All too regularly I am in touch with friends who are finding themselves with a lot of extra time on their hands due to more corporate “right sizing” and we sort thru the immediate steps of goal reassessment and plotting the job search strategy.  Then comes the step of actually putting yourself and your talents out there and opening up for the harsh reality of a very tight job market.
I try to frequently tweet and post articles relating to staying engaged and motivated in our creative endeavors by volunteering some of our talents to organizations to which you feel connected.  They are feeling the economic crunch from all levels and can probably really use the help and support of your time and talents while you get the creative rush of doing something new, different and challenging of your skills in a whole new working environment.  We don’t mind “making money for the man” when it’s a cause we believe in and it is particularly satisfying to be around like minded people making progress toward our mutual goal.
Showcase your talents, connect with others in your field, stay primed and ready for the next job and feel great at the end of the day for all that you’ve accomplished on the way.  Positive energy can be created quickly while the alternative is often lost focus, dwindling momentum and precious time wasted while waiting for things to happen as opposed to making good things happen.  Forward your phone to the cell and you won’t miss a call that day or two a week that you are out pro bono.
Some corporate structures include pro bono as a part of who they are, like GSD&M in Austin, and it helps balance and center creative energy to apply it positively to mankind as well as to the bottom line.
For many this is a great opportunity to decompress, reassess, and properly address our most heartfelt passions and that energy created will cross into your job search as well as the excitement of learning the systems employed by the non-profit.  I just put together an IP Television system for streaming races for my daughter’s team and had a blast doing it!
When asked in your next job interview what you have done since leaving company X, it will be fun to feel your pride as you explain the progress you helped facilitate within that favorite organization and that will speak volumes on who you are!
Let’s get busy.

Garry Leigh
Snafu Consulting, LLC

When ad revenues sharply decline what do you do with your magazine?  Make it more focused on the reader to increase circulation, word of mouth, demand and thereby ramp up revenue?  Of course not.  You do what everyone else in traditional media does today and change the product to better suit an advertiser’s message while hoping the consumer doesn’t feel used in the process.
Living is going where the remaining ad spending is for publications and will be adding new features to court those accounts like a health and beauty column, a fashion department and of course, an occasional travel piece for better ad proximity to editorial content.
Pages in Living are down over 35% this year so why not?  Will the reader notice or care?
Does this remind you of any other facet of media lately?  It reminds me of an episode of “30 Rock” which really brought home the product ramifications of catering to advertisers rather than viewers.
The real solution for traditional media’s dilemma might just be to go where the consumers are and give them what they want when, where, and how they want to consume it.  Rather than spending billions trying to push an audience to our house, how about we take our brilliantly targeted content to them in their environment in a form that is most usable to them?!
I know, this is the same message you’ve heard from Snafu Solutions for years, but when MARTHA STEWART gets dragged into the fray, it’s time to act or in the very near future her magazine may be adding a stock tips feature. Brought to us by Citi.

Garry Leigh     Snafu Consulting

Are you sure you know what she's thinking?

The days of our programming departments spending TONS of money on audience research are pretty much over and now we have to fight for every bit of music testing we can get, so perceptual research and the usual strategic planning based on those volumes of information are pretty much left to local management to figure out now.  There are marvelous exceptions along the way, and you are the lucky ones, but for the most part we’re out digging up every bit of info we  find on our audience and what they want to hear right now.  Not last week or last month, but right now.  It’s actually a tall order and many Program Directors are screaming at their staff right now for saying something no-one wanted to hear.  Yes it is a part of the PD’s job to help the staff find hot topics and guide them on seamlessly integrating that content into their show, so as always, check with me anytime on an extensive list of sites which overview usage in their particular web niche.  Then we’ll try to focus them as tightly as you can on your market as the hot topics will very widely by geography, but this can help you get into the moment.

