PT thanks New York-based marketing consultant Rich Kelley for this report.
“Content is no longer something you hand down from on high on a sacred tablet,” advised John Byrne, editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek. Today it’s more like “a campfire that you use to gather people. What becomes important is what then happens among the people.” The editors at BusinessWeek identified four trends among readers: they are experiencing an overabundance of information; they use multiple sources to find it; they like to organize into micro-communities; and their professional needs are “pretty narrow.” From these findings emerged Business Exchange (BX), “a little bit like Wikipedia, Digg, Flickr, and Google Search,” in Byrne’s words. Users choose the categories they want to follow—they create a topic and an abstract and BX immediately populates the topic page with information from websites around the world. “People are creating topics and things that editors would never think of, like commercial space travel,” reported Byrne. Just launched in September, it has exceeded BW’s expectations on three fronts: number of topics created; advertising performance (in terms of clickthrough rates vs. core site); and how rapidly Google has indexed the product—365,000 pages already.
Byrne appeared on a publishing panel in November at the 12th annual ad:tech new york, where advertisers, publishers, and exhibitors engaged in four days of nonstop panels and talks about current trends in digital marketing. Alongside Byrne was Vivian Schiller, just days before she became the new president and CEO of National Public Radio. As SVP and GM of NYTimes.com, Schiller showcased new topic pages, as well as beta products TimesExtra and TimesPeople, new initiatives that, like Business Exchange, include links to competitive sites. “The evolving role of the editor is the theme of these new products: the editor’s job has changed from curating content created by journalists and columnists to curating the entire Web.”
How newspapers are changing also dominated the chatter at a session on local advertising. Moderator Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates, noted that “last year the newspaper industry saw its steepest ever decline in print classifieds,” and the action appears to be moving online. “Local advertising has become the new black,” announced Borrell. “Of the $260 billion spent annually on advertising, 45%, about $120 billion, is spent on local advertising.” And 2008 was a big growth year for local online advertising, up 48% to $12.9 billion and expected to grow 7.8%, even in the midst of a tumultuous economy, to $13.9 billion in 2009. Newspapers may have been the first to bring local advertising online, but media companies are now finding, according to Borrell, that local sites have their own distinct attributes—and offline brands, whether print, radio or TV, are “baggage.” “Miami.com used to redirect you to the Miami Herald website. Now they’re two different sites.” Media General, owner of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, just bought inrich.com and richmond.com—both separate from the newspaper website. “Media companies are starting to get it. Local sites are not about brands or core products. They’re much more about entertainment and shopping than about local news.”
Other panelists echoed Borrell. Peter Hutto of local.com noted that AT&T has proved utterly incompetent in making the transition from being Yellow Pages physically to putting it on the Web. “Compare that to what tiny little craigslist has done.” Eric Stein, director of local markets at Google, agreed: “It was just two days ago that YellowBook became the first company to partner with YouTube to post local videos online. Why did that take so long?” Search and video are very popular with local audiences. Local videos run 90 not 30 seconds. Nielsen identifies some 210 designated marketing areas (DMAs) for local advertising in the U. S., but once you get beyond the top 50 it’s difficult to negotiate placement and terms efficiently.
That’s where aggregators like local.com and agencies come in. “There’s a massive amount of local co-op dollars lying unused. We try to find ways to make it easier to use them,” explained Kurt Weinsheimer of Spot Runner. In a separate presentation, Google’s Nicole Resz explained that advertisers can now use AdWords to place auction bids for print ads in 800 newspapers, radio ads on 1,600 stations, and TV ads in 94 networks. Stopbitingnails increased sales 50% in strategic markets through Google radio ads, according to Resz, and www.cruise.com reduced its cost per lead 30% through Google print.
Google product evangelist Frederick Vallaeys delivered the “tech” in ad:tech as he described the three flavors of Quality Score (search, content, and mobile) and exploded numerous myths about Google advertising (i.e., there should ads on all results pages, no competitors means cheap traffic, low volume keywords always have a high minimum CPC, etc.). Key takeaways: you should research which queries generate customers—sometimes organic results are so good that no ads meet the relevance threshold. Always think relevance, not competition or frequency.
