Landing pages: a solution for local mobile

February 6th, 2012

Local television stations and newspapers must become “ammunition business” companies in an era when the deer have guns. Everybody is a media company these days, and there’s a market in helping people and businesses get better at the business of media. In so doing, we move from competing with them to making money off their growth, and we think this is smart business.

For the past year, a friend of mine has been developing a tool to enable local media companies do just this: an HTML5 mobile landing page generator for agencies and media companies. I’m not suggesting there’s a lot of money in media companies designing mobile websites for people, but there is a significant market for landing pages for ads that run anywhere within our ad infrastructures and beyond. If we sell clickable ads, we need to also manage (for clients) the destination of those clicks. There’s nothing worse that an ad that clicks through to a basic HTML website on a mobile device. If advertisers offer people a clickable bargain — or some other incentive — it needs to load quickly and have the versatility to do what the advertiser wants done in an affordable way.

The ability to do this on behalf of advertisers is significant, and that’s what Mojaba does. Mojaba is the brain child of Christian Gurney. It’s not the first landing page software, but it was created so that non-technical people could generate the finished product. Gurney told me via email that the “back-end analytics go way beyond Google to show you the exact GPS coordinates of mobile users.”

With this product, you’re making a statement that the browser is where it’s at with mobile. Is that true?
We think that the early success of applications – especially on the iPhone – diverted attention from the fact that for 95% of businesses and organizations, mobile websites are the very best solution. Study after study shows that the mobile browser is one of the top three applications used by consumers on their phones.

What was the inspiration for this product?
I was amazed and frustrated by constantly being unable to find information about businesses when I was away from a computer. Especially when traveling: going through an airport with my bags and you just can’t pinch-and-zoom with one hand. So clearly as a user, the experience with desktop sites on my iPhone was bad. A Google study showing that 79% of websites have no mobile solution was the wake up call to the opportunity.

Why did you create a tool for agencies and media companies rather than going straight to the businesses who need HTML5 landing pages?
Mojaba is our first step in the conversation with agencies. Our long-term goal is to add products and services to remove a number of pain points for them when it comes to mobile marketing. The global shift to mobile being the conduit for people to get information from the web is undeniable. Through our services and support, we hope to earn the right to become the agencies’ best friend for mobile. If we can do that, we think we can have a strong business that provides true value.

Mojaba is a smart addition to any local media company’s portfolio, because the more we are able to provide “ammunition” to those in the market with the audience hunting guns, the greater our value in the new marketplace.

Posted in Advertising, Disruptions | 3 Comments » |

P&G’s moves are a dark harbinger for all media

February 4th, 2012

Those of you who follow this blog and my writing won’t be surprised by statements this week from the CEO of advertising behemoth Proctor & Gamble,  Bob McDonald. Here’s the important line by that’s being quoted by Jeremiah Owyang and others:

“In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that return on investment of the advertising when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient.”

P&G announced it was laying off 1,600 people, including some in marketing, which will result in $240 million in annual savings, but it’s the consequences of McDonald’s statement that has most people concerned. Ad Age:

He (McDonald) cited the 1.8 billion in free impressions generated by the Old Spice campaign in recent years, adding “there are many other examples I can cite from all over the world.”

Jeremiah Oywang wrote that the marketing industry should see this as a bellwether event indicating that digital marketing will:

1. See an increase in spend in overall digital marketing.
2. Makes marketing accountable, through analytics and tracking.
3. Will need to integrate paid, owned, and earned.

Jeremy Epstein wrote that the history of social media, when it’s written, will view this week as a watershed moment, and I agree with him.  The idea of “spend more on advertising to generate more sales” no longer works, he wrote.

There is probably NO company in America (maybe even the world) that rode the wave of mass, traditional advertising to behemoth status more than P&G. It’s as iconic a marketing org as there is and this week will be recognized as the one where the balance of power finally-and forever-shifted.

