Advertising

A 3.5 Million Page View Flop?

Get out your hankies.  It’s true, Valleywag, the premier Silicon Valley gossip site, is going under.  Well, not exactly going under but it’s cutting some staff and getting folded into Gawker Media’s larger gossip site, Gawker.

The reasoning is pretty simple, as Nick Denton explains in his lovely blog post about “sleepwalking into economic extinction.”  Cut cost or a decline in ad revenue will mean the death of every living thing on planet earth.  It’s recession 2.0, who wants to out gloom Nick Denton?

Actually, you may not need to.  One of the fun things about Gawker Media is that they publish their traffic stats.  Apparently, Valleywag has been over 3 million page views a month for most of the year (topping 6 million in May).  You don’t need to be a CFO to calculate some modest CPM revenue with that kind of traffic.  It’s common knowledge that Gawker pays their writers absolute crap (trust me, I once interviewed for a job at Gizmodo) and hosting blog content isn’t exactly the same overhead as YouTube.  So why the hell would Denton fold this into Gawker and throw all that traffic out the door (assuming Valleywag readers aren’t loyal to Owen Thomas)?

The short answer is that I don’t know.  For some other projects I’m working on, I’ve been reading about ad revenue models until my eyes bleed and I don’t understand how Valleywag can have the overhead that Denton outlines in his doomsday graphs.  I don’t think he’s lying, I just don’t totally get it.

I do know that if he can effectively merge Valleywag’s audience with Gawker’s audience that he will have a much stronger Web property in the long run.  While Gawker has readers from all over, it’s still essentially a New York media blog.  Conversely, outside of maybe the big tech and political blogs, there is no blog property that resonates with Silicon Valley like Valleywag.  If you see San Francisco as an emerging media market due to the obvious shift online, merging Valleywag into Gawker gives Denton a Web property that reaches both the current center of the media universe and the potential future of the media universe.  The audience reading the next generation of Gawker could be more influential in major media purchasing decisions than anyone reading Ad Week, Advertising Age or any of the old guard.

So whether or not this is a gamble or a necessity remains to be seen.  However, if Morgan Stanley’s numbers in Denton’s post are accurate, seeing online ad growth shrink from 16% to 6% still doesn’t make online publishing a bad place to be for the next couple years.

Measuring the Awesomeness of Jimmy Page’s Stairway to Heaven Guitar Solo

One of the greatest guitar solos of all time is Jimmy Page’s masterpiece on Stairway to Heaven. Right after Robert Plant sings “your stairway lies on the whispering wind,” Page launches into an epic solo that, at the time, extended the song well beyond the limit of any airtime that radio stations could give it (this would later be amended). Yes, the solo is awesome but how do we measure how awesome it is?

For starters, let’s look at engagement. The average guitar solo is about 15-20 seconds so, if you count the 12-string strumming part, the Stairway solo is easily over a minute, making the solo 3-4 times more awesome than your average guitar solo.

Let’s not forget about impressions either. Stairway has been a AOR staple since November 1971 and often appears near the top of the list on Classic Rock Greatest Hits of All-Time countdowns. According to Wikipedia, it is the most requested song of all time on FM radio despite never being released as a single. Don’t forget about all the amateur guitarists playing this song in Guitar Centers all around the country at this very moment either. Yeah, they may be annoying people but those are impressions too.

Then, of course, there’s Page’s use of the double-neck guitar. Sure he probably didn’t use the double-neck in the studio but it’s still implied in the overall awesomeness quotient due to the live performances. Using the ad equivilency model, I think that makes all these numbers worth 1.75 more than other guitar solos by the same measurement. Keep in mind that this formula doesn’t apply to the five-neck guitar that the guy from Cheap Trick uses. After three, each additional neck begins to count against you.

Ok, this is obviously stupid, right?

The parallel hit me while reading the excellent Brains on Fire post in response to an Ad Week interview with Alex Bogusky of Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Bogusky was quoted as saying:

We are so lucky to be in a creative field at a time when the economy is running on creativity. Yet we are still inculcated to mistrust the concept of creativity. We may be perfectly positioned, but we spend our time trying to add scientific processes to our strategies and scientific testing to our work. Why do we distrust something that is so easy for us all to identify and identify with?

It still amazes me when I hear clients that are really drawn to a creative idea, have the budget to do it but can’t justify it unless they can measure quantifiable results. If this approach was taken to any other creative discipline I would be amazed if any creativity survived. Not to mention, it’s probably at the root of many consumers’ disdain for marketing.

