@bmorrissey

Today in instrusive advertising...

I'm not sure if this is the way to catch up to Google. Peter Kafka at Media Memo points out that Ask has gone where I thought search engines wouldn't tread again. It turned its entire homepage into an ad. There are too many properties chasing too few ad dollars. The race for them will lead to many more intrusive ad formats in the name of being "impactful." The argument is this is no different than a full page magazine ad. After all, readers buy magazines as much for the ads as the content. (This is the trope that ad sellers trot out. It's only true in a few cases.) The trouble is the Internet will increasingly resemble Times Square. There's a price to be paid, not just in aesthetics. My mom has even noticed. She remarked to me the other day, "What's with all the advertising on the Internet? There's those teeth-whitening ads everywhere. It's worse than TV."

Are designers to blame for bad Web ads?

Last night I was at a dinner with Dean Donaldson, digital experience strategist for rich media company Eyeblaster. The gathering was to discuss a new measurement technique Eyeblaster is championing that looks at "dwell time" and "dwell rate" as a better way than clicks or impressions to figure out the branding effectiveness of Internet ads. At one point, Dean said something quite interesting. He said the notion that banner ads don't work is mostly because of poor creative. This is a regular argument. He went on to pin much of the blame on designers. On the Web, he explained, designers for some reason were the creatives. Rather than craft the kind of emotion-tugging ads we see in traditional media, they've focused on, yes, Flash microsites. That's meant, for the most part, terrible Internet advertising. When I asked for the best Web ad he's seen recently, other than the Apple banners, Dean pointed to the full-page placement for Chanel No. 5 on MSN recently. It expands to cover the page. On the Internet, ruled by designer sensibilities and a cult of usability, this is ugly intrusion. To Dean, and most importantly to Chanel, it's a good ad.

To some extent, Dean might have a point. He's echoing the argument IAB chief Randy Rothenberg has made: the Web needs to embrace the type of creativity that produced VW's "Think Small" campaign. Maybe. Another guest, Wired's Frank Rose, brought up the idea of telling stories and noted that online the challenge is to get other people to tell your story. This rang true to me. Creativity on the Web has a long way to go, but it's probably a mistake to believe it'll imitate the lush Chanel ad in Vogue. The ability to build applications and utility and enable consumers to advance a brand message.

Journalist brands

This blog isn't a meditation on the future of media. Plenty of other places for that. But it's understandably at the top of my mind, selfishly. Vint Cerf, the reputed "father of the Internet," had something smart to say about how things will shake out in media. Journalists need to build their own brands. In the past, it was more important to attach yourself to a brand. That still matters. Writing for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times will continue to bequeath validation. Many people talk to me because I work for Adweek. But validation will become more personal and self-made. Networks will matter more. This is how Cerf put it:

Journalism is going to become all about branding.In this gigantic mass of information that's accessible to anyone who's interacted with the Internet, how can we help people learn to trust opinions, learn to trust selections, choices and reports coming from journalists? ...[Branding] is one of the elements that will help you compete against all the other sources of information that people are exposed to.

Time to reinvent media for the Internet

There's a strange feeling in the media business, almost eerie. People talk about it in hushed he’s-got-cancer tones. There’s a sense within newsrooms that the industry is changing forever. Some say it’s dying. The question turns to who is to blame. Inevitably, the finger gets pointed at Google. This is Jim Spanfeller, CEO of Forbes.com, writing earlier this week on PaidContent:

In the end, in attempting to “do no evil,” Google has done exactly that. I say this not just as someone running a content site but also as an end user. If this inequity of support continues along these lines, we will see a continuing destruction of our journalistic enterprises—enterprises that are one of the core building blocks of our democracy.

Spanfeller is someone I’ve known for years and respect quite a bit. His bill of particulars is long and some of it is quite sensible. (The last click metric of attribution, most agree, is outdated and gives too much credit to search over branding efforts.) The underlying theme, however, is Google is ripping off publishers. I understand what he’s doing here. Forbes is suffering like everyone out there. As a member of the Online Publishers Association, he’s got reason to paint Google as the villain. If only it were that simple.

Google is just the representation of the vast changes in delivery and consumption of media that digital technology has caused. The thing is, the media companies themselves are mostly to blame for what’s happened. The other day, I went to a panel called “Seven Minutes to Reinvent the Internet (for Advertising).” Quite sensibly, the majority of the seven speakers chose to spend the their time on the reinvention of advertising for the Internet. This was partly a cop out but partly a smart acknowledgment that there’s no changing the Internet. Ty Montague, the chief creative officer at JWT, showed a clip from The Thing of the monster mutating and growing stronger in the face of attempts to subdue it. His message: “Ain’t gonna happen.” Ask the music industry.

That’s instructive to media companies grousing about Google. There are many things wrong with how it ranks stories, I agree. Too many bloggers regurgitate original reporting and game Google to get their stories more play than the people who did the real work. Aggregation, in many cases, has become license to simply steal. That’s wrong.

