The End of the World Wide Web?

Seana Mulcahy of Brand-Truth asked:
Did you see the Intel campaign entitled, "End of the World?" Many say the signs used in the campaign should be rephrase to read, "End of the World Wide Web." Apparently big wigs at AT&T, HP, and Cisco wholeheartedly agree. They say they are working under the gun (no pun intended) to save the Web. ... Whatever stat you look at, the outlook is positive. Check out what speakers have to say today and tomorrow . As far as the potential for Web breakage, I'm on the fence. I guess I am against the old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." My faith is in the brains of the technologists. (Full article on Mediapost)


My reply:
I agree Seana - let the technologists do their job to increase data flow, improve security and keep the future flowing down the pipes. The danger or challenge to online advertising is with private webs.

I have been hearing about a new level of Internet for some time - mainly from companies using or providing ASP solutions looking for more secure data exchange.

Considering this, I foresee private webs developing so that technologies such as Microsoft's IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) would not have to compete with the data flow of the public WWW.

What does this mean to online advertisers? Fragmentation of traffic and exclusivity advertising which could lead to reduction in online advertising.

However, even with private webs, the public WWW has a long life ahead and will offer increasing online advertising opportunities for a long time to come ... which in today's technological pace is about 4 years.

Using Localized Search to Your Advantage

A few weeks ago I talked about how search engines were going local - providing localized search results. Today, the search site Ask Jeeves debuted its new search technology Teoma 3.0 which includes localized search features. Users can now search for items such as "guitars in Chicago" and Ask Jeeves will return results for businesses selling guitars in Chicago. The search is powered through a partnership with Citysearch, a local search service.

Here are two ways online advertisers can take advantage of these developments in localized search.

Citysearch is a purely localized search engine. Users begin their search by entering the city name they are interested in finding results for. Results are displayed for that city, along with paid placements. What makes Citysearch useful for test marketing is that advertisers can contract for paid placements with specific city results. An excellent use of this is for test marketing ad campaigns, targeting certain cities for product introduction or revenue growth.

Because search engines with localized results are dependant on users entering city or zip codes, advertisers should include this information (zip codes and city names) in their site design and keyword selection in order to optimize their search engine marketing.


Check it out:
www.askjeeves.com
www.citysearch.com

Ad Networks - Finding Advertising Gold With Niche Sites

Jim Meskauskas of Underscore Marketing asked about The Role of the Network Buy:
Buying big sites like Yahoo!, AOL and her subsidiaries, and other tier-one branded media properties is the right thing to do, but it is not the only thing to do. People working in this industry appear to understand more than most people in marketing that we are highly fragmented, multi-media consumers. We talk often about the role the Internet can play in this embarrassment of niches. Yet by and large, agencies and their clients buy the same big sites with numbing repetition. (Full article on MediaPost)


My reply:
I agree that ad networks provide the perfect opportunity for advertisers to utilize niche sites in order to fill out their media plans. Ad networks are (or can be) the goldminers of advertising by having in-depth knowledge of the channels and publisher sites they represent.

However, just as with any over-mined territory, effectively and efficiently finding gold on the WWW is requiring more knowledge of the territories - which is why vertical ad networks such as ThomasB2B and Quigo are growing in popularity.

ThomasB2B
http://thomasb2b.com/

Quigo Technologies
http://www.quigotechnologies.com/

Reality TV -Learning the Game of Business From The Apprentice

Cory Treffiletti from Carat Interactive asked the people on MediaPost what they thought of reality television. The responses of the people were truly a mind-blowing reality. These people are all "advertising professionals." Yet one peson admitted to not owning or watching television, another said reality television was a passing fad (after over a decade of reality programming being on TV.) (Full article on MediaPost)


Here was my comment:
Excellent article Cory - but I'm really shocked by these responses. Someone actually working in advertising and admitting to not owning a TV!? How can you be in the game if you're not even watching?

I also question the statement "they are just a passing fad but they do show how easily people's likes and dislikes can be manipulated and how word of mouth and peer pressure can drive people to "have to watch" a certain tv show"

How do you judge "passing?" The reality concept has been alive for over a decade and is living a full, very lengthy life cycle. Over-saturation is the real danger to reality programming. Too much fat is what will decrease the genre's performance and possibly cause it's demise.

