Online Advertising

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THE SAI 25: THE WORLD’S MOST VALUABLE STARTUPS
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A great ad can entertain and inspire by tickling us with its producers’ creativity. Advertising makes some of my favorite things free (pretty much all my favorite sites on the internet, and also radio) but it certainly can be overdone by front-loading $12 per-ticket movies with too many previews. But a worse offense is to launch an advertising campaign devoid of creativity or innovation. A great ad campaign can move us emotionally. It can make us laugh or cry or bring color and humor to an otherwise mundane city bus.

But I learned a new rule of advertising recently that discourages creativity. Turns out that many ad campaigns Continue reading →

I’ve decided to take a cool new job with Glam Media, serving as the General Manager & VP of their publisher network. It’s an interesting take on a model I’ve got some experience with. Glam has a media network of female-centric beauty, fashion and lifestyle bloggers (that’s *not* the part I have a lot of experience with) that they sell the advertising around (that is) and also provide other services like SEO and content distribution. They have a viciously loyal following and have succeeded in getting relevant advertisers like Levi’s and Macy’s to match the content. I attended one of their publisher functions the other night and met the author of a cool fashion blog called Stiletto Jungle. She had quit her job as an attorney to blog full-time on fashion and Shopping…Glam pays her bills by selling advertising on her site. I’m decidedly impressed with the smarts and positioning of the folks at Glam so far. They’ve achieved a lot in a really short amount of time.

One thing that has me a bit concerned however is that about a day after I accepted the job offer from Glam, I went in to Lens Crafters for a new pair of specs and when I got sized, there was only one pair that really spoke to me…I had to have the Prada eyeglasses. Let’s hope this trend doesn’t escalate for the sake of my pocketbook…

For the past eight years, I’ve chosen advertising for my career, and I often find myself in debates with friends who claim that advertising doesn’t influence them at all. Most people seem to have a lot invested in believing that they are independent thinkers and somehow unaffected by the thousands of messages they receive each day through various media. I can understand that…believing that we are all highly influenced by our environments and to admit that whomever has the most budget to spend on advertising, would be able to influence one’s mind is an admittedly chilling and unsettling thought. And, thankfully, not true. Knowledge, for example, is a far more persuasive message than even the most brilliantly suggestive advertisement. This video, however, gave me pause to wonder how great the power of suggestion actually is….

I’m on my way to Palo Alto today to present ViTrue at the Under the Radar conference. Fresh on my mind today is the backlash that erupted on YouTube in the past few days around the Lip Sync contest that Malibu Rum put together, soliciting YouTubers to do a lipsync to that ‘Lime in the Coconut’ song. I love that song by the way. Always makes me smile and I’ve legitimately wondered if one can relieve a belly ache by drinking a lime/coconut concoction. At any rate, they key thing that’s being called into question on this effort is the authenticity of the brand and their contest. I love that the community has literally risen up and shouted that this particular form of advertising, user-created advertising, needs to adhere to certain standards. And here’s the kicker, the standards aren’t decided by some board of white guys, or by the publisher or by the advertiser– they’re decided by the community on YouTube. I dig it!

CORRECTION: The song is “Day-O, Daaaaay-O”… personally I like the “Lime in the Coconut” song better…

Amidst all of the M&A hoopla surrounding the online advertising space currently, what has my attention the most is friggin’ Google. Seriously. It’s ridiculous. Google’s stock hit $518 today…I remember sitting on a beach in Mexico 2 years ago with some friends who had just sold off some GOOG after the stock had taken a major nosedive. I told them to hold on, that I saw the company entrenched as the hub of advertising in the 21st century. I didn’t fully believe my own words as true when I spoke them…frankly, I’m rarely prophetic certainly about stocks but it turns out a number of investors believe what I believed as I was into my 4th shot of tequila, that Google is poised to own the buying and selling of advertising. With this week’s acquisition of FeedBurner, a company that I’ve been consistently impressed with and whose management team I had the pleasure of meeting last fall. They’ve been long-rumored as a Google acquisition target and in my mind, combined the perfect combination of business integrity, solid technology, and a host of great partnerships. The Feedburner acquisitions expands Google’s dominance into the RSS Feed space and will complement its AdSense network and Doubleclick adserver well. What’s next? Well, my own attention will be closely on the roll out of their AdSense Instream product which they announced last week.

