Digital Advertising Technology Landscape

This schematic has become my cheat-sheet of choice for making sense of the digital advertising technology landscape...


Source: Terence Kawaja, LUMA Partners via Slideshare

From my perspective, the take-away here is that the digital marketing ecosystem continues to fragment by the day as innovative firms find new ways to create value. In turn, the challenge is that each bucket that pops up adds another layer between the advertiser and the consumer (and another potential point of confusion for marketers getting hip, or trying to stay hip, to digital).

It's interesting to see how many buckets Google is active in through owned/operated properties. At my count (based on the original schematic below, not the updated one posted above) the Big G has a play in 9 of them:

DSP - Invite Media

Ad Exchange - DoubleClick AdX

Ad Networks - Google Content Network

Creative Optimization - Teracent

Ad Servers - DoubleClick

Analytics - Google Analytics

Mobile - AdMob

And, of course, since this chart only shows the "display advertising technology landscape," it doesn't include Video (YouTube), Search (Google) and all the other Google products.

Methinks it's only a matter of time before advertisers will be able to just go through Google to get to their audience and check all the boxes and buckets along the way.

In 5-10 years, the digital advertising landscape could look very well like this...

And, I suppose it's possible publishers could even be dis-intermediated too!

Now, surely, this outcome might cause some concern for marketers over Google having access to all the data, potentially fixing pricing, etc. But I think the benefits of centralization, simplification, and efficiency will outweigh the cons for 98% of the 5 million-ish advertisers that currently work with Google today. For the other 2% (big Internet retailers, Fortune 500's, etc.), there will still be a need for either a) agencies to act as their advocates or b) internal teams that will put all these pieces and buckets together themselves.

And, while the 2% may control a good 20% of the total digital advertising spend, that's a healthy 80% ripe for Google's picking. My bet is Dennis Woodside, Penry Price, Jim Lecinski, and the other Google ad sales big wigs have this cheat-sheet affixed to their desks as well.

Update 7/27: Just came across a great post by Doug Weaver on his blog, The Drift, reacting to this graphic. He likens the state of today's overcrowded display advertising technology landscape to 2 hobos slicing a bean. Rather than introducing "one more data source that's going to refine targeting by a quarter of a point" or "another technology or platform to shave a nickel off the CPM," Weaver urges us to focus on finding/creating companies that will create "new online wealth."

Vintage Rishad

Rishad Tobaccowala is a tough act to follow. The man generates more sound bytes per second than Bill Maher touring the Vatican. Or Al Gore at a Hummer plant. Or Rush Limbaugh at the gay pride parade. OK, you get the point.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of moderating the ad:tech Chicago keynote panel immediately following Rishad's keynote conversation with Drew Ianni. As you can imagine, the crowd was plenty warmed up.

Unfortunately, I missed the last 20 minutes of his session while they got my panel situated and mic'ed up backstage but I was still able to fill 4 pages of notes with classic Rishad quips. Below are the ones I caught. To sample the entire vintage, run a search on Twitter for "#adtechchi + rishad."

• You can't get good word-of-mouth without good products
• Before social media, there was no amplifier for WOM
• When clients ask for a Facebook strategy, inquire why they never asked for an NBC strategy
• The future doesn't fit in the containers of the past
• Marketers spend 50% of their time demanding resources for what they spend 10% of their budgets on
• The future will be about marketing, not advertising
• Marketing is understanding and meeting customer requirements
• 4 things that build brands are performance, desire, culture, and intrigue -- only 1 of which has anything to do with math/data
• Most important thing with earned media is to de-fang detractors
• TV works
• If you are going to build digital without TV, you have no imagination
• Working media will decline from 85-90% of budgets to 65%
• The world may be digital but people are analog. Analog = feelings.
• Ideas scale much faster than math
• Creative and media must be at the same table but don't need to work for the same company
• Clients want best-of-breed (resources) with minimum drama. The only way to ensure zero drama is to hire 1 agency and get a pool of mediocrity.

ad:tech State of the Industry: It's Getting Better All the Time

Yesterday, I had the honor of moderating the keynote panel at ad:tech Chicago. Below is a copy of the presentation I used to kick things off and give the panelists something to react to. It should be pretty self-explanatory without my voiceover.

One thing I'll point out is that on slide 9 I asked the crowd to weigh in via show of hands and some 80-90% voted for social media as the fastest growing area of digital marketing. But, as I mentioned in my post recapping my ad:tech webinar, "growth" can be widely interpreted.

I should also mention that @LenKendall makes a good point when he says, er... tweets, "When determining growth of ANYTHING. Factor in growth of population. That ratio will show you true growth vs. stagnation."

Overall, I thought the dialogue on the panel was great. Sean Finnegan of SMG was a great sport about slide 19, especially considering his kids were in the audience. Jeff Levick of AOL Advertising shared some interesting nuggets about the direction his company is heading -- specifically, around creation of original content. (Off-stage he told me that they have some 1,000+ writers in NYC cranking stuff out.) John Cantarella of Time.com had a great soundbyte as he lamented "parasitic aggregators" of content -- although he refused to name any, I chimed in with a Huff-Po cough. And Jeff Bell represented DOmedia well by calling attention to the need for better attribution management -- although that buzzword seems to have caused some confusion.

It definitely seems like the consensus is the volume of planning (and actual spending) activity is picking up. Both AOL and Time.com reported heavy increases in RFPs -- interesting, John pointed out that almost 100% of the requests are for custom packages, not straight ad units. And Sean and Jeff both said they've seen client budgets open up a bit headed into the holidays.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time before I could get to the SMS Q&A but we were able to squeeze in 2 live audience questions that called attention to trends in video and corporate social responsibility.

I'd like to thank Drew Ianni, ad:tech programming chair, for the opportunity to participate and CIMA, for nominating me to represent the organization. And, of course, my fellow panelists for engaging in the conversation and opening their kimonos a bit.

Looking forward to next year. Hopefully by then, WAY up will be the new up. Hey, we can imagine, can't we? (Sorry, had to close with another Beatles reference.)

State Of The Industry: ad:tech Chicago Keynote Panel Presented by CIMA

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When it Comes to Digital Marketing, Is Up the New Up?

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I just posted a preview of my upcoming ad:tech Chicago keynote panel on the Connectual blog. Check it out for the inside track on the panelists, topics, and a discount link for conference passes. And please weigh in with any questions you'd like to see me ask these distinguished gentlemen.

Below is the official session overview...

State of the Industry (Presented by the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association)

Consumer generated content, social networking, widgets, online video, ad networks, activation, engagement, mobile marketing, the death of television as we know it and so much more—The digital revolution is in full swing and the velocity of change only seems to be increasing. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) estimates that online advertising spending will surge past $20 billion in 2009 as marketers increasingly leverage digital media and technology platforms to establish a dialog with their customers, optimize messaging and delivery and, ultimately, drive brand preference. But what about the current recession and its impact on media and advertising? Is digital media suffering along with other platforms or is our industry benefiting from these tough times as marketers shift a disproportionate amount of spending to performance-based marketing channels?

We are pleased to partner with CIMA, the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association, to present this State of the Industry session and welcome Aaron Goldman, Managing Partner at Connectual and the Executive Director of CIMA as the moderator for this session. If you need a primer on where things stand today and also need to prepare to embrace and leverage what comes next, don’t miss this annual bellwether state-of-the-industry event.

MODERATOR:

Aaron Goldman, Managing Partner, Connectual

PANELISTS:

Jeffrey Davidoff, Former Senior VP, CMO, Orbitz

Sean Finnegan, President, Chief Digital Officer, Starcom MediaVest Group

John Cantarella, General Manager, TIME.com

Jeff Levick, President, Global Advertising and Strategy, AOL

Beware the Undertow: Don't Get Swept Away by the Forrester Wave Reports

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Last week, Forrester released its Wave report evaluating US digital marketing agencies on strategy and execution. Brian Morrissey has a good summary in AdWeek if you don't want to pay the $1749.

I wasn't able to find the full contents of the report for free online but I did find a complete copy of the Q2 '09 Forrester Wave rating the web design chops of digital marketing agencies. After dissecting it a bit, I have some questions about the methodology and overall usefulness of these reports.

The Envelope Please

Per Forrester, the top agencies for "transaction-led web projects" (read: ecommerce) are Sapient, Razorfish (who just got acquired by Publicis resolving Microsoft's conflict of interest but not Razorfish's -- see my update to this post), imc2, IconNicholson (yeah, I don't know either), and IBM Interactive.

As for "image-led web projects" (read: branding), the top shops were Sapient, Razorfish, IBM Interactive, imc2, and Organic.

Checking Boxes

Forrester used the following 18 criteria to score agencies:

1. User research
2. Persona creation
3. Persona application
4. Design process
5. Skills and staffing
6. Cross-office consistency
7. Measurement
8. Collaboration abilities
9. User experience
10. Brand image experience
11. Satisfaction of reference clients
12. Market positioning
13. Clarity of vision
14. Emerging web technologies
15. Industry focus
16. Billable staff as of Q4 2008
17. Revenues (2008)
18. Revenue growth (2008 over 2009)
19. Number of North American offices
    

From there, Forrester used 25 (undisclosed) criteria to score 2 websites and 1 persona submitted by each agency.

