JohnDeMayo.com: Internet Advertising Insight

Calling knowledgeable Internet Advertising industry types

A new initiative of mine is to create a new network of blogs, to serve as a centralized resource for information related to many internet advertising topics that are near and dear to my heart.

One problem somewhat inherent with blogs are that they tend to cut /slice by PERSON, not by topic.   This can make it hard for someone to monitor the blogosphere for all posts on a certain topic (although as more posts are tagged, and tags are better sorted and searched, this has improved a bit).

Another problem is that few blogs seem to encourage visitor-submitted articles, for visitors that don’t want to maintain there own blog but may have some interest in putting an article together every once in a blue moon.

I am seeking writers / contributors to help with this network of blogs.  Our emphasis will be on writing, reviewing visitor submissions of, and finding and publishing links to, information relevant to specific topics.  We are happy to give the author significant credit for all posts, and are always happy to provide a prominent link either back to the full article, or if the full article is posted on our blog, back to the author’s main site or blog.

I am hoping we can focus on original, unique content, and less on posting comments and links to M&A activities, and comments on the web 2.0 space without a strong tie in to direct response internet advertising.  Less fluff, more content.

This is a not-for-profit venture, and its purpose is to better organize internet advertising information / articles / postings, and make more visible some of the more knowledgeable people in the space.  I will be paying all costs related to hosting, software, etc., and I do not expect to pursue any revenue lines.  I have already spent a considerable amount of money on relevant domain names for this project.

Topics I am proposing covering:

By medium or targeting criteria:

Search
Email
Banner
Behavioral
Software (?)
Desktop (?)

By goal type:

Lead generation
Brand(ing)
Product Purchase

If you are interested in contributing, please drop me a line and tell me a bit about yourself, and how you can help.  I am looking for:

4-5 core people to write on a weekly basis or so, and aggregate content they stumble across on a near-daily basis.  They will be featured in the about us page, as well as below any contributions they write.  Must work in and be knowledgeable in the internet advertising space.  Mr. Jay and I are the first two core people, and we could use a few other solid people, in particular that have knowledge in the email, software, desktop, brand(ing), and product purchase categories, to help round out our knowledge base.

1 core person to handle graphics, and any technical issues related to the site.  I have not yet decide on a platform and welcome input.  This person will be credit on the “about us” page.  I would prefer they work in the internet advertising space in some way.

Any number of contributors who would like to write original content to be published on their site.  While contributors will not be featured on the about page, I am happy to post a quick about / link below any of there contributions, telling the world who they are, and linking to their blog or site if they desire.

Email me john@johndemayo.com if you are interested in helping per above.  I expect this project to be live in 1-2 weeks.

Online Advertising Industry M&A Deal Flow Link

Thanks to Stein for passing me this great link showing Online Advertising Industry M&A Deal Flow.

http://www.o-a.com/acquisitions.html

For those that haven't seen it yet, worth a look.  For those of us that don't pay thousands of dollars for access to a good database, it can be hard to find good lists like this.  Also fun to look at is a gooogle map of deals done in Southern California.

http://www.socaltech.com/intelligence/map/

Stay tuned for a post where I speculate on some of the valuations and multiples used in some of M&A activity in the online ad space.

For those of you that do not use an RSS reader and prefer to have new posts made on this site pushed to you via email, I am starting a simple email newsletter.  Please sign up below if you prefer this option.

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Lead Generation Companies: Go wide? Go Deep? Both? Thin Layer?

11/17 edit:  Good chart/illustration added, a few words cleaned up.

    The term "online lead generation" defines a category of advertising spend in the billions per year.  AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Google, Adteractive, Quinstreet, Valueclick, Advertising.com, and LowerMyBills bill clients in excess of $100 million per year, EACH, to promote online lead generation campaigns in the mortgage, debt, education, and related verticals.  A huge space no doubt.

    The question for lead generation service providers and middlemen these days tends to be how wide to go, how deep to go, and how thin of a layer to occupy.  Companies like lowermybills and classesusa tended to go very deep (buying most of their media from the source, and selling most of their leads directly to advertisers), but not very wide (as most of their business came from one vertical).  Companies like an Advertising.com are structured to go both fairly deep (buying most media from the source and selling leads both to aggregators and end clients) and fairly wide (working across a number of lead generation verticals).  Some newer companies like LeadPoint are working with a thinner layer, and as of right now they are neither wide nor deep (working primarily in mortgage, and predominantly on the sales side, but not buying much or any of their media directly from the source of origination), with significant success.

    In the end, it's a question that has no clear answer.  As you think about companies in this space though, it helps to think about whether they are wide, deep, or neither (thin layer), and what technology or other assets they bring to the table.  As the space continues to get crowded, just showing up to the game will cease to be enough to bring success.  The right positioning and a significant asset will be necessary for success.  Keep your eyes open as start-ups begin to redefine this space.  Call it Leads 2.0 if you have to :)

Leadclick acquisition closes

The Leadclick media (eAdvertising.com) deal finally closed, with First Advantage paying around $150 mil for a majority stake in the company.  Anyone who saw Richard Chiang at ad-tech or at the late evening festivities saw a happy man, congrats to him and the rest of the good folks there.

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/11-08-2005/0004210847&EDATE=

Behavioral Targeting: A stab at demystification.

