I took a screenshot of what my follower chart looks like.  While this data is readily available thru other services, it looks pretty sweet thru Twitter and was impressed with their execution.

I especially like the list of “Your Followers Also Follow.”  For me, it’s Jon Steinberg (Buzzfeed), Michael Learmonth (AdAge) and Ben Lerer (Thrillist, Jack Threads, Lerer Ventures).  Not bad company.

The way you access this is thru the Twitter Ads function which is located under the Settings drop down.  Once under Settings (the little widget/gear), go to Twitter Ads then to Analytics.

But your investors and the street want and expect repeat business.  Recurring revenue.  Having a new ad product launch each month and getting a launch advertising sponsor each time dilutes over time.

Constantly changing your ad strategy actually hurts, IMHO.  It takes time for creative and media folks to ramp up knowledge of ad unit specifications and availability – and if they are ever changing, then we do not have enough time to do each unit justice.

I agree consumers like new things.  And brands like being fresh.  And in this whole world of digitally delivered content, being new and fresh is the whole point.

But for a publisher or platform, please be consistent with your offerings.  Don’t keep sunsetting what we’ve gotten good at buying and executing against.  Introducing new ad products every 6 weeks and wondering why others are not getting adoption isn’t rocket science.

This post was in reaction to this piece re: Facebook.

I am working off the GroupM $113.5B worldwide digital ad spending number from a recent AdExchanger article.  All other numbers come from Lara’s research of these companies Form-10k‘s.

I ran a similar report in 2011 which is located here.  Read it so you can compare.

Google’s growth is terrific and Yahoo! took a step back in 2013.  I’m always amazed to see Google dominating digital ad spend with 41% share whereas the next closest competitor is around 4%.  That’s 10x.  10x!

Nice to see Amazon and Facebook building out their ad businesses and showing y/y growth but the larger question is of where is it coming from?  Who is losing (or is the whole advertising pie getting larger)?

Thanks to lots of the innovation in the advertising technology sector, this line item on the media plan is growing.  A couple cents to this vendor.  A couple of cents to that vendor.  A dime here, and a dime there.  While any one point in the ad tech stack is fairly inconsequential to the entire media plan, when you add up all the items, it could amount to material dollars.  The dollars you attribute to non-working media are dollars that are not working to distribute your message or communications to the audience you think would be most receptive (or even moreso these days, an audience who wants to hear from you).

Technology has been bought by Madison Avenue virtually two ways in the past three to four decades.  It’s been purchased thru licenses and seats for many backoffice tasks such as billing (big winner here is Mediabank/MediaOcean, etc) and for front of house tasks such as access to research (Nielsen, SRDI, etc), ad serving and light analytics (Doubleclick, DG MediaMind, Facebook Atlas, Adobe Omniture, etc).  Much of this technology equates to 8-15% of a media plan, which if a marketer is investing $100MM in media, $8-15MM of that goes to fund the famous Lumascape.  Per a recent article about digital ad spending on AdExchanger, GroupM expects that Internet ad spending will reach $113.5B, which is about $9-$17B for infrastructure/advertising operations (per my calculations).

The question I’ve been asking many folks in our industry – both on the sell and buy side, is whether point solutions will win-out or full stacks will win-out?

I believe that the cost of a point-solution derived stack will prohibit them and over time, full advertising operations stacks will win out.  Not a fantastic analogy but when I buy a car, I go to Tesla to purchase a car, I don’t tend to build my own car from scratch and purchase each piece from a different vendor.  Economies of scale happen with a total stack from one vendor.  If this is the case, look for roll-ups by larger players like IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, Marketo and others.  These folks will look to strengthen their marketing offering with the acquisitions of point solutions.

Chief Digital Media Officer:  At The Media Kitchen and it’s parent, kbs+, I work with the teams to help inspire and execute through digital media.  Not all of the media we plan or buy is digital, though about 55% is, so that’s a big chunk of change.  I cross multiple digital channels including display, video, mobile, search, and social and work on making sure we have the right infrastructure and advertising operations setup so that we can execute.  The role of the Chief Digital Media Officer will evolve over the next few years as digital becomes purely a delivery mechanism and the channel itself won’t be as important.  Meaning, we do not have a Chief Radio Officer of Chief OOH Officer, so this thinking will have to change with the time.

Venture Investor:  I invest in marketing and advertising technology companies thru kbs+ Ventures.  This is done not by investing out of a fund but opportunistically off of our balance sheet.  Launched at the end of 2010, kbs+ Ventures has built up a portfolio of companies who are testing different thesis we have in the marketplace.  You can read a recent article about kbs+ Ventures in AdAge.  The majority of all my investments in recent years have been thru kbs+ Ventures but I do make a small handful of non-competitive investments in other areas of digital media including my most recent one (more coming soon!).

Golf Tournament Coordinator:  Many of you know I founded and host The Silicon Alley Golf Invitational almost 9 years ago.  It all started as a way to get founders to network outside of the hustle and bustle of NYC and has grown into an event that attracts sponsors and is home to 100+ founders, execs, venture capitalists, and ecosystem supporters.  I’m in the middle of planning and executing the 2013 SAGI event as it’s coming up on July 22.  For more information about SAGI, you can contact me here.