Media companies, who make their money via advertising adjacent to or interrupting their content, will ultimately be the ones who feel the pain of all of this, because the net allows companies like P&G to function in the role of media company all my themselves. Where they do still advertise, they can do so with confidence in the effectiveness of their spend, and the blue smoke and mirrors of mass marketing simply cannot compete with hard network data.

This is why you’ll hear me repeat over and over again that content isn’t the problem for media companies. The problem is what’s taking place in the advertising world, and no content solution will fix it.

Posted in Advertising, Disruptions, Reinventing Local Media | 2 Comments » |

The blogosphere, circa 2012 (Hint: it ain’t dead or dying)

December 30th, 2011

One could argue, I suppose, that blogging has always been a cry for attention, but then you’d have to admit the same for all forms of media. As Dave Winer so brilliantly points out, “the readers are the product, and the customers are the advertisers,” so who can blame content creators for wanting attention? It’s one thing to have an idea and to put that on paper, but it’s like the proverbial tree falling in the forest unless somebody else reads it. However, when money is exchanged for content creation, everything changes, because the paradigm moves from just being read to the number of people reading. This is called mass marketing. Media has always thought it was the content business, but Dave rightly discerns, attention for advertisers is the real business.

Much has been written over the last few years about blogging and blogging’s future since the dawn of social media. The latest is Jeremiah Owyang’s “End of an Era: The Golden Age of Tech Blogging is Over.” I won’t attempt to deconstruct this view, because others with greater credentials than mine have already done so. I do wish to comment about what’s happened to blogging, however, because 2012 will be my 10th year with The Pomo Blog.

There are many definitions of blogging, but mine most closely resembles, again, Dave Winer’s. He’s writing here about how some tech blogs, most notably TechCrunch, moved from being “blogs” to being media companies writing about technology, like CNET.

It’s understandable because they earn their salaries based on how much they please advertisers. It’s like the hamster-farms they write about — the readers are the product, and the customers are the advertisers. Bloggers, as I use the term, are the product without bothering with the advertisers. It’s people and their ideas, for better or worse, and nothing more than that.

This is The Pomo Blog. You won’t see any advertising here, because this blog isn’t about attention; it’s about ideas and the challenging of assumptions. It’s a teaching vehicle, and the student is me. That’s all it is, and this brings me to the social media disruption.

Technology spawned the personal media revolution — the “Great Horizontal” to which Jay Rosen refers — which has given voice to the formerly voiceless. Telling the world what you think only requires time. Everything else is free. If you follow closely (from a distance) all that’s taken place with this in the past ten years, however, you’ll find thousands of people who’ve interpreted this as a way to “make their mark” and pursue dreams that aren’t so horizontal as much as they are hierarchical.

I always used to argue that bloggers were not really competing with traditional media companies until I began seeing the various A-list, B-list, C-list rankings. It was clear that some people were in it for the rankings, and in that sense — and just as Dave asserts — they were trying to generate a mass following. But regular blogging takes time, so when social media came along, these people fled the blogosphere to find the audience — the “Klout” — they were seeking elsewhere, because, well, it was more efficient and a whole lot easier to grow a reputation using connected social media.

Personal branding burst onto the scene, and we started seeing stories, posts, tweets about how to advance our personal brands. I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post “How to ‘be somebody’ on Twitter” that was based entirely on practices I had observed from those whose primary purpose on Twitter (and especially when tied together with Facebook) appeared to be growing an audience. There’s, of course, nothing wrong with that, but it has separated the wheat from the chaff in terms of blogging and the blogosphere.

I’m not suggesting anything untoward or disingenuous about this. It simply is what it is.

What I am trying to suggest is that this wing of the blogosphere has indeed vanished or transformed into plain old fashioned media designed to accrue an audience, and as long as this continues to be its goal, I’m not sure it’s all that sustainable, because their product — the audience — isn’t as necessary as it once was. That’s because the people who used to want that product — the advertisers — are now using the same technology to route around inefficient middlemen and go directly to the customers they seek. Further carving up the same old pie nets only smaller pieces and more confusion for the people who have the money in the first place. Any business model today based on traditional advertising has a rude awakening ahead.

