And while we're at it, your PowerPoint #sucks too

While I am on a rant about what #sucks in our industry, I was recently reading Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint presentations. Whilst this particular model is tailored to a specific purpose, this is a great reminder of the basics of using PowerPoint - have only highly relevant slides, be sure to get through them before everyone gets bored (and because of unexpected delays) and force yourself to have each slide contain a single point by using 30pt font or above.

To me, the additional point to be made is that PPT is a collection of tools at your disposal - not your master. Just because you have a slide in your deck doesn't mean to say you have to use it on the day!

Consider a professional golfer who carries 14 clubs in their bag, or the sculptor with a dozen sizes of chisels, or the children with hundreds of barbies (I have 3 girls, give me a break!) - in each of these cases not all the assets are used day to day, but rather a select few get the job done with several kept in reserve for unforeseen circumstance. Your deck should be the same way.

I remember a pitch early in my career where after the first 3 slides the potential client told me to show him the very last slide and he would decide based on that content whether the meeting was worth continuing. He was quite rightfully trying to save himself from some junior sales guy who had (lots of) something to say and who was determined to get through it all before taking the next breath.

I watched a company pitch the other day, a very seasoned executive at the helm, and every time a slide came up he started with "This is just..."

Really? Screw that.

What he was subconsciously saying to the audience was:
1. The content of this new slide is dull
2. Someone else put it together for me and I haven't looked at it
3. What I am about to show you doesn't need your attention

And he did it for every slide. Every slide!

The person he was pitching was bored and had no reason to pay any attention to what he was being shown because before he had a chance to digest it, he was already hearing 'don't bother, its crap'!

Whilst I might keep some slides that show brand safety, PSA test structures and free dynamic creative examples for search retargeting, I rarely use more than 2 core slides, only skipping forward to the others if a specific question comes up.

The old adage of 'people buy people' remains true today - when was the last time you heard someone say "Well! I had just to buy their product because they have the most amazing deck".

Happy PowerPointing.

Service in our industry #sucks

What is it with digital marketing? Why are service levels so bad, and why does it seem so wildly accepted? I remember when I was on the agency side and was growing a media team, the flow of sloppy emails, crappy presentations and a whole ton of bullshit from vendors and publishers seemed never ending. We would get proposals from companies with spelling errors, other agencys' logos on them and no thought put into them at all. The most mental investment the sales person must have committed was whether the logo went on the left or the right.

We developed the attitude that 'if you don't care about us, then we sure as hell don't care about you'. Don't stand for it people, expect and demand more. Much, much more.

When I made the switch to the [dark] vendor side, I swore that we would not be the same, Chango would be grown into an organisation that really cared about our customers, and we would be a partner, not a vendor.

Listening to our search retargeting clients, we have achieved just that, and I love it. We have client services people who care as much about a client saying we rock as we do about the CPA. We constantly strive to deliver unexpected surprises and have our unique ways of doing it.

Getting this right isn't hard as such, but it is a culture, an attitude. You can't 'teach' it, but you can 'grow' it.

I won't claim Chango gets 100% of campaigns right first time (this is media after all, so let's not talk BS and say it works for everyone, every day) but we do get 95% of them right, and in those few cases when a client doesn't hit CPA, they always tell us it was a pleasure working with us and they learnt something.

Digital marketing is fun (have you seen Dirty Jobs??), make sure you enjoy it and only work with people who care enough to know that the logo should always go on the left :)

Part Two and a Half: The Media Agency / Client Relationship – When Agencies Become Media Vendors

In part two I discussed how some media vendors have been forced to start acting like agencies in order to compete for media dollars, but once in that position, there are a number of benefits to the situation, if only they can afford to maintain it.

But I couldn’t move on without considering the reverse scenario - agencies themselves are becoming media vendors.

We primarily see this with the holding companies who have been creating trading desks through which they buy ‘raw’ media from the exchanges, package it up in some way with data and optimization, and offer it to the brands that engage them. Whilst glass walls exist between the desk and the agency, and the agency buys from the desk like they would any other media source, the trading desks often have their own relationships with the client too. In those circumstances they use (sometimes) proprietary technology, their own flavor of secret sauce and their own teams to provide an end to end media buy. They have become vendors.

But it’s not just the big agencies doing this. Look at an agency running a simple technique like site retargeting by using a DSP (Demand Side Platform) and they too are being vendor-like. The advantage is control and margin - buy your site retargeting campaign through an end solution vendor and you pay their profit margin, but buy it as close to source as possible and you get to keep that margin for yourself. Interestingly the brand always ends up paying the margin of course, unless they themselves choose to bring the technology in-house, something I predict will occur a lot more over the coming 24 months.

How will the agency / client relationship have to evolve to account for such a development?

Look out for future parts of this series:

Part Three: The Media Agency / Client Relationship - The Unrealistic Client

Part Four: The Media Agency / Client Relationship - Choosing The Right Agency for Added Value

Part Two: The Media Agency / Client Relationship – When Vendors Become Agencies

In part one of this series I discussed how clients are taking control of their digital marketing programs by bringing technologies like ad serving in-house. Whilst it may seem trivial, it frees the brand to switch agencies or work with multiple agencies because they own their own data. The shift has been rapid too, with my estimation of ad serving contracts being 90% held by agencies just 5 years ago to perhaps only 30-40% today.

But technology today also includes many aspects of the media buy itself, especially within the world of direct response display.

About a year ago when I was on the agency side, one of our clients was a large online/offline retailer. Being tasked with generating new customers and ROI we invested in a lot of techniques such as site retargeting and behavioral targeting. The relationship had its challenges, but it worked, and we provided the knowledge to know how to structure their spend, which providers to use and how to get everything to work together.

And then one day we took a call to say that the client was going to take one of their behavioral targeting campaigns in-house, cut us out of the equation. The reason? We “weren’t adding any value to the relationship”. As the agency, that sucked of course, particularly for my media planner who had suggested the vendor in the first place; you can’t help but feel cheated in those scenarios.

