Retail Weak.

People Saving for Boffo Christmas.

Huge.

NEW YORK — 38-year old unemployed college dropout becomes one of the most sought-after copywriters and advertising men in history

David Ogilvy was the man behind the famous “Man in the Hathaway Shirt”, “Commander Whitehead”, and “At 60 MPH, The Loudest Noise In This Rolls-Royce Comes From The Electric Clock” campaigns.

He was 38 years old — and unemployed.

He was a college dropout. He has been a cook, a door-to-door oven salesman, a diplomatist and a farmer.

He knew nothing about marketing and had never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising

Yet, he became one of the most revered marketing minds in the world.

He helped to establish modern advertising with his big ideas. He produced many of the world’s most famous and sophisticated ad campaigns. His style, wit and convictions helped mold an industry.

But most importantly, he knew how to sell. His copy followed the basic rules of advertising: research and position the product, develop a brand image, build culture, and have a big idea.

Here’s the story:

David Ogilvy was born in West Horsely, England on June 23, 1911.

But he did not graduate from Oxford; as he put it years later, he “got thrown out.” He called this “the real failure of my life.”

After Oxford, Ogilvy went to Paris, where he worked in the kitchen of the Hotel Majestic.

When Ogilvy returned to Britain, he worked as a door-to-door salesman for Aga Cookers. He sold stoves to nuns, drunkards and everyone in between. In 1935 he wrote a guide for Aga salesmen that Fortune later called “probably the best sales manual ever written.”

And in 1936, his older brother Francis got David an internship at the London ad agency Mather & Crowley.

David Ogilvy immigrated to the United States in 1938. He became associate director of George Gallup’s Audience Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.

During World War II, he worked with British Security Coordination and served as second secretary to the British Embassy in Washington. After the war, Ogilvy lived among the Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and worked as a farmer.

But he thought he could never earn his living as a farmer, so at the age of 38, he decided to start his own advertising agency.

Once again, he went to brother Francis for assistance. S. H. Benson Ltd., another London shop, also invested $45,000, but insisted that Ogilvy, who had been out of advertising for 10 years, hire someone who knew how to run an agency. Ogilvy chose Anderson Hewitt, an accountant he had met briefly in 1941. The business opened as Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather (HOB&M).

One of the first ads he wrote as the head of his own agency was “Guinness Guide to Oysters”.

Ogilvy always stressed that “every advertisement must contribute to the complex symbol which is the Brand Image”.

Brand Image meant the personality of the product — a combination of its name, packaging, price, its advertising style, the nature of the product, etc.

An ad campaign, Ogilvy said, must always revolve around a sharply defined personality — a coherent image that you must stick to year after year.

In 1951, a small shirtmaker, C. F. Hathaway, came asking for help. This led Ogilvy to create the image of a man with the black eye patch, and “The Man in The Hathaway Shirt” campaign was born. This narrative, creative campaign ran for 25 years.

For Schweppes, Ogilvy persuaded the client, Commander Whitehead, to appear in his own advertisements. The campaign featuring the distinguished looking, bearded Brit in various ads and commercials ran for eighteen years.

For Rolls-Royce, he used the headline, “At 60 Miles An Hour The Loudest Noise In This New Rolls-Royce Comes From The Electric Clock”. This remains the most famous automobile advertisement of all time.

By 1960 he had achieved his ambition to run a great agency that spread around the globe and firmly in place as one of the top agencies in all regions.

In 1965, Ogilvy dropped his title of chairman of what had become Ogilvy & Mather’s U.S. operations (remaining chairman of O&M International - OMI) to become creative director - a position he kept for nearly 10 years, before “retiring” to Touffou, in 1973.

Ogilvy came out of retirement in the 1980s to serve as Chairman of Ogilvy&Mather in India. He also spent a year acting as temporary chairman of Ogilvy&Mather Germany. He visited branches of the company around the world and continued to present Ogilvy&Mather at gathering clients and business audiences.

When in 1989, Ogilvy group was brought buy WPP, two events occurred simultaneously: WPP became the largest Marketing communications firm in the world, and David Ogilvy was named the company’s non-executive chairman, a position he held for 3 years.

Ogilvy died on July 1999 at his home in Touffou, France.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Spending on online advertising in the first quarter declined for the first time in more than three years when compared to the fourth quarter, the Interactive Advertising Bureau said on Tuesday.

Dollars spent on online advertising totalled $5.8 billion (2.9 billion pounds) in the first quarter, up 18.2 percent from the year-ago period, but down from $5.9 billion in the 2007 fourth quarter, the IAB said.

“The cyclical fourth quarter to first quarter drop in traditional media advertising spend, combined with an overall economic slowdown, resulted in a not-so-expected first-quarter slowdown in the growth of online advertising,” said David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which helped compile the figures.

At the same time, first-quarter online ad revenues of $5.8 billion were the second highest ever recorded for a three-month period, the IAB said, after the 2007 fourth quarter’s $5.9 billion.

“We continue to experience significant growth and vitality in interactive marketing, media and advertising,” said IAB President Randall Rothenberg.

He cited consumers spending more and more time online as advertisers and marketers find more ways to reach them through digital media.

Conducted by the New Media Group of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the IAB revenue report was launched in 1996 by the IAB. The IAB represents more than 275 interactive companies that sell and support online sales.

Peter Thomas Roth Conditioning Multi Tasking After Shave Tonic

Is the concept of the Big Idea dead in advertising? How much has the
internet and Web 2.0 specifically altered the fundamentals of the industry?

In his 1983 book, On Advertising, master David Ogilvy held forth on the
central tenet to sell products:

“You can do homework from now until doomsday, but you will never win
fame and fortune unless you also invent big ideas. It takes a big idea to
attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product…Research
can’t help you much, because it cannot predict the cumulative value of an
idea, and no idea is big unless it will work for thirty years” (emphasis by
the author, page 16).