I’ll never disrespect or discourage anyone for crying for attention, but if the end game is an audience for advertising, you might want to rethink your future.

(Disclosure: The Pomo Blog wouldn’t be here had it not been for the direct assistance of Dave Winer in getting me started.)

Posted in Advertising, Blogging, Culture, Disruptions | No Comments » |

The power of the personal brand (in a social world)

December 22nd, 2011

In a recent Nieman Journalism Lab article on the possibility of newspapers making money by selling ads on Twitter, Justin Ellis notes the successful efforts pioneered by celebrities and athletes. The fact is that the reach of certain celebrities far exceeds that of traditional media companies, so why shouldn’t advertisers pay them instead of media companies to get their word out? Besides, there’s that whole illusion of endorsement thing.

Mr. Ellis says much in a tongue-in-cheek reference to a certain reality show “star.”

Not to mention non-news outlets like, um, Kim Kardashian, for whom pay-per-tweet is a long-standing phenomenon.

Kardashian may be a “non-news outlet,” but she is so only in the sense of a traditional view of “news.” Prior to social media, celebrities required the filter of news organizations in order to be promoted, but much of that is now in their own hands. Are they “media companies?” Of course they are. And just as Wal-Mart has a bigger advertising platform than the New York Times and the Washington Post combined, Hollywood and our athletic fields are cranking out new platforms regularly. It’s into this environment that the efforts of newspapers to play copycat look just a little weak in comparison.

In the last few weeks, The Hartford Courant and The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune have experimented with using Twitter as a new advertising channel. At the Courant, they’ve started offering twice-daily deals to local businesses — think Groupon by tweet — to their followers. The Times-Picayune, more controversially, used Twitter to advertise itself — or at least its website, as the online division of its parent company, Advance Publications, paid New Orleans Saints players to tweet about the newspaper’s relaunched Saints site on Nola.com.

Mr. Ellis notes that the hashtag #spon, which appears at the end of some tweets is a “semi-legible indicator of a sponsored tweet.”

“A Twitter search for #spon is an enlightening look,” he adds, “into what sorts of companies are paying people to tweet: at the moment, Verizon, Clorox, Pepperidge Farm, and Q-Tips.”

I like what Advance Publications did in employing NFL celebrities to promote its website, but the use of a mass media Twitter news stream is problematic. It’s is a part of what I dubbed “unbundled advertising” in a 2005 essay about how to make money in the unbundled universe of the Web. It was written prior to Twitter.

If unbundled media is where we’re headed, then unbundled advertising must necessarily follow. This is a scary concept, however, for there is no command and control mechanism or manipulable infrastructure in the unbundled world. The upside, though, is that it costs very little to participate. All that’s necessary is the release what I call “ad pieces” into the seeming chaos of the Internet, where other businesses will take those pieces and reassemble them when summoned by customers who are trading their scarcity for information they actually want.

So while I fully support the concept here, we need to go back to the comparison with Kim Kardashian to understand why media companies using this particular application — in their own streams — is suspect strategically. The problem is that Kim Kardashian is a real person; The Hartford Courant is not. Ms. Kardashian’s brand is personal and as transparent as a reality star can be. Followers and fans connect with her on a visceral level. They experience emotions in their vicarious relationship with her. When Ms. Kardashian tweets for a sponsor, there’s an inference that she wouldn’t try to “fool” her fans. The endorsement also benefits her directly, and fans understand, accept and appreciate that. The few seconds it takes to “see” the endorsement isn’t wasted; it supports a real person with whom fans are connected.

Moreover, the purpose of following a celebrity on Twitter is different than the purpose of following a news organization’s stream. For Ms. Kardashian, it’s about the connection. With The Hartford Courant, it’s about the news feed. To the former, therefore, a sponsored tweet is about the person, but to the latter, it’s about noise, an interference. A sponsored tweet in the midst of a stream of news is an interruption. It’s, well, advertising.