A year on though I can look back and give a more subjective response – I don’t blame the client, and they were entirely correct to do what they did. After the vendor was selected, setup and integrated into their processes, there probably wasn’t much we could have added. The vendor had a good relationship with the client, they had their pixels all over the site and they were doing the granular optimization day to day. We could monitor and give input, but it wasn’t really worth 12% of a $3m annual spend.

Was it fair that the client cut us out of the equation and slashed our potential to earn revenue from them? No, of course not, but who said anything had to be fair. It is another example of how the typical relationship between a client and a media agency is fundamentally broken. What we should have done was had clauses in our contracts that took such a scenario into account, but as the challenger agency brand, we didn’t have the power to negotiate for those.

I remember another example where a long standing travel client asked us to build the media plans for another season, which we did expecting an auto renewal on the contract, only to watch them take those same plans, hire a media planner for $60k and execute everything themselves. I tried to show anger to the vendors we had chosen for their media plans, but who can blame them for taking the revenue?

And now as a media vendor, that’s a common problem we face – who do you take money from and when?

Whilst this situation has always happened in advertising, the site retargeting vendors seem to have led the way within the digital space. It is a technology play more than a media play, requires very detailed setup and frequent optimization. They build complex algorithms to match creative to placement to cookie to time of day, and they often use their own dynamic creative engine. To remain competitive against other types of spend they rolled out performance models to replace the typical CPM, charging only for incremental performance they drove. And of course to manage all of these moving parts they hired account managers to liaise with the client (be a brand or an agency) who hold weekly calls and status meetings……

How is that any different from what an agency does? Reality is, it’s not. In these scenarios, the line has disappeared between an agency and a media vendor, and both are trying to find their new ways of operating.

For the agency the threat is clear, they risk losing repeatable revenue from some of the most popular techniques like site retargeting and search retargeting, and they must find a new way to stay relevant, (which we will explore further in this series).

For the vendor it’s a love/hate situation.

When you get a smart client and you have smart client-facing people, it is to the vendor’s advantage to act as much like an agency as possible. Primarily it reduces the risk of being cut from a media plan, but additionally the better relationship leads to better revenue opportunities and deeper integration.

However, get a client who is not so… experienced … then it is the worst situation for the vendor. They must now provide the campaign AND hold the brand’s hand just as the agency would. All the calls about pixels and tagging fall on their shoulders, and they must provide the same weekly calls the brand expected from the agency - but without the nice 12% management fee on top! And within a competitive space like ours, where so many of us are younger companies fighting for the sunlight, we must do this at the sacrifice of some margin.

As vendors we also risk upsetting an agency. In a recent example, a known retailer that we were working with through a large agency decided to terminate that agency relationship and bring the business to us directly. Both relationships mattered to us and so it was a difficult situation. Our relationship with the agency was strong though, and so a simple conversation and an arrangement on another client was all it took to make sure everyone stayed happy.

In short, the brand’s have taken control and are causing media agencies and vendors to redefine their behaviors, whether they realize it or not. Right now it is to the brand’s advantage as they are often getting good service for less cost, but at some point, the brands are ultimately the ones who will have to pay. For us as a vendor we play fair of course, following ‘rules’ that resemble those from adolescent dating – we sometimes don’t know who is really interested, whether they “like us” or “like us, like us” and we particularly don’t date our friends ex girlfriend – not unless they tell us its ok of course!

Look out for future parts of this series:

Part Two and a Half: The Media Agency / Client Relationship - When Agencies Become Media Vendors

Part Three: The Media Agency / Client Relationship - The Unrealistic Client

Part Four: The Media Agency / Client Relationship – Choosing The Right Agency for Added Value

Part One: The Media Agency / Client Relationship – The Brand’s Take Control

Five years ago I found myself as an executive of an ad serving business in Europe, competing against the likes of Atlas and DoubleClick for mostly agency clients. The pitch was about delivery speed, reporting functionality and how quick you could traffic 30 placements with 20 creatives after a martini lunch. The agencies spoke our language and the brands did not, allowing the agencies to not only make a handsome profit from our technology (often $0.05 to $0.50 CPM above cost), but also to own the client’s data and the pixels on their site, making it hard for the client to move their account in the future.

Most clients failed to understand why that could become a problem, and most agencies failed to see how quickly it would change.

Roll the clock forward and the landscape has indeed changed. Now on the media supply side I work with both agencies and direct advertisers and we work with the ad servers that those clients tell us to (mostly Dart) - but in most of these situations, it is now the client that owns the technology license, not the agency.

The enablers of this change are the demystification of what ad serving is and the influx of cheap labor that understands how to use it. Ask most CMOs and they can tell you their ad server gives them independent reporting, view-thru measurement and campaign management, and that a low(er) cost resource manages it for them.

More importantly, ask the smart CMOs and they will tell you it gives them the power to switch agencies if and when they want to without losing historical data or needing to re-pixel their website. To this day Dart does not have a feature for porting a client out of one agency’s account into another’s, and probably with good reason.

(Of course it also helps that starting prices for Dart are down to $0.25 CPM, and will drop quick with some volume, and if you can’t afford the annual minimum investments, companies like AdSwerve will step in to give you access for a lower investment level. For the value, that’s a great deal.)

But ad serving is not the only aspect of digital marketing that CMOs are looking at bringing in house as they begin to question the three core value props the agencies have:

1. Know what to buy to make the campaign successful
2. Manage the buying and implementation processes
3. Negotiate the best rates

The first point is critical – in my old agency team at iCrossing we had a dozen people who were primarily focused on points 2 and 3, allowing me to focus heavily on innovation and keeping us ahead of the game. Combine that with media planners who took many, many publisher meetings themselves, there was rarely a new tactic we did not know about. And this value was passed back to the clients in the form of better results, (and sometimes just a chance for them to be involved in something cool).

As for the second point, the industry is matured to the point where no brand needs to recreate the wheel in terms of processes – the resource that was being charged out at 3x salary a month ago is now on staff at the brand doing the exact same job!

And for the third point, well the world has changed significantly over the last 3 years. Whilst it remains true that some agencies hold guaranteed access to certain inventory sources at preferred rates, the percentage of media that is being bought through auction tools is rising sharply, and where an auction exists, so does ‘equal’ access (and therefore CPMs).

So if you are a marketer who feels you have the time and connections to stay in touch with this evolving industry, what are you really using your agency for?

