ambient

One of the more amusing shifts over the last ten years is the recognition that many of us who thought we were getting into the technology business actually ended up in the media business (and vice versa). So, as technologists-cum-media moguls, it behooves us to pay attention to how confident media buyers are about the various mediums for which we develop.

MediaPost quotes a study by Advertiser Perceptions to claim that ad exec confidence slightly declined in the third quarter, specifically about their ability to buy more media on behalf of their clients.

By media type, the latest survey of ad exec confidence:

It’s clear that digital formats (not sure why mobile is not considered “online”) fare the best going forward. We know this is because they are the cheapest to deploy, management tools abound, and ROI is - more or less - directly measurable. So, long term, two trends are clear:

1. Online ads are the best place for marketers looking for direct reach and highly optimized campaigns

2. Eventually, almost all of the “offline” formats are going to be online (which would make the above graph a little boring)

So, as a techie in the media business, I’m not worried about things in the long term (barring a total collapse of industrial civilization). In the short term, I’m very grateful for my experience at SEMDirector, a business built on the concept of ROI measurement and actionability. There’s no question: online media is hot and it’s going to be hot for the next 10 years, at a minimum. There will be short term ebbs and flows, but that’s true anywhere.

Also, in the above chart, notice that in online, mobile, and cable tv - the three most measurable mediums - confidence is waaay up still. So, yes, there is a contingent of pessimistic ad execs, and that could grow over 2008, but as Seth says, times will always be crazy.

Some practical advice:

1. Commodity ad systems, such as AdSense, aren’t a great long term strategy for monetization. Sure, there are lots of people making good money at it, but I wouldn’t count on it long term. There just isn’t enough relevant context in the medium or the message.

2. Focus on providing real value in whatever ad system you use to your end users / participants. One of the reasons I am building my business and staking my future on social media is that we have the opportunity like never before to give individual consumers a lot of power in every single transaction. Let’s make that worth something and not try to wash them out / aggregate individuals back into abstraction again. Consumer influence matters. This is the best chance marketers have to tap into that. Work with systems that let marketers listen better, not just talk better.

3. If you take #2 to heart, you’ll realize that there is still a ton of opportunity for building ad platforms that meet those demands. The existing ad networks out there are still highly irrelevant, anti-social beasts. There is a lot of room for small, agile startups to come in and redefine media, yet again.

So, gloomy (or not so, in this case) reports be damned; get out there and start changing some games.

The new Facebook Ads network presents some new opportunities for marketers. Whether those opportunities translate into any real value for consumers / Facebook users remains to be seen.

I wanted to understand how it compares to PPC ad networks from the likes of Google, Yahoo, and MSN, so I created a small text ad for Boompaste. It was denied. So I created a new one.

The first, disapproved ad said “Meta is Betta. Get all your news in one place.”

I think Facebook rejected it because you have to use the title of your company, product, or service in the ad title and body. Annoying, but whatever. I guess they are shooting for high quality ads, which is good for users.

My second ad reads “Boompaste: Meta is Betta. Get all your news in one place. Boompaste aggregates the most popular stories on the web.”

It was approved, for two reasons, I believe:

1. I targeted 16-40 year olds the first time. This triggers additional editorial review. The second time I targeted 18-40 year olds and it went live almost immediately.
2. I used the name of the offering in the title, as mentioned above.

So the ad is live, and within 10 minutes I had about 196 impressions and 1 click (CTR of 0.51%). Gotta love PPC.

I’ll post more results later. So far, however, I like the experience. It’s clean and well done, if still immature.

In order for Facebook to really compete, marketers are going to need:

• Data exports: there is currently no way to export campaign / performance data from Facebook. It would be even better if this was available via API, depending on the delivery options for reports. If you could schedule email delivery of reports, that would be fine.
• Some sort of transparency. This is a critical area where I believe Facebook is lacking, and it’s tricky because it’s related to privacy. When you buy ads on search or even content networks, you can easily see it live. For example, if you bid high enough on “laptop,” you can query Google, etc. for that keyword and see your ad running in its live environment. You can also view competitors and their ad copy. More sophisticated marketers automate this process.
• Automated ad placement - Facebook needs to understand that marketers with large budgets work hard to create consistent campaigns across a variety of networks. Nobody wants to manually create thousands of ads on Facebook when you can automate that entire process on Google. Facebook does offer a valuable enough audience to target it as a network regardless, but velocity will suffer in comparison to other networks.

