steinblog.com

shutting down

2007-06-12T11:52:00.001-07:00

It's become pretty clear that I can't keep up to date on the old blog these days. So, I'm going to take my long-absence to shut it down...for the time being.

I'll still be shooting off my mouth, but primarily in my ClickZ column, and maybe on some other people's blogs.

And, I hope to be back. I have a few new ideas, and I'm bound to have some time to work on some of them.

Thanks, all!

Lazy, Lazy, Lazy

2007-05-21T14:17:00.000-07:00

Alright, I haven't been "lazy", per se. But I have been amazingly busy. I did what I said I never would...I lost momentum on blogging. I used to brag that I found blogging addictive: that I would wake up thinking about what I would blog that day. Well, I seem to have let about a month's worth of morning's pass by, while working on those paying clients...but I think I'm back in the swing here.

Plus: I just saw this AdSense ad:

(not clickable)
Yeesh. How stuff like that winds it way through the system is beyond me. Alright...let's get back to keeping a close eye on how technology is changing advertising. Number one of which would be the amazing purchases of the last few weeks: DoubleClick to Google and Aquantive to Microsoft. Amazing (although not unexpected). Here we are in a space where the big software development shops are suddenly sitting at the fulcrum point between advertiser and consumer. I've written previously about how advertising is increasingly becoming a challenge of probability (specifically in ClickZ). These moves definitely show a significant march in that direction.

Cumulative Advantage: Why Marketing Strategy is Dynamic

2007-04-17T09:22:00.000-07:00

NYT has a short article about Cumulative Advantage, which is essentially the effect that occurs in a networked world where a moderately successful item (song, book, Web site, YouTube video) begins to become extremely successful, very quickly, pulling away from highly similar items of equal intrinsic quality.

whew.

Essentially, this is why you are more compelled to watch a video that 1 million people
have seen, as opposed to one that only 5 have seen. You (we) are drawn to things that others have deemed to be good. This is one of the mechanics of word of mouth, and something that clearly sets us up--as marketing strategists--to think of the world in highly dynamic terms.

Past (broadcast world) strategy had more to do with trying to figure out what would work and running it. You'd see if it did work, and try to learn from success and failure. Today, that is myopic and lazy. Today, we live inside of a highly-connected world where there is data, data and more data.

This is the opportunity that we have today. Everything is a living lab, where we can watch our target markets operate in very-close to real time, with stacks of algorithms at the ready. We need to continue to operate in a living way. Running a marketing program is more about optimization today than it is about initial insight. It is about flexibility and the ability to think quickly and recognize patterns as they begin to emerge.

Google and DoubleClick: Match Made in (Data) Heaven

2007-04-16T09:16:00.000-07:00

So, Google gets DoubleClick. What does that mean?

Well, first off, it definitely cements the notion that online advertising is Google and vice-versa. Google controls 60% of search, so they touch all of those ads. I don't know if anyone's clear about the reach of AdSense, but it's pretty big, especially down at the lower end of the tail with small publishers and bloggers. Now, everyone that uses DART is going to have their data pass through a Google server.

Certainly that represents a pretty significant chunk of a big and growing market. But what is even more interesting is the way that Google uses the things it buys. That is, they want the marketshare, of course. But they also want the technology and (more importantly) the way that people use the technology.

I wrote in ClickZ a week or so back about the concept of Adverting by Robots. The idea being that computer scientists are increasingly becoming interested in advertising, but they are approaching it as a math, and not a creative challenge.

The thing that they need, of course, is data about what ads are effective and under what conditions. The DART system is able to catch a lot of that. That great big data set is now going to be available to the Google engineers and their magic algorithms.

Owning the Means of Production: Brands do Content

2007-04-11T09:36:00.000-07:00

MarketingVox is linking to a story in USAToday about brands creating their own content. There's definitely nothing new about this concept. P&G used to own (and still might..I'd have to check) soap operas. That is, they were created by P&G Studios and the P&G owned the rights to them.