And yet, almost the very same day as I read this from Ogilvy, I find myself
almost stunned off the treadmill as new master Seth Godin holds forth on the
big idea in the third disk of his audio book, Meatball Sundae:

“There’s a difference between a big idea that comes from a product or
service, and a big idea that comes from the world of advertising. The secret
of big-time advertising during the 60s and 70s was the big idea…Big ideas in
advertising worked great when advertising was in charge. With a limited
amount of spectrum and a lot of hungry consumers, the stage was set to put
on a show. And the better the show, the bigger the punchline, the more
profit could be made. Today, the advertiser’s big idea doesn’t travel very
well. Instead, the idea must be embedded into the experience of the product,
itself. Once again, what we used to think of as advertising or marketing is
pushed deeper into the organization. Yes, there are big ideas. They’re just
not advertising-based” (disk 3, minute 48).

Of course, we should probably define a “big idea.” As explained, a big idea
is an advertising tool to sell products. It stands the test of time. It
originates with the company and is distributed far and wide. It is
inextricably linked to the product and the experience of the product.

In my mind, big ideas include cut-out coupons. By-mail Sears catalogs and
mail-in rebates. Tony the Tiger and the Trix Rabbit. Toys in cereal boxes
that had kids begging Mom to pick that one! (Why cereal innovation is on my
mind this morning, I have no idea.) Shopping malls. Radio jingles. Anything
that fundamentally affected people’s decision about whether to buy a certain
product or not.

So where do I stand?

I side with Ogilvy. The big idea isn’t dead - in fact, it can only be
expanded. I don’t see Tony the Tiger disappearing from the hills of Grand
Rapids. In fact, I would be disappointed if there wasn’t a new way to
interact with Tony. I want his roar as my ringtone. I expect to see him at
Club Penguin.

None of this has changed - the ways companies persuade, coax, cajole, argue,
and convince us to buy their products - except for Godin’s point about the
ideas being provided solely by the company. Of course consumers have more
opportunity to interact and suggest to a company and the wise companies
listen.

But for Godin to claim that the experience of the product is only now linked
to the big idea is folly. Mothers bought a particular type of margarine
because of the coupon. We chose Honey Smacks cereal because of the colors,
the kinetic energy in the commercials, and the cute, cracked-out frog mascot
(again, with the cereal…).

The big idea has always been linked with the experience of the product
because the experience has often been more important than the product
itself! This is nothing new.

The internet and Web 2.0 only give us more opportunity to riff on that. Big
ideas may not have to originate with a company, but they will still likely
need to flow from or be enacted by the company. Maybe the new importance in
advertising is not creating the big idea, but being wise enough to hear it
when it is whispered from the crowd.

As media companies struggle to figure out their digital future, the elephant in the room is that they have only been able to monetize online audiences for pennies on the dollar compared to traditional media. Here’s why: Traditional advertising formats FAIL on the web. By traditional advertising formats, I mean display ads, video ads, and any other ad whose format and value proposition approximates or imitates that of an offline advertising format.

Google is the ONLY company that has succeeded in web advertising. Why? Because they perfected search advertising, an entirely web-native form of advertising, whose value proposition is perfect for the web and which has no offline analogue.

Why do traditional advertising formats fail on the web? Because people have no patience for them, as they did in traditional media, where we were habituated to looking at print ads or watching TV commercials.

Research by Jakob Nielsen puts this into sharp relief:

Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.

This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other editorial choices that try to distract them.

“Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so,” said Dr Nielsen.

“People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience,” he said.

This is why pre-roll ads on online video = fail, why overlay ads on online video = fail, and why online display advertising is a commodity business, where online publishers have to shovel page views and battle for every $1 increase in CPM. Some sites can get $50-100 CPMs on some pages from certain advertisers, but $1 — even $0.10 — CPMs are common on the web.

Just ask newspapers and magazines about their ad pricing power in print vs. online. Can you imagine a print publisher getting $1 for 1,000 times an ad was seen? You’d go bankrupt after one issue.

Here’s a sobering thought: If all advertising in offline media got converted to current online media CPMs, it would probably be worth a fraction of the value, i.e. $300 billion would become $50 billion.

If 1 to 1 transfer of advertising value is at one end of the spectrum and 1 to 0 transfer of classified advertising value to Craigslist is at the other extreme, most of online media is closer to Craigslist — online publishers are vaporizing advertising value in the shift of dollars online.

Even Google has struggled with this problem, as they still make virtually all of their money from pay-per-click search and contextual ads.

But why, why is this so? Because most online advertising creates NO value for consumers.

Search advertising, because it is relevant to what users are already searching for, creates enormous value. But the search advertising is largely about helping people buy what they already know they want.

What about the objective of advertising to convince people to buy things they don’t yet know they want or need (or what never otherwise want or need)?

Consider this: What is the most successful type of advertising online advertising that convinces people to buy something they weren’t in the market to buy?

Email spam.

Spam is probably the most inefficient form of advertising every created, and it creates more hate and loathing among consumers than the worst 30 second TV ad ever created.

But it works. With millions of emails sent at virtually no cost, a 0.001% response rate can still be highly profitable.

The reason why most online advertising fails is that web users see it as little better than spam.

Display ads are ignored in the same mindset as spam is ignored — I’m trying to get something done online and your display ad is getting in my way.

As Nielsen highlights, web use is driven more and more by utility.

Despite the popular notion of viral content, e.g. viral videos, even entertainment on the web most often happens in a utilitarian context.

Sure people browse videos on YouTube, but searching YouTube is the killer app. Want to find video content? Search for it on YouTube, and chances are someone has uploaded it (legally or not). Why do you think Google acquired it?

Social networks have hit hard against the online advertising wall — I’m trying to talk to my friends and you’re showing me ads — get out of my face. I’m trying to talk to my friends and you’re shoving down my throat notifications of what my friends are buying (i.e. Facebook Beacon) — get out of my face!

Is it any surprise that most ad spending still happens offline? Most advertisers use the web themselves. They know how annoying traditional ad formats are on the web.

So what’s the solution?

We need to invent new forms of advertising on the web. But it’s more than that. Facebook introduced Beacon as a new form of advertising — but it didn’t create a lot of value for users.

Online advertising must create value for users or it will create little or no value for advertisers.

This would seem self-evident, but it has not been the case with traditional advertising, which was developed for CAPTIVE audiences, and web users are increasingly anything but captive.

A Google Girl - Not Facebook Material?

Google Inc.’s announcement of a service to “make the Web more social” was decidedly casual, or staged to seem that way.

