Bloomberg is buying pounds of web ads today. Click for high-res photo

Bloomberg is buying pounds of web ads today.

fred-wilson: fun picture of Pincus, Zuckerberg, and Paul Graham at Startup School Anyone else feel slightly funny about this photo? As Rafer sez, “Facebook doesn’t try to hide their intent at all”, but can you imagine Sergey Brin slapping five with some, call it, potential black hat SEOs or SEM arbitrageurs 6 or 7 years ago. They made Brin a lot of money as well, but he wouldn’t be caught in public with them. There’s Don’t be Evil, maybe we need a Don’t be Stupid.

fred-wilson:

fun picture of Pincus, Zuckerberg, and Paul Graham at Startup School

Anyone else feel slightly funny about this photo?

As Rafer sez, “Facebook doesn’t try to hide their intent at all”, but can you imagine Sergey Brin slapping five with some, call it, potential black hat SEOs or SEM arbitrageurs 6 or 7 years ago. They made Brin a lot of money as well, but he wouldn’t be caught in public with them. There’s Don’t be Evil, maybe we need a Don’t be Stupid.

(this post was reblogged from fred-wilson)
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The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously today to outsource its e-mail system to Google Inc., making it the largest city in the nation to make the move and handing the Web search giant a major victory in its quest to become a software provider to the world’s cities and businesses.

Los Angeles adopts Google e-mail system for 30,000 city employees | Technology | Los Angeles Times

Google = Enterprise


Still think Android will be a big play for the G in the enterprise.

Gawker Gets Scammed

mikehudack:

spiers:

ryanbrown:

spiers:

The sponsored posts should go for far more than the $3 CPMs on display.  They’re taking a premium form of advertising and using it as an add-on, when they should be upselling it. (And there’s no inventory for sponsored posts.)

And in that email exchange, there’s no upselling, just throwing it in for free.

What’s more: this lead CAME to them! Why are you throwing in fries and a drink when the client is clearly willing to pay full price for the stand alone product? I’d understand if this was an effort to build a portfolio of executions for a new product or something… but the “sponsored post” is pretty old hat for Gawker Media, and the “client” is already starting at the 25k line!

What Ryan Brown said.

Because the rebuy is better than the buy. Because you want clients who get real value and keep coming back. That’s how you build a business.

Classic sales rule; Don’t sell what has already been sold. No need to throw in the sponsored posts, that is how you build value over time, and get the renewals. The drip feed of added value while also up-selling.

But I feel for this rep. Calling on the autos, its been slow all year, and then bam, economy comes climbing back, and you get this call from Spark for Suzuki. All the hard work has paid off and you are looking to hit your Q4 number so you throw a little extra at them.

I wouldn’t have noticed the slight tweak in the Spark email(-).

(this post was reblogged from mikehudack)
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Ted’s answer is ultimately the way to best target niche communities, that runs contrary to much of what brand advertising needs; broadcast and reach.

Hi Dooode. - The future of branded advertising

Rafer sez:
@rahmin @jamesgross There’s nothing that says that brand advertising, in the mass media sense, survives the transition to the Internet. It may be that only brands which know how to create demand without uniformity of reach and without low-hassle large media buys survive.

(via rafer)

There is no evidence that there won’t be reach or uniformity with the web. Brand advertising already has survived on the web, the question is how powerful it becomes. I would bet that 95% of brand dollars online go to 6 media companies(GYMFFA; Google, Yahoo, Microsofy, Facebook, FIM and AOL). YouTube has more reach than any broadcast channel, Yahoo has more reach than almost all newspapers combined, and Facebook has more consumer minutes in a day than any media conglomerate can throw at an advertiser with TV, Radio and Print combined. The Web is creating media monopolies and brand advertising opportunities, that all the past moguls would kill for.

(this post was reblogged from rafer)

The future of branded advertising

rahmin:

tedr:

bijan:

Much has been said about the issues facing publishers and advertisers particularly when it comes to branded advertising.

