Author Archives: Seiche

OMMA Behavioral

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All told great sessions held at Hotel Nikko, SF.

Some random observations:

  • What short memories marketers have. Total obliviousness to the four other companies that preceded the Behavioral 1.0: Neural Applications, HNC Aptex, Nestor Interactive and Trivida.
  • Somebody threw out $775 MM in BT spend this year. Where does this number come from?
  • Good session by Brent from Omniture about “antici-pointment.” That is Omniture-speak for the messaging disconnect from ad to click to landing page.
  • Where else can you hear the word, “Inchoate” used 3 times? Not at @dtech.
  • Eric from 33Across mentioned the need to re-use a la lead gen, users that expressed interest but didn’t follow-through to conversion.
  • Frost from Collective/Predictify talking about agencies having their own database of behavioral profiles.
  • Budgeting 15% of spend for optimization of campaigns.
  • The “Social Media Advertising Pile-On”

Check out OMMA Behavioral Raw blog

MP3s Coming soon…

Long Tail Meme Challanged by Harvard Prof…

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Harvard Business School Associate Professor of Marketing, Anita Elberse (HBS – Bio) takes down Wired Editor-in-Chief, Chris Anderson (finally) on the latest online business fad: The Long Tail concept. This is basically, “make it up in volume” notion.

While it may be true that distribution of certain goods is less expensive in an online setting (sometimes), human behavior is pretty solidly on hits, fads and top sellers. Sure, there will always be a small market for random Oldies and nostalgia but that business simply does not scale and is often referred to as “niche”. Here is Elberse’s work:

  1. The Shape of Consumption
  2. A Taste for Obscurity?
  3. Implications for Strategy
  4. Advice to Producers
  5. Advice to Retailers
  6. Who Will Prosper?

So what is the “The Long Tail” premise? Nothing original, just a “Business 2.0” rip of the Pareto Principle (aka 80-20 rule) developed by Economist Vilfredo Pareto over 100 years ago. When I worked for mass drugstore chain Walgreen’s and got to observe consumer behavior up-close-and-personal, common sense business contradicts the Long-Tail concept.

The longish defense from Chris Anderson in response to Elberse:

  • “My point is not to suggest that Elberse is wrong and that I’m right, it’s only to point out that different definitions of what the Long Tail is, from “head” to “tail”, will generate wildly different results.”

OMMA Behavioral Coming Up…

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Mediapost’s OMMA Behavioral is coming up mid-July…looks very promising; I’m expecting to attend!

  • Tacoda founder (and one of my former bosses from RealMedia) Dave Morgan is opening it up – very fitting!
    • Unrelated but Dave wrote an interesting article in AdAge about the communal consumption of video a few months back. See The End of the Shared Media Experience? (AdAge): “Media’s past was anchored in content people consumed at the same time in the same place, such as movies in theaters, or at the same time but in different places, such as shows on TV and radio and news in papers and magazines. Media is now shifting more and more toward an on-demand future.”
  • Joe Andrieau is also going to be there on the data portability panel…should be very interesting…OpenSocial in the context of advertising.
  • Keynote is being given by Omniture’s Josh James – an interesting albeit non-obvious choice. Omniture’s management has expressed interest in redefining “behavioral” for their on site multivariate Test & Targeting package (acquired in Offermatica and a UK-based company). Most of the industry sees this as an offsite challenge.

At Walmart.com’s Online Media program it was both.

SVASE Digital Media: Building a Business with Social Networks

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Downloadable excerpt from SVASE: Digital Media: Building a Business with Social Networks

(MP3).

The Panel:

  • Patrick Chanezon, API Evangelist, Google

  • Jyri Engestrom, Entrepreneur, Google and Co-founder, Jaiku

  • Konstantin Guericke, CEO, jaxtr and Co-founder, LinkedIn

  • Ramu Yalamanchi, Founder and CEO, hi5

Moderator: Trevor Cornwell,Founder, Embarkons, Inc


MISC. NOTES:

  1. Patrick from Google discussed the concept of socializing objects; people gathering around something.
  • question later came from an engineer of how this works with object-oriented programming…(no joke).
  • Find opportunities using “Chain on Pain” mentioned as a helpful and applicable Guy Kawasaki-ism.
  • Naming…just add “ster”, e.g. Jobster, Dogster, Jaxtr, etc…
  • Konstantin thought it key to build value in the product, enough for people to pay for…
  • Jyri brought up a question that prospectice investors ask, that entrepreneurs ought to ask themselves…”What is your Unfair Advantage?”
  • Some prescient advertising insight offered by Ramu in the Q&A

    • Tired of Doom & Gloom in the Online Ad Biz?

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    May want to read on… The IAB announced the 2007 stats. While they are slow in coming, these reports are usually very interesting and full of good insight.

    • For 2007, revenues totaled $21.2 bil, exceeding 2006 performance by 26 %, itself the former record year.
    • Q4 2007 Internet advertising revenues hit $5.9 billion, representing historic revenues for a single quarter and a 24% increase over the same period in 2006.
    • This is the fourth consecutive year and 13th consecutive quarter of record results.
    PRICING MODELS
    FY 2007
    FY 2006
    CPM or Impression
    45% ($9,492)
    48% ($8,102)
    Performance Deals
    51% ($10,817)
    47% ($7,933)
    Hybrid
    4% ($897)
    5% ($844)

    Sure is interesting to see performance deals exceeding CPM-based advertising…

    Full IAB-PWC Report

    Behavioral Ad Targeting Snippets of Note

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    • AdAge reports on Rainbow Media’s AMC, introducing behavioral targeting characteristics to its upfront sales via a new measurement system developed with Nielsen: Audience Identity Metric (AIM) is a “new “measurement tool will help advertisers align brands to psychographic categories of AMC viewers. Very interesting, is this online behavior-based media planning influencing TV advertising or media trade hype?
    • Looks like a German company, NuggAd is picking up where Neural OptiMatch left off with Predictive Real-Time Behavioral Targeting.

    Memetic Marketing & Social Media

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    A collection of interesting stories that I’m digesting around social media and related technologies:

    Study: VOD Brand Recall Impressive

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    Anthony Crupi writes about VOD effectiveness…kind of ties into the MTV post. Not sure he entirely gets it but the newly-acquired Nielsen Research’s IAG does:

    “Viewers were 68% more likely to recall a spot seen in an on-demand context than they would an ad on linear TV…consumers were 83% more likely to identify the marque after being exposed.”