacafe. 

Here's a slice I made of a four-minute video on YouTube about the BT around the world sailing race.  I wanted to highlight what I thought was one of the more "that's gotta hurt!" moments in a video otherwise full of them:

 

Here's the url for this slice on Gotuit: http://www.gotuit.com/player/index.html?c=SM_Entertainment&t=8503&s=59028

Gotuit doesn't actually rip and store video itself; rather, it's an interface through which you create a data layer (on Gotuit) that identifies and describes (with title, tags, and a free-form text field) slices of videos hosted elsewhere.  Gotuit provides a browser toolbar with buttons that make it easy to quickly deep-tag a slice of a video and then share it via embedding or a hyperlink in a blog or other web page, or by simply emailing it to one or more friends.

So what?  Search is already a killer app on the web.  Video is exploding on the web.  Ergo, search for video will be huge.  Since video (and audio) is consumed linearly, meaning you can't browse it the way you can browse text, simply tagging and otherwise describing a source file on YouTube or somewhere else is only partially helpful to getting you to what you're looking for and helping you consume it efficiently.  Being able to deep-tag slices becomes really useful particularly for form factors and contexts -- like mobile -- where efficient use of limited resources (time, bandwidth, and memory) are more important. 

It doesn't stop there.  Of course, if you can tag inside a video, and you can sell ads against tags, you can advertise inside a video, in a highly targeted way.  And if you can tag inside a video, you can also string together slices to create what we used to call "highlight reels", but now would call "tag-dimensional mashups" I guess, allowing "omni-directional re-purposing" of content.  Videos of NFL games could be sliced and mashed up to create "best touchdowns", "hardest hits", "ugliest players" series.  Again, particularly interesting for mobile applications and contexts.

While I'm not sure that Gotuit in its current business model incarnation (today's separate service vs. a licensed, embedded capability in major video sites) or UI expression has reached its final stage, this is a really interesting company, and Patrick is a very smart guy.  Check them out.

Recursive E-Commerce

Just fooling around, with one-click ordering Javascript popup.

 

A Web 2.0 Travel Service That Gets Web 2.0

My friend Perry Hewitt, who runs the online marketing consulting firm Colechurch Consulting (so named because it helps bridge marketing-IT divides for its clients), pointed me to FareCompare this weekend.  FareCompare, an airfare comparison engine, uniquely albeit gratuitously  does the Google maps mashup thing with airfares.  Gratuitous, since the map doesn't add much to your processing of the information provided -- most people know where the cities listed are.  But what I like are the multiple approaches to syndicating its service:  Firefox plug-ins, Google and Yahoo desktop widgets.  (I checked Expedia to see if they offer the same thing -- they do, but only one, and it's the buggy, out-of-date version of what FareCompare distributes.)

This syndication thing is going to be big one of these days.

(BTW, Perry, love your site's new design.)

The Case For CPM (And Other Digital Media Learnings)

From a July survey of 6,000 people by DoubleClick, via November 20th's NYT:

About a third of consumers sometimes click on banner advertisements on the Web. But twice as many consumers sometimes respond to such ads indirectly, avoiding clicking on them but later visiting the Web sites advertised...

DoubleClick makes its living serving ads, and obviously has an interest in making the case for all those ads that people don't click on.  Nevertheless, it's useful to have some numbers here on the relative impact of CPM-based online advertising.

Here's the study:

http://www.doubleclick.com/us/knowledge_central/documents/RESEARCH/dc_touchpointsIV_0611.pdf

Surprisingly, the Times omitted mention of the word "sometimes" that DoubleClick had used in the study to describe the behaviors above.  So, as I read these results, folks are twice as likely to sometimes visit an advertiser's site after seeing its web ad as they are to sometimes click on the ad itself.

The rest of the study has some very interesting findings about the relative importance of different media channels to different stages of purchase decision processes, across different industries.  It's worth a look.

Notes From Zurich

I recently gave two talks in Zurich at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institut's 56th Annual Retail Conference and 7th European Foodservice Conference.  GDI, led by David Bosshart, is an old, established, and well-funded think tank that judging from the conferences has a very loyal, pan-European following among very senior executives.  Both were wonderfully intimate affairs where there were plenty of opportunities for interaction, in lovely settings with terrific food. 

