ChasNote

A reader of JCPenney’s Home Style Guide especially liked Maggie Mason’s Dishtowel Lust story and re-posted to the women-oriented social news site Kirtsy. Sixty-nine others added their votes at Kirtsy.

The winner of Jones Soda’s Graffiti drawing contest has been announced: 21-year-old Leeann McMichael of Adrian Michigan.

“The former Onsted resident and Adrian College senior said she noticed the joint-sponsored contest through Facebook earlier this year and used the forum’s graffiti board and paint application to draw her label design, which depicts a giraffe drinking a strawberry soda. As it drinks, its spots transform into red zebra-like stripes.

“Representatives from the Seattle-based drink company said by telephone Friday that the contest attracted more than 7,000 entrants. The general public was able to vote for their favorite design, before the popular works, including McMichael’s, went before the soda company’s panel of judges for further eliminations.”

(Photo credit: Dan Cherry.)

Careful readers of ChasNote may have noticed a post yesterday that went up, and then came down (”unpublished” as they say), in the blink of an eye. It was a link to register for the Outside Lands music festival in San Francisco next week — for free. I posted it before I realized that it was FM’s VIP registration link, intended for my use only as part of FM’s partnership with Outside Lands to run the CrowdFire pavilion and website. Oops!

Well it turns out ChasNote does have at least one careful reader, Stacy Segal-Reichlin, and for that, Stacy, I thank you. You earned that free ticket.

From yesterday’s NY Times:

“Heather Armstrong’s wickedly funny blog about motherhood, Dooce, is more than just an outlet for the creativity and frustrations of a modern mother. The site, chock full of advertising, is a moneymaking machine — so much so that Ms. Armstrong and her husband have both quit their regular jobs…. advertisers are eager to influence the 850,000 readers, mostly women, who avidly follow Ms. Armstrong’s adventures. Although Ms. Armstrong will not disclose exact numbers, Dooce’s revenue this year is on track to be seven times its size in 2006, according to Federated Media, which sells ads for the blog.”

If the Times requires you to register, here’s roughly the same article at IHT.

Here’s my entry in Graffiti’s MUSIC! drawing contest, sponsored by Microsoft and linked to the social media music site CrowdFire, also sponsored by Microsoft. When you submit your drawing, you can immediately upload it to CrowdFire for a chance to win goodies.

Cut me some slack, I drew that with my thumb on my Mac’s trackpad.

Dell launches Digital Nomads, a social media site where experts, Dell employees and visitors discuss their hopes and dreams for a better, more mobile future. And they’re inviting visitors to collaborate on a whitepaper that will define “digital nomads.”

Comscore numbers published by TechCrunch show Facebook at 132 million uniques worldwide and 153% year-over-year growth (versus 3% growth at My Space). Wow.

Lehman Brothers forecasts year-over-year online ad spending to grow 23.4% in 2008 and and 19.4% in 2009, with video advertising growing at better than double those rates. By Lehman’s count, online will represent 6.6% of total US ad spending in 2010, more than double online’s share in 2007. Charts and graphs at TechCrunch.

Hey, it’s my site and I’m allowed to write snarky headlines.

Officially the news is this, as reported by Bloomberg: eMarketer plans to cut its 2008 and 2009 year-over-year growth forecasts for online advertising by a few more points, which currently stand at 23% and 16%, respectively.

“Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said for the first time last month that the company, the biggest seller of online ads, faces a more challenging economic environment. Google’s ads tied to Internet search results are still faring better than much of the graphical banner ads sold by companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft.”

I have no doubt that the online advertising market, across the board, will feel the pain of the broader recession. I also agree that Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL will feel greater pain than Google. But it’s not because Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL — which sell mostly graphical banners instead of text ads — are used by advertisers for online brand-building, and brand advertising suffers more on economic downturns.

While the second part of that sentence is true, the first part isn’t. Most marketers buy low cost graphical banners on Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL for the same reason they buy text ads from Google, to drive clicks and other DR activities. Because they are less efficient DR vehicles than Google, they’ll be cut from plans first. The online publishers that have spent recent years working with advertisers on relevant, high-value, integrated sponsorships (rather than chasing Google) are going to fare better — in relative terms — than those three portals.