Scary Territory.

Originally posted on January 8th, 2008 on www.onlinemarketingmavens.com

In the almost two years I’ve been in interactive media planning and buying, I’ve seen advertising networks blossom and grow into a viable complements to almost every online marketing plan. Whether it be with behavioral, demographic, or contextual targeting, networks help build efficient reach across the long tail of the web. Skittish, brand protective marketers have been given assurance that risque content can be easily avoided, including un-patrolled user-generated content.

According to ComScore’s Nov 2007 rankings, Advertising.com just beat out Yahoo! as the largest reaching web property, with 86% online reach. Now that is pretty impressive!

Last week, Clickz reported that some ISPs were starting to cookie behavior across the entire web with the potential to sell segments to advertisers or networks. While advertising networks monitor what is on their network and create targeting channels accordingly, ISPs will be able to look at behavior across the entire web including search. While this is only being tested at this point and claims not to track very personal things like health queries and sex site visits, it still scares me! As we can now reach 86% of the web with one ad network, is it really worth tracking a user’s every move to reach other other 14%?

This functionality may introduce a lot more targetable segments, are we just risking getting too niche with our focus? I’ve spoken out for behavioral targeting in the past, but tracking one’s every move doesn’t seem like it’s worth the risk.

Second honeymoon for me and the internet.

Originally posted January 17th, 2008 at www.onlinemarketingmavens.com

It has been a tough week in my world of online media planning and buying! Two campaigns were set to go live with new sites, rich media vendors, and complex creative. So many things that makes Internet display advertising great were utilized with the buying and creative aspects of these campaigns. As usual, timelines were tight, things were changed mid-stream, and there were unexpected hurdles.

I love my job for many reasons, one being that I am obsessed with the Internet, but at times like these I feel exhausted due to the complexity of it and the number of people each well-planned online campaign relies on. The funny thing is, my frustration drives me online to re-connect with friends, blog, watch silly videos, you name it. It’s just funny, that’s all I’m saying

Here is me looking not into it today.

But this too, shall pass, and tomorrow I will be excited about applying new targeting capabilities to my clients, and reading awesome articles such as this one!

Next time I will take time to formulate quasi-intelligent conclusions about online marketing, but today, I just want the internet to hug me back.

Marketing to Boomers online.

Originally posted January 20th, 2008 at www.onlinemarketingmavens.com

This week I did research for a client that is contemplating enriching their presence online. This company already has strong brand awareness but seeks to make an emotional connection with their target audience, which mostly consists of Baby Boomers.

As a Gen Y marketing and social enthusiast, I love learning the individual traits of each generation, culture, or demographic group. The Baby Boomers are definitely a great group to watch, especially now as they are showing people how aging gracefully is done.

I remember as a young child seeing my grandparents play cards with all their friends. They all had short grey hair and wrinkles abound. They seemed ancient to me, in part because I was so young, but also because it seemed they accepted their age and aging role in society. As my parents near that same age I can’t help but be impressed at how savvy, active, and good looking they and their peers are in comparison! As I read more about this group’s media usage, it increases my admiration of this impactful group!

USA Today reported last year that marketing to this group is growing like crazy due to the impressive economic power this group has. What I find most interesting is the way marketers need to communicate to them, appealing to their young outlook on life. This direction is being reflected in advertising more and more, and luckily, the “I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up” era ads are on the decline. Perhaps seeing seniors in these pitiful situations in the media for so long contributed to the Boomers’ intention to buck that perception.

Here is a good article about how Boomers are mobile-savvy and another about Boomer’s Empty Nest Lifestyle outlining their online usage and buying power.

In my research, I set up an Eons.com account, but due to honesty about my age, I was sectioned off from 50+ content that I am dying to find out about. Next time, I will get an advertiser log-in so I can get the inside scoop on Boomer social networking, which is at this some super exclusive club. I still learned from my experience on the site, though, as Nintendo Wii purchased a multiple-day home page takeover, punctuating everything I learned this week about marketing to Boomers in my research.

Love is in the air, and in Cyberspace.

Originally posted February 14th, 2008 on www.onlinemarketingmavens.com

Lisa loves love and search. I also love love and impactful and relevant advertising, even when it’s not Online - gasp!

I wanted to post because it’s Valentine’s Day and love is in the air. I love my position, my unnamed company, and the fact I’m leaving the snowy frigid weather of Minnesota tomorrow to lie on the beach in Jamaica with my husband for a week. It’s a good day.

One cool thing I read today about Valentine’s Day and advertising - Virgin Atlantic launched this awesome mobile microsite in conjunction with a crazy out-of-home and events campaign. Leave it to genius and rich guy Richard Branson to do something so cool that kills both the advertising and PR birds with one multi-platform stone.