Garry Leigh      Snafu Consulting.com

When doing Hot Hits back in the day for Mike Joseph, at boot camp he always stayed in our face about each live break being referred to as “a relate”.  He never called them a break or whatever… only “a relate”.  Obviously, that meant whatever we said had damn sure better relate to the target audience in the moment or we’d never get out of boot camp and wind up back on our old stations somewhere.  You had to know and understand the target audience well enough to relate EVERY BREAK to build a connection to that listener one by one.  We had to earn their trust every day break by break.  There was never a throw away time n temp, never a simple call letters/title/artist… every break was a relate or you didn’t deserve to be in Hot Hits in a top 5 market.  Two boot camps and two different Hot Hits stations in two different top 5 markets, I still agreed with Mike on that and to this day that fundamental of the medium hasn’t changed for truly successful stations.  Lots of time and effort went into researching the audience and Philly was amazingly different from San Francisco, but the audience weren’t there to listen to me, they were listening to hear a reflection of what the station meant to them.  When I read this piece from Advertising Age this morning, it brought back that broadcast basic of making the connection with the listener every single break – oops – relate (sorry Mike).  Good reminder that it’s not just us, it’s a part of the fabric of life and our intercommunication at many levels.  See you in New Orleans!  Enjoy.         Garry Leigh      Snafu Consulting
Connect More, Advertise Less
What Mardi Gras Parades Can Teach You About Human Nature

Posted by Tom Martin on 01.21.09 @ 08:55 AM
Tom Martin
Here in New Orleans, the Christmas decorations have given way to the Mardi Gras decorations, which got me to thinking about an old blog post I wrote a few years ago about connections.
As I sat on the neutral ground one year during Mardi Gras helping my kids yell for and catch beads, toys, etc., I had an epiphany. Here we were, in the middle of what can only be characterized as organized chaos, and amidst the yelling, screaming music, an interesting thing happened — we made a connection.

As my 3-year-old (at the time), Hayes, sat slumped in his ladder, fast asleep (poor thing was sick), I was doing my best to keep him from being hit by a flying bead while also catching him a few trinkets so when he awoke he wouldn’t feel left out of the fun. And then a float stopped in front of us and on the top deck some 20 feet away a young woman (I think — not sure as riders are masked) made eye contact, gave a quick little frown and then reached down and launched a huge stuffed animal, but only after assuring she had my attention and that I realized she was throwing to Hayes. I caught it and waved a thank you to her and then she was off. Mission accomplished. I was a good dad.

Now if you’ve never ridden on a Mardi Gras float, you can’t fully understand how unique this situation is. As a rider you can’t hear anything but a constant swell of screaming and yelling. Hundreds, thousands of people screaming for your attention in hopes you’ll “throw them something mister.” Add to this the fact that you’re on a moving platform, it’s dark and maybe you’ve had a cocktail or two, and it is hard enough to pick people out of the crowd that you are looking for much less make a random connection. But it happens.

In fact, this same thing happened a dozen or more times as the parade continued to roll on. I didn’t know these people, they didn’t know me but they felt something. A connection. For a fleeting moment, a personal connection was made and the nameless rider put down the 25-cent plastic beads and tossed an item that costs them (Mardi Gras float riders pay for the stuff they throw out of their own pockets) not an insignificant amount of money.

Why?

And that has gotten me thinking. About this idea — connection — the simple human need to connect to others. Powerful. Powerful because it causes people to do things, feel things and act on those feelings. Powerful because connection lives beyond the transaction and creates feelings and memories that last. Powerful because in a world of hyperconnectivity, consumers have never been less connected to brands.

At first I thought it might just be me, but then one night I read a report of Anderson Coopers’ coverage of Mardi Gras that year — he rode in Endymion, a Super Krewe, the big parades that you see on TV. He remarked: “Rolling on the float late at night, I realized Mardi Gras is not about the beads or about Bourbon Street. It’s about making a connection, one person to another.” And it hit me. Anderson was right. He had captured the essence of Mardi Gras but more important he had captured this powerful human insight, one that I’m sure can be used to create more powerful and effective work. People really do want to connect. But as advertisers, we need to give them something worthy of connecting too.

So the next time you sit down to write a brief or review concepts, ask yourself if what you’re doing is advertising or trying to connect. If it is the former, try again. Who knows, you might just get rewarded with a nice prize for your efforts.

