Business Quests in the Information Age

Blog Ad Network by Six Apart helps monetization of smaller blogs

Six Apart is one of the few companies of the so called web 2.0 wave whose focus on sustainable business models is a major strength. Using their position as a blogging platform to structure and manage an ad network is really a no-brainer from a business standpoint, while it is also in keeping with Six Apart's consistent policy of offering easy-to-use solutions to its customers. They are uniquely positioned to generate substantial business value from this initiative. I am very curious about their pricing mechanism and about the degree of visibility they will allow into their profit margins from this activity. And perhaps even more than those aspects of the scheme, I will be interested to understand their targeting philosophy (serving the relevant ads to each micro-audience) because that's one of the big battles of tomorrow's advertising.

clipped from www.marketingpilgrim.com Six Apart Launches Blog Ad Network, Blog Services clipped from www.marketingpilgrim.com Blog software company Six Apart acquired creative agency Apperceptive, a company that built blogs for sites such as The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, BoingBoing, and iVillage. Now they’re launching an advertising network for blogs. They are also venturing into design, programming, and blog marketing services. As an ad network, Six Apart is competing with Federated Media Publishing, Glam, Blogads, and others. Here’s how it will work - they will get advertisers, bloggers put the ads up, and the two share revenue (not sure what the payouts are like, but I believe it’s typical to get 20-30%). Six Apart is working with Adify to provide back end support so bloggers can see their payouts and manage their account. they are targeting their services to the little guy The ad network is currently in invitation-only beta and it’s just for bloggers who use Six Apart’s Vox, TypePad, or LiveJournal.

Fret no more about Google

The decrease in paid clicks on Google's online advertising network has been one of the worrying news of the first quarter for modern day advertisers. The Economist has done a good little piece of analysis showing why the decrease may only be the result of Google's own aspiration for more relevance and better performance of ads. And I think it shows pretty well why Google is here to stay and very far from being already "over the hill" as some put it. It is perhaps the most telling testimony of the company's ambition to build a sustainable position in the elusive field of online advertising and beyond that narrow perspective an indication of the stringent demands the company has on itself.

So emails may be flying around showing how great a working environment Google is, but nobody should infer it's a corporate version of Club Med. And judging from their ambitious cooperation with SalesForce , these guys are going for a cut of every significant business transaction they facilitate. That is some business quest!

clipped from www.economist.com The case of the missing clicks What does it mean when people click on Google's ads less often? The scare started when comScore, a research firm, reported in late February that Google's “paid clicks” had decreased by 7% during January, and were flat compared with the same month a year earlier. the ratio of paid clicks to searches dropped even faster than the number of paid clicks: it was down by 16% in the month of January. eMarketer, another research firm, projects that online advertising in America will grow by 23% this year, economic troubles notwithstanding, because the measurability of the medium is too compelling for marketers to ignore. the likeliest explanation is instead that Google itself is to blame—by, paradoxically, increasing the quality of its ads this is what drove Google's revenue last year: it grew by 56% on the back of a 21% increase in revenue per paid click.

Lego Mindstorms at Ad:Tech

Just attended a splendid presentation of the way Lego has been actively seeking to and succeeding in involving passionate users in the life of the Mindstorms product line. Lego's people noticed that Mindstorms was generating a lot of passionate contributions and involvement by the community of users, many of whom were absolutely not kids but male adults. The product seems to have been outrageously successful in the Silicon Valley, where the local tech enthusiasts seem to be the typical customers. The product was being hacked and transformed in all sorts of ways... So Lego's people decided to really engage in a very intense interaction with their customers and to let them influence the life of the product to a very large degree. They set a few very simple rules to manage the community of carefully screened engaged users: respect, positive contribution and giving Lego a veto right on how the product would evolve... Today, it's one of the best known examples of how powerful a genuine engagement with customers can be to drive buzz, word of mouth and basically to make it possible for a lovemark to emerge. There's even the case of famous author Chris Anderson who went on to build a drone using a Mindstorms NXT control module...
Here's a nice little video about Mindstorms:

OpenSpime gets Joi Ito on board

Great news for my friends at OpenSpime who got the nod from Joi Ito who joined their Board of Advisors. That's just a dream asset to have for their team. Getting the right advice from the right early supports is one of the most powerful ways I know for a start-up to take off beautifully. Here's their announcement.
These guys are clearly embarked on something that fits very well my definition of a business quest and they do seem to be able to attract top talent to guide them in the uncharted waters ahead.

Understanding business growth to manage more of it

To many people the very idea that growth can be a problem for a business may sound strange. Yet, growth is the cause of demise of many new ventures and proper management of business growth is one of the most critical tasks for managers to perform. I put together some slides to outline some very important aspects of growth sustainability mainly from the financial perspective. Hopefully it will give entrepreneurs some food for thought. Enjoy and please let me have your feedback.

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Carbon emissions: facts to make a difference

Nowadays a day seldom goes by without some piece of news regarding the sorry state and dismal prospects of the Earth's environment. These are the days of inconvenient truths. Opinions are numerous, conceptual ideas abound,  more or less scientific and rigorous conclusions widely distributed and each person responds in their own way. Some will feel anxious, others don't know or pretend not to know (so they can drive an over-sized car with an engine that makes a noise that is music to their ears), others still feel a century is too long a time to worry and a few do what they can to help.
The point however is that we all seem to be like drivers or airplane pilots deprived of instruments, flying or driving blindly in the worrying knowledge that the wall we will hit is getting dangerously close. That's the key issue: we lack data about the impact of our daily micro-decisions on the environment even though there are all sorts of calculators of environmental impact out there. What we do not have is a means to measure what is going on as it's happening, which is really a pity in a world so connected. That's precisely one of the challenges OpenSpime, the self proclaimed "infrastructure company for an open internet of things", seems to be addressing with a pretty cool infrastructure that combines sensors, software, the Internet and mashups to deliver actual maps of carbon dioxide emissions. A good friend of mine is their CTO and I am impressed with what these guys are presenting in this video:

WPP building the next generation agency?

