ChasNote

Great thought piece at Searchblog on the value of branded media online.

“Why is it that a brand marketer looking to reach college educated women, 18-34, is willing to pay $40 CPMs in Vanity Fair, but just $3 in an ad network?

“The first and most important reason is engagement — the reader of Vanity Fair is engaged in the magazine, and when she comes across that Lancome ad, the chances that the ‘between the ears magic’ will occur is far greater than at a random site run by an ad network. The second and related reason is creative — a two-page spread is simply a far more effective media vehicle for the brand’s message than the IAB unit.”

Overcoming these two hurdles comes down one thing: Marketers need to think like publishers. Publishers — a term I’m using here to include the creators of magazines, newspaper, websites and TV programming — are deeply committed to converting first-time trial readers or viewers into loyal subscribers or appointment-TV watchers; it costs far too much money buying audience, carriage and circulation (not to mention producing the content) to survive any other way. They must engage that audience. Marketers, meanwhile, recognize that it’s a waste of money to advertise with media properties that haven’t created engagement.

Marketers are also wasting money if they place advertising in high-engagement environments yet fail to provide creative that likewise engages the audience. The best TV commercials from the past six decades are 30-second and 60-second films that have overcome their miniature running times with brilliantly-crafted narrative arcs, evocative performances, catchy music and captivating cinematography. In other words, with filmed content. The creative units attached to online ad campaigns must move beyond call-to-action blinking banners. They need to become portals into content experiences that rival the great content at the best media sites.

Battelle takes a deep look at the difference between media companies and ad networks at Searchblog, and how the big online portals are confusing the two.

“Do we [in the media business] sell inventory to the highest bidder via algorithms, automated processes, and platforms? Or do partner with marketers and creators of media to build brands - both media brands, and consumer marketing brands?

“I know how the folks who no longer work at AOL, Yahoo, or MSN feel about this question. They’re all brand people. And it’s entirely clear how the Google-chasers have answered that question: They’ve collectively spent billions of dollars amassing ‘access to inventory’ and ‘ad platforms’ in single-minded competition with Google.

“It seems the future, according to AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft, is in ad networks.”

Meanwhile, one of the top brands in quality content and marketing relationships with global brands, ESPN is severing ties with ad networks:

“The sites like ESPN have cut ties with Specific Media and several other ad networks saying that ad selling that relies heavily on arbitrage and algorithms is not for them. ‘We’re heading down a path where it no longer suits our business needs to work with ad networks,’ said Eric Johnson, Vice President, Multimedia Sales, ESPN.”

Jeremiah Owyang, at his site, writes up a case study of Dell’s Facebook Graffiti Contest, part of its ReGeneration campaign. His “what could have been better” section — that conversational campaigns should be given longer life spans, and that the content they produce should be given more exposure too — is worth a full read at his site. His summary of the campaign overall:

“Unlike most marketing campaigns that deploy heavy ads, fake viral videos, or message bombardment, this campaign let go to gain more. Overall, this is a successful campaign as they turned the action over to the community, let them take charge, decide on the winners, all under the context of the regeneration campaign. The campaign moved the active community from Facebook closer to the branded Microsite, closer to the corporate website, migrating users in an opt-in manner that lead to hundreds of comments was clever. Well done.”

And MediaPost’s Social Media Insider blog says:

“There are a lot of impressive stats here: 1.1 million people voted on their favorite illustration, 7,300 people entered a submission, the contest has almost 1,300 friends, and there are currently 209 comments to the post at ReGeneration.org announcing the winners. Clearly, Dell’s ReGeneration effort supports [FM CEO John] Battelle’s contention that social media may finally make online advertising much more interesting to users than the ongoing crop of forgettable banner campaigns.”

The more high-quality, credible content that’s published at American Express’s OPEN Forum blog site, the more instances that other sites will tell their readers about it, link to it and improve the OPEN Forum’s “relevance” in search engines. Here’s another from the official WOMMA site.

From Adweek’s coverage of a panel at Ogilvy’s Verge conference. Outgoing Facebook chief revenue officer Owen Van Natta defended the company’s Beacon advertising concept, while Gawker’s Nick Denton slapped back:

“Gawker media publisher Nick Denton said he believes the ‘innovation’ in social media ad models is mostly a result of their failure as media properties. Even MySpace gets higher click rates than Facebook display units, he noted.”

FM’s Battelle disagreed:

“Not all ads on Facebook perform poorly, though. John Battelle, founder of Federated Media, said Facebook applications like Graffiti Wall are running ad campaigns for companies like Dell that are performing well by all metrics. ‘There’s no engagement in ad networks,’ he said. ‘We haven’t yet figured that out yet, and I think social media will.’”

In a recent post on American Express’s Open Forum site, Battelle tells business owners who interact with their customers online: You no longer just selling widgets, you’re in the media business. The point is this, don’t define yourself by what you sell (”we sell trains!”) but rather the service you provide your customers (transportation services). American Express — the company that’s paying Battelle and other business authors to license their content — gets it. The Open Forum site isn’t about selling plastic debit cards, it’s about empowering their customers with tools to grow their businesses, plastic debit cards and insightful business content included.

