The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Advertising

The Ad Biz, Yesterday and Today

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Ken Auletta covers the state of advertising in a New Yorker piece called The New Pitch: Do ads still work?.

Some tidbits:

  • “When we introduced Scope, in the mid-sixties, we were able with television advertising in the first four weeks of the ad campaign to reach more than ninety per cent of U.S. television households ten times.” — Roy Bostock, the former chairman and C.E.O. of the MacManus Group.

  • “I believe today’s marketing model is broken. We’re applying antiquated thinking and work systems to a new world of possibilities.” — Jim Stengel, the global-marketing officer for Procter & Gamble, speaking at last year’s meeting of the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

    About Apple’s iPod launch:

    According to the advertising-tracking firm of TNS Media Intelligence, Apple spent twenty-four and a half million dollars to launch the device, and forty-five and a half million dollars between January and September of 2004. (By contrast, Roy Bostock says that to reach the same number of consumers as Scope did when it was introduced would cost at least two hundred million dollars in the first year.) Apple’s expenditures were relatively modest, and surprisingly traditional: only two hundred and six thousand dollars went for Web ads, and ninety per cent of last year’s total went for television, with the broadcast networks receiving twenty-five million dollars and cable just under eighteen million. Yet the real reason that the iPod has more or less cornered the digital music-player market is far simpler: the product was brilliantly conceived and executed. Word-of-mouth and promotion did the rest.

    Still shocking in a way that the main “alternative” focus of the piece was about product placement, rather than about interactive advertising.

    Also from the mag: selling in 1938.

    • Publishers/Topix

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    ClickZ’s Kevin Newcomb got some details of potential ad integrations between the investing publishers (Gannett, Knight-Ridder, and Tribune Co.) and Topix.net, which he lays out in a story today. Shameless self-promotion, I know, but just wanted to highlight the ad stuff, which I haven’t seen elsewhere.

    My Vast AdSense Riches

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    Okay, okay. Now that Google has changed its Terms of Service to allow me to talk about my earnings from AdSense, I’ll come clean. I’ve had AdSense links on my blog since May 12, 2004, and I’ve amassed a grand total of $4.38. And I even succumbed and tried those crazy new AdLinks, too. (Admittedly, the switch to TypePad resulted in a couple of adless months before I upgraded to Pro.)

    But Danny Sullivan notes you still aren’t allowed to “engage in any action or practice that reflects poorly on Google or otherwise disparages or devalues Google’s reputation or goodwill.” So maybe I should shut up and just pocket my $4.38.

    (Noticed they’re testing electronic transfer of earnings now, too. Hope that allows them to distribute smaller amounts than they do by check, or I’ll get my first check from Google in 25 years!)

    Of course, I’m not doing this for the money. This blog just allows me to experiment with the various contextual ad solutions out there. Looking forward to trying others as time goes on (and more are officially introduced).

    The Controversial Cookie-Deletion Report

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    Really interesting post from JupiterResearch’s Eric Peterson, refuting and discussing some of the criticism that’s been hurled at his controversial report on cookie deletion.

    Consumers are simultaneously confused and concerned about cookies. This is the important point — [Seth] Godin and others appear to be arguing that consumers are not engaged enough to figure out how to do something as technically simple as using their browser, anti-spyware application or operating system to delete cookies. Were we asking about something more banal than privacy and security on the Internet I would wholeheartedly agree with Seth.

    However, we live in a climate of fear. Internet privacy and Internet security are constantly being discussed online and offline, ChoicePoint and Lexis/Nexus are in the news, AOL and Earthlink run anti-virus and anti-spyware commercials. Consumers have every reason to be concerned about identity theft, phishing scams and privacy invasion — not because the problem is actually that pressing but because the media (bloggers included) keep these subjects top of mind every day. Think about it. When is the last time a week went by that you didn’t read/see/hear something about a privacy hack?

    UPDATE: Now Threadwatch comments on Eric’s defense.

    MSN’s New Ad Play

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    Gary’s up in Redmond for the MSN Strategic Account Summit and weighs in on the new ad platform. In short, he says “this is a big deal.”

    I agree completely. What’s fascinating to me is that this isn’t just a self-service paid search ad bidding interface. It’s “the first component of MSN adCenter” which will “give advertisers a one-stop shop from which to plan, execute and adjust their online campaigns.” (Quoting from the press release here.)

    And if Steve Ballmer’s remarks in the keynote were any indication, online is just the beginning. Microsoft wants to build the technology to enable the targeting and delivery of ads to a whole bunch of other Internet-enabled platforms. (ClickZ coverage is here.)

    Ballmer in the keynote:

    The whole way, in some senses, in which you even buy what you consider today to be traditional TV media is absolutely going to change over the course of the next probably two to three years, and the technologies that enable that, both on the consumer end, and on the advertiser end, we’re absolutely, here at Microsoft at least, investing in, and have a leading edge position relative to what’s going on in the market.

    So we need to make sure that our dialogue with you is a lot about what’s going on in traditional existing online today, but also talk about how the future of some of these other media will essentially merge with the online type over the course of the next several years. And we look forward to engaging with you in that leading edge dialogue.

    Meanwhile, the newly-unveiled paid search platform part of it ain’t so shabby itself (though only the French and Singaporeans get to play with for now) where it comes to data and targeting. Here, Yusuf Mehdi demonstrates the new technology by describing a scenario in which a sporting goods retailer goes to buy for a campaign around March Madness:

    We’ve done something that’s pretty unique with our technology. If you come down here below, we’ve actually taken the breadth of information we know about our customers on MSN, through registration data when people sign up for a Hotmail account, or an instant message account, or they customize their homepage. We enrich that data through third-party sources, so that we can overlay wealth index and demographic information, and then we map that to the keywords.

    So that when you come down here. you can see that the data now in the keyword for basketball, according to our search queries, and this is data that we actually pulled from our network, believe it or not, it shows that the keyword basketball it tends to be more female than male that is actually searching on that keyword, and you see the demographic range of that age group. Then you see things that are lifestyle-indexed, so for example, we can see for example, a big popular group, the second series leaders, and the description of that marketing target. And then, of course, the wealth index.

    Comcast/TiVo

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    In the absence of much time (and with the realization that I haven’t posted this week), I’ll point to this announcement of a relationship between Comcast and TiVo. Interesting how TiVo’s advertising solution — which has mostly played second-fiddle to subscriptions — is actually highlighted.

    As an extension of the relationship, TiVo and Comcast will make TiVo’s interactive advertising platform available across Comcast’s customer base without interrupting the award-winning TiVo subscriber experience.

    TiVo is doing some interesting stuff in the interactive TV arena. I think concerns about the company’s overall viability have overshadowed much exploration of this, however.