In a world where singles had to be under five minutes long (it would’ve been shorter if not for Dylan, btw), how would Jimmy Page have made a case for his epic guitar solo in Stairway to Heaven? More importantly, if it was omitted, how would it have affected the legacy of Led Zeppelin?

The fact is that attaching your brand to a creative idea makes you look more intelligent, inventive and creates an actual connection with another human being that goes one level deeper than an overused emotional trigger. Good design, writing (you know sometimes words have two meanings) and compelling interactivity can only be measured on the most basic levels but the real value is far more obvious. Not all that glitters is gold, but some of it is.

So when will this new day dawn for those who stand long? Hard to tell. Interactive platforms are certainly expanding the canvass for creativity, as I learned when I visited the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley this week, but there is still a ways to go before everyone can climb the stairway over quantifiability. Perhaps only then will our shadows be taller than our souls.

(ed note: forgive me for this self indulgence…at least I didn’t use every line from the song, as I originally intended)

Observations from Suxorz: The Worst Social Media Campaigns of 2007

SXSWThe word of the day at the Suxorz Worst of Social Media session at SXSW was transparency.  Led by Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine and Steve Hall of Ad Rants, the session poked fun at what are mostly well known blunders in the world of social media marketing.

The winner (?) of the distinction was none other than the largest client at my agency, HP.  Of course, we had nothing to do with their work with PayPerPost, who really should’ve won the award, but there was something about the combination of a huge brand with such a low concept marketing idea that really made the crowd turn against them.

Other runners up included:

  • Molson – A Facebook group that encouraged people to post drunk pictures to win a try to a trip to Cancun (presumably to get drunker)
  • Carlton Beer – The famous YouTube commercial that got millions of views but had no connection to any of their actual brands
  • Wal-Mart – The classic Edelman fake blog Wal-Marting Across America
  • Whole Foods – Their CEO posting negative comments anonymously about a competitor to drive their acquisition price down
  • Cisco – Paying bloggers to write about what the “Human Network” meant to them
  • Coke – For jumping on the Coke/Mentos bandwagon about a year too late and then pretending like it was their marketing program all along
  • Vespa – Steve Rubel’s old agency set up a blog for Vespa enthusiasts but then abandoned the blog and the last several posts were about how the marketing people wouldn’t return emails to the bloggers
  • Agency.com – The classic video about pitching Subway (they lost), although it was agreed that this was more embarrassing than actually unethical
  • Target – Their Facebook stealth campaign that told Facebook users not to tell anyone they’re working for Target
  • Guiliani – His closed MySpace page that preventing anyone from friending him or commenting on their support
  • Sony – The PSP fake blog that told the story of two fake boys who wanted PSPs for Christmas, which was particularly dumb due to the amount of real teen boys who probably could’ve provided better content.

No big surprises but an interesting overview of a year that this industry will probably look back on as a learning experience.

More SXSW updates later.

Forrester: Listen Before You Shout

ShoutAccording to Mary Beth Camp and Peter Kim at Forrester, the big agencies that currently rule the marketing world, both on the PR and advertising sides, won’t be going away as much as they will be changing their focus to be more deeply entrenched with consumers. Naturally, this is a true 360 from how the industries have worked since the beginning of time and they make a point to mention that there are no agencies currently doing this, which should get their report forwarded around to plenty of the top brass tasked with reversing the downward spiral many agencies are facing.

Luckily for the agencies, Forrester has outlined an easy three-step process towards revamping your businesses for the future:

To become a Connected Agency, current players will have to shift:

1. Consumer: from messages to connections.

2. Media: from push to pull interactions.

3. Operations: from campaigns to conversations.

Simple, eh?

The main factors driving this will be familiar to many people working in social media. For starters, the report points out how sophisticated consumers are at ignoring your messages. Not only do they know how to block ads they don’t want but they’ve also been given better tools to fast forward through your commercials in media where they have traditional been passive. On top of this is the old faithful pyramid of influence, which clearly show organic word-of-mouth to be roughly twice as powerful as any other vehicle for your messaging.

There’s not a lot that you can argue with in the report except for one question: “what advantage do agencies have in making this change over individuals or small specialty shops?”  Sure, you could argue the economics of it and how the agencies have access to the brands and are skilled at selling in larger programs.  Plus, if there was a network of smaller specialty practitioners that were more ingrained in the social landscape then they will probably be sucked up by the big media holding companies as their value becomes more obvious.