Last fall (if not earlier), American Express recognized the importance of search equity, the status of its brand among the organic results from search engines. These results — the free ones, not the paid listings — are a proxy for the relevance and trust your brand has earned among its business ecosystem: customers, partners, the press and the peanut gallery. In other words, your brand’s position in search results reflects how active and successful you are in the conversation.

I say last fall because that’s when I first noticed American Express paying careful attention to the small-business authors and bloggers that rank highly on search results for SMB terms and phrases (including American Express trademarks), and making sure its ad messages surfaced on those high-influence sites.

Now American Express is making an even greater investment in its search equity, a greater commitment to having a voice within the small business conversation. It has partnered with top independent content creators covering small business — especially those authors who don’t merely create content but also use content to inspire a conversation — to produce the OPEN Forum Insight from Business Experts site.

Authors such as Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, Scott Belsky of Behance.net and John Battelle of Searchblog are contributing exclusive content to the site. No plugs for Amex OPEN Forum Events or Travel Services from these contributors, mind you, just insightful editorial features on the topics Anita, Scott and John cover at their own sites. Content that appeals, quite obviously, to their existing audiences, which opens the door to efficient marketing in two ways. One, American Express is running ads on each site that invite readers to read more from the authors they came to read in the first place. Ads for original content by top business authors, targeted to those authors’ loyal readers? Needless to say, click-through performance on these ads is vastly better than average.

Two, authors don’t want to publish content and then hide it from their core audiences, so American Express is benefiting from some unpaid (and un-asked-for) promotions, like this call-out by Anita Campbell to her own content at the OPEN Forum site.

When audiences follow their favorite authors to the OPEN Forum site, they arrive ready for a conversation. A week in and visitors have clicked on the “I find this post useful” button more than 100 times, and the commenters are out-pacing the contributors based on word counts. Engaged visitors tend to carry the conversation with them, too, even as they leave the site that started it. According to Technorati, 17 blogs are linking to this section of the OPEN Forum site, and there have been news pick-ups by aggregators such as I Want Media (on 2/22/08). As more sites “endorse” the conversation by linking to it, Digging it and Twittering it, Google will take notice, and American Express’s search equity will feel the juice. And the 1% rule of social media suggests that for every comment post and every trackback link published, there are 99 others who quietly found the content useful. Search equity is the tip of the social-media iceberg — a partial indicator of a much larger phenomenon.

Congratulations to the team that put this together: Steve Clark, Jason Ewell, Naama Ashkenazi Bloom, Amy Fitzgibbons and Lou Paskalis at American Express; Rachel Bogan, Lee Baler and Scott Cappuzzo at Digitas; and James Gross, Marcia Simmons, Matt Jessell and Teresa Nielsen Hayden at FM.

Disclosure: When Battelle isn’t writing Searchblog, he is FM’s CEO and my boss.

From NY Times:

“Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, said Tuesday the broadcaster was moving to save as much as $50 million a year by reducing its reliance on expensive pilots of new series on the NBC television channel.”

More evidence (like anyone needs it!) that the packaged-goods approach to media — where large media companies own and control distribution of content — is breaking down. As audiences move to the internet, the economic models behind television networks are becoming less lucrative. Fifty million dollars a year to throw programming-spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks just doesn’t pay out anymore.

From Media Week.

“Like much else in the digital world, Google stands at the center of this shift, Horan said. The ability to use search engines to find information means a more meritocratic media world, where a smaller advertiser or publisher can compete with larger companies on the basis of relevance. A car shopper, for instance, uses search to find information and considers a variety of sources rather than turn to a single trusted brand, he said. Intent-driven media also means a blurrier distinction among content, commerce and community, he said. As an example, Horan pointed to Nike+, the running system and social network that blend product, branding and service.”

I’m wondering if Horan read Battelle’s book.

From NY Times:

“In a posting Friday afternoon, Emily Gould, a Gawker editor, dropped the bomb: both she and Choire Sicha, the site’s top editor, were quitting. A third editor, Joshua David Stein, confirmed on Saturday that he was leaving, too. Gawker’s three remaining staff members were all hired within the last three months.”

More interesting to me is why:

“Ms. Gould, who has been with Gawker for a year, said she was upset about a new compensation system that pays writers according to how many times people view their blog posts rather than only by how many posts they write. The system, she said, pits writers against one another. ‘It really gets in your head in this weird way because you’re getting so conscious of how many people are reading what,’ Ms. Gould said. ‘You get focused on being sensational and even more brain candyish than Gawker was to start with.’”

Here, for example, is the image that usually accompanies coverage of rumors related to FM — FM’s founder and CEO, John Battelle, giving the Battelle Salute, taken sometime in the late 1990s: