The River

I’ve seen lots of links to this AdAge piece, which makes much of Google’s potential to edge out trade publishers.

“Google has created a revenue stream from being the card catalog or the newsstand, not the magazine,” Kenealy told the American Business Media conference, according to Advertising Age. “If Google can slice and dice (information),” added a b-to-b publisher, “and give highly qualified users to very targeted advertisers, then what do you need a trade publication for?”

As a journalist for a trade publication myself, I must ask… what about the content? Businesspeople doing searches on Google aren’t just looking for ads to click on and make a purchase. They’re looking for organic search results that link them to relevant information — usually articles in trade publications (with accompanying ads).

These searchers want an understanding of what criteria they ought to be considering, what features are most important, and whether the vendor is respected and reliable. There’s always going to be a value to being associated with quality content — whether that content is purchase-related or not.

As an aside, Google (and Overture) are proving to be valuable partners to trade publishers, bringing in shared revenue through their contextual ad placements.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention the other thing Google can’t provide — the communities John Battelle describes in a recent blog post.

Seth Godin has a fantastic blog post about “The Curse of Great Expectations.” He describes a trap I feel myself falling into sometimes — that of benchmarking everything. (You’ll note my entries about my sometimes-obsession with measuring my exercise performance.)

The bottom line: the world today is so full of data and overflowing with choices that it seems more difficult to simply be happy in the moment. This is a part of the culture in New York, perhaps because the choices are physical and not just virtual. There’s always a hipper bar, a more successful business, or a more ‘in’ restaurant right around the corner. The Internet, as Seth points out, just adds more channels and choices, with sites like Shopping.com and Froogle lining up your options for easy comparison.

Seth says:

But it stresses us out. A benchmarked service business or product (or even a benchmarked relationship) is always under pressure. It?s hard to be number one, and even harder when the universe we choose to compare our options against is, in fact, the entire universe.

This week in SF brought a multitude of priceless moments, so the next couple of entries will chronicle a few.

Passing through the always-crowded (during Ad:Tech, anyway) hotel hallway, my colleague Janis and I caught sight of a name tag. It was the famous Scott Richter, aka the Spam King. We said hello, caught up on events in Richter’s lawsuit against IronPort’s SpamCop, checked out samples of the SpamKing clothing line, and did the obligatory business card exchange.

It wasn’t until we were walking away that Janis called my attention to the fact that we’d just given our e-mail addresses to a notorious spammer. Hmm…

P.S. Richter also happened to mention that wide distribution of the SpamKing duds had been held up by the little matter of a trademark holder called Hormel. Good thing Scott’s dad is also his lawyer.

We’ve seen a big rise in the attention accorded to the ad network model, as evidenced by a significant presence by such networks at this show. In some ways, networks — and I include Google and Overture in my definition of network — are playing an important role in the resurgence of the industry.

But John Battelle, in his talk here and in his blog, brought up a good point — not one for which I have a counterpoint or answer, however. He talked about the role of advertisers as participants in the community formed around publishers and their audiences.

The whole size and scale issue lies behind this problem. Just as a practical matter, advertisers don’t have the bandwith to participate in the micro-communities that build up around blogs, for example. Once you begin to aggregate, you start depending on technology to pick appropriate pages for participation — and sometimes, there’s just nothing like the human touch.

Somehow Blogger’s e-mail posting feature on my blog was commandeered by spammers this morning, resulting in a frightening amount of pollution. I feel so… violated.

I’ve deleted the “chopper slut” deluge, but let me apologize profusely to anyone who had to deal with the excessive postings in RSS feeds. Aargh.

I’m in serious sleep deprivation/information overload mode here at Ad-Tech, but it’s generally a good thing. There’s a lot of energy fueling things here, which says good things about how the industry is doing. Our team has been doing a bang-up job, if I say so myself, of covering the incredible flow of news issuing from this conference. I’ll be writing my column this week on some kind of show-related theme, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, there’s the Ad:Tech Blog. Worth checking out.