Look out for future parts of this series:

Part Two: The Media Agency / Client Relationship – When Vendors Become Agencies

Part Two and a Half: The Media Agency / Client Relationship - When Agencies Become Media Vendors

Part Three: The Media Agency / Client Relationship - The Unrealistic Client

Part Four: The Media Agency / Client Relationship – Choosing The Right Agency for Added Value

Addictive entertainment - live search queries

I am up in the Chango offices in Toronto this week, and we just activated a screen on the wall for our party that shows live search queries hitting our systems. With more than 5 billion a month, and 100,000 queries per second on media impressions, this is an amazing technology.

It is the live search terms that are addictive though! Sat here over the last 5 minutes I can see 'society' seeking everything from coupons, to naked celebrities, music lessons, vacation deals, the best french press, kinky things to do in bed and how to write a novel! If you have to Google it either of those latter searches, perhaps they are not your strength!

Some of my other favorites whilst sat here:

how to check if my yeast is active

how to attach paper mache to a tree

nervous job interview

squatter rights new york city

make a fake plastic city

13 year old boys normal height

time fertilizing an apple tree

how do you break up with someone you love

how to open standard wooden chest without key

become a freight forwarder

and the utterly intriguing "how to start a cemetery" !

3 simple alternatives to attribution modeling

As a follow up to previous pieces on attribution modeling, check out my latest article on Search Engine Land - 3 simple alternatives to attribution modeling. These tactics include the Media Overlap Report, the PSA study and the Traffic Quality measure.

Previously we have looked at The Truth About Attribution Modeling and An Update on Attribution Modeling - Little Has Changed in a Year.

You can feature in an Online Marketing Summit presentation!

I will be speaking at the Online Marketing Summit on the 11th July at OMS Jersey City and on the 18th July at OMS Atlanta - the topic will be "Is retargeting / remarketing right for you?". (Spoiler alert - yes it is!)

I will be using in part the 7 Types of Effective Retargeting from Chango to explain how site retargeting and search retargeting differ, and how your campaigns should be using each one.

I want to answer the questions you ask, and so leave your questions in the comments below and I will read them out and contact you with your own custom response. In addition, I want to hear your stories of retargeting - what worked, what didn't - and if you can share some numbers, then even better.

Credit given to all contributors at OMS.

Stick a clog in it! The Dutch deal with cookies

It's big news from Holland, where they have been busy passing laws on cookies and net neutrality.

In a somewhat surprising move, they are first to follow up on a previous European directive that insisted that cookies had to be opt-in. At the time (Nov 2009) an update to the Telecoms Reform Act caused concern to marketers who were worried what an opt-in would mean, but then in December they seemed to climb down and the panic seemed over smaller.

The idea is good. There is a move to ensure consumers understand what data is being collected on them and give them choice on whether to proceed. The problem though is that the word 'cookies' has a bad name and is associated with nothing but negative connotations. The reality is that cookies provide important functionality, but also a better browsing experience, more relevant content and better advertising.

The presence of cookies should be communicated, but forcing an opt-in is likely to only have a negative impact.

For a background on cookie law...

2011 Jan - Big News: EU 'reverses' stance on requiring cookies to be opt-in

2010 Dec - FTC should ban all those evil cookies - the spoof!

2010: Jul - Pay Attention! An update to online privacy law

2009 Nov - EU Passes Cookie Law - Opt-in Required

In a more positive move, Holland also passed a law that says mobile networks can not charge more for accessing services like Skype, perhaps the first move to a true net neutrality legal framework.

(Note to British readers - best Peter Kay one-liner - "I met a Dutch girl with inflatable shoes. I called her up to ask her for a date, but she'd popped her clogs.")

FailBlog

Sometimes I hate my colleagues for showing me things like FailBlog because of the time they can consume! You have to check this out though, simply awesome blog.

Search Engine Land: Why Search Marketers Are The Future Media Planners

Display advertisers and search marketers used to be polar opposite, rarely worked together on a campaign (even when an agency called it integrated) and didnt really understand each others business.

"I was in a full-service agency at the time running a display team, and started hearing of display ads running for display clients that my team wasn’t responsible for. My first reaction was common – I was protective of my budget and felt that these search marketers didn’t really know what they were doing with banners. But as I looked at the tools they were using, I realized they were better equipped than I was."

Read the full article on Search Engine Land here.

My body has a value!

For years now I have both bought and sold advertising space and time. I can tell you the value of a digital impression in almost any setting, or what return on investment you might get from a 15 second pre-roll on a contextual site.

Space and time has value. And therefore so does my arse, my back and my belly!

Sure I will consider wearing your Abercrombie shirt or your Bench sweat pants, buts this biological billboard will cost you. A lot.

(Abercrombie might have to pay me more, have you smelt their stores!!)

There were some experimental companies set up to monetize the space that our bodies have, paying students to wear shirts with ads on them, but none of these companies seem to have made it work. Yet those same students will happily do this for free for all manner of brands. Oh, and they are paying the advertiser!

Personally I am turned off anything clothing with a big brand written on it... unless someone reading this cares to sponsor me...

Have you started search retargeting yet?

Over the last few weeks I have been watching with great interest as we have launched and optimized a series of search retargeting campaigns for major brands, including a lot of known retailers. What is interesting is the results - the CTRs are nothing short of spectacular, ranging from 0.1 to over 1% on certain words!

Having built its own RTB technology, Chango optimizes each keyword with each site / creative / time of day etc, considering multiple data points at any moment. That anti-segment approach means every situation is treated differently and that's what generates the results.

The term 'clothing deals' for instance running on a coupon site might generate a 0.2% CTR, but place an ad to those searchers when they are on a video site between 3:30 and 5:30pm on a weekday and it gets a 1% CTR.

What has also been interesting is the realisation of more marketers that search retargeting is different - it is not a quick campaign technique, it is also a long term solution to deliver consistent returns and make SEM work a lot harder. The future will be that all marketers will accept the essential tools for any campaign are not just SEM and SEO, but also Search Retargeting (SeRT) and Site Retargeting (SRT).

Watch this space

AdSwerve – a business I wish I had thought of!

