In my last post, I briefly touched on an interesting topic: the economy of attention, inventory and media in an online environment.

The relationship between advertisers and media is one built on scarcity. There are only so many 30 second spots, billboards and half pages available. Each piece of media had a different value too, depending on the content it was surrounded by, or place in time and space.

Attention though, was a lot easier. Because of the costs and legal restrictions associated with creating media in the real world, consumers did not have too many options. They had to drive past the billboard on the way to work, if they wanted to watch TV there was only a limited number of channels to choose from, and the same again for print. Influencing their consumption was important for those selling advertising inventory, but the market was not too competitive. At least compared to the internet.

Online, there is potentially infinite inventory. Creating space to place an ad does not even need to involve the direct involvement of a human. For the advertiser, the limiting factor is the audience, not the platform.

There is still a scarcity, but it is not created by the nature of the inventory, and it is far more fluid. This is not the whole story. The relationship between consumer, online media and the technology behind the platform is far more nuanced than this.

Catapults are historically great tools for distributing rocks, rotting cows and pots of Greek fire. In this way, they bear a remarkable resemblance to the modern online advertising network, such as adsense.

While there is value in attention, there will be an industry focused on providing access for money. As long as there is a demand for attention, there will be motivation to create the means to deliver it. 

Thanks to the internet, there is no longer a scarcity in inventory. In the dim, distant past there were only so many pages in a magazine, or a limited number of 30 second blocks in prime time. Online this is no longer a factor. Now the limiting factor is attention. Where the people are, what they look at and how long they spend there. Google does not sell its advertising inventory because it is on ‘Google.com’ it sells it because it has created an online property that people give their attention to. The same goes for any other source of traffic. 

All of this attention is fragmented. While some sites do have access to a large audience, there are a lot of others out there that do not get attention on that scale. However, a lot of them do have very focused audiences, ripe for the right ad. Individually, each site like this has slim to no chance of securing advertising, but when added to a network of sites, it becomes easier to sell and buy advertising inventory.

Moving ad distribution from the hands of those who own and operate the sites and generate the content to a company who is dedicated to this role makes it easier to create value from attention and traffic. In a large enough network, the individual quality of each site is no longer as important, assuming some basic metrics are met, the advertisers can simply throw as many ads as they can at the network, and see what sticks.

Two of the most intensive jobs of starting a magazine are finding content and procuring advertisers.

I’ll admit this…the first issue was short. This next issue (which will be out shortly) will be longer. To keep up with this trend, here at PCOS Magazine, we need help! I don’t like short, and I know you, as readers, like more pages and more content. Who doesn’t?

Do you have a background in journalism? Do you like to write? Do you have a unique story idea that you’d like to develop into a story and then contribute? If so, then we want to hear it!

Also, more advertisers means more premium content. We need advertising sales gurus who are willing to work on commission (at least staring out) to help PCOS Magazine add more advertisers to its repertoire. You have the background? Contact the editor!

Some recent work, featuring some particularly awesome photography from Adam Voorhes.

I’m building a Facebook Fan Page for October Custom Publishing (my company), in order to try and get us out there a little more. On there you’ll be able to view almost every page of every magazine we’ve either published or been hired to create thus far. I’d really appreciate you becoming a fan, and I’m happy to return the favor! Take a look at the page here. Introduce yourself!

It’s that time of the year again where in-between neglecting duties to my family and multiple full-time job deadlines, we somehow managed to crank out another issue of GivingCity Austin. Please hit this link to download, and PLEASE send it to as many people as possible. We’re probably not going to do another unless we can find someone willing to bankroll it for us, so the more people that see it, the better chance there is that someone may want to.More pages after the jump….although I’d really rather you went here and just download the thing.

I didn’t manage to get to the AOP Conference last week, but no surprise that it appears the discussion there was mostly much wringing of hands about how to make the paid content model work.  The Guardian reported;

“Digital consultant Bill Murray warned publishers that if they put a barrier in front of their users, it is likely that they will disappear. Instead he suggested, they need to rethink the concept of content. The most important factor in the success of iTunes success wasn’t the content, he argued, but the service”.

