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2.11-2.13: Cotuit

2.13-2.14: NYC
2.15: NC

2.16-2.18: Cotuit

Last fall and early this year I’ve been exposed to an interesting beta test at Google involving the insertion of television ads into the Dish satellite network using Google’s auction model and browser interface. The results have been very interesting, but the process carries some ramifications for an entire ecosystem of agencies, media planners, clients and broadcasters.

Let me digress right at the start by confessing a classic interactive bigotry against television as an expensive, dumb (in the sense of being one-way) medium that is dead and gone thanks to Tivo and the DVR revolution. The obituary writer with the biggest impact on my thinking was Joseph Jaffe in his polemical Life After the 30 Second Spot.

“The 30-second spot – at least as it exists today – is either dead, dying, or has outlived its usefulness. Take your pick.”

When he wrote the book (which I strongly recommend as one of the best books about the New Media Avalanche) there was no GoogleTV. What has happened is the television ad, as it existed when Jaffe stuck a fork in its butt, has morphed into something funkier and more complex because of several key changes. Those are:

1. Buying. Upfronts, that practice of advertisers committing to a series or specific duration of slots is about to gets seriously messed up by Google’s auction model. Media buying is getting very efficient, (or as they say in Boston, “wicked” efficient) thanks to a model that permits a buyer to select a day, time, specific channel, specific show, and bid for the time. The winner doesn’t pay the winning price, but the price of the bid of the second-place loser. It cuts out the traditional media buying agency by putting the client right in the game.
2. Flexibility: Art cards (I love Madison Avenue jargon) are the messages one inserts into the tail end of an ad to customize it, usually localizing it for the franchise or dealer paying for the slot. Example. Mercedes Benz has its agency produce a really slick commercial showing the new model swerving along the California coastline on A1A. A local dealer, Fred’s Car Barn, pays to run the spot during the nightly news. At the end of the spot, when the Ritalin Announcer speedtalksthroughtheyourmileagemayvary message, up pops the Art Card, saying “Shop At Fred’s Car Barn on the Miracle Mile in Methuen” with a local phone number. Now, thanks to dynamic serving technology from companies like Visible World an advertiser can serve literally hundreds of different art cards, modifying the final call to action to fit the time of day, show, audience, etc.
3. Metrics: hand grenades share something in common with television metrics: close enough is good enough. In the 90s I was convinced “interactive television” was the next big thing, and before we’d know it we’d be clicking on lamps in sitcoms and ordering them right from the Pottery Barn. Well, I don’t have a Dick Tracy Video Phone Watch either. Television was supposed to get accountable, and fall into line thanks to the ramrod discipline of Advertising 2.0 (search engine marketing, retargeting, behavioral targeting). Guess what? It’s still sloppy, but as I’ll describe later, it’s getting better.
   

Now what is GoogleTV? Go back a couple years. Google is public, critics are calling it a one-trick pony overly dependent on AdSense, Google’s text advertising model that puts text ads adjacent to relevant content. It’s a good model, and it kicks off an astonishing renaissance in web advertising, but Google needs to diversify. Obviously the company is going look around the media landscape and seek opportunities to extend its auction model. Television, the Moby Dick of Marketing, is a good first target and Google puts its engineers on the task. What emerges is GoogleTV and this is how it works.

GoogleTV only works (today) with Echostar’s Dish satellite network (I’m a DirectTV customer myself). Following an alpha trial in Walnut Creek, California, they went national by co-locating some servers at Echostar’s operation facility in Colorado. Those servers directly address the Dish Network’s ad insertion system and traffic the advertiser’s spots into the slots won through the auction interface. Google purchases, in its own upfront, a chunk of the Dish Network’s local inventory. Ads are divided between national and local “pods.” The network (CBS, AMC, HBO, ETC.) sells a portion of the ad slots to national advertisers, and the local affiliates sell the remainder of the slots to Fred’s Auto Barn and the local jewelers. What doesn’t get sold is filled with public service announcements and internal cross promotions (“…stay tuned for the season premier of Lost in the House…”). Television is like airplanes, it flies, whether or not the seats are filled, and those empty seats, if they can be sold right up to the time the door is closed and the plane pushes back from the jetway is money in the bank that is otherwise lost.

Television, like any medium, doesn’t sell out 100% of its inventory. That’s why ads repeat, lots of internal promos run, this is your brain on drugs …. Google takes the local inventory that doesn’t get reserved in an upfront and makes it available to any advertiser (today mostly big companies, and soon, that mass of medium and small business advertisers who wouldn’t consider running television because the barrier to entry is so high. Larry the Dentist isn’t going to engage with an advertising agency to build a 15-second spot about teeth brightening and then build a set of different art card at the back end. Buying the ad , in the old model, was a voodoo science. Not anymore. Now Dentist Larry, if he has the commercial, can approach television advertising through the same Google web interface he would use to bid for AdSense search terms like “periodontist AND Smallville.”

I just came out of a beta test with Google and I don’t want to share results, but let’s say the cost of this program significantly less than it would have cost if we did it the traditional way. We ran thousands of slots, during prime time (these were not 3 AM infomercial remainder ads), reaching millions of viewers. Google was able to measure, through its analytic integration with Dish’s set-top box infrastructure, that over 90 percent of the ads were viewed to their full 30-second conclusion.

Measurement of the impact of the program on sales at Lenovo.com and our phone system is certainly not as a precise as the discipline we apply to search engine marketing and banner, but it was a lot closer in terms of precision than the old days in television when about the only thing one could hope for was a pre- and post-campaign brand awareness survey. We saw significant (again I won’t go into specifics) increases in traffic to Lenovo.com from specific search terms. One of the two ads was for our most excellent tablet notebook computer (which I type this on). Traffic to Lenovo.com from the keyword “tablet” exploded when the television was running, offering us some correlation with the on air content.

Let me digress in conclusion on what the big picture impact of this is for the world.

1. Is Google “disintermediating” the traditional advertising agency from traditional media? This is a super touchy topic so let me be blunt and say, IMHO: yes. I can, as a marketer client, buy television, radio, print … everything but guys wearing sandwich boards … through Google’s auction front end. This means a big disturbance in The Force for media planners and buyers, the “rice bowl” of big agencies.
2. Will clients need to have their own internal media planners? Yes.
3. Data processing and analytics are the biggest differentiators between Google and the other global interactive ad networks who don’t own a metric capability of their own. In the future we’ll be able to make an even crisper revenue attribution and expense-to-revenue case than we did in the beta.
4. What becomes of the traditional agency model? It fragments into specialty niches and the traditional agencies become high added value creative production houses. The one thing a client and a network can never do is create compelling content. Period.

The next 24 months are going to see some interesting moves by companies in the tech commerce space towards an integrated on and offline media model presented to them through a unified Google front end. The impact will be greatest down the taper of the long tail – big advertisers are moving too many dollars in bulk to care about nickel and dime economies at the auction level – but when the local ad pod – be it in newspaper, billboards, radio, or tv is integrated with search terms and banners ….

We might finally be realizing some of the sci-fi predictions made about the future of advertising a decade ago.

Fortune has an excellent interview with Irwin Gotlieb, the godfather of media planning software, and CEO of WPP’s GroupM. Here’s his take on Google:

“And then there’s the other elephant in the room: Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). If Gotlieb’s strategy is like renovating a rickety house of media, Google is trying to tear the old relic down. The search engine behemoth talks about partnerships even while launching products like GoogleTV Ads, an online auction system for selling cable ads. Who needs media buyers when you can secure commercial time the same way you buy banner ads?

“Of course, GroupM and Google do work together. GroupM spent more than $300 million last year buying search ads from Google. But that just makes the relationship complicated at best. Google is dropping $3.1 billion to acquire DoubleClick, a pioneer in selling advertisers clickstream information. (In May, WPP spent $649 million to buy 24/7 Real Media, which collects web data in nearly the same way.) Google’s heft can obviate Gotlieb’s advantages. GroupM’s clients pay in part for Gotlieb and Scanzoni to get the best deals and the sexiest ad placements. Such relationships become less important when technology makes the whole process transparent. So Gotlieb is wary. “Google can do something without regard for whether they can actually make money on it,” he says. “That can be very destabilizing to the rest of the business.”

It’s so strange to be rowing in February that I feel compelled to note the news that I circumnavigated Grand Island this morning in my second row of 2008. Maybe it was the two dozen copies of the book that arrived yesterday, maybe it was the flat-as-glass conditions, I am inspired and any time I can get off of the erg and on the water is a good day indeed.

I also learned I can stand in 35 degree water in barefeet and absolutely feel no pain or cold. This is either a good thing or an indication that I am turning into wood from the ground up.

I was paranoid the whole row, worried I’d smack a winter mooring stick, flip the boat, and go into massive heart attack mode or turn blue from hypothermia. This makes me wonder what the risk analysis would be by an actuary if trying to decide which was worst for me — cycling the byways of Cape Cod or sculling over its waterways?

UPS just dropped off a big heavy box and inside was the fourth edition of The Book of Rowing, the “omnibus” guide to the sport I wrote in the late 80s. Twenty years later and the book is still in print. Seeing a new edition, with a new cover, makes me want to sit down and write another book in my copious spare time.

Thanks to my editor, Juliet Graemes, at The Overlook Press, for giving the book a new look and lease on life. Amazon has it here. Don’t ask me why I went for “D.C.” instead of David for the byline. I guess some affectation in the hope I would turn into E.M. Forster or e.e. cummings.

Instapaper
Get Instapaper. Best browser plug in for reminding me what to read when I finally find time to read it. This is not a del.icio.us replacement, just a personal “string around the finger” tool. From the Instapaper FAQ:

“We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them.

“Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.”

Google Notebook

Sits in the lower right corner of my browser and as that browser becomes my desktop, having a note taking capability is crucial. I like this and wish it would embed in all of my local apps as well.

Sheldon Brown, the marvelous human encyclopedia of all things related to bicycles, passed away on Sunday from a heart attack. He had been ill for some time with multiple sclerosis.

I never met him, but carried on an email relationship about my fixed-gear and assorted technical questions. He was answering tech questions on the day he died. AASHTA (As Always, Sheldon Has The Answer).

I’ll miss him. He had one of the most amazing virtual lives as represented on his website, Sheldonbrown.org
His technical expertise will live on at Sheldonbrown.com

And in his memory, “Pedal Your Blues Away.”

Pedal your blues away,
forget all your troubles for play.
Hop on your bike any time you like,
and pedal your blues away.
Pedal your blues away
and ride down the ol’ highway,
singing your songs as you roll along
pedaling your blues away.
CHORUS: You’ll fine lots of happiness as you spin along;
things are hunky-dory as you fly.
In the middle of your heart,
you’ll find a new song,
with your palsy-walsy riding by your side.
Pedal your blues away,
you’ll find love in every by-way.
Hold up your chin,
let them see you grin,
and pedal your blues away.
(REPEAT CHORUS)
Pedal your blues away,
you’ll find love in every by-way.
Hold up your chin,
let them see you grin,
and pedal your blues a-way!

There are doubtlessly a gazillion critiques of last night’s Super Bowl Ads. Not being a TV ad expert, and prone to skipping them with the Tivo, here’s my favorites based on those that demanded a rewind by me and my son.
1. eTrade’s barfing baby and creepy clown. Call me weird, but a baby talking in an adult voice into a web cam who blows lunch and declares the clown in the background to be “creepy” hits me where it counts.

2. The weird sales lead dot com company that uses patently racist stereotypes — Ramesh the Indian sales schlub with seven kids who talks like Gunga Din — and Ring Ding the Chinese Panda. These spots cost $2 million, right? So why would someone use colorforms and furniture outlet animation to fill the slot? I know! The ads are so bad that they pop out from among the slick beer and car spots. This is the Nasonex Bee school of animated ads. Make them so horrible that the viewer is compelled to watch out of sheer disbelief.

And Fox pushing the whole catalogue of ads onto MySpace? It’s a YouTube world, but Rupert has to push his investment. I enter MySpace only at gunpoint.

That’s it. I want an Audi R series. The Patriots got beat fair and square in a great game, but I still think American football is dumb sport and any portents of “history in the making” were just an illusion. The spectacle is what it is all about.

Update: yup, SalesGenie confirms the strategy was to suck.

‘Tis the season of desiccation, a New England winter, some serious wind chill, zero humidity, and I start to crack and split like a stream bed in a drought. Since real men don’t use lotion (… the prisoner puts the lotion in the basket), I have usually just let my hands suffer, abused by gloveless clam digging, wood splitting, and the wearing of monstrous wool mittens like a giant four-year old would wear.

I found a yellow tin of this stuff over the sink last month, abandoned there by my wife who said it smelled foul.