Here are the notes from the retail conference that GDI published:

http://www.gdi.ch/index.php?id=1299

Here are some photos from the Foodservice conference (these folks know how to have a good time):

http://www.gdi.ch/61-80.1250.0.html?&L=1&tx_gooffotoboek_pi1[7305][fid]=15&tx_gooffotoboek_pi1[7305][record]=7305#7305

Adify: A First Step Toward A Multi-Tier Online Ad Network Ecosystem

Yesterday I posted ideas about the likely emergence of multi-tier publisher aggregation mechanisms for the online ad market.  Things move fast.  Today, via TechCrunch, I learned about Adify, one of 13 firms selected from over 200 to present at today's Web 2.0 conference in SF. Adify allows publishers to set up their own virtual ad networks to market ad space they have to sell on their web properties.  Translated:  it's sort of a specialized eBay or Amazon storefront for online ad space.

So, now advertisers can search and browse these storefronts to buy space at retail in highly targeted ways.  But we can also predict that new intermediaries will emerge to package and broker value-added bundles to advertisers who lack the time or the sophistication to do the shopping themselves.  These intermediaries could be new services provided by the traditional ad networks, or they could be new players entirely. 

More broadly, what we're seeing is the predictable exploitation of the big arbitrage opportunity in online advertising.  Rough numbers:  a $20 billion online ad market, with (conservatively) a 15% margin*, featuring (my guess) a 50% arbitrage opportunity =  a >$1 billion market available to the quick and the clever.

(*Prior to its recent stumble, Aquantive's March 10Q reports that, excluding consulting by Razorfish and DNA,  revenues and pre-tax profits were $37 million and $15 million, respectively.  After a share of corporate G&A and taxes, I make that a 15% margin more or less.  Of course one company's profit margin is only a vague, flawed proxy for the industry profit pool, but it gives you a feel for how lucrative this business currently is.  I'd guess Hellman & Friedman have done very nicely after taking DoubleClick private in 2005, what with lower overhead and tax-deductible interest on buyout debt.)

Related:  Madhens

De-Optimized

Follow-up to my post on MegaKarma: traffic to my blog doubled (rough estimate), and a couple of people voted my post up on Reddit.  But then I got voted back down into the dark hole I came from.  Oh, the humiliation.

Moral of this story:  Just as is true in the real world, there's no substitute for personal networking.  Send your posts to others, ask them to comment constructively on their blogs and link to you if appropriate.  Services like Megakarma might be helpful, but only on the margin.  Anyone have a different experience?

MegaKarma: Social Media Optimization

Via an ad on Adverblog, I learned of MegaKarma.net, a service that helps you game submissions to social bookmarking / voting services like Digg and Reddit.  The basic idea is "you scratch my back, I scratch yours":  once you've submitted your link to the social bookmarking services, you submit it to MegaKarma, which then emails it to a list of other members of these services who vote it up (if they like it) after it's posted.  I'm just trying this service now (with this post!), so I can't say yet whether or not it seems to be effective.  But it does seem like a way around the "credibility power law" effect that emerges in systems like these, where "power posters" have disproportionate clout in the algorithms the services (properly) use for rankings.  Just as we had PR firms to spread the word and build buzz in Old Media, we now have services like these for the New.  Technology changes, but socioeconomic dynamics remain the same.

Postscript:  Mike-O-Matic's take

"Monetizing" The Blogosphere: Networks of Networks

Typepad users like me who loggged in today saw Typepad plugging Bayraider, a new shopping blog from Shiny Media, which seems to be trying to follow in the wake of PopSugar.  With the entry costs being so low, a few motivated friends can get together and put together small networks that collectively improve their ability to sell ads.  This makes me think that we'll see more entrepreneurs putting together such networks, following in the model pioneered by Federated Media.  Of course, with the A-Listers snapped up already, I think we can expect to see a multi-tiered market aggregation market emerge: 

Appassionata

This morning I went to the OpenACS/ .LRN conference Carl Blesius organized at Harvard Medical School.  Carl recruited Kathy Sierra, author of the Creating Passionate Users blog, as a keynote speaker.  13 pages of notes for a 45-minute presentation suggest she had my attention.  Here are some excerpts of my notes:

Think Viral, Act Tribal

An entrepreneur approached us recently, puzzled and a little frustrated.  She had what was, on the face of it, a great idea for a personal gift business.  Even better, one tailor-made for viral marketing: it was the kind of thing that you'd expect people would pass along as an affordable and useful service to family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, fellow church-goers...  But despite doing the de rigueur marketing du jour -- paid search and telling folks she new about it -- she wasn't making any appreciable gains toward the 100,000 user milestone she had set for herself and for investors as a gate for further effort and funding.

