Churbuck.com

Happy May Day! I found a free wireless connection in the BGS lounge at Beijing airport and am replicating my Notes database before the 11-hour flight to San Francisco, then onto Phoenix, and eventually Raleigh for the last half of the week.

Relaxing Sunday writing reports, drafting the outline of the next book, and staying off line. Saturday was insane, running around Beijing with the director Peter Webber (Girl With a Pearl Earring) and checking out the cheap DVD shops with him. Watched a fantastic film yesterday, Days of Living Wild, Wong Kar Wai’s 1991 masterpiece.

Saturday was a gorge fest of great food, very little sightseeing, an amazing massage that made me drool, then dinner with my sister’s inlaws, Huang Hua and He Liliang at their hutong. Great hospitality and a great story about Kissenger’s secret flight to Beijing in 1971 to arrange Nixon’s historic meeting with Mao. The sticking point was the language in the proclamation indicating whom invited who, the point being that Nixon invited himself.

Huang Hua was Mao’s translator to the West beginning in the late 1930s and served in the Chinese Foreign Service for years, in the capacity of the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations in the 1970s after spending the sixties in Africa as ambassador to Egypt, Ghana, and elsewhere. When someone tells stories of Edgar Snow (Red Star Over China), Nixon, Kissinger, negotiating the truce of the Korean War, an armchair historian like myself can’t help but be captivated. It was the perfect punctuation point to a productive and eye-opening week.

More blogs when I get stateside, or on the plane if I can’t sleep, which I should as it is now 11 pm on the east coast and I have to restart the jet lag resetting process.

Tons to digest and blog about. I wrote a four page report on the market and trends for my boss which I won’t share for obvious competitive reasons.
Heartening to see so many responses to my previous post. It means someone is reading.

and I’m not telling. Let me just say RSS is a wonderful thing.

No posts for a few days. Checking out of my hotel and doing the tourist thing this weekend. Flying back to the States on Monday, then to Phoenix, then to RTP for three days, then finally back to Cotuit.

Jeez, what a day. I have completely collapsed in my hotel room north of city after an evil hour long cab ride from the Haidan District, the Silicon Alley of China, up here to Huilongguan, a sort of no-man’s land on the way up the Badaling Expressway towards the G-Wall of CN. Cabs are cheap — at least compared to their NYC counterparts — but they are just about as impossible to hail during rush hour on a Friday before a big holiday. The city was shitty with traffic when I walked out of my last appointment at Sina.com and flagging down a cab was an endless jaywalk, off-sidewalk, walking from corner to corner, dodging buses, bicycles, mopeds, more bicycles, bicycles ridden by the “surgeons” (the one’s with the gauze masks), bicycles that were loaded down like trucks, and insane cabs already filled with luckier people, while my buddy and guide, Liu Liu, told me: “Wait here.”

And then Liu Liu vanished into the seething masses with my hotel key and my only record of where I needed to be. The sun was setting. I was screwed if he didn’t come back.
Beijing is defined by its intersections. One can roll down the expressway, admire the view along the boulevards; but come to an intersection and everything changes into a rush for the lifeboats. They say the most dangerous occupation in Beijing is that of a traffic cop. These poor guys get run over on purpose, or beaten up for issuing tickets.
When your interpreter and guide tells you to Wait here you feel very, very alone. The Chinese writing looks like Klingon. The restaurants have big pictures of food never seen in nature (to be fair, when has anyone seen good pictures of food?). Street signs, even with Western writing, are unpronounceable. You look around, the tallest guy for miles, staring into the face of 20 million commuters headed your way and you think:

I want my mommy

Liu Liu returned. He is a senior at Beijing University studying finance. Tall, bespectacled; he isn’t into sports, loves movies (obscure Russian movies, which means he’ll get along great with my son), lives with his parents, is an only child, and wants to work in film. He likes gin and tonics, hanging with his buddies in the quiet cafes around Hohai, and the noisy rock and roll joints on Drum Street. He is immersed in World of Warcraft, lives on the Internet, reads lots of blogs, but doesn’t feel comfortable blogging himself yet.