This seems to me to be the crux of the issue and is accidentally a key insight in to the reasons that publishers find the paid model challenging.  The natural instinct for a publisher is to put the content at the centre of the thinking.  Magazine publishers start their working day by thinking about how to make a better magazine and then work out wards from there.  When they ask what their readers want, the answer can only be something that can be squeezed into a magazine delivery format.

“Not me!” I hear the progressive publishers cry.  The honest truth is, it is almost all of us.  The paid content model requires a fundamental rewiring of how our media brains work.  Instead of putting the content at the centre of our strategy we need to put the user at the centre.

If I ran a chain of coffee shops I might consider that if I make the best coffee I can my business will thrive.  I invest in better beans, more reaosting technology, training my staff how to make the best coffee, serving the coffees in the finest china mugs money can buy.  I will fail every time until I realise I am not in the coffee business at all.  Not sure? Well think about this;

A famous case study of the demise of the Parker Pen company exposes the same mistake.  When Bic began eating into the share of the Parker Pen business by selling cheap biros the managment at Parker determined to compete.  They reworked their manufacturing process to produce cheaper pens.  They judged that to match the price of the new upstart they needed to cut their own price.  The result was disasterous and share conitnued to fall.  After a while the rate of decline accelerated to a faster rate than the growth of Bic.  What had gone wrong?  The inisght to fixing the problem was to recognise that Parker was not really in the pen business at all.  When a customer selected a Parker Pen it was most usually as a gift.  The substitues were not the Bic, but a rather a cigarette lighter or a letter opener.  A reduction in the quality of the Parker Pen had sidelined them in the gift market and continued to leave them at a competitive disadvantage to Bic on price.

What is there to learn from this for business media? The content we used to offer (mostly news) is now avaialable for free.  We have competed by offering our own news for free but have discovered that our users, instead of rewarding us with loyalty and praise, now simply take us for granted and use us as one of many sources of news on the Internet.

Other articles in this blog have said this before, and I make no apology for repeating it again.  Our business is not content.  Our business is helping users to make better decisions and helping vendors to sell more.  When David Gilbertson says that we over estimate the importance of business journalism he makes a fair point and if you read this blog and others you will find lots of clues about what to do about it.  But now for a heresy.  What would happen if we put the question differently?

Instead of

“Giving content away in an advertising supported model does not create enough user engagement (page views/session) or repeat visiting to justify a high CPM.  As a result we conclude that the ad model doesn’t work and we say, how can we create a paid content model?”

Lets try, “What would we need to do to persuade users to engage with our content in such a way that advertisers woudl agrees to pay a CPM sufficent to pay for the content creation costs and give us a profit?”

Let’s think about the scale of that task.  In the old model a typical B2B magazine with a 20000 circulation might have expected to sell ads at around £1500 a page.  That equates to a cost/000 of about £75.  Our current free content model is a long way short of that.  Our typical B2B companion website might get 100,000 page views a month. With a 70% bounce rate only 30% of that traffic is likely to be effctive for advertisers to reach.  Let us imagine that we can service three ad impressions on each page.  So if we sellout our usable inventory our total ad impressions will be 90000.  If you are selling your inventory at £30/000 cpm you are probably doing well.  So if we sell out, our monthly revenue will be not more than £2700 – less than two pages of advertsing in the old model.  My hypothesis could be wrong by a factor of ten and we still don’t have a great business!

We need to find a way to take this model and achieve at least £50000 revenue/month. Driving the number of user visits up is unlikely to work.  The universe of relevant people is limited by the scale of the niche.  In any event the task is daunting.

Consider this:

Where maximum monthly revenue = M

Monthly page impressions= T

Bounce rate (expressed as a decimal) =B

Number of Ad impressions/page =A

Average achieved CPM =C

Then M= T*(1-B)*A*C

Max Rev = 100*(1-0.7))*3*30= £2700

So. all other things being equal, by how much would any one variable have to move to achieve our £50k goal? The terrifying answer is we would need either 1.9m page impressions/month or 55 ad impressions on each page or a CPM of £555!

This seems to me to be so far removed from anything that could be remotely achievable that the drive to paid content is impossible to resist

Does this mean that we should give up on the ad model. If we could improve CPM by 50%, increase available traffic by 50% and halve the bounce rate would that help?  The answer is not much.  Our maximum revenue would still be just £13000 a month.

As with content strategy, using offline thinking in the online world is always going to disappoint.  If you think about it, the magazine ad model, where we could charge £70/ooo to perhapsps fifty advertiisers in the same issue is the equivalent of having 50 ad positions on every web page.  No wonder the offline ad model doesn’t work in the online world.

Is it possible to consrtuct an advertsing model for the b2b web that pays the bills? While I think about that keep cracking on with those hybrid strategies.

I’d stop buying GOOD magazine a while back – partly out of an effort to spend less money (no ladies, I’m not independently wealthy, contrary to popular belief. Nor am I a Formula One race car driver, and I have never saved the earth from certain destruction) – and partly because it just wasn’t making me want to buy it. Anyway, I saw this issue and picked it up because of the cover. Despite the almost unreadable cover-lines up there in the top right corner, this cover made me want this magazine. Totally imaginative and different cover, obviously advertising content that’s slightly different from what they usually put out. Digging the 3-D set made from props used throughout the magazine – although I wonder why they didn’t make the ‘GOOD’ logo in the same way – or all the cover-lines for that matter. Regardless, very cool. I like the visibility of the white strip of information at the bottom of the cover, but think some the information in there could have been a little more interesting.

Inside, they’ve only got one page dedicated to contents. It’s basically a list broken into categories of the 100 (or so) subjects they’ve covered in this issue – they have a lot of content, so have gone with single line entries for each piece (something I wish here was more of this kind of restraint in the magazines I work on at the full-time job, instead of trying to print half of every article on the TOC).

A few pages in and you get to the ‘Quarterly Progress Report’, the purpose of which is to give you an update on what’s been going on with GOOD recently, and a preview of a lot of content you can find online. I like this idea, and the magazine devotes several pages to this, but I’m surprised that they didn’t make it more obvious in the design that you need to go online to read this stuff. I think because so much of the magazine – and in particular this issue – is filled with shorter, front of book style pieces – this whole section doesn’t really jump out as being something that’s meant to be a tool to drive you online…if anything it’s a little confusing and frustrating… frustrating because it seems that with just a few layout tweaks this whole section would become much more efficient. It’s not all teasing web-content, but the majority of it seems to be.

Like the page says, this section begins their ‘First Ever’ GOOD 100. The entire section is a collection of short, front of book length stories, short people profiles and info-graphics.

The card models used on the cover are scattered throughout the section in their appropriate stories. There is TONS to read here, and I can’t see anyone going through this from front to back… like i said earlier, the whole looks like front of book layout and content. It all looks great, in fact I think the only thing that detracts from the layout throughout is that there are very few ads in the magazine, and those that are in there tend to look a lot like the editorial pages, like the one below:

Even the spread ads are confusingly infused with the magazine’s message, like this one:

I think with the addition of a bunch of full-page, full-bleed, colorful ads throughout, the editorial pages would become stronger and more defined, and the consistency in the layout and editorial more of a defining characteristic than it currently is. Nice little touch on the back page folio here:

Also, I like that even thought they obviously spend a lot of time on their info-graphics (above), they’ll still run a straight graph every now and then, like below:

All in all, a good experience, and definitely an issue that I won’t mind revisiting several times. I’ve got to hand it to them: for a magazine that’s only 17 issues into its lifespan, it feels a lot more established and solid than some of the other crap you’ll find on newsstands right now. I’ll be waiting for the next issue now.

Michael Withiam is a senior-level executive with more than 25 years experience building and leading business units in technology-driven industries.

My professional background includes 14 years of direct P&L responsibility, extensive experience in large-scale technology, capital and operational project management, and the negotiation and administration of complex contracts and government agreements.

My career foundation is marketing, communications and media relations, with noted success building customer relationships and revenue through product development and brand management. I have successfully led very large customer service, field service and call center operations in high-transaction consumer markets to exceptional customer satisfaction ratings, and have directed operations for large commercial sales forces in the telephone, cable television, telecommunications, and media sales industries.

I am also a community leader, consultant, college professor and writer.

I enjoy interacting with people and exchanging ideas and thoughts on a variety of topics. I have developed this blog as a way to share my experiences, thoughts and perspectives on business and community issues with a broad group of people.

