A Digital Marketing Blog by Chuck Hildebrandt

Twitter Finding Its Legs As A Marketing Tool

2009-05-19T11:26:00.003-06:00

Ad Age is reporting that Twitter is becoming a "killer app" for local businesses looking to communicate short-term deals and specials in order to drive feet into the store.

I can vouch for this localized aspect of Twitter myself, as I have subscribed to a few local-based feeds, such as cubsbaseball, tweetchi and getoutchicago, which provide the kind of real-time updates about important things that Twitter does best. I mean, aplusk might be entertaining, but he doesn't actually need Twitter to communicate the things he does. He could do the same in a regular ol' blog.

To all this, I say, "finally", and on two fronts:

- The value of Twitter as a marketing vehicle has been questioned in general. It looked like it might go the way of MySpace pages, which were used as not much more than extensions of marketers' websites. Such pages may have connected on some level with their target, but they didn't necessarily deliver anything that was valuable or essential. A real-time update service for local concerns does qualify as a valuable and essential tool, though.
- Local businesses have been struggling to harness the Internet as a marketing tool for well over a decade now, dabbling in local search, yellow pages apps, broad-based SEM and even couponing, with limited success at best. Using Twitter as an intrusive, push-based medium, particularly to phone apps, could be the game changer that finally gets local businesses online -- plus it's free, and will probably stay that way.

Potentially transformational stuff here, folks. This one has a good chance of catching on and sticking.

No, I am NOT This Guy

2007-06-06T12:38:00.000-06:00

When you google my name, you'll get a lot of results, most of which concern me either in a professional capacity or in a baseball addict capacity. Depending on when the spider crawled, the results differ from time to time.

But without fail, the #1 result always reads:

Freedom owner's debt woes multiply
HILDEBRANDT'S DEBTS. Here's what banks and others say they are owed as of Monday by Chuck Hildebrandt:. • Fifth Third Bank, two revolving credit loans were ...
www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/08/17/loc_loc2a.html - 50k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

With a link to a story detailing his malfeasant misdeeds.

Rest assured, I am NOT this guy, as coincident as his screwing banks, utilities and contractors over his baseball team is to my own love of baseball.

I wonder how many job interview opportunities I've lost because of this?

Don't Mind Us, We're Joost Watching You!

2007-06-06T11:59:00.000-06:00

The Mediapost article Joost's Volpi Touts 'Targetability' (free registration required) states:

"Our biggest asset is targetability, and our belief is that TV advertisers want a high degree of targetability," he said. "From an advertiser perspective, we know exactly who's watching what content."

This is the kind of statement that anyone hardly bats an eye at anymore. Twenty years ago there would have been a privacy uproar at such a statement, even if it were made in a trade publication. Now, in the age where we've come to expect ubiquitous government surveillance, and in which we're raising a generation of children who grow up taking for granted that they're constantly being surveilled, we just shrug our shoulders and say, "meh..."

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. After all, I work in this industry, too. But from a marketer's perspective, this is good news, indeed.

Widgets: Advertising Will Never Be The Same

2007-06-04T11:22:00.000-06:00

So says this article that ran originally in Billboard.

Widgets are those handy little apps you can place on a PC (or Mac) desktop that transmits information to you from a website, such as news headlines, weather forecasts, sports scores, etc., without you having to endure the pain and agony of opening a web browser and visit the website itself. The Vista operating system has embraced the widget concept (calling them "gadgets").

Remember the old application PointCast? It was essentially the same thing in that it used what was called "push technology", i.e., it pushed information to you through this application, without your having to manually request it. Same deal here, essentially, except each widget is standalone, with its unique stream of streamlined information, as opposed to the omnibus that PointCast was intended to be.

So who benefits from widgets, from a marketing point of view? Seems to me that those who can deliver information in a branded environment would obviously benefit (Weather.com, CNN.com, etc.), although their ability to directly monetize it might be hampered in this format. After all, a widget is almost by definition of very small app, as opposed to large desktop apps like Weatherbug, so the ability to carry advertising on a widget might be difficult.

Perhaps widget content providers would like people to click headlines and come to the site for more information, but isn't the point of the widget that you receive the information in the widget without having to come to the site? Seems to defeat the purpose, n'est-ce pas? Used in that way, the widget is not more than an RSS conduit.

From my standpoint, of course, I am most interested in how direct marketers can use the widget for customer acquisition purposes. I'm a bit doubtful that you can successfully engage widget users to sign up through a complex registration form on the widget itself, and using it to drive traffic might be a testable proposition, but I wouldn't bet on its success as a high volume generation marketing vehicle. I'll keep my eye on it, though, in case an acquisition usage tactic becomes clear to me.

Cops of the World, Rejoice!

2007-06-04T09:59:00.000-06:00

It will be easier than ever to find your nearest Dunkin' Donuts location! (free registration required)

Or, go directly to www.myicedcoffee.com.

Big Studio Involvement in Online Video Takes a Step Forward

2007-05-14T09:25:00.000-06:00

Joost Boost Worth $45 Million (free registration required)

The concern over Big Media's ability to control distribution of their content online should be more possible with the launch of Joost, the new online TV-cum-social networking start-up that is sure to get more blessing (and money) as they evolve. Not only have they received money from CBS and Viacom in this round, but they already have content agreements in place with Warner Music, National Geographic, Turner Broadcasting, The Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, CNN, Hasbro, the NHL, Sports Illustrated and Sony Pictures Television.

This looks like the VOD model they've been talking about for 15 or so years, only online instead of through your cable or satellite provider. The key differences between Joost and GoogleTube are (1) Professional media companies provide the content, not regular folks; and (2) it will focus on long-form programming (half-hour-plus), as opposed to short-form videos (under 15 minutes).

The key to this taking off, in my view, is the ability to watch Joost through your TV set, the ultimate lean-back medium, as opposed to watching it through your computer, a lean-forward medium. This will get easier as HDMI connections on TVs and ever-faster broadband Internet connections become more common. I'm not positive how fast the video stream has to be for the quality to approximate current 525-line standards, let alone HD, but it has to be faster than current 384 kbps standard.

Video, Schmideo -- D1SPLAY RULEZZZ!!!

2007-03-19T20:35:00.000-06:00

There's no doubt about it -- video might be on the cutting edge, along with other 2.0 buzzworthy strategies like RSS, podcasts, blogs and the like -- but after house list email marketing and the low-hanging fruit of search, display advertising is still planned to be larger than any of the others, even in 2007. This in eMarketer:

And even though rich media spending is growing incredibly and display spending is topping out, it won't be until 2011 when rich outstrips display:

People just like to stick with what's familiar and easier to manage. When rich becomes as easy to manage as display, that's when the tipping point will really occur.