The rest of the report was completed based on interviews with agency staffers and 2 client references offered by each shop.

Better than Nothing

While I applaud any and all efforts to bring sense to the nonsense that is the agency/client RFP process, I think the Forrester report is incomplete, at best, and flawed, at worst.

For one thing, the process for selecting which agencies it includes in the report is questionable. Per footnote #6, Forrester "invited 29 shops from Advertising Age's top 50 digital agencies by web design revenue to participate" along with 2 from a previous report, before picking "the 20 largest."

So, right off the bat Forrester assumes that the best agencies are the ones with the most revenue. (Unfortunately, many clients make this mistake too when building their list of shops to RFP, but more on that later.)

Even after settling on 20 shops, it's quite telling that 2 dropped out of the Forrester study because they "had commitments that prevented them from dedicating the required time and resources."

Indeed, it takes time and resources to contribute to, I mean... manipulate the results of this report. First, you have to pick your best 2 websites and 1 persona that you worked on in the past year -- clearly, not representative of your entire body of work, just cherry-pick the top outputs. Then you have to offer up 2 client references -- obviously, focusing on those that are best buds, relatives or otherwise inclined to only say glowing things about you. Finally, you have to take your best people off their current projects to make time for Forrester's intensive interviews.

Geez, this Forrester Wave report sounds a lot like the Agency/Client RFP process itself, aye?

Losing the Forrest for the Trees

Don't get me wrong, I think the Forrester Wave reports are valuable resources for clients trying to decide between the shops evaluated. My issue is that not all the shops are evaluated. And, furthermore, the criteria is too complicated and subjective to be really meaningful.

As an aside, last year, while I was at Resolution Media, I had my team inquire as to how we could be included in the Forrester Wave Search Marketing Agency Report. Resolution Media is rated by AdAge as a top 20 agency by revenue so I thought that would be enough to make the list. Turns out, our inquiry was returned by a salesperson looking to sell us a research subscription. It was unclear whether or not this is a prerequisite for inclusion in the Wave reports but we declined and instead took them up on an offer to speak directly with one of their analysts who was responsible for compiling the report. Let's just say that we never heard from anyone but the salesperson again.

Now, I realize that doing comprehensive research on 18 criteria across the hundreds, nay, thousands of digital marketing agencies out there is simply not feasible. However, I'd argue that all the various points of differentiation (Cross-office consistency, Measurement, Collaboration abilities, User experience, etc.) can all be boiled down to one key metric/benchmark: client satisfaction.

I won't make you go back and read all 4,000+ words of my client-agency RFP manifesto but here was one of my suggestions:

"I’m a big fan of the Ultimate Question as a way to cut through all the clutter and get to the heart of how good a job a company is doing. Responses to the question, 'How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?' tell us more about that company than any exhaustive questionnaire or fancy demo ever will.

We need a system whereby all agencies are required to create a 3rd-party audited list of current and former clients including duration of engagement (ie, number of years under contract) and breakdown of service offerings. Then, each quarter, a 3rd party asks all clients to anonymously rate their agencies on the Ultimate Question. The resulting list would be sortable by agency service offering and client category and be made available to the general public for a nominal fee (to cover the survey hosting costs).

This model is really nothing more than a peer rating system for agencies -- not unlike Yelp for restaurants or eBay for merchandise sellers. Just as LinkedIn is the Facebook for business, I guess I’m suggesting a review site for marketing communications agencies. I firmly believe in the power of transparent and self-policing communities."

Rest assured, folks, I'm working on it! In the meantime, please take the Forrester Wave reports (and the plethora of agency press releases they touch off) with a grain of blue ocean sea salt.

Keys to Success in Digital Marketing

Here are my slides from the webinar I gave today in tandem with ad:tech on "Cashing in on the Top 10 Hottest Areas of Digital Marketing."

As you'll see I ran thru some market research to set the stage then counted down each of the top 10 and pointed to one key to success for each discipline.

To view the recording complete with voiceover and post-preso Q&A, check out "adtech Digital Marketing Webinar" on the Connectual blog.

10 Hottest Areas Of Digital Marketing

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Thought I'd relay one tidbit from today's session. After the presentation, we polled the audience about which of the 10 areas of digital marketing I outlined would see the most growth over the next 12 months.

