Display Advertising - the Market of Re-Targeting

The following post was written by Jeffrey Zwelling who is the CEO and founder of Convertro.com
I really recommend anyone who is interested in Online-Marketing to read it as it explains the market of displayed advertising and the "Re-Targeting" concepts very well.

http://zwelling.convertro.com/2010/06/what-does-gsi-commerce-acquisition-of-fetchback-portend-for-retargeting-companies/

On June 1, 2010, GSI Commerce, the 800-pound gorilla of outsourced ecommerce, announced that it had acquired Fetchback. TechCrunch reported that the purchase price was $40 million. FetchBack was one of the first companies to sell retargeting and had reached many of the ecommerce clients. In the beginning, they sold on a CPM basis, often as high as $10, but eventually retained some of their defecting clients by offering CPA and CPC deals. In the meantime, competitors like Dotomi, Acerno and ReTargeter challenged Fetchback with better technology, better reporting and sometimes better targeting. Most recently, Google and Yahoo entered the market.
For those who aren’t familiar with retargeting or behavioral display marketing, let me explain. A consumer comes to a website, typically e-commerce, and browses around. While they are on the site, a javascript drops a cookie. In Fetchback’s case, they actually used an iframe (think a little webpage inside of the ecommerce site) that drops several cookies. When the consumer leaves the ecommerce website and travels around the greater Internet, he or she receives banner ads for the merchant’s website. Fetchback accomplishes this by “registering” those cookies with brokers of display advertising who are given maximum bid amounts to pay publishers to market against those users. When the user arrives on a site like Yahoo mail, ESPN news and the like, nearly instantaneously the publisher notifies the broker site that he or she has arrived and “auctions” off that advertising space to the highest bidder. An ad is displayed, Fetchback records that event and bills the merchant accordingly. The average price paid for that ad is 42 cents per thousand impressions, meaning that Fetchback’s gross margin on this deal is north of 90% given a $10 CPM.
It’s great money for Fetchback if you can get it, but of course the merchants want proof that this type of marketing works– 99% of the time, the consumer doesn’t click through the ad but merely “views” it, and ecommerce merchants are highly skeptical of the impact of this so-called “viewthrough.” Fetchback (and Dotomi) developed a system for demonstrating the incremental impact of these viewthrough ads: people eligible to receive the ad because of browsing history were separated into different groups – the standard group receiving the merchant’s ad, and a control group shown a public service announcement with no reference to the merchant. Fetchback compared the difference in conversions between the two groups and claimed the difference to be the result of the viewthrough effect.
To be honest, to early customers this was very compelling, albeit somewhat unprofitable. Fetchback was smart enough to price as high as they could since they were one of the first to offer the channel. However, in doing so, they created not only a tension with their customers but also opportunity for others to enter the market.
At first there were two ways to compete with the basic Fetchback model apart from price. One was to optimize the ad itself by dynamically creating an ad based on the product that the visitors had looked at or put into their shopping cart. The other was to take some risk out of the media buy by only getting paid a cut of the sale if the retargeter’s cookie was present at the time of checkout. Both approaches had problems but retargeting continued to grow.
The big change came about a year ago when Google started offering retargeting to a select group of beta customers. Google’s pitch was the same as Fetchback’s with one very obvious difference: Google’s CPM’s were 50 cents, or essentially wholesale to the public.
Our company started seeing clients working with more than one retargeter at a time. Some had three or four retargeters running concurrently. And of course we measured the conversion rate, average order value and general ROI for all of them. (We were also able to determine if having multiple retargeting companies created some duplication – it does. This means that customers were paying twice or more for the same same due to duplication of credit.) What we saw was Google trouncing the competition in every metric.
This didn’t bode well for FetchBack or retargeting companies in general. While there were some benefits to keeping Fetchback alive to maximize reach, it was obvious that the massively different ROI did not mean that our clients were long for Fetchback. In addition, retargeting became almost commoditized at the same time, with multiple companies adding the same functionality to their keyword bid management software (Efficient Frontier), product recommendation tools (Rich Relevance) or even comparison shopping engine feed managers (Channel Advisor).
Indeed, my own company added retargeting to our product offering, although with a different angle: we could use it to leverage our advanced visitor scoring analyses. We believe that it’s more important to determine who is worth retargeting rather than what or where you retarget them. Adding retargeting to our platform wasn’t hard to do and we don’t see it as a profit center, but rather an accessible means to help our clients make customer insights actionable.
We were impressed with Fetchback’s solid sales team which combined a very tactical inside sales team with a large salesforce. They seemed to reach every potential buyer and they showed up regularly on our client’s dashboards. But as a service, they didn’t have the technology or pricing to compete. So in the end, they took the best deal they could get, which by our accounts doesn’t look like they believed they had a future as a stand-alone business.