I welcome your reactions, feedback and thoughts through the comments feature of this blog or through direct contact at michael.withiam@gmail.com or 757-416-2188.

A little more about me:

I am a strategic thinker and problem solver, with demonstrated ability to lead the development and execution of strategic business plans and sales programs that ensure effective customer segmentation, strong acquisition and retention programs, the identification of new and untapped market opportunities and strong fulfillment, logistics and customer service infrastructure .

I am a motivating, collaborative leader with proven ability to develop and engage employees and customers in all aspects of the business. I am an outstanding communicator, able to tailor messages to all levels of an organization and to all internal and external audiences.

I have completed projects as a consultant including product development for a software firm; operations improvements for a waste management company, a sales compensation program for a telecommunications company,  marketing, sponsorship and media relations work for a professional soccer team, public relations and communications training for a non-profit organization, and government relations and communications training for an industry trade association.

I am also an active community leader and volunteer, having assumed leadership roles in the United Way, Chamber of Commerce, and Economic Development organizations in every community in which I have lived.

To see my resume please click on the tab labeled “Resume”.

You can also find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and at Writer’s Write, my second blog focusing on non-business oriented essays, commentary and stories. All of these sites are listed in the bottom right hand side of my profile page.

First, apologies to those who come her regularly for the lack of posts over the Summer.  I have spent most of the time honing a model for how b2b might look in the future and this blog has not been front of mind.  But the Summer is over and it is now business as usual.  There is still pain all around us.  Results from Centaur Media, where revenues have dropped by nearly a third in a year, will come as no surprise to anyone who works in this space.  More cost cutting has been announced at Emap and RBI.  The downturn in revenues is now affecting events as well as publishing and the online world remains challenging operationally commercially and strategically.

Nowhere is this more  important than in recruitment.  I went sailing last week with a recruiter in the finance sector.  He was telling me how tired he was of job board offerings.  Where is the innovation he pondered?  For publishers the price point on job boards is very challenging.  With the market thinking that £150 a job is a lot of money, it is hard to see how small publishers can compete with the mainstream job boards.  The volumes that are needed to create a viable business are very large.  You need to sell more than 500 postings a month to create a £1m business.

How can niche publishers add value both to compete with generic boards and to justify a higher price?  One answer comes from an interesting US business www.jobvite.com.  

This solution offers employers an application which plumbs vacancies into its employees social networks.  Vacancies are posted on employees Linked In or facebook pages creating a viral access to audiences of potential job applicants who may not be actively searching for a post.  This tackles one of the main weaknesses of the job board solutions.  Their model requires potential applicants to be active.  In our old print model we could push recruiters messages at possible applicants who had not considered themselves active. Reruiters will pay a premium to access these potential applicants.

Although I can see some real challenges for the jobvite model (getting employees to agree to using their personal networks for their employers interest is the obvious one), this represents a an innovative step forward.   So much of our old model profits came from recruitment, we ignore the challenge of innovating new solutions for the online world at our peril.  The question we should be asking ourselves is,  how can we add value to the recruitment offering?

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• Emap inform looking to cut 35 more jobs (guardian.co.uk)

Myadbuyer.com Opens One-stop Shop for Advertising and Marketing a Small Business

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Driving at 40km through phantom road works is frustrating. Doing it with a long line of cars behind you and not a worker insight just makes you feel stupid.

Brisbane is full of road works and 40km signs with no workers nearby right now. It is no wonder that commuters don’t slow down for them. No one believes them.

Most people would obey the speed limit if they believed that there is a valid reason to. They have just been trained to ignore them. The expectation has been set, and it is that the signs placement is independent of the existence of road works. Of course people don’t slow down.

Do your ads do the same? Do your customers, even the loyal ones, actually believe you, or do you also fail to follow through on the promise?

Sometimes, when you are in management, you need to show outsiders with whom you have business around the office. Sometimes this is just to establish credibility, for a sense of completeness or to demonstrate competence or create an impression. Sometimes this will mean that you will need to introduce them to the internet marketing geek. Here are a few pointers for getting the most out of them.

Make sure they  look the part
Nothing is worse than introducing the internet marketing geek if they don’t look the part. It is vitally important that they look the part when introduced to any outsiders, your company’s internet marketing credibility depends on it.