I see it from a different angle though.  The benefit of being a specialist is that you’re more agile and can adapt to these kinds of changes much faster than big agencies.  Also, contrary to what the report suggest, CMOs are getting smarter and will be able to overcome operational struggles much sooner than agencies will be able to change their whole model.  It’s much easier for a CMO to start a few new specialty areas than it is for an agency to tell their creative department to completely change the way they think.  Just look at how CRM has become integrated into the corporate structure while agencies struggled to figure out what their role was.

Of course, I could be wrong.  Agency-wide emails could be going out right now that could turn the agency structure on its head.  But, of course, the emails aren’t going out.  Not yet anyway.

Why Ad Equivalency Needs to Die

Dead AdSome recent talk on the blogs about developing an ad equivalence model for social media has really been rubbing me the wrong way. While on a fundamental level I believe PR and advertising have almost nothing to do with each other, the thing that really bothers me about ad equivalency is that it suggests that advertising value is the industry standard for marketing when, in reality, it is inflated and based on flawed metrics. While this belief may be held by some CMOs, this is really the root of why PR agencies have always been less successful than other marketing disciplines at showing the value of what they do and getting paid fairly for it. If you look at how SEO is sold by the few reputable companies that do it, the brand awareness value of organic search is proven through an excess of data and then the results are simply reported on.

John Bell at Ogilvy PR got the ball rolling with his post “The Next Evolution of Social Media” and, to his credit, he prefaced his case for ad equivalence with the following:

What we do is different than advertising. It is different than traditional, narrowly-defined PR. It is different than direct. But what we do – word of mouth marketing using social media methods – must be comparable to the more established disciplines or our programs won’t grow beyond enthusiast clients and “try-and-learn” scenarios.

He goes on to say that the key differences between social media marketing/WOM and advertising that need to measured more effectively are third party WOM activation, engagement and levels of trust.  In many ways, this really isn’t much different than showing the value of PR as whole, which also benefits from delivering messages through more trusted channels in more engaging ways (if you agree that editorial is more engaging than advertising).  I don’t think many will disagree with the need for better measurement in these areas but I don’t think this is necessarily a case for ad equivalency.

The problem lies in how advertising is valued.  In almost every sector but online we are seeing a leveling off or decrease in ad spending.  What’s happening is that marketers are finding out that not only is traditional advertising outdated but it’s downright ineffective for the budgets that are demanded.  Ad agencies are bloated beasts that have been adjusting to this trend by paying junior employees less to do more work and farming out as much as they can to the lowest bidders.  The result is poor advertising being placed in declining disposable media formats.  Oh, and no one is paying attention to them either.  The last thing that social media marketers need to do is get aboard that sinking ship.

Katie Paine, who writes the best blog in the world on PR measurement, was a little more direct than me in her assessment of the idea.  She says that ad equivalence is catering to “backward looking CMOs who don’t get it” and takes us a step in reverse to “screaming more loudly at more eyeballs” instead of focusing on the real value of what we do.

So what is the solution?

As I said a while back, the key to measuring online media and engagement is having a desired interaction and knowing how much that is worth to you.  With advertising it’s easy to let the market dictate pricing but, since this is a relatively new discipline and the media is extremely fractured, it’s up to the individual marketer to prove the value of their interaction.

Yes, this is more difficult and harder to sell to a 60-year-old CMO but reverting back to a flawed methodology doesn’t address the real problem and that is that PR agencies and small boutique shops aren’t doing a very good job of promoting the real value of this media.  There is a lot of preaching to the choir through blogging and twittering but people need to climb the marketing food chain and be vocal about all the aspects of this media that have tangible value instead of looking for a quick fix.

AT&T’s Confusing Digital World

AT&TIt’s hard to really figure out what the strategy was behind AT&T’s “Build Your Digital World” campaign except that someone probably yelled out “social networking!” in a room full of advertising creatives.  The campaign appears to be a half-hearted attempt to build community in order to either engage AT&T wireless customers with the company’s key messages or possibly to gather data on prospects to figure out how to better market to them.

Although hosted on an AT&T wireless domain, the site is credited to AT&T Knowledge Ventures, which is supposedly now know as AT&T Intellectual Property (although both sites are still copyright Knowledge Ventures).  While it isn’t a bulletproof theory, AT&T Knowledge Ventures exists to protect trademarks and is generally only used for the company’s advertising.