~ ~ ~
Tom Martin is president of Zehnder Communications, with offices in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. He can be reached at Tom.Martin@z-comm.com. Follow him on Twitter: @TomMartin .

For years we’ve been discussing ways to take radio across boundries and make aspects of the local station brand not just available, but as a “go to” at the top of your daily digital adgenda. In fact, the very first blog in the archives relates to exactly this and I think Ketchum’s research is screaming we need to take another look.    Garry Leigh     Snafu Consulting

Legacy Media and New Media Meld: Mass Communications Succumb to Communications by the Masses

According to the third annual U.S. Media Myths & Realities survey by Ketchum and the Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center, the melding of media means that content deliverables once owned by a specific medium are now found on nearly all platforms, creating a participatory and fragmented media landscape.
As Americans buy products, seek information, plan their social lives, and make personal and business decisions, the lines between media channels in the 21st century have become increasingly blurred, says the study report.

Along with a steep rise in the use of shopping Web sites among consumers, doubling from 2006 to 2008, 44% of those visiting shopping Web sites read consumer reviews and comments there, showing that these sites have transformed into virtual social gathering places and information destinations, rather than just a place to purchase goods.

Consumers are (frequently) placing more trust in the experiences of their online peers than they are on the retailer’s product descriptions. This participatory media landscape, says the report, means media audiences are having just as much influence, if not more, as the content providers themselves.

Nicholas Scibetta, Ketchum partner and director of the agency’s Global Media Network, concludes that “… not only are people posting their thoughts via consumer-generated reviews, but they are also responding to each other’s comments… (creating) pockets of social networks found all over the Web… conversations among readers, information seekers, and reviewers can be found from The New York Times and The Huffington Post, to YouTube, to the neighborhood blogger… with the widespread availability of such conversations, the lines that once separated mediums have now melded.”

Jerry Swerling, founder and director of the USC Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center, says “.. it’s a transformative time in which we are seeing outlets move from single-media to multi-media… “

Consumers are using a wider variety of channels than ever before. Newer channels, such as blogs and social networking sites, are gaining more and more traction. The survey found that 26% of consumers use social networking sites, compared to 17% in 2006. The usage of blogs nearly doubled (24% in 2008 compared to 13% in 2006).

Among influential consumers, the 10% to 15% of the population who initiate change in their communities, 32% read blogs written by journalists (vs. 8% of the general population), and:

43% read blogs by non-journalists, compared to     16% of the general population
70% of influencers use search engines, vs. 57%     of the general population
43% of influencers use video-sharing Web sites, vs.     25% of the  general population
29% of influencers use specialty information     portals (such as WebMD), vs.16% of the general population
Influencers also use more new media such as     videocasts (19%), RSS news feeds (15%), podcasts (12%), and mobile media (9%)
The use of more established media channels continues to wane. 65% of consumers use major network television news as a source of information (down from 71% in 2006). Local television news saw a sharper drop – 62% in 2008 compared to 74% in 2006.

Swerling concludes “… we’ve watched traditional mass communications give way to communications controlled by the masses… the melding of media is… demonstrated in the actions of legacy media, which are continuing to embrace and implement the principles of new media. Conversely, the journalistic principles that underline news organizations… accuracy, timeliness, objectivity… move to other delivery channels.”

For more information about melding media, please visit Ketchum here.