Read more here:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/01/fetchback-40-million-gsi-commerce/

Opera Unite

Some details:
Take control of what you share online
Opera Unite allows you to easily share your data: photos, music, notes and other files. You can even run chat rooms and host entire Web sites with Opera Unite. It puts the power of a Web server in your browser, giving you greater privacy and flexibility than other online services.

Share with other Web browsers
What if you use Opera at home, and a different Web browser at work? Opera Unite services can be accessed from any modern browser, including mobile browsers! At home, just select what you want to share, and you can view it later using your work Web browser without any problems.

Integrated and extendable
Simply enable Opera Unite when you start Opera, and you are ready to go. Find and install services with one click from our online catalog or easily create your own by using Web standards like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and AJAX.

To read more - http://unite.opera.com/

Dead Grasshoppers Give Life to Social Media Marketing Campaign

A nice video, and a creative campaign:

Read more about the campaign itself here:
http://mashable.com/2009/06/15/grasshopper-campaign/

Palm Pre vs. iPhone. Should we even bother?

If at first the user experience of the iPhone was the most attractive thing about it, today, the strength of iPhone is the huge range of amazing applications that were developed for it.
Now, when more phones that give a slightly better user experience than iPhone are in the market, iPhone is not competing in the same field anymore. Today, iPhone brings a great added value (the applications) that can't be easily competed by none of the others.
BUT - the Palm Pre does give a nice fight on the user experience side and has a comfortable OS for app. developers (see a review below). So, I spent 5 minutes to learn more about it.
Enjoy the Palm Pre review -


(* BTW, personally, I am waiting for the next phone revolution to buy my next phone. So - 99.9% that my next phones will be - 1.modu and 2.one of the coming Android phones. modu for its hardware platform that will create an amazing eco-system and an Android phone for its software platform that will let application creativity extend into new levels).

What is webOS?
webOS is an embedded operating system developed by Palm for the Pre smartphone. It’s based on the Linux 2.6 kernel and features a tight integration into social networks and Web 2.0 APIs. As an example the Universal Search feature accesses your contacts, and then crawls content provided by Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia and even Twitter.
The operating systems has a touchscreen-based graphical user interface and ships with a set of typical smartphone applications, like an address book, calendar and task manager.

Read more here -
Get up to speed with our Palm Pre extended executive summary
Written on June 6, 2009 – 9:09 pm
Ralf Rottmann, Serial Mobile Entrepreneur, Apple Addict
http://thenextweb.com/2009/06/06/speed-palm-pre-executive-summary/

Big Bing or Bing Bang or...

The commercial is too complicated for me, and I didn't understand yet how Bing can help me make better decisions than before.. But... Bing is here and the promise is that it will be a Big Bing.
Enjoy!

Google Squared Goes Live Today!

Many times we need to find something by searching the web, and after we find it, we want to compare it to other things that are available.
Google Squared vision is to do it automatically for us and arrange everything in a very intuitive way - spreadsheets.
The Beta was released today and obviously, it is not perfect yet. Together with that, the service can already be very helpful for easily comparing restaurants, stores, movies, gadgets, and more.