The root problem does not lie with the Internet, it’s with media. I’ve seen it in my own career. Media organizations haven’t adapted. They’re structured in much the same way as they were before the Internet. They bought this fallacy that it would be an additional distribution channel. So instead of radically changing their businesses and cost structures, they fiddled. Newspapers were content with their local monopolies. Magazines kept churning out glossy puff pieces so long as there were ad pages. It was all bound to come crashing down. Google is an easy scapegoat.

That doesn’t leave me necessarily in the Jeff Jarvis camp of Google worship. It’s an amoral enterprise that will take whatever steps it can to build its market cap. Sometimes it’ll cross the line. But focusing on Google is pointless. It’s time to reinvent media properties rather than look for government subsidies or trying to shake down Google. My bet is the innovation won’t happen within media companies. They’re too slow, too conservative and too culturally wedded to defunct processes to make the leap. That doesn’t mean all hope is lost. I’m encouraged by the strides made by publications like NewWest.net and all the independent technology publications (I won’t call them simply blogs) that have filled the void capably. The media model for the Internet will be nimbler, have a drastically lower cost base and figure out new ad models that actually excite marketers.

Martin Sorrell wrote in WPP’s annual report that the new "frenemy" is not Google but change. That’s true. The other night, I commiserated with a fellow reporter. He said he wonders sometimes if he would make the same choices he did nearly a decade ago when he went into journalism. I couldn’t agree. What’s going on in the media industry is actually pretty exciting, if a bit messy in the short term.

Here come the brand social marketing bribes

In the aftermath of the P&G Digital Hack Night, I questioned whether we were witnessing the beginning of an icky trend. What bothered me was the use of charity to get people to market for a brand. Marketers will do whatever they have to do to get into the stream. Charities are a great cover to get people to do their marketing for them.

Sure enough, I came across a Tweet today that looked quite automated: "I just helped donate a FREE box of KRAFT Macaroni and Cheese to Feeding America at www.sharealittlecomfort.com" Sure enough, Kraft is making people an irresistible offer. They'll make a donation to charity if you'll send out a message to as a Twitter or Facebook update. This isn't the first time Kraft has dabbled in this kind of promotion. It linked up with SocialVibe to do a Facebook campaign that used a similar approach: get friends to install a Kraft app and the brand would make a donation to charity. Kraft hopes to get its message broadcast out 1 million times through this program. What's important is it will be broadcast out in personal networks.

On the face of it, this benefits all parties. Charities get help, people get to feel good about themselves for doing nothing more than clicking a button, and brands get to piggyback themselve into the stream. The problem is these kind of programs threated to pollute the stream. What happens when we're all just marketing to each other, blasting out updates for brands, whether there's a cause attached or not? Luckily, as Karl Long says, you get the network you deserve. I'll let a few instances of this pass, but the unfollow and unfriend button will be put into use once this takes off.

When brands get thrown into the stream

It looks like Domino's pizza video is going to be the Dell Hell of the Twitter era.Brands have to look back to those old times - 2005 -- wistfully. After all, Dell had many indications it had problems with its laptops and irate customers out there. Even Jarvis could have been mollifed with some deft ego-stroking. Welcome to the real-time era, brands. While they're trying to figure out how to become a positive part of the stream, they're finding sometimes it's much easier to become a bad part of the stream. The Domino's pizza video surfaced yesterday. Today, this is what Google says about the Domino's brand, built over 50 years.

Blending paid and earned media in the stream

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is sensibly stepping forward as the public face of the company when it comes to advertising. For all its might and potential, Facebook has suffered from a peculiarity of Silicon Valley: an inability to have someone who talks marketers' language. Maybe Sanberg that's person. In an interview with Businessweek, she made absolutely clear Facebook is an ad business, only a different kind of one than the mass-impression plays on portals and even MySpace. Instead, she talks about the real challenge for advertisers in social media: become part of the stream.

We believe advertising needs to blend into the experience. So yes, when you're reading BusinessWeek, you see an ad. It's something you expect to see, and it's part of your experience. It's part of the experience of reading magazines. On Facebook, what you see are ads that are very similar and integrated into the experience we have. So we don't have big banners across the site, nor do we have text-based ads that are really part of the search experience. What we have are ads that act like our site.

This brings up the (not new) concept of earned media Fred Wilson touted this week. Earned media is an old PR term. It's typically the stuff a company does that gets people talking about it. in the past, that's been through the mainstream media. Nowadays, we're all media. What's interesting is, despite what many of the social media gurus will say, companies need to do more than just be awesome to get part of the stream. Yes, that's important, but advertisers will still need to buy their way in through paid media. The problem is media is created, bought and measured not based on engagement but impressions. That means the type of ads that will work in the stream are different. Take the example Sandberg used: a Honda virtual gift campaign. Honda bought its way into the stream with a virtual gift option on Facebook. About 750,000 Facebook users chose to interact with that and created an additional 2 million impressions for the brand. Is that earned media or paid media? Maybe both.