    Behavioral targeting has been a popular topic of online advertising articles recently.  It’s been cited as a high growth area, and as an area that some advertisers stay away from (but for largely undefined reasons).

    It’s more important to start to dissect exactly what behavioral targeting is, and what the various implementations are.  In order to do this, I will attempt to illustrate what some of the more popular methods of collecting behavioral data are, and what the more popular uses of this data are.  In order to have behaviorally targeted ads, you need to both capture data and then deploy an ad (somewhere / somehow) using this data in some way.

    There are a few major data collection methods that advertisers, agencies, sites, and networks use.  Some of the most prevalent are:

    -Establishing demographic data on users when they fill out information on a site (so I know cookie=1234 is Male, age 29).  Can be enabled by sites with registration pages or possibly software installed on the users machine.
    -Establishing interest data on users when they visit sites with certain content (so I know cookie=1234 has visited Edmunds.com and requested a car quote, and therefore they are labeled as have a high propensity to purchase a vehicle).  Can be enabled by most any site with content-specific pages or lead capture forms or software installed on the users machine.
    -Establishing search history data on a user (so I know cookie=1234 has searched on “mortgage refinance” and can label them as likely to be interested in mortgage products).  Enabled by search sites, search software (i.e. toolbars), or software installed on the users machine.
    -Establishing site-specific user behavior (so I know cookie=1234 visited MY site, and browsed but didn’t buy).  Enabled by the site that is later buying the advertising – most often used to find people who browsed your site but didn’t take the desired action, and induce them to come back.

    As you can see, it very well might be touchy for an advertiser to endorse software capturing interest and demographic data, and use it to their advantage, from a privacy perspective.  It would seem reasonable however for them to cookie users that came to their site, and show them ads at a later time suited to inducing them to come back.

    There are also a few methods by which ads are finally deployed to users (using this information in some way).  The more controversial methods are historically when an ad is displayed via software (ala Claria and related), and is often displayed while a user is a competitor’s site.  A less controversial and more accepted method is to simply use the data to better target ads.  So you are about to be served an ad from an advertising network, and instead of showing you a random ad, they should you a circuit city ad because they know you visited circuit city recently and browsed but didn’t purchase (a methodology often employed by Advertising.com).

    In the end, advertisers should more carefully consider all of the options as related to behavioral targeting, instead of accepting or denying the category as a whole.  There are some very touchy methods and implementations that could hurt a company’s reputation.  There are also some fairly accepted and safe methods that can be very profitable forms of advertising for advertisers, that are very unlikely to draw fire from consumers or privacy advocates.

    Once again I have under impressed myself a bit in regards to exactly how clear my writing is.  With that said, hopefully it helps some folks a bit, and hopefully it spurns other writers to dive a bit deeper into the topic and explain all of behavioral options and implementations.  Identifying your customers and serving them a loyalty offering via normal display based advertising on a 3rd party site is a lot different then paying to have adware-captured personally identifiable data used deploy a pop-up to a user over a competitors website.  But they are both behavioral.

Hot Silicon Valley company seeking top-notch software engineers

Are you a highly motivated person who wants to work on some of the coolest search and matching-related research and development work in the world?  Do you enjoy solving challenging problems in very innovative ways?  Do you like to work hard  on multiple, fast-paced projects concurrently?

We are looking for a few world class, fun-loving, senior engineers to join our small team and work on a wide variety of projects.  Below are listed requirements for a couple of positions we seek to fill at this time.  Since we have other openings coming up as well, feel free to send us your resume at techjobs@adchemy.com even if you do not see a job that matches your interest exactly.

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Title:  Senior Java Software Engineer

Required qualifications/education:

1. Web application development
2. Java, J2EE, XML, Apache, Tomcat
3. Oracle or MySQL or SQLServer
4. Linux
5. Ability to work well in a team environment
6. Degree in Computer Science

Experience in one or more of the following areas are plusses:

1. High performance distributed system development
2. Search technologies
3. High performance math software
4. Innovative data structure and algorithm development
5. Scripting (Perl, Python, shell)
6. C++
7. Start-ups

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Title:  Senior Search and Matching R&D Engineer

Required qualifications/education:

1.  Minimum 3 years of industry experience
2.  Excellent coding skills in Java or C/C++
3.  Experience with scripting languages such as Perl and PHP
4.  Experience building large-scale systems
5.  Strong communication and collaboration skills
6.  Degree in Computer Science (MS or PhD preferred for the senior  positions)

Experience in one or more of the following areas are plusses:

1.  Search engines and information retrieval
2.  Natural language processing, machine learning, data mining, or related areas
3.  Design and use of databases
4.  Start-ups

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About Us:  We are a young, pre-IPO Silicon Valley company, well-funded and profitable, located in Palo Alto, California.  Our Internet business is growing at the rate of 50% + month.  Our investors were early advisors and research collaborators at Google, and the management team are veterans of several online advertising, marketing, and search giants such as Shopping.com, Advertising.com, Amazon, and Yahoo!  We have PhDs and Faculty from universities like Stanford and Cornell working for the company.

ad-tech NY

As a bulk repsonse to emails I have been getting, yes I will be in NY for ad-tech next week (Sunday afternoon through Wednesday afternoon it appears).  If you work with education, mortgage, or related leads and want to spend a few minutes chatting drop me a line, I am not attending any seminars and prefer to fill these days with 15-30 minute meetings with folks in spaces related to those I work in.  john@johndemayo.com