Put simply, AdSwerve brings enterprise-level ad serving from the leading company in the field, DoubleClick, to the smaller advertiser. They do one thing, and from my experience to date, they do it very well, this is DoubleClick for the little guy.

Opening its doors to customers less than 18 months ago, AdSwerve is approaching 100 customers, and at a $250 a month starting price, is likely paying the bills for itself quite nicely. Founded by Clint Tasset (a former DoubleClick man), and with Matt Fiskness on board shortly after, they are a group that get the ad serving eco system well and have stumbled across a fascinating business model. To their customers they are a technology and services company – it just happens to be that the tech they offer happens to be one of the best developed platforms in our entire industry, and is certainly not the technology of such a young company!

Their relationship with DoubleClick appears very symbiotic too. Dart focuses itself on building the best ad platform in the market and targets the large advertiser or agency who can shell out a minimum of $50k per annum. AdSwerve act as a reseller for that same platform and brings it to the smaller advertiser, providing all their own support services, giving Dart a revenue stream they otherwise would not have. And as the client grows? Well then they can become a fully-fledged Dart customer directly if they choose too.

And perhaps they fill another gap too – ‘excellence’ is not the first word most people would give as their descriptor of Dart customer services! Back in the day when I ran Bluestreak Europe, customer service would be the primary reason we would steal clients from Dart, (but to be fair to Dart I have not had personal need to use their customer service directly for a few years now).

For those of you who are less familiar with ad serving and why it matters, let me summarize. Ad serving serves 3 major purposes:

• First, it provides independent analytics for your display media campaigns, and as stated by media insertion orders using IAB standards, is the set of numbers by which the media owner must bill. In fact, the “agency-side” or “advertiser-side” of ad serving is commonly referred to as 3PAS, or ‘3rd party ad server’ because of its independent nature. (*1)

• Second, it allows for easy management of the sites you run on and the creative units you use – having trafficked out a campaign of 30 ads to 50 sites, the last thing you want to do is to contact all those sites directly to change them all when the client changes their corporate color from red to green on a whim! Dart makes things like this significantly easier.

• Thirdly, it unifies reporting. If you advertise on multiple sites you need one tool and one reporting methodology – if you are reliant on 50 sites analytics, you are not comparing apples to apples. (*2)

And yet historically, the leading tool in this space has not been available to the majority of advertisers. Until AdSwerve came along.

And it leads me to another reason I like this company. By being an AdSwerve customer, you get access to Dart’s advanced reporting, including those that help you understand my favorite subject, attribution modeling. Even as an agency guy at iCrossing approving invoices for tens of thousands of dollars to Dart monthly, I didn’t get access to such tools without paying a lot of extra cash.

So clearly I am an AdSwerve fan! And I wonder what of their future? Their symbiotic relationship with the big G restricts them from expanding out to other technologies like Atlas, cutting off what to me was their obvious next income stream. But if we look at the valuation Google placed on Groupon ($6bn), perhaps we see the answer there. Clearly Google wants access to ‘local’ and to increase the services offered to the smallerer advertiser beyond AdWords, and isn’t that what Clint and team are building? Certainly the latter. One future could be that their business for the little guy takes Clint and team back into the machine at some point, bringing technology and services to the small advertiser at scale. (Wild speculation of course!)

Or perhaps they will continue their great service and success being happily independent – Clint and Matt are based in CO, and declined the move to Mountain View after the Google acquisition telling me that ‘people who live in CO live here for a reason’. I could not agree more. Good luck to them.

You can find more information on AdSwerve on their website at http://adswerve.com and watch out for tutorial videos on YouTube from them soon.

---

(*1) Approximately 4 years ago, all the major independent ad servers stopped being so independent; DoubleClick was sold to Google, Atlas ended up at Microsoft, Bluestreak (no site anymore) at Carat and so on, with many questioning whether they could still be referred to as ‘independent. What matters is that they are independent of either the advertiser or the media owner… unless you are MSN or Google of course!

(*2) When it comes to analytics, an ad server will also give you access to ‘post-impression’ or ‘view-thru’ data, the process by which someone may be exposed to an ad and later converts without actually ever clicking on the ad itself.

Ballsy video campaign

If nothing else, Tremor's new campaign has balls.

http://www.thankyouhulu.com/

Noob Guide Infographic (and check out this blog over here...)

I am a sucker for a good infographic! This one from Unbounce is pretty awesome - a visual approach to online marketing. Pick a tactic, follow the instructions, and Unbounce being a landing page company, learn where the landing page should be developed! But all relevant.

But also, check out the blog from Matt Schultz that I found this on - ByteEngine. The blog has had some of the coolest stuff on it lately.

After the Noob guide, my favourite is the comparison between the burgers we see in advertising compared to the burgers that are served to us. Check it out here.

(Tip of the hat to @ByteEngine)

Brand Protection is NOT About The Domain You Run On

Being concerned about brand protection in display advertising makes sense - after all, who wants to place an ad against questionable content?

And there are many horror stories from over the years to scare the marketer, including the jet ski company who ran ads against an obituary for a sports star who died during a jet skiing accident during a vacation, or the UK telecoms brand who appeared alongside pro-Nazi messaging.

The screenshot here was taken just a few moments ago and shows an article about the finding of the Air France plane that crashed, and up at the top is an ad from Amex showing how reward points can be used for trips to Paris.

And hands up, in a former life I worked on simultaneous campaigns for a retailer and for a travel client that both saw ads appear against a photo article 'covering' the newly invented naked sport of Girling (think Curling but...).

It happens, and in response marketers specify certain criteria in their media buys such as Comscore 1000, no adult, no gaming etc. But actually they are missing the point, simply because they probably do not know better, and partly because if something goes wrong they can tell their bosses that they followed industry best practices.

But the media world has changed - no longer do we target ads by domain, we tend to target individuals. Take intent marketing techniques like retargeting for instance. Retargeting only cares about who it is talking to, not necessarily where.

Specifying rules like Comscore 500 limits the ability of the program to succeed and does not actually protect you.

Let's go back to the Amex / Air France ad again. The ad is on a major Canadian news portal, a domain that appears in most 'ok' lists because of size and scale. But even still, here we are with a problem.

