John Battelle's Searchblog
"There is no question that Mark and Facebook are getting the Google circa 2004 treatment," says search guru John Battelle on his Searchblog. Mark Zuckerberg's story is similar to that of Google boys Sergey Brin and Larry Page. A young entrepreneur drops out of a top college (Harvard) to nurture "a simple but powerful idea" into a billion-dollar business.
Facebook still has a long, long way to go to get into Google territory, but Zuckerberg's open app decision may have given the social network the legs it needs to grow into something truly huge. But Facebook has a different sort of problem to Google, in that it can't necessarily beat its competitors by offering better technology. The business of social networking is all about the users, innovation, and ease-of-use.
Battelle lists a bunch of questions that he'll ask Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Among them: "How do you handicap the competition, and what will keep Facebook on its current growth trajectory?" Is Facebook on the path to direct competition with Google? "Can you imagine Facebook as a broader search or portal company?" Finally, Battelle will ask about the future of advertising on Facebook, more pointedly, how it intends to grow. - Read the whole story...
Monday, September 17, 2007
Microsoft selects Datran Media for e-mail marketing services
By Dianna Dilworth
September 17th, 2007
Technology giant Microsoft has selected Datran Media to deliver its e-mail marketing communications worldwide.
Microsoft will be employing Datran’s StormPost platform, which lets the technology firm customize its communications. Microsoft can use the platform across its communications but is starting with opt-in Hotmail-featured offers and newsletters.
“This really adds a lot of new opportunities to their sending potential, since Storm Post helps with targeting, deliverability and compliance,” said Josh Baer, chief technology officer at Datran Media, New York.
In collaboration with Microsoft, Datran Media also developed an e-mail inventory management system that lets Microsoft’s advertising sales staff keep track of sold and available e-mail media inventory, similar to banner inventory management. When inventory goes unsold, it can then be released into the entire market place exchange.
“It is specifically designed so that their sales force can sell segments within that message, which optimizes what they sell and how unsold inventory is released,” said Matt Keiser, co-founder and president of Datran Media.
Microsoft can also segment its list and sell e-mail inventory based on different segmented audiences.
This platform will now be available for all Datran clients.
Earlier this year, Microsoft’s technology team accepted the StormPost .NET-based platform, a collaboration of the two companies, as a component of Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions.
B2B Online Advertising Up
Businesses spread the message.
US business-to-business ad spending totaled $14.39 billion in 2006, up 1.4% from $14.19 billion in 2005, according to a BtoB Magazine analysis of ad spending data from TNS Media Intelligence.
Online display ads made up nearly 10% of B2B ad spending, or $1.4 billion, according to TNS. That figure is 17% up from 2005 levels, BtoB said. The firm does not track paid search or online video.
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The top 100 B2B advertisers spent an estimated $6.76 billion on B2B advertising in 2006, up 3% from $6.56 billion in 2005. Telecom giant AT&T led the pack with ads about its merger with Cingular.
"Right away, we had to communicate that these two companies had come together and formed one company, and that the name of the company is AT&T," said Wendy Clark, senior vice president of advertising at AT&T, in a statement. "We had some work to do repositioning the company."
eMarketer last year estimated that overall B2B media spending for 2006 would hit $23.7 billion. That figure included trade shows, exhibitions and other marketing expenditures.
B2B online ad spending data released at the same time by Veronis Suhler Stevenson (based on TNS data) put online ad spending at nearly $2 billion for the year. Although it did not disclose its complete methodology, Veronis Suhler's figure likely included an estimate of B2B paid search spending.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
New Facebook Ad Platform Targets Users by Keyword
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Saturday, September 15, 2007
Scaling Intensity: BT And Social Media
By now it’s widely understood that the core focus of targeting is not the content of the page, but the consumers of that content — and, even more important, how they consume it. Unfortunately most advertisers and publishers still approach Web 2.0 with models of consumer behavior based on Web 1.0 limitations, as Andy Monfried, founder of leading social media technology developer Lotame explains below.
Behavioral Insider: What were some of the motivations that led to the development of Lotame and your signature technology for social network targeting, Crowd Control? Previously you worked with Advertising.com, right?
