Research consistently shows that in online media, creative is the most important component for driving effect. Some studies indicate that the quality of an ad can actually be responsible for up to 75% of a campaign’s total impact.

This might sound like much, but the importance of quality is really no wonder considering how the advertising landscape look today – thousands of advertiser messages being thrown at us in an increasing array of channels. In some campaigns it can be tens of thousands of sites. And naturally, we can’t pay attention all the time and remember all of them, or pay it forward to our friends using social networks. We filter the information – the good stuff wins, and the bad stuff gets ignored.

So, for online campaigns to work properly these days, our ads have to be better than ever before. However, media fragmentization not only increase the significance of great creative but also makes it harder to assess which creatives will do a great job. Knowing what works on before hand is getting harder, and great opportunities often have a way of presenting themselves halfway into campaigns that are already live.

The reason is simple – the media landscape is less predictable, and more dynamic than ever before. Complex and unpredictable.

Reaching consumers in more ways, on more places and thru more channels, means an exponential increase in the number of contexts our ads are supposed to work with. And understanding the circumstances and media environment for our campaigns is the key ingredient to gain attention, and drive impact. In fact, the same ad can have the complete opposite effect on the same person, depending on where and when it’s being shown.

It’s obvious we need to align our creative process with the increased complexity of the new media landscape, optimizing our workflow for responding to change, rather than following plan. Launching with a big bang may still work, but it’s an increasingly risky strategy, and in most cases we might be better off by welcoming the changing requirements, even late in the process, and use our ability to harness that change as a competitive advantage.

So online media both increases the need for great creative, as well as make it harder to predict what creative works. This means we we need to tweak our creative process to become more based on continuous learning and modification, rather than huge up front risks and speculation. Luckily, online media enables us to do just that.

Much has been said about how much more intriguing online media is compared to other mass marketing channels. Consumers can interact with ads and brands, purchase stuff immediately and recommend what they like to their friends.

What hasn’t been talked about is the massive opportunity to reduce risk while increasing quality thru a cycle of test, measure, refine and update. Because unlike tradtional, static media channels, online media allows us not only to see what’s working and why in real-time, but also update our campaigns on the fly. This idea – to learn and improve in quick iterations – isn’t something exclusve to online advertising, it’s at the heart of most successful projects and ventures in online media, from social gaming to search engine marketing.

But the advertising industry have been slow in adopting this mindset, the reasons being lack of tools proper tools and that it requires a substantial change in agency-advertiser relationships. Advertisers need to allocate budgets differently, and also participate along the process to ensure that activities are supporting advertiser goals. And agencies can no longer expect a clearly defined point of deliver, and instead they must take responsibility for their work over a much longer period of time.

Together with a couple of other companies, we’re bringing you the tools to improve your feedback loop and let solutions evolve over time. But the organizational challenge is something all you agencies and advertisers will have to sort out by yourselves.

Changing how you structure projects and allocate budgets might sound like very hard work, and it probably is. But first of all, I can tell you first hand I’ve seen it happen over and over for agencies I’ve met all over the world. And second, it’s not like you have any choice. Media fragmentization and more complex consumer behavior makes it close to impossible to predict and plan every campaign up front. There are simply too many unknown factors to take into account. And this problem will not only persist, but increase exponentially.

The most effective way to deliver high-quality advertising is to release earlier, learn from your mistakes and improve over time. The quicker your feedback loop, the quicker you can improve to the point where consumers pay attention you and not your competitors.

Sign up to see the circus for yourself!

Last year we presented Copybox at Techcrunch50. But so far, the number of people we’ve let on is very limited. Partly because Jacob Nielsen tells us to, but mostly because we’re the target audience ourselves and still know plenty of stuff that need fixing. Also, since the economy went south we’ve had to focus most of our limited resources on Rich and other platform part of our products that generates enough money for us to stay in business.

(quick rant on the hardships of building an ad tech business is coming up – ok to skip if you just want the state of Copybox haha)

Burt’s platform sofware is often mission critical to the campaigns we run, and need to be able to scale from hundereds to tens of thousands of requests per second, with zero performance loss in minutes. For real. Add that SLAs that require four nine uptimes are not uncommon, and you realize that we deal with different challenges than the average web startup. Ad tech requires massive scale from the first user, and bailing out using the fail whale just isn’t an option. The people talking about how building a web business these days is “easy”, “cheap” and “fast” certainly haven’t tried to build what we’re doing