Simply, it is not the domain, the sub-domain or even the network. It is the content. And that content could be news and more commonly, it could be user generated content.

So the answer is to educate yourself on the alternatives, of which there are primarily two that I have experience with - AdSafe and DoubleVerify. With these tools the emphasis shifts from blocking sites and moves to inspecting content before the ad loads, a much more logical solution in the current world of buying media.

Awkward Wedding Photos!

Nothing to do with digital marketing, but this is awesome! Check out the full list on HuffPo here.

90 Days In - The Insider Scoop On Search Retargeting

About 90 days ago I announced here that I had quit my agency job to join Chango as Chief Revenue Officer. This is the insider scoop.

Firstly, the transition from agency life to supply side is not as big a change as the switch from supply side to agency life was 4 years ago. Back then I was running the European arm of Bluestreak (an ad serving and email delivery company) providing technology and services to agencies and the occasional direct brand, and through a failed acquisition of that company, I ended up at iCrossing.

Four years ago we had clearer definitions in this industry - a technology company provided tech to agencies, agencies looked after brands and their strategies, media owners sold media, and analytics platforms provided the results. Now it seems everyone is trying to race to the middle - agencies are building trading desks, DSPs are becoming agencies on the side, technologies like ad serving are being bought directly by the brand, and media owners are giving away creative for the campaign.

So there is no longer any big shift in day to day work life when moving between one area of our industry to another - except I have to buy the gifts for the agencies now, rather than them just arriving on my desk!

Secondly, it is awesome to walk into all these agencies that I competed against for so long and see under their covers! One word - lobby - it seems today that you cannot be respected as an agency without a kick ass lobby! Fill it full of retro computer gear, cool lighting effects, attractive employees or space age furniture and you are on to a winner.

Those agency visits also bring forward the realization that the business of being an agency is tough to the point that no one has it figured out. That does not mean the agencies I visit are not good, far from in fact, it just means being a master of everything seems impossible.

Thirdly, we might just work in the most complex industry ecosystem out there. I feel for the new people entering our World because they have so much to catchup on. I wonder to what extent they teach students the history of why and how exchanges came about for instance?

But what about Chango itself?

The company sits at the perfect intersection between the two divided ranks of our industry - the 'who' and the 'where'. It used to be that you would pick a site to advertise on based on some demographic information, and then do a deal to place your ads there. What you were buying was both the who and the where. It was very simple.

But then the exchanges came about and the media became available 'raw' - it was the where, but it lacked the who. And so along came data companies to supplement the campaign with that information and the division continued.

Today the trading desks are the end result, using DSP technology to buy the media that a 3rd party data source has determined to have a value to the campaign, typically to generate an ROI.

ROI comes from spotting and understanding the right behaviors

Those behaviors = intent

The most literal example of intent expression comes from search...

And it's on that basis Chango was founded - use the literal expression of intent from search to determine the who. And the first 90 days have demonstrated over and over again that the theory is accurate and it has resulted in our best ever business quarter.

But what I have also learnt is how important it is to have control of the where. Good data is great, but married with full optimization control of the media, the results are amplified. In our case we take a great idea, Search Retargeting, and make it great with full proprietary RTB capabilities.

We don't have everything right yet, but we have retailers getting north of 25:1 ROI, and a team that is doing things no one else is even thinking of yet. And if we had everything done, what fun would there be to have in Q2!

The first 90 days have been great, it was an awesome decision.

And to top it off, Chango has been selected as one of the 4 most innovative companies and will be appearing at AdTech to compete for the title. Come say hi.

An experiment in content - or why I am asking if you have met the Queen

As a multi-agency guy I have sold, managed, project managed and consulted on thousands of websites over the years across most industries, and probably totaling more than $100m in budgets. And whilst many of those needed the complex platforms and proprietary systems we built, I look back now and think many could have used something more lean, and less costly.

Over the last few years the use of blog platforms such as Blogger and WordPress have become not only more common, but also more professional and 'accepted'. There is no criticism by a consumer if they visit a brand and find the site is based on such a system. And reality is they probably don't know.

And so I wanted to create an experiment, something that would let me analyze the value of original content for myself and see how 'social' sharing and interaction could really amplify awareness and engagement. I wanted to prove to myself that the value of the destination is not in the $100k spent on building the site, but the content added to it. And that marketing could be done by your visitors or customers.

And that perhaps there is no destination at all.

So I picked a subject I know about - the British! Since moving to the US a few years ago the most common question I get asked is 'Have You Met The Queen'. Sure we are small nation, but even so, it always amuses us Brits that this crops up quite as often as it does. I have also been asked if Paris is a town in London, and do many of us live in castles. But I am not hear to mock :)

'Have You Met The Queen' just had to be the selected name.

On Monday 21st Feb on a particularly boring flight, I set to work making notes on what the content could be, how it would look, how I would promote it etc.

On Tuesday 22nd Feb I chose the domain, decided to try WordPress as I already know Blogger from this site, and simply went with BlueHost listed on the WP site.

After $90 and 10 minutes I had a domain registered, the username and password for my control panel and with a single click, had WP installed. The first thing to do was to try writing a post, and I replaced the standard 'hello world' with an easy piece of content - a YouTube video from the BBC featuring animals speaking with a British accent. (I hate animal videos, but this is awesome!).

Next I searched for WP themes and soon ran into what seems like a mini monopoly and was staring at sites that wanted me to pay $100 to buy 5,500 templates - I only needed one! After one last look around I found the link to the free ones hosted by WP and settled on something unique looking and fitting to my new magazine style brand.

So now I had a domain, a site, some content, a design and was ready to go. And the running total on time was about 3 hours.

To make sure I had the basic promotional tools, I next went fishing for widgets and plugins and found some awesome functionality for free:

• SEO: Yoast -A free application that takes care of everything that matters, including titles, linking, pinging to engines etc
• Analytics: Google - free and powerful, why not!
• Sharing: SocialSlider - another free tool, this one to create a floating button on the webpage that expands out to offer a huge variety of user promotional tools
• Sharing: AddToAny - supplemental to SocialSlider, this one sits at the bottom of the posts and allows for quick sharing of a single piece of content
• Sharing: Facebook Like button from Facebook
• Mobile: Mpexo - cool, not so pretty, free, useful mobile pages with a device sniffer for phone browsing, solves a problem
• Mobile Analytics: Percent Mobile - tells me I have had 2% of my visitors from mobile devices, and a massive amount of other data

And I added some quick content about glasses, Tony Blair and a naked woman, a recipe for Yorkshire puddings and the location of a secret pie shop in London (shhhh).

