AR&D - Audience Research and Development

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

LOCAL ADVERTISERS ARE HUNGRY FOR (VALID) NEW MEDIA OPPORTUNITIES (Terry)
I was a part of an advertiser education summit on behalf of KTBS-TV and its affiliated properties, KPXJ-CW21 and LifeWise Cable Media, yesterday in Shreveport, LA. 72 people showed up to hear myself, Jarvis Coffin, CEO of BURSTMedia, Randall and Audrey Ashe of Synapse, the outstanding local web development team that's building the station's Media 2.0 applications, and Lindsay Lang of Hip Cricket. We spoke with them about the realities of Media 2.0 and the wonderful opportunities — for them — that come with it. We had business owners, advertisers and agencies represented.

It began at 10:30am and ended promptly at 2:30pm. Lunch was served as well, so the event wasn't too taxing on the work day of attendees. It was a great event by an important and forward-thinking client of ours.

We walked through the fundamentals of how everything is unbundled these days, and that they are going to have to get on board the unbundled boat if they are to do commerce successfully in the future. Since media itself is being disrupted, it stands to reason that advertising is as well, and this is especially true for local advertisers.

There is a genuine lack of knowledge about all of this at the local level, and that means there's a big opportunity for those who can put one of these events together.

Google is making great strides muscling its way into local markets (it just added the ability for local consumers to add reviews to businesses via Google Maps). As you've heard me argue many times, the internet pureplays are our real competition for local ad dollars — already getting over half, according to Gordon Borrell. We simply must organize the local web, and its evolution will be the evolution of local advertising.

Jarvis was his usual enthusiastic but practical self. He reminded everybody that 99% of the $17 billion spent on web advertising last year went to the top ten internet properties, including Google with its Adwords program. He stressed the need for local advertisers — all advertisers — to tap the strength of networks in achieving their goals. Behavioral marketing is the path of the future, whether it's video or other display advertising. I completely agree with this, which is why we're creating a local ad network in this market.

I am convinced that local advertisers are ready and willing to spend money online, but that they resist "same old" approaches that don't really produce results for them. One of the beauties of a valid Media 2.0 strategy is that it offers many opportunities for creative marketing, something the static plans of the old web simply cannot do.

I also grow further convinced that a good web sales person will sell "against" the mainstream entity he or she represents, for it is precision that's being sold, not gross rating points. There's a lot of confusion about price points and the like, but we'll work all that out.

The creation and execution of an off-site advertiser education forum is a very smart move for companies with something other than portal websites to tout. Local advertisers aren't stupid; they see what's taking place around them and are just waiting for somebody to step forward with things they see national advertisers doing.

When we have the ability to offer behavioral targeting and remarketing techniques to local advertisers, they'll jump at the opportunity to spend their money with us and not with Google. We need a local network to do that, which is why we must organize the local web.

Then, we'll be able to serve, for example, an automotive ad to anyone who's visited any automotive-related site on the network (behavioral targeting) or do it backwards (remarketing). Remarketing is a pretty cool tool. A user who visits a particular site on the network will be served ads from that site regardless of where they go on the network.

We also need to provide paid local search in an environment that isn't static yellow pages directory information.

We need to build sites where the content is advertising.

We need to unbundle everything we do and make content widgets — including our video player — available to anyone.

When I speak with local advertisers about these sorts of concepts, their eyes light up and they are oh so thankful for the knowledge. We can take on the big new media players, but we'll never be successful trying to do it from the top-down. Scalable revenue growth is available from the bottom-up, and that's at the local level.    <Permalink>

<<< >>>

NIELSEN TO FUSE TV AND WEB METRICS IN HOUSEHOLD MEASUREMENTS (Steve)
Nielsen is thinking about a plan that would integrate its traditional TV ratings with people's use of station and network website visits. The idea is that they would come up with a number that would show the relationship between TV viewing and web use in People Meter homes.

Sounds good, right?

Forget it. The idea is DOA.

This continues the notion that websites are somehow an extension of television stations. They are standalone businesses that should be a division of local media outlets. All this number would do is reinforce the idea that web should drive TV eyeballs. It would often result in a false conclusion: "Our web is doing a lousy job getting us an audience!

The web is about unbundling content, not bundling numbers. Further, as stations launch niche sites that aren't branded with station logos, how does Nielsen propose to measure those? Will stations have to submit every site they have launched?

And what about the mobile web? I spend a significant amount of time now checking my news and email on my phone. The iPhone will be the beginning of another shift toward the mobile web. All this new metric will do is measure household usage. When people use the mobile web, they behave differently.

Nielsen // Netratings should focus on doing a better job measuring usage of the web itself. The Internet Advertising Bureau has already taken Nielsen // Netratings to task for its metrics. Let's not buy into new cockamamie numbers that look backward at 1.0 thinking in an increasingly 2.0 web.    <Permalink>

<<< >>>

WILL THE NEW YAHOO BE SOMETHING REALLY DIFFERENT OR JUST A FRESH COAT OF PAINT? (Terry)
Terry Semel's departure from Yahoo speaks volumes to observers — including investor groups — that the giant portal has noticed that it has lost its way in the midst of fundamental changes in media. Distributed media is the model now, not organized portals. Jeff Jarvis has long called Yahoo "the last old media company," and it's pretty hard to argue with that. In a post this week called "Yahoo's Big Mistake," Jeff wrote:

Yahoo made the mistake too many other media companies made: It thought that the internet was a medium. It’s not. The internet is a place. It’s a means, not a medium.

I’ve said it often before and I’ll say in once more: Yahoo is the last old-media company. It controlled content — made or licensed — and spent money...to bring people in to see it and then forced ads down their eyeballs until they left. Meanwhile, Google distributed itself anywhere and everywhere. The ad on this page (Jeff runs Google Adwords on his site) is the pioneering commercial widget of the internet; it makes this page part of Google without Google having to make, market, or pay for it. Google is a platform. Yahoo is a portal. Google is a network. Yahoo is a destination. Google is a tool. Yahoo is a thing.