Yep. It stinks but I like it. Take two hurting hands, smear a concoction of olive oil, rosemary, eucalyptus and beeswax all over them, and proceed to smear big greasy fingerprints all over the mouse, the keyboard … I use it on my face too. Is that wrong? At least I’m not using Bag Balm, the infamous Vermont goo and your cows’ udders.

I just opened tin #2 and have one on my desk in North Carolina. Burt’s is based in Durham, N.C. but was founded in a turkey coop in Maine. Burt was an actual beekeeper and his face is the one on the can. Louise Story wrote in the New York Times on Jan. 6:

“IN the summer of 1984, Burt Shavitz, a beekeeper in Maine, picked up Roxanne Quimby, a 33-year-old single mother down on her luck, as she hitchhiked to the post office in Dexter, Me. More than a dozen years Ms. Quimby’s senior, the guy locals called “the bee-man” sold honey in pickle jars from the back of his pickup truck. To Ms. Quimby, he seemed to be living an idyllic life in the wilderness (including making his home inside a small turkey coop).

“She offered to help Mr. Shavitz tend to his beehives. The two became lovers and eventually birthed Burt’s Bees, a niche company famous for beeswax lip balm, lotions, soaps and shampoos, as well as for its homespun packaging and feel-good, eco-friendly marketing. The bearded man whose image is used to peddle the products is modeled after Mr. Shavitz.”

Ms. Quimby walked away with $300 million after Clorox bought the company. Burt? He still lives in the turkey coop (with $4 million) but it still doesn’t have running water or electricity.

There’s a Burt Blog. 

Monday 2.4 – Cotuit to North Carolina

Tuesday 2.5-Wednesday 2.6 – North Carolina

Thursday 2.7 – North Carolina to Cotuit

Friday 2.8-Sunday 2.10 – Cotuit

Week of 2.11 – NYC

The intense storm that whacked into the Cape last weekend dislodged a chunk of shipwreck from the sand off of Wellfleet’s Newcomb Hollow, pushing it ashore and above the high water line where it rests today. Cape Cod Times had a story and I made a note to check it out this weekend, an excuse to journey to the most remote and beautiful edge of Cape Cod where the Atlantic meets the sandy berm that Thoreau walked in the middle of the 19^th century.

So Cousin Pete, Wife Daphne and I grabbed digital cameras and drove east at noon on Saturday, hoping to get some fresh air on a nice 40 degree February day with a lunch stop at the Chatham Bars Inn (chowder, fish & chips, Cape Cod Red Beer).

The traffic was a little heavy on Route 6 as we drove through the middle of the afternoon. As we turned off onto Ocean Drive, it was obvious we weren’t the only rocket scientists with an urge to gawk at a fifty foot section of 150-200 year ship side on the sand. As we pulled into the parking lot of Newcomb Hollow it was hopeless. When you see an SUV parked at a 45 degree angle on a sand bank you know parking is tight, and we had no desire to stare at the wreckage in the company of a bazillion others. And Cape Cod used to be deserted in the winter …

So we banged a u-turn and came home.

Sigh. No side stop at First Encounter Beach where the Pilgrims killed their first Wampanoags. No side stop at the Pilgrim Springs where the Puritans found their first fresh water in the new world. No stop at the cemetery to look at the graves of the unknown dead who were buried there after washing ashore from wrecked ships.

Nope. No history today but I got a good lunch out of it.

Here’s a link to the slideshow at the Cape Cod Times.

Worldsourcing

Reid Walker, Lenovo’s VP of Global Communications and Sponsorships, just launched a blog on the Lenovo blog platform devoted to the topic of “worldsourcing.” Esteban Panzeri built this in record time and it launched a couple days ago. Reid writes of the World Economic Forum in Davos, CH:

“Lenovo’s Worldsourcing business strategy was front-and-center during a discussion between Lenovo president and CEO Bill Amelio with BusinessWeek’s tech writer Steve Hamm. Steve ended writing an insightful piece based on this discussion on his “Bangalore Tigers” blog entitled: Lenovo: A Company without a Country, where he posits how global corporations are transforming themselves into “transnationals.” Bill Amelio says he firmly believes that businesses must “operate as if there’s just one time zone,” and always be “on,” and goes on to describe how worldsourcing has transformed Lenovo’s headquarters operations, which are now distributed across the globe with quarterly board meetings rotated from region-to-region.”