Digital Student:  While I technically don’t go to University, I am a student of all things tech + web and am constantly learning different platforms.  One of the platforms I’m studying is Wanelo and you can follow me here.  I’m testing the usage of the platform to bookmark things for me and for my family.  Medium is also a platform that I’m noodling around with but less about writing and more about reading.  Lots of good content on Medium so far.

Husband + Dad:  This August, I’ll be celebrating my sixth anniversary to being married to Sherri.  We’ve been blessed with two amazing children who are each coming into their own and developing some amazing personalities.  We live in Westchester County, NY and I try to spend most of my evenings with them.  I’ve seriously cut down on the amount of after-work activities to prioritize my family in recent years.

I hope this helps shed some light on what I do.  The agency work and investor work are like peanut butter and jelly – both can live on their own but when together, they taste delicious.  What makes us a good investor is that we know what the agency wants and needs and vice versa.  It’s a nice feedback mechanism to help make better agency decisions and venture investments.

I’ve been witnessing companies coming thru the door and telling me that they are a pure technology platform, not a service business.  Most of the time, their motivation to say this is to achieve a technology multiple (on sale) versus a service business multiple.

I think this is faulty and a mistake.

There is nothing wrong with wrapping services around a technology, especially in the early days of your company.

If your idea is new and unique, then most marketers or their agencies will have no idea how to build the assets necessary to deploy on your technology platform; thus a service business is needed.

If your idea isn’t overly unique, marketers and agencies still generally want help to get assets created or implemented.  A services group can help enable this to happen.

At the end of the day, as a startup or technology company, you want marketers or their agencies to have the best possible experience when using your platform.  I define experience by performance and service.  This will have a higher chance of keeping them back (and the dollars flowing).    By creating an organization that can enable this to happen (creating the right assets, trafficking properly, building KPI’s and metrics), you are at least starting off the relationship on the right foot.

Put the service back in technology.  It’s not such a bad thing.

I have been tracking SocialFlow ever since I was introduced to Frank Speiser at an event at Nihal Mehta‘s apartment in January 2010.  After learning about what he was building and why, I quickly saw the opportunity to leverage the technology for marketers.  Later that year, Frank give a talk at The Media Kitchen‘s Digital Media Venture Capital Conference and I’ve stayed in touch since.

When we found out that SocialFlow was raising money and was looking for a strategic or two to participate, it was a no brainer for us because of the trends that we are seeing in the space.  I will explain those below.

1.  Evolution of Communications Architecture:  Way back when, the communications architecture generally consisted of Public Relations, Investor Relations and Paid Media.  While those three still exist today and are still going strong, we’ve now re-arranged the construct to be Paid/Owned/Earned media.  What you [as a brand] do and say in paid media can be made exponentially greater when you leverage owned and earned.

2.  Communications Velocity:  The speed in which communications hits the marketplace has increased rapidly.  I don’t know of a “law” such as what we have with transistors (Moore’s Law), but I have to imagine that the speed in which we communicate has increased so significantly that old media cannot keep up.  Within 15 seconds, I can put out 140 characters to my entire follower-base on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, or whatever other communications tool.  When it was just print ads, television ads, or even radio, it took months… sometimes a year (inclusive of production)!

3.  Big Big Data:  Almost every digital platform we use exhausts some form of data trail.  This data trail can be collected, mined, and optimized into an opportunity or insight for a marketer (or any company for that matter).  With the explosion of digital communications, there is a ton of data that’s available to optimize from.  Making sense of this data thru frameworks, architectures, and algorithms, will allow marketers a leg up in the communication “wars” for customers.  Note: It’s not about the size of the data set, it’s about the insight that’s gleaned.

4.  The Shift of Dollars:  We have all seen the charts that show time spent with a media channel vs. advertising dollars and the gap that exists in digital is still large.  But it’s getting smaller, which means that ad dollars continue to flow into the digital landscape.

SocialFlow capitalizes on the four points above.  They are smack in the middle of all of this.  Many of the kbs+ Ventures portfolio companies also exhibit these traits (and others).

With our relationship with Frank, the evolved management team, and the market traction the company has, we were super excited to green light this investment.

Expectations were set high for this car due to the reviews and listening to @jason talk about how much he loves his car.  Also the entrepreneurial side of me was unbelievably curious as to how Elon Musk built a car in the USA without being part of the old Detroit boys club.  Building a business without knowing the constraints of the industry, being naive, could be a very good thing, especially when disrupting it.

In one statement, I was blown away by the car.

We test drove a Model S Performance car (pearl white w/19″ tires – winter).  Here is what stood out to me:

1.  Power:  I had no idea that an all electric car could be as powerful as this.  While I knew it was technically possible, I had no idea what to expect.  I thought driving my Audi A7 was fun for a sedan but the Model S Performance car certainly gave it a ride for it’s money.

2.  Seating:  I have two young kids so having the option of the 2 seats in the back of the car is a major plus as it frees up the second row.  This means we can take family and friends along with us because right now, my current car has two car seats in the second row.