Click and Buy in Online Video: Fine Idea, Limited Execution

2007-03-19T20:07:00.000-06:00

This BizReport story says that Kohl's has become the first advertiser to to use MSN's new VHL (Video Hyperlink) technology. (Microsoft loves those cool little three-letter extension handles.) When you're watching an MSN video (actually, a Kohl's video on MSN Movies site) and an item on sale at Kohl's come onto the screen, a big green arrow starts flashing in the lower right hand corner. That's your cue to mouse over the items for sale and click it. At that point the video pauses, and another browser window pops open to the Kohl's site to the page where you can purchase the item.

It's a cool technology and the idea is almost as cool as the technology -- you can see the video in action here. This execution does have some limitations, however:

People have to want to view a promotional video, such as a Kohl's marketing video, to see it in action. This is probably not a practical application for content-oriented video.
In this video, you have to move quickly, say within three to four second, to click on the item or it's gone, and it takes a while to figure out how to go back and see something you like again. (Just clicking on the time status bar behind the current point won't do it.)
In addition, the model in this video is always moving, so it's easy to click and miss.
The video gets interrupted, which hurts the flow of the experience.
You can't click on the green arrow and choose the featured item on the video -- they should consider allowing that.

All in all, it's a good first effort, and I can't imagine it won't improve with subsequent executions.

Viral: It's Not For Just Anybody Anymore

2007-03-19T19:28:00.000-06:00

So says this Mediapost article (free registration required). A Dynamic Logic survey reveals that 50% of over 1,000 respondents in the marketing field think of viral marketing as a fad, whereas only 24% think of it as a marketing strategy with traction.

I've thought for sometime that successful viral campaigns are like catching lightning in a bottle. It is extremely difficult to predict with any level of certainly that something you create might catch on with your audience so strongly that they forward it to all their friends. Marketing viral is particularly tricky in this regard because no one wants to look like a marketing tool to their friends, so advertisers either have to mute their brand identity in the campaign -- which obviously defeats the purpose -- or they need to do something to take the "brand hero" aspect down a notch, such as injecting an ironic twist into the execution.

But because successful viral relies on insight into zeitgeist -- knowing the exact right mood at precisely the right moment -- it seems more likely that these campiagns will happen at best by hunch, and at worst by accident, than by careful planning, which by definition is a process that takes place over time. That, I think, may cement the idea that successful viral marketing is lightning in a bottle.

I also wonder whether there's a little bit of wishful thinking on the part of marketers in this survey as well: perhaps if they call it a fad, they can convince their management or their clients that it's not reasonable to ask for it, thus removing the likelihood of being set up for failure.

Social Networking Goes Niche

2007-03-14T09:19:00.000-06:00

As titled in this Business Week article.

The gist is that more people are getting turned off at the overt openness of MySpace, where basically anyone can reach out to you (except if you're a teen, in which case you can put up a wall), so social networks that allow you to control exposure of your profiles to others are gaining traction. The article names Vox as an example of just such a niche network.

I see MySpace as filling a fundamentally different need than Vox. MySpace is all about widening your circle. It's a place where kids can connect with other kids from far-flung places, to help mitigate the isolation they feel as their parents place ever more restrictions on their mobility in response to our increasing media and news culture built on fear of strangers and of The Other. Young people, therefore, would like as many contacts as possible. It also makes them feel popular if they have 100,000 "friends" in their network.

People like the protagonist in this story, who fled MySpace for Vox, want to use social networks in a different way: to strengthen ties with the contacts they already have, and to broker, and have brokered, contacts with only those new people with whom they share common interests or purpose.

But there's another thing not being addressed by this article: is another reason people are fleeing MySpace that there's just too much advertising and storefonts being put up there? I can easily envision such backlash against this marketing tactic causing the sun to set on it in the next year or two. And if that happens, what would justify continued investment in broad network platforms like MySpace?

Online Leads To Offline -- And Vice Versa

2007-03-14T09:11:00.000-06:00

I've seen numerous articles suggesting that online research leads to offline purchases, but this is the first article I've seen suggesting that exposure to offline advertising leads to online searches.

This makes perfect sense -- I can easily recall instances where I've done the same thing -- but this is the first I have seen this idea articulated in trade press.

This is based on research by the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, representing a category that currently does most of their advertising offline.

Another Ad Network Gets Busted

2007-03-14T08:56:00.000-06:00

This time it's TMP (TrafficMarketPlace), as a user alleges that Travelocity and Cingular are still serving ads through malware. As I mentioned in this post, that's how it happens to major advertisers, and surely they know by now that it happens this way.

I pulled my company's advertising out of TMP because we suspected some funny business from one of their affiliates. We experienced a sudden spike in impressions, no increase in clicks, CPAs going from about $5 to hundreds of dollars in a single day. We suspected impressions fraud. We went round and round with TMP to try to get a resolution in place, then all of a sudden, my rep left, her spot was not backfilled, and the VP of Sales became suddenly unavailable. We ended up simply not paying for it, and ultimately not working with them anymore.

And now this.

Viacom Sues Google -- Now What?

2007-03-14T07:08:00.000-06:00

Everyone knows the what, and few people are surprised, although the amount does make one giggle in shock -- but what does this mean?

The core legal issue here is the "Safe Harbor" provision of the Digital Rights Management Act, which indemnifies online service providers when their users infringe copyright law by storing protected materials on their servers. The idea is that there's not much a provider can do to stop the individual, so only the individual is liable, not the provider.

What Viacom maintains is that, in this case, YouTube is profiting from the infringing materials, so Safe Harbor doesn't apply to them. Viacom has demanded that YouTube remove some 100,000 pieces of copyrighted materials from their servers, but YouTube is just not moving fast enough in bringing them down, nor are they proactively preventing users from uploading new material.

YouTube responds that they do not allow advertising on user video pages, in order to comply with the spirit of Safe Harbor (that is, not profit directly), although one could easily maintain that existentially, YouTube profits when the system is widely known to allow protected material. In practical terms, that means that if I remember a great "Family Guy" bit and want to see it replayed, I know I can get it on YouTube -- and as of today, that's still true. (Careful when clicking on this link -- this clip could be construed as very disturbing for some people.)

OK, so now what the technical issue is and what it means, but what does this lawsuit really mean? On the one hand it's hard for Google to control their users. If their users infringe, they're gonna infringe, so what can they do? That's not a good argument, says Viacom -- it's your service, you're making money off these videos, so we want our cut, and if you can't pay us, then take them off -- and it's up to you to figure out how.

Google is reported to be working on a search function to identify protected content on both Google Video and YouTube, but they're not there yet. So what can they do in the meantime? Go to signup-only model so they can control users better? That could cut down their reach significantly. Review every video that users upload? That would create a backlog months long, on the optimistic side.

