Media Tech Business

Earlier this year, Matt McAlister uploaded pages from the January 1998 prototype issue of The Industry Standard, the late, great, fattest magazine of Web Bubble 1.0. See the pages here

On this page, Michael Tchong worried about whether online advertising was flattening out when, toward the end of 1997, it was looking as if web advertising would not attain its first $1-billion dollar year after all:

“Although the industry had hopes of topping $1b in sales this year, it now looks like revenue may reach only $870 million. Are advertisers growing disillusioned with the benefits of Net advertising?”

The Standard, meanwhile, grew fat and happy, throwing legendary parties from rooftop to rooftop, coast to coast. At Real Media (later to become 24/7 Real Media) we contributed to the fun with 2-page magazine spreads and web ads that showed the little Real Media people jumping from a right-rail ad to the “attractor” banner at the top. Below are some I dug up for this little retrospective.

 All the “action figures” in these ads were Real Media employees. We had fun doing the shoots and seeing ourselves in ads on bus shelters and billboards in New York and San Francisco in those good old dot-com days. Alas, the agencies we worked with – Mezzina, Brown in New York and Lot21 in San Francisco – are also gone. 

Tags: Ad Networks, Ad Sales, Digital Economy, Monetization by Bennett Zucker
No Comments »

Very cool to see friend and former boss (at TACODA and earlier at Real Media) Dave Morgan take on global advertising strategy at AOL. Nice interview with Rafat Ali here shows why one of the web’s great storytellers is the right guy for the job.

Following the earlier appointment of TACODA CEO Curt Viebranz to President of AOL’s Platform A, the portfolio encompasses Advertising.com, Adtech, Lightningcast, TACODA, Third Screen Media and soon to be added Quigo.

AOL appears to be stitching together a smarter plan than Yahoo!, which is back-pedaling into becoming a technology company again, rather than zooming ahead into a networked future. As one of the true global media powerhouses, TimeWarner has more to lose by becoming less reliant on its own content than does Yahoo!, which has de-emphasized media and re-upped the ante on technology.

The best news for TW and AOL is that the content is always there for them to use to attract and retain great audiences. And it’s also there for them to make money from Google and MSN and former almost-media company Yahoo!, all of which depend on the TW’s of the world to feed content to their hundreds of millions of hungry users.

As perennial underdog to Google, Yahoo! and MSN, AOL also has more to gain by being bold. Ditching the ISP business, continuous reorganizing, massive layoffs and other wrenching changes are necessary for the company to compete again. They’re moving on all fronts, but the steady drumbeat of acquisitions and appointments is the clearest sign that AOL intends to win the fight to become solid number 2 behind Google.

Yahoo! is also banking on maintaining and growing its global audience leadership through platform and network acquisitions, but ultimately they’re hellbent on doing everything the Y! way.

This concerns me as a Yahoo! shareholder (from its acquisition of Right Media in July), but more so as a Yahoo! loyalist whose browser home page has been set to my.yahoo.com since 1996.

Yahoo! can’t grow its audience by building a better mousetrap: It’s the cheese that lures users. Please, Jerry, give us more and different and better varieties of cheese, not a stronger, faster spring or better distribution around the kitchen!

Hearty congratulations and good luck to Dave and Curt and the gang at TACODA. And an equally hearty HURRY UP! to the Yahoo! crew.

Tags: Ad Networks, Ad Sales, Behavioral Targeting, Digital Economy by Bennett Zucker
2 Comments »

… and he is us. (Walt Kelly, Pogo)

For years I’ve enjoyed asking a couple of simple questions when speaking to online advertising, marketing and media groups:

- “How many of you delete your cookies?”

- “How many of you use ad blockers?”

Try it the next time you’re in front of a roomful of advertising and media professionals. I’ll bet you will find that at least a third, and often more than half, of the audience will raise their hands. They are the professionals, and they don’t get it.

They think that internet advertising is an invasion of privacy, an unwanted distraction, and a downright unAmerican practice. If people in the business don’t understand, how can we expect ordinary web users to welcome cookies, targeting and advertising generally?

Lots of people in the online business tend to be self-absorbed and smug about how they have changed the world. Well, they’ve done a poor job of educating themselves and the people around them who have made them successful.