Currently attending a panel with Lance Maerov, the SVP Corporate Development (read M&A) for WPP and Trevor Kaufman, the CEO of Schematic, a company they bought last year as part of their string of nearly a hundred acquisitions and investments in 2007. They're talking about how traditional agencies are acquiring and investing to stay relevant in the years ahead. I have a short excerpt in the video below, but here is a summary of interesting points:

• traditional agencies realized sometime last year that they were quickly becoming less relevant and being challenged by new players. Their response was pretty much that of any incumbent: buy what you can't match. The interesting question is how will they actually address the challenge of truly integrating the acquisitions and achieve a fundamental transformation of the DNA of the traditional agency business;
• topic of building the next generation agency seems to be in the CEO's agenda at WPP, which is a good sign and pretty much what is also happening at Publicis;
• choosing for acquisition targets they went first for companies they had been in touch with for a number of years;
• big focus on BRIC countries and North America;
• the traditional agencies are choosing companies for acquisition based on their size and business potential, looking for good management teams in place because they don't have the skills and resources to take over the management of these companies. In Maerov's words "if an entrepreneur thinks that WPP people will start running his business once the acquisition is done, that's a red flag for us and the deal will not happen";
• areas of interest include behavioral targeting, analytics, interactive capabilities, integration between online and off-line spaces;
• in the video below they mention 24/7 Real Media, another acquisition of WPP in 2007, which they said was interesting because it allowed them to optimize campaigns both online and off-line;
• Maerov said despite the purported slow-down of the economy he sees no sign of budgets being reduced and that WPP will pursue an aggressive strategy of acquisitions, something that is confirmed in this article of the NY Post;
• in the same article they mention a recent acquisition through JWT of 75% of Belgian Tagora, positioned as a dialogue marketing agency, with annual sales of 5.3 m$ (3.6 m€ with gross assets of 2.74 m€ end 2007). Could not find the acquisition price, but I would be interested in getting it...

OnMedia_NewNewAgency
Video sent by alexpapa

 

The American spirit of rising to the challenges ahead

Being in NYC these days, I am spending quite some time observing the city and its people as well as watching those huge screens displaying TV programs on the avenues of the city that never sleeps. These are uncertain times for the US economy and one of the things I was looking for was how people would react to that. First of all, I see none of the gloom and doom even though people acknowledge the ride ahead may be quite bumpy for a while. Secondly, I am impressed with this very American way of seeing opportunity and rising to the challenge in troubled times. To illustrate this, I see quite a few people who are turning the current pressure some people feel into a business opportunity selling books and workshops on how to make real estate decisions or how to reduce debt. Some authors do that positioning themselves as experts while others occupy the "consumer activism" space defending customers from the nasty tactics of credit card companies and other providers of financial services. And this is quite intense.

So there's a big difference between US and Europe: the Americans are able to see opportunity in almost any trouble, while Europeans see trouble in many opportunities. For example, the way we handled the expansion of the EU to Eastern Europe is perhaps iconic of this: the French started complaining about Polish plumbers "invading" their market and no public figure, no political leader trumpeted the only message that was constructive back then (and perhaps now): "go East young man!"

What makes a commercial powerful and lasting?

Since I am in Canada these days and since I am most interested in the momentous changes that have been going on in the field of marketing for the past couple of years, I 'd like to comment a beautiful advertising campaign. It's the Molson campaign that was released many years ago and which plays very well on the existence of stereotypes commonly held by Americans about (did I say a-boot?) Canadians. Quite clearly this is an ad that captures human attention mainly because it's fun and light. See for yourself:

But there are other aspects to it that are interesting amongst which is the fact that it lends itself to sequels and to further exploitation of the dominants stereotypes. Here's a second film that illustrates this:

On the same theme, a couple of friends told me about (a-boot?) somebody who produced a derivative version of the Molson ad that makes huge fun of the cultural divide between French speaking and English speaking Canadians.

Perhaps a good way to bring sterile debates to a fairer proportion than politicians would like to and perhaps a good inspiration for somebody to do something analogous in Belgium because the people of that country deserve a much better political leadership IMHO.

So, what makes a commercial powerful (i.e. capable of seizing human attention in a world of content overload)? What makes it last and get a second life in a radically transformed media environment? I wonder whether there are other ads from past years that could be exploited by modern day communication agencies in the interactive space as shaped by the Internet to deliver high impact campaigns...

What's key in guiding customers?

"In giving advice, seek to help, not please, your friend."
Solon

Over the past couple of months I've been working on some pretty confidential stuff that made it very difficult for me to share on this blog. However, as I seek to guide my customers towards maximal achievement of their personal and business potential, there is definitely one thing that I am faced with on a near permanent basis: telling them what they need to hear and not what they would like to hear. As an external contributor to their business, I consider integrity as my key asset because it provides the bedrock of coherence, rigorous analysis and compassionate advice. So of course, one of the things I am careful not to let customers do is use me to justify their decisions regardless whether I agree or not with their decisions. Hence the quote above.