ChasNote

Among the list of 14: Apple and Google have peaked (though Google’s stock will spike later in the year); Yahoo and AOL will merge and will cut a deal with Microsoft to monetize Microsoft’s traffic; and Twitter will continue to gain momentum. And two of particular interest to ChasNote fans:

“The online media space will be hit hard by the economic downturn in the first half, but by year’s end, will have chalked up moderate gains over last year in terms of gross spend. I think it’s possible that Q1 09 will be lower than Q1 08, marking the first time that has happened since 01, if I recall correctly. This will cause all sorts of consternation and hand wringing, but in the end, it won’t matter. The web is where people are spending their time, the web will be where marketers spend their money.”

And:

“Major brands will continue to struggle with the best way to interact with ’social media.’ They will take budget reserved for media spending (IE buying banners and building out branding campaigns) and start to become publishers in their own right. This is not a new tactic (many marketers, in particular technology companies, have published magazines, for example, and many consumer brands create or co-create television series), but given the plastic and social nature of online media, many marketers will see these efforts fail, in particular when the efforts are executed in partnership with major media companies. The reason has to do with putting the cart before the horse: in order to truly succeed in conversational media, the company must itself be fluent in that conversation. A partner with tons of traffic, but who is not fluent, will not be the ‘translator’ major brands need.”

His final prediction is that he’ll finish that next book. I’m betting against that one. His FM colleagues (myself included) have plans to keep him busy with his day job.

Great advice from my colleague James Gross:

“All of this led me to powerlifting and to one my friends who was a great powerlifter. I asked him how I could get into it. And he told me one thing, ‘Go pick up the heaviest weight in the gym, and see what you can do with it.’ Now, he really didn’t mean to do exactly that, but I understood what he meant. Everyone wants to get in shape, they start with exercise books, personal trainers, a new wardrobe, etc. What my friend was telling me was, get out there, see if you like it, if your body reacts to it, you will know what do next.”

There’s a recession out there. OK. Get back to work.

Gabriel Rossi @TheBrandBuilder tells his 1200 followers that Amex’s OPEN Forum blog is “one of the best social media efforts I’ve ever seen.”

Amazing (and widespread) credibility for a website that started as an ad campaign.

Sponsor underwritten publications, like American Express’s OPEN Forum blog, have given independent authors new outlets for their editorial insights. Battelle’s contributions to several of these projects adds up to 15,000-words worth of columns he hopes will find their way into his next book.

From NY Times:

“LG ELECTRONICS used to run separate advertisements in each country it did business in, and the ads focused on the products it sold: televisions, phones and home electronics. Now, it is introducing its first global campaign featuring a celebrity. And it was not a Madison Avenue agency that designed the ad, but that eminent wrangler of celebrities, Conde Nast….”

“The Conde Nast Media Group, which created the ads, earned almost $100 million in revenue from custom work like this in 2008. It has created campaigns for the department store chain Dillard’s, the vodka Grey Goose, and the luxury car brand Lexus, which have included in-store events, parties and television programs. All the advertising it creates must run in Conde Nast magazines and Web sites.”

This isn’t unique to Conde Nast, and it isn’t new. So why is that independent blogs (or their partner FM) get so much flack when they help their sponsors devise and execute ad campaigns designed, like those made by Conde Nast, to be more relevant to their own audiences?!

At Justinsomnia my colleague Justin Watt does the math on the number of monthly pageviews one needs to make $100k in annual ad-sales income.

The basic math works out to this: You need a million monthly pageviews if you have one ad per page, and you sell 100% of them at CPMs just over $8. Or half a million pageviews, if you put two ads on every page and keep the same CPM and sell-through rate.

There are a couple of challenges, though. First, to experience 100% sell-through on your inventory, you need to work with ad networks that sell to direct response (DR) advertisers who don’t really care where their ads run — like Google’s Adsense — and campaigns from those advertisers rarely return effective CPMs (after the ad network’s 50-60% commission) above $1, unless your site is focused on enterprise routers. I’d recommend modeling revenues based on 50% sell-through rates. Second, the brand advertisers who pay premium CPMs, which online means above $5, are more interested in audience reach and influence than they are in pageviews and ad avails. If you have fewer than 500k monthly uniques (as counted by a 3rd party like Comscore), you need to be an enormously influential brand in your own right if a major advertiser’s going to take a meeting with you. Third, even if your site is large enough and influential enough to merit high-CPM advertising from major brands, the ads won’t sell themselves. So you need to account for commissions you’ll pay to staff sellers or an outside rep firm. More on media math here.

But, dang, the charts department at Justinsomnia puts ChasNote’s to shame!

I bet Dell’s not the first brand to use wiki software to create a living whitepaper, but they set a high bar with What It Means to Be a Digital Nomad. I can’t think of a good reason why anyone would create a static PDF whitepaper anymore.

(Disclosure: FM works with Dell on parts of the Digital Nomads campaign.)

At Continuous Beta, my FM colleague Pete Spande draws a distinction between the reality that conversational marketing can be enormously efficient and the myth that it’s free.

“That is the trick with Social Media. It isn’t free but the low cost of the tools make it feel free from a distance.

“If you go to where the people are (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, the ‘blogosphere,’ etc) you must invest time, money, and energy to stimulate a conversation. Marketers can and do create fan pages, groups, and even applications for very little money. But creating them and getting people to use them are two very different things. The people who become a fan of you your brand within Facebook or subscribe to your brand blog’s RSS feed are the people your brand has already converted. To grow beyond that base you must invest money, time, and energy.”

Many marketers are using social media platforms to create noise — getting customers to a fan page — without joining those customers in an actual conversation. In Battelle’s response to Pete’s post, he proposes how brands can begin to converse.

“First, finding the true leaders of a community you care about, and engaging them in a dialog about how best to join the conversation they lead. What you come up with just might be something like HP’s VoicePosts, Intel’s embedding code and support of BB’s OffWorld, or American Express’ Open Forum.

“Secondly, I like the approach of determining you have something valuable to add on your own, and you might become a publisher in your own right, as long as what you build is truly valuable. That’s how you end up with Microsoft’s CrowdFire, or Asus’ WePC.com (or come to think of it, American Express’ Open Forum again).”

From Business Week:

“Just last week, Barclays Capital (BCS) lowered its projections for U.S. ad spending to a negative 10% next year and a positive 1% in 2010. Every one of the traditional media platforms is getting hit, with newspapers (no surprise) taking the brunt of the pressure, with a drop of 17%, followed by TV (minus 15.5%), magazines (minus 15%), and radio (minus 13%). While other researchers aren’t offering prophesies quite so dire, one thing is clear: This is already no typical ad recession. In 1991, ad spending dropped a mere 1.9% from the prior year, while in 2001 it fell only 6.2%.

“The only bright spot this time is online advertising, which, despite a series of downward revisions, is still expected to grow between 6% and 10% next year over 2008 levels.”

Online has come of age. No longer the experimental fringe of media spending, it’s the trackable, efficient platform that is likely to benefit from a recession.

In a round table hosted by Canada’s Boards Magazine, Pescovitz shared his vision of advertising 2.0:

“It’s a really interesting time because previously there’s been this wall, necessarily so, between the editorial side and media, but with the rise of underground media to become mass media in the form of blogs and other kinds of systems, there’s an opportunity for marketers to join in the conversation between authors and readers in an open and transparent way. To be honest, I have a great time talking to ad agencies and marketers and companies about ways to connect with our audience and our community.”