Nevertheless, it’s good strategic thinking, because it gets us into the world of unbundling, where aggregation is the real value proposition. We’d do much better, however, if we would take up the challenge of developing the personal brands of our news people and helping them create the relational types of connections with fans enjoyed by others with celebrity. This would directly conflict with the core value proposition of mass media — the maintenance of a sterile stage from which to place advertisements — so it’s not likely a concept that media companies will enthusiastically embrace. Moreover, media companies think of employees as “theirs,” so the idea of trumpeting a brand that might one day quit and go elsewhere seems counterintuitive. This is, however, precisely the kind of thinking we need to employ, for today’s media is increasingly unbundled and social, and people follow people, not institutions.

But Mr. Ellis nails the real problem. “Newspapers,” he wrote, “are trying to insert themselves as a middleman in a medium that doesn’t require one.” He’s right. With the possible exception of aggregators, there’s just no market for middlemen online. Advertising is the new content king, because they can place that content directly in front of people in the same way we can. The people formerly known as the advertisers are now competing with us for the same eyeballs.

It’s a battle we’ll lose, because they have the money.

Posted in Advertising, Culture, Journalism, personal media, Reinventing Local Media, Unbundled Media | 1 Comment » |

Big ad money shifting to promotions (and away from media)

December 7th, 2011

Advertisers are now media companies themselves, and as I tried to point out in my last essay, we now find ourselves actually competing with them. The evidence of this is everywhere, but media companies simply ignore it, because the only thing we can see with advertisers is, well, advertising.

For as long as I have known Gordon Borrell, we’ve both been saying that the ad category to watch — due in large part to the disruptive nature of the Internet — is what Borrell calls “Promotions,” the spending of marketing dollars on things other than traditional advertising. So dramatic has the growth been in this category — and what’s projected to come — that the gouge it takes out of advertising budgets won’t be a small bite.

“This was no boating accident; this was a shark!”

Borrell Associates is a research and consulting company that’s driven by data. Once each year, the company produces major trend reports and then tracks those quarterly. Its latest data about the Promotions category is incredibly revealing, especially as it relates to growth.

In an email exchange with Kip Cassino, Borrell’s research guru, he noted that for some time, far more has been spent on promotions than intermediated advertising and that this trend is not only continuing but accelerating.

Most of it is money — five cents off a can of peas at the supermarket, or $2,000 off the next new car you’ll purchase. Discounts, deals, couponing, loyalty programs all share one thing in common: they are vehicles for enhancing sales with the promise of savings.

Promotions have another thing in common as well. Their ROI is immediately apparent. If a store owner puts a coupon on his website or in the daily paper, he knows exactly how much business it brought him — no guessing about “engagement,” or reach and frequency. This appeals to most businesses, especially the smaller ones.

Online promotions have lagged online ad spending, but Cassino says that is changing as well. “With the burgeoning popularity,” he wrote, “of mobile devices — the phones and tablets — online promotions will see massive growth during the coming five years.”

He noted that most businesses don’t separate promotions from advertising, so spending on a website or social media strategy is just “advertising” to them. The ramifications for media companies are stark.

“As overall spending on the intermediated (ad) side of marketing continues to decrease,” he wrote, “these media outlets will either have to learn how to gain revenue from the promotional side or face growing competition for a shrinking revenue pool.”  The result, he added, will resemble “a continuous game of musical chairs.”

Most media companies, Cassino noted, simply ignore the situation. “They note incremental growth on the ad side,” he wrote, “and see no reason to look at where most marketing growth is really occurring.” This is true, he noted, for both legacy and online players. Education, said Cassino, is the first step.

Promotions are not merely an extension of advertising. They have been invisible to many media outlets for decades, because they are primarily tactical tools — the province of the brand or product manager. They are top-line, not bottom line, oriented. Almost any media can find a good spot in promotions, but to do so requires a thorough knowledge of how and when it makes sense, and how it is best applied.

