Online media planning: July 2007 Archives

 Some informative presentations at "Christmas in July", netimperative's seminar on online retail today.  And a classic bit of marketing jargon from Bruce Fair, Commercial Director at Yahoo! Marketplace who managed to keep a straight face whilst suggesting that online retailers should:

• Diversify marketing mix to complete a 360° tier 1 ad strategy

Can't wait to slip that bullet point into one of my presentations - preferably one that someone else is going to present!

P>... is the topic I have for a session at Ad:tech London on the 27th September.

I'm doing 30 minutes on the achingly trendy subject of 'how to integrate web 2.0 opportunities into your marketing strategy'.

It's impossible not to be impressed and excited about the rise in social networking sites in particular and we are certainly thinking very hard about if and how they can be used to help achieve marketing goals.  I know all the arguments about invasion of personal space, but speaking personally, I'm not especially offended by having advertising on my Facebook profile page.  Would I like it to be better targeted to me?  I don't think I have a problem with that either.

On the other hand, we do have a tendency to be seduced by the latest shiny new thing.  From a media perspective, I'm a big fan of boring old buys on the big portals or networks - fantastic reach, great brand association, normally pretty good results.  The social networks might have the page impressions, but that doesn't of itself mean they will automatically be great choices for all advertisers.

I went to Shiny Media's Brands and Blogs seminar on on Friday. 

It's great to see that the blogging debate has finally moved on from stories about how powerful blogs are at destroying brands - not a positive argument to take to a marketing director.  One theme that many speakers on Friday returned to was how blogs can deliver a good platform for online media. 

The Guardian, B5 Media, Glam and of course Shiny Media themselves are all attempting to create blog channels which can be attractive to advertisers.  I'm slightly sceptical about some of the arguments delivered from the stage: I paraphrase a little, but there was a sense of "We're delivering a highly targeted audience, so of course our CPMs should be $20 or so".  Out in the chilly world of media buying, the truth is that your CPMs can be whatever you want them to be - but if the media doesn't deliver conversions at volume, you're going to struggle to stay on any plan. 

I was also wondering about the status of the blogger in all this grand new world of aggregated blogs. Essentially many of these companies are offering bloggers a way to monetize their work in a way that they would struggle to do themselves (away from the easy embrace of Google Adsense I guess). 

But isn't all this just a bit reminiscent of the relationship between the record industry and its stars?  The Marillion reference in my title is of course to the dreadful prog rock band (only hit, the uber-dreary "Kayleigh") who pioneered a new online relationship with their audience long before Myspace brought us the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen.  Marillion were dumped by their record company, but acquired a (presumably quite small) database of the email addresses of their fan base.  An email appeal to their fans raised enough money for them to release a further album, Marillion.com.  Last.fm has the whole story. 

Perhaps I'm a hopeless dreamer, but couldn't individual bloggers find a way to market without needing to wrap up their wares into an aggregated site.  At the final reckoning, will the world belong to middlemen like record companies or blog aggregators - or to individual bloggers and 'creative artists' like Marillion?