Standing beside a campfire, the company’s engineering director, David Glazer, explained how, through an agreement with Facebook and similar sites, the effort would serve a primal human need.

“We all like huddling around fires, and huddling around food and talking to each other — people are social,” Glazer, dressed in a red-checked shirt and sneakers, told about 100 people gathered outside the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., last month. “With Friend Connect we are trying to make that happen everywhere on the Web.”

Within three days of the campfire, a dispute erupted between Google and Facebook, its largest partner in the new service, that reflected the fact that for Web companies there is nothing casual about the business of Internet socializing.

There’s too much money, maybe billions, at stake.

Facebook, the burgeoning social network, abruptly withdrew its support for Google’s Friend Connect, meaning that none of Facebook’s tens of millions of members could sign on to websites using Google’s new service.

Coming so soon after the highly publicized launch, it was an embarrassing rift.

In the common social networks, people communicate, organize and socialize largely within sites — such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn — but not outside of them. This model, referred to in geek parlance as the “walled garden,” ensures that social networking sites get traffic and screen time from members, and the accompanying revenue.

Many in the industry are proposing a different model, in which every website would have a social aspect. In this scenario, there would be no need for a person to confine socializing to MySpace or Facebook. People could tap in to their information — contacts and pictures — as they roam the Web. The social networking sites would function more like a utility, storing a person’s contacts, photographs and other tidbits.

“Social networking sites are at a major fork in the road,” said Bernard Lunn, a tech and media entrepreneur who writes for ReadWriteWeb, a blog that focuses on tech issues.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has argued that his site makes human relationships more “efficient.”

Sure, he said in a speech last year, two friends “can communicate off line if one of them picks up the phone to call the other, or if they take some time to hang out, or if they randomly bump into each other. But these methods are all synchronous — they’re kind of inefficient. In order for them to work, both people have to be paying attention to each other at the same time.”

Until Facebook’s withdrawal, Google’s Friend Connect would have allowed Facebook members to visit other sites using the service and, while there, tap into their Facebook friends list and other information.

To protect privacy, users would use their Facebook user name and password to access their information. That, Google executives explained, is how Friend Connect would make the Web “more social.”

Shortly after the launch, Facebook executives asserted that Google hadn’t briefed them on Friend Connect. And having seen the service, they said, they discovered that it violated Facebook users’ privacy by passing their information to third parties.

“We had not had a chance to review how it worked before it launched,” Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, said in an interview last week. He declined to detail the company’s privacy concerns.

Glazer said Facebook had been fully briefed on Friend Connect.

“We talked to them before the announcement, we talked to them after, and there was a person from Facebook at the launch,” he said.

Moreover, he noted, the only Facebook information that Friend Connect gives to a third-party site is the person’s public Facebook photograph, and that is done only after a user has logged in with his or her Facebook credentials.

Some observers suspect that Facebook cited privacy concerns as an excuse for pulling out of an agreement it had come to view as a competitive threat.

“What Facebook is after, really, is control over their users,” said Chris Saad, co-founder of DataPortability.org, which advocates for standards for sharing information.

Though Facebook has made moves toward opening its walled garden, Saad said that, from a financial standpoint, the company “has a difficult balancing act to perform.”

On one hand, it would like to keep users on the Facebook site. On the other, users are demanding the ability to utilize their Facebook contacts when they are elsewhere on the Web.

Visit PC Mall at Googads!

THE Rooz Cafe, a restaurant and coffee shop in Oakland, Calif., signals its distaste for patrons who post reviews on Yelp.com with a small sign: No Yelpers.

The sign is routinely ignored by devotees of Yelp, a San Francisco Internet company that enables average folks to write reviews of everything from restaurants to plumbers to parks.

“If you want good coffee and a comfy place to work, I’d recommend this place,” wrote Stephanie S., who gave Rooz four stars. “And the No Yelpers sticker made me laugh.”

Rooz’s owner, Steve Ranjbin, said he put the sticker up as a joke, but added that he had a complaint about Yelp.

“Yelp does not respect us as business owners,” Mr. Ranjbin said. “They don’t listen to business owners unless you’re an advertiser paying Yelp.”

Mr. Ranjbin, who said that amateur reviews can hurt his business, said some had misquoted him or called his employees names, but that Yelp had refused to take these comments down. Yelp rarely removes reviews, even when advertisers complain, preferring to let the crowd have its say.

The proliferating reviews of Mr. Ranjbin’s establishment offer a good illustration of people’s newfound love of comparing notes via reviews online.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 2.5 percent of all Internet users in March went to Yelp.com, and traffic there quadrupled over the last year. Yelp tracks its users through Google Analytics, and the company, which is almost four years old, said it had 9.5 million unique visitors in April, nearly double the 5 million it reported last October. There are more than 2.6 million reviews on the site.

“This site is having an impact on business,” said Greg Sterling, founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting firm that focuses on the Internet’s effect on local consumer and advertiser behavior. Mr. Sterling said that Yelp had become an early leader in that field, which also includes Judy’s Book and Insider Pages.

Mr. Sterling attributes Yelp’s success to its young, urban demographic, as well as to starting in San Francisco and entering other markets gradually, rather than rolling out nationally all at once. Yelp now has community managers in 17 cities. It also introduced some social networking and transparency, allowing users — Yelpers — to post profiles and follow each other’s activities.

Although Yelp sees itself as more consumer oriented than many so-called Web 2.0 companies, which stress community and information sharing, Yelp has adopted many of the same calling cards as Web 2.0.

“It’s obviously the way of the future,” said Jeremy Stoppelman, a co-founder and the chief executive. “Media is shifting.”

Among the biggest targets in Yelp’s sights is the multibillion-dollar Yellow Pages market. “Yellow Pages has always been a pay-to-play environment,” Mr. Stoppelman said. “But now the power has shifted from businesses with money to little guys who perform. The reason is because that’s what’s good for the consumer.”

In other words, consumers who once chose a business because it had the biggest ad in the Yellow Pages are now just as likely to make that choice on the basis of favorable reviews from customers. “Ads aren’t playing that role,” Mr. Stoppelman said. “We’re about getting that information out there.”