Here were the results:

Social 56%
Video 12%
Analytics 10%
Search 9%
Behavioral 8%
Other 5%

The skew towards social may not surprise you -- especially seeing how it was ranked #1 on my list -- but I don't think the question was phrased properly so it's difficult to interpret the results.

The word "growth" is quite subjective. It could refer to any of the following:

• Increased usage by consumers
• Increased usage by marketers
• Increased marketing opportunities available to marketers
  
• Increased budget allocation by marketers
• Increased performance of the channel (read: ROI) for marketers
  

It's hard to know how people were defining growth when they responded so I wouldn't take these results to mean anything other than social media is hot right now and will likely remain more top of mind than any other area of digital marketing going forward.

Connectual Press Roundup

My company and I have been in the press a few times this week. Here's a quick roundup...

• Quoted in the MediaPost article "Microhoo As Good As Done, But Is Search Ready For Consolidation?" sharing thoughts on the implications of a Microsoft/Yahoo search deal. Read more of my musings on the Connectual blog.

• Featured in the Examiner under Chicago's Young Entrepreneurs. This was a fun interview. My favorite quote is, "The bottom line in the digital space is innovate or die. I choose life!"

• Promotion for my upcoming ad:tech webinar "Cashing in on the Top 10 Hottest Areas of Digital Marketing." Join me on 8/4 at 2p edt for a 20 minute presentation followed by Q&A and then a virtual expo.

Digital 30: Just What the Web Was Missing

So today I came across this article in Mediaweek -- Web to Soon See :30s

Apparently, ShortTail Media is introducing a new online ad-unit that's a cross between a full-screen takeover and a 30 second TV commercial.

C'mon, really?!? You're telling me someone sat down and said, "Hmm, maybe if we take the 2 most annoying ad placements of all time and put them together, we'll have a great offering!"

And they certainly didn't do themselves any favors by positioning it to Mediaweek as a "a full-screen, deliberately intrusive placement."

As the story goes, "Back in February at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual meeting, [ShortTail Media founder David] Payne delivered a provocative speech urging the industry to adopt bigger, bolder creative and to be less sensitive to user-experience."

Less sensitive to the user-experience?!? Has Google taught us nothing? Need I remind you of the acquisition email and the pop-up?

Somehow I don't think the way to " inspire a creative revolution" is by hijacking the web and holding consumers captive.

Even though IAB Chief Randall Rothenberg and I may disagree on what makes the heart beat and the mouse click, I'm sure we can both agree that this experimental ad unit is not going to do much more than make the blood pressure rise and the mouse click 'X'.

CIMA Survey #6: Trends in Interactive Marketing

Tonight I'll be moderating a panel at the first CIMA byte of the year. We'll be kicking it off with the release of the results of CIMA's 6th bi-annual survey on the state of the interactive marketing industry.

Troy Mastin, analyst to the stars, er... CIMA will be presenting the research and has given me a sneak preview. Here are the 5 key insights he's pulled out of the data (along with my comments.)

1. A sharp decline in the health of the industry noted. (No surprise here.)

2. Economic conditions and industry dynamics impacting vertical categories. (CPG up, auto/finance down... again no surprise.)

3. Rich media and search seen as strongest established tactics; Mobile and social represent the most interesting areas of growth. (The fact that rich media outscored search suprised me. I've seen display budgets getting cut faster than search but maybe all the buzz around Hulu skewed people's responses.)

4. Google and Facebook seen as the Industry leaders but “up and coming” solutions continue to fragment the landscape. (Interesting that Facebook is seen as a leader despite very poor monetization.)

5. Direct marketing viewed as better insulated than advertising for the first time. (When in Rome, er... Recession...)

After Troy presents the research, I'll lead a discussion with this esteemed panel:

-Brian Mandelbaum, Vice President, Interactive Group Media Director, Cramer-Krasselt
-Michael Kahn, SVP, Marketing, Performics\VivaKi Nerve Center
-Julie Wainwright, CEO, SmartNow.com
-Joe Laszlo, Director of Research, Interactive Advertising Bureau

If you weren't able to pre-register for this event, unfortunately we're not taking walk-ups. But I'm pretty sure we'll be recording the event and posting to the CIMA site so you can catch up on the dialogue and what color shirt I was wearing. (Hint: some might call it lavender.)

UPDATE 3/25: Troy's presentation has been posted to the CIMA site and event pics are up on Picasa. Here's one of me getting cozy with the panelists:

Yes it was a good discussion...

What Comes First -- The Heart Beat or the Mouse Click?