I watch The Apprentice because of my desire to be entertained and to learn - so maybe I do feel that I "have to" learn, whether it is from a book or from a TV show. No book can show what is shown on The Apprentice. Apprentice allows you to watch and learn how other educated people react in business situations. Yes, the situations are setup and the content is heavily edited. However the end result is being able to see different individuals working together to accomplish a goal, while at the same time, attempting to outshine each other to win the job.

As far as product placements, I would love to see products/services placed on the series that help the contestants (which are basically small businesses) achieve their goals (i.e. using Kinko's, or implementing project management and personal productivity tools.)

The Apprentice is one of the most thought provoking shows on TV. Mark Burnett (producer) has really hit on what I believe to be a great concept with Survivor and Apprentice, providing us insight into how people go about winning the game - because after all, business is a game.

Increasing and Controlling Dialogue With Your Customers

Tom Hespos posed this question:
Online is playing a huge role in developing brands around communities where conversations are taking place. How transparent is your company? Could it stand to bring more consumers into the loop?

His example of a "corporate transparent" forum is Channel 9 - a website created and sponsored by Microsoft in order to improve communication with developers.

My response:
I agree with the importance of dialogue with customers; I disagree with the need for corporate transparency, preferring lowering the barriers to communication while maintaining control.

With the immediacy of information distribution, especially among early adopters, corporate transparency is very short lived. Public deception is hard to recover from. Additionally, while public forums are a great step towards building a community through easy dialogue, they provide a platform on your own soil for attack and need to be carefully monitored.

Example being RealNetworks/Rhapsody's thinly veiled "Freedom of Choice" website to promote their RealPlayer with Harmony. Harmony technology cracks Apple's FairPlay code allowing Real media to be played on the current version of iPods. What happened when Real opened the doors to the site? It sure wasn't harmony and fair play. The veil was quickly pulled away and the dialogue turned into an open flame war. Thousands of Apple fanatics jumped onto the site to voice their anti-Real/pro-Apple opinions.

The only "succesful" corporate sponsored forums I have participated in are non-transparent and heavily monitored - contrary opinions are quickly extinguished. Channel 9 is a great example of lowering the corporate walls restricting communication. However, their affiliation with Microsoft is obvious and the forum is very controlled.

If your goal is dialogue, make it easy for customers to contact your company both one-on-one and through a corporate sponsored public forum. Provide dedicated staff that can respond to inquiries and moderate the discussions. Additionally, join in on discussions on non-affiliated public forums where you can respond to questions and misinformation (keeping your responses to fact, not opinion.)

And keep the cloak of transparency at home - it never worked to begin with.

The Bad and the Best of SMS Advertising - Don't Soak the Customers

Companies world-wide are realizing the benefits of pinpointed interactivity with mobile phone advertising - and the importance of having an opt-in/opt-out - for everyone involved.

A recent SMS campaign in Germany is an example of what I would call user opt-in, publicp**soff. The garden equipment company Gardena created an interactive billboard - send an SMS to the posted number and the billboard, with its built-in sprinklers, will soak an innocent passerby. Not too friendly. Was the person soaked a potential customer?

On the other hand, a company to watch that is creating public friendly "mobile CRM" campaigns is London based Enpocket. They combine SMS advertising with CRM technology to create pinpointed campaigns that build positive customer relations. An example is an SMS/CRM campaign they created for a beauty products company. Women who opted-in needed to respond to 10 SMS questions over 10 days in order to receive personalized hair care advice. The questions were simple and non-intrusive (Is your hair dry?) The response rate was 90%!

While American companies have been late to adopt mobile phone advertising, they can learn from these examples. Make it personal, take advantage of the interactivity, and keep it pinpointed to the target audience.

Increasing Search ROI Through Effective Landing Pages

Cory from Carat Interactive asked the following:
Search has definitely reached the apex of its value from an ROI standpoint, but the strongest value that it adds is its ability to create a shorter connection between the user and the information.... Now that search is fulfilling the inevitable promise of decreasing ROI effectiveness against increased demand and increased prices, what are we to do with search?