The day of the gold watch after time served with a single company is long gone and the project-by-project employment model has now been the norm for much of America for years, so why do we in broadcast and marketing so lament moving on to the next project? Maybe because we feel that all of the time and effort we put into the medium itself has somehow been wasted? Traditional media’s mutation to both new and emerging media platforms is necessary and natural, although challenging to each of us and to our individual skill sets.
Radio, from programming to sales, has always been an intensely personal medium for the producer as well as the consumer, so it stands to reason we all take any change very personally. Any good sales person has cultivated deep relationships with their clients and has thereby lived the ups and downs of each client’s business cycles and strategic decisions, good or bad for years. Sales people feel just as much loss from those relationships being severed as an on-air personality no longer being able to share in the daily life of each listener.
We are all being forced into making deeper decisions on our own path to success and relying less on any one company’s employment.
So lets try to separate ourselves from the emotion of the moment, and look at the bigger picture of starting our own business. Of course, this process begins with building a business plan for you own new company.
(From the myownbusiness.org site)
Does Your Plan Include the Following Necessary Factors:
* A sound business concept
* Understanding your market
* Healthy, growing and stable industry
* Capable management
* Able financial control
* Consistent business focus
* Mindset to anticipate change
* Plans for online business
We all need to be able to do our market research and build a model that will be in demand not just today, but into the future far enough for us to develop the skills and gather the capitol we’ll need for the next business cycle and then the process begins anew.
Now is the time for all of us to embrace our newfound independence and do everything possible to control our own destiny and no longer be working at the whim of some investment company and their momentary valuation of our worth to their strategic market play (most of those models crashed and took billions of investor’s capital with them).
Since deregulation began with the subsequent “right sizing” of some of the most creative minds in broadcast, we should do as many of them have and go about creating and building the next platform for the delivery of entertainment. As the number crunchers in San Antonio are literally executing their vision of corporate value for the next five minutes, so should we develop our own individual plan for the next several years and begin it’s implementation about right NOW! Research thoroughly, plan well, work hard and just as you always have, do it BIG! Let’s get started!     -     Garry Leigh          Snafu Consulting

I’m a BIG believer in ONE and had to pass this on so you don’t miss it. Fun. Garry Leigh at Snafu Consulting
New York Times
Opinion
Op-Ed Guest Columnist
Notes From the Chairman

By BONO
Published: January 9, 2009

Dublin

Once upon a couple of weeks ago …

I’m in a crush in a Dublin pub around New Year’s. Glasses clinking clicking, clashing crashing in Gaelic revelry: swinging doors, sweethearts falling in and out of the season’s blessings, family feuds subsumed or resumed. Malt joy and ginger despair are all in the queue to be served on this, the quarter-of-a-millennium mark since Arthur Guinness first put velvety blackness in a pint glass.

Interesting mood. The new Irish money has been gambled and lost; the Celtic Tiger’s tail is between its legs as builders and bankers laugh uneasy and hard at the last year, and swallow uneasy and hard at the new. There’s a voice on the speakers that wakes everyone out of the moment: it’s Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” His ode to defiance is four decades old this year and everyone sings along for a lifetime of reasons. I am struck by the one quality his voice lacks: Sentimentality.

Is this knotted fist of a voice a clue to the next year? In the mist of uncertainty in your business life, your love life, your life life, why is Sinatra’s voice such a foghorn — such confidence in nervous times allowing you romance but knocking your rose-tinted glasses off your nose, if you get too carried away.

A call to believability.

A voice that says, “Don’t lie to me now.”

That says, “Baby, if there’s someone else, tell me now.”

Fabulous, not fabulist. Honesty to hang your hat on.

As the year rolls over (and with it many carousers), the emotion in the room tussles between hope and fear, expectation and trepidation. Wherever you end up, his voice takes you by the hand.

•

Now I’m back in my own house in Dublin, uncorking some nice wine, ready for the vinegar it can turn to when families and friends overindulge, as I am about to. Right by the hole-in-the-wall cellar, I look up to see a vision in yellow: a painting Frank sent to me after I sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” with him on the 1993 “Duets” album. One from his own hand. A mad yellow canvas of violent concentric circles gyrating across a desert plain. Francis Albert Sinatra, painter, modernista.

We had spent some time in his house in Palm Springs, which was a thrill — looking out onto the desert and hills, no gingham for miles. Plenty of miles, though, Miles Davis. And plenty of talk of jazz. That’s when he showed me the painting. I was thinking the circles were like the diameter of a horn, the bell of a trumpet, so I said so.

“The painting is called ‘Jazz’ and you can have it.”

I said I had heard he was one of Miles Davis’s biggest influences.

Little pithy replies:

“I don’t usually hang with men who wear earrings.”

“Miles Davis never wasted a note, kid — or a word on a fool.”

“Jazz is about the moment you’re in. Being modern’s not about the future, it’s about the present.”

