Neat Digital Ad


Now THIS is cool. Above is a snapshot of weather.com at about 4:45pm. The ad on the right, for Cuervo Gold Tequila, has sucked out the current temperature and the location I had looked up and put that info IN THE AD. I am sorry, I am impressed.

Of course this ad is running during happy hour too.

Trying to find out who the agency is that is responsible but too much noise on google. Can't wait to show our IT director this one! (you think you have it rough, try to do this!!)

Print Mags Going out of Business - Let's Get on With It!

I had drinks the other night with a buddy who is the CEO of a 4th generation firm that manufactures assembly line products for food industries. His eyes lit up when he talked about how they were e-mailing interactive PDF “specials” to his customer list. The cost was nothing, and he could track hits and links and they even made a sale from this (a sales for him is a big ticket).

He scoffed and said he was never going to buy a print ad again. I asked why and he said because you can’t track it. So we talked for a while about how e-mailing your customer base was not defining his brand or introducing his company to any NEW prospects. By the time we were done he had agreed to buy 8 4-color full pages in the most dominant of the three publications serving his industry. (I have to look up that publisher – they owe me one!)

But my friend mentioned that the other two publications were getting thinner, there was no good editorial in them etc. etc…. My advice to those publications is to get it over with and go out of business. Companies still need to do print advertising for many reasons, but just not as much as they used to. A few strong publications will survive, let’s get on with it.

The Return of the Maiden Name

A bit off-topic but here is an observation. For 30-40 years there has been a question when a woman gets married. What to do with her name. In my wife's family we have most of the options on display:

My wife took my last name and the kids have my name

One sister did the hyphenation for her, her spouse and the kids (Meyer-Idzik)

Her brother's wife kept her name, and they merged names for the kids (he reamins Idzik, she remained Miller and the kids were: Miller + Idzik = Midzik)

The other sister did a full merger, she, spouse and kids are all the same: (Smith + Idzik = Smidzik)

There are alot of choices. But what is interesting is the alumni directories and now FaceBook especially (this is for the people in their 30s or older who are using Facebook to catch up with old acquaintances) - many of the women are listing their names as Mary Jones Smith - so people can find them. I have many married friends who took their husband's name at least outside of work, and now through FaceBook I am suddenly learning their maiden names. I don't know the point here except that it is intersting. What does this mean for future generations of kid-naming? Nothing perhaps, but I always wondered what happens when hyphenated-named kids marry other hyphenated-named kids - do they just keep it going??

This mattered alot more to me before delving heavily into my family geneaology a few years back, when I realized that blood is blood no matter what the name is.

Randomly,

ted

The Race to the Bottom

It seems to me as if media companies are falling all over one another in a race to price themselves out of business. First, print, with a few exceptions such as SD Times, is in a death spiral. We know that many many publications are on their way out. But it seems that media companies in jumping on the online bandwagon are so desperate for sales – any sales – that they are pricing themselves into oblivion.

Because there are very low barriers to entry on the Internet there are often dozens or even hundreds of places that an advertiser MIGHT find a buyer. Which websites are best?? Dunno, wonders the ad buyer, who then concludes that it must be the ones that generate the most clicks or have lower prices.

What about the hundreds of blogs or websites that might mention your product or be “on topic?” The popular solution has become the so-called Ad Network, which acts like a broker. Advertisers can place one banner with an Ad Network, and it’ll appear on hundreds of websites. At the opposite end of the business, website owners can sell their “inventory” of banner spots via the Ad Network with no effort – especially leftover, or remnant, space.

Sound like win-win? It’s not. It’s lose-lose.

When websites – with their carefully crafted content, expensive designs and unique readers – become just another member of an Ad Network, do you know what they are? A commodity. An eyeball aggregator. Nothing more.

When you’re part of an Ad Network, a click is a click is a click and the lowest price wins every time. Therefore, the Ad Networks, with the willing cooperation of publishers and advertisers, are slashing prices in an effort to compete with one another. A network I use recently told me their standard CPM (cost per thousand impression) for remnant space was dropping to 50 CENTS. That’s one million impressions generating $500 in revenue. Who can stay in business for that? (We told them they were not to sell any remnant space on our site.)

Plus, the Ad Networks are now being asked to serve up certain sections, pages, niches within their website. Slicing and dicing. This means that a network advertiser will buy fewer impressions – less money for publishers – as it cherry-picks only specific parts of websites. Where does this end?

Maybe Rupert Murdoch has figured this out as he brashly said today, “ENOUGH,” we’re not giving our content away for free anymore: http://bit.ly/14o03e. It’s like a take-off on the New Hampshire state motto: “Give Free and Die” Oh I know, everyone says lead-gen is the answer – I don’t think so. Stay tuned.