You can definitely see how the idea has gained so much favor, and it is really the long-term fallout from the Internet revolution. When we started advertising online, we realized that the ad had to be interesting and valuable in its own right. So, naturally, the ads started to evolve into content.

The question then becomes, how far can this go? Well, in the USA Today story, to the extreme, where the content is compelling enough to capture interest for a full 30 minutes.

Ad about how great newspapers are won't go away

2007-04-09T09:13:00.000-07:00

You know, I actually sort of like this campaign from the Newspaper Association, touting the power of newspapers.

But this morning, the ad just opened up, covering about half of adage.com with no apparent way to close the stinking thing!

It's even covering up an article on ad clutter!

Free 411....of course

2007-04-09T09:02:00.000-07:00

Another day, another great big disruption to someone's revenue stream. Google announces free 411 directory assistance. And...they do it better.

411 is a joke (to paraphrase Public Enemy). Why do you have to a) pay for this? and b) pay so much? Plus, I hate the fact that they connect you directly to the listing, but you have no record of the number. So, if you get a busy signal or need to call back? On to 411 again. A bad, overpriced system. Definitely needing shaking up.

Google's new experiment not only is free, but it allows you to get a text message of the business information. How great is that? And how happy are businesses going to be about that? This is a market that has been sitting like a ripe apple for a long time and its good to see it plucked.

The Growth of Ad Auctions

2007-04-05T09:06:00.000-07:00

The idea of an online auction has been around for a good, long time. The idea makes a lot of sense: a ton of ad space is either undervalued or unsold, simply because it too frequently, the process of selling involves people, and people are focusing on buys that are bigger and more interesting than just a bunch of banners scattered across a network.

Or...we realize that ad space has a temporal element to it: if someone doesn't buy the home page at 4:00 on a Saturday, that impression is gone, along with any potential value, just like a hotel room.

But we've got two big stories this week around auctions: Google is doing it with TV and DoubleClick is doing it online. It's a pretty amazing step forward, and one that could potentially change much of the dynamic of buying ad space. The planning portion is going to be a challenge, of course. That is, where CPMs were previously some combination of rate card times relationship, we'll now just get pure market-based pricing.

The big thing to see, of course, is the quality of the inventory that is posted up. That will determine much about whether buyers will see auctions as a way to backfill buys to hit reach and frequency goals, or if they will actively engage as a method of getting high-value placements.

Video Issue #1: What is online video

2007-03-26T09:08:00.000-07:00

My ClickZ column this week focuses on the issues and the opportunities for advertisers around online video. Each day this week, I'll focus a little deeper on each of the issues. Please feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts.

I went to the Apple Store this weekend. What a place. The virtues of the Apple retail experience have been listed a thousand times before, so I won't re-hash, but they clearly know how to do Good Store. If nothing else, they realize the value of making the products the heroes, and when you let people touch heroes, they get excited (and buy!)

At the store yesterday, the hero of the day is AppleTV, and its a great illustration of the first issue around online video: what, exactly, are we talking about? Here is a device that (elegantly) blurs the line between online and off in terms of viewing content. The value here is apparent...to the consumer, as well as the producer. A new revenue stream is opened-up for NBC with episodes of the Office.

What about advertisers? We are a little left out of the picture...or are we? The opportunity to talk to consumers may be roughly equal to $1.99 an episode. You can clearly see an opportunity to offer the premier of a show on iTunes for Free, brought to you by SteinBlog Heavy Industries.

The point is that there's not really a single thing called "online video", and--as such--there's really not a good silver-bullet approach to using online video effectively.

YouTube and Advertisers: Wading into the Chaos Pool

2007-03-21T09:52:00.000-07:00

I spoke at the ClickZ video ad conference this week (held here in lovely San Francisco, thank you Rebecca). After our presentation, someone asked the panel "if you have a brand that is controversial, what advice would you give about posting video on social networks?"