I think about this now, in this new year. The Big Bang of pop music telling me it’s all about the moment, a fresh canvas and never overworking the paint. I wonder what he would have thought of the time it’s taken me and my bandmates to finish albums, he with his famous impatience for directors, producers — anyone, really — fussing about. I’m sure he’s right. Fully inhabiting the moment during that tiny dot of time after you’ve pressed “record” is what makes it eternal. If, like Frank, you sing it like you’ll never sing it again. If, like Frank, you sing it like you never have before.

If.

•

If you want to hear the least sentimental voice in the history of pop music finally crack, though — shhhh — find the version of Frank’s ode to insomnia, “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” hidden on “Duets.” Listen through to the end and you will hear the great man break as he truly sobs on the line, “It’s a long, long, long road.” I kid you not.

Like Bob Dylan’s, Nina Simone’s, Pavarotti’s, Sinatra’s voice is improved by age, by years spent fermenting in cracked and whiskeyed oak barrels. As a communicator, hitting the notes is only part of the story, of course.

Singers, more than other musicians, depend on what they know — as opposed to what they don’t want to know about the world. While there is a danger in this — the loss of naïveté, for instance, which holds its own certain power — interpretive skills generally gain in the course of a life well abused.

Want an example? Here’s an example. Take two of the versions of Sinatra singing “My Way.”

The first was recorded in 1969 when the Chairman of the Board said to Paul Anka, who wrote the song for him: “I’m quitting the business. I’m sick of it. I’m getting the hell out.” In this reading, the song is a boast — more kiss-off than send-off — embodying all the machismo a man can muster about the mistakes he’s made on the way from here to everywhere.

In the later recording, Frank is 78. The Nelson Riddle arrangement is the same, the words and melody are exactly the same, but this time the song has become a heart-stopping, heartbreaking song of defeat. The singer’s hubris is out the door. (This singer, i.e. me, is in a puddle.) The song has become an apology.

To what end? Duality, complexity. I was lucky to duet with a man who understood duality, who had the talent to hear two opposing ideas in a single song, and the wisdom to know which side to reveal at which moment.

This is our moment. What do we hear?

In the pub, on the occasion of this new year, as the room rises in a deafening chorus — “I did it my way” — I and this full house of Irish rabble-rousers hear in this staple of the American songbook both sides of the singer and the song, hubris and humility, blue eyes and red.

Bono, lead singer of the band U2 and co-founder of the advocacy group ONE, is a contributing columnist for The Times.

Now that the left brain linear thinkers have come in and rewired all of your systems for maximum efficiency and cleaned out all of the right brain people who are impossible to valuate and are thus expendable, what is left for your ability to maintain the creative connection between your brand and your primary consumer?  Placing a real value on that creative link is very difficult without some hard metrics and I think we are now getting closer to having the numbers which justify right brain approaches and staff.  HBR has articles going deeper on the topic and this article from MediaPost really does speak to the absolute necessity of not only maintaining but growing this creative connection for your brand.        Garry Leigh at Snafu
Media Metrics: Hate to Burst Your Bubble
by John Gerzema, Monday, December 1, 2008, 12:00 AM

As if sub-prime mortgages, failing hedge funds and institutional bailouts were not enough for 2008, there is yet another crisis brewing on Wall Street. Only in this case the assets cannot be traded away or hedged against inflation. The financial markets think brands are worth more than the consumers who buy them think they are worth.

We examined brand and financial data from “BrandAsset Valuator” (BAV), the world’s largest study of consumer perceptions of brands. We’ve invested more than $ 115 million dollars and each year we interview 500,000 consumers in 44 countries. We’ve tracked consumer perceptions of around 40,000 brands since 1993.

And the numbers tell a story of Main Street offering a very different view of brands than Wall Street. While brand value increased 80 percent in three decades, among 2,500 brands we studied across 14 years of data: brand awareness declined 20 percent; brand quality eroded by 24 percent; trust in brands declined by a staggering 50 percent. And 85 percent of brands were either stagnant or declining in brand differentiation.