Worldsourcing is an interesting (to me) meme that addresses the future of global corporate operations, to wit, Lenovo’s status as a company with no headquarters per se, but a floating center that moves fluidly between Beijing, North Carolina, Paris, Singapore … where-ever and whenever (which is around the clock) the business demands it.

Reid defines Worldsourcing:

“What is Worldsourcing?

Increasingly, we live in a world with just one time zone and business must source materials, innovation, talent, logistics, infrastructure, and production wherever they are best available. And they must sell wherever profitable markets exist, anywhere in the world. In a nutshell, that’s worldsourcing — a business strategy that taps global diversity and resources and distributes management, operations, processes, and production to create more efficiencies wherever they will function best to deliver the best value to customers. Worldsourcing is not about cutting costs, it’s really about growing your company’s value by leveraging the right expertise in the right places to identify and serve markets in both developed and emerging markets.”

I should post sometime about my thoughts on working for a so-called “Chinese” company — my boss is an Indian who grew up in Michigan, one of my closest colleagues in Indian from Kerala by way of California, our CEO grew up in Pittsburgh, VP of Alliances is a Frenchman, one close colleague is from Newcastle …. — English is the corporate language, we operate in who knows how many countries …. This is Walter Wriston’s Twilight of Soverignity taken from theory to practice.
One of the most astonishing things about working at Lenovo is its personification of the principles laid out in Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. Thanks to technology we can source talent and expertise from anywhere in an instant. The fact that there is “no there, there” means a guy like me can attempt to run a global digital marketing operation from a old Captain’s house in a Cape Cod village, and that can be a very good thing.

So please check out Worldsourcing, Reid is no newcomer to blogging and has a front row seat at one of the more progressive organizations around.

Here’s a link to Scoble’s post on his interview with Lenovo’s CEO, Bill Amelio at Davos.

I’ve never had a real, hot-towel, straight-edge razor barber shave and after two weeks of giving my face a break from the daily scraping, I want one.

But after a few phone calls I guess the concept is dead, done in by disposable razors and unisex salons and the passing of a generation that went into the woods for a week, came out, and took a single bath every Saturday night. Where has Floyd the barber gone?

I know there is a place in New York City — The Art of Shaving — that gets raves, but here on Cape Cod, alas, there is nothing but my 12-bladed Turbo vibrating Gillette razor and a can of blue goo.

Sorry, but there’s something about the Micro-hoo stuff that makes me think of two slightly out of breath fat people holding hands and jumping off a bridge together.

This may not be the politically correct thing to say, but mergers never seem to result in a spectacular chemical reaction. M&A may hope for the online equivalent of baking soda and vinegar — a violent and quick expansion with lots of bubbles. I think the result will be what happens when you turn on the blender and what comes out is gray and a little bland.

Neither party actually brings something awesome to the party. This aggregates a big audience (and big audiences are gray blobs). The hidden jewels inside of Yahoo — Flickr, del.icio.us — are still there but aren’t going to justify the $44 billion tag on their own.

Interesting to read that Jerry Yang went scrambling to News Corp. and AT&T looking for counter offers. AT&T? News Corp. I get — said so below. But AT&T?

There is great commotion and uncertainty in the interactive media world today. 2007 was the year of the Great Silent Avalanche, when online advertising won its victory over traditional media but no one really held a party. But right now, everyone is holding their breath, looking at the big consolidation, and on the edges, in the bushes, are those darned little furry mammal creatures ready to rush out and eat the dino’s eggs.

• The deal will go through
• It’s the best competitive response possible to Google dominance
• It doesn’t solve the central issue of Search – how do you dislodge the verb “to google?”
• It begs the question of how much media creation the combined new entity brings to the party
  • Google is platform and denies it is a media company
  • YHOO has tried to be a media company (and too many other things)
  • MSFT has tried to be a media company and now is trying to be a portal/search/platform company
• Does this set the stage for two different standards for web based applications and services?
  • Will the world further divide into Google People and Yasoft People?
• Who gets hurt?
  • Consolidation on this scale hurts traditional media trying to build scale. News Corp. comes right to mind

I’ll think some more, but right off the top, I’d say this is going to happen and 2008 will become a very very weird year. 2007 was the year of ad networks – Google/Doubleclick, Microsoft/Atlas. This is the year the superpowers line up. Will there be a cold war?

Silicon Alley Insider — Blodget et al — are liveblogging the Microsoft call.