Yelp also makes money from advertising. Advertisers can pay to have their businesses featured more prominently in Yelp search results, and the ad will link to that business’s page on Yelp, complete with reviews, maps and other information. Advertisers can also pay to move favorite reviews to the top of search results. And the site runs banner advertising.

Yelp is privately held and does not disclose revenue figures.

Its early traction does not guarantee a rosy future. Yelp faces increasing competition, including rivalry from giants like Microsoft, Google and Citysearch, which are all homing in on the lucrative local advertising market. Mr. Sterling cites a study from the ad agency McCann-Erickson that showed that local advertising in all media was a $100 billion business in 2007.

While the $100 billion total has stayed relatively stable, Mr. Sterling said the Internet’s share was growing rapidly.

Total Internet advertising rose to $21.1 billion in 2007 from $16.9 billion in 2006, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Estimates of spending on local online ads in 2007 range from $2.9 billion to $8.5 billion.

In addition, newspapers are moving more aggressively online, including allowing reader reviews. Other start-ups let users write their own reviews. And some businesspeople question why a business getting free reviews on Yelp would pay to advertise on the site.

Yelp’s model is more labor-intensive than many Internet enterprises. It needs an old-fashioned sales force to pound the pavement, and it also must monitor the commentary for accuracy. Its head count is 120 and growing.

Yelp is part of a distinctly Silicon Valley phenomenon, jokingly known as the PayPal Mafia.

Mr. Stoppelman and his co-founder, Russel Simmons, worked together at PayPal, and Yelp’s first $1 million in backing came from a PayPal co-founder, Max Levchin. Other PayPal alumni with successful second acts include Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, founders of YouTube; Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn; and Mr. Levchin, who runs Slide, which makes Facebook applications.

Mr. Stoppelman, 30, and Mr. Simmons, 29, started Yelp in July 2004 and have taken it through several rounds of venture-capital financing.

Pete Blackshaw, an executive vice president with Nielsen Online Strategic Services, said Yelp had created a site where people’s reputations matter. As on eBay, where buyers and sellers build reputations based on their dealings with others, Yelpers can get a complete view of other reviewers’ activities. “That counts for a lot,” Mr. Blackshaw said. “It keeps the abuse to a minimum.”

Mr. Blackshaw added: “Consumers are rating and reviewing, ranting and raving, and the creative output is useful for other consumers. And it’s giving companies really good data.”

The Yelp founders agree. Mr. Simmons, who is now the company’s chief technical officer, has written more than 100 reviews on Yelp, and Mr. Stoppelman more than 700 reviews.

“We let consumers that have actually patronized the business share their thoughts freely,” Mr. Stoppelman said. “We’re real people. We write real reviews.”

2008 Men’s NCAA Championship DVD

Internet Ads: Irritating and Ineffective

The advertisements that appear on Web sites are a nuisance for readers and a false economy poised to fall to Earth. Pro or con?

Pro: Ephemeral and Annoying

Quick, name the last two online advertisements you’ve seen.

Too hard? O.K., name the last online advertisement you clicked on. (I mean intentionally, not because it slipped under your cursor while you browsed People.com.)

Can’t think of anything? Being able to tune out ads might make your Web-browsing more enjoyable, but it’s a dilemma for online advertisers struggling to find niches in the cluttered columns of their Web pages.

Online ads are fighting for air on the forest floor of the Internet, where Flash images and written content soak up reader attention. Those rough conditions have encouraged wide experimentation, with limited results. For example, one innovation called the click-to-pay method only charges advertisers when browsers click on their icon. But click-to-pay can be expensive—as much as $2 per hit—and up to 50% of clicks are unintentional or even fraudulent.

To be fair, online advertising has some advantages. Web sites have extraordinary access to consumers, tracking clicking behavior and reader attention-span to sharpen their ad target. Google’s AdSense has been at the vanguard of these reforms. But its contextual advertisements, which use keywords to generate ad placement, can yield both accurate and absurd results. For example, a Google search for Eliot Spitzer generates sidebar ads for The New York Times (which broke the original story about the Governor’s scandal)— and “Client 9” T-shirts.

Contextual advertising makes search engines look like gold mines to ad companies, but they’re also raking in consumer ire and privacy concerns. The backlash comes from browsers who think the data-mining and keyword-spying constitute privacy violations. This has executives worrying that their strength—easy access to consumer patterns and preferences—could also be a weakness if the counterattack has teeth.

None of this means online ads are entirely doomed. The technology is improving and ad companies are learning how to target consumers better. But online ads won’t pay until they learn how to make us pay attention.

Con: Pertinent and Precise

Internet ads are here to stay; thinking otherwise is just nonsense. The movement to the Web is a natural progression for advertising, which has existed for ages, an early form of it dating back to 4000 BCE on Indian rock art.

The 17th century brought advertisements to newspapers. Then, as eyeballs moved toward TV in the 20th century, the advertisers followed. And now that the Web has become a global tool—according to a 2008 IDC report on consumer behavior, almost half of total media consumption is online—and you can rest assured that advertisers are, yet again, following.

Last year, $27 billion was spent online globally, representing a mere 7% of total advertising budgets, so there’s plenty of room to grow. And because today’s ad market spans the globe—30% to 50% of U.S. Web site traffic comes from international visitors—it is less susceptible to the domestic economy.

Many say Internet ads are too pervasive and hence ignored; I believe that, just like traditional media, they’re absolutely noticed when they’re relevant, as proven by higher click-through and response rates to better-targeted ads.

Today’s ad market has networks that serve as “agents” for advertisers, helping them spend money online. As founder and chief executive officer of the Rubicon Project, a service for Web sites that optimizes ad networks to make more money from ad space, I see this trend continuing. Seven years ago there were 15 of these networks; today, more than 300.

These networks differentiate themselves through geographic focus, pricing models (cost per thousand views, clicks, actions), vertical specialties (sports, travel, and gender-specific, to name a few), and format (text, banner, video ads).

Industry analysts predict Web-ad spending will jump to $62 billion by 2012. If this is a false market, it sure has a lot of people fooled. At the very least we’ve come a long way from pictures on rocks.

CBS Black Ceramic Mug

Peter Redman, National PostGlen Hunt, creative director at Dentsu Canada Inc., hopes to imbibe fresh concepts from its parent agency.