How about a web-wide blackout? Every website would replace its contents with a blank screen for a few minutes at a peak time of day. And here’s the message they’d put on the screen instead:

This is your internet without advertising.

Please disable your ad blocker, enable your cookies and enjoy the great free content.

Tags: Ad Blockers, Behavioral Targeting, Data, Digital Economy, Digital Publishing by Bennett Zucker
No Comments »

By next March, a dozen companies you’ve never heard of will launch notable products, ad networks, or services based on behavioral targeting. Some are newborn; others are already making money, but still flying low. They come in lots of new flavors:

1. Targeting with ISP data. Competitors include Adzilla and Nebuad, which have raised $10.25MM and $30MM recently, and Phorm. They all work with ISP subscribers’ data to target more relevant content and ads. Other companies with strong ISP relationships will enter this market, as will a venture that includes ISPs as founding partners.

2. Data exchanges. As one founder described it to me, “it’s a little Tacoda and a little Right Media. It can’t miss!” The theory is that sites will gladly sell user data rather than continue to give it away to ad servers, networks and research companies. At least two raw startups and two veterans are racing to produce the first commercial-grade data exchange, where advertisers can bid on audience by behavioral segment. They split the ad market, with two of them being all about performance and two going for brands.

3. Purchase behavior. Tom Hespos wrote recently that purchase behavior may be the new behavioral “thumbprint.” And he’s right: One company documents a conversion rate increase of 790%. The aCerno Transaction Marketplace is an online data co-op whose 300+ customers can target their own and each other’s customers all over the web.

4. Exotic behavior? Agent-based modeling is the secret science that will propel one startup’s better targeting engine. The goal is to super-size valuable segments comprising enormous populations of target-lookalikes.

5. Beyond behavior. Mindset Media offers brand marketers the chance to tailor their messages according to twenty elements of personality, such as “Humility” and “Bravado,” “Creativity” and “Compliance,” each of which has up to five distinct “mindsets” that can be targeted at scale. Tasty.

More flavors and details to come.

Tags: Ad Networks, Behavioral Targeting, Data, Digital Economy by Bennett Zucker
1 Comment »

If the dot-com boom and bust was our era of smoke and mirrors, five years after bottoming out we are all about firebombs and rivers of hot lava. In 2007, hype and hope still reign, but they’re backed by the full faith and credit of a $16-billion digital ad economy.I had personal interest in two of this year’s big deals: Yahoo!-Right Media and AOL-TACODA. I was with Right Media when Yahoo! bought a 20 percent stake in October 2006 and the remaining 80 percent last April (deal closed in July) for more than $700-million. Before I joined Right Media, I was with TACODA for three years, and I celebrated AOL’s $275-million purchase in August.

Right Media and TACODA created two of the most popular trends of the hot lava era of media technology. A lower tier ad network, Right Media, came out of nowhere to invent the online media exchange concept that became central to the acquisition and growth strategies of Yahoo!, Google (Doubleclick) and Microsoft (AdECN). And behavioral targeting, ably nurtured from an interesting idea to a mainstream tactic by TACODA, is being touted and reinvented by dozens of networks, technology providers, and entrepreneurs with visions of better media tech mousetraps.

I had the unique opportunity to help create a lot of the hype and to evangelize the real results generated by these technologies that were, are, right for their times. MediaTechBusiness will be a platform for me to synthesize a lot of what I’ve learned over a long career in marketing, sales and management in media and technology, but not just from these companies. As a four-time loser with other startups, I know as much as anyone about what it takes to succeed. Now, as the guy with the “hot hand” and a couple of big wins in a row, I’ve had the privilege to meet with dozens of CEOs, VCs, analysts, recruiters, media sellers and buyers in recent months for up close and personal investigations of the possible next big thing.

Where permitted, I’ll identify and interview principals of some of these businesses. Where I’m under non-disclosure agreements, I hope to be able to share some of the truly imaginative and exciting new developments I’ve discovered. If you are among my sources, and you know who you are, please let me know right away that you’d love to join the conversation. If we haven’t met, what are you waiting for?

Tags: Behavioral Targeting, Digital Economy, Media Exchange by Bennett Zucker
No Comments »