When you get right down to it -- meaning using your "follow the money" instincts -- this must have something to do with the failed negotiations between the two parties to allow YouTube to carry Viacom clips. Google apparently wasn't going to pay Viacom to their satisfaction, so Viacom might very be using this lawsuit as a negotiating tool. Pay us now, Google -- or you'll pay us later. But either way, you're going to pay us. (Wow, maybe the "Family Guy" clip is a propos, after all!)

I predict the lawsuit does not proceed to fruition. It can't -- YouTube risks sinking an entire online marketing channel if they fight and lose. Google will settle, and it'll cost them.

Show Me The Metrics! (What, is it 1996 already?)

2007-03-12T09:07:00.000-06:00

IAB: Better metrics would increase online ad revenue

A survey co-sponsored by the Audit Bureau of Circulation and NSON Opinion Research confirms that advertisers would spend more money online if only the metrics came from an independent third party auditor. My self-interest detector is going off, but as an advertiser, I can vouch for the validity of this.

I think this is a good news/bad news situation for online publishers. Better metrics by third parties will lead to more spend, so the investment will for the most part be well worth it. The bad news part is two-fold: (1) Third party metrics and auditing cost a boatload of money, and (2) not a few publishers would go belly up as their sham self-reported visitor numbers are exposed for all to see.

Walled Garden Down, Ad Revenue Up

2007-03-12T08:46:00.000-06:00

AOL has profited handsomely by moving from a subscription-based revenue model to an ad-based revenue model, and the proof is in this Mediapost article (free subscription required).

I don't think anyone is too surprised that this might occur, but the article might lead one to believe that all the growth comes from AOL.com, specifically. I was questioning that, and the article is silent on it, leading me to wonder: how much of this revenue growth comes from network cash cow Advertising.com?

One amusing part of the article is toward the top where they say:

"The Time Warner unit's decision last year to replace its ailing subscription model with a free service supported by advertising resulted in a 454% surge in billings from 2005 to 2006, compared to a 142% increase in portals overall."

Gee, this makes 142% sound so paltry. But seriously, it is good to be a portal, as Jeff Lanctot at Avenue A confirms in this ClickZ article.

And On The Flip Side of the Online Video Spectrum:

2007-03-09T10:59:00.001-06:00

NBC Poised To Sell Digital Downloads. (Free registration required.)

Here's the latest attempt by Big Network TV to generate revenue directly from consumers for their standard TV offering. They'll be selling flotsam like five-minute video clips of SNL for a buck ninety-nine, although you'll also be able to buy sketchy-quality videos of shows like "The Office" as well.

I predict this will not work in the long-term -- meaning sustain a profitable SKU for anything longer than a year -- for the opposite of many of the reasons I elucidated in my preceding post.

The Most Successful Online Video Event So Far ...

2007-03-09T09:55:00.000-06:00

... has got to be CBS March Madness product, located here. When they first came out in 2004 in conjunction with CSTV, it was as a $19.95 subscription. Starting last year, CBS started offering it free to viewers, with the cost underwritten by advertisers.

Now that's really starting to bear solid fruit: this Mediapost story (free registration required) reports that revenue has gone to $9 million this year, over double that of last year's $4 million, with advertisers such as AT&T's wireless unit, Kraft Foods and DiGiorno buying into the fun.

I can think of four key reasons why this specific online video offering has become so successful:

It's an event. March Madness has become the #1 sports event in America, and it generates a significant amount of low-level non-professional (and professional) gambling. So there's a lot of intense interest inherent in it. (I love serendipitous assonance.)
It's sports, a top avocation for the heaviest users of video, young men.
It's free. Appealing for obvious reasons.
It's a viable alternative to nothing. This is not an insignificant point. I would be willing to bet that the vast, vast majority of online video viewership of March Madness comes in the early rounds during weekday day games, when most people are at work and have no alternative method of or access to viewing games. Once you get later into the tourney -- specifically, Sweet Sixteen -- every game is on TV anyway, and plays at night or on weekends. The chances you'll be watching a relatively grainy online video versus watching the same game on better-resolution TV, especially hi-def, has got to be nearly nil.

If proven correct, then the implication here is that people respond to scheduled video events that are special in nature and not otherwise available to them. This is not the same viewing psychology as watching UGC on YouTube, or catching up on the latest 30 Rock on NBC.com.

2007-03-08T17:12:00.001-06:00

Technorati Profile

"How Radio Is Becoming RadiADo"

2007-03-08T15:44:00.000-06:00

The brilliant Al Ries, author of the marketing classic "22 Immutable Laws of Marketing", validates in this Ad Age article my main beef with terrestrial radio that I mentioned in my post here.

Are Ad Networks Safe for Brands?

2007-03-08T15:04:00.000-06:00

Of course they are, according to this iMediaConnection article in which the author interviews Joseph Apprendi. And who is Joseph Apprendi? He's the CEO of Collective Media, a "leading online advertising network specializing in audience targeting and optimization". And if you can't trust the CEO of an ad network, who can you trust?

To be fair, Apprendi does recognize the need of brand marketers for transparency, which is the number one point of contention between ad networks and advertisers. But he does suggest that the desires for 100% campaign (not just list) transparency and complete control over carve-outs are unreasonable, and does slightly mischaracterize the issue as one only of quality assurance. That's part of the issue, to be sure, but the one issue he would never bring up is that of bait-and-switch. We've seen this before -- ad network touts ESPN and CNN and iVillage as part of their networks, and you run with them, and within a week you're getting emails from your CEO with links to www.popcap.com, wondering what the hell the media buyer is doing advertising a product clearly intended for adults on a site for little children. (Of course, you could reply asking your CEO what he's doing on such a site himself, but you wouldn't have to love your job too much to do that.)

Ad networks want nothing to do with the bait-and-switch discussion because for some of them, it's a core business strategy, and the others who might be sympathetic to a client's wishes don't want to pigeonhole themselves into a guarantee that's too hard to keep. Until the networks can figure out a way to give brand advertisers what they need (not just want), they're never going to become a must-have part of the plan.

The End of Web Radio As We Know It?

2007-03-08T14:46:00.000-06:00

This story is so big that even the mainstream media sources are talking about it, but I will link to the first source in which I saw this story online, this Business week article.

The technical issue here is payment on a per listener/per song basis versus the traditional percent of revenue basis. Since web radio generates hardly any revenue to start with, there's no way they can withstand hefty fee increase the Copyright Royalty Board is demanding through their mandating the former, to take effect within the next two months.