Looking outside our research, we saw signs of the Brand Bubble in other studies. Jack Trout and Kevin Clancy’s research for the Harvard Business Review found that 90 percent of 42 product categories had lost differentiation over time. Leonard Lodish and Carl Mela, also writing for HBR, reported that consumers are 50 percent more price sensitive than 25 years ago. Further signs of this worrying disconnect emerged as we examined the extent of the gap between business and consumer perceptions of brand value. Among Interbrand’s top 100 most valuable brands, 45 percent were actually declining in consumer perceptions according to BAV.

This isn’t a brand problem, it’s a business problem. Shareholder value is at risk. Today, brands account for 30 percent of the market capitalization of the S&P 500, or almost $4 trillion dollars. The 250 most valuable brands are worth $2.197 trillion dollars, which exceeds the GDP of France. Even the world’s top 10 most valuable brands are larger than the market capitalization of 70 percent of U.S. public companies.

Why does the Brand Bubble exist? I believe the changing nature of media and technology has caught brand management off guard, while at the same time the importance of creativity has risen among consumers, raising their expectations of brands.

Blowing Up

In the span of just six years brands have come up against a convergence of forces.

First there’s the fragmentation of everything – of channels, choice, modes and mediums. The highest rated show in America, All in the Family, had a 34.0 HH rating in 1972, compared to 14.6 for American Idol in 2008. This means not only are there a myriad of new competitors, it’s no longer possible to build a brand on the back of mass media, the way we did in previous decades. Brands must now aggregate audiences through micro-communities and tailor their appeals through bespoke channels.

Second, because of social media (collaboration, communication and sharing, social networks, applications and consumer generated media), consumers trust each other more than brands. A Mediaedge:cia study found that 76 percent of people rely on what other people say versus 15 percent on advertising, and 92 percent of people now cite word-of-mouth as the best source for brand information. Universal McCann found that 74 percent of global Internet users write reviews online, while 75 percent of people consult blogs before they buy, according to Bazazarvoice. Brands have nowhere to hide.

Third, personalization (of products, experiences, mass customization and micro-addressability) means there are no USPs anymore. A brand has a myriad of potential appeals and avenues to be personally relevant. This new paradigm is still difficult for many marketers to grasp, but micro marketing will be paramount to future competitive advantage.

And finally, portable content (RSS, podcasts, video, widgets/gadgets, mobile, slingbox) creates a redefinition of place. Enabled by unlimited storage capability, content is now instantly accessible and easily shared, meaning that consumers no longer distinguish an off- and online world. Marketers have not caught up to understanding this fluidity. Active listening and response is difficult in most organizations that are not yet “marketing nimble.”

All of these forces accelerate the decay in brand equity. As the power has shifted from institution to individual, brands are commoditized in compressed periods of time. Consumers are simply quicker to punish uninteresting and stagnant brands.

The Rise of Creativity

At the same time these forces have also unleashed a marketplace thirst for creativity. Today, consumers are not only citizen journalists, they’re amateur filmmakers, art critics, design mavens and content syndicators. In this creative renaissance, where consumers expect even inexpensive products to be “cheap chic,” they demand that brands continuously surprise and delight them. That’s why brands with what we call “energized differentiation” (continuous movement, momentum and direction) – outperform the S&P 500 by almost 30 percent in our modeled fund.

What’s interesting is these energized brands are blue chips like P&G, GE and Colgate, who are innovating beyond advertising, such as in product development, corporate social responsibility and sustainability. And there are low interest category killing brands like Geico, Simple Human and Method, who are effective at layering messaging and creating an ethos out of a seemingly commoditized product. There are high-energy brands effectively utilizing design and environments such as Pinkberry, Muji and Uniqlo. And there are brands like Zappos, Innocent and Ikea, for whom creativity in attention to corporate culture and core values resonate with consumers, who see them as more innovative and offering higher quality products and services.

The Brand Bubble is very real and yet, at the same time, it is avoidable. As researchers, economists and planners, our team concluded that brand value is dividing along the lines of creativity: A smaller number of highly creative and innovative brands are creating disproportionate value in our study. What’s their secret? Each is unleashing a continuous stream of marketing creativity, product and service innovation, design, advertising, social media mastery, media experimentation and CRM. They teach us that today, everything is marketing and only creativity matters if a brand is to hold its value in this rapidly transforming and unforgiving marketplace.