My advice was (and I quote) "Tread freakin' cautiously"

I absolutely believe that it is fantastic that we have sites such as YouTube where anybody can post a video and anyone comment on it, or post videos that are responses. That is a good thing and there is so much crackling energy around it that you have to pay attention. But that doesn't mean you, as a brand, need to dive in head-first.

If people out there in the world absolutely love you, a consumer-generated media strategy can be a fantastic thing. If there are people out there in the world who hate you, a CGM strategy can be deadly. Because any latent feelings that consumers have about your brand will come to the surface immediately when they are prompted. If everyone thinks your brand is successful only because you kill bunnies all day long, that message is going to come out the minute you post a video about your non-bunny-killing activities on YouTube.

This week, AdAge is asking the big question about YouTube and Google's purchase: was it worth it? They point to the limbo state of their ad model: it's not what it is now, it's not what it wasn't and it is going to be something, but no one knows what that is. But, they also point to the weak spot: advertisers don't necessarily want to get into a space that is under the control of consumers and therefore, by its nature, based upon chaos.

Sometimes, it helps to think of advertising simply as a math problem. Everything has a probability of success, as well as a chance of failure and a chance of something unexpected. A good ad strategy used to be a clever line and a good consumer insight. That won't cut it anymore. Today, you need to consider the dynamic ecology of the consumer landscape, identify risks and take actions to mitigate issues. Sometimes, that may simply be chosing not to participate in a space where the odds are stacked against you, no matter how attractive that space is, and how many blog posts are written imploring you to embrace a Brave New World.

Calendar meltdown!

2007-03-12T11:51:00.000-07:00

We got all stressed about Y2K and nothing happened.

Congress decides to change daylight savings time, and every computer on the planet screws up its calendar.

Yeeesh!

Attn Email Marketers: Take Jupiter Survey

2007-03-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

If you use email to do business, please take a minute to help out our friends at Jupiter Research with the their annual email survey.

Telling Brand Stories

2007-03-09T09:09:00.000-08:00

One of the big marketing ideas of the last several years is to begin generating stories about your brands and for your business. Mark Thompson wrote a compelling piece a few years back about the concept of having a story in BrandChannel, complete with some very good advice.

I see today, as well that Ira Glass has a series of videos up on YouTube about how to tell stories. Glass hosts This American Life, and I believe he knows more about telling stories than anyone since maybe Mark Twain.

Here at Ammo, we've been up to our neck in stories for a while now. I don't promote my own company here on the blog, and that's not my intention. But we've been doing some deep thinking about stories: why they get told and (more importantly) why they get listened to.

One of the main insights that we've hit on is that, simply, a brand is not a story. They are two distinctly different things. The chart to the left represents the primary differences between a brand and a story, and it is a basis for a process that transforms/evolves brands into stories.

I think that's the most important step: going from a strong brand to a compelling story. It's not always easy, of course, as some brands don't really appear to have anything to say. But there certainly is a process that you can use, where you unpack the brand into a series of parts, and begin to assemble those parts into a tale that unfolds.

That's why the first difference up there is that, while a brand is "Statement of belief", a story is a "chain of events". The brand comes whole: it is everything you need to know in one simple sentence. The story is told in pieces, where each piece sets up the next, and they all lead to one overall truth which tells you something not only about the characters in the story (which could be the product, or its founders, or any other aspect of the business), but about the world as a whole.

When people ask you to think about stories, don't just make them up. Watch Ira Glass and see what he has to say about stories. There's a lot marketers can learn, just by thinking about those who make a living telling stories.

Ning in the SF Chron: Let's not get too excited, OK?

2007-03-08T14:52:00.000-08:00

Well...a front page story today in the SF Chronicle about a new Internet company, complete with
photos from the launch party (held at Ruby Skye), analyst quotes overflowing with optimism ("...social networking is about to become, in the words of Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li, "like air. You can't escape it, you have to have it. It will be built into everything we touch and do online.") and lots and lots of promises of overwhelming growth.

The Chronicle seems to have gotten over its crush on Google, so that's good news. But it seems like they're ready to dive back to the heady days. We'll keep a close eye on them.