The invisibility is most obvious when it comes to the online world, where, as noted, we’re now competing with the people who have the money. More and more companies are spending promotions dollars on social media, for example, because it really delivers for them. According to Borrell’s latest SOCIAL LA$R™ (Local Ad Spending Report) research, businesses use the following metrics to determine success in this area (in this order):

1. New Customers
2. Additional Fans, Friends, Followers
3. Increased Visits to Business website
4. New email contacts
5. Increased Sales volume
6. Increased Visits to Business Social Network pages
7. Lead Generation
8. Increased Tweet Responses

National advertisers are way out ahead of local businesses, as the below graph shows, which ought to look like a big, fat opportunity to everybody.

When you examine these numbers, it’s pretty clear that businesses — remember, they’re the ones with the money — are now functioning exactly as we function. They are using tools that used to be ours alone, and the energy powering the movement to personal media (which includes businesses) is both abundant and renewable. Our goals are virtually the same as those of business-turned-media-companies, but the problem is we’re still counting on them to support ours. That is not going to last forever.

The opportunity we’ve always had is to use our knowledge and skill to advance this phenomenon and find our new value therein. There’s growth written all over this, and it begins with eyes to see it.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read my latest essay, Social TV and Second Screens: To What End?.

Posted in Advertising, Broadcasting, Newspapers, personal media, Reinventing Local Media | 2 Comments » |

Marketing in the Net

November 17th, 2011

One of the things I love about the Internet is the access it provides to utterly transparent, unvarnished and fully-rationalized crap. If you have a point-of-view — and who doesn’t? — then you can find both validation and nullification on the same good old Web. Sometimes, the validation is complete, while other times it’s very subtle and partial. Same with opposing viewpoints, but the beauty here is that when it’s complete nonsense, it’s an amazing and hilarious thing to behold.

One human being’s obvious truth is another’s crap, I guess.

Much has been written here over the years, for example, on the topic of authenticity. Among other things, it’s one of the new values of journalism. People want to hear from those directly involved in the story or to be taken as close as possible to the scene/source, so they can judge for themselves. Authenticity is also smart for 21st Century businesses, because in the network, it’s much more about what you do than what you say. That’s because the other participants in the market conversation — the people formerly known as the consumers — not only see through BS, but they’re capable of calling it out in such a way that others can see it. You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into, as Steven Covey says.

Which brings me to Lisa Barone, Co-Founder and Chief Branding Officer of SEO consulting firm Outspoken Media. I don’t know Ms. Barone, and I can’t even remember how I found her piece at Blogworld. She’s a marketer, and the article is called Why Authenticity Is A Lie (Bad) Marketers Tell.

…What your customers want is the best version of you. The version of you that allows them to see themselves, where they want to be, and which helps them achieve their goals.

That’s what marketing is — Using yourself to show people their desired outcome. Even if that outcome is just your customer with a finally-working dishwasher.

As a marketer, you provide that experience by giving up the hokey authenticity act and creating a characterized version of yourself that exudes who your audience wants to be.

This is utterly astonishing to me. It’s trickery and manipulation. “What your customers want is the best version of you.” Huh? And if that best “version” is false, that’s okay — even desired — by customers, because a “characterized version” is better than the “hokey authenticity act.” Really? How does Ms. Barone know what customers want? Most marketers know a lot about what “works” for them but little about what people really want. This is gimmickry, all of it, and it’s a lame relic of the mass marketing fed industrial age.

What I love most about this is the authoritative nature of its advice. Marketing is defined as “using yourself to show people their desired outcome.” Right. Show white teeth instead of tooth decay. I get that. But it’s as if she’s quoting scripture in her effort to belittle authenticity. Hell, maybe what she’s talking about needs belittling, because if the best you can offer is this “authentic self” meme, I think you’ve missed the point on authenticity. We’re hyperconnected, in the network today. There is no (zero, zip, nada) demand here for messages that “show the desired outcome.” What people want is the truth, not sales pitches.