My response:
I think your point that "the stongest value that it (Search) adds is its ability to create a shorter connection between the user and the information" implies the importance of the landing page. Your search marketing worked, they found your site - now what happens? Is the value proposition clear? Is it immediately obvious what the next step should be (ie. registering). Have you test marketed various landing pages and evaluated their effectiveness?

The importance of landing pages can be seen with new search engines that display the landing page with the link - such as IceRocket (coolest search engine that ever landed on the Net.) Each search result displays an image of the landing page for each link - and allows the searcher to open a Quick View of that page within the IceRocket page. If your landing page is effective, the searcher will be more enticed to go to your site. If your landing page is not clear - the searcher will simply move on to the next result. Make your landing page a destination that entices your customers and gives them clear directions on where to go and what to do.

Effective SEM will help customers find your site, effective landing pages will keep them on your site - increasing your search ROI.

www.icerocket.com

Increasing Revenue With Affiliate Marketing

Jim Meskauskas from MediaPost wrote:
When I first started in advertising, I had two responsibilities: one was to post all of Burger King's spot TV buys in every market in the United States; the other was to learn as much as I could about using demographic research tools and understanding the information they provided. The purpose of this pattern-seeking, as many of you know, is to most precisely identify a target market and then communicate with them as persuasively, specifically, and efficiently as you can.

But expansion efforts are always going to entail some degree of uncertainty. Behavioral targeting strategies and tactics work best to mitigate some of the unknown by using behaviors and actions as correlative determinants for future consumption. But even these techniques rely on a certain element of statistical faith.

You can't really call it spreading the word if no out outside the church hears it.

I commented:
It is true that you can't expand your customer base or revenues using the pin-pointed methods described. If you are fishing with the same lure over and over in the same pond - you'll never grow your customer base or increase revenue. But knowing your customer demographics and behavioral characteristics can be used to catch more fish through affiliate marketing.

Go fishing in another pond with similar characteristics as your current pond. You know the demographics and behavioral characteristics of your current customer base. What other ponds (web sites) are filled with fish that have those same characteristics?

Try a different lure in the same pond. What tangential product or service can you sell those same fish? Good example being music instrument manufacturers. They can sell their customers instruments, but they can also lure them with tangential products, for example selling them online music.

Affiliate marketing programs can be used to accomplish both of these market expansion ideas - fishing in a new pond and using a different lure in the same pond.

Media Evolution - Network Dinasaurs Learn to Live With New Media Species

Cory Treffiletti of Carat Interactive wrote:
Every few months it's fun to make a prediction and try to anticipate the direction of the advertising industry, so this week I decided to take another stab and see if I could stir the waters up a bit. This time I'm guesstimating five years for the demise of network television and the reign of cable and interactive as the two dominant forms of media.

My Comment:
Media Evolution
Networks are dinosaur media. But they don't have to die. They just need to adapt to the changing environment.

I recently worked on the production and marketing for a few Discovery Channel shows (BIG, Monster Garage) and had the chance to get the opinion of people working in the cable industry (granted it was a small sampling, but I think indicative of the industry mindset.)

You know what every single person working on the production of the cable series said their goal was? To work on a network show. This opinion was expressed by the sound crew, the camera crew, the associate producer, the producers, the executive producers... you get the point.

Why do they all want to work on network? There is ten times more money spent on the production of each network show than on cable shows.

When I asked what network show they would want to work on - none mentioned anything currently on the networks. Rather, it was either something new - or the cable show moving to network.

What I read from this, was not that the network programming was any better than cable's - hell, I rarely watch network. I took it as networks being bloated, over-budgeted dinosaurs.

The Internet is not a massive comet coming to wipe out the network dinosaur media or TV in general. Rather, it's a new form of media that is evolving into a faster, more adaptive media species based on the realities of the current state of the world (technologically and demographically speaking.)

Networks are fairly intelligent beings, and I am sure that they will find a way to adapt before they die. Maybe that is becoming leaner, with lower production costs (we've seen this with the preponderance of low cost reality series.) Maybe it is staying large and producing only very high-quality content. Or maybe it's learning to use the Internet to attract an audience, keep an audience, and promote to that audience in order to increase their chance for survival.

But one thing is for certain - networks are intelligent enough to know that they need to adapt and learn to synergistically live with the new media that is developing on this planet in order to survive. They will still be on this planet in five years, in one form or another.