Archive for April, 2008
While I am madly updating our blog roll, I wanted to call out blogs in the Web 2.0 area that I think are worth the daily/weekly read. That is, so far. This list grows exponentially each month and it’s difficult to keep a lid on it for my own sanity. That said, below are current faves in the business arena. I won’t bore you with my food blog addiction – we can have that conversation another time, just email me. In all cases, I suggest you subcribe to their RSS feeds, to make the perusing more efficient. Web Strategy by Jeremiah Jeremiah has been in the Web 2.0 space for forever and has experienced and explored it from many different angles. His intelligent coverage is excellent. Marketing in a Web 2.0 World LaSandra is an active participant in the Web 2.0 community – speaking, contributing, commenting, twittering. Worth following! TechCrunch A classic. Go there daily Adrants another classic – more on gen’l online marketing, but lots lately on 2.0 DishyMix blog This podcast is an ongoing education on the quickly evolving online and web 2.0 space. The blog is a back up to the Dishymix podcast series. Intelligent, always cutting edge, worthy of a weekly listen and view. Subscribe now! Let me know what your favorites are. There is so much terrific content out there in the blogosphere that it’s easy to miss gems.
I’m still exhausted from all that is Ad-Tech. Very disappointed with most of the keynote presentations – too broad, too generic. Much of the talk through out the show was on Web 2.0 and 3.0 and social networking and CGM in general. Two of the sessions that I attended were outstanding. Marketing with Downloadable Media: Podcasts and Vidcasts – Buy Ads in Existing Content or Make Your Own Show? was a terrific overview of the podcasting, vcasting and other downloadable media landscape. Moderated by Chris MacDonald (of LibSyn), and the panelists were Jim Louderback (Revision3), Kin Robles (National Podcasting System), Mark McRery (Podtrac), Roxanne Darling (Beach Walks with Roz). If you are just getting your feet wet in this new medium, check out these folks and their companies for a good cross section of the players in this arena. Making Widgets and Gadgets Work for You was both a great overview (what’s a widget and how does it differ from a gadget etc) but strategic and tactical at the same time. I really walked away with a great sense of the importance of widgets in the overall scheme of things, and why, and where to start. Also kudos to whoever pulled together the panel (the moderator Jerimiah Owyang, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research probably) for combining the analytical side with Jane Felice of comScore, Ed Davis VP product development for major publisher ESPN, Ed Schoen product dev with Facebook, and the Hooman Radfar (CEO of Clearspring - makers and distributors of widgets). (Jump to the Ad-tech website to get bios of these people). I loved that the moderator was taking comments and questions from Twitter real-time. Very cool.
Two BT related products have recently appeared on my radar – one just launching this month, the other has been around since 2004, but in stealth mode, and is coming to market formally now. US-based online marketing company ValueClick Media will launch a platform in the summer offering advertisers behavioral targeting based on predictive analytics, according to a presentation it made at Hollywood OMMA on March 18. Once again my direct response antennae were raised having spent years in predictive modeling strategies for circulation plans with traditional catalog clients. I wondered if that concept had morphed into the online world, and if so, how.