I’ve spent most of my career working at companies best described as Ad Networks. My role has been to work directly, or lead teams that work directly, with publishers who host advertising on their websites. The web publishers host the ads as a means of supporting the web services they offer the public for free. Most see the results of my work as the banners that appear on sites like Dictionary.com or Tribe.net. In the past, I’d often spin my role within greater society as “I help keep the internet free.” A noble cause in the face of flashing banner ads imploring you to “punch the monkey and win $20 banana bucks” to be sure. In many respects, this is really not a very fun job. Serving as the middle man between publishers who believe they’re entitled to more targeted advertising from more relevant advertisers at higher rates, and advertisers who want results from every penny spent and will cancel at the first sign of lack of ROI, could be thankless at times. It’s a tough business, but an admittedly interesting one as the internet and it’s marketing vehicles have evolved into new implementations. Take, for example, some of the video creative that allows the user to initiate a play of the ad, like this one for Sin City. Creativity is driving new ways for users to engage in marketing messages that are continually evolving.
I hear a lot these days from firms desiring to form their own ad network. In fact, the founders of the first ad network I worked for, Flycast, even started a company whose primary offering is to power the technology of ad networks with the idea that you could potentially power hundreds of niche gatherings of web publishers. The flavors run the gamut from Mobile Gaming Ad Networks to Specialty Blog Networks like John Batelle’s Federated Media, and F*#$edCompany’s founder, Pud’s gigantic ad network, AdBrite. There isn’t a single firm that doesn’t seem keen on building an ad network– and I’m flattered with a lot of recruiting calls as a result. But a word of warning: running an ad network is no picnic. It’s an already hugely competitive market, with a number of large players from AOL’s Advertising.com, publicly traded ValueClick and my previous company, Tribal Fusion dominating the top 3 spots. It is hard to gain traction in an “up” market where at the end of the day, the advertiser just wants clicks and sales and the publisher just wants high rates and a big check each month. I’ve done it once before and I wouldn’t wish building an ad network from scratch, in this market, on anyone.

It’s been a wild week to be in the eye of the storm. My new company, ViTrue, is smack in the middle of what’s starting to legitimately feel like a revolution in advertising. Video is a medium I’ve always been interested in because when placed online, it has gigantic advantages over traditional ads for engaging the consumer. I’ve always asserted that TV advertising’s primary pull is its ability to evoke an emotion in the viewer. Banner ads, newspaper ads, and Google text ads can’t do that. But video absolutely can, just as it does on television. Everyone’s found a lump in their throat while watching a television commerical at one time or another. For me it was the Cindi Lauper/Kodak “True Colors” ads during the ‘96 Olympics.

So ViTrue’s starting with online video, and leveraging the web to make it flow both ways between the consumer and the product. This week we finalized a deal with Turner/TBS to power their user-generated-video site, “Am I Funny or Not?” We’re also providing the technology for Friendster’s “Get Political” video contest that allows people to upload their own political ads. Check out one I uploaded on Arnold’s behalf: sharkle.friendster.com

And if that weren’t exciting enough, the grey lady got around to picking up my career move: www.nytimes.com/swansonarticle

August 23rd will mark my 5th Anniversary with Tribal Fusion– and I’ve decided to make August 25th my last day. When I joined the company 5 years ago we were 5 people trying to eek out an existence in a horrible online ad economy. September 11th was soon to follow and if there were any advertising budgets left, few of them were online.

Still, we kept costs low and took advantage of the down market to slowly claw our way to profitability. It provided me an amazing opportunity to work closely with our CEO and founder, Dilip DaSilva and play a key role in the generation of a company. It was a fantastic experience to make huge contributions and experience successes and failures that were all my own. Before long I found myself as a Vice President at one of the web’s top media companies. I was invited to speak on panels, and I built a fantastic 10 person team to whom I’ll be sad to say goodbye. I’ve been on top of the world in many regards and yet I was itching to begin something new.

On September 5th, I’ll begin work as VP of Network & Partner Development for ViTrue a small start-up based out of Atlanta focused around user-generated video advertising. I’ll work from home and I’ll be starting from scratch. I’m certainly out of my comfort zone on this– but I’m hoping to grow through a new set of unfamiliar challenges. So, here goes…