A usage for example: as a product manager at modu, I was occasionally building comparison tables for available handsets. The new Google Squared Search engine could have helped me save a lot of time by automating at least some of my work...

Take a look at this search: "mobile phones":

http://www.google.com/squared/table/agyoK6a0nieaiqftw1n6y78w

I was also searching for fashion stores and restaurants in different areas of Chicago - Take a look -


http://www.google.com/squared/table/agLoMdyLZKdsfWp0G9KL4pqg


http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=restaurants+chicago+"gold+coast"

This technology is by no means perfect. It is only the beginning... But it is SO Intuitive, SO Clever, and already VERY Helpful.
I recommend to check it out - http://www.google.com/squared

Exciting - Project Natal for future Xbox

It looks imaginary or something that will be in the market only in years from now.
So... No. I know that it's for real. Trust me... Or don't.
Project Natal is a revolutionary new way to play: no controller required. See a ball? Kick it, hit it, trap it or catch it. If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips or speak you and your friends can jump into the fun -- the only experience needed is life experience.
I just can't wait to do kick box training with one of the fighting games... It will be SO MUCH FUN (anyway - better than a class in the gym ;)
-- Thanks to Michael Shaulov for sending me the video.

The advertizing budgets are low this year - BUT

Maybe, that's why the commercials are funnier than before. Or maybe it's just the summer...
Enjoy -

Blue Ocean vs Red Ocean

In the last few days I've discussed and presented this concept a couple of times, and I thought that will interested you too.

What is Blue Ocean Strategy?
Companies have long engaged in head-to-head competition in search of profitable growth, but today, competing head-on often results in nothing but a bloody ‘red ocean’ of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Blue Ocean Strategy contends that although most companies compete in these red oceans, this strategy is unlikely to create strong profitable growth in the future.



Tomorrow’s leading companies will probably better succeed not by battling competitors but by creating ‘blue oceans’ of uncontested market space. These strategic moves - termed ‘value innovation’- create leaps in value both for the firm and for buyers, creating all new demand.

To learn more - http://www.slideshare.net/jessestarmer/blue-ocean-strategy-summary-61974

Reducing Fat - A Great Marketing Concept

And it can be helpful before the summer -
If you gained weight along the winter, most of the chances are that you will stand and by that, burn some calories :)

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

At Dr. Z's class today of Marketing Strategy we were discussing pricing methods for the marketing manager. 

Our discussion reminded me of this great article from WIRED. 

I, BTW, totally believe in "freeconomics". 

Enjoy!

Short preview: 

Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything "free" was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You'd get one thing free if you bought another, or you'd get a product free only if you paid for a service.

Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It's as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?).

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. 
Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web.
Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

To read the article: Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Or you can start with this video:

The introduction of Apple Macintosh (1984) - still the best Super Bowl spot for me

Intended message:
Adelia Cellini states in a 2004 article for MacWorld, "The Story Behind Apple's '1984' TV Commercial":
Let's see - an all-powerful entity blathering on about Unification of Thoughts to an army of soulless drones, only to be brought down by a plucky, Apple-esque underdog. So Big Brother, the villain from Apple's '1984' Mac ad, represented IBM, right?

According to the ad's creators, that's not exactly the case. The original concept was to show the fight for the control of computer technology as a struggle of the few against the many, says TBWA/Chiat/Day's Lee Clow.

Apple wanted the Mac to symbolize the idea of empowerment, with the ad showcasing the Mac as a tool for combating conformity and asserting originality. What better way to do that than have a striking blonde athlete take a sledghammer to the face of that ultimate symbol of conformity, Big Brother?[8]

However, in his 1983 Apple keynote address, Steve Jobs made the following comment before showcasing a preview of the commercial to a select audience:
It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers initially welcoming IBM with open arms now fear an IBM dominated and controlled future. They are increasingly turning back to Apple as the only force that can ensure their future freedom. IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control: Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?[13]