Andy Monfried: After I left Advertising.com I did some consulting for social media publishers and found they had this incredible platform, but the tools used to monetize it were woefully inadequate in comparison to the property itself. The prices they were having to offer for inventory were unbelievably low. I remember thinking to myself this just couldn’t be.
BI: How about advertisers? What sorts of perceptions or misperceptions did they bring to social networks?
Monfried: Advertisers for their part are working with Web 1.0 tools and methods for a Web 2.0 world. What I mean is that advertisers need to serve and sell social media advertising in the same manner as people are actually using it. Lotame bridges this gap by effectively aligning consumers and advertisers.
BI: How do you achieve that kind of alignment?
Monfried: Most targeting, even targeting that bills itself as behavioral targeting, has a very outmoded notion of behavior. The implicit assumption is that behavior consists of passive consumption of “precooked” information or entertainment content. So you follow what Web site visitors browse and associate that by inference with some subjects they’re likely interested in, segmenting accordingly.
That may or may not be adequate for traditional Web published content, which is still largely based on the model of old media, which are designed to target passive consumers. But when you’re attempting to migrate advertising, new media now accounts for at least 20% of all impressions and rising fast.
You’ve got to look at entirely new sets of data that social media generates and, more importantly, learn how to cull from that relevant ways of tracking the kinds of engagement, participation, interaction and involvement in depth that are unique to social networks and how to segment audiences who are actually makers and creators.
The mandate now is to go beyond targeting in terms of subject classification and contextually by content. What we do is tie engagement to context for the first time. We pride ourselves on being the industry leader at presenting this hidden value to our clients.
BI: How does Crowd Control apply behavioral methodology to social media?
Monfried: We track over 34,000 individual behaviors ranging from uploads to sharing to posting to linking to commentary. It’s not just about navigating existing content. It’s about how individual members in a social network interact with content in specific communities. We provide publishers with those behaviors and a general taxonomy that includes 171 different segments. But we allow — more than allow, we encourage — publishers to code them any way they want to reach the customers they most need to.
The object in fact is to make this technology light enough so that publishers can easily learn to target behaviors on a self-serve basis. Our technology is customizable to provide our clients with the ability to tap into the audience they want without wasting time, energy, or money on people who aren’t interested in their product.
BI: At this stage it appears social networking is still a tough sell for many brands. Would you say it’s primarily a vehicle for direct sales?
Monfried: Social networking is not by any means a direct marketing vehicle alone. It’s the biggest opportunity for brand frequency because you’re talking about a highly involved user population. The average page views per session can be in the hundreds. When there’s that much involvement you’re uniquely positioned as a brand to target for high frequency and recency.
BI: What sorts of criteria make the most sense in judging metrics on a behaviorally targeted social media campaign?
Monfried: As ads get richer the duration of time spent with the ad becomes much more relevant than click-through. For so long click-through rate and conversion metrics have been the primary factors in determining the success of an online campaign. However, social media needs to be looked at through a different lens. I think engagement metrics are evolving into the next yardstick when you’re talking about successful online advertising within social media.
OMD recently provided a study showing that one engaged user is the equivalent of eight regular users. I think engagement has to be part of the discussion when you’re talking about effective behavioral targeting inside Web 2.0 and successful online advertising results. If your interest, especially as a brand, is to identify customers by the highest levels of interest and the most intensity, social media’s the place to be. It gives the brand the opportunity to send multiple creatives to people they identify as their sweet spot.
BI: How do you see the convergence of behavioral targeting and social media evolving the remainder of this year and into next?
Monfried: Ultimately we see the adoption curve over the next 12 months growing to make user-generated content a much bigger part of media plans. As experience becomes more prevalent, we see brands becoming more comfortable.
The Next Differentiators: Transparency and Quality?
"If anyone should be bored with the ad network business, it should be me," confesses Joe Apprendi, CEO of Collective Media, which reaches 99 million unique users monthly across high-profile inventory like USA Today and TVGuide. Joe has run sales operations for Click Now, 24/7 and Falk in a career about as long as the Web itself. "But I have never been more excited by this business," he tell us. After attending the MediaPost Behavioral Marketing Forum in July and hearing JupiterResearch's Emily Riley explore the distinctions between different kinds of online behaviors, Joe was eager to extend the discussion. As networks aggregate greater reach and consolidate to achieve scale, he argues that they will need to differentiate themselves in the market. Media buyers need to ask deeper questions about how behaviors are being gathered and where the ads are showing up.