Panels on social media marketing abounded. Danny Sullivan, leading search guru and currently editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, offered a helpful taxonomy of the different phyla of social media. To understand who you’re marketing to, he argued, you need to distinguish social news sites like Digg, Reddit, and Yahoo Buzz from social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon—and not confuse them with social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn—or with social knowledge sites like Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers—or social sharing sites like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Urban Spoon and Yelp. He created a chart to show how each of them compares with Google/search in terms of traffic, branding opportunities and demand (search intent). For example, social networking sites may have many users but any given page has low traffic, low demand and low branding opportunities as compared with social sharing and social knowledge sites—where web users go to find information, images or videos.
On the same “social synergy” panel, Adam Lavelle, chief strategy officer for iCrossing, predicted that by 2010 70% of the content online will be user-generated content (UGC). Marketing in this space requires direct engagement with the content. In a case study where iCrossing had to identify complaints about a software product and develop an outreach strategy, his team tagged complaints on forums, provided answers with links to the client’s website, and found in the process that they had to develop new engagement metrics (number of conversations engaged, number of postings, volume of traffic to postings, pageviews) and also had to develop ways to monitor tonality and to categorize topics. “Social network marketing is really reputation management,” noted Lavelle.
Specialized agencies are emerging to serve the social media landscape. To launch the second season of Gossip Girl, the producers approached OMD, who turned to the Stuzo Group to launch a Party Kit Giveaway Sweeps and a Photo Sweeps on Facebook. In less than a month, Stuzo created a customized entry form, user voting, user profile widgets, viral social feeds, custom and feature pages, and content sharing tools. Results: over 154,000 page views from 88,000 unique visitors over three weeks. The 1,000+ photo submissions were voted on 4,183 times. So, with the right partner and tools, it seems possible to brand on social networking sites.
Most brand advertisers have essentially the same online marketing plan, complained Tom Koletas, VP of Imaginova. They focus on the four large portals that get 100+ million unique visitors a month (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Live)—and a few networks. So Koletas and his co-panelists made the case for advertising on the “mid-tail”—what moderator Susan Bratton, blogger extraordinaire at Dishymix, defined as “the top 50 sites that get between 15 and 80 million unique visitors a month”—and distinct from the 100 million or so sites that get fewer than one million visitors—the so-called long tail of the Internet. (You can check your site’s traffic and demographic profile for free at www.quantcast.com.) Mid-tail sites, argued Stan Holt from eHarmony, are typically built on search and word of mouth. They have passionate users, are likely to have UGC and are usually willing to partner with advertisers on creative execution. Grant Hosford from eHarmony reported that they had a “great experience” with a recent moderated chat on advice.eharmony.com with Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus author John Gray and are eager to work with publishers who have similar nonfiction books that would appeal to eHarmony’s three million unique monthly visitors (interested publishers should contact ghosford [at] eharmony.com and cite this article).
With cell phones having 85% market penetration in the U.S. and more than 100% in most European countries, mobile advertising was the focus of many sessions. Yet according to Mickey Alam Khan, editor-in-chief of Mobile Marketer, mobile advertising is still characterized by “early knowledge arbitrage.” “The suppliers far outnumber the buyers.” CPMs can be as low $1, CPC and CPA deals are available, and clickthrough rates can be as high as 18% “because mobile users are only doing one thing at a time.” During last year’s football season the traffic on the ESPN mobile site was higher than on its main website. And mobile sites are cheap; the Obama campaign spent just $7,000 to build theirs.
Clever mobile apps are starting to appear. Evan Tana of Loopt told how users of the Loopt mobile social network can easily locate and meet nearby friends. During last year’s Warped Tour, Loopt users were able to follow band members from city to city. And Nike has developed the Playmaker app to enable mobile phone users to arrange a pickup football game.
Podcasts of many of the above-mentioned presentations (and more) can be heard here.