Running total, probably 7 hours, and still only $100 spent.

So then it came down to promotion. I decided against SEM as it didn't feel like the right fit and I didn't think I would learn what I wanted to learn. So instead I tried to create a brand page on Facebook... only to learn that you need 25 fans in order to name it. Makes sense from their perspective I suppose, and stops cyber squatting on names someone shouldn't have.

However, I didn't really want to bother my friends and so I had a frustrating 24 hours watching the site get up to a huge 6 likes. This was not going to do, and I turned to Facebook ads.

What a cool system!

What is particularly clever is how it pre-generates you a sample ad and shows it to you on your own page, it really could not be easier. A few clicks later and the required 16 digits, I had an ad made and a campaign live, subject to approval.

In the same spirit as the content of the site, I was a little cheeky - I had a picture of the Queen and the headline was 'Knickers to you!". However it was approved within minutes and I was pleasantly surprised to see I had hit my 25 fans 24 hours later.

Well then I was hooked! So I set it to run for a week and see what would happen, and after $100 invested over 7 days (as of right now), I am seeing some impressive results - an average CPC of just $0.16 and a pre optimization CTR of 0.137%.

The targeting is just so accurate. I was able to choose any interest, such as a love of British Cadbury's chocolate buttons (go seek them out of you don't know what I am talking about), and really zero in on an audience that would hopefully like the content.

And as the number of fans grew, a funny thing happened. The page took on a life of it's own. In 7 days I had created something new that was now growing organically.

What did I create though? Well there is the site - haveyoumetthequeen.com - but Google Analytics tells me I only get 100 uniques a day, and so that isn't it.

When I look at Facebook Insights I see that whatever it is I have created is actually living and breathing there. I have generated almost 20,000 post views within 7 days, and although I scaled back on Sunday, Monday's numbers already push me way past 25,000, and growing fast.

Every few minutes I get an email from Facebook telling me that someone has posted to the wall, and when I get a moment to go check, I see that 10 comments have been added to it and a ton of likes and responses. Each one of those interactions having a social effect of course, promoting the content to more and more people.

As an example, as I started to write this post 30 mins ago, I published a short piece on the site about 'mushy peas' and added it to the Facebook page. As it stands now, I have 5 likes and 5 comments - on a post about peas! I love it.

But I wonder how a brand client would have reacted. I remember during my days in the UK with iCrossing that the social media team created an awesome blog about 'green' issues for a car insurance client. The blog sat outside of corporate and so could take on a life of its own. That was very forward thinking on behalf of the agency, but especially on the part of the big insurance brand.

I think clients like that are the exception, not the rule, and there are many brands who will continue to invest more money than they need to, and agencies will continue to invest it. And it is not a criticism at either, merely an observation that 'comfort' has not caught up with possibilities (and that sometimes that investment is justified).

So what did I learn?

• As much as we talk about users watching TV whilst looking at an iPad or iPhone, an interesting observation came on Sunday during the Oscars. I could have refreshed the Facebook page throughout them and told you when the commercial breaks were with the TV switched off! The timing of batches of new 'likes' came in almost perfect sync with the commercial breaks, and a complete void of any activity during any major award.
• Content is king. I am certainly not the first to say this, but even amateur content can have mass appeal if it is original and what your targeted audience is looking for
• Don't focus on a single destination, focus on the content - let the users come to you where they want to, don't force them into visiting one destination
• Site stats don't matter! I won't care if I don't ever pass 100 uniques a day on the .com, as long as I know people are consuming the content somewhere (although this will be interesting to track as the flow of traffic between the two is increasing)
• Create the feedback loop - Facebook is perfect for this - allow fans of your content to create more of that content and share it with the same community
• Listen, listen and listen some more. From reading the posts and looking at some of the emails I am getting, I can already think of many things I would loved to do with this 'brand'

I also learnt that there are a lot of British people in the US who get asked a lot of dumb questions. And that there are a lot of British people who come to the US and ask a lot of dumb questions! And then I have created a little place where people want to come together and share those stories, as well as learn more about British history, humour and our food (which is not as bad as it is made out to be!)

Not Saving Babies Here Folks

What is fascinating about the new 'do nothing for 2 minutes' website is not that the kid behind Million dollar Homepage is very much in tune with the moment, but that it is disturbingly hard to actually do nothing for two minutes for many, many people.

We have become trained to have our brains on 'receive' constantly, always needing to absorb information from almost any source, whether it be useful or something less so like LOL Cats or Damn You Autocorrect.

(must... not... go... read... more... funny... misspelled... text... messages...)

The sheer quantity of crap we absorb daily is incredible, and if we ever actually find a theoretical storage limit of the brain, it will not be because a rocket scientist fills theirs with numbers, but because some average Joe has looked at too many Awkward Family Photos or People of Walmart, and they will simply explode.

I remember tweeting a few months ago after a short period of bad health that I was "going off the grid to reboot", and a week in the sticks actually made me a lot better. That week was indeed a reboot, during which time my brain had a good old fashioned spring clean and dumped all of that clutter that was not adding value. My RAM cleared, I could operate better. I had no idea how true that Tweet was.

I have now discovered some basic changes in the way I work that have made a huge difference to my productivity, and have switched me from being a slave to information to being in control of it.

(Firstly, I do not have a job that involves saving babies. If you do then this isn't for you and please ignore all references to not responding immediately to messages!!)

So let's imagine having tea with your mum (as all us Brits do), or having dinner with your most important client. And during the conversation someone taps you on the shoulder and asks you a question. Overhearing this question several of the intruders friends decide to express their opinions to the group too. But you don't hear all their points of view because the server wants to give you dozens of reviews on the menu from people you don't know, and before you can absorb them all the mailman arrives and drops off some letters which you open immediately. Glancing up occasionally to mum or your client you fake attention a moment, holding it long enough to hear their next question but not long enough to respond before answering your phone.