Here were the learnings of the day in the order in which they were learned:

• I am blessed with patient, nice colleagues in here in China. They are forthright, share what they know, don’t pull punches, and face completely different, and amazingly similar challenges that any online operation does anywhere.
• Everyone has a humidifer that looks like a frog in their cubicle. Big plumes of fog over every desk. This place is dry. Like ten bottles of bottled water per day kind of dry. Chapstick is your friend.
• Everyone is younger than me. China is young. You see a 40-something in the office and you notice.
• James Ding at AsiaInfo is smart. He’s got a Long Tail Internet TV company — UITV.com — to do niche channel streams and PPV. I liken it to cycling.tv. His partner, Edward Tien, wired the country for broadband in the 90s and is the man behind China Netcom.

• Old Beijing, the hutongs or traditional one-story neighborhoods and alleys north of the Forbidden City, is my favorite part of the city. Funky and lively.

• When two opposing cars meet, the one with the white license plate and the man in the green Army uniform wins.
• Not knowing how to speak Chinese makes me feel stupid. I have to speak slowly and clearly and not use idioms. I feel like a text-to-speech reading machine.
• Blogs on WordPress.com are inaccessible from China and that pisses me off.
• I discovered Rebecca McKinnon’s blog on China and think it is smart. She is at the Harvard Beekman Center.
• I can tell a cab driver how to find my hotel in Outer Mongolia with sign language and extreme grimaces.
• A noise like “Doo-way” means “OK.” Answering the phone with “Hway!” means “Hello” and thank you is “Shay-Shay.” I do not know the word for “no.”
• Cashing a 100 RMB bill is like trying to break a $100 at a convenience store. And it’s worth like $12. If it has a hole — a pin hole — no one will take it.
• It is fitting that there is a BMW and a Jaguar dealership in the lobby of the Sina.com building. Gauging from their IPO performance, this is sensible and a better idea than Starbucks.
• Jeff Young at ZDnet needs to see China before slagging it.
• There was something called the Sexy Weather, where the weather lady started at the north in Harbin wearing a fur coat, and stripped by the time she got to Hainan in the south.
• Sexy girls are a big deal on Tom.com.
• All traffic numbers here are staggering.
• There is a cell phone called the “I Chocolate You”

• I counted 36 construction cranes when I looked out a window this morning.

• I want to come home. Work week is done. Some tourism this weekend. Big old jet airliner on Monday to S.F., then Phoenix, then RTP, then home on Friday night — one week to go.

A VC: Flickr Rocks

“My love affair with Flickr rages on unabated.”

It wasn’t until the past week or so, with a new digital camera, and a ton of shots piling up on the SD card from this China trip, that I really have come to appreciate the sheer genius of Flickr.

I love it so much I will probably upgrade upgraded to a Pro account. I haven’t had much experience in the community functions, but I am receiving notifications of people adding my photo stream to their accounts, and that, as Martha Steward would say, is a good thing.

You don’t have to blog to love it, but if you blog, you will definitely love it. From uploading photos taken off my Treo, to managing hundreds of digital snaps from the Canon IXUS — Flickr is now a “core” application for me.

IMG_0387

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.

I like the presentation on this dish. Basically spare ribs with the spare ribs included to remind you what you’re eating. Which is actually very useful as I had to turn to my colleague Fei Hongxing every other spin of the lazy-susan to ask him what was coming around the bend.

Spent the day learning about the China mobile phone market. 80 vendors duking it out for one billion potential customers, a third of whom have already signed up and plunked down some serious disposable income to get connected.

It’s a GSM world over here, but it’s moving to a China specific 3G standard called TS-SCDMA by 2008, with the push starting next year to get the Tier One cities signed on by the Summer Olympics in ’08. The market is young, professional, and concerned either with price or fashion. I went to a trendy nightclub earlier in the week and people were wearing their phones around their necks on leashes like ID badges. Phones are jewelry and will be the way the Chinese get online and stay online, since Internet penetration is only around 8 percent. When 3G hits I think that trend will intensify as broadband content starts streaming to the devices.

Before dinner I visited a Chinese version of Best Buy which was total electronics heaven. Bazillions of phones, PDAs, phones, USB memory sticks.

Then off to dinner. Chinese hospitality is humbling. Very gracious hosts and many toasts made for a late evening and tired blogging. More to come when there is time to process it all.

I spent the morning with Philip Zhang, sales director at Sohu.com at his offices in the Science Park near the Academy of Sciences in Haidan. Through an interpreter, I learned some pretty cool stuff about Chinese web publishing, interactive networks, and wireless content strategies.