The real issue, as I see it, is the music industry regaining some measure of control over their product, even if it's only symbolic. They're mightily pissed at the MP3/piracy phenomenon, which has reduced their sales at the local Tower Records (that is, if it's still open) and through Amazon.com. Heck, the unchecked growth of the MP3 single-handed even killed off a burgeoning online sales channel characterized by once-known entities CDNow and CDUniverse, which can now be only found strewn among ancient Mayan ruins somewhere in Mexico, I think. (Actually, I see a site called CDUniverse is actually still selling CDs online. Do you buy your CDs there? No? See what I mean?)

So, killing off several thousands basement web radio stations that weren't generating any money for them anyway is a cheap way to make a point to music distributors everywhere: don't eff-you-see-kay with the RIAA.

I doubt anyone is quaking in their boots as a result.

Answer: Enough Data To Make Your Freaking Brain Explode!

2007-03-08T14:12:00.000-06:00

Question: How much data storage exists on the planet?

According to this article in eMarketer, a study by IDC reveals that there are 246 exabytes of total storage on the planet.

An exabyte equals 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes, and there are 246 of those, which I'm sure is really meaningful to you. So how about this: if the average iPod is 40 gigs, then from that much storage you could create over 6.6 billion iPods, more than one for every person on the planet. Yeah, I know, you probably got three of them -- that'll cover for the guy in Vanuatu and the teenager on the Faroe Islands that don't have one.

And because I knew you were gonna ask -- an exabyte is 1,000 petabytes, a petabyte a 1,000 terabytes, and a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes -- so that means an exabyte equals a jillion zillion gigabytes.

But that's not the best part. The best part is that the story goes on to say that more data is going to be generated just this year -- 255 exabytes -- than there even is storage available. If that doesn't make your head explode thinking about it, then you have a hell of a head.

So the next time your no account CTO tells you "storage is expensive" as an excuse to not keep log files for your site -- yes, that's what one actually told me less than a year ago, in front of the CEO -- that's when you know it's time to quit.

Goodbye News, Hello "USASpace"

2007-03-08T13:30:00.000-06:00

OK, so it's not as facile as all that, but it's interesting how USAToday online has relaunched itself as more or less a social networking site, where you're invited to interact with the news stories, rather than be the passive audience for the news. You can leave comments and recommendations on individual stories, and it also is replete with video and blogs.

I'm not sure whether this is a bad thing. I'm used to my news sources being authoritative, and this has the feel of a blog, which I do not deem as being authoritative. After all, if just anyone can go in and add content, how can you vouch for the quality of it?

One thing I don't like, for sure -- it's laid out very poorly. The various areas don't appear properly sectioned off, and it's hard for the eye to track through it very efficiently.

A Downside of Blind Networks

2007-03-08T10:12:00.000-06:00

Looks like AnnCoulter.com is starting to appear on advertiser hit lists, even as they get top-flight advertisers, thanks to their relationships with ad networks. Their being hitlisted may not be because of her politics per se, but because of that age-old #1 enemy of advertisers: controversy.

This post in Daily Kos reveals the names and contact information of various advertisers who've appeared on Coulter's site. The mission of the poster is to"out" advertisers who support what they term as "hate speech".

We in marketing know that this kind of thing -- running on controversial, divisive, or otherwise wacky and irrelevant sites -- is de riguer when casting your lot with a blind network. It's bad enough when this kind of thing happens when you have a CPA buy running -- but to trust any blind network with a CPM buy with zero transparency, and I don't care how "reputable" the network is, is something like dumping your money into the middle of the street and setting on fire the portion of it that's not blown away by the wind.

On the one hand, serves them right. It's 2007, and if you don't know that this kind of thing can happen on a blind network by now, you're either ignorant, cynical, in cahoots with blind network sale people, or stupid. Any agency that allows this to happen should be put on the hot seat by their clients, pronto.

On the other hand, this is one more data point in the discussion of transparency in ad network buys to start with. If this can move the discussion toward a resolution that provides a broad level of insight into where your ads run on ad networks, then it's totally worth it for some advertisers to die from the poison berries on your behalf.

Big Shift in Search Landscape Coming?

2007-03-05T09:55:00.000-06:00

Here's some interesting news I saw in a MarketingVox story: seems that, according to the blog Search Engine Land, Microsoft filed for a patent in which an algorithm is described that would remove a company's organic search listing if a paid ad showing the same base URL appears on the same page. This looks like an attempt to shift search-oriented revenue from SEO agencies who specialize in natural search to the search engines themselves through paid advertising.

I wonder how SEO professionals are reacting to this? If my client thinks he can ensure top positioning by paying a few cents or dollars per click in paid search advertising, why would he also pay me four or five figures a month to design a spider-friendly site to try to accomplish the same thing? The client might reason that they might be able to save a few bucks by shifting his SEO dollars to PPC and focusing on that.

Of course, given that Google, MSN and now Yahoo have eCPM-based positioning algorithms rather than straight competitive bidding for positioning, it's not as easy as driving up bids to get premium positions, anyway. A good SEO client services person would need to gently explain the potential pitfalls of such strategy without looking baldly self-interested.

Mark Your Calendars for March 31, 2008

2007-03-05T09:47:00.000-06:00

That's when you should at least be starting to think about buying stock in companies that manufacture television sets and digital converter boxes. That's because, according to this story in eMarketer, people are waiting until the very last minute to convert from analog sets to digital sets. Analogs will become absolutely useless as braodcasters switch to 100% digital signals a couple of springs from now.

I'm all set with my TV itself, although my portfolio might need a little sprucing up before then.

Maybe Panama Doesn't Rock For Clients?

2007-03-05T09:11:00.000-06:00

Following up on my breathless musically-lyrical treatment of early results from Yahoo's Panama launch, this story in Mediapost (free registration required) suggests that clients may not be as thrilled about early performance as are paid search providers.

Avenue A reports that, across their 33 clients, click-through rate is definitely up, by +10%, but conversions are down an average of -5%. The story contradicts itself on cost-per-click, claiming it dropped early in the story but then referring to a CPC rise in the next paragraph.

CPA, the third most important individual metric to clients (after margin and then revenue), is up +6%.

This might mean something -- or it might not. A key question I have here is about the integrity of the study. Testing best practices state that you hold all ancillary variables in control while you test one or just a few key variables at a time, with everything else running exactly the same on a simultaneous basis (in this case, same bids, same keywords, same keyword rotation, same offer, same copy, same copy rotation, same site split within the content distribution network, etc.) If you can't manage that, then you need to apply some sophisticated regression analysis to tease out the noise in order to bring everything onto the same playing field.

In this case, the thing that exacerbates the analysis even more is that they are comparing on a before-and-after basis, in which changing competitive conditions over time can also create a challenge in determining the validity of the results.

I'm not saying that Avenue A hasn't applied all the statistical filters required to the study in order to eliminate the noise, and their conclusions may be totally valid on an objective basis. But that's the question that I as a second-hand observer have.