The advertising industry must be very, very careful about this kind of stuff, because anything that smacks of manipulation will have automatic and drastic consequences in the network. What’s proposed here is a very slippy slope, that the wearing of masks is acceptable in a horizontal world. I don’t object to picking and choosing the best character traits, if that’s a choice, but the line must be drawn at pretending, and I’m not convinced that this is something companies can resist when it comes to profit.

This is not the old world where you can say one thing and do another, because the barriers to entry into the communications world are so low. Anybody can challenge anything, and as Umair Haque so brilliantly notes, in the 21st Century, it’s all about the product you produce, not what you say about that product.

Authenticity is the most misunderstood value of new media, and we shouldn’t be surprised that marketers have mistaken it for a hokey gimmick that makes their sophisticated gimmickry look good. Authenticity is hard for businesses who’ve spent lifetimes perpetuating “the best version of you,” because the unintended consquence is you end up believing your own crap. Hyperconnectivity exposes this, and the only option is to be real.

Insofar as sports is an analogue of war, marketing draws its language from the arenas, stadiums and fields of the world. Ries and Trout’s popular and influential books, Positioning, The Battle For Your Mind and Marketing Warfare suggest that sellers of anything are engaged in a real war with customers and potential customers. Likewise, John Man’s popular book The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan puts business leaders in the shoes of a barbarian conducting war on his neighbors. At stake in this analogue is money, big money gained through market share. It’s all there in black and white: kill your competition, enslave those you conquer, and live on with the spoils of victory. It’s the stuff of pride for anyone with an MBA.

There’s just one small problem that the world of Mad Men overlooked: unlike toy soldiers (or real ones) on a battlefield where one is defending the land and the other is trying to take it, this battlefield doesn’t belong to either, and the owner of the playing field today has the power to say, “Get lost!” When this happens, marketers are trained to ignore the signals, because they feel they have an inherent right — an entitlement, if you will — to play where they don’t belong.

This illusion is what’s being dismantled by technology, because, when given the choice of shutting down the battlefield, guess what? We do it with vigor.

It used to be that, if you had enough money, you could tilt the scales of believability in your favor. That was the gift of mass marketing, and it made a whole bunch of people rich. In today’s increasingly meritocratic culture, performance and product are what count, and this has only begun. “Marketing” is a dirty word in the network.

This is why authenticity is neither hokey nor a gimmick; it’s the narrow path to success in the 21st Century.

Posted in Advertising, Networked World | No Comments » |

What credibility?

November 13th, 2011

Here’s a quote today from Ted Diadium of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in a piece arguing on behalf of journalists keeping their beliefs to themselves:

The most precious thing that any news organization has to sell is its credibility, and that sometimes gets into the shadowy territory of the perceptions that readers and listeners have of their news source. If they see that reporters and editors and Web producers are political activists, our news consumers can easily begin to suspect that the stories are slanted to conform with those political views. Once that faith is lost, so is the reader.

A couple of things to consider. Firstly, what credibility? Here, again, is the Gallup chart:

Secondly, let’s be clear about what Diadium is actually saying when he says “sell” our credibility. He’s talking about maintaining a sterile environment into which they can place advertisements. Therefore, what is presented as an argument for journalism is actually an argument for mass marketing, and this is the great illusion under which many journalists function today. Ignorance of the truth doesn’t make it any less disingenious.

Posted in Advertising, Journalism | No Comments » |

The big, dumb audience

October 26th, 2011

The central tenet of mass marketing is that it “works” by dropping messages into large groups of people. Whether it’s the pulpit, the stage, the stadium or mass media, the best advertising can do is a one-to-many paradigm. It doesn’t matter who or what these groups are; what matters is the size of the gathering, because the more eyeballs, the greater the likelihood of “hitting the target.” It was the wonder of this that drove newspapers from their activist, partisan nests in the late 19th Century and birthed the absurd notion of “objectivity.” The crowd had to be large, diverse and passive, not small, strident and active.