Sohu — which translates as “Search Fox” — is the grand-daddy of the Chinese Internet, and having listed on NASDAQ in March of this year, is one of the better known Chinese internet brands. It also helps that it is one of the few Chinese sites to have an English version, which at the very least allows inquiring Western browsers to check out what all the fuss is about. Soho is a site, but also a 1,700 employee networks that has a search engine engaged in a battle with Baidu (Baidu is the Chinese king of search. No one seems at all concerned with Google nor Yahoo) for dominance, has Chinaren — an “alumni” or social networking site; Focus, for real estate, and 17173 for gamers.

About 65% of the company’s revenue is from advertising revenues and the most profitable segments are IT, Auto, and telecomm (which includes wireless). Real estate is the most profitable segment for Sohu (not surprising, as I would say building materials is a bigger growth business than Internet, at least in Beijing). 10% of the income comes from wireless advertising — SMS, MMS.

According to Zhang, the primary online activities for Chinese users is pretty much the same as it is the world around:

• Email
• Search
• News

The demographic for online users, vs mobile users, is 18-35 years old. Mobile skews to the 16 through 25 year old segment.

Sohu is big on blogs and claims to host over 4,000,000 blogs, where users can do the usual blog thing and upload to their hearts content. There are 40 million registered users in the overall Sohu “community” and the intention is to migrate that mob to the blog model over time.

Ads are sold on a day basis, let me repeat, a day basis. Not CPM or CPC. Day.

The killer for Sohu is the Sogu toolbar, this is their search play, and as I understand it, this browser plug in allows them to serve popups on other publishers’ site. This sort of freaked me out, and remember, this discussion was via interpreter so I may have misinterpreted it, but what I heard was this: the toolbar provides Sogu with the ability to “push” (I kept thinking Pointcast, but whatever) pop ups onto other sites.

Sounds positively Gatorish to me.

Rich media advertising is the hottest thing they have going. There is so much clutter on the typical page that it stands to reason that video based adverts are going to stand out. Sohu does offer a channel sponsorship model as well for exclusive ownership of specific “channels.”

On keywords, one cool thing they do is mash up maps with advertiser’s logos. Search for “Peking Duck” around Hohai, and bang, you will see the map with the Peking duck shops that paid for the right to be there appear.

Very cool stuff and further reinforcement that if you want to see the future of online advertising in large dollar volumes, go to China. If you want to make Jakob Nielsen have a seizure, ask him to critique any Chinese website. My favorite is www.it168.com — an IT site. I think I could count 14 ad impressions on the homepage, and some of them will induce epilepsy like that weird Japanese cartoon did to six-year old kids a few years ago.

More in a future post on Chinese page design and online clutter.

My thanks to Philip Zhang for his time. Very instructive. It’s a total battle of the bands over here and Philip says they have their hands full at Sohu dealing with the China market let alone consider exporting the model internationally.

Very few Chinese interactive media brands are operating internationally. Oak Pacific is looking for a US country manager. Sina has offices in the US. But so far, no hot interactive model has crossed out of the country. Give it time.

Or so it would seem. I spoke to a young American yesterday who explained the censorship and site blocking strategy and he said “everyone knows how to proxy around it. It’s no big deal.”

Wish I did. I need to run my daily searches against my favorite blog search engine. Google blog search next ….

… and it works just fine, it just isn’t as good at Technorati.

Wikipedia is dead too.

I’ve been keeping an eagle’s eye out in the chaos and confusion of moving through Beijing for marketing impressions from Western Brands and comparing them to how Chinese brands represent themselves. To keep the discussion simple, I’ll first look at outdoor advertising and then in a second essay, look at online.

Outdoor advertising — and by this I mean bus shelters to buses, billboards to storefronts — really should be separated into nighttime and daytime effects. Nighttime is a battle of neon. Not a lot of it, saturated Vegas style, but islands of it that really stick out. Daytime is a war for space. The Baidaling Expressway, which runs north out of Beijing up to the Great Wall, has its share of billboards, but only once one gets inside of the fourth ring road (Beijing is defined by concentric circles of ring roads, like Washington D.C.’s Beltway). Then things get interesting. No Western brands appear until one gets into the heart of the city, and the most effective ones are actually building brands — IBM, Ericsson, Microsoft — which interestingly enough are not out in the main technology park in the Shandi district where Lenovo is based and one can see Western companies like Peoplesoft and Nordisk.

Once in the city proper, the advertising starts going nuts.