Glen Hunt wrote the iconic Joe Canadian “rant” ad campaign for Molson Canada as a copywriter at Bensimon Byrne D’Arcy, a campaign that received many awards, including a prestigious Cannes Lion. After travelling the world from 2003 to 2005,Mr. Hunt was named creative director at Dentsu Canada Inc., working on accounts that include Lexus, Toyota, Vespa, Fred Perry and Canon. He spent time with Financial Post reporter Hollie Shaw talking about the ad biz.

—

Q What is your favourite current campaign?

A If I had to choose one, I’d say N.Y. Tap for Unicef. One day a year New York restaurants are being asked to offer their patrons good ol’ New York tap water, along with sparkling and flat, for a fee of US$1. According to Unicef, US$5.5-million has been raised thus far, with all proceeds going to provide clean drinking water in Africa. It’s an incredible thought and a powerful campaign.

Q How do you define good advertising?

A Good advertising always offers a return on investment — that is our job. No R.O.I., no good. That said, really good advertising accomplishes something much more in establishing a deep and meaningful bond with the consumer, and one that lasts. It invites [consumers] into a conversation, it engages them, it’s visceral, they feel it. Good advertising never attempts to hide the truth, it reveals it.

Q How do you think the relationship between client and agency has changed over the years?

A Client and agency collaborate with each other to create something stronger. It used to be a master/servant relationship and we had to do a lot of dog-and-pony shows, and now it’s far more collaborative. We rely on each other. We have to– time-lines are tight and so are budgets, so we can’t afford to waste either. Our goal is to create something faster and less expensive with greater impact.

Q Do most campaigns require an integrated strategy to be successful? Have you seen the paradigms that measure success change?

A There’s really no right answer. It depends on your budget and the audience you are trying to reach. If you want to reach a broad demographic, then creating a brand universe with a lot of touch points is a must.

On the other hand, if you want to reach a targeted group and know where to find [it], then a singular media can be very effective. In one instance, we wanted to speak to high-end dog owners who treated their pets like children. So, we invented doggie billboards, two-foot-tall billboards written to the dogs, then placed them at dog parks in expensive neighbourhoods. It was perfectly targeted and worked like a dream. As far as paradigm shifts, you need look no further than You-Tube as a gauge of audience impact to see that things have changed –dramatically.

Q Given the ongoing fragmentation of media and audiences, how can you make sure that marketing messages are reaching the right people?

A It’s often said that 50% of a company’s advertising dollars are wasted– they just don’t know which 50%. Today, one of the really big benefits of technology is the reduction of wasted messages. Through data and research management, we know more than ever before about when to place a message before the target audience and how they respond to that message. Through a combination of profiling the target, understanding their life choices, and measuring their responses and attitudes, we can continually fine tune the media investment. The Internet clearly has led the way on this, and other media have been forced to follow.

Q There have been some big trends emerging in recent years, including a rise in viral marketing and social-network marketing. What do you see on the horizon?

A The proliferation of mobile marketing is going to be huge. It’s already massive in Japan and it’s going to go atomic in Canada. We’re likely five to 10 years behind, but when it happens, watch out. QR Codes, mobisodes, mobile gaming, they’re all coming. Our platforms in Canada just are not designed to handle the bandwidth now, but they will be soon.

Q How are you influenced by your parent agency, Dentsu Inc. of Japan?

A We’re very much our own entity in Canada, but Dentsu Japan has a lot to offer us, so we’d be foolish not to take advantage. There are three places graduates want to work when seeking a job in Japan: Sony, Toyota and Dentsu. Dentsu is huge, and they have access to innovative media and integrated concepts that are eons ahead of what’s available in North America. As a Dentsu office, we get to pick and choose the very best of what’s available. That helps to keep us way ahead of the curve. They are our crystal ball into the future.

On a recent visit to OC’s own Buy.com, I noticed that the Aliso Viejo online store still has dot-com flair.

Free ice cream, sodas and Naked Juice. Catered lunches every day! I’m told that scooters, Razors and even Segways are regularly used by employees to move from one cubicle to another — although not on the day I got a tour.

Little pots of fresh grass decorate the conference room tables and the lobby. Someone comes in weekly to trim grass with scissors. While the game room got cleared out for more customer service staff, a Ms. Pac-man arcade game found a new home in the cafeteria.

Neel Grover, its chief executive since May 2006, is young, friendly and determined. Dressed in dark jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt, he’s far from the suited exec at most companies in the county. That’s him on the right, although that’s not his motorcycle. Buy.com’s founder Scott Blum is a collector.

The company plans to report its sixth consecutive profitable quarter soon. Not bad when you’re selling everything at a discount (except for prices set by the manufacturer).

“It’s not just me, by any means,” Grover tells me. “I have a great team. Most of the employees have been here for 10 years.”

That means the bulk of its 125 employees were there during the dot-com mania days, when it was a publicly traded company, employed more than 300 people and had free-shipping deals so frequently, I’d time purchases to take advantage of the deal. But also back then, the company was losing money and many critics thought Buy.com was going bye bye.

You don’t need to be all doom and gloom about it.

Sure, the U.S. could be in a recession. Consumer confidence is declining. Food and gas are so expensive it’s more cost-effective to stay home and diet.

But the advertising business (of all things!) is actually benefiting from the painful spectacle of the traditional media landscape fragmenting into shards. The internet is continuing to oust broadcast TV, print and radio from their once-secure position as the automatic repository for ad dollars, and the complex environment that’s been rattling the advertising and media industries could actually function as an economic buoy during these hard times.

Here’s how it works. Advertisers and the companies that service them now need a multitude of ways to drill their messages into the public consciousness. That desperation plays right into the hands of the giant holding companies that now own everything from traditional ad agencies to media planning and buying businesses to PR firms to promotions specialists to digital advertising agencies with expertise in hot, new areas like search-engine optimization.

Clearly there’s pain; but it’s not being evenly distributed right now.

Just compare Google’s results and those of The New York Times Co. Google recently reported a 42 percent jump in revenues in the first quarter of 2008 over the same period in 2007. Nearly half of the revenue came from the U.S. and the figures aren’t inflated by the acquisition of DoubleClick. Meanwhile, the Times saw revenue slip 4.9 percent and advertising revenues drop 9.2 percent.