Do all website demos at their desk, even when you do it all yourself
There is no reason to ever demonstrate a website from your own office. Use the internet marketing geek’s computer instead. Even if you run it yourself, it still appears more genuine when they are there too.

Talk them up
It is true that building a person up can be good for moral, but that isn’t why you’ll do it in this situation. You want to convince the outsider that your company’s internet marketing prowess is insanely good. Any points you score with the internet marketing geek are just a bonus.

Tell them what to do
At some point the conversation will turn to the outsider’s website. This is when you need to suggest to your internet marketing geek which parts of the site to incorporate into yours. This is the best way to show that you paid attention, and tells the outsider that you understand this web thing, and are intimately involved in the design process.

As an ad agency owner, it never ceases to amaze me on what makes this business tick. In light of the worst economy in 60 years, logic would say that agencies should be pitching their ability to make the cash register ring.

Instead, any talk about getting customers through the door is obligatory at best with a lot of agencies. Why talk about results when you can drone on and on about your agency’s “award winning” TV commercials? After all, it’s how many awards an agency wins that separates one shop from next. Right?

Who’s kidding who, it’s a lot easier for agency people to wax philosophical on their “break through creative” (the most over-wrought words in advertising) than to defend their work through the prism of increased market share and higher comparative sales.

Unfortunately, too many of my colleagues have forgotten the golden rule in retail advertising:

“It’s not creative if it doesn’t work.”

And even more prefer the easy way out through the creation of advertising that “tells not sells.” You know, the kind of commercials that spend 22 seconds setting up the joke and the last 8 seconds poorly selling the product.

So the next time, you’re ad agency is enthusiastically trying to sell you on another “award winning” television campaign. Keep them honest and ask four simple questions:

1. What is the strategy behind what you’re proposing? (Note: “because it’s such a cool idea” is not a strategy.)
2. Why is this campaign the best use of my advertising dollars?
3. Is there anything else we could do that would deliver a better ROI?
4. Will this campaign increase awareness or sales? (Note: awareness is hard to measure; sales are not.)

Then, just sit back and get ready for the show; along with developing all those award-winning commercials – many agencies have become quite adept at the lost art of tap dancing.

There is one thing that the mainstream web does not often have to deal with, and that is a huge volume of really bad traffic. This issue is usually only seen with mass SEO networks, free content pages, the adult industry and spam. Creating value from this kind of traffic has three distinct stages:

• Sell them what they are there for, and gives the best ROI
• Keep their attention while you offer secondary and Tertiary products
• Extract some kind of value via third party ads and traffic trades

While you have an idea of why they are on the page and they might even have come with a purchase in mind, they are often going to be hard to convert. With spam traffic, you will know what offer they are responding too, so the sales page can be very focused. If you understand the market, you will also have an idea of what secondary offers will work too, if they don’t click through from the first. Just give them something to keep them in the network and clicking. If you also have a high tolerance to risk (as a spammer, the answer should be ‘yes’), cookie stuff and give them a toolbar and some malware as well.

Traffic looking for free is even harder. While you know why they are there, and what their interests are, they do not want to buy. Moving them down the funnel is going to be hard. Sales content is probably served as above, the offers with the best conversation and return are pushed first and the hardest. Other offers that also work within this traffic niche are promoted too. Additional offers that are not directly related are used as well, as you might still catch a few.

What you can’t sell to, you still want to keep in your network. Disabling back buttons, circle jerks, pop ups and so on are all tricks that have been used in pursuit of this goal. Given that most browsers are fairly secure these days, their effectiveness is no where near where it used to be.

There are cleaner ways to keep them within the network too; links to more free content that you control, be it specific pages, or move them to a new list or directory page. Content within the same niche but in a different media is good too. Even if at the end of the day you can’t convert the surfer, you can always use them as a part of a traffic trade.