Here’s a few photos:

Then, one starts to notice some familiar brands, but still competing for attention:

And right around the corner ….

The situation in the stores is even more chaotic, according to my colleagues who visited a tech mall last night (which I need to do before the week is over.) Lots of machines competing for attention — like your average 42nd St. electronic store in NYC.

Bus shelters and sidewalk displays seem focused on mobile phones. Lots and lots of Lenovo impressions for our handheld business. This one is for a Lenovo PC.

And finally, my favorite impression of the day. From lunch:

Next up, online advertising for PCs in China. This is mindblowing stuff.

My Weblog: Waiting For Break Out Notebook Marketing

“Notebook makers are going to need to step up to the plate and differentiate their machines on their own. Some are already working on this. The best example I can think of is a ThinkPad ad that creates an image of ThinkPad as being a tough platform that protects data. This is a tremendous start but I hope Lenovo goes farther and creates messaging highlighting how emerging features are based on valuable DNA that’s still a part of the product line.”

Jim Forbes once again proves why he is one of the smartest guys observing the notebook market.

I spent the morning with Xiaoxin Chen, CFO of Oak Pacific Interactive, one of the largest interactive networks in China. Mindblowing discussion about the Internet in China, the explosion of wireless, file sharing, consumer willingness to buy online, Google, Baidu, and his hot company — one of the top ten in terms of traffic with 30 million visits per day and about 15 million registered visitors.

Mop.com – which translates into “cat rushing forward” — is primarily a site aimed at the younger market. This is a MySpace type of model for China. All Ajaxy and Web 2.0-ish but more.

You register and basically get your own place, your social network, your file sharing network, etc. This is where the two viral sensations of China — the guys in Yao Ming shirts lip synching (who have since been signed to corporate sponsorships) — got their start before they viralled over to Youtube.

Mop is a broadband network, and their TV site — itv.mop.com — is total video, from movie trailers to user uploaded content. The model is advertising based — I counted a dozen impressions on the home page, the design is crazed — and there is a premium model where users can buy more space, and services.
Chen, a Stanford MBA, is riding a tiger. An hour with him and you want to move to China and set up shop. This is Wild West stuff, volumes of users and ad dollars that no SOMA or Silicon Alley dot.com could have dreamed of in the late 90s. His partner, the founder, Joseph Chen, a Stanford classmate, sold his first company to Sohu, hung around for a while, left, went optical before that bubble burst, then got back into interactive media with ChinaInteractiveCorp — which is now Oak Pacific Interactive, a network which includes pcast, dudu.com, uume, and DoNews.

I need a month here. Too much to absorb in a week.

Yesterday was an eye-opener in terms of getting a different vantage point on the same goal.

I spent the day working with my Chinese colleagues — not a new thing, I’ve collaborated with them via email, and in person in North Carolina since the middle of January. But being here, in their offices, watching how they work, and hearing first-hand their perspectives on what it means to be a Chinese company seeking to become a global company is an entirely different thing than making assumptions from North Carolina trying to help them realize that goal.

The entire vibe is one of intense and keen interest in figuring out the best way to build a true global company — not an integration of a Chinese and an American one. Having spent last week in Singapore with colleagues from all of the Asia Pacific region, instant messaging with the United Kingdom, organizing operations in Buenos Aries — this is head spinning to say the least.

While IT is the backbone, what’s more apparent to me is the necessity for the old cliche from the early days of online community, lessons learned on the docks of Sausalito by the first denizens of the W.E.L.L., by the Geeks on the Beach at Reel-Time — that face to face time is the most precious commodity of all. Flat worlds, fiber pipes, IM, SMS, global wireless … all expedite the collaboration, but nothing can ever replace the intense bandwidth of sharing a lunch with a colleague 13 time zones away from one’s home. I blogged early on global governance and management, now I’m living it, and it is apparent we’re on the threshold of something massive coming, the early stages of a new world that will demand new thinking.

The friction is — essentially –airplanes and jet lag. Language is a pain, but even so, seat me next to someone over a bowl of fishhead soup and I’ll gain a better understanding than I would from a 7 am conference calls and a hundred emails.

I walked my own personal, original, unrestored segment of the Great Wall on Sunday. Watching the sunset over the hills to the west, the cherry blossoms striping the slopes, the flapping of the flags on the parapets ….

As Richard Nixon said in 1972: “That sure is a great wall.”