Making money became the fundamental reason for media, and industrial age managers began to see their news customers as a mass instead of people. It is this idea that’s being turned on its head today. People can be smart. Masses, to be effective, are best considered dumb. Whether it’s the audience, the readers, the listeners, the viewers or whatever, what we see is a vast sea of faceless “consumers” held captive by the breathtaking marvel of our content and into which we can drop messages that they neither want nor need. And, of course, people will pay us to deliver those messages.

Along comes the Web and shatters that perfect money machine, because it’s not a one-to-many paradigm. The Web is a 3-way phenomenon — down, up and sideways — and it’s much more suited to direct and content marketing than mass marketing. This is causing a huge conflict for those whose money comes the old fashioned way.

For example, Shawn Riegsecker, the founder and president of big online ad network Centro, told eMarketer last week that “brands increasingly pushing to pinpoint their exact target audience” is a “fool’s errand.” The quote caught my attention, because Centro is THE giant in the non-targeting ad game — the old money machine — a pertinent fact that eMarketer left out of its interview (Wait a minute, Shawn. Isn’t your company the main benefactor of a purely reach-based ad model?). Centro commands big money from ad agencies and dictates which sites in the market get paid based on their reach and often old school, run-of-site CPMs. The company is at the very heart of the Madison Avenue illusion that the Web is just another playing field for mass marketing.

We’re driving ourselves insane by trying to get to the right audience when close enough is good enough.

Right. Riegsecker is to ad innovation what the New York Times is to new journalism. Everything’s fine. Now just shut up and send us your check.

For sure, Centro offers targeting, but its bread and butter is dumb masses. Notice also that he references sellers as “brands,” another moniker compliments of the mass marketing industry. It’s all about “brands” selling into big, dumb audiences, not products and services being sold to human beings. Ad networks and agencies are the middlemen of this sophisticated big money machine, and the Web finds all middlemen to be inefficient. This, too, is driving people nuts, especially those whose livelihoods depend on status quo maintenance.

He’s partially correct in that a lot of people are trying very hard to find the “perfect” target, but a lot of that is driven by businesses who view the Web more as a lead generator than a brand lift mechanism. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t stop the ad industry from playing defense against the direct marketing magic of the Web’s data. There’s simply too much money at stake. As I’ve said here often, however, that money is living on borrowed time, because advertisers are themselves becoming their own forms of media companies, and nobody has any idea where it’s all going. Meanwhile, those with skin in the old game keep fighting to defend their model, and that’s a problem, because every day you play defense is another day you could be playing offense in this age of disruptive innovation.

Gordon Borrell, who studies these trends in online advertising, agrees that “advertisers need to stop fretting over the absolute perfect audience target or metric and get their message out to the best possible target.” He adds, however, that “getting as close to the audience ‘truth’ as possible is more or less a mandate with digital media, and I don’t want to see an end to that quest.”

Borrell noted that digital data is the real problem for traditional media.

We all know how traditional media believe that it’s all about size. They’ve railed against measurements that make them look puny while embracing other measurements that prove their dominance. With the Internet, I suppose it boils down to advertisers wanting to hit that exact target — which seems to be getting smaller and smaller — rather than buying mass. So therein rests the big conflict: a big dumb audience versus a small group of wallet-ready buyers.

So Riegsecker may be right from his perspective, but it’s exactly that perspective that’s being challenged by the data-centric Web. This is why those companies who’ve invested in data — the best examples being Google, Amazon and Facebook — have such a big future leg up on their old school competitors. As ad money continues to move to the Web, it’s going to want specificity, not just big, dumb audiences.

The real conundrum in all of this is that we’re in a slow transition period, so mass marketing is still extremely valuable. The smart companies who’ve long depended on dumb masses, however, are also getting their feet wet in the other, even though it feels uncomfortable and a lot like competing with ourselves. The stakes are simply too high not to diversify our business models, and the people formerly known as the audience are now in charge anyway.