I’ll add more later. You may want to read Fred Wilson’s blog - he is conducting a similar experiment.

Boompaste is live.

I’ve been inspired by quite a few different takes on RSS and the best way for people to follow the buzz on the web.

Boompaste is designed to make it easy to do so. I’ve got a lot more planned for the site, and it’s barely finished started (with bugs and all) but I wanted to at least get it out there for my friends to see and use. I’m not heavily marketing it right now, because I’d like to see how it grows on its own.

If you think there are ways to make it better / more usable, just let me know.

Through a friend, my wife discovered Etsy. I’m sure it’s been around for awhile, but we just found it and we think it’s fantastic.

It lets artists / craftspeople market and sell their products without having to create their own website and figure out how to handle transactions, etc. The look and feel is clean and simple, and it’s a great way to start getting immediate traffic.

The site favors new users / listings so it enourages the prolific.

My wife, Kaoru, has had her own jewerly store online for a long but Etsy makes life so much easier that she is going to switch all of her operations over to Etsy. If you’re an artist, or you know one, there is tremendous potential here.

Mike Arrington writes about the ugly place that Silicon Valley has (once again) become now that stupid loads of venture capital have been flooding in for the last two years or so.

Ugliness / greed aside, this particular bubble (if it is one) is interesting. One could look at boom / bust cycles as a matter of exuberance vs. boredom. The last time it all came crashing down, I personally believe, is that people just got bored. Sure, all of the petfood.com stories turned the entire era into a joke but there was, as we must acknowledge, an incredible amount of innovation that occurred. Then all the money went away and the engineers got back to what they do best.

In the following years, innovative services like Flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia and, of course, Google were developed. Much of the innovation that we hear about today happened during the downturn years between 2001-2004. If this cycle is indeed nearing an end, I wonder how long it can possibly last. We are just on the cusp of what will be an entirely new generation of technology-driven innovation and services — everything from scalable, interesting virtual reality to major, disruptive (at last) in human-computer interfaces — and it makes me seriously doubt that this next downturn will last long at all.

We are also faced with a set of serious crises - namely, the effects of global climate change and disgusting food / farming practices - in the next 10-20 years. Say what you will, and I certainly have, of that capitalist optimism (some would say delusion) in the face of adversity there is something about crisis that brings out a lot of talent and enthusiasm for making things better.

Finally, back in the internet / tech realm - a lot of the core technologies we rely on today are getting a little long in the tooth. Consider email. Does anyone think that we will be messaging one another using the same tired old protocols and client interfaces 20 years from now? It’s past time for revolutionary thinking about how we do not just email but web servers, operating systems, HCI, and data management.

Here’s to the next downturn.

I may be a little slow on the uptake, but I just got why Pandora is such a powerful ad platform for advertisers.

Pandora has done a great job in making the application interactive. If it plays a song I don’t like, I give it a thumbs down; if I like it, thumbs up. That becomes quite a powerful semaphore in determining which ads to show because songs are delivered in the context of channels.

So, on my Pandora, I have a Tristania channel and an Iron & Wine channel. Both of those specific bands become mapped to larger symbolic channels in my own mind (eg. Tristania = dark fantastic adrenaline-pumping capital ‘R’ Romantic Byronic gothic symphony vs. Iron & Wine = chill guitar-strumming melancholy pensive relaxing americana).

My interaction in each of these spaces gets pumped in the form of very sophisticated demographics data to their advertisers. When Tristania is playing, I get Absolut Vodka, shrouded in dark shadows, and when it’s Iron & Wine, I get relaxing images of people taking long baths or going on vacation.

Brilliant, if you ask me.