Viral marketing is conceptually easy to get, but tactically hard to do.  One way to understand it better is to actually approach it the way epidemiologists do, which is to understand disease vectors and transmission mechanisms.  The former refers to the paths through which an illness spreads, while the latter refers to how sickness gets passed along, and by whom.  Listening to the entrepreneur it became clear that while she had a highly nuanced view of her ultimate target customer segments, she had a very uniform view of the folks who would get the message to them. 

To unpack the challenge, we suggested the following exercise.  Assume for a second that the virus will spread in a simple 1:10 pattern -- that is, each person tells ten, who then each tell ten in turn.  In six "hops" you get to 100,000 people (ignore the decay rate for the moment).  Question is, how do you sustain signal strength and consistency across each hop?  The answer lies in figuring out who in advance your likely carrier for each hop might be, based on formal and informal roles; next, understand his tribe, his mechanisms for engaging it, and his motivations for doing so; then package your "virus" for maximum effect in that context.

Here's how this might work in practice.  Let's take a popular example:  "most-emailed articles".  Today, the tools used by popular services like NYT Online include a form element where you can add your comments on an article you are forwarding to an acquaintance.  One essential lesson from "Structured Collaboration" best practices is that blank text fields are some of the least effective elements for enabling people to interact.  Most people, confronted with the "comments" field, might type something like "Thought you'd find this interesting" if they type anything at all.  I presume they wouldn't have sent the article if they didn't think the recipient wouldn't find it interesting -- making the comment gratuitous, and missing the opportunity to convey something else.

That "something else" could be information that could provide *context* to the recipient.  Let's assume the form element was, instead of a comment, a drop-down list or set of check boxes that described the recipient, or recipient group in some way.  For example, recipients could be "work", or "school", or "church", or "government", etc.  What would this allow us to do?  It would allow us to convey the article in the context of other related articles that together might point to a theme. 

This synthesis could help to convey a point much more powerfully than sending along the isolated example might. (To sustain usage of a mechanism like this, the email might provide only a short article summary and a link that would bring each successive recipient back to a site from which the enhanced forwarding mechanism could be used again.)

Taking this one step further, add tagging.  Other readers subscribing to those tags (via email or RSS, doesn't really matter) will be more "susceptible" to reading those forwarded articles knowing they have been categorized into a bucket they care about (at least until tag spam causes this increased receptivity to decay).

Now, let's add a motivation layer.  For example, let's assume that if you forward an article, or for that matter any other viral marketing element, you and the recipient are automatically entered in a sweepstakes drawing, or get a coupon.  Providing context to the recipient also provides information to the sponsor/ marketer that allows these offers to be more closely tailored.

On a related front, my friend Bill Ives just signed on to help another friend, Peter Gloor, at Peter's social network analysis software firm iQuest Analytics.

I'd be interested in hearing about any applications people know of that demonstrate these ideas today.

OPA Breakfast Meeting: User Experience and Engagement

On Wednesday, Jeffrey Rayport and I attended an Online Publisher's Association breakfast in Boston.  On the agenda:  presentation and panel discussion of really interesting new research from the Northwestern University Media Management Center on the links between user experience and consequent engagement with web sites.

September 21: Business Blogs Lunch Talk at KM Cluster

Bill Ives and Amanda Watlington, who have just published a new book called "Business Blogs:  A Practical Guide"  have graciously invited me to speak at the September 21, 2005 meeting (postponed from June 7) of the New England KM Cluster  in Waltham at Novell's headquarters.  My lunchtime talk (title TBD) will be drawn from my own experience and from that of organizations like the 3E Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government  and from MIT's Sloan School of Management, both also covered in Bill and Amanda's new book.

See Bill's blog for an abstract of the talk.

Go Daddy

This post was originally published on my first blog, hosted by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center.

I've been travelling between Boston and Washington a lot lately, and have been dipping into the bin of free magazines by the airline gate to keep stimulated until "electronic devices are permitted" in flight.  Recently I picked up the Valentine's Day edition of Ad Age and came upon some interesting data.