The real fool’s errand, therefore, is acting as though it’s otherwise.

Posted in Advertising, Disruptions, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment » |

Playing defense when offense is required

October 1st, 2011

Here’s the latest in my ongoing series of essays, Local Media in a Postmodern World.

Playing Defense When Offense is Required

The world of local media is under attack by powerful outside forces, including a bad economy. We find ourselves with our defensive units on the field constantly, and this is interfering with our ability to play offense. The problem is that this is a time when offense is what’s really required, if we are to survive into the future. This is not a new message for me, but I’ve tried to state the situation a little differently this time in the hope that some who were unable to receive it in times past will now be open to the message.

I’m in Chicago for the annual Borrell Local Mobile Advertising Conference this weekend. I’m moderating a discussion with my friend, Raycom’s Pat LaPlatney on how to make money with “consumer generated content.” I’ll be using the thoughts expressed in this essay, which is why it’s being published today. If you’re in Chicago, drop by the session and say hello.

Posted in Advertising, Broadcasting, Disruptions, Reinventing Local Media | 1 Comment » |

Ads dominate ESPN online videos

September 27th, 2011

The Cowboys won last night on ESPN, so I spent a little time this morning at ESPN’s website to catch the analysis and post-game interviews. The experience was irritating, to say the least, and it reminds me again that television companies, who are used to “monetizing content,” are going to have a really hard time with consumers as unbundled viewing continues to explode. Let me repeat: pre-roll ads don’t work for viewers, especially not in this kind of segmented environment.

It’s clear after watching about 10 videos, that the only thing that matters to ESPN is the “draw” that the headlines and video captions produce. It’s all about the ads. Clicking on a link leads immediately to a volume-enhanced, 15-second commercial (often the same one), regardless of the length of the clip you’re about to see. When the clip is finished, ESPN’s video player defaults to the next video in line, which results in another ad being served. Even though I was clicking out of the player, I’m sure ESPN recorded those as ad views.

The point is that, at least for ESPN, it isn’t the content that has precedence; it’s the ads, and this is going to bite them in the ass, because pre-rolls are not at all like ads in a television commercial pod. They’re far more disruptive, and consumers have the choice of bailing out altogether and doing so with a substantially bad taste in their mouths. I am extremely reluctant to click on videos knowing that such is coming, and that’s true regardless of how badly I want to see the content. As a consumer, I also make a mental note of the brands that employ this strategy. I have choices.

The industry misses all this in its need to find a replacement for the money tree that it used to harvest in the legacy world. Online video ad rates are far, far too low, because we’re using old wine accounting for a new wine universe.  Assisting us in this fool’s folly is Madison Avenue, which relies on the old wine accounting methods to get their share. Folks, it’s going to crash and burn, because nobody has asked the people formerly known as the audience if they’d accept all this. I would bet the ranch that 20 years from now, we’ll look back and laugh at the lunacy of sticking a 15-second commercial in front of a 30-second piece of video “content.” It’s a hopelessly archaic concept.

Much is written about how the entire TV universe will eventually be delivered via the Internet, complete with pictures of people in easy chairs “leaning back” to watch what they want, when they want it. Put a scowl on the faces in the easy chairs, however, and you get an idea of the untenable nature of forcing this on people. They will not stand for it. Will. Not.

So rather than timidly going along with it, we need to find the coconuts to stand up and say “no!” Online inline advertising is doable but not by using old accounting methods and pricing. We also need to get off this 15-second bandwagon. It’s just too long to be viable in today’s time-is-the-new-currency world. Think about it. People don’t skip commercial pods via their DVRs because they hate commercials; they just don’t have the time for so damn many of them!

This is our business. Nothing should be more important than finding a reasonable substitute.

Posted in Advertising, Broadcasting, The Great Horizontal | 1 Comment » |