FOLLOW UP: I just ran across this story on BizReport, which confirms my earlier post regarding Yahoo's happiness about performance, and also cites the Mediapost story above. But this is interesting -- the BizReport story notes Avenue A's clients seeing a click increase and CPC decrease -- BUT no mention on CPA increase and conversion drops! I guess including that sort of information would have put an unwelcome and unhappy spin on the story, huh?

What Frustrates Users About Web Video

2007-03-02T09:53:00.000-06:00

Wave of the future though it might be, the online video revolution might experience blips on its way to content nirvana, as detailed in this eMarketer article.

Of course, commercials within videos is the #1 annoyance, since despite the well-established commercial nature of online, people still expect content for free, without commercial sponsorship (or interruption, depending on your POV). But check out what trails closely behind:

I find it very interesting that #2, #3 and #4 are all related to the ability to find decent stuff to watch, on a consistent and predictable basis. People are conditioned by their TV-watching training to be able to find exactly what they're looking for in the same fashion, all the time. Why wouldn't they want that in online video as well?

I think people will get used to the advertising aspect over time and its prominence on this list will diminish as online video matures as a platform. But the desire of users to consistently and reliably find good quality videos to watch creates a business opportunity for someone with good coding and marketing skills, I believe.

Google to offer more click fraud protection

2007-03-01T12:02:00.000-06:00

As reported in CNET today.

This is pretty good news if you're used to paying $100+ per click for mortgage- and health-related keywords. This is also good for Google because it shifts the onus of responsibility from Google to the advertiser, since it requires the advertiser to identify which IP addresses they want to block. As a paid search advertiser of Google's, my response would be to call my account manager, give her a list of companies I want to block, and let her figure out what those IP addresses are.

Van Halen Was Right

2007-03-01T11:46:00.000-06:00

Panama rocks!

Jump back, what's that sound?
Here she comes, full blast and top down.
Hot shoe, burnin' down the avenue.
Model citizen zero discipline
Don't you know she's coming home with me?
You'll lose her in the turn.
I'll get her!
Panama, panama
Panama, panama

OK, the lyrics have absolutely nothing to with the early successes that advertisers are experiencing with Yahoo's new Panama paid search system, but I never let that stand in the way of a good non-sequiter.

+5% increase in clicks overall for week of 2/11, +9% week of 2/18. Google and their investors were so nervous about Yahoo's success that their stock dropped all the way from $466.19 at cob February 5th (launch date) to $463.75 cob February 26 (day before the "crash"). That's a drop more than one-half of one percent. Scary, huh?

Banner Advertising 2.0

2007-03-01T11:27:00.000-06:00

This is ultimately a CNN Money story about how display advertising is evolving into a algorithmically-oriented exercise in exactitude in general, but the most compelling part to me is the first part that discusses how agencies are using such algorithms to make creative adjustments to banners on the fly, meaning elements like colors and copy. The article doesn't talk about the format of the banners that can be changed in this manner -- I assume it's a rich Flash-based format -- but it sure is a lot different from the days of begging and negotiating for creative and IT resources to set aside a few hours here and there and make simple changes to your banners for testing purposes.

Many senior management types believe that online marketing success boils down to negotiating ever lower rates for the media purchased as the path to lower CPAs and higher revenue margins. But until you get to a certain spend level -- at least two commas of spend per month -- online media is generally a transparent marketplace where you know whether you negotiated a rate that's too low -- in such case, your ads simply won't run. Yahoo might write Class 2 IOs for 10¢ CPMs -- the inventory simply won't clear unless no other advertiser is purchasing the allotted salable inventory for higher rates.

One thing that leaped out at me in this story: Yahoo digests about 12 terabytes of data from user interaction every day. That adds up to almost 4.4 petabytes a year.

Did you even know what a petabyte was before today? Neither did I.

XM = More AM and FM? Siriusly?

2007-02-28T12:30:00.000-06:00

This Adweek article provides for terrestrial broadcasts -- those with antennas here on earth -- hope for the future as satellite radio gains more of a foothold in listening share: those who listen to satellite radio actually spend more time listening to AM/FM and Internet radio than non-satellite customers. In fact, the claim is that these people listen to more AM/FM (14 hours) than satellite (10 hours and 45 minutes), with Internet not far behind (8 hours and 15 minutes).

Huh? Really? I happen to have both Sirius and XM in the car (both units were free to me, and I don't mind paying the $25/month), and i gotta tell ya: I rarely switch the unit over to AM or FM. If I had to put a frequency on it, I'd say I listen to satellite radio 100% of my car rides, AM maybe 5% of car rides, and FM less than that. As a listener, I have no interest in terrestrial because it seems that every time I flip it to either band, there's a commercial on. Plus, the sound of music on Sirius is so good, and the connection so stable, that there's no quality advantage to FM at all. (My XM XT Roady unit sucks for music -- I only listen to comedy, baseball games and old-time radio on it.)

Honestly, I would like to meet one of those people with satellite radio who listen more to AM/FM instead. I won't to know what the thought process is there. Seriously -- I can't imagine.

VCs Are Like the Mob

2007-02-28T12:24:00.000-06:00

At least in Silicon Valley. This blog post on the Business 2.0 site says it's not about getting funded in order to survive -- it's about connections and introductions, and protection from competition and the big bad established online companies.

The cost? Well, just wait until you hit the big time. Then you'll pay the cost.

Another Category iKiller for Apple?

2007-02-27T12:11:00.000-06:00

Even though this Business Week article attempts half-heartedly to focus on the delay in delivery of Apple's iTV device, the fact that the device is even coming is the real story. Revealed late last year and officially announce on January 9, the iTV was due to have arrived in by now (i.e., late February 2007). now Apple is claiming a delivery date of mid-March, although they've declined to provide an exact date.

The cachet that Apple has that allows them to whip up tremendous excitement in this type of personal technology cannot be underestimated, nor is it, I think. Indeed, the iTV is blithely referred to in the title of this article as a "TV Revolution." Apple already essentially owns personal music transport systems with their iPod; they're also waiting in the wings to take over multimedia telephonic devices with their June-arriving iPhone. No reason to doubt they can own this category, too

Remember when Apple was were just a computer company? Yeah, I barely do, myself.

YouTube vs. Big Content: Who Needs Whom?

2007-02-27T11:11:00.000-06:00

Story in BizReport tells us that despite Viacom pulling hundreds of thousands of its copyrighted ivdeos off its site, traffic to YouTube has actually gone up since the first of the year, and in fact, the top-rated video site gets more traffic than all TV, cable and broadcast network web sites combined.