This is the new game. What's interesting to me is that Facebook seems to want it both ways. It's talking about advertising that's different from traditional placements in that they're optimized for engagement rather than impressions. Yet when I asked them about moving to a pure engagement ad model, it assured me, a NYT story to the contrary, it is not testing engagement pricing. Some say it doesn't matter how the media is priced, but I think moving to a pure engagement model, and developing a system that shows ads based on their liklihood of sharing, sends a message to the market about what type of ad business you have: a blend of paid and earned media.

Community marketing done right

 

Marketers need to figure out how to involve their communities in marketing. Most of the efforts so far kinda suck. I think it's because most companies don't really have communities, just people they sell stuff to. The really interesting brands tapping into community like Zappos, Etsy and Threadless have it baked into their DNA. It's pretty inseparable from what they do, rather than another tactic.

Chad pointed to something interesting along these lines. When you visit Amazon to check out the new Kindle 2, there's the usual videos, product details and even consumer reviews. That's nice but not really enough. The Kindle is a product that it really helps to hold -- and it has a pretty passionate user base. Amazon, without retail stores, came up with a solution: let its users meet potential customers to show them their Kindles. It sounds kinda ridiculous -- I joked to Chad that I was waiting for the story of the serial killer who used Kindle meetups to find prey -- but it's also ingenious. Not only will people get to see the product, but they'll meet with the ultimate sales people: Kindle owners who love the thing. From what I can tell, there are plenty of willing evangelists out there. This is one in New York City.

That's real one-to-one marketing. For all the talk of buzz marketing and the other creepy stuff, these kind of community initiatives could work for brands that actually have people passionate about their products.

Brands get in bed with micro-media

The media world is in upheaval. That makes it an interesting thing to cover, although strange because it directly affects me at the same time. Mass media is challenged and buffeted on many fronts. Often, like the auto industry, everything is pinned on the recession. If only that were true. In fact, the economic problems are just bring to the surface deep-seated problems with the media business in the face of digital delivery.

One of the big problems I'm preoccupied with is the ad model for content. I wrote a couple stories this week that look at how brands are tapping micro-media (is that a term?) for the kind of advertising they can't get from traditional media. This is something I covered before as "advertorial 2.0," a term some didn't like. An interesting phenomenon I finally got around to covering is the rise of mommy bloggers as belles of the ball in the eyes of brands. In both instances, content and advertising blur. This is a trend that directly runs counter to traditional media, or as a State Farm exec termed it to me "authority-driven" content. State Farm hired the creators of Mommycast to shoot a video series around insurance-related topics. The other story looks at how Sanyo got a group of popular YouTube creators to make videos about its news camera, crafting the content around the product attributes.

Brands feel they can get more from these "real" content creators. Part of it is they feel there's more of a connection with the audience than in regular content. Another big part of it is a willingness to embed brand messages directly into the content. This is the challenge for mainstream media. It can't rely solely on reach to carry ad messages cordoned off from the content. This will work for The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times (maybe) and some others. But as Wenda Harris Millard has pointed out, there's not enough advertising right now to support all the media outlets out there -- at least with their current cost structures. That means advertisers are going to demand a helluva a lot more from media.

That's where micro-media comes in. Innovation occurs at the fringes. For better or worse, we'll seem emerging ad models happen there. These two cases point to a marriage of content and advertising that's tighter. The YouTube artists have turned their hobbies into a living. Some make well over six figures, I was told. The videos they created for Sanyo aren't bad. Most branded entertainment is cringe-worthy, but I found the integrations they did pretty clever. Similarly, mommy bloggers have loyal audiences -- and a willingness to play ball with brands. That means reviews of free products, documenting trips provided by companies, etc. What amazed me about this world was the power some of these women have accrued. When I interviewed one of the Mommycast creators, there were two PR reps on the phone -- one from Google, which had a distribution deal with her, and another from Media Rights Capital. The woman and her partner, who just a few years ago began a podcast, now have a Hollywood agent. Even a mommy blogger with a modest audience could reasonably expect a Caribbean cruise on Disney's dime. It's more than a little crazy.

The type of deals Sanyo does with YouTubers and State Farm with Mommycast is money that isn't going to mainstream media. My bet is we'll see more brand attention shift to micro-media that offers not just focused audiences, but a willingness to do interesting integrations. The challenge for traditional media is keeping up without separating the needed separation between advertising and content.

Ads masquerading as content in the stream (con't)

Peter Kafka at MediaMemo has more evidence of ads aping content in the stream. He points to the efforts Conde Nast is using to make money off Reddit, the Digg-like social news site where users vote up and down headlines. The ads look just like the headlines users vote on. The result: Conde Nast says the placements are getting 5 percent click-through rates.