Kaiyzen Group

Mediaweek has a very interesting write up about ESPN dropping their ad networks and focusing on selling direct to maximize their brand value.., and ultimately profits.

I did not hear the news but the article references a quote from a keynote by the Martha Stewart president during the IAB annual show.  I guess Wenda Harris Miller equated to using ad networks to treating inventory like “pork bellies”.

Supposedly there are two camps forming.., one for direct selling.., and the others taking the easy way out and just ditching their inventory to the ad networks.

I will have to inquire with a contact if this includes their ESPN Mobile group…, they have been using AdMob to take care of their inventory.  My guess is that the ad networks they have ditched are their primary sites only for right now since dealing with mobile inventory is still growing up and a specialty left to the mobile folks.

I will try to dig into this subject some more

Facebook beacon has been quite of late.  MarketinVox has a post about beacon and some comments from Owen Van Natta.., Facebooks “Chief Revenue Officer”.., whatever the hell that is.

Van Natta says that “beacon is down but not out”.  He blaims the media for hyping up beacons failure and that it was actually well received.

This of course is total bullshite.., and quite ironic of course they would use some PR/media muscle to start to drum back up support.  In case you cant tell I am not a fan of the service, luckily I am not a avid user of Facebook.., probably log in once a week to see if any messages have been left for me.  Here is a previous posting of mine when beacon launched.

The whole monetizing social network traffic is becoming quite an issue.  You can see Facebook needs to pull something out of their arses in the next couple years to justify that $15 billion eval.  Of course everyone knows Googles remarks of their somewhat sub-par growth during Q4 last year saying that monetizing social network traffic is prooving to be mroe difficult than they thought.

It seems so far other that piddly banner ad CPM’s the best way for social networks to make some cashish is to sign lucrative contracts with one of the big players who are dying to feed their ravenous appetites for traffic.

Adage has a writeup on challenges marketers face when trying to playing in the social network arena.  Some look to possible video and branded content, others look to widgets for that next level of revenue.

I have my own thoughts and ideas for methods and services that could generate some nice revenue and brand awareness…, but I will keep those to myself for now until I can flush things out a bit more.

The Wall St. Journal has written tonight about Google releasing Ad Manager, a service for publishers to manage the ads they sell and place on their site.

This seems to be competing with OpenX which is a popular open source ad server.

As WSJ points out, now that the DoubleClick deal is finally cleared for takeoff we will probably see the big bad G move at a swift pace for integration and releasing new services and offerings.

Watchin In Treatment.., a great new show on HBO with Gabriel Byrne.., he was in Usual Suspects which may be my favorite movie of all time.

Byrne plays a psychiatrist and each episode covers one session with a patient.  In this episode he is seeing Sophie who is a teenage gymnastics phenom who tried to kill herself by riding her bike into an oncoming car.

In this episode a pizza arrives.., Byrne didnt order it, but takes it anyways, assuming that Sophie ordered it.  When she arrives she explains that she was on the bus on her way to the session and realized that she hadnt eaten anything.., this is where my annoyance and this post comes from:

Sophie: “I realized I hadnt eaten anything, so I texted Google to look up a pizza place.., and they gave me the number to call and order”

Byrne: “Google can do that?”

Sophie: “Google can do anything”

F#$kin Hell!!!  Product placement is pretty rampant, I usually dont have too big a problem with it.  One company that LOOOOOVES product placement is the big G.  Those sacks get search and maps in to whatever movie/show they can.  I was watching Crack a couple weeks ago with some friends.., ok movie.., but everytime the main character changed locations their was a Google Maps transition.

For the first time since starting to watch this show the dialog wasnt interesting.., and the drama was non existent.., it kind of reminded of the truman show where trumans wife busts out that cocoa in the one scene to slang it.  It was SOOOOO transparent that I actually laughed out loud as the lines were delivered.

Thank you Google for ruining another piece of entertainment…, I just hope the rest of the world can see through all this transparent bullshit.