In short, when you have a lot of bad traffic you can:

• Sell hard on the primary, best, offer
• Understand your market & select secondary offers to match
• Include offers from outside of the niche
• Feed them link bait and bookmark worth pages when they won’t buy
• When everything fails, use them in traffic trades/low return offers

Spammers are the ninjas of the internet marketing world. It requires a lot of subtle skills and they stay out of the limelight. Thanks to the measures taken to fight it, the margins have been cut and most operators now use clearly illegal means to get mail out and make money. They have also had to refine a few skills:

• Social engineering
• reverse engineering security and filter systems
• writing effective sales copy
• creating large robust and distributed semi-autominous systems

In the past all you needed was a few tempory accounts, a couple of phone lines and a room of old boxes and modems and you were off. Grab a fresh list, and burn it until you made money. These days the barriers of entry are a lot higher.

A higher barrier of entry cuts down on the number of opperators. This in most industries would cut the volume of activity too. Online, I doubt this is the case. Spam scales really well, and one person can easily produce as much as ten, assuming their network is large enough.

The industry has changed from ethically challenged to clearly illegal, it is still a very interesting one to watch. For a good overview, check out:
http://www.icir.org/christian/spamalytics/

One of the reasons so many media companies are in trouble is the simultaneous crisis in all revenue streams.  It seems to many, that whatever strategy is deployed, the size of the potential revenue pot keeps falling. 

Back in the sixities, almost all business to business titles were paid for.  News about your industry was valuable and that value could be measured with money.  Today nobody charges for news.  In print, yields have been under pressure for some years.  Online display advertising with it’s transparent measurability has given advertisers a legitimate stick with which to beat media owners.   Where there has been success in selling online display the achieved CPM has been falling.  Too much traffic, too little of it useful or enaged, consequent poor click through rates mean that much inventory remains unsold – a growing proportion for many – and what does get sold is at rates that are falling.  Where once the choice advertisers had was limited by the number of titles in a market, today they are confused by so much choice.

We lost our way with recruitment.  Where we used to charge thousands of pounds for a page of advertising, the job board model now offers an ad £100.  In the recession prices here too are falling.

However we solve the current strategic conundrum, it seems pretty clear that unless we can push back the tide of prices tending to zero we don’t have a business.    The truth is, whilst there are things we can do to make a difference the price of a transaction in the new world is unlikely to reach the heady heights of the old world.  There are  four steps that all media companies must take:

1) Set the fixed cost base at a  level which is supportable by the new model.  This means attacking some sacred cows and stripping away layers of management costs.

2) Improve the value of your advertising proposition.  Seth Godin says,

“As long as your site is about something else and the ads are a distraction, you’ll see CPM rates drop. As soon as you (or the advertisers) figure out that creating online communities aligned with the advertising, where attendance is a choice by the consumer, then you’re creating genuine value.” 

In B2B that means making ads relevant and targeted.  Don’t give up on vertical search solutions.  Keep experimenting – there are riches ahead for the media company that gets it right.

3) Audit every activity that leaves the building and assess it for value.  Use that value audit to establish the prices that could be achieved.

4) Give up on the idea that you are going to survive by doing the stuff you used to do.  News products supported by advertising are going to be very small businesses.  Plan and implement a series of new product developments that will help you scale your business.  Buy some expertise to help you do it.

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A study by Outsell (only available to subscribers) surfaces one of the underlying systemic issues affecting business media companies.  They asked business to business marketeers in the USA what they were doing with the money they were no longer spending on trade press advertising.  In summary the money went;

• 29% will be spent on the company’s own web site
• 21% will be spent on paid search and search engine advertising
• 17% will be spent on events
• 15% will be spent on other online community or special interest sites

Back in the days of Web 1.0 we used to talk a lot about the opportunities that arose from disintermediation.  Now it appears that it is the business media companies  themselves that are being disintermediated by their own customers. 

One of the biggest costs of trading as a magazine publisher is distribution.  Building a circualtion and then providing access to it for advertisers was the essence of the profit model.  In the digital world, distribution is pretty cheap and marketeers are discovering that they can build traffic on their sites directly without relying on business media publishers.

The implications of this are clear.  If we take the Outsell numbers at face value, even if we succeed with our online content models we might only expect to win back 15% of the money we are losing from print.  That won’t support the costs of a comprehensive content model.  If we are to win our full share of the digital cake we are going to have to think differently about the business we are in. 