I called Tony Winders, the VP of Marketing for ValueClick Media to get a better understanding of their new offer. Tony was a tad cagey (delightful, but cagey), since they have not officially launched yet, but was able to give me a bit more detail about the beta. The conversation also touched on privacy issues (of course), the consumer’s lack of understanding of cookies, the need for guidelines and on and on. We had a lot to talk about. Until now, BT methodologies have fallen into one of three flavors: retargeting, clusters, or custom business rules. Retargeting is the most effective form of BT because it targets individuals who have already interacted with a brand. Clusters assign each visitor to only one group and custom business rules give a high degree of control to marketers, but both rely on human interpretation of data to determine how a visitor will be classified. ValueClick Media hopes to popularize a new, predictive approach to BT by allowing its technology to automatically determine to what category each visitor belongs. ValueClick Medias’ algorithm takes into consideration the observed behavior of visitors and creates predictive models for future behavior – all based on attributes provided by anonymous cookie data, not personally identifiable information. The resulting profile data defines each visitor as belonging to one or more categories (mobile, finance, retail/shopper, travel/air, etc.) ValueClick Media can then leverage their extensive inventory (over 130 million unique visitors per month) to give advertisers large scale potential per category – something a smaller ad network would not be able to supply. Another product, called ACerno, has been in stealth mode for almost 4 years. The concept borrows heavily from the blind Cooperative databases that catalogers have been using for over a decade. In fact, ACerno is a wholly owned subsidiary of i-Behavior, one of the major coops. aCerno collects anonymous information from an association of more than 375 major online multi-channel retail web sites that are not identified to each other, representing 140 million shoppers,. The information is completely private and only tagged with an ID, with no cross-reference to personal information. aCerno compiles this anonymous data using cookies. aCerno’s analytics provide two exclusive tracks of predictive information: · Who the customers are – knowing what a person shops for correlates strongly to who they are; e.g., someone who buys a dress and a crib is almost certainly a woman with a baby · What customers will buy next – large populations with similar patterns of purchase behavior can be discovered and sold aCerno clients’ best prospects are identified with modeling and profiling techniques, finding users that look most similar to their best customers. Once these high-value prospects are recognized, aCerno uses its massive advertising network to deliver targeted advertising messages directly to them, creating brand consideration or incremental transactions, which can be purchased on a CPA basis aCerno’s extensive network of high-quality websites, web publishers and portals is targeted exclusively at the cookie level with banner ads and rich media to achieve maximum reach against the target audience. The network reaches over 95% of the Internet population with 80+% of the impressions being served into sites on the ComScore Top 500. This is predictive analysis – scoring million of cookies against hundreds of variables to create models. The concept was so successful to catalog mailers that it became the vast majority of their prospecting efforts and budgets, replacing the us of individual rented mailing lists ultimately. The same may be true for retailers going forward, using custom models of their customer, that can change per promo, or over time, and using those as selection criteria for branding efforts or to drive traffic to a store. Both companies are extremely sensitive to the privacy concerns that my surface regarding their products, and have gone to great lengths issue very thorough privacy statements as well as educating both the consumer (about cookies) and their publishers/website owners about the concept of modeling with cookies. Ultimately, the success of either product will be a combination of results, and the willingness of consumers to allow the use of cookies to be used to better targeted offers.
I think the real front-runners of a new media can be found in the trade groups, clubs and societies that spring up to support them. One that I’ve got my eye on is The Association for Downloadable Media, I’ve been very interested in the progress of the ADM, since I’m such a podcast fan, both from a personal as well as a professional perspective. I don’t think enough of our clients are taking advantage of this medium in their communications mix. We are encouraging all of our high tech clients to have their white papers converted to podcasts (or video – but that’s another story), and seeking out online placements for their audio files as well. The ADM will be running a series of forums and hosting a party. I will certainly be attending some if not all of the sessions. Check them out. Some of the issues the ADM is wrestling with are on their site. But their biggest challenge is their effort to establish terminology, standards, guidelines and best-practices that make downloadable content easy to justify, buy, scale and measure both in advertising efficacy and audience metrics. Once content is downloaded, all trackability and visibility disappear. So standard measurements of eyeballs (eardrums?), repeat listeners, pass alongs, Behavioral Targeting possibilities vanish if they ever exitested. Kudos to this group for taking this on! They will present their first Standards and Guidelines at Ad-Tech SF on April 16th. I’m sure there will be a podcast to download later, if you can’t be there in person. Elymedia has been producing a monthly series on Web 2.0 for the SVAMA. Our topic is Emerging Media, or Web 2.0 and the format, speakers and topics will change monthly. The next meeting: Emerging Media Morning Forum |