Online Video Ad Models: The Race is On

2007-03-07T08:59:00.000-08:00

Demonstrating an enormous amount of optimism, Eric Schmidt told an audience: "It should be the case that monetizable viewing habits on the Internet should catch up with those on television."

He further added "Our strategy is first and foremost to get as much licensed content on YouTube as possible, index everything, and develop the advertising tools that will allow people to make money." That certainly is a reasonable approach. I mean, they built the entire Google business on that model, first indexing Web sites than developing advertising tools. Well, not developing from scratch, of course. More like liberally borrowing and building out.

But pretty clearly, the race for content is on. Joost's going for, of course, as are a number of other players. Schmidt's optimism is a bit striking. That's the approach we all believed in just before the big crash: content is king, get the people first, monetize it later.

Will this be different? I'm not sure. I do know, at least, that we are building off a model that already has a proven advertising track record, so we should pay attention when Schmidt points that advertisers who value Desperate Housewives watchers will be interested in following them wherever they go.

Joost Ad Model to rely on data

2007-03-06T08:19:00.000-08:00

MIT's Ad Lab blog has a nice round up of thoughts on Joost's ad mode. Joost is currently in beta, but plans to be a new way to consume streaming content online....as in, watch television shows online.

There's a quote there from the Joosters, which is that they want to really disrupt the current ad buying system for broadcast. Traditionally, you bought ads based on reach and frequency. They want to shift to quality, and the way they are going to do it is by, yes, leveraging data.

Once again, what's happening behind the scenes in the online ad space is way more interesting than what's going on on the front.

The Wow starts....MSFT to go digital with ads

2007-03-05T11:13:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: Mich Mathews is
(a) a woman
and
(b) spelled with just one "t" in her last name.

She's now pictured there to the left.

Of course, I would have known that if I did a simple search ;-)

-------------------------------------

Speaking at the 4As conference, Microsoft's Mich Mathews said that the majority of their ad spend would move online in the next few years.

No word on whether or not Mich made it out of the conference hall alive. I imagine she had to hack his way through a sea of media-reps, similar to the last-remaining-human would has to in most zombie films.

That a big company (especially one whose products are all digital) would make such a move is becoming less and less remarkable. Microsoft is following territory already trod (or claimed to ready to trod) by Unilvere, P&G, Bud, Coke and others. What was remarkable was the reason he gave for the shift. Ends up, Microsoft is interested in online because of "the enhanced reporting abilities it brings".

Well that's cool. Especially coupled with the fact that they are still going to do broadcast, but with more targeting. I imagine that the data for that targeting is going to come from online, right? Here we have online, with the data that it throws off, in its proper place in the middle of the marketing mix.

It makes sense for Microsoft to adopt this attitude. After all, they build Ad Center entirely around the ability to target ads. They must have, at some point, realized that these big spreads in magazines haven't amounted to nearly as much as a very well-considered, data-driven campaign.

JetBlue: Failure in Competence:Benevolence

2007-02-22T10:55:00.000-08:00

JetBlue, a brand that I do, in fact, like, screwed up pretty bad last week. Essentially, it seems, the whole system just completely and totally unraveled, leaving passengers in planes, in line, and on hold. What a mess.

The work of apologizing has begun, using the Internet as a primary vehicle. You may have received an email as well, if you've ever flied them. Here are a few excerpts:

We are sorry and embarrassed. But most of all, we are deeply sorry.

The storm disrupted the movement of aircraft, and, more importantly, disrupted the movement of JetBlue's pilot and inflight crewmembers who were depending on those planes to get them to the airports where they were scheduled to serve you.

Words cannot express how truly sorry we are for the anxiety, frustration and inconvenience that we caused. This is especially saddening because JetBlue was founded on the promise of bringing humanity back to air travel and making the experience of flying happier and easier for everyone who chooses to fly with us. We know we failed to deliver on this promise last week.