As you wave off the mailman (armed with all the responses you wrote to the letters of course), finish considering the menu reviews, deal with the shoulder tapper and his friends (including one who you didn't think had originally heard, but somehow got the initial communication privately) and dealt with all the incoming calls, you look up to see that mum or the client left.

Who can blame them?

We have become a society where the incoming information stream takes priority over the existing one. It makes us rude and less effective.

So I tried something simple - I turned off all my notifications.

My Outlook no longer chimes, my cursor doesn't take on the form of an envelope, nothing tells me 'I have got mail', my iPad doesn't do it's charming double chirp and my iPhone does not vibrate every time I get an email. I go and check those channels when I am ready, sometimes that is a few minutes, sometimes it might need to be an hour.

And my productivity has improved greatly. As have my personal interactions - if you have my attention then you have my attention, I will not accept the shoulder tapper, the mailman or the phone calls... until you get up to go to the bathroom of course, then I will check everything through my iPhone.

And I am sorry to my colleagues and clients if my response comes a few minutes later than it normally would, but it will be better and more considered for it.

It is somewhat liberating; I feel like I am in a support group - "hi, my name is Dax and I sometimes don't check my email for 20 minutes, and I am not a bad person!!"

So I challenge you to do the same. Start with the site that simply asks you to do nothing for two minutes and then graduate to turning off your own notifications. Take back control and give your attention to what you are doing, not the next incoming and unknown piece of information. That can wait until you are ready for it.

And if you think you can't do this then you probably need to try this more than most.

In my latest read, "Is the Internet changing the way you think" (a brilliant collection of answers to that question from diverse thinkers including Richard Dawkins, Larry Sanger, Peter Diamandis and Douglas Coupland), the author, Nicholas Carr, states about books:

"As a technology, a book focuses our attention, isolates us from the myriad distractions that fill our everyday lives. A networked computer does precisely the opposite. It is designed to scatter our attention. It doesn't shield us from environmental distractions, it adds to them. The words on a computer screen exist in a welter of contending stimuli."

It's an eye opening comment for sure. But by turning off those notifications you create the best of both worlds, the concentrated absorption of information that a book provides, married with the instant access to almost anything you could wish to know.

Go on, try it. Be a better person, pay attention to your mum, textsfromlastnight.com can wait.

Big News: EU 'reverses' stance on requiring cookies to be opt-in

I always love a chance to break out this image of the cookie monster boiling dough on a heroin spoon, who wouldn't!

Are cookies evil? No!

As I wrote about in November 2009 (EU Passes Cookie Law - Opt-in Required) the EU had decided they were very evil and were to be stamped out with a strange, industry-killing law requiring them all to be opt-in.

Oh those crazy Europeans! (I get to say that, I'm one of them)

Well I have pushed and pushed to find clarification on what each member state in Europe was going to do to implement this law, never really to find an answer. It seems neither could they, and the whole thing is unraveling somewhat.

As reported in the WSJ this week a secret memo has surfaced (and without the help of Wikileaks) that reveals they don't so much care about a forced opt-in anymore. "Settings of a browser or another application" seem to now be sufficient.

This is good and bad.

It's good because as an industry we can focus on self-regulation some more and find a more suitable and less damaging way forward, but it is bad for consumers in that the EU is back to square one in some ways.

The uncertainty continues.

Search Data Matters (or why I just quit my job!)

As a media agency guy I set out several years ago to develop a new approach to media planning for our clients, an approach that would allow them to capitalize on the growing need to invest media dollars into display and get a positive financial return. SEM bid prices were rising, SEM programs were becoming mature and digital investment continued to grow. Display was going to be the natural next port of call for these brands.

And so we developed the concept of performance display, the idea that you could ‘talk to individuals expressing intent’ rather than simply ‘shouting at the crowd’, a method that removed the wastage from the media spend and produced extraordinary ROIs.

These programs rely on a foundation layer, a combination of techniques that find those intent markers, whether they be a site visit, a search event, an onsite behavior, a social interaction etc and use them to message the right people.

One of the strongest intent markers is search data, and for that reason I am leaving the agency world behind me today and joining Chango, a leader in the concept of search retargeting.

In its simplest form, search retargeting allows a marketer to discover and target those prospects that are searching for the terms that matter to the campaign, but may not have engaged with the brand yet.

That’s a powerful proposition – just like with an SEM campaign, the prospect is expressing their need or desire openly in the search event and you get to respond to them one on one. It is this ability to target so accurately that makes SEM the first point of call when a campaign has an ROI goal.

But search engine marketing is not perfect, the search funnel leaks prospects constantly.

The first leak is when a prospect searches for the terms you have identified as important to you but choose to click on a competing SEM ad or naturally optimized link. You have lost the opportunity to engage with someone expressing a need you can solve, and more critically, your competitor has won that chance.

The second leak is when the prospect clicks your link, visits your site, but leaves without converting. A wasted SEM spend perhaps, and certainly a risk that whilst they continue their research they may rest on your competitor’s site again.

With the right approach you can plug both of these leaks. A campaign that runs in the background, talking to these prospects and winning new opportunities for engagement will increase the success of your display program, as well as make your SEM and SEO investments work harder.

I believe that the most successful digital programs of 2011 will include search retargeting as part of their foundation layer in order to achieve these improvements, and as a result will have the highest ROIs. And as an (now ex)agency guy, I know clients love it.

Beautiful data visualization of the World - Facebook connectivity

Beautiful visualization of Facebook connectivity. Just amazing how countries can be recognized so clearly even though this picture does not include any added borders. Read more here.

And thanks to @hblodget here are China's ghost cities - an interesting contrast to the connectivity that Facebook shows in the rest of the world.

FTC should ban all those evil cookies - the spoof!

So whilst the FTC 'Do Not Track' issue is a serious one, a big problem is a lack of consumer knowledge. I created the spoof below to highlight some of these. Enjoy!