The site basically has two main components.  The first is that it allows you to build a profile in a DNA-like way for how you use digital communications technology.  The exercise is simple but not really entertaining enough to make you want to share it with anyone.  Since viewing what are essentially survey responses from strangers isn’t appealing to anyone, the other main draw of the site is that you can view an NFL quarterback’s (Vince Young) profile, except that all the answers are still pretty boilerplate.

The main problem is that AT&T gives you no reason to register and share yourself on this site, which defeats the purpose of all social media.  A better way to go would’ve been to focus on the experience of creating your digital DNA and then make the exploring process as visually engaging as possible.  Otherwise the digital world that you create is a very lonely world, which hardly speaks to AT&T’s “new direction.”

Over Marketing Kills WOM

DisappointedDavid Pogue’s Circuits e-mail today contained a sneaky lesson about WOM and it’s relationship with advertising. The e-mail followed up on a rant from Pogue’s blog about how disappointed he was after seeing “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” and finding out that his favorite scenes from the trailer weren’t in the actual movie. As with most of his blog posts, comments immediately began flooding in from people who were similarly annoyed with misleading trailers from this and other movies.

But doesn’t this happen all the time?  And not just in film.

When you see the screen of an HDTV in a print ad, isn’t actually a high-res photograph? Don’t they go frame-by-frame in every major television commercial to make sure the colors are as unrealistically vivid as the one’s it’s sandwiched between? So isn’t this an accepted practice that doesn’t really hurt the brands that do it?

The director of “National Treasure: Book of Secrets,” Jon Turteltaub, doesn’t think so. While he makes a case for certain clips being more appropriate for trailers than the actual movie, he also cited examples of how misleading advertising can erode word-of-mouth and actually really hurt a film.

“Personally, I think that’s what happened to ‘Sweeney Todd.’ Perhaps they didn’t want anyone to know it was bloody, gory and a musical. So they hid that. What happens is that the wrong audience sees the movie on opening weekend, and the word of mouth is all wrong. Great movies can get lost because of this”

Maybe there is something to be learned here for all marketers.  If you ultimately rely on word-of-mouth for the long-term success of your brand then you need to make sure your WOM mentality extends into all areas of your marketing.  It’s not good enough to just create a WOM campaign with the leftover money from your massive traditional media campaign.  It’s a mentality that needs to permeate everything you do.

Does Money Talk or is It Creativity?

FreixenetMany associate people who participate in advertising as sellouts (with the exception of the underpaid masses who actually do the work). So what happens when someone who obviously wasn’t influenced by the money practices their craft for a brand?

Such is the case of Martin Scorsese and Freixenet Wine. Scorsese isn’t short on money and it’s unlikely that he can really be bought for anything short of a fortune. What appears to have happened was that Freixenet, who is not an enormous brand by any measurement, approached Scorsese with an idea that was inventive enough to pique the director’s interest.

I had the privilege of working indirectly with Scorsese once. All I can say is that when we asked what Scorsese was willing to do in order to promote a product related the Goodfellas DVD release, we were told “the idea better be good or you probably won’t hear back.” I’m sure a fair amount of money exchanged hands but it’s hard to imagine Scorsese getting involved in marketing activity that would make him look bad.

That brings us to the actual idea. Considering how Scorsese is a Hitchcock fan, the short film, which featured the brand prominently in the conclusion, was a mockumentary about a lost Hitchcock film that Scorsese would try to film in a similar manner Alfred himself. The roughly five minute film was jam packed with references to other Hitchcock works and concluded with a scene of the director talking about the film while black birds assembled outside. It’s good, check it out.

The lesson? When you can’t afford talent, try attracting it with a creative idea that people will want to be a part of.

Note: This was actually JWT in Spain (yes, JWT!). Naturally, the site is clunky and the video can’t be embedded but hopefully this level of creativity will spread to the US offices someday.

What Do Your Google Reader Trends Say About You?

Google Reader Trends

Considering how I try to read more than 15o blogs or RSS feeds a day, every so often I need to go through my list and do some weeding. For many years I used Bloglines as my main newsreader and I never really had a problem with it. Then Google Reader came along and everything changed. From the easy ways to manage tags and keyboard shortcuts, Google Reader just enabled me to digest more media without needless distractions or software problems. Best of all, it contains features that let me peek into my reading habits so I can delete the feeds that I don’t really follow.