I just read IAB President, Randall Rothenberg's masterpiece -- "A Bigger Idea: A Manifesto on Interactive Advertising Creativity." It's a bit meaty but, as you know, I'm not averse to lengthy blog posts around particular passion points. For anyone who wants to understand the impact of the digital sea change, Rothenberg's piece is required reading.

He begins by attacking the "four enemies of online branding:

A direct-marketing culture and tradition that devalues creativity and its long-term effect on brands

An interactive agency business model that disincentivizes greatness and fails to penalize mediocrity

An unwillingness by mainstream agencies to integrate technologists as full partners in the advertising creative team

Media industry values and habits that malign and depreciate our own products, and by extension our customers'"

And he closes with four action items for "digital publishers and agencies:

1. Motivate greatness among your best creative people, for their work inspires consumers and customers alike.
2. Collaborate -- creative agencies and publishers -- with each other and within yourselves to develop outstanding advertising and communications products.
3. Assemble writers, designers, and technologists into teams that can engage the intellect and emotions of audiences and individuals across all channels, toward the goal of creating enduring brands.
4. Prove to your customers that causing the heart to beat quick is at least as important as making the mouse click."

There are a number of threads in Rothenberg's post that sparked my interest and merit further discussion. For now, I'll just focus on one -- "the gap between the mouseclick and the heartbeat."

To illustrate his point, Rothenberg poses this "admittedly trick question:

What's the biggest difference between a traditional creative agency and a new-age digital agency?

Answer: Traditional creative agencies are named after human beings. Digital agencies are named after inanimate objects or nonsense words."

Indeed. Although, most of those traditional shops now carry acronyms in place of the principal's names to cater to today's short attention span masses -- DDB, BBDO, GSD&M, TBWA, Y&R, JWT, etc.

Rothenberg's point is that the "depersonalization of the agency business" is indicative of a trend towards advertising globalization and industrialization. He posits that we need to start to "recognize and reward the creative individuals who make greatness happen" -- whether that's by naming firms after them or giving them a bigger stage at awards ceremonies like Cannes.

I agree with Rothenberg that we are witnessing the downfall of advertising creativity as we've known it to date but I would argue that what's replaced it -- a relentless pursuit of scale, accountability, and optimization -- is much more relevant and powerful to advertisers and consumers in today's burgeoning digital media ecosystem.

Put another way, I think these days what makes the heart beat is the mouse click. Not the other way around.

Take for instance, the Snuggie -- which has become Resolution Media's mascot of sorts. What made this "blanket with sleeves" become a cult sensation? It sure wasn't their TV spots. Watching the folks in this commercial lie around on the couch is more likely to make your heart stop than beat. No, what got everyone excited about this product was all the mouse clicks that resulted when this brand went viral -- the commercial parody, the pub crawl, the sightings blog, etc.

I really believe the cause and effect with Snuggie's popularity was mouse click then heart beat. People took to this brand because they were excited about all the mouse clicking that was happening and wanted to be a part of it. In a matter of days, thousands of people signed up for the pub crawl and the commercial parody has nearly 2 million views.

So, rather than hearken for the days of old when marketers built their brand by creating masterful ads and broadcasting them out to the masses, we need to embrace the idea that what moves the needle in today's instant gratification, always-on, Type-F society is planting the seeds of a brand across various media touchpoints and sparking viral, peer-to-peer conversations.

Indeed, the message has become the medium. And, for marketer's to thrive/survive, that message better click.

Reviewing My 2008 Predictions

On Tuesday, I linked to my post on the RM Blog outlining 10 predictions for search marketing in 2009.

Today, I thought it would be fun to review my predictions for 2008 to see how I did. At the end of 2007, I used my Search Insider Buzz-o-Meter column to lay out the following predictions:

1. "Google to bow display ads on SERPs after the DoubleClick deal closes."

2. "More consolidation in the [agency] space, with large shops scooping up specialized search firms as they acknowledge how critical search is to all aspects of marketing and realize how hard it is to build search expertise in-house."

3. "More and more search firms [will] stick a flag in the sand regarding their core expertise -- some will embrace all forms of performance-based media, others will develop full-service digital marketing capabilities led by 'search-think,' and still others will remain true to query-based marketing only."

4. "Facebook to have a major impact on the search marketing landscape in '08, whether it be incorporating Web search (via MSN?), reacting to news feed optimization or spawning regulation around data portability."

5. "A[n economic] pullback could actually be good for search -- when times are tough, marketers load up on platforms with proven ROI -- I also think it could stunt innovation, with the Big 4 unwilling to take chances and upstarts unable to get funding."

6. "Search marketers to figure out how to leverage widgets beyond the mere link-popularity benefits."