3.  Electronics:  Google + Garmin was pretty sweet.   I was used to Google from my Audi but having a 18″ screen in the car is pretty sweet.  This screen can do HD back-up camera, music, tuning, air suspension controls, etc.  It’s gorgeous and love the touch of night vs. daytime lighting.

Downside:   I cannot wrap my head around how much this car will be worth in 3-4 years when I’m likely to move on.  Maybe this is the wrong question to be asking?  But it’s something that I’m noodling and holding me back.

I don’t think this car is revolutionary as it’s still 4 wheels and takes up a parking spot, but I think this car is evolutionary to our automotive world and something that is going to set the standard for the future.  It’s almost like driving the future, today.

I read a ton of online reviews of this car and Road and Track says it best:

“Beautiful, well-crafted, cool, and seriously fast, the Model S isn’t just the most important car of the year. It’s the most important car America has made in an entire lifetime.”

This morning I read the 2013 Investor Presentation (PDF) by Adobe and wanted to highlight a few things that I found interesting:

On slide 22 of the deck, Adobe mentions “key digital marketing growth drivers:”

1. Shift of marketing spend to digital
2. Re-platforming of the Web
3. Demand for Cloud-based solutions
4. Multi-channel campaign and social marketing solutions
5. International growth

#2 (re-platforming) above is really, really interesting.  I had been looking for a term to capture this insight and I think they nailed it.

The 1990s ad-stack is on the way out, or at least has matured.  The new marketing stack is filled with social, mobile, local, and dynamic delivery.  Marketing tomorrow will not look like marketing yesterday.

On slide 26, Adobe talks about their stack (well, cubes):

1. Adobe Analytics
2. Adobe Target
3. Adobe Social
4. Adobe Experience Manager
5. Adobe Media Optimizer

I’d have to say that these cubes/stack are pretty much aligned for the future.  Marketers and agencies are demanding ROI for their marketing spend and quantitative validation is key to success.

Read the investor presentation if you get a chance.  It’s a fast read.  If your organization is not aligned with this thinking, rethink where you are headed.

Google acquired DoubleClick ($274B mkt cap), AOL acquired AdTech ($2.86B mkt cap), and Facebook acquired Atlas ($65.4B mkt cap).  ValueClick owns MOJO and retained Mediaplex ad-server ($2.05B mkt cap).

When we think about ad servers for Madison Avenue, our guts tell us DART and Atlas**.   Both of these two ad serving solutions are now owned by larger-than-life media platforms.  MediaMind, the challenger of ad serving solutions is making inroads across Madison Avenue and believe it or not, has surpassed Atlas as the number two platform.***

Having heard the speculation turned news recently about Facebook acquiring Atlas and reading Gokul’s post on AdExchanger, I still do not understand why they did this acquisition unless Facebook thinks they can convince Madison Avenue to use them as their 3rd party ad serving tool of record.

My question to Madison Avenue:  Wouldn’t you want an impartial 3rd party to be your ad serving tool?  Why would you rely on a media property who is going to make more money off media than ad serving to deliver you your attribution models?

And with this, I’m not saying Google is any better.  It’s a big reason why the majority of our clients are not on the DART ad server.

In the finance world, there is significant rules around proprietary trading (prop desk) and analyst/research work.  The two basically do not intermingle and in the recent laws, the two might have to split.   This is FINRA rule 5280.

(a) No member shall establish, increase, decrease or liquidate an inventory position in a security or a derivative of such security based on non-public advance knowledge of the content or timing of a research report in that security.

(b) A member must establish, maintain and enforce policies and procedures reasonably designed to restrict or limit the information flow between research department personnel, or other persons with knowledge of the content or timing of a research report, and trading department personnel, so as to prevent trading department personnel from utilizing non-public advance knowledge of the issuance or content of a research report for the benefit of the member or any other person.

I understand that advertising is not finance, but wouldn’t we take clues from a more robust industry?

If you are a marketer or agency and put all your media plan data in a company who is selling you millions of dollars of advertising media, don’t you think that the data will be used against you?

Here is an example, purely from illustrious purposes:
Property A – $6/cpm $3/cpa
Property B – $8/cpm $3.50/cpa
Property C – $7.75/cpm $3.40/cpa

Imagine the three properties above have their data in an ad server controlled by Google, AOL, ValueClick, and now, Facebook.

When you go to purchase media from any of these four properties, they can see what you are currently paying and what the actual performance is.

This gives these media platforms a significant leg up on pricing & performance as they know where they need maintain or beat.

Is it just me that’s skeptical?

On a completely other note, I do not run M&A for Facebook but I would have suspected they would have built their own Ad Server and maybe acquired an attribution company such as Adometry, C3 or VisualIQ (or the many others in that space).

* Companies who own significant media properties.  Google, AOL, Facebook, ValueClick.
** There used to be a trade magazine that showed ads served each month by ad server, but I haven’t seen it in a while.  Purely based by my conversations with other agency heads, Atlas and DART are the primary ad servers that come up in conversation.  MediaMind is coming up more and more.
*** Updated after an email conversation with MediaMind.