An update on attribution modeling - little has changed in a year

Just over a year ago I posted about attribution modeling as follow up to an SMX panel in NY. The key messages from that piece were:

• Attribution was coming, but was certainly not here yet in the eyes of most marketers
• Attribution modeling has the potential to make you smarter and your campaigns more efficient
• There were many barriers to getting started, especially technical ones
• But if the problems can be overcome then the results are worth it

So I watched the video above with interest - Adam Lavelle (CSO @ iCrossing) interviewing Chuck Sharp (SVP Analytics iCrossing) on this very topic, and importantly where this is heading. Of particular interest is that the industry has not moved much in the last 12 months - we still have many marketers using the last click scenario, and subsequently making budgeting decisions in a semi-blind fashion.

Why?

Well it is certainly not because of a lack of effort being poured into breaking down the technical barriers discussed in my last piece, with agencies and specialist companies all managing to extract the information that is required and put it together in some meaningful way.

What we actually see is that the continuing barrier is organizational behavior, and an unwillingness to change. I see two reasons why this might be the case, the first being about the level of accuracy that is possible, and the expectation of what level is acceptable or valuable.

As an example, I took my daughters to Disneyland Paris a few weeks ago. They researched the park online, they chose the hotel, they even chose the night they wanted the 'Princess Dinner', and all on their computer at home. They told me everything they wanted on the phone and I booked it on my laptop. Disneyland saw a direct load visit come in and spend a chunk of money within a 10 minute transaction and have no correlation, technical or otherwise, to any previous ad exposure, search activity etc. And the same problem exists when we consider a multi-browsing research phase spread across a desktop and a mobile device.

In short, there is no 100% accurate answer.

And that's ok! It is a directional tool, not one that will give 42 as the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. It is designed to offer insights into how your channels are working together and for you to then make better decisions as marketers. In this data driven world, the value of gut feel from marketers should not be forgotten.

I particularly like what Chuck has to say in the video about what attribution is, where it fits and ultimately how it can be moved forward so we are not expressing these same frustrations another year from now.

Chuck talks about starting attribution as an internal research project; something with a question and an answer, and hopefully something that is actionable and can be shown to have made a difference. Such a project has a good shot at establishing some trust within the business, laying the foundations for further work to be conducted.

Beyond that, Chuck then talks about a 3 to 5 year timescale to see big changes in attitude, and that seems realistic to me. If the organization is public then it's likely to be a little longer due to the sensitives of showing year over year comparisons, and the limited opportunity in those reports to explain that the counting model has changed.

Most importantly - get started. Last click is inaccurate and is misleading.

Most display creative is crap

Let's tell it as it is.

It is astonishing that as we roll into 2011 we are still facing most of the same limitations that have existed for 10 years in terms of file sizes and the like. And yes, there are companies like OggiFinogi who are helping to bring rich media into an exchange buy, and companies like Say Media (formerly VideoEgg) who are running IAB standard units before firing up a full page video unit when initiated by the user, but they are the minority of creative output today.

Media plans are finally evolving with techniques like site and search retargeting that allow us to talk to the individuals with intent rather than shouting at the crowd, but the creative is not keeping up. We still are forcing the user to click to the destination chosen by the brand or to take no action at all.

That doesn't really strike me as a dialog.

There are some alternatives, but most seem to be in the direction of customization or personalization of the ad to something the user did. A great example is with site retargeting where it has become relatively common to see the ad unit change to show a photo of a product that the same user had just looked at on a retailers website.

Still, where is the choice?

Let's make an effort to have creative that catches up with media planning - let's give the user some choice. Imagine an ad unit where the options were:

• Click to the campaign landing page
• Click to the homepage
• View the brand's Twitter feed
• View the brand's Facebook page
• Subscribe to an RSS feed

Now we have created a situation where the consumer has some choice, and the creative becomes a possible dialog with an individual. A short one, but nonetheless it's a dialog.

And along these lines it was interesting to see Radium One talk about placing 'Like' buttons within their creative units, a start in the right direction.

(Image courtesy of FreeFoto.com)

Real or fake? (Or 'Cricket can be fun')

We know people love a good conspiracy theory (the grassy knoll, the tunnel in Paris, who stole all the W keys from the White House computers for the incoming Bush administration...) and so perhaps it is no surprise that marketing videos are often looked upon with skepticism. The latest two to grace our (multi) screens are offerings from Brylcreem and Gillette - being competitors adds further fuel to the fire.

First up we have Roger Federer performing an outstanding trick shot, knocking a beer bottle off the head of someone after a photo shoot had come to an end.

And then along come Brylcreem with a story too similar to seem real - at the end of a video shoot for the upcoming Ashes series (Americans - the Ashes are a tiny trophy containing the remains of a burnt set of stumps, the stumps being the wooden things the bowler is trying to hit - quality heh!).

The Brit in me hopes this is all real as it means we might have a shot at the Ashes this year, but the conspiracy theorist in me is throwing the red flag on the field and challenging the call.

Ice cream store reveals Florida's demographics

I came across this map on the wall of an ice cream parlor this weekend down in Florida, the basic idea being that you take a pin and place it on where you live. Extremely visual way to see the geographic make-up of visitors to the beaches of the Gulf.

Furthermore, I was hosted by Say Media (formerly VideoEgg) about a month ago at an event down in Napa where we listened to a speaker discuss the changing face of the Floridian population. The interesting takeaway was that the retired generation are living longer, are under more financial pressure and are often supporting the generation (or two generations) below them, creating the perfect storm of financial problems for the many thousands of people who chose to make Florida their retirement home. And this storm is actually driving them out of Florida, sending them away from retirement bliss and back to their home states to get jobs to make ends meet.

Seems an odd juxtaposition of people heading north to leave the state to go earn more money, against tourists heading south to the Gulf to spend $8 on an over-priced ice-cream.

Please vote for me on Hipstamatic's competition

(Shameless request for votes)

Hi all - I have a few photos entered into the Hipstamatic competition and have 5 days to collect votes! The photo on the left can be found here, and I have a few others entered on these links below

Thank you - much appreciated!

http://hpstm.tc/26c6

http://hpstm.tc/26c7

http://hpstm.tc/26c8

http://hpstm.tc/26c9

http://hpstm.tc/26cb

(/shameless request for votes)