7. "The next wave of opportunity is likely in the torso -- after all, as the tail gets longer, the belly gets fatter."

8. "[Microsoft's KSP platform aka AdIntelligence] will make search marketers smarter in '08, and hopefully it will push Google and Yahoo towards becoming more transparent with their data (although I'm not betting on that.)"

Now, to steal a page from Paul Harvey, "for the rest of the story..."

1. Wrong. Didn't happen outside a tiny pocket of experimentation with banners on Google Image results.

2. Sorta. iProspect gobbled up Range Online Media. Publicis snapped up Performics. That was about it though. Instead of acquisitions, we saw a trend towards large agency holding companies infusing resources from their search specialist shops into individual agency brands (eg, WPP creating Group M Search and infusing search talent into Mindshare, Mediaedge, and MediaCom).

3. Right. Search agencies definitely chose sides this past year. As I pointed out in yesterday's Search Insider column, Didit is positioning itself as a "company providing bid management services." 360i kept its "Search-Informed Marketing" approach but acquired creative shop i33 to deliver full-service solutions. Meanwhile, Resolution Media stuck with its laser-focus on Query Marketing (although per prediction #9, look to see expansion here). There were more examples but these 3 check each of the boxes I outlined in my prediction so we'll move along.

4. Sorta. As I suspected, Facebook finally launched web search in tandem with Microsoft but it didn't exactly set the search world on fire. Data portability was a hot topic with the launch of Google Friend Connect but regulation in the space came not from the government as I expected but self-imposed practices from folks like Yahoo shortening the duration of personal data storage to 90 days.

5. Wrong. The recession might not have been bad for search (after all, flat is the new up, right?), but it wasn't good for it either. And innovation among the Big 4 may have slowed but it certainly wasn't stunted. Google rolled out SearchWiki, Microsoft rolled out a number of cool features like Farecast integration and more (see my comments on this post), and Yahoo, despite being battered the most, still managed to roll out Search Monkey as part of its open initiative. Meanwhile, the search for the Google killer continued as startups like Cuil raised cash and launched to very little acclaim.

6. Wrong. 2008 was a big year for widgets, although they're now more commonly referred to as applications thanks to Facebook and the iPhone. Not much application for search marketers though.

7. Wrong. The power of the long tail shone mightier than ever in '08, helping Obama take the White House. There was much debate at the recent Search Insider Summit over the relevance of the long tail to search marketers with no clear consensus. The torso did emerge in a big way this year, just not from a search standpoint. Rather the torso reared its ugly, er, head as vertical ad networks become the "it" thing in online display media.

8. Right. MSFT AdIntel made Resolution Media much smarter search marketers this year. And, sure enough, Google followed suit becoming more transparent with absolute search volume data and a nifty Insights for Search tool.

If I take half-credit for the sorta's, the tally puts me at 38% accuracy. I certainly went out on a few more limbs with my '09 predictions so it will be interesting to see how I fare this coming year. One thing we can all bank on (sorry, bad word choice) for '09 -- it ain't gonna be pretty.

It's Not All Doom and Gloom

Proving once again that flat is the new up, today comScore reported $534 million in online sales for Black Friday, up 1% over last year. And, while the 2008 holiday season to date is down 4% versus '07, the combination of Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday are up 2% so there's some (flat) momentum here.

Update 12/3: comScore reported today that Cyber Monday saw $846 million in online spending, up 15% over 2007 -- the second heaviest day of online sales since they've been tracking. Could up be the new up again?

"Flat is the New Up"

I've found myself using this sound-byte on more than one occasion recently so I thought it was worthy of its own post. I first heard it second-hand at DPAC with attribution given to Mr. Sean Finnegan of SMG. I've dropped it in many a budget conversation as marketers look ahead to 2009 and we realign our expectations. Thanks for the nugget Finney!

Update: MC Finney reached out to clarify that he did not come up with this phrase. He credits this Newsweek piece with turning him on to it.

Update 11/25: In further "flat is the new up" news: comScore forecasts flat growth for '08 holiday ecommerce spend.

Update 12/16: Just came across this variant from Rob Norman of Group M: "Not bad is the new great."

Update 5/7/09: This just in from the MediaPost Search Insider Summit, "Browse is the new buy."

Does Search Get Too Much Credit?

The Atlas Engagement Mapping concept has gotten a lot of play with it's headline-grabbing sound byte that search gets too much credit because it is usually the last ad clicked prior to conversion. The notion is that proper attribution needs to be given to each of the consumer touchpoints (eg. online display ads) prior to that last clicked ad. Offline marketing also plays a role (as does word of mouth, etc.) in influencing conversions but today those platforms can't be tracked holstically since they are not delivered digitally.