Nucomony who just closed a round of funding recently from WPP (a leading ad firm).., has a blog with a post talking about how Traffic is Dead, Hail the King.  In my post the other day about Microsoft, I talked about their continual ad push, and their anouncement regarding their “Engagement Mapping” technology they will be releasing.

Between the new analytics startups such as Nucomony, MS’s push, and the traffic palyers (comscore/neilsen, hitwise, etc) looking to move beyond the page view method of ranking sites, it appears that maybe the industry as a whole is ready to move beyond click throughs and page views as the primary means of web measurement.

I am happy to see things move towards this way.., not too sure if, or even how, engagement will be the new thing for major online marketers to grab hold of and embrace.  I do have a passionate disliking for the search market, even it generates boatloads of $$$.., I just dont believe in the fact that all those clicks are actually happening on the search engines.  My paranoia and conspiracy theory mind has me believing that waaaaaaay too many random, errant, and fraudulant clicks happen on the major search sites and through their affiliates.

I will be following the Nuconomy blog as well as my normal round of ad/marketing sites.., looking forward to see what other stories and write ups pop up regarding the subject of engagement and the death of the page view.

A study sponsored by Startcom, Tacoda, and ComScore is showing that long held notion of the value in gauging an online marketing campaigns effectiveness by the click through rate is piss poor judgement.

According to the study 6% of the population account for 50% of all display add click throughs.  The key stat they throw out is that these heavy clickers are ages 25-44 and live in households with under $40,000 income.  This is a VERY bold claim since age and income are the two big bargaining chips when pitching to marketers whether it be banner ads online or print ads in a magazine.

Of course these three players involved in the study have their own agenda’s and biz planz they are trying to execute on so they will skew any data to support their mission.

I am glad to see reports and numbers like these.  Long have I believed that banner ads are a bunch o crap from a value standpoint.  For some marketers like the loan people they might make some sense, but I think newer forms of direct marketing and lead generation are what will be true value to marketers on the online.

I think of banners, and now video ads of more the mass market approach to just make sure there are eyeballs on your brand/image/slogan.

I have written before about the growing traffic of the CPG players web properties as they start to embrace digital ad solutions more.

AdAge has an article about OfficeMax and their digital site they launched for the holiday season in ‘06.  The site ElfYourself attracted an astounding 26.5 Million visitors during the holidys.  The site enables you to upload a pic your selfself and paste your face on a dancing elf body.

According to Anne Bologna, president of the agency that created the campaign, in its second year of existence the site had a 10x increase in traffic and 123 Million elves created.

These are pretty remarkable numbers.  Just as with the CPG guys, its impressive to see big brands be able to leverage their vast audience and drive what adds up to a TON of traffic when measured against the average consumer site.

When they are valued, especially in VC/investment scenarios, consumer internet sites typically garner most or all of their evaluation on the number of unique monthly users.  If you have created a site that is getting 500K-1 Million visitors, and have ANY sort of revenue model, including the dreaded AdSense only even.., you have a site that is worth some moula.

This brings up two questions in my mind.

1) If a consumer site with 1 Million monthly visitors is worth, lets say a $10 Million evalutation, and they are providing some random service like videos, address book, calendar, whatever…, what is a product/brand site worth that has the same amount of traffic?

2) Given the rediculous aggregate traffic that product/brand sites are starting to generate, what are some new business opportunities for these companies to leverage their audience and make increased side income through their web properties.

For #1 who knows.., a handfull of the valutations on startups are B.S. in my book, so who knows what a product/brand site is worth, but it has to be something.  For #2 I think there is HUGE potential for these companies to make incremental income per customer/user on an anual basis.

Lets say I am a company with a brand website that gets the 1 Million users per month.  If I can figure out how to garner an incremental 10 cents per user/year…, which is absolutely nothing, than that means another $1.2 Million in revenue for just conducting business as usual while putting some together to generate that 10 cents on average.  It could be banner ads (ughhh), PPC links (meerrgghghg).., affiliate solutions (not too bad).., or something new where I provide something of value for free in exchange for the opportunity for direct marketing maybe.

Something to keep an eye on this year as more companies increase their digital budgets to move more campaigns and efforts online.