Battelle on Ad Networks

John Battelle writes the lengthy (1,500 word blog entry!) first part of what looks to be a two-parter on the obsession around Ad Networks, the competitiveness of Google vs. AOL, Yahoo, MSN in the space, and what will actually make happy brand marketers in the future.

We'll have to wait for part 2 to see just how insightful the whole is, but the first one is certainly a good read...

Clearly, brands have built what I've called "packaged goods media." And in the past few years, I've come to the same conclusion about online media. In short, I think brands will also build the next batch of great online media companies. And up until recently, I thought Yahoo, AOL, and MSN were best positioned to be those companies. Now, I'm not so sure.

Expanding choices outpacing our ability to choose?

Ahhh, online media: rushing headlong into hyper-segmentation.

As a technology-driven business this is not surprising, since it simplify follows the "if it can be done, it will be done" axiom of technology.

Which leads to the following (partial, and ever-expanding) list of choices:

Supplier	Knowledge	Ad Type
Google, et. al. Paid Search	What I'm looking for	Text Display
DoubleClick, et. al. Ad Networks	What I'm interested in	Display
Federated Media, et. al. Blog Networks	What I'm interested in	"Conversations"
Hulu	What I watch (TV/film)	Interstitial
YouTube	What I watch (amateur)	In-video overlay
LinkedIn	Who I am and know (professionally)	Display
Facebook	Who I am and know, and what I do (personally)	In-newsfeed

Of course, what you buy still largely depends on marketing objective, but do we really know enough about how our current spend is doing to to move our pile of chips forward to the next thing?

Wrong question. As long as offerings are advancing, the competition is taking a look at what to do with those offerings.

Market segment share (or, in this case "share of voice") is won and lost in transitions. Welcome to the digital marketing treadmill...

Shifting from "product, then marketing" to ...

…“product is marketing”.

[Ed. note: In this post I’ll use “product” to represent “product or service”].

With Forrester Research Social Media analyst Jeremiah Owyang hosting a lively discussion (37 comments and counting) on “A Definition of Marketing”, it seems apropos to dive into what has been happening with marketing.

The majority of marketing simply follows mediocre product definition and/or development.

In some cases we get good products followed by good marketing.

But, with the Internet to provide zero barrier-to-trial access to your product, or at least to discovery and discussion of your product, we’re seeing cases where the product is almost entirely also the marketing.

Here are some who have done no, or very little, traditional marketing/advertising (thus, no Apple on this list, as they spent $383.7M in the US alone in 2006*...see a discussion of their defiance of conventional marketing wisdom in this earlier post):

• Google: Even their unsuccessful products are marketing.
• Facebook: Helped by news of MS investment, but huge prior.
• digg: And other Web 2.0 winners like del.icio.us, Flickr, etc.
• Wii: Spectacular zig while MS/Sony duke it out on the zag.
• Virgin America: Lots of early access to bloggers.
• Tesla Roadster: What Zero Motorcycle could have been.
• Asus Eee PC: Inexpensive, small notebook gets big attention.
• Slingbox: Right time. Right niche. Right product.

These are all products worth talking about. "Remarkable" in the purest sense of the word. Seth Godin's fundamental premise in Purple Cow. Or, provocatively put another way on Jeremiah's blog by Thomas Marban (creator of popurls, among other things): "marketing is a compensative [sic] process for not being remarkable."

Disconnection between marketing and product definition has never been less tolerable.

So, if this is how marketing has evolved, what lies ahead?

The natural step in having marketing make its way deeper and deeper into the early part of the product cycle, is for it to go all the way to the beginning. When Social Media evolves to becoming Social Product, end users actually build your product with you, and by that I mean much more than etching their name on it, or deciding whether it's white, black or silver.

From conversation comes product. A little something like this...

* AdAge, 2007

How come Apple doesn't ...

... follow conventional marketing wisdom and is instead plowing $’s into the media everyone is running from?

• Conventional: Take money out of print/TV. Go Online.
• Apple: Superbowl ads. TV/print for all products.

• Conventional: Don’t just take TV ad and run it Online.
• Apple: Run “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” all over the Internet.

• Conventional: Get heavily involved in conversational marketing.
• Apple: Not a stitch of Social Media. One-way only ... when they’re ready to talk.

• Conventional: Tune your message by vehicle and/or point in purchase process.
• Apple: Same messages in TV, print, apple.com and Apple stores.