One big challenge is that creating great advertising technology incorporates the most demanding parts from both B2C and B2B at once, meaning that we need to make products people actually want to use (like in B2C), but feedback cycles are often long and reliability is crucial (like in B2B). Not to mention that working capital can be a real bitch… little depending on your business model I guess (simple licensing deals for instance are not included), but in most cases getting the really attractive gross margins requires a big dip in working cap on your behalf. Not even Amazon or Akamai can save you here. It just costs plenty of money to build the ad exchanges, trading systems and demand side platforms that everyone (incl. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) are having wet dreams about controlling

In case anyone is keeping score, these are the main reasons why you see lots of ad tech startups raise tens of millions of dollars, still with nothing to show for it. But it’s also the reason we’ve seen a handful of multi billion dollar deal purchases in our market the last two year’s alone, so I guess that’s ok from an investor POV

But let’s get back to Copybox! Constrained resources or not, as it turns out, revolutionizing creative writing is a lot harder than we thought. Which is probably one of the reasons that the word processor has been untouched for 20 years. But we are making progress. Burt is probably in iteration 10 or so after Techcrunch50, one big change being that we’re now on the desktop.

Don’t worry “I’m a PC” fanboys, we’ve got it for you guys too. Also, we’ve started to rework the design with (not so little) help from Andreas and Jaan to push a less dark and gothic feel to something you might actually like to spend 8 hours a day looking at.

We’ve also realized that for the first full release of Copybox, creating dynamic content is not enough to deliver the kind of organic idea growing (trippy…) kind of experience that we’re aiming for. So we’re adding features that will be part of every writing tool – (good) outlining, remixed “undo/redo” functionality and a (working) set of language tools for grammar, spelling etc. And no in-document formatting, just structure. There are tons of super awesome design tools. Use them.

But first, we’ll release a version of desktop Copybox with dynamic content. ETA 6 weeks. You probably won’t (but it’s not impossible) put a dent in the creative universe with that version of Copybox, but at least you’ll have tangible proof that someone is actually working on making your creative writing tool smarter, better, faster and stronger.

Booyah.

Update: The video from our presentation is up. Check it out here.

So last year we had a blast presenting at Techcrunch50, and earlier this year we had a great time talking about Burt at Plugg. And now it’s time to make an appearance on the mother of all launching conferences, DEMO. And since the last Swedish company presenting a product there was Skype, this naturally feels kind of cool

So on wed. 23 sep at 12:25, we’ll present Rich, a campaign analytics tool focused on creative agencies. The idea is to give agencies everything they need – and nothing they don’t – on one simple report page, that answers critical questions such as “was the ad visible?”, “how long was it visible?” and “did people notice it?

Using campaign metrics to improve your campaigns thru trial-and-error is not a new concept. In fact it’s been around for over ten years. But despite this, most creatives – the art directors, copywriters etc. making the ads and that would have the most to gain from using these tools – have yet to take advantage of one the most prominent features online media has to offer.

But it’s really no wonder considering that the reporting tools were never built with these guys in mind. The tools were created to satisfy the buyers and sellers of advertising, not the creators of it.

So we thought “what if we created a tool specifically tailored for the creative agency, with metrics that makes sense for them?”. As it turns out, that made all the difference.

Basically, Rich is Google Analytics for banners and widgets. It’s third party that runs on top of ad servers such as Atlas and Eyewonder. It can be used for premium inventory or on ad networks and ad exchanges. And the installation is dead simple, it just takes a second or two to track ads with Rich.

The last few weeks have been crazy busy to get Rich in decent shape for Rich. There’s no way that we could have done it without the help from our friends at eLabs – Ruby boutique agency extraordinaire – and CP+B – our favorite agency that has not only provided invaluable feedback on how to design Rich, but also did a huge contribution to the final design. Thanks guys!

But enough talking, there is enough of that going on in marketing analytics as it is. Using metrics to improve your work is a contact sport. So get over to richmetrics.com and get your invite and start getting the insights you never thought possible, in a report you can actually understand.

Most companies presenting were very well polished, but still kind of dissappointment since, well I actually understood what most of them did

Seems to me that companies with products in the very early stage should really give you a “WTF – is this it?” kind of feeling. At least if a company is trying to hit it really big. I doubt that I would be even close to understanding the potential of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. after hearing a 5-10 minute presentation – which often includes introduction, market, problem, solution, demo and summary btw. – when they were showing their product for the first time.

It would frankly be interesting to just see some solutions to problems I didn’t even know existed.

But Techcrunch50 is great fun, I tell you that. Nice people, decent parties and kind of unreal to discuss what Burt is up to with people who’s products you depend on every day. It’s a shame that we don’t see more European companies on stage or in the audience.

Also, I had an excuse to grab coffee with Jaan Orvet, the super awesome web maniac who’s helped us out with Copybox lately.

