GigaOM Moves to IDG; FM Loves Him Anyway.
Om himself says it best:
“Three years ago, when John Battelle and Chas Edwards met with me for a cup of coffee across the street from the old Business 2.0 offices in downtown San Francisco, their company, Federated Media, was still in its infancy, and our company, Giga Omni Media, was little more than a dream.
“John, a long-time friend and a peer from the tech media world, asked me if I would sign on with his studio of talent and let them represent my then one-man effort, GigaOM.com, commercially. Naturally, I said yes. In the time that passed we had our ups and downs, successes and embarrassments. But we progressed and prospered together.
“…Federated Media has become more than just a studio for technology bloggers, but a leader in the conversational marketing movement.
“Progress is often accompanied by a divergence of ideas and ambitions within partnerships. At Giga Omni Media, we have been developing a network that revolves around niche verticals. As our needs became more specialized, we sat down with the folks at Federated to try and figure out how we could continue to work together. But both sides quickly realized that instead it was time to wrap up what has been a successful business relationship.”
Om and Paul, it’s good thing our offices are only two blocks apart; I still owe you tacos.
More from PaidContent:
“While this is not a significant monetary setback for Federated, it does point to what the John Battelle-founded online-ad company is giving up as it continues to scale: Its focus has been on large-scale national advertisers and creating both general and custom programs with them, as opposed to the more ‘intimate’ sells required for enterprise-focused vendors that GOM attracts. FM has a big-brand focus, for most part, and beyond its early start with tech sites, it has now moved into all kinds of other verticals like parenting, food, graphic arts, small business and others.”
Motrin Moms Campaign Had No Social Media Strategy; Got One Anyway.
An agency friend asked for my take on the recent dust-up over Motrin’s campaign targeting new moms. As I see it, Motrin made two blunders. One, old-fashioned bad creative in a post-Internet world. Two, when the campaign upset its customers, it demanded that those customers come to Motrin’s website to get their apology. Excerpts from my note below.
One:
The ad creative was careless. There’s no question that carrying a baby, or pushing a baby stroller, or going sleepless for weeks, can cause pain that lots of us parents take Motrin to alleviate. But by talking about slings as a trendy fashion accessory, they overlooked that many parents see slings as vital equipment for an approach to parenting that those parents take very seriously (see Attachment Parenting). We’d never talk about clothing-based religious practices as “fashion accessories.” I’d argue that to the attachment parenting community, calling slings “fashion” is an insult of similar magnitude. This was bad copy-writing, full stop.I’m guessing no one worried too much about sloppy, perhaps insensitive copy-writing because it was a traditional ad buy. There was no “social media strategy,” so don’t worry about it. TV and print and standard banner ads are one-way, so who cares? The reality is: Social media happens to you whether or not you have a strategy. (I stole that line from Pete Spande.) If you have strategy, you are in the conversation and you prepare for the conversation. If you don’t have a strategy, your customers have the conversation without you, and when it goes in the wrong direction, you join the conversation late and defensively. Motrin landed in the latter situation.
Two:
When Motrin’s customers got pissed, they voiced their discontent on the social media platforms where they “live” online. Yet Motrin did not go “visit” those customers (ie, joining the Twitter conversation, right there on Twitter) to apologize. It required those angry customers to come to Motrin.com to get an apology. It should have syndicated the apology, published it on Twitter with @jessicagotleib and #motrinmoms, and published it as a comment on the most influential blogs that joined and accelerated the conversation.IBM, Intel Launch Conversational Site on Virtualization.
IBM and Intel teamed up with FM, AnandTech, DailyTech and Hot Hardware to launch IBM Virtualization, a social-media platform for IT to define, explore and optimize processing virtualization. From one post:
“First dual-core in 2005, then quad-core in 2007: the multi-core snowball is rolling. The desktop market is still trying to find out how to wield all this power; meanwhile, the server market is eagerly awaiting the octal-cores in 2009. The difference is that the server market has a real killer application, hungry for all that CPU power: virtualization.”
It’s bad news when a Top 10 global advertiser fires Tiger Woods.
Herman Miller has launched Thoughtpile, a conversational site that invites visitors to submit workplace innovation ideas. I like the concept, but the execution isn’t working for me. Too much flash eye-candy and not enough substance (or guidance on how to use the site).
(Thanks, Shab!)
Wharton Professors Say Don’t Cut Ad Budgets In a Recession.
From Knowledge@Wharton:
“With corporate managers under enormous pressure to control costs and maintain liquidity in the current credit crisis, advertising budgets often appear to be a dispensable luxury in the struggle to survive. Executives who succumb to that temptation, however, put the long-term future of their companies at risk, according to Wharton faculty and advertising experts.”
“Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader, [adds] that as companies slash advertising in a downturn, they leave empty space in consumers’ minds for aggressive marketers to make strong inroads. Today’s economy ‘provides an unusual opportunity to differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd.’”