I will not dispute the fact that search often-times gets too much credit for driving sales. Online display ads definitely play a role in driving consumers down the purchase funnel and often stimulate search activity. That said, there are times when search does not get enough credit. Today, search ads cannot be 3rd party ad served. This means that search does not get credit for any conversions that occur after someone has been exposed to a search ad and converts via another channel. Meanwhile, online display ads routinely get attribution for post-view conversions.

The bottom line is that maketers and agencies need to understand the impact of all media placements on driving consumer response. While Engagement Mapping is a good step in that direction, until search ads (and offline ads, for that matter) are delivered the same way online display ads are, we'll never have a completely accurate picture of the influence of each channel and, therefore, never be able to allocate budget appropriately.

DPAC Tweet Coverage

As has now become my modus operandi, here's a recap of the Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference, 140 characters at a time. Remember to read bottom-up to keep the chronology...

Highlights from my panel at #DPAC re: search in a recession -- Patrick Harris of MSFT: "Technically, we're not in a recession." 4 minutes ago from web

Highlights from my panel at #DPAC re: search in a recession -- Gerry Bavaro of Didit plugs direct mail and coupons! 5 minutes ago from web

Highlights from my panel at #DPAC -- Debbie Johnsen of Leading Hotels: "If you're not moving $$ into search, you are doing something wrong!" 6 minutes ago from web

When it comes to search, beware integration for integratio's sake -- http://tinyurl.com/6q8mcj 7 minutes ago from web

Ok, time to get set up for my panel on search and it's recession-proofness. Gonna have to work in some Rohan soundbytes. #dpac about 5 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Christy Tanner of TV Guide seems to think UGC and social media are one and the same. Old school. #dpac about 5 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Peter Naylor of NBCU at #DPAC: "It's a 90-day by 90-day existence (for ad sales org's)" about 5 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Ahh, "Banner Blindness" - how I've missed you, my old buzzword friend. Thanks Peter Naylor of NBCU for the resurrection at #DPAC. about 5 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Ross Sandler of RBC at #DPAC cites DCLK/DL study: 15% more ads on avg content pg and 10% decrease in click-rate. Too much clutter! about 5 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Can't believe I missed it but apparently yesterday Sean Finnegan dropped this gem at #DPAC: "Flat is the new up." about 5 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Jordan Rohan at #DPAC: 30% of sold inventory now comes thru ad networks vs. 6% in 2006. about 5 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Jordan Rohan at #DPAC: With Yahoo's US Portal now valued at $8 bil. new buyers like Disney and Comcast could emerge. about 5 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Re: my last tweet - that's because avg cpm on AOL is $13.61 vs. $0.63 for Facebook. about 6 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Jordan Rohan at #DPAC: for every 1 hour a consumer spends on Facebook instaed of AOL, the internet ecosystem loses over $600 of annual rev. about 6 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Re: my last tweet. That's kinda like saying you always find what you're looking for in the last place you look. Why? Cuz you stop looking. about 6 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Jordan Rohan at #DPAC re: economy - "The bottom will happen when you stop asking." about 6 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Jordan Rohan at #DPAC: "The recession is bigger than you are." about 6 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Jordan Rohan up next at #DPAC. Should be a doozy. That dude never minces words. about 6 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Every online media business these days claims to have cracked the code on creating win-win-wins for consumers, publishers, & marketers. about 6 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Sang Kim of Ripple6 at #DPAC introduces a new buzzword - "cloud communities." Basically the idea of syndicating social networks. Dig it! about 6 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Re: my last tweet. Those tenants were part of a Google branded entertainment pitch. 10:02 AM yesterday from TwitterBerry

Alexandra Levy of Google at DPAC: 3 key tenants - 1. User comes first 2. Relevant ads win 3. Engaging right audience is key. 10:01 AM yesterday from TwitterBerry

Keynote from CEO of Audemars Piguet at DPAC. Never heard of them? Me either. They make $40k watches. Apparently, recession-proof. 8:39 AM yesterday from TwitterBerry

Len Lauer of Qualcomm at DPAC: US is 3-4 yrs away from having scalable mobile point of sale capabilty (ie, credit cards on your cell phone) 8:27 AM yesterday from TwitterBerry

OMMA Tweets: Day 2

Unfortunately, I had to leave OMMA early today and was only able to attend the morning sessions. Here are my tweetin' highlights...