Next week, we’re heading to DEMO in San Francisco, which I haven’t visited before. But considering that the tradition and track record of DEMO is quite insane, it should be great fun.

To kill time before San Diego, I’m cruising along Highway 1 for a weekend in LA with the rest of Burt’s core team. Life could be worse, I guess

Anyways. Here are the slides, enjoy!

Crispin Porter + Bogusky is recognized as the world’s best agency, being the creators of classics such as Whopper Freakout, Whopper Sacrifice and Subservient Chicken (yes, it seems as BK has been a good client). And now they’re venturing into Europe by purchasing Daddy, with the objective of creating an innovation powerhouse in Gothenburg, Sweden, of all places.

This is naturally exciting stuff, mostly because I’m happy for all the founders/partners at Daddy, but also since I’ll get the chance to see how the industry’s best and brightest are working up close. I attended CP+B’s Digital Peep Show in NYC last week and I was extremely impressed by how they approach things!

Again. Congrats Björn, Jonas, Gustav and the rest. You deserve it!

Creative Summit, Sweden (17-18 june)
I’ll be speaking strictly on Burt’s products, the business case for why online advertising needs a creative injection and what our plans are for this year. It takes place waaaay up north in Sweden and includes speakers form Coke and Disney so most likely it’ll be totally awesome.

Webdagene, Norway (10-11 sep)
This will be a talk on constrained creativity, remix as an innovative process and how technology will revolutionize online advertising. Yup, big words. Looking forward to meeting Paul Annet from Clearleft, one of my heroes when it comes to web UX.

Both events look like they have rock solid organisation so I’ll probably post videos of both!

This time, it’s Jorge over at Spectator Bytes asking “Will Advertising Spending Be Another Victim of the Digital Media Transformation?“. More specifically, Jorge brings up the idea that many Internet services have reached broad adoption with little or no ad spend and asks:

What if this formula of success extended beyond Web products into other types of businesses (e.g., autos, food, appliances, toys, hardware devices, etc.).

It’s a interesting notion, which I suppose could be killed off just by pointing out that a web company’s capital and operations management is a tad easier than that of a say, electronics manufacturer. A web site can increase the “product inventory” by adding a new server (or just launching a new instance on EC2), an electronic manufacturer have to build a new server. And this is a luxury problem of course, since this implies that demand overshoots supply. The Internet industry learned the hard way how bad things can get if we have the inverse situation, that supply overshoots demand… capacity planning is a bitch, anyone from the dot-com-crash will tell you that. And the rest of the world still don’t have commodity hardware, VPS hosting, cloud computing etc. to decrease the risk of scale. But they do have advertising, that decrease the risk of scale by ensuring that demand meets supply. And that’s worth a lot.

But let’s say that open source hardware, just-in-time production, 3d-printing or whatever solves this dilemma, so that every industry have the same elasticity in scale that we do. We could kill the whole notion of “advertising is no longer needed since we have cracked the WOM-formula” by pointing out that Apple – the most buzzed up company on the entire planet – spent about 500MUSD on advertising last year. On a sidenote, this is (roughly) on par with what Microsoft normally spends in a fiscal year (in relation to revenues). But that would be somewhat unfair and I do think that Jose has a point. Relying on a blanket of ads clearly isn’t the most efficient go-to-market strategy for launching new products, or – even more so – new brands and companies. Using a PR- and WOM-driven strategy is.

Relying on PR and WOM in the initial stages of a launch makes sense from a trust perspective – the new ideas (products, brands, companies etc.) are coming from someone you “know” – but also they make complete sense from the perspective of allocating scarce resources. When an idea is new, there is a natural “story” to sell to press/bloggers and for people to talk about. It’s an opportunity that you only have when your idea is new. So naturally, resources should be allocated to leverage that “newness”. The problem starts when you’re not new any more. And with the velocity of media attention and social objects these days, this is a matter of days, or hours. And this is where advertising comes in.

Advertising leverages and accelerates the initial platform of awareness and trust that we’ve created thru PR and WOM.

But sure, for advertising to be really effective, it needs that initial platform. And to create that platform we need to have a product that walks the talk. It needs to be really, really good. But the increased pressure on product quality that information transparency has brought upon us doesn’t mean that the corporate budget will shift to product development and customer service – for the most part they already have a large chunk of the budget. Advertising actually accounts for quite a small part of the corporate budget in comparison to what it’s supposed to accomplish (sell a lot for a high price).

So it’s not a matter of advertising OR product, it’s advertising AND product. My guess is that if someone is going to get squeezed it’s the product guys: “we’re spending so much money with you, and this is all you have to show?”. So instead of advertising becoming more like product development – the in-meme right now – maybe it’s a matter of product development becoming more like advertising?