Now looking ahead, Google and the rest of the digital-advertising world are expected to grow just a little slower this year than they would have otherwise. But for Google, a bodacious 42 percent rise in revenue appears lackluster compared with the 63 percent year-over-year pop it saw in 2006 and 2007.

A market-research company, eMarketer lowered its 2008 growth forecast for online ad spending from whopping 29 percent in October 2007 to measly 23 percent in March 2008. You get the gist.

Marketers are still spending online and will continue to, whether it’s through paid search, banner ads, video, viral ads, email, or even coupons. Spending on online promotions, which includes tactics like contests, coupons and rebates, will triple over the next five years to $22.8 billion from $8 billion in 2007, reports a new study from research firm and consultancy Borrell Associates.

Online marketing and advertising also has a leg up in a stressed economic environment, because the return on investment is significantly easier to track and explain to the boss.

Meanwhile for the newspaper industry, the weakened economy and the rise of the internet is a perfect storm. A report from Deutsche Bank on Gannett said, “The ad trends remain weak, and there are no positive catalysts in sight.”

U.S. newspaper circulation has been on a downward slide for the last 20 years and it drops more significantly in areas of higher broadband penetration, according to global ratings agency Fitch Ratings. Just Monday, a Reuters analysis of a new release from The Audit Bureau of Circulations shows that U.S. newspaper circulation fell 3.6 percent during the six months ending in March 2008 compared with the same period a year earlier.

Circling back to the ad industry: Those holding companies who have reported their first-quarter results all have shown good organic revenue growth in the United States, in part because of the diversity of their services, says Alexia Quadrani analyst at Bear Stearns.

Omnicom, the largest marketing-services holding company by annual revenue, just announced organic growth in the U.S. at 6.7 percent in 2007, just 1 percent lower than in 2006. Randall Weisenburger, Omnicom Group’s executive vice president and C.F.O., characterized Omnicom’s outlook for the year as “cautiously optimistic,” in his February conference call announcing annual results to analysts. “We’ve been to this movie, and we’ll weather it very well, I think,” he said.

Last Friday, WPP Group, Omnicom’s closest competitor, announced 5.1 percent like-for-like revenue growth for North America, as opposed to 3.9 percent in 2007. “North America remained relatively strong and better than last year, and global revenues were in line with budget,” materials for its first-quarter trading update stated.

Most recently, holding company Publicis Groupe announced organic growth in North America to be 5.3 percent after registering just 3.1 percent last year.

Havas, another holding company, saw 6 percent organic growth in the U.S. compared with -0.8 percent in 2007 over 2006. “North America saw a significant increase in growth across all our businesses,” the company announced.

Underlying the health of these companies is that the advertising market may be slow to grow, but it’s not declining. And if there has been a flash freeze, it started closer to the beginning of 2007, says Jon Swallen, senior vice president of research at TNS Media Intelligence.

Both Nielsen Media Research and TNS have reported U.S. ad spending grew under 1 percent in 2007. Meanwhile, marketers are known to believe that cutting back advertising in a time of economic unrest only exacerbates their inability to sell product. When you throw in this year’s Olympic Games and presidential election, the advertising market is likely to grow faster than it did in 2007.

In the media space, however, these special events are likely to benefit the few: NBC, which is airing the Olympics; specific local broadcast stations located in areas of the country where candidates need to fight for votes; and 24-hour news networks. Unlike advertising companies, who can easily diversify their services by acquisition to meet the newest demands of their clients, TV networks are still TV networks.

One of the main challenges for online advertisers is figuring out which Web sites are worth their advertising dollars. How do they know where their competitors are advertising? How do they figure out whether a banner ad would be more effective than a keyword search ad?

A new search engine called Yureekah launched this week to help ad agencies and advertisers find where competitors are advertising and determining the best options for future brand advertising.

Devaraj Southworth, one of its creators, said the idea stemmed from his own company’s needs. He runs a small creative agency and a media planning firm, and it often took several weeks to put together an online ad strategy because he had to manually go through Web sites, ad networks and portals to figure out where his client should be visible. Southworth said he’s even had to cancel a campaign because finding that information was too labor-intensive to meet the deadline.

He envisions, for example, a small boutique hotel using the service to find out out where Marriott and Hilton are advertising. The small business owner can then determine how best to spend his money to compete for patrons.

“Clients always ask us, ‘Where are we and where should we be?’” he said. “This can help level the playing field so everyone can figure that out,” not just the advertisers with huge budgets.

The site is currently free to use, but Southworth says more features will be rolled out that have revenue potential. Right now the information is coming from portal sites his firm works with, but he is trying to add information from more ad networks and publishers in the future.

From Yureekah:

Yureekah is the worlds first search engine for the online media industry.

Today millions of ads run on millions of portals hourly. Imagine a world where you could identify where all your competitors are advertising, and use that information to decide how to advertise in the portals that best fit your brand — irrespective of geography, language, and time zone.

(!)Yureekah’s mission is to fulfill this need; to organize the world’s online advertising information and make it universally accessible and useful. More specifically (!)Yureekah will serve as a single gateway for all online advertising, and as a real-time information resource for the millions of online media professionals, advertisers, and small business owners.

Adman learns to swim in a sea of digital media

As TV spots lose effectiveness, Tim Spengler’s Initiative USA helps clients find new ways to market their products.

Tim Spengler’s first act after being named president of the media-buying firm Initiative USA was to draft a small team of what he calls amphibians.

He wanted to make a splash. He also recognized that advertising executives would need webfeet to navigate, even survive, in the intensely competitive and rapidly changing ad industry. Like creatures that can live on land or in the water, media planners must master two dramatically different environments: old and new media.

“The world is becoming so much more complex,” said Spengler, 43, who this year took charge of Initiative USA, which helps plan advertising campaigns for such companies as Bayer, Coors, AOL, Home Depot, Hyundai and Kia. “We have to understand and prepare for the changes.”