The red text is my addition. This is a good lesson, here, and it illustrates a key point about what happens when a company blows it. They need to apologize, yes. But they also need to manage the perception of their competence and their benevolence. Consumers (humans) forgive lapses in competence. They do not forgive lapses in benevolence.

That's what JetBlue is doing. They are admitting (in a sense) that they were incapable of handling the disruption to their system. But, more importantly, they re-iterated the benevolence that is built into their brand and their product. That's why it is so critical in this memo to remind people about JetBlue's whole purpose: "bringing humanity back to air travel". That's key. They are built around giving people great experiences. They can't possibly lose that, and in this apology, you can see that they are re-affirming that, far more than they are making promises about upgrading their systems.

Fear Not the Ad Avoiders

2007-02-21T08:54:00.000-08:00

Ripped from today's headlines: a shock to the system....Some People Hate Ads!

Big deal. Starcomm and Microsoft have released a report (detailed on Mediaweek) profiling the 15% of the world that does not like and avoids advertising.

"This is the kind of stuff that keeps us up at night" someone from Microsoft was quoted as saying. That is not only an over-reaction, but also missing the key point of advertising.

The point of advertising is not to get people to look at advertising. The point of advertising is to sell stuff, either right away, or at some future date. Advertising an instrument, and generally a blunt one at that. It's not that these people don't buy things (clearly, many are buying technologies that allow them to avoid ads, such as Tivos and Satellite Radios).

Advertisers need to always understand what their role is: move people toward purchase. It is entirely possible that is going to happen at a site that a person chooses to visit...not during a commercial they have been coerced into watching.

Google AdWords Changes

2007-02-15T09:11:00.000-08:00

Andy Beal is reporting that Google is making a few significant changes to its AdWords program. The first is that they will expose the Quality Score behind each ad. The second is that they are making some changes to how that score is determined.

Google has always been very clever about the way it decides the order in which it is going to show ads for a particular keyword. Competitors (up until recently) simply placed the highest-bidding advertiser on top, the 2nd highest next, and so on. Since search engine marketing is a pay-per-click system, this didn't really do the publisher much good. A highly-bid, unattractive ad won't get a click and placing it in the prime spot is a waste. Instead, Google did some complicated math problem to determine how "good" an ad was, multiplied that by the bid and used that to figure rank.

Of course, Google likes to keep all things secret, much to frustration of its customers (many of whom have built their entire business upon this black box). There has been a slow, but steady, effort at the company to open up more of the details of its business, and this is bound to be a welcome addition.

But: they are also sending people into yet-another-tailspin, by also changing the way that score is determined, which--naturally--will shuffle the order of the ads. Andy's right: people will complain, but others will also brag. Whenever Google makes a change, you can be sure that a number of agencies will announce that there was no effect on their business. That is, they have something more solid in place, and I tend to believe it.

The Month that just flew by....

2007-02-14T09:30:00.000-08:00

Well, Happy Valentines' Day to everyone (although, I do recommend you spend a few days with Freestyle creation My Black Valentine).

This last month pretty much flew by me. I don't know about the rest of you, but the pace of business feels pretty brisk. Certainly a good thing, as we get flooded with RFPs and new projects. Things are definitely cruising along here.

But this hasn't been a very good blog month. So, now that a few things have cleared my desk, it seems like a good opportunity to catch up and clean out the notebooks of a few things that have been defining the worlds of technology and advertising.

The Kiss that Killed the Super Bowl Ad Frenzy
Well, that may be a bit of hyperbole, but...c'mon. The Snickers Kiss ad was terrible. The version on YouTube, placed by a consumer has the following tags: "Snickers Mars Homophobic". But more than that, this is an so clearly crafted just to generate a reaction. Not to generate awareness or sales, but just startle people into noticing it. That's no strategy. They pretty much undid the good vibes they created with their outdoor "Hungerectomy" campaign, which was brilliant.

The fact that they assumed people would flock to a site devoted to the ad is even more evidence that this was a strategy gone awry. Send people to the store to buy things. Not to your own playground to prattle on.