Things are too chaotic on the morning of day two to compose a reasoned essay on what the situation is regarding computing, Internet, mobile telephony, and branding opportunities in China. and I need to get outside and explore more on one of my precious days off in the country before a week of meetings.
So here’s a random list:

• Right off the bat I saw a Yahoo ad on a bus. I love bus ads. CNET used them to great effect in Manhattan in the mid-90s. Yahoo was the only U.S. internet brand to make an impression yesterday and this one was sighted outside of the northern entrance to the Forbidden City.
• Internet access in the two hotels I’ve visited is hardwired and fairly fast. I moved a ton of images up to Flickr without any problem. I’ve been googling with no hiccups and have seen no examples of censorship. There may be different “zones” for hotel access, but I can’t say I have seen any blocked messages or sites.Wikipedia is not loading, but running a politically sensitive search on Google permitted click throughs to sites critical of the government. I have not looked for any porn or other objectionable content. In no way have I felt that any online activities are being delayed, blocked or impeded in the four hours I’ve spent online.
• There aren’t a lot of American brands in evidence. Microsoft has a large office building with their logo on it. But it seems to be European brands such as Lufthansa, Nestle, Volkswagen, Audi, and Mercedes in the highest abundance. This history plaque in the Forbidden City was sponsored by American Express. And on every plaque carrying this, there appeared to be smears of mud or clay where someone tried to obscure the tagline.
• I have seen no Internet cafes yet.
• Wireless phones tend to be either local brands, Nokia, or Motorolas. People use them incessantly. My step-sister, who is a film executive, has one glued to her head at all times. No one appears to be using them for email (I have not seen a Blackberry in use) and I don’t see many people texting SMS nor any advertising calls to action that use SMS codes.
• I saw the word “Mashup” on a poster at this Beijing art gallery. The art here is amazing and the gallery district in a former factory in the 7-9-8 district is right out of San Francisco’s SOMA.
• Blogging is big. I am going to meet some bloggers later this week, but I understand from my step-sister that a lot of business people blog here in Beijing. My China blogroll only now holds:

• Virtual China: “Virtual China is an exploration of virtual experiences and environments in and about China. The topic is also the primary research area for the Institute for the Future’s Asia Focus Program in 2006. IFTF is an independent, nonprofit strategic research group with more than 35 years of forecasting experience based in Palo Alto, CA.”
• ChinaTechStory: which isn’t working at the time of this post.
• ChinaTechNews.com: a good frequent news feed.

There is a Starbucks inside the Forbidden City. Of course. The other big American brand is, of course, McDonald’s. While eating gyoza in an awesome little cafe, the family at the table next to us was tucking into a great meal while Junior ate a Big Mac and fried from the Golden Arches. The world isn’t flat, but it sure will be fat.

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.

Walking over a bridge in Houhai, I decided to snap a picture of some long-pole anglers when this bridal party swept into view.

Great day of walking from Tianamen through the Forbidden City, around the shores of Beihai Lake, and all the time eating, eating, eating.

Photostream on Flickr

My Weblog:

Jim pens one of the best reasoned discussions of customer tracking I had ever read, and wades in between me and Jeff Young at ZDNet — The Cookie Monster.

Accountability is a drag, but as the man sang, “You gotta serve somebody.” Or as the Cliche Goon’s say, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

I’ll say it again and again — metrics is not an abrogation of a customer’s rights to privacy. If you trust the brand and the brand doesn’t sell your name down the river, well, what’s the beef?

And I’ll go back to the Scott McNealy quote: “We have no privacy. Get over it.”

The late Tom Mandel — he of the W.E.L.L., SRI and the person who put Time Magazine online — once had a fascinating lunch discussion in Palo Alto about a book idea for the “Compleat Paranoid’s Guide to Living Off the Grid.” Basically, we wondered if a person could exist in contemporary America with no social security number, no ID, no nothing. These conversations happening when the privacy freaks were losing their marbles over Caller ID on their phones.

psychosis

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.

What a fun flight into Beijing. The announcement comes over the loudspeaker that we are having an emergency and to grab an oxygen mask. Great fun. I realized my last thoughts would be a white paper on lead generation techniques and not the 23rd Psalm.

Then, as we were getting ready to land, they handed out health disclosure forms. I was drawn to “Snivel” and “Psychosis,” conditions I have been known to experience, but fortunately was not at the time.