Shifting media consumption patterns have stirred angst on Madison Avenue. Advertisers’ tool of choice for the last half-century — the 30-second television spot — is becoming less effective. More people are using digital video recorders to zip through commercials. Fewer people are watching broadcast networks, and young consumers are just as likely to find entertainment on the Internet as on TV.

Chief marketing officers at major companies have long faced pressure to perform, but it has become more intense. These marketing chiefs, in their jobs for less than two years on average, frequently fire their media firm to jump to a new one, adding more stress for executives such as Spengler.

“It used to be all about ‘How many ratings points are we buying?’ and ‘What’s our awareness level?’ ” Spengler said during a recent visit to Southern California to tour New York-based Initiative’s offices in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Now, instead of simply coordinating clients’ TV advertising plans and then negotiating their time buys on ABC, CBS or CNN, which was largely Spengler’s job a few years ago, there’s a sea of digital media for advertisers to swim in.

This year Spengler’s challenge is complicated by fears of a recession, which could prompt companies to tighten ad spending, and the recently concluded Hollywood writers strike. The networks got a late start this year on their TV pilots and few are finished. That means when the advertising sales season kicks off next week in New York, advertisers will be asked to put big money down on network schedules that are still in flux.

In a blow two weeks ago, Spengler’s top lieutenant, Alan Cohen, defected to become chief executive of OMD USA, another prominent ad firm. Cohen, who was the head of Initiative’s Hollywood business, is now one of Spengler’s chief competitors. Spengler called Cohen’s departure “a huge loss, but we will continue to make great hires.”

Spengler was probably destined to run an ad agency. When he was a boy growing up in Connecticut, he would spend hours studying the merchandise in the fat Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck catalogs.

“I was always interested in brands. I thought they were cool and exciting,” Spengler said in a staccato-burst style of speaking. He would cut out pictures of logos, the CBS eye and the NBC peacock, to hang on his bedroom wall. He wrote to Adidas and Puma to ask for their decals.

“If there had been a Web back then, I never would have gone out,” he said.

When Spengler was in college, where he was a championship tennis player, he couldn’t decide on a profession. In his senior year his father, head of marketing for Bristol-Myers, sent Spengler’s fraternity a subscription to the trade publication Advertising Age. That did the trick.

Spengler worked for two ad firms in New York. In 1993 he flew to Los Angeles for a Saturday morning interview with the head of Western International Media, a now-defunct company that helped pioneer the specialty of ad buying. In most agencies, buyers were “fourth-class citizens,” Spengler said, several rungs below the creative directors who design the ads.

Western was different. The boss told him, “The stars of our company are the buyers.”

“That was all I needed to hear,” Spengler recalled.

Within two years, ad giant Interpublic Group bought Western and eventually merged it with Initiative. Spengler continued to climb the ranks and in 2002 he “begrudgingly left L.A.,” he said, for a bigger job in New York as Initiative’s chief negotiator. In 2006 he became chief activation officer, coordinating Initiative’s buying units.

During the last year Initiative has expanded, adding such major clients as Hyundai, Cadbury Schweppes, CBS Corp. and Showtime. Instead of hiring Initiative to simply negotiate ad buys, more companies are looking for expertise in selecting what forms of media to buy.

It used to be that the most powerful element of an advertisement was its message. But now for advertisers, Spengler said, “where you are says a lot about who you are.”

In the coming years the conversion to digital media will intensify. Next year television stations are expected to convert to digital from analog signals, which should trigger a tidal wave of information about consumers’ media habits.

“We have to figure out how consumers are using all forms of media,” Spengler said. “It’s a challenging time. We are all trying to figure it out, but no one has the answer.”

Internet Chases Its Long Tail: How Much Advertising Will Thrive?

A glut of ad networks is clamoring for finite advertising and consumer dollars spent across infinite options. And we’re still in the early stage of the digital age. If fragmentation should ever become counterproductive, there would be a hasty return to the critical mass hunt. By then, the next-generation search engines, aggregators and social networks will be general audience clearinghouses, and traditional big media–from the broadcast and cable networks to The New York Times and USA Today–will be reduced to glorified digital brand content providers.

Anything is possible as developing interactive options continue to replace old business models and the Internet’s grand experiment in targeted niche advertising and e-commerce unfolds. For now, it’s the hundreds of ad networks and exchanges that manage as much as three-quarters of online advertising, per some estimates.

A recessionary economy and intense confusion over ad networks will make it difficult to assess their effectiveness in attracting advertising support for the Web. There seems to be too much of everything, from online ad inventory and Web content to ad networks and other aggregators. The law of large numbers dictates an eventual shakeout.

Ultimately, search engines and social networks will be charged with cutting through still more layers of clutter. For now, the race is driven by a single intent: to beat Google at its mass automated placement of ad dollars. Even the largest branded players (including NBCU, Viacom, and Conde Nast) are fighting for attention by creating their own in-house ad networks. For instance, Fox Fusion sells ads across dozens of News Corp.’s disparate sites from The Wall Street Journal, and MarketWatch to MySpace, the Fox TV networks and Twentieth Century Fox films.

The emergence of vertical ad networks online could take a larger share of online ad dollars by significantly boosting CPMs paid for delivery of premium content. Even the biggest industry-wide ad networking effort–Project Canoe’s sale of national ads across the leading cable systems–was designed to counter Google’s increasing move into TV ad sales.

However, retaining and mining initial advertiser support will prove to be an even more formidable challenge as more than one-quarter of $7 billion in online display ad spending will filter through ad exchanges and networks against a backdrop of $35 billion in total U.S. online advertising by 2010, according to eMarketer. The Washington Post. Co. collapsed its company-wide ad network after only 16 months. ESPN recently ended its use of third-party ad networks to protect the ongoing direct sale of its premium brand content.

Indeed, the mounting backlash could eventually be significant, especially given Web producers’ unwillingness to pay a 40%-plus placement fee to ad networks in a challenged advertising economy. Major Web publishers are becoming concerned about the potential damage from the commoditization of their brand content and brand advertising inventory, being traded like “porkbellies,” according to an Omnimedia executive. A recent Avenue A/Razorfish Digital Outlook found that ad networks’ spending has gone flat, noting that vertical site share of advertising increased to 39% in 2007 at the expense of major portals whose share declined to 19% from 24%.

