02.13.2007
Joe Marchese explores the challenge faced by independent publishers — who are often their own editorial staffs, too — as they attempt to maximize revenue while maintaining journalistic integrity. From Mediapost:
“Consider that when a journalist is an island unto his/herself, he or she must also assume the roles of advertising sales, marketing and finance. If you thought it was tough for massive corporations to deal with the bipolar issue of maximizing profits and maintaining journalistic integrity, imagine when it is one individual fighting that battle with his/herself everyday. Massive corporations at least provide a paycheck and platform, allowing great journalist to focus on what they do best while ‘the suits’ focus on the advertising and profits. It may have been a constant internal battle for journalistic integrity, but as much as you might want to despise media moguls, at least there was a battle happening. There was also some comfort to knowing that there were rules regarding the operation of the news divisions, a sort of church and state separation.”
And he calls us folks at FM thought leaders! I like that.
“Thankfully there are thought leaders, like Federated Media Publishing, that may someday provide the scale of operations and monetization necessary to create the next generation of church and state separation between journalism and ad sales, while nurturing/encouraging quality independent journalism in a way pure performance networks never could (but this a fight that is far from won).”
02.12.2007
The weekend Journal on the sites that start the momentum for viral phenomenon, such as Digg and Newsvine (sub req, WSJ).
“A new generation of hidden influencers is taking root online, fueled by a growing love affair among Web sites with letting users vote on their favorite submissions. These sites are the next wave in the social-networking craze — popularized by MySpace and Facebook. Digg is one of the most prominent of these sites, which are variously labeled social bookmarking or social news.”
02.12.2007
Folks in the media business (86% of them, anyway) are more inclined to say blogs are important versus the mainstream public, where only half say so. Still, that means there are four times as many people who say “blogs are important” as there are people who read newspapers. From the Guardian UK:
“John Zogby, president and CEO of Zogby International, gave some stats that showed the different view of the media inside and outside the industry.
- Only 27% of the public said they were satisfied with the news but 76% of people inside it are satisfied.
- Only 12% of the public read newspapers but 26% of the industry reads them.
- 32% of the public get their news from Tv but only 5% of the media does.
- 40% of the public gets their news form the internet but 60% of the media industry does.
- Just over half the public said blogs are important but 86% of the media said they are.”
02.12.2007
Jonah Bloom’s column today in AdAge makes a distinction between the fad of user-generated TV spots and the larger, more meaningful movement of conversational marketing, a term he credits to Battelle:
“This movement is changing media and the nature of advertising. I’ve been talking with the author and entrepreneur John Battelle, who has been documenting the transition from what he calls ‘package-goods media’ to ‘conversational media’ on his blog at Searchblog. It was Battelle who coined the term ‘conversational marketing’ as he found that advertisers who used their ads ‘as invitations to conversation’ — or even turned live online conversations into ad messages — were outperforming those who viewed ads as unchanging packages to be posted next to content.”
02.12.2007
The brothers in charge of Google’s radio ad-sales program have left the company. From WSJ:
“The dMarc acquisition is crucial to Google’s ambitions to extend its ad platform into newspapers, television and other media as it seeks to diversify away from Internet search. Google has had limited success so far in translating its efficient and automated online-search methods to the $20 billion annual market for radio advertising.”
This line, toward the end of the article, raises the most interesting question: “DMarc also has been selling mostly remnant inventory, or low-priced ad spots sold at the last minute.“
Can Google’s high-margin, high-automation approach to advertising ever move past the low-priced pay-only-for-performance slice of marketing budgets?
02.09.2007
My next guest-blogger post is up at ZDNet:
“Smarter minds than mine (BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis on frictionless ‘open ad marketplaces,’ and Google’s Eric Schmidt on his preference for targeted ad bots over targeted ad salespeople) have argued that algorithms and auctions will create market efficiency for advertisers and publishers, and with market efficiency, a kind of ‘perfect’ ad pricing that recognizes value more intelligently. Especially for small, quality independent publications that are left out on the ad-budget sidelines today because they don’t have the resources to take media buyers out to expensive restaurants, perfect pricing will mean increased revenues.”
See why I don’t agree over at Alan Graham’s blog!
02.07.2007
In my first column as guest blogger for Alan Graham’s “Tales from the Web 2.0 Frontier (ZDNet), I talk about two case studies of “conversational marketing” in which brands managed to to stay on-message while also creating campaigns that achieved PR and viral success — Cisco’s “Welcome to the Human Network” and Dice’s “Rant Banner”:
“Every marketer these days wants the kids at My Space befriending their corporate mascots, producing fun-yet-favorable YouTube videos that feature their products and writing blog posts on that fresh, revitalized feeling that comes from using their brand of soap. But here’s the catch. Most of us – the My Space kids included – don’t want to talk about most companies’ products. We want to talk about ourselves! So what’s an aspiring “conversational marketer” to do?
Find a way to associate your brand and products with a conversation that your customers are already having or would like to have.”
Check out the full piece at ZDNet.
02.07.2007
This week I’m the guest blogger for Alan Graham’s “Tales from the Web 2.0 Frontier” blog at ZDNet, which started off Monday with an interview on what FM is all about:
“Federated Media is an online media company that pulls together the leading independently-published websites (such as Ars Technica and PROTRADE), blogs (such as Boing Boing and Dooce), social-media sites (such as Digg, Newsvine and Metafilter) and video podcasts (such as Diggnation and Ask A Ninja) into portfolios or “federations” of properties reaching similar audiences. Each site and video producer is hand-picked for quality, influence and reach so that brand marketers can do business with FM-affiliated websites or video programs with the confidence that they are associating their brands with quality content, marketing themselves in relevant and safe environments, and doing so with a high degree of scale and marketing efficiency.”
More at ZDNet.
02.05.2007
Scott Kirsner in the SJ Merc News sees a future where the wheat separates from the chaff among independent publications based on transparency and journalistic ethics. Amen.
“I believe we will soon see a bifurcation in the blogosphere, with trusted bloggers letting readers know about connections that may influence what they write. Blogs where payment for reviews seems to dominate — or where every third posting is about wonderful free dinners and gifts lavished upon the blogger — will be regarded much more skeptically. How many more people have relied on Julia Child for cooking advice (who never endorsed a product), rather than Ron Popeil, star of late-night infomercials for the Showtime Rotisserie Oven?”
02.03.2007
From MarketingVOX: A MarketingSherpa and AdTech survey of online marketers found that paid search and SEO were, by far, the most popular online ad tactics in 2006. The biggest-growth areas for 2007 are advertising on blogs, social networks and RSS feeds. Pop-unders seem to be losing their affectiveness.