ChasNote

Last year AOL paid $275 million to buy Tacoda. Now, according to Venture Beat, AOL is dropping the brand and rolling the technology into Platform A’s Ad.com unit.

“iThis is a shocking move for some, because Ad.com doesn’t target much at all, and offers ads of $1 or less per a thousand views — and is generally considered a ‘bottom-feeder’ by some in the industry.”

Times are tough at ValueClick, too

No news here for folks who have participated in the television or print publishing businesses anytime in the past 50 years, but it may be revolutionary news in certain online marketing circles, especially circles in, say, Mountain View. From Ad Age:

“Now, new findings from the Online Publishers Association suggest that content is king: Ads on branded-content websites are more effective than non-branded sites and outpace industry norms in nearly every category.

“[The study] determined that ads on content sites have greater impact on the overall purchase process, including customer awareness, brand awareness, brand consideration, brand preference and purchase intent, especially among the consumer package goods, financial services, technology, telecommunications and travel sectors, giving credence to the idea that audiences are attracted to websites.”

From Erick at TechCrunch:

“Plenty of people blog for free, but when you are blogging for a multi-billion-dollar media conglomerate like AOL (a unit of Time Warner) at least you can expect a steady paycheck. Or not. Recent belt-tightening at AOL is hitting its network of bloggers, many of whom are being asked to curtail their posts or stop altogether. Others are being asked to post for free, and are actually doing so in the hopes that they might save their jobs come August.”

Media Kitchen’s Darren Herman scared me with his headline Goodbye Media Sales Execs. That’s it, I said, no more inviting Darren join me on stage at the Conversational Marketing Summit!

Then I read his post, and found myself in deep agreement with his take on the future of media sales:

“While ad exchanges currently supply Madison Avenue with inventory such as 300X250, 728X90, and other IAB standard impression units, you cannot purchase integrated/custom campaigns. While what you can do in a banner/button unit can be extremely creative and unique, you are not able to purchase page takeovers, custom content, or any other unique placements.

“I believe Media Sales Exec’s lives are going to become much more efficient. Let agencies and marketers buy standard ad-units through exchanges layering on different targeting data (not just technologies), but when the phone rings to publishers, it’ll be for the custom/highly integrated media opportunities: where the sexy dollars are.”

More on the topic from my colleague Pete Spande.

Here too is an earlier post at ChasNote.

As reported by Silicon Alley Insider, data from PubMatic’s June AdPrice Index says:

“Online publishers earned a $0.36 CPM, or cost per 1,000 ad impressions, for inventory sold through ad networks in June, a one-cent drop from May.”

The biggest drop in prices occurred at small sites, those with fewer than one million pageviews a month, where average CPMs delivered by ad networks was $0.81, down from $1.13 in May. That’s still better than $0.46 CPMs for mid-sized sites (1MM to 100MM monthly pageviews) and the $0.23 CPMs for large ones. Not pretty for independent publishers trying to make a living.

Paris-based Quividi has created software that enables video cameras in billboards to determine a rough demographic profile of the person looking at the ad:

“they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon. The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.”

What happens if I’m walking by a billboard on a day I happen to be wearing a dress?!

In addition to solving the relevance problem (serving the right ads based on demographic-recognition algorithms), consumer acceptance may be an issue:

“Although surveillance cameras have become commonplace in banks, stores and office buildings, their presence takes on a different meaning when they are meant to sell products rather than fight crime. So while the billboard technology may solve a problem for advertisers, it may also stumble over issues of public acceptance…. ‘I think a big part of why it’s accepted is that people don’t know about it,’ said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group.”

Robert Moskowitz explores that topic in his recent piece for iMedia Connection. He interviewed me for the article, and I gave him my take: It’s a ridiculous notion. The hoopla over ESPN and others firing their ad networks is a symptom of our youth as an industry; publishers and ad networks will coexist happily as they do a better job of defining the different roles they each play.

“‘The industry is not that old,’ says Chas Edwards, publisher and CRO of Federated Media. ‘As an industry, we’ve only taken a couple of runs at what online advertising can look like. We’ve been focused on the click. But now you have significant budgets and marketing experts who think differently than just the direct response metric. We’re still in the early stages of imagining what brand advertising on the internet looks like and how we can measure success against that. So I don’t think we’ve yet seen a lot of interesting brand executions online, but we’re beginning to.’”

Seth Godin has an odd — though perhaps too common — encounter with the robots that are building ad networks all over the internet. The robots in question, in this case, are employed by Forbes.