Behavioral Insider: You think media buyers need to demand more transparency and inventory quality from BT networks. How so?
Joe Apprendi: A lot of my perspective comes from my background. First, I started in the ad network business close to 12 years ago. Whether you were a direct marketer or a brand advertiser with a Fortune 1000 company, you cared where [your ad] ran because you were burned in the past. And the burning in the past for advertisers was where you may have run where you didn't think you could possibly run with the network.
I think today that still exists, and I think networks like ours and others are trying to address the quality of the inventory. Because BT is so new, there could be opportunity for abuses if agencies and advertisers don't get more educated faster about how behaviors are collected. What behaviors are you actually buying? Whether it is BT, context targeting or channel targeting, how you source that data and ultimately make it available to agencies and advertisers is what we're really focused on.
Behavioral Insider: Explain the transparency you have in mind.
Apprendi: I do believe all behaviors are not alike. One of the most important things about BT is this question of how you sourced it. There's a lot of different avenues for acquiring BT data. BT is only as good as your context targeting. BT is context over time. You are reaching them out of context, but it is still the basis of context. You can collect it yourself, through your own ability to determine the context in which a particular user is on a page.
And how that technology works is a huge criteria. A lot of context-sensing capabilities and hence BT capabilities that ad networks and publishers employ are all keyword-based. Hilton Hotels vs. Paris Hilton. There is a high probability Hilton Hotels is about travel while Paris Hilton can be about innumerable things, and 99% of context-sensing engines will assume it is travel.
[The Entrieva engine we use] doesn't only look at keywords, but phrases and concepts, and also the frequency of those concepts. Based on that, are you just using the highest ranking category? Pages can be about multiple things. Will you only make the determination based on the highest ranking one? When we determine a behavior it is at minimum one time within the last 30 days. That is our standard. A lot of times it can be one time in the last 90 or 60 days. You don't know. So you would probably assume a user visiting a particular type of content three times in the last seven days is a higher quality prospect than one who visited once in 90. I don t think those questions necessarily are addressed. Most people don't ask the question, and I think they should.
Behavioral Insider: But that raises a questions for agencies who are themselves just getting up to speed on BT. How much are they willing to pop the hood and see these details?
Apprendi: We are very early. First and foremost, online media planning and buying is a time-consuming process and probably there are nine other topics or issues they need to address in advance of this one. In general they are happy to hear about it because it is news to them. Honestly, it is just getting them more educated on what does run of network mean or channel mean or us vs. another network. A lot of that is news to the agencies. It is good for them to understand certain behaviors are different from others. One travel profile may not be the same as another. And it is incredibly empowering so they can talk intelligently to their client. They can make it more a part of their RFPs: quickly let me know your methodologies and how you source your behavior. Just add it to the regular RFP process.
Behavioral Insider: How will consolidations like Yahoo buying Blue Lithum and AOL snapping up Tacoda affect how BT is evaluated and sold?
Apprendi: We are all trying to increase our profile. I think the Tacoda play was strictly about reach, without question. AOL had inventory; Tacoda had behaviors and they tried to reach more of these users and increase the size of the buy. However, it is no different from the overall ad network business.
Again, for brand advertisers, which I believe will fuel BT, quality is a far higher priority than they it was against direct response. So as a result I think for BT networks in general the [quality] standard is going to be much more interesting and [emerge] faster than it did for direct marketers buying ad networks in the past. It isn't a technical discussion necessarily. Is it a brand I trust that sources the behavior or not, and then how did you collect it? I don't think it is that complicated to cover those two points. I do think you will start seeing more branded behaviors.
If I sell you the Collective Media business executive behavior as a source, I communicate who is in the network, what providers I source from and methodology. If it was the Wall Street Journal business executive behavior, that immediately adds credibility and immediate trust. What is going to be interesting is that these leading brands in their verticals will start seeing a way to complement what they have done with their brand and seeing how behavior can play a role in their overall strategy. You will start seeing more marriages like Hachette and Jumpstart because it just makes sense. But it doesn't just have to be within a specific vertical. It can be with any trusted media brand. I think you will start seeing some of the leading vertical media brands start thinking about their own branded audience.
Friday, September 14, 2007
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