Online Ad Spending May Grow, But Not Evenly Across All Online Formats.
The Economist cites eMarketer forecasts that put online ad growth in positive territory — at 8.9% for 2009 (though eMarketer has pulled back from its August estimate of 14.5% growth). Improvements in performance marketing platforms (such as paid search) and in rich-media creative formats for brand advertisers, it argues, will enable online media to steal share of the advertising mix, even as ad spending overall is expected to be down.
“All this makes spending on advertising much less speculative, so that it starts to be treated instead as a cost of sales. This is one reason why online advertising should suffer less than other sorts. This week eMarketer, a market-research firm, predicted that online-advertising spending in America, which makes up about half the global total, will increase by 8.9% in 2009, rather than the 14.5% it had forecast in August. The firm thinks search advertising will grow by 14.9% and rich-media ads by 7.5%, whereas display ads will grow by 6.6%. In short, online advertising will continue to expand in the recession–just not as quickly as previously expected.”
I agree with the premise. Online overall may grow, but certain parts of the online ecosystem — namely, standard banners that are targeted by demographic alone — will suffer as online ad dollars migrate toward the bottom of the media-spending pyramid (direct response and guaranteed performance programs) as well as toward to top (limited supply, high impact branding opportunities on premium sites, around premium video, etc). The ChasNote graphics department illustrates the trend below, with the good old days represented on the left; the next 18-24 months represented on the right.
Verizon Sparks Positive Conversation With Ads on Fred Wilson’s Site.
FM worked with Verizon Wireless (and its agency, Moxie Interactive) to place Verizon ads promoting the BlackBerry Storm on Fred Wilson’s site, A VC, even though Fred had recently criticized the product on the site:
“In fact, that post which is critical of the Storm is still on the front page of this blog where the ad is running. And this blog has been no friend to wireless carriers and their abusive business models like demanding exclusives from device manufacturers.
“Conversational media and conversational marketing is coming of age. Marketers are understanding that you have to be part of the conversation even if it isn’t flattering about you and your products and services. And participants in conversational media are starting to recognize that marketers and their brands have a seat at the table and a role in the conversation. In this case, they are helping to fund it (sort of).
“Kudos to Verizon for understanding that you can’t control the content your campaign runs next to.”
An interesting conversation broke out among A VC readers, including BlackBerry fans that came to the brand’s defense and others who applauded Verizon for supporting the discussion.
“It could be very effective for Verizon. This blog hits a bullseye on the product’s target market. Plenty of people will disagree w/ Fred’s view on the Storm (I do, fairly strongly!) And there’s a LOT of people who feel married to Verizon or can’t/won’t use AT&T or T-Mo (and thus iPhone, G1 etc) and will now choose the Storm despite reservations…. I am convinced that there is TONS of potential here. People are sick and tired of all these years of ads making grandiose, inherently biased claims for their products. ‘Marketing’ as it’s done in the US has become equated w/ mistrust. I’d bet that a company’s active endorsement of a balanced discussion, pro and con, about a product will cause the public to listen rather than tune out.”
And:
“I’d be impressed if people from Verizon made this decision based on the content & context of specific posts on your blog as opposed to simply picking your site from some broad technology category.”
And this, from my FM colleague John Schneider:
“Yes, this was a conscious, and human, decision that was made. With fewer than 200 properties, FM always handpicks the best fitting sites — there are no fancy algorithms. In Fred’s case, he has an engaged and influential audience that has strong opinions on new technologies and product offerings. Ultimately, it’s Fred’s audience we are trying to reach. They clearly respect his opinions, but form their own as shown here in this comment thread.”
And:
“Well, I think it’s brilliant that you did because of the tension created by Fred’s recent post about the BlackBerry Storm. There’s hope for advertising.”
Hope for advertising?! I’m welling up over here!
Congrats to the teams at Verizon Wireless and Moxie Interactive. And thanks, John Schneider, for putting this program together, and Fred, for MC’ing the conversation.
Newspapers Can’t Even Sell Their Online Inventory.
According to Bloomberg:
“U.S. newspapers’ online advertising sales fell 3 percent to $749.8 million in the third quarter from a year earlier, the second consecutive drop, according to the Newspaper Association of America.”
Tough times for online publishers living in the middle of the pyramid, those who don’t offer high-impact, unique sponsorships for brand marketers, nor DR programs that deliver conversions more efficiently than Google.
Print Ad Marketplace Gets Uglier: Dell Cancels Cover 4 Positions.
From Ad Age:
“Dell has pulled out of its long-term contracts to run ads on the back covers of business magazines including Fortune and The Economist, a retreat that only underscores magazines’ vulnerability during this recession…. the broader recession is also combining with the challenges posed by digital media to put pressure on all media channels to prove their immediate worth.”
Refresh.