ChasNote

If you’ve spent time with me in the past few years, you’ve likely heard some variation of my recommendation to “market in the vernacular of your customers.” (More here.) By that I mean: Figure out what attracts your audience to a particular media product or platform (whether it’s Vanity Fair, MTV or Facebook), and then speak to that audience with the same grammar, tone and format as the medium that attracted them.

This isn’t new. If I was among your target audience in the late 1970s, you were likely to find me watching the groovy kids on the sitcom What’s Happening. When Dr Pepper ran commercials starring a guy dancing his way across town dressed like the kids on What’s Happening, surrounded by a group of back-up dancers that looked like extras from the show, it got my attention. The commercial was nearly as much fun as the program, only shorter. I didn’t yet have an iPad and I had recently burned out on Atari Pong; the vernacular I spoke most fluently at the time was TV, and that’s the language in which Dr Pepper spoke to me.

Fast forward to today. If your customers get their news from Digg (where I work), they are speaking a vernacular in which yellow boxes next to blue headlines help them discover content they better not miss. The bigger the number in the box, the more they are likely to pay attention — since it’s a content item that has been vetted and recommended by influencers in their community.

Brands that speak to Digg readers in the vernacular of yellow boxes and blue headlines are succeeding with the Digg audience more than advertisers running more traditional banner ads. By an order of magnitude, in fact, if you’re looking at click-through rates.

Earlier this month, Intel took the idea a step further. They used Digg Ads units (Digg-able, bury-able ads between the 2nd and 3rd story on Digg’s homepage) and IAB-sized Content Ads to drive Digg readers to page filled with news stories breaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The page wasn’t a collection of press releases on Intel products, or even a list of editorial stories picked by an Intel employee because it said something nice about Intel. It was a round-up of CES stories that were vetted by the Digg readers themselves. Intel’s sponsorship created something that Digg itself was lacking: One page assembling the most important gadget news from CES for the reader who doesn’t want to be distracted by any other kind of news. (You know who you are.)

And Intel’s campaign took advantage of something else, too. While nearly 40 million people come to Digg each month, they’re not the only ones speaking the Digg vernacular. Readers of most content sites on the web have noticed yellow buttons and invitations to Digg stories right there on the site they’re reading. Like a Briton coming to America and finding out that we too speak her language. So Intel took IAB-shaped Content Ads and ran them on other sites — such as Wired and CNET — that also attract Intel’s customers in a context where those customers would understand that yellow boxes with big numbers in them mean there’s socially-curated content they might want to check out.

According to Intel’s David Veneski:

“The ability to ‘Digg’ something on the Web has become a ubiquitous sign of approval from a content hungry audience throughout the Internet. With our content ads the goal was to team up with Digg to provide genuinely interesting stories coming out of CES across a wide landscape of sites where our customers seek information.

“Recognizing the aggregation of compelling content was brought to you by Intel in a social friendly, audience approved ‘Diggable’ format gave us the ability to add value to our audience’s experience rather than just paying for an impression that may or may not be of benefit to them.”

Advertising that seeks to improve the audience experience? I like it. And I’m betting website audiences will too.

(Credits: Dave Veneski at Intel; David Zamorski, Sarah Reed and Melissa Sabo at OMD; and Elyssa Wilpon, Erin Coull, Dav Zimak, Eric Hoppe, Dan Contento and Mac Delaney at Digg.)

In this week’s New Yorker, financial-page writer James Surowieki offers a pessimistic outlook on the CNET-CBS marriage.

First, he argues that a good partnership strategy is often better than an owned and operated (O&O) approach:

“Merger mania also rests on what you might call the fallacy of ownership — the assumption that you have to own a company to make money from its properties. In fact, much of what mergers are supposed to accomplish can be achieved through partnerships and alliances. Google has made deals to handle searches and advertising for companies like A.O.L. and I.A.C., giving it access to their customers without the hassle of an acquisition. And I.B.M. has, in recent years, marketed the products of its competitors Sun Microsystems and Novell, enabling it to expand its offerings and its potential customer base. If CBS and CNET had simply agreed to cross-promote each other’s brands and distribute each other’s content, CBS would have had many of the benefits of merging without the costs.”

Second, he suggests that the merger makes the most sense if the gameplay is layoffs and cost-savings:

“There are, of course, situations in which acquisitions do make sense. According to a recent meta-analysis of a number of merger studies, mergers that rely more on cost-cutting — combining back-office operations, eliminating redundancies, and so on — than on promises of vast growth are more likely to be successful. (The merger of J. P. Morgan and Bank One, for instance, led to more than three billion dollars in annual cost savings.)”

I hope that’s not the plan.

From AllThingsD:

“CNET Networks will also announce a much expanded editorial and advertising relationship with Yahoo that will give the tech news site broad distribution on the highly trafficked Internet portal…..

“Under the new deal, sources at both companies said a large swath of CNET tech news and also reviews will be carried on Yahoo, making it the major supplier of tech news content to the site. Rather than just focusing on its owned-and-operated properties, Yahoo’s more recent strategy has been to partner with media companies.

“In addition, under the terms of the deal, Yahoo will sell some of CNET’s remnant inventory and also allow CNET ad sales staff to sell into some areas of Yahoo.”

Smart.

It suggests each company has begun to recognize its strengths — and begun to get comfortable with its weaknesses. Yahoo has enormous audience reach (it’s a portal) and sells lots of banners at low CPMs (it’s a giant ad network); it isn’t a leader in original content or high-CPM brand advertising. CNET has a great sales team that generates very high CPMs around premium tech content and an award-winning editorial team (it’s DNA is that of a niche publisher); it isn’t big enough to make the high volume, low CPM ad-network model work outside the core tech sites.

It’s a shame — given all the recent news at both companies — they didn’t do this sooner.

From Times Online UK:

“What’s surprising, though, is that the pure-play internet media companies that might have been expected to benefit from the tectonic shifts in the industry have done badly too. Yahoo!, CNET Networks and Interactive Corp all seemed to be in a great position three or four years ago, and yet all three look like they’ll soon cease to exist in their current form as investors express their displeasure with poor stock performance.”

“Part of the explanation for this is simple enough. Yahoo! and CNET could be considered new media versions of old media models; they aim to drive large numbers of people to their pages with expensive investments in content, and monetise that traffic via display advertising. But low-cost blogs — especially in the technology news space that CNET once led — have scooped up a lot of the audience.”

FM, Huffington Post, PaidContent, TechCrunch and others are called out as alternative models.

I spent 6 years selling adverting and other marketing services for CNET — asking, as part of my job, for marketers to join our readers online. I’m sure glad I didn’t have to sell against that headline when I was there!

Elinor Mills at CNET’s News.com asks what she takes to be a rhetorical question, “Want to ‘converse’ with marketers?” and provides her answer in the headline to her piece, “Me neither.”

I wonder how Intel, the advertiser running alongside that story, feels about CNET’s point of view, that Intel doesn’t belong there, that marketers aren’t adding to the CNET experience except insofar as they pay their bills.

Mills also challenges the founding concept of conversational marketing:

And what’s this with the slogan of the conference — “Brands are conversations”? No, they aren’t.

Oh my goodness. Forget about the sometimes-controversial programs called conversational marketing. Great brands have sparked conversations since before there was an internet, conversations that often don’t even require that we open our mouths. We tell our friends, our colleagues and communities something about ourselves (I’m not saying it’s always something good) by the brand choices we make — the cars we drive, the sneakers we wear, the cellphones we use. I don’t know Elinor personally, so perhaps she doesn’t engage with brands or people who use, wear or talk about brands. But if that’s the case, she’s part of a very small segment of population.