The lesson for Big Content is that people are probably not coming to YouTube and other video sites primarily for content produced by big studios. If it's there, great -- if not there's plenty of other things to watch. That seems to be the message video site users are sending to Big Content. Question is, are Big Content smart enough to hear the message?

You know, this YouTube thingy might work out after all.

Broadband's Commentary on Net Neutrality

2007-02-26T12:24:00.000-06:00

Read with interest this commentary (free registration required) by Scott Cleland, who heads up an organization called NetCompetition.org, in which he characterizes the battle of net neutrality as being between the "online giants" like Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, and IAC that want net neutrality regulation of broadband companies, and the broadband companies like Time Warner, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and Comcast, who "obviously don't want to be regulated".

Cleland provides three "bottom-line" reasons why advertisers should oppose net neutrality -- quoted from the article:

The companies that advertise very little want to regulate some of the advertising sector's best corporate clients.
Net neutrality will only strengthen the online giants' ability to dis-intermediate advertisers from their corporate clients.
Net neutrality would effectively outlaw broadband from evolving into a two-sided market paid for by both consumer subscriptions AND advertising revenues--the way newspapers, magazines and cable currently operate.

It's no accident that Cleland is himself self-interested -- NetCompetition.org is described as being funded by the broadband companies themselves.

Missing in this debate, as you might expect, is the potential of broadband companies using their stewardship of this public utility to grant unto itself exclusive content and platform rights, thus squeezing out content players small and large from having a platform on which offer their wares to the public. Without net neutrality, we might not see any more Youtubes sprouting up in the future, which of course would serve the major broadband companies just fine. But the overarching industry problem might also be the stifling of innovation as small players get locked out of the opportunity for distribution, while the pipe-cum-content owners rest on their laurels and maximize profits to increase bonuses for executives rather than plowing them into new content and technological innovations that would improve the Internet experience for users.

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

2007-02-22T13:02:00.000-06:00

This blog post from Guy Kawasaki, a VC/author/serial adviser-and-board-member, is one of the best pieces of productivity advice I've seen in a long time.

We've all sat through long boring PowerPoint presentations, and for Guy it's endemic to his VC job because he has to listen to funding pitches all day. So he has developed (or at least is evangelizing) the 10/20/30 rule for PPT presentations:

- 10 slides max
- 20 minutes max
- 30 point font at minimum

Guy maintains that ten concepts is the most any human can comprehend at a time, and 20 minutes is a good goal because the average presenter will spend the other 40 minutes setting up the laptop to work with the projector.

The 30-point part is especially amusing, as well as salient. Guy theorizes that people who cram more words onto a PPT page don't really know the material and need more text as a crutch, thus forcing a smaller font to fit it all in. His alternate recommendation: determine the age of the oldest person in the room, and divide it by two -- that's your minimum font size.

This is one of those pieces of productivity advice I latch onto immediately and never forget.

Like Viacom, CBS Rebuffs Google/You Tube

2007-02-22T11:28:00.000-06:00

According to this Mediapost story (free registration required), the negotiations between Google and CBS to extend the agreement to show CBS content on YouTube have ended. This happens not long after Viacom had broken off talks regarding a similar agreement.

Boy, wouldn't I like to be a fly on the wall of the corner offices at the media companies as they talk about YouTube. How much of the problem in reaching an agreement stems from CBS's and Viacom's being threatened by a new media upstart? After all, these companies have been around for decades (Viacom: 1971; CBS: 1927), and YouTube launched -- launched, mind you -- in February of 2005, a scant two years ago. If I were an old media company regarding such upstarts, both in terms of the threat they pose and in terms of the audacity of their very existence -- my nose might be a little out of joint, too.

Interesting comment by Larry Gerbrandt, general manager of Nielsen Analytics: "The problem with You Tube is there is no revenue yet ... How is Google going to see a return on the $1.65 billion they paid? They have yet to create a model. On the other hand, once they start to generate significant amounts of revenue, those copyright issues become more significant."

This all prompts a recall of Mark Cuban's famous email regarding the Google acquisition of YouTube in the first place, in which he wrote that anyone who would buy YouTube is a "moron". The delicious irony here, of course, is that Cuban himself cashed out on Broadcast.com to the tune of $5 billion. To see just how much Yahoo is benefiting from that deal, just type the URL www.broadcast.com into your browser and see where it takes you.

Young People Believe

2007-02-22T10:50:00.000-06:00

Here's something that media salesfolk should be mighty interested in. The Audit Bureau of Circulations have just released a news item, the main point of which is that as spending in digital media increases, advertisers will demand more accountability, in which they don't currently have much confidence (fewer than less than half of ad-agency respondents and only one-third of advertiser respondents being so).

But here's a data point that jumped out and grabbed me:

"Younger ad professionals appear to be less skeptical: 75 percent of respondents under age 25 said they trust the metrics provided by online publishers, compared to 22 percent of those in the 55-64 age category."

That's a huge disparity, and it tells me less about how confident different age groups are in Internet advertising metrics than it does about the general level of skepticism among age groups.

So you salespeople can probably use this kind of insight to tailor your presentations based on the age of your audience.

Opt In No No!!

2007-02-21T16:02:00.000-06:00

So I'm buying tickets for a Philadelphia Phillies game at their website, and when you do so you have to register on their site, using your email address as user name and creating a password. And down the page a bit you see the opt-in statement stipulating that you agree to accept emails from the Phillies, Major League Baseball and their partners, and the checkbox next to it is pre-checked. You can debate the efficacy of pre-checks, but that's not what's interesting in this scenario. This is: I noticed the check mark inside the box looks dark gray and not black. So I tried to uncheck the box -- and it would not let me! The Philadelphia Phillies disabled the ability to uncheck the email opt-in box, essentially forcing ticket buyers' consent to opt into their email list!

And here's a bonus no-no: when you put in your credit card number, you see an unchecked box with the statement "Save credit card info". So I left that unchecked, for obvious reasons. But after I closed the window on that first transaction and I went back later to buy tickets for another game, and I got to that same page, my credit card information was pre-populated in the fields, even though I specifically refused to consent to them keeping it on file!

If you're a marketer, I hope you have at least a squishy feeling in your stomach about the tactic, if not disgust. Intellectually, it's easy to recognize this as a bad tactic. Yet some marketer working for the Phillies thought this was a good idea. Maybe the marketer is inexperienced and thought he was pulling a clever move; or maybe he didn't want to do it but was strong-armed into the tactic by a non-marketing-savvy boss. In any event, this is a terrible way to gain "consent", and I'm not saying this because I'm Mr. Goody Two Shoes. I know viscerally that it's bad because I was the customer in this situation, and as a customer I felt violated. So you can probably guess how much merchandise I'm going to be buying from the Philadelphia Phillies and Major League Baseball this year.