This is a great 101 from AdAge.com on where we are in behavioral marketing and who creates the wake that thousands of others surf. Let me know what you think about your site and how we can maximize return on the investment it took to get the eyes and ears on it in the first place!
Garry Leigh
Snafu Consulting

As Tracking Proliferates, Web Publishers Are Left Out

Behavioral Targeting Punishes Producers of Original Content

by Michael Learmonth 

Published: January 05, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Who’s the most valuable surfer on the web? For the auto advertisers, there are few more valuable than a visitor to Edmunds.com. For the next three months, he or she is considered an “in-market car buyer” and will be stalked by a host of ad networks, portals, brokers and other digital middlemen who cut their slice of the advertising pie.

Edmunds created a valuable asset — in this case, an “in-market car buyer” — but like most web publishers, they don’t participate in the mini-economy that flourishes after visitors leave. What’s worse, a host of ad networks will sell that “in-market car buyer” to advertisers at a fraction of the rate, thereby increasing ad inventory while driving down ad rates for Edmonds, KBB.com and other sites like it.

The same is true for publishers across the web that spend considerable dollars to create desirable editorial environments for web readers and advertisers only to have that value diluted by those packaging and re-selling the datastream left in their wake.

A parallel ad universe
Publishers have long viewed this parallel advertising industry of networks and targeting firms with unease, much as they had to learn to compete with portals aggregating their content. But you didn’t hear a lot of criticism when the pie was growing at a double-digit rate. But publishers are facing their leanest year since 2001.

The latest estimate from Barclays Capital is putting online display-ad growth at 4% in 2009, meaning the pie is essentially staying the same but with more venture-backed networks than ever competing for available budgets. Rumors abound about ad networks, portals and Google poaching audiences and dollars. Even agency holding companies such as WPP and Havas are buying up online ad inventory and repackaging it using behavioral data to target ad dollars.

“The notion of selling somebody an ad based on a click away from a site vs. the engagement one feels on a content site — ESPN or elsewhere — undervalues or commodifies the experience that advertising is trying to achieve,” said ESPN President-Sales Ed Erhardt. “My sense is this kind of sales proposition is dangerous for advertisers and for agencies and ultimately for the media companies spending billions on content.”

As the bottom fell out of the online display ad market this past year, executives at ESPN, Turner Entertainment, Forbes.com, Martha Stewart Living and the Weather Channel have all made a public show of “not working” anymore with ad networks. “Value is being extracted by third parties, so we made the decision to stop working with third-party ad networks,” said Walker Jacobs, Turner’s senior VP-new media sales.

Whose customer is it?
But the real issue is, Who created the customer and who owns the data generated by a visit or a sale? “Data is key; everybody wants to own it, everybody wants to use it. It’s not just ad networks — its portals, publishers and holding companies,” said Mike Cassidy, CEO of Undertone Networks. “The question to be answered is who owns the data, if anybody.”

In the offline world, publishers market their own subscriber lists. But online that data is harvested by a host of third parties such as Google’s DoubleClick, Microsoft’s Atlas and vast ad networks such as Platform A’s Advertising.com. “People are stealing from the media companies who have lost control of their data,” said Operative CEO Mike Leo. “It doesn’t make sense to me that the people creating these valuable audiences aren’t getting paid for it.”

Here’s how it works: A publisher decides to allow an ad network to sell some of its inventory. That network places a cookie on the publisher’s site. Now, when a user leaves that site, and goes somewhere else, the network can track that user. If that user is worth $10 CPM (meaning the cost to reach a thousand viewers) on a site such as Edmunds.com, the network can buy low-value inventory for, say, a 40-cent CPM on MySpace and re-sell it to an auto manufacturer when the onetime Edmunds’ visitor arrives on the social-networking site.

“Edmunds declared that person a valuable customer and for a brief moment in time gets to create value from that,” said former DoubleClick executive and now FreeWheel CEO Doug Knopper. “Then it goes away and Yahoo gets to monetize that customer.”