Since Apple is widely celebrated as a marketing genius, is conventional wisdom simply wrong?

Not really. It’s just … too conventional. Apple is making it clear that when done well, anything is possible. TV/print in product launch windows. Good online video at very, very high frequencies. Conversations about your product that you don’t have to stimulate, much less participate in. And great messages reinforced all the way from awareness to purchase.

And when they see good opportunities, they will innovate, as they have with the barrage of in-depth product videos at apple.com in the last two quarters. A great strategy for the Internet’s #1 OEM web site (at least according to compete.com).

What Social Media needs now is...

...PageRank for conversations.

This is the third post of a Social Media Trilogy. Having wondered when Social Media will have its “AdWords moment”, and hand-waving my way around a 3x3 of Social Media’s competitive positioning challenge, I might as well make something up about how Social Media can break through in terms of becoming the new high-scale, high-effectiveness weapon-of-choice for marketers.

All we need is a large-scale, real-time conversation detection, enablement, aggregation and amplification system.

Conversations are happening everywhere. And that’s the problem. They need to be detected, aggregated, amplified and syndicated back out. That will create a nexus of conversations which will be useful to end users looking to observe—and participate—and to marketers who now have a place where there is discernible user intent around finding conversations. The same “database of intentions” that Google represented for search in general.

The question becomes whether this is simply a next generation version of Techmeme, Technorati, del.icio.us and digg, or the mother of all Google mashups (e.g. 10x overweight comments and other “conversations” in results), or whether it is a system that perhaps has some genetic material from those, but is a distinct, new service with new technology.

Perhaps the PageRank for conversations.

In this 3x3 you can see...

...the competitive landscape for Social Media.

It’s a conceptual take on how Social Media is positioned relative to its competitors on two axes critical to marketers: traffic (or the ability to buy at scale) and marketing/monetization effectiveness (roughly CTR). It also shows the likely trends (arrows) for all these vehicles.


Aside from the fact that the graph lacks deep data accuracy, there are other issues with some of the generalizations made to keep it reasonably simple, but that does not change the fact that Social Media is currently lagging behind both Paid Search and Display advertising in attractiveness.

But, the graph also points out where Social Media’s opportunity lies: Once it has had its “AdWords Moment” (more on that in this post), Social Media needs to come in slightly under Search’s traffic proposition and well above Display’s effectiveness.

It should be able to do this because eventually Social Media will understand the user’s context even better than mere search (although targeting effectiveness will drop with increasing traffic as there’s probably a maximum size to conversations), while the volume of “conversations” will only increase.

Of course, this is all generalities and hand-waving. What do you think?

When will Social Media...

...have its "AdWords" moment?

I use quotes because I don’t mean the literal selling of AdWords adjacent to Social Media. Instead I'm talking about the more general notion of replacing a predominant, but less efficient monetization of a very large amount of traffic generated by several players around a fairly well understood user context with a much more efficient monetization by one player that can be bought at scale by advertisers.

Those were the characteristics of the Search Business circa 2000 (prior to the victory march of AdWords' version of paid search). Interestingly, the Social Media Business of 2008 is in much the same state:

Here’s an illustration of Social Media’s current issue: Dell.

If the data at Spyfu (a service that as of 2/1/2008 was scanning over 500M Google results on over 2M keywords across nearly 10M domains) is to be believed, then as of 2/16/2008 Dell is spending an estimated $236K/day on Google advertising. That is an approximate annual investment of $90M. Dell, one of the most instrumented direct marketers in the PC (or, for that matter, any) business has the ROI data (marketing invested to benefits—including revenue—generated) to know that this investment is worth it, or they would be taking their money elsewhere.

Speaking of elsewhere, could Dell take that $90M towards Social Media and get better performance (the way advertisers took their money from Yahoo to Google)? At CTR's one to possibly two orders magnitude lower than high performing online vehicles, no ability to go to one source and buy $90M of Social Media and no proven conversion performance of the resulting customer, the answer today is most certainly “no”.

But, as a CNET producer told me a decade ago, the Internet is in perpetual beta, so the question is not whether Dell could take the $90M towards Social Media now, but whether they will in the future.

Only if Social Media can surface an efficient (for media company, advertiser and end user) monetization method that can be bought at scale.

That will be its "AdWords" moment.