Mobile Search Field is Wide Open

2007-02-21T11:11:00.000-06:00

According to this article in Business Week, when people "google" on their phone, they're not necessarily defaulting to Google's mobile site. Google is the leading search site on mobile, albeit with a thinner margin over Yahoo than on the desktop, with MSN lagging way behind. But a company I'd never heard of until today, Medio Systems, is powering the default search engine for Verizon, T-Mobile and Amp'd with a "white label" solution. They got in there because they are sharing revenue with the mobile carriers, whereas Big Search is not doing so yet.

The stumbling blocks for search on mobile is the same as for the Web on mobile: speed. Plus, it turns out people are less patient waiting for results on mobile than on the desktop, and don't want to navigate a bunch of links to get their answer.

I can definitely picture that. The speed thing, along with the resolution thing and the cost thing (mine is a pay-as-you-go 1¢ per Kb, and lots of web pages are a few hundred Kbs) is keeping me myself largely offline on my phone. The only people I know who use mobile web regularly are those whose companies pay for the high monthly fees. But even when mobile web solves these three issues, I think people will still use it for different reasons than the computer web. I believe mobile web will be used more for a quick info grab rather for than an entertainment experience. I know many companies are betting on long-form programming for mobile, but unless there is a significant redesign which allow for a substantially larger screen plus current ease of portability, I just don't see it becoming huge.

Consumer Reviews on Ecommerce Websites

2007-02-21T10:45:00.000-06:00

Great article in CIO-Today about how more websites, even those that sell products, are allowing consumers to provide reviews and feedback about the products, and even the website and shopping experience itself, right on their sites, despite previous fears of negative feedback appearing. They've found that it actually increased sales in tests they ran, and that more sites are offering them ("By the end of 2006, 43% of e-commerce sites offered customer reviews and ratings, almost double the 23% figure at the end of 2005, according to New York research firm MarketingSherpa"), and people are taking advantage of the opportunity to speak ("In a survey of more than 1,300 people, MarketingSherpa also found that as much as 50% of customers aged 18 to 34 have posted a comment or a review on products they have bought or used.").

In my early days at CoolSavings, around 1999, we talked about launching a similar community-type function where folks could share shopping and coupon tips and become more involved with the site. We didn't in part because of the technical challenge (and costs), and partly because of inability to control for content. We, too, didn't want numerous posts bad-mouthing the site and service. That is the chance you take, of course, but it doesn't seem to be happening that way too often. Plus, two immediate advantages of soliciting customer feedback in a forum setting that leap to mind are (1) It provides invaluable real-world feedback that you can gather very inexpensively and incorporate into your process quickly; and (2) it puts pressure on the business to improve the product and experience in order to decrease the number of negative reviews. Both these advantages should lead to improved sites and experiences for consumers, which is a win for both sides.

"From Clipouts to the Web, Coupons Transition Slowly"

2007-02-21T10:11:00.000-06:00

Article in the New York Times (free registration required).

Having headed up online marketing at a coupon-oriented site myself for a long time, I can vouch first-hand for the interest that people have in coupons online. Certain folks (e.g., women, early middle age, middle income, B-C-D counties especially) love the idea of printing coupons from a website and then going to the store and redeeming them, thus saving many dollars on each grocery trip. That's the vision people generally have when they click through the banners touting "baby coupons", "grocery coupons", "pet coupons", etc.

As you might expect, the reality is pretty different. While the coupon selection today looks remarkably better than when I worked there, it's still not nearly as comprehensive as Valassis inserts in your Sunday paper, and major CPGs like P&G, Kraft and ConAgra are still noticeably missing from the site (although Quaker Oats is there).

The printable coupons are the major lure this website uses to bringing in registrants for the primary purpose of sending them email offers for lead generation clients, where probably two-thirds to three-fourths of the lifetime revenue on each member comes from. It's not that they're luring people under false pretenses -- they do deliver on the coupon promise better than at any time I've seen, and they don't use tactics that are any more underhanded than pre-checking lead gen offers and forcing you to uncheck each one to opt out. And they do make offers visible to pre-registrants, whereas before all offers were kept behind the wall and you had to sign up to see them. But the vision people have when they register and the reality is substantially different.

One interesting stat that jumped out at me: only 12% of all 175 million Internet users are interested in coupons, according to Comscore. Does this include the online savings you can get at places like Coupon Mountain? I love sites like those because it's essentially free money whenever you buy something online, and 80% of the things I buy online do have some coupon or coupon code available to use for the purchase. My tip to you: before buying anything, open another browser tab, go to your favorite search engine, and search "(product you're buying) coupons". Unless you know of a more effective way? Please share!

How Major Advertisers Get Sucked Into Adware

2007-02-20T09:17:00.000-06:00

FTC Fines Adware Company $1.5 Million

No major advertiser who values its brand wants to associate it with dark-gray-hat adware companies. Certainly Travelocity, Cingular and Priceline didn't want to. So how does it happen?

One common way it happens is through affiliate marketing. When an advertiser wants to spend a lot of money to acquire a lot of customers under very tight CPA goals, they tend to spread their dollars around to more sources, and the deeper into sources they get, the less diligent they are vetting the sources. When an advertiser signs a CPA media deal with ad networks, even big-name networks owned by major media companies, they are charging the network with the responsibility to drive high volume within that cost goal, and historically they do not ask very pointed questions about the networks' tactics or affiliates. It's a sort of "don't ask/don't tell" tactic that they hope doesn't blow up on them.

Some affiliates of brand-name networks might be networks themselves with their own set of affiliates, and some of those affiliates might be affiliate networks, too. So sometimes, by the time your advertising actually appears on a site or in a desktop app or bundled with a software download, it might be several times removed from the original deal the that you the advertiser did with the big-name ad network. Unless you have the right kind of tracking software -- and not many low- or mid-budget CPA advertisers do -- you have little idea where your ad actually ends up.

Exacerbating this is the common tactic of networks to cloak their affiliates from the client, ostensibly to keep the advertiser from doing business directly with the affiliate and thus cutting out the ad network middleman. But another unacknowledged reason is that if you as an advertiser knew who some of the affiliates really were, you might well demand your money back. I have before -- I recently had some $170,000 in CPA advertising credited by one network when I discovered a certain affiliate that was carrying my advertising in a manner that blatantly and brazenly violated the insertion order terms and conditions.

This incident should probably wake up large customer acquisition-oriented advertisers to vet their ad sources more carefully, at least in the short-term. What they should try to do is insist that their ad network vendors be fully transparent and report where their CPA advertising runs, or else either take their business elsewhere or build their own affiliate networks.

OK, I'll Read This Story ... After I Check My Email

2007-02-20T09:05:00.000-06:00

There are 12-step programs to help people deal with addictions to alcohol, cocaine, overeating, overspending, oversexing, overspending -- isn't developing a 12-step program for overemailing just so 21st Century?