For those of you that use Google Reader, I’d highly recommend clicking in the “Trends” link in the main menu. You will probably be surprised by what you see. Since I choose to view headlines only (and then click through to the full items), the Trends reporting is like a palm reading for the reality of my media habits.

The results are much different than what I would tell you I read if we met in a bar. If you asked me what I read daily, I would probably say the New York Times, a popular blog like Gizmodo and then probably something work-related like Micro Persuasion or Conversation Agent. Apparently, none of those are really right.

Let’s look at the top 5:

  1. Mashable – This was a bit of surprise at #1. Sure I like to follow breaking Web technologies but I had no idea that I read this more than any other source. I will, however, say that I can’t think of anyone who does what Mashable does better than they do.
  2. Hot Chicks with Douchebags – This was a shocker. Not only is it #2 but I apparently read 96% of everything they post. I guess living in New York and seeing so many sleazy guys with beautiful women has really just made this site well tailored for my sense of humor. It’s also concise, consistent and I can read it while another tab is loading. Still, #2?! Kind of embarrassing.
  3. Silicon Alley Insider – Not a huge surprise. This well-written, incredibly plugged-in site covers tech happenings in New York far better than anyone else. It’s kind of like our Valleywag without all the gossipy stuff that I don’t care about anyway.
  4. Rotofeed – Confession: I play fantasy sports in all seasons. It’s one of my dirty secrets. I even have teams for sports I don’t care about. This is a Blogdigger feed that aggregates dozens of fantasy sports blogs into one feed. An overwhelming amount of content but I’m a nerd. Please pretend you never saw this.
  5. Blogging Stocks – One of the best Weblogs Inc. blogs. It has commentary from all over the spectrum and generally gets to the point a lot faster than any competing product from Motley Fool or TheStreet.com. It’s a tremendous volume though and it makes the top five even though I don’t read 94% of their posts.

While I’m sure the world is endlessly fascinated with my personal media habits, I do actually have a point here. Every year billions of dollars are spent on media that is directed by what brands believe consumer media habits to be. Much of this data is the result of surveys that simply ask people questions about their media habits that are probably grossly missing the mark. If you wanted to sell me a toaster and tried to reach me through the New York Times Web site, you’d end up spending millions of dollars before you reached me half as many times as a couple hundred dollars on Hot Chicks with Douchebags, which I would never tell you about on a survey.

Aside from being another nail in the coffin of traditional media buying methodologies, I think this makes a good case for both contextual advertising and participation in social media. Contextual advertising, apart from a few unfortunate circumstances when inappropriate content will trigger an ad, works across a wide swath of media and will largely match itself to the content instead of the source. Engaging in social media, on the other hand, can help brands uncover many of the lesser known niche content providers who aren’t top of mind enough to make their way into survey data. Simply put, you can find your consumers’ version of Hot Chicks with Douchebags.

More Kinds of Long Tails

TailsThey say that everything you do online will exist forever. Somewhere somehow someone is recording everything you do online and there is an omniscient cache that scales the history of time on all Internet activity. Of course, this doesn’t explain how I’ve lost two complete sites to server crashes but, nonetheless, the myth persists.

Seth Godin touches on this today in his “Time has a Long Tail Too” post, which reminds marketers that many of their campaigns will live much longer than they were originally scheduled for. He uses Reebok’s Terry Tate campaign as an example of an effort that was creative enough to live beyond the normal cycle of the campaign. The problem is that the commercial concludes with a Web link that is now dead.

Dead links suggest dead brands.

Something similar happened with one of our automotive clients earlier this year. We were brought on late to the project by an ad agency and when we explored the site, which acted as an extension of the traditional media campaign, we found that no one had updated the blog in months. What’s worse is that the company that wrote the blog was sending new entries all the time but the ad agency had already moved on from the campaign and wasn’t posting them. The brand went on to launch one of the best blogger engagement programs that I’ve ever been a part of and, sure enough, most of those bloggers linked back to the site with the dead content.

This makes me wonder if there is a role for a Web continuity manager (try explaining that job to your grandma) at large companies that have more campaigns running than a single interactive marketing manager can keep track of. As the Larry Tate commercial nears 1 million views on YouTube, how many prospects will be sent to a dead page instead of finding new ways to engage with the brand?

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