I also read that 57% of men go Online to research Valentine’s Day gifts. This is not surprising to me, but now I want to know how many are shopping Online the day of. Since 12% claim they are looking for a store’s address and phone number, my guess is a lot.

Have a great week everyone and Happy Valentine’s Day!

One Love!

It's been a while, and a book Review!

Lisa and I have been up to our eyebrows in exciting field work, learning more so we can serve you better! Unfortunately, all this experience-getting has made a huge dent in our time for blogging. In passing, some ideas are being kicked around for blog posts coming soon. Lisa will be inventing a new product, I will be composing a guide for Interactive Sales Representatives, and someday when the spring planning storms die down will come a Web & TV Convergence The Third. But for now all I have to give is my bed-time blog post.

Lisa and I being the hyper-influential bloggers in the Online marketing field that we are, we were approached to review a book called “Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook” by Darren Barefood and Julie Szabo. This book written for marketers gives an overview of the social nature of the Internet and the accompanying landscape and how to launch a social media relations campaign.

While busy doing rather than reading, it took me a while to get through this book. It was interesting, but I tend to be the kind of consumer that takes in her content in bits and snippets Online - much like the Internet community they talked about!

As an Interactive marketing geek, the overview was really a nice refresher course on recent trends in social media. The ideas on blogger relations were new to me, but unfortunately, I am unable to really put this to work in my job as an Interactive Media Planner/Buyer. They are still interesting to keep in my back pocket, though, for a future brainstorm, client, or position. Their views on transparency seemed in line and refreshing, especially since I’ve been hearing a lot about pay-per-post, etc. The new ideas were fun and noteworthy and there were lots of great examples. I would recommend this book for a small business owner (especially one with a strong web page) or someone at a large company that is in charge of reputation management or PR. While it would be beneficial for a range of marketers, I wouldn’t say that is a must-read in most cases.

TTFN

I heart Twitter, vertical ad networks, and the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium!

Originally posted on May 19, 2008 at www.onlinemarketingmavens.com

I’m skipping the Family Guy re-run this evening to fuss about my new Online favorites. Giggity Giggity.

Although I’ve been reading about the micro-blogging site Twitter for years and have created profiles several times, they were typically abandoned after a few days of reading random Tweets. Now, with it’s popularity bang there are so many more interesting people to “follow”, and with the Twitter Facebook Application

I can feed my addiction to updating my Facebook status by text. Not new, I know, but new to Sarah’s List of Interactive Addictions. In fact, now you can follow the Mavens! Although we’re sometimes too busy to blog, we’re rarely to busy for 140 characters or less.

My newest addiction while planning Online Display campaigns is Vertical Ad Networks. While several more traditional ad networks make a number of different content channels available, I’ve found that when you are looking for something more targeted, Vertical Ad Networks are a nice way to gain some more contextually targeted inventory within one buy. Many times they have premium inventory and a shorter list of sites that are easy to relay to a client and ultimately sell through. While I still love my Ad Networks, it’s sometimes hard to illustrate their value to more traditional clients.

Some networks such as Martha’s Circle are a nice addition to a larger premium publisher buy on MarthaStewart.com. No more sneaking a high volume of text links and below-the-fold placements to bring that eCPM down! Other networks offer hard-to-reach audiences such as the Luxury Ad Network, Adcision. The one I’m most stoked about, as a girl with a lot of single market initiatives, is the Local Ad Network, such as what CBS is launching with providing local sites with a news widget wrapped around an IAB unit.

My third blog-worthy favorite du jour is the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium. As mentioned, as a gal with a lot of single market initiatives to plan for, I often have the single market budgets that prohibit me to run on some of the larger sites like Yahoo because of their spend minimums. As a result miss out on some of that great targeting. The Yahoo Newspaper Consortium has helped me ad reach to a few low budget, single site plans. Kudos to the people at Yahoo! for this great idea. Stay strong brothers!

TTFN!

Web and TV Convergence.

Originally posted on January 25th, 2008 on www.onlinemarketingmavens.com

As Lisa pointed out in a previous post, online video usage is exploding, and we aren’t talking just YouTube. According to a Horowitz Associates report outlined here, 16% of adults with broadband access watch full episodes of TV online. Personally, I’m a big fan of this because I am without a DVR, but I do have a serious addiction to many network shows such as Heroes, Prison Break, and Grey’s Anatomy. As an Interactive Media Planner/Buyer, I find this advertising opportunity very attractive due to the high impact placements and the ownership opportunities which typically include a few mid-roll placements that I have seen to be not just video, but also interactive units.