There’s nothing new about behavioral targeting or ad networks. But now a bigger number of players are locked in a battle for a static, or in some cases shrinking, slice of the online ad pie. Even one of the fathers of behavioral targeting, former Tacoda Systems founder and now Tennis Co. chairman Dave Morgan, concedes it hasn’t been a boon for publishers.

“Are publishers finding it difficult to continue to grow their business with highly scaled ad networks in the mix? The answer is yes,” he said. “If you are the third, fourth or fifth destination site in your category, you will have a tough time getting advertisers to give you a premium, but that’s just the way media works.”

How the problem started 
Publishers brought the problem on themselves in at least three ways: first in deciding several years ago that their “remnant” ad inventory didn’t have much value and deciding to sell it through networks in the first place; second, giving up their data for free to myriad networks and behavioral targeting outfits; and third, trying to compete with networks on scale, rather than on selling and investing in a unique editorial environments for users and advertisers.

“In other words, publishers got away from selling the unique environment of their brand and into the tonnage game, but they didn’t have a lot of scale or a lot of sophisticated technology to deliver it on the scale of the networks,” Mr. Morgan said.

As marketing dollars tighten, online publishers’ greatest asset is their branded environments, which, they argue, have intrinsically more value for an advertiser than anything a portal or a network could provide. That’s the reason the Online Publisher’s Association commissioned a study in August that show branded sites deliver better brand awareness and purchase intent.

“People either believe in context or they don’t,” said Sarah Chubb, president of CondeNet. “Is it the person or the behavior or the context? We think the most powerful thing is the relationship we have with the consumer.”

But while that argument might work for some, it won’t be enough for some sectors. Take news, for example, where the biggest news sites, CNN.com, MSNBC and NYTimes.com, have to compete with portals that create no news content of their own, such as Yahoo News, AOL News, Google News and even Huffington Post and the Drudge Report.

Is a “business decision maker” targeted on the New York Times’ website more valuable than a user of Yahoo News? Maybe. But it’s also true that the ability to target a “business decision maker” — or even a regular reader of the Times — on Yahoo will subtract available ad revenue from the Times.

Edmunds.com sales director Bradley Spannbauer said the site makes an effort to protect its data by not working with ad networks and attempts to make sure advertisers aren’t re-selling the data or using it to target users off Edmunds.com.

“There is a value to those users and if you let an ad network or other retargeting source share that data you are giving away money and it doesn’t make sense,” he said.

sign of the times in 2008.

Internet Tops Newspapers As News Source, Still Lags TV
by Erik Sass, Yesterday, 7:43 PM

The Internet is now the most popular source of news after TV, according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which released its year-end roundup of news media consumption last week. While TV is still king of the hill, its steady decline in the face of Internet competition bodes ill in the long term.
In 2008, 40% of the respondents said they got most of their national and international news from the Internet, versus 35% for newspapers in 2008. The Internet’s share is up from 24% in 2007, while newspapers also increased slightly, from 34%. The long-term trend is even clearer: the Internet’s share has more than tripled from 13% in 2001, while newspapers fell by almost a quarter–from 45%, in those six years.

(The figures add up to more than 100% because Pew accepted multiple responses to account for ambiguity in its survey of 1,489 adults from December 3-7. Although Pew did not explain this ambiguity, it might include respondents citing online newspapers or TV news Web sites alongside the traditional medium itself).

Although print newspapers–especially big metro dailies–appear to be locked in an irreversible long-term decline, newspaper Web sites have had big increases in audiences. In October 2008–the last month for which data is available–newspaper Web sites attracted a total of 68.97 million unique visitors–up 64% from 41.96 million in October 2004. The October 2008 figure represents 42% of the American adult Internet-using population–up from 28% in October 2004.

TV still takes first place as a news source, claiming 70% share in 2008–but that’s down from 74% in 2007, and a peak of 82% in 2002. Significantly, the percentage is lower among adults under the age of 30, who have taken to Internet news enthusiastically. Fifty-nine percent of respondents in this age bracket said TV news was their primary source, while an identical percentage tapped the Internet. That’s a big change from 2007, when 68% of people under the age of 30 choose TV, versus just 34% for the Internet.