Speaking of YouTube: The Hammer Falls
Viacom comes down hard on Google and I have to say I have some mixed feelings. I recognize that this is a big company attempting to throttle what feels like a natural impulse, but...c'mon: Viacom owns content. They paid good money to create The Colbert Report and should have the right to govern the way it is used. Clearly, technology has made it simple to take video from the television and put re-distribute it. It's also dead-simple to slap your own logo on top of it and get a little action from your work. But it seems pretty clearly illegal, from my view point. Ease-of-use does not connote a change of rules. If your bank decided to place all your money in a big pile in the parking lot, rather than in the vault, it would still be wrong from someone to take it.

HOWEVER: it is also clear that big media is breaking a butterfly on a wheel. They send out blanket notices to everyone who they think may potentially be breaking the rules. This, they appear to be doing without a lot of consideration or thought. So, a whole lot of dolphins are getting caught in the tuna net: people who really haven't done anything wrong, as well as people who actually may be creating some new, clever, innovative value for the brands.

The head-to-head conflict is a mess. Nothing's going to get done here. The big media companies are the ones who can act monolithically, and should take the initiative. They need to establish a new set of practices....maybe a new department...that is designed around enforcement (yes), but also innovation and partnership.

If I ran a big media company, that's what I'd do: Stop the blanket threats. Create a group comprised of a lawyer, a new-media specialist, a community organizer and a technologist. Have them scan the world for uses of their content and do one of three things: leave it alone; request its removal; find a way to work with and support the artist.

PEW: 28% of Net Users use Tags

2007-02-01T11:49:00.000-08:00

Wow. There's a report out from PEW about tagging. They claim that 28% of Net users have tagged some bit of content.

That's a significant number. Tags are a key bit of lubricant in the online word-of-mouth machine. A tag is essentially an open-recommendation. If you tag a bit of content with tag X, you're telling the world "if you're interested in X, you should read this thing.

If I were you ;-), I'd start putting an "add to del.icio.us" link on just about everything I put out.

Google TV Hoax? More evidence

2007-01-30T12:02:00.000-08:00

Why do I find this so fascinating?

The world is buzzing about the possibility and the potentialy hoax-ed-ness of Google TV. You know, when I watched the video the first time I noticed that when the camera panned down the screen, there was a link called "Affiliate Programs."

That's pretty odd, and definitely not Google standard (which placed a link to "Advertising Programs" on the bottom of pages). So, that would mean one of two things:

1) the hoaxer mis-typed something at the bottom of the page, when creating his fake Google TV site.
2) Google is offering an affiliate program for Google TV.

I understand that part of the story is that Google will charge for subscriptions to Google TV, but I don't know of anything else that they currently refer to as an "Affiliate Program". For what its worth, I think the answer is #1, and the mis-type is the give-away.

(I have screen caps, but for some reason Blogger's not letting them load)

SuperBowl Ad Interest Waning

2007-01-30T09:07:00.000-08:00

"Borrowed interest is always something you look at, but [our marketing] will give us more pop, in our opinion, than going into a Super Bowl environment."

That's the informed opinion of John B. Williams, general manager- Microsoft Windows global communications, talking about the Super Bowl in AdAge. That's right, he's going to skip the Super Bowl this year, despite the fact that he's launching the biggest upgrades to Windows ever.

Is it possible that what Apple started,

Microsoft will finish? It may just be that advertisers are beginning to lose interest in the battle for attention of Super Bowl breaks. We've talked about this for a while, but this may be the turning point year, as not only Microsoft, but also P&G and Unilever look to more natural growth paths for their brands.

Google TV Beta?

2007-01-29T18:56:00.000-08:00

Well, speaking of Google rumors...there are a few videos up on YouTube, similar to the one above, claiming to have screen captures of a Google TV beta. There's a bit of controversy as to whether or not these are real or fake, but I have to admit that it looks fairly real to me.

Of course, even if it is fake, this is bound to happen, right? And, if so, this is a big disruptor in the broadcast space.

UPDATE TechCrunch says "boowowowowowowooooo-gus!"