This week, Adotas published an interesting article about the merging of the Internet and TV. The author, Peter Koeppel, thinks this is inevitable due to increase of media consumption multi-tasking and how far quality content online has come. This sounds super cool to me as a consumer. My two favorite things - TV and the Internet - become one? A match truly made in heaven. Some of this convergence has already started with the XBox Live, Apple TV and other products. Long before was Web TV, concepted in the mid 1990s as a component which basically allowed for using the TV as a monitor and a remote as a mouse. I remember seeing ads for this in high school, thinking it was really cool but maybe ahead of the times for a mass audience. Or maybe I just wish I would have thought that. In doing some searching, I found that Microsoft purchased this and is still trying to improve upon the original concept with MSN TV 2.

Later this week, MediaPost published an article about TV buying taking a cue from online advertising networks utilizing the long tail of the web to deliver aggregated reach of a particular audience. It’s no surprise that Google was the first to roll this out with Google TV Ads, taking a cue from their Adwords product.

My geeky excitement of what will happen next with this is right up there with what will happen with behavioral targeting in 2008. Professionally it will create another media buying challenge, which I am totally up for. Personally, I just want to watch my Heroes and Instant Message my buddies about how cute Peter Pitrelli is or what power we would want if we could choose without having to start up my computer.

TV and Web Convergence Part Deux.

Originally posted on January 28th, 2008 on www.onlinemarketingmavens.com

First off - Happy Birthday to my blog mate Lisa!!

Secondly, after I published the last post about Web and TV Convergence, I came across more enthralling articles that touch on this subject! As mentioned previously, Web TV has been here in some sense for a long time and continues to grow, slowly but surely. The amount of speculation about this convergence has seemed to blow up recently, and I intend to continue monitoring it’s progress. My reasons being out of both general curiosity and interest in how this will eventually drastically effect my livelihood. I figure if I stay on top of things in can only be for the good!

Ad Age points out that TV interactivity has been around for some time, and is in fact very prevalent. While the definition of interactivity is used broadly here, referring to using select or OK on remote controls, a study done by Harris Interactive found that 66% of those surveyed WANT to be able to interact with television advertising! While this is most likely high due to the newness and novelty of this option, it’s still impressive.

A BusinessWeek reporter ranted last November about the fact that the progress of this convergence will no doubt be hindered by media companies and their fear of control. Later, BusinessWeek referenced it’s own article to predict the reality of this to have 40% penetration within three years. This time, electronics mammoths are said to be encouraging connectivity with features on their high-end TV sets.

In my opinion, consumers will get what they want, regardless of what they are offered on a schedule. Even though Heroes is on Monday at 8pm CST on NBC, people have grown used to controlling the media consumption in their lives, and their appetites for this control will only become more ravenous. In my 5 years working in media, I’ve seen the print newspaper industry decline rapidly. But as consumers lead by behavior, the industry is retaliating by giving the people what they want - easily navigable news, video, traffic, weather, etc., all without the dirty fingers. As it turns out, giving the people what they want in terms of media has been shown to work!

TV and Web Convergence The Third.

Originally posted June 24, 2008 at onlinemarketingmavens.com

The topic of web and TV convergence is becoming something of an obsession with me. My choices to watch long-form programming on my home computer are increasing rapidly, and I wish I had time to watch everything I want to. I’m not just an early adopter - just about 74% of the online audience tunes into some sort of online video every month, averaging to over 235 minutes each!

While I have not had the pleasure of placing during the top TV networks on-demand programming online, I’ve been closely following the possibilities. There are different tactics used by the big three to keep people coming back including community features and mobile applications. These are the most attractive to me for many of the same reasons that TV is attractive to advertisers - great monitored content with large, loyal audiences. Now all we have to do is convince the clients. Breaking into advertising on the big three online isn’t extremely cheap, and targeting capabilities are fairly limited. One study shows that the Internet brings in 50% more GRPs than TV. Despite this, only 7% of ad dollars are allocated to web even though online usage accounts for 17% of time spent for the average person. The article referenced mentions that this must be because TV budgets are brand dollars and marketers have been trained to think online advertising as a direct response vehicle. I’ve been hard at work in hopes to shape my fellow advertising professionals and clients to stop focusing on CTR and start seeing all the great branding that can happen from a well-planned online campaign.

I’m crossing my fingers that some of the broadcast buyers at our agency will be offered make-goods online, as ABC recently announced they will be experimenting with. I just have to hope that they embrace online video professionally as much as they most likely do personally. Am I, Interactive Planner/Buyer and they, experienced Broadcast Buyers ready for the convergence that seems to be coming down the pipes? What does this mean for our jobs? Will I need to re-immerse myself in GRPs? Will they need to learn about impressions, ad serving, and behavioral targeting? All I know is I’m going to keep obsessing, researching and predicting. Think of this series that never ends…

If you missed them, here are parts one and two of my reports on the subject.

Now I’m off to watch my ninth episode of Dexter online this week!

Time to get blogging.

I was active in the blogosphere and then work and Twitter got in the way. Working on getting some archives up in here and want to continue to convey my numerous opinions about the online media industry.

See you soon!