Jim Barnett of Turn at OMMA coins a new buzzword "Branded Response" referring to marketers that have hybrid brand/DR goals. 10:26 AM September 19, 2008 from TwitterBerry

Lars Bastholm of AKQA at OMMA: "Our clients set aside budget for things that 'might come up along the way.'" Must be nice. 10:11 AM September 19, 2008 from TwitterBerry

Nigel Morris of Isobar shares what he was told by Google's country mgr in Belgium: "All agencies are middlemen and we want to destroy you." 09:23 AM September 19, 2008 from TwitterBerry

OMMA Tweets

Well, Day 1 of OMMA is in the books. Rather than give the traditional recap, I'll just share my Tweet-stream to give you a flavor of the conference so far....

Quote of the night: Lance Neuhauser - "You guys are so worried about Google that you can't focus on dessert." about 1 hour ago from TwitterBerry

@leeodden is schooling the OMMA crowd on DAO. And of course he got a plug in for SMO (social media optimization.) about 7 hours ago from TwitterBerry in reply to leeodden

The verdict is in at OMMA: you CAN brand with search. Hooray! about 7 hours ago from TwitterBerry

About to start my panel at OMMA re: search and branding. Giddyup! about 9 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Q thrown out to audience at OMMA: "How many of you think Google's competitive to your biz?" Over half the room raises hands. about 10 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Chris Anderson's follow up: "Are we scared of the power of Google or are we scared of the power of math?" about 10 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Chris Anderson from Wired at OMMA: "There's a lot of Googlephobia out there." Ya think? about 10 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Bill Wise just did a full-on reenactment of the court scene from A Few Good Men at the OMMA Yahoo sponsored session. Intense! about 10 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Chris Zaharias from OMTR at OMMA: "Multivariate testing is the single most important thing you can do to improve search campaigns." Amen. about 11 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Alex Gross from backcountry.com asks audience at OMMA: "Do you inherently trust Google?" One person raises hand. She works for Google. about 11 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Uggh. Audience Q at OMMA re: click fraud. Are we stuck in 2003? about 12 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Satya Patel at OMMA invested in a company focused on social media monetization. There's an oxymoron. about 13 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Henry Blodget at OMMA: Twitter will get couple hundred million valuation. about 13 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Warren Lee at OMMA: it's all about people, processes and technology. That's how he decides where to invest. Sounds easy enough. about 13 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Strategies vs. Tactics

Attending the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose has got me thinking about the difference between strategies and tactics.

The knock on SES for some time has been that the content is too tactical in nature. However, as Dave Gould, big cheese at Resolution Media put it, one man's strategy is another man's tactics.

I'll elaborate on that a bit but, before I do, I'd like to give props to Kevin Ryan who has done a good job morphing SES to live up to its name. Day 1 of the conference yesterday was programmed almost exclusively with topics and speakers (including yours truly) that activated high-level strategic thinking.

As I've stated in the past, too often these shows are filled with self-promoting speakers who either spend too much time talking about themselves or diving so deep into niche program tactics that they're wholly irrelevant to the audience.

But again, strategies and tactics are relative terms. Let's look at it through the lens of a typical corporate marketing organization...

To the CEO, a goal might be to increase revenue. Therefore, the strategy he/she might deploy to achieve that goal is to launch a marketing campaign. And the tactics he/she might activate are PR, web development, and advertising.

In turn, to the CMO, the goal is to drive revenue and the channel available to him/her is marketing. The strategy he/she might deploy is to launch an advertising campaign. Accordingly, the tactics he/she might activate are TV, print, and online ads.

Continuing down the line, to the VP, Advertising, the goal is to drive revenue and the channel available to him/her is advertising. The strategy he/she might deploy is to launch an online ad campaign. The tactics he/she might activate are display, email, and paid search media buys.

Now, to the Director of Online Media, the goal is to drive revenue and the channel available to him/her is online media. The strategy he/she might deploy is to launch a paid search campaign. The tactics he/she might activate are geo-targeting, promotional creative, and automated bid rules.

Finally, to the Search Marketing Manager, the goal is to drive revenue and the channel available to him/her is paid search. The strategy he/she might deploy is to do geo-targeting. The tactics he/she might activate are geo-modified keyword selection, IP-based DMA targeting, and regional promotion copy and landing pages.

It's truly a game of telephone -- what started as a high-level strategy got interpreted down the line as nuts-and-bolts tactics. But isn't that the point? How else would this company meet its goal of driving revenue if each stakeholder didn't consider strategies and tactics on a relative basis?

So the next time you attend a conference or sit in a meeting that you think is too tactical, I urge you to consider the frame of reference of the person doing the tacticizing and find the strategery in it.