Then the lovely cabin stewards went through the cabin spraying some sort of “World Health Organization Approved” germicide which made me feel like I’d been bug-bombed by a can of Raid.

firstvuechina

Originally uploaded by dchurbuck.

Made Beijing at 11 pm, being met by a very nice colleague who took off her Friday evening to greet me at the custom’s gate. After a quick ride through the hazy darkness (there have been Gobi sandstorms) I made it to the hotel, logged on, send some mails back to RTP, ate a sleeping pill and just awoke to this, my first look at China.

Sort of takes the romance out of the balloon.

http://www.shockabsorber.co.uk/bounceometer/shock.html

Basically, a tool for determing what kind of sports bra one should wear according to chest size and the intensity of the activity. I offer this only as a public service. Thanks to C.D. for the link.

No jet lag hell to report. Two days on the road, 12 time zones away from my biological clock, and three 30 mg Temazepams — Restoril to you non-generics, definite veterinary soporific — one on the plane to Singapore, one the first night, and one last night, and I feel 90% okay. I didn’t get poisoned by the seafood dinner, and just chowed down some of the funkiest food I have ever eaten — Sundanese (not Sudanese) — consisting of a whole fried fish coated in atomic chili sauce, rice that smelled like eau de toilette, and a bowl of soup with a whole hardboiled egg and indeterminate meat balls floating in curry broth. Basically really Indonesian stuff you don’t find around Cotuit. I think I can do a striped bass in the deep fryer though. This is the land of seafood and is giving me some ideas for summer recipes.
Now I’m sitting in the Singapore Airlines “Silver Kris” lounge at Changi Airport banging away on my X41 (and listening to some fellow Americans in Red Sox t-shirts curse their inability to get on the network on their Dull Inspirons ((dude’s you need a Blue Think button on your machines, ThinkPad’s wireless configurator insures you’ll never “repair connection” again))) charging the battery on my new duty-free 6 megapixel Canon IXUS60 (Ben, they did not have the SD450), moving treo photos off the phone onto an SD card, answering Notes mail, sending memos, and generally feeling like quite the Digital Traveler.

Beijing tonight, tomorrow I see my step-sister, the ever-invigorating Dede and her husband Bing, and the Chine adventure commences. There will definitely be photos now that I have done my duty-free-duty.

The tracking of an advertising spend has traditionally been the personification of a lost cause, with everyone harking back to the old cliche that half of advertising works, no one knows which half.

I’ve blogged my anger over the high degree of precision which agencies and vendors hold internet advertising to, when print publishers and other traditional media have no idea other than specious reader surveys, fudged circulation numbers, newstand sales, and that ultimate in fuzzy logic: “pass along” figures to base their efficiency case. When I was an online publisher I basically wanted to tell the advertisers and their agencies to go take a flying leap at a rolling donut, and made a good initial kick off to the Forbes Digital Tool by selling flat day-sponsorships with competitor blocks and no guarantees of impressions, and certainly not click-throughs.

Move ahead a decade and now I’m the buyer of the impressions, not the seller. And you know what? It’s the measurement and precision, the promise of optimization that is exactly why internet advertising is the fast form of advertising in the world today. I’ve been looking at the results of some recent campaigns we’ve run in the general, business, and IT press and it is truly astonishing the variance in click-throughs (the diminutive number of click-throughs, measured in basis points), and the lack of measurement on our end of what happens to the click-through once it lands on our pages.

This will change and it will change soon. We should be able to track the life-time value of a visitor from first arrival via a search term or banner clickthrough, across multiple sessions and repeat visits. I’m not marketing impulse buys — no gums and cigarettes — but serious durable goods that the user expects to hang onto for at least three years. That means my marketing spend — if measured only against initial action — can’t show a true ROI or expense to revenue ratio if I don’t keep tracking that user from first click to checkout.

This is basic stuff, it falls on me, not the publishers, and …. it means I need to get much better at getting my messages in front of those people who are in the market for my stuff at that particular point in time. This is where Battelle’s theory of the “database of intentions” and search engine marketing comes in. This is where the chimera of behavioral targeting comes in. This is why the smart people at Yahoo know that the most valuable impression in the world is a car ad at that point in time every four years when the average American turns to the web to help them decide what four-wheeled vehicle they will buy next.

It’s statistical chess and it’s hard. But the people who are good at are few and far between. This is going to be an education as we reform our spending, our measurement, and our optimization.