Last week I spoke on a panel at the E Publishing Innovation Conference and I reminded the delegates of Michael Wolffs book from the early days of the Internet, Burn Rate.  In this highly entertaining book Wolff describes his adventures in raising money for start up companie in the febrile world of Silicon Valley.  At the end of the book, he declares a worry.  What, he postulates, if it turns out that the Internet revolution is not about media at all?

It turns out that he may have been right.  Although content and media may be part of the solution for business media companies it should not be at the centre of strategy development.  What we need to do is examine closely what our customers (the companies we used to call advertisers) are doing with their spend and help them to do it better.  As I have argued before, nobody wants to buy advertising next to content, what marketeers really want is tools that help them sell more stuff.  That certainly means we are in the lead  generation business.  We might also need  to be in the business of providing widgets and applications  and marketing services that improve the effciency of marketeers own websites.  Of course content is part of what we do, but if we think it is the purpose of what we do, our revenues from “advertisers” are going to be modest.

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UPDATE: Please download the 4th issue here!

Been super busy the past few months and really haven’t had time to update the blog at all. We’re happy that the new issue of GivingCity is now complete (at last!), and we can move on to the next one – and get that one done on time! Please take a look and give me your feedback. Also, please please please send the link to as many people as you can!

Inside this issue:
The New Philanthropists
Here are some of the young, active, and engaged people making a difference in Austin now.
Are There Too Many Nonprofits in Austin?
And if so, what’s the solution? Four experts weigh in.
Unscripted Collaboration
The We Are One video proves nonprofits can – and do – work together.
PLUS
Tom Spencer on Austin’s philanthropic culture.
An all-girls football game for charity.
What you don’t know about Goodwill.
The “social entrepreneur” poster child.
What’s so cool about Leadership Austin?
Teaching philanthropy in schools.
New Austin-born films about giving.
Mando Rayo’s argument for social media.
Katie Ford’s encounter with the convicted.
DJ Stout’s SIGNS for change.
…and photos from the fundraising event, Austin Under 40.

I have spent the last couple of weeks reviewing some investment opportunities some early stage businesses.  In thinking about whether to proceed I began to wonder about the next developments that will be needed to leverage the business media model into a workable and scaleable  advertising based solution.

Most publishers complain that they have more inventory than they can sell.  This, it is argued demonstrates how hard it is sell digital advertising to b2b companies.  The volume of unsold inventory leads to price weakness and an overdependence on ad networks and backfill.  When clients are persuaded to buy advertising too often the ROI is poor and click through rates are alarmingly tiny.

I think the analysis is flawed.  It seems perverse to complain that there is too much inventory in the same way as it would be perverse to complain that we had too much circulation.  The truth of the matter is that we do not have too much inventory, but rather we have too much of the wrong kind. We have discussed before that a key challenge for web sites is to build user engagement.  A visitor to a site who arrives from natural search is unlikely to hang around for more than a page or three, and this is too little engagement to develop a high propensity to engage with advertising.  (First challenge – increase user enagement)

The second problem is that the nature of our ad inventory is of little use for brand advertising.  Brand advertsing requires a build of opportunities to see, reach and frequency.  Standard skys, leaderboards and banners are not good at delivering that.  To compound the problem we struggle to serve the right ad at the right time to the right user in the right context.  So the next two challenges are to create inventory sets that enable our customers to develop brand as well as clicks and then to find tools which enable us to put the right ad in front of the right user at the optimal time.

The fourth challenge is arguably the easiest.  We have to teach our sales people how to sell the digital opportunity.  Most sales people in b2b come from a pedigree of selling “space”.  Digital sales is much closer to the agency model, with every proposal bespoked against a clients objectives.  Sales people are often frightened to admit they don’t know what they are talking about but this is easily fixed. (I am working with BEC Development in offering a primer course for anybody who wants to develop their digital sales skills-To get on a programme just go the Bec Development website and the fine folk there will help you).

There is one final piece of development you should get your teams to think about.  The mobile device of choice for business people is the Blackberry.  Mobile browsers are not great, but b2b websites are none the less missing out on an opporutnity.  View your website through a mobile browser and you will discover that it is slow to load, the ad experience is awful and the rendering of the content is almost unreadable.  There is much to do to build user engagement, but you should add to your list of tasks mobile apps and optimisation of what you do for mobile browsers.

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