The one thing that ad networks–like search engines and other aggregators–can afford is convenience. Nine out of 10 ad agencies and advertisers buying online media indicate plans to work with ad networks this year, and even commit more dollars than in 2007, according to Collective Media. About 60% of brand advertisers and direct marketers will use ad networks this year, although only about one-quarter are into behavioral targeting–which means they could still end up on major portals such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. That does not include major acquisitions such as Microsoft-aQuantive; Yahoo-Blue Lithium; and AOL-Advertising.com. It is telling that AOL, Yahoo and Google topped all ad network reach in March.

But reach does not assure long-term success. A recent report from desilva + phillips does not quantify the financial success of advertising networks, but it does identify them as the focus of healthy merger and acquisition activity–especially those “that attain scale.” In 2007, nearly $2 billion was spent on the acquisition of 10 smaller pure-play ad networks, while another $300 million was invested by venture capitalists.

Still, it is not clear that ad networks are effectively working long-tail magic. The top 100 Web publishers sell only 40% of their inventory through direct means. Still, ad dollars for the 10 largest online publishers represent 70% of all industry revenues, the desilva + phillips report states.
Unless smaller, specialized ad networks and Web publishers become more sophisticated about distinguishing and pricing their inventory and content, the big guys will continue to have their way. Of course, Google is ready to do its part with a new revenue-sharing Ad Manager service Web publishers can use to manage their own ad sales. But the ultimate weapon held by Google and other major players is the one-stop digital dashboard–from upload to distribution. That technological approach to optimization just might help long-tail advertisers to settle the age-old conundrum: which 50% of my advertising dollars work?

Anthony Logistics Astringent Aftershave

Why should you increase your advertising budget in a recession?

Recession—it’s the inescapable word these days, isn’t it? Well, it doesn’t have to be a dirty word. Recession can be a savvy marketer’s best opportunity to get noticed. There are several well-know examples of this. In fact, a recent cover story in Advertising Age, boasts about various brands which were birthed as a result of recession. These include the IBM personal computer in 1981 and the iPod twenty years later. But, one of my personal favorites is the story of the Kellogg’s. brand because it illustrates how a small company can make it big through smart marketing (or it could just be that I love breakfast cereal). Either way, the story goes something like this (don’t quote me on all of the nitty gritty particulars)…

During the Great Depression, Post was the leading cereal brand. In fact it was the only cereal brand people would have thought of at the time. But, due to the Depression, money was tight and sales were falling. Post figured they did not need to continue advertising because they “owned” the market (for cereal) and they needed to cut expense. Cereal was considered a luxury anyway.

Kellogg’s, on the other hand, took advantage of the economy that was suffering. They created a positive ad campaign featuring Tony the Tiger and the very positive and enthusiastic Kellogg’s slogan “They’re GREAT!” They DOUBLED their ad budget, and bought ad spots in newspapers and radio time across the nation. Americans loved Tony the Tiger and the positive message he sent during a very negative time. Kellogg’s brand bucked the trend, and grew quickly, in a time when money was tight by keeping their brand top-of-mind.

Today,Kellogg’s remains a top cereal company in the US—perhaps even the #1 cereal company. Why? Because they unleashed the power of advertising.

What are you doing for your brands?

Philip B. Shin-Aid Pomade

Google’s revenues rise lays fears of advertising slowdown

Fears that the economic slowdown in the US has infected advertising spending were assuaged last night after Google beat Wall Street expectations with a 42 per cent surge in revenues for the first quarter of the year. The figures, which came after the New York stock market had closed, saw shares in the internet search engine rise 18 per cent in after-hours trading. Wall Street had worried that Google might have shown weakness in US advertising spending as the world’s biggest economy grapples with recession.

The group’s performance was in part boosted by overseas business, which for the first time contributed a bigger portion of revenues than Google’s US operations. With advertisements bought using currencies such as the euro and sterling which are stronger than the US dollar, transactions result in more dollars for Google.

Eric Schmidt, Google chairman and chief executive, said last night: “It is clear to us that we are well positioned for 2008 and beyond, regardless of the business environment.”

During the first quarter, net income rose to $1.31 billion (£658 million), up from $1 billion in the same period the year before. Revenue rose 42 per cent to $5.19 billion, above Wall Street expectations. But that rate has slowed compared with 63 per cent revenue jump in the same quarter of 2007. Concerns about the sensitivity of Google’s business model to a US slowdown have seen its shares fall from about $700 each at the end of last year to $449.54 at the formal close last night.

Some Wall Street analysts were hoping that the performance of Google during the first quarter will help Yahoo!, its smaller rival to elicit a higher offer price from Microsoft which is seeking to buy the search engine for about $41 billion in cash and shares.

The figures from Google also underline the urgency of such a deal for Microsoft which is trying to compete better with Google over the $40 billion a year online advertising market.

Mr Schmidt added that Google was excited to be testing out a partnership to run some of rival Yahoo’s web search advertising sales. While Mr Schmidt failed to be drawn on whether such a venture could lead to a more lasting tie-up, its move towards Google forms part of Yahoo!’s attempt to explore deals with other companies to avoid a Microsoft takeover.

Excuse Digg’s Moniker up there.

I’ve just been through my ‘trials’ with Digg. It’s been an interesting experiance, I can assure you. As usual I went in cold and saw how it worked. Digg works very well and is put together in a very fine way. I started out putting up my 11 blogs. At first ‘Diggers’ showed some small interest in my works… but only for a moment or two. At first I got quite a lot of attention, right off the bat. I got some pretty good scores on my posts submitted. As the days progressed I saw that my scores and posts weren’t getting all that much attention. I just had 1’s and every so often I’d get a 2.

But it was interesting while it lasted. I, of course, post a great deal. That is oddly upsetting to the people at Digg, they are indeed literally afraid of too much content, as I will explain soon enough. So therefore I posted first, of course, then Submitted my Digg’s here and there. I didn’t really go in for the most popular stuff, and I basically ignored everyone at digg. I saw that they were focusing on things that were very political and breaking news in a number of fields. There was an openness to Digg that did have a lot going for it though. They weren’t as Censored as most sights… of course these people never say they Censor… it isn’t written down anywhere but it is a narrow and thin line that they often tread in their goal to think