My head always hurts when I hear people say that at least with television, brands can safely advertise their brands.

Yes, television has been a success story when it comes to branded advertising. The dollars are big. Forget big, they are enormous.

But I’m convinced that it’s a fragile business. First, it’s not growing. And our attention is shifting. Even if Nielsen says we are all watching 25 hours of TV per day we know it’s not true in our hearts and our brains. The second the TV commercial comes on we whip out our mobile phone or we turn our eyes to our laptops. Or we just click thru the ads on our DVRs.

Yet online branded advertising has real challenges. The current search business doesn’t deliver branded advertising. The classic banner ad if targeted works well for many things — except branding.

To make display advertising ads friendlier to brands, new formats are being introduced like this super sized banner ad I saw on Alley Insider today.

To give you an idea how big that Mercedes ad, that photo is my 15” MacBook Pro which has a 1440x900 display!

I’m not sure this format is the best for publishers, advertisers and consumers. I have a feeling it’s not.

But I am optimistic that there will be more compelling solutions for branded advertising.  I’ve seen a number of creative ideas & technologies over the past few months and I’m sure we’ll see others too.

@bijan. I’m with you 100%. Though the first way for brands to be effective online is to ditch standards and seek out publishers that are willing to prepare custom integrations for the brand into their media form. Advertising has been a lie for 100 years and we have the metrics to prove it now. Brands needs to be where their customers are and make their intentions known by helping their customers enjoy their lives more. Red Bull’s arial and DIY events are a great example. Samsung power stations at airports are another. Even the Bud Light Wheat / SNL takeover is the future. All of these were envisioned by the brand (and with the publisher or property holder) as an actual adn real (vs. pretend) benefit to the customer. It says we think your lifestyle is great and want to make it better. (Note the Bud Light ad buyout meant there was more time to show more programming (classic SNL clips) which along with reduced total ad minutes is a win for viewers.)

This is how advertising will work in the next century. It will take much more work, it will allow for far fewer martini lunches and a roiling of creative destruction for years to come before things settle out.

I’m speaking with confidence as our advertisers on Dogster and Catster get all their ROI from providing fun and information to our audience. They still use banners, but their just to set the stage for the real sharing points. We almost always turn down agencies that request pure banner buy, because they’ll never get the return they want and thus never come back.

So think big about how advertising will change, but think beyond IAB and standards and think about integrating with customers actual lives in a meaningful way.

I always struggle when web heads(included) use their logic to explain to the world what brand advertising should be.  Ted’s answer is ultimately the way to best target niche communities, that runs contrary to much of what brand advertising needs; broadcast and reach.

The web needs to make up it’s mind on what it can do. I’m concerned if the broadcast and reach model wins. Welcome the ad exchanges and the winner take all media companies.

(this post was reblogged from rahmin)
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More than just security, though, the White House saw the opportunity to increase their flexibility. Drupal has a huge library of user-contributed modules that will provide functionality the White House can use to expand its social media capabilities, with everything from super-scalable live chats to multi-lingual support. In many ways, this is the complement to the Government as Platform mantra I’ve been chanting in Washington. When you build a vibrant, extensible platform, others add value to the foundation you establish; when you join such a platform, you get the benefit of all those features you didn’t have to develop yourself.

Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal - O’Reilly Radar

This should help convince more brands that the LAMP stack is the way to go. Nice symbolic win.

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400 years after Hudson found New York harbor, Eric Sanderson shares how he made a 3D map of Mannahatta’s fascinating pre-city ecology of hills, rivers, wildlife — accurate down to the block — when Times Square was a wetland and you couldn’t get delivery.
Eric Sanderson pictures New York — before the City | Video on TED.com

Principles of the Web | For Marketing « JG Etc.

New blog post.

Bono in NY Times.

It is a strangely unsettling feeling to realize that the largest Navy, the fastest Air Force, the fittest strike force, cannot fully protect us from the ghost that is terrorism …. Asymmetry is the key word from Kabul to Gaza …. Might is not right