“A woman named Jennifer Rosini at Forbes sent a note that read:

Hi , You are invited to join the new community of the high quality business and financial bloggers from Forbes.com. Our community - the Business and Financial Blog Network, will launch shortly.

“I wrote her back, pointing out that she hadn’t even bothered to pretend it was a personal note… just a mail merge missing my name.

“She responded (this is the entire note):

I’m not sending these out. I have people working for me that send out 500 a day. Are you interested in joining, Seth?

“The juxtaposition of the third sentence with the second just highlighted the inanity of the entire enterprise. It’s a high-quality network, but 500 people a day are being asked to join, and it’s okay to spam people but do I want to join anyway?”

“The end result of spam (email spam, blog spam, Twitter spam, Squidoo spam, comment spam, phone spam, politician spam) is that it eats away at your brand. If you don’t have a brand, you might make some short term cash but it gets tiresome creating annoyance everywhere you go. If you do have a brand, a brand like Forbes, say, you don’t notice the brand erosion… until it’s too late.”

Needless to say, brand marketers don’t want to be associated with distressed brands — so what’s the point of this approach?

From yesterday’s WSJ in an article about traditional publishers acquiring web services platforms like Conde Nast’s acquisition of FM alum Reddit.

“Usually when publishers acquire technology companies it’s to spruce up their own Web sites. But increasingly publishers such as Conde Nast and Meredith are drawing on the technology to create advertising campaigns for marketers.

“This takes publishers further into the realm of marketing services. Instead of simply selling marketers ad space, they’re rolling up their sleeves and designing the promotions as well. For the next five months, visitors to the Dillard’s Web site will be able to rank products featured in a top-10 list selected by Conde Nast’s Lucky magazine and fashion Web site Style.com. The fashion lists will rotate seasonally, giving visitors the chance to rank new items every two weeks. The top-rated item on the list then will appear in Dillard’s online ads running on nine Conde Nast Web sites, including Teen Vogue, Glamour, Style.com and Vanity Fair.”

Smart. Also not surprising. High-end offline media companies have always had staff and production capabilities to provide marketing services well beyond trafficking and inserting commercials. This is part of what drives premium rates at leading media brands. Advertisers expect their media partners to do more than cash their checks; they demand that their media partners help them succeed among an audience that the media companies know best.

This is why I was confused by news that ESPN has discontinued working with ad networks. I get it that ad networks cause pricing and channel conflict because — despite promising publishers like ESPN to sell their remnant inventory in a blind manner, as part of a “channel” — they sometimes pitch site-specific opportunities. They offer lower rates for the same banners ESPN sells directly. This is a partnership problem, a serious one, but one that should be addressed with tactics short of termination. It’s not religious problem, as ESPN and others have portrayed it. From Mediaweek:

“ESPN’s decision crystallizes a philosophical debate in the online ad sales industry that has intensified since the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual meeting last month when during a keynote address, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia media president Wenda Harris Millard gave her now famous warning against selling Web inventory like ‘pork bellies.’”

My interpretation of Wenda Harris Millard’s pork-bellies battle cry is this. Digital publishers need to remember that they are publishers — companies that engage with high-quality audiences around content in a unique and magical conversation, and service firms that know how to chaperon marketing brands into those conversations. In other words, companies in the mold of Conde Nast, Meredith and ESPN that offer high-touch marketing services.

Whatever ad avails you don’t sell, offer up on the pork-belly exchanges — online we call them ad networks (or Google Adsense), in TV we call them PI or DR rep firms. Hey, people sometimes want pork bellies, and audiences almost certainly don’t want 30-seconds of white static whenever a TV network fails to sell 100% of spots.

But if you don’t or can’t articulate what it is that makes your media brand uniquely valuable to your marketing partners (hint: it’s not your demographics), you’ve ceased to be publisher.

More on the difference between publishers and ad networks from Battelle.

Caught in the act by AdRants, Disney family resorts ads have been running alongside near-porn photos and content at sites such as Egotastic.

“Last Fall, some contextually placed Disney ads appeared in a webcam video of ‘Andrea’ fondling her breasts. Now, a series of banner ads are appearing on celebu-porn site Egotastic next to Keeley Hazell covering her breasts, images from a Kristen Davis ’sex tape,’ images from a Lindsay Lohan sex tape, Denise Richards displaying her crotch and more. Screenshots are here. No nudity per se but possibly NSFW. More than likely the ads appeared on Egotastic as a result of a blind buy with neither the agency nor Disney having knowledge. It’s yet another reason why blind buys are rarely a good thing for most brands, especially one so very conscious of its family-friendly image.”