The business angle to this post: get your nose out of your screen and call someone once in a while. Immersing yourself only in written communicating is not healthy for relationships.

Yahoo's Rich Media SNAFU

2007-02-20T08:11:00.000-06:00

According to this story (registration required to view), PointRoll has written to its clients stating that Yahoo is going to make an effort to enforce their policy of charging fees for third-party rich media placements.

Yahoo have apparently pulled the PointRoll rich media ads of some clients and replaced them with standard ads. It appears the real reason behind the move is to try to migrate advertisers to use of rich media solutions from AdInterax, a company Yahoo acquired in the fall, and for use of which Yahoo would waive the fees (since AdInterax is not a third-party to Yahoo). PointRoll, who claim to have 70% of the rich media market, is a direct competitor of AdInterax.

If I'm a Yahoo media rep, I can't be too happy with having to field numerous phone calls and emails this morning from media-buying clients asking for makegoods on what's been switched out, and a bonus to salve hurt feelings. Yahoo might be an 800-pound gorilla, but it's a huge jungle out there, and Yahoo is already seen as a stumbling giant anyway. There are too many other online media vehicles out there for significant advertisers to cave to Yahoo on this.

On the other hand, there's no word in the story on whom the affected clients were, and that is a very large question. I have trouble envisioning Yahoo putting their foot down with their biggest advertisers (such as automotives, financials and the biggest direct advertisers) or their most coveted advertisers (such as CPGs) very hard. Would Yahoo risk ticking off an eight-figure spender just to try to strong-arm them into migrating their rich media technology to AdInterax? I doubt that.

I don't see Yahoo's strategy here succeeding for very long. Online media is a fluid commodity that is highly subject to the vagaries of supply and demand. If Yahoo loses business over this, the strategy will go bye-bye.

Web Video: The Spirit Is Willing, the Model Is Weak

2007-02-19T15:24:00.000-06:00

Credit cutting-edge advertisers: when they see a significant new media model, they work to get in on the ground floor and establish early leadership however possible. In an increasingly digital world, it makes good business sense to be recognized as leading-edge, and moving first into nascent technologies helps that cause nicely. But doing so has to be a "near-future" rather than "right now" consideration, and sometimes moving first also means recognizing that conditions may not be quite right quite yet to make an immediate move-the-needle splash.

That's where online video appears to be at the moment, as this Ad Age article will attest. With digital ad spend expected to exceed $20B in 2007, according to eMarketer, less than 4% (some $775MM) of that will come from video.

According to the Ad Age article, the key inhibitors to make an immediate consumer impact in online video are:

Fragmented audiences (therefore, hard to generate reach quickly).
Limited ad inventory availability.
Lack of web-specific video content to sponsor.
Ad buying model still evolving.

Industry pundits believe online video viewership must at least partially migrate from traditional TV viewership -- not all online video viewership can be incremental, after all. And the dollars must follow too, says pundit wisdom, as much as 10% of the current $65B by 2010. How can an effective system of categorizing the viewing options and congregating the viewers and ad inventory be created, in such a way that it will be easy for online sellers and buyers to deal with?

But that's only half of the problem. The other half is, where are online viewers going to be watching their videos, even in the next few months? The market is so young and in such flux, that's a major issue. Can viewers be conditioned to accept advertising? What's the proper ad length? Where does it belong during the program? Is the traditional content-plus-ad spot even going to end up being the dominant format long-term?

Some major players are going to have to make some very large bets to try to mold the market to their liking, and many of these players are going to have conflicting agendas with others, and winners and losers will be declared. But that's the way new business models evolve, and video advertising will be no different.

MarketingSherpa: One Out of Four Consumers Use Preview Panes; 59% Block Email Images

2007-02-19T10:01:00.000-06:00

I have always used preview panes whenever I can, mostly at work. At home I use the classic Yahoo mail client, which doesn't have the preview pane available. I would think most people who work in offices handle their email clients the same way.

And now the proof: this MarketingSherpa article confirms that 69% of people view their emails within a preview pane while on the job, but only 27% do so at home, for basically the same reasons I (and possibly you) do.

Part of the issue is availability of course, but there is also a significant minority of people who don't use preview pane even when available to them. 95% or so have preview-pane-capable email clients, while 38% of home users do. That means that roughly 70% of the people who do have preview panes available to them use it, and it's consistent between office users (69/95) as home users (27/38) -- but this also means that almost 1/3 do not use it even if they can. It would be fair to predict that as more folks at home have preview panes made available to them (e.g., as Yahoo's Outlook-like "Beta" view becomes more popularly used), the 70% acceptance rate figure will probably hold firm with the absolute growth.

As with most tech and digital applications, preview pane usage does have a demographic skew: 84% of 18-34s use it, but only 58% of 55+s do. I would guess this is in part due to the older generation's aversion to fully exploring the options available to them in their digital applications, as the default for mail clients is no pane preview.

The article states upfront that 59% of users blocks images, but the chart they show well into the article seems to show the opposite: that only about 41% block images, with the majority of those people being in the 35-54 range. The article also states later within that fewer than 50% block images. So even though the article appears to contradict itself somewhat, it seems safe to take away that roughly half of email users block images.

The implication for email marketers: bring your value proposition immediately to the top of the email, and try to limit images at the top to the degree possible, so that your email recipient does not decide in the 1.4 seconds it takes to scan your email that you have nothing relevant to say, and that your email is too difficult to interpret at first look.

Interpublic's Prediction: Five Big Trends

2007-02-19T09:37:00.000-06:00

The Interpublic group of agencies this morning announced they believe the five biggest trends of 2007 will be, on a broad scale, and digital media stands at the center of these predictions.

The five are:

Physical and digital worlds collide
Consumers build digital homes
Social software drives communications
Marketers embrace digital nets
Next-generation content makes it big.

If you have 20 minutes to kill, the video, entitled POV: Emerging Media Predictions for 2007" and delivered by Greg Johnson, Executive Director of Interpublic's Emerging Media Lab, can be seen here. Unfortunately there's no written transcript available just yet.

To me, the most interesting prediction is #2. I have begun to wonder whether the digital home will be the centerpiece of what becomes Web 3.0. Web 1.0 consisted of web content pushed by publishers to consumers, much as old media had been. Web 2.0 is the social and community-based interactive web. I think that Web 3.0 might be life-management web, in which you can use the Internet to communicate with your house, your car, your electronics, etc., to manage tasks related to these items. I also think it will be used to greater effect to manage your general scheduling, both day-to-day (appointments and tasks) and throughout your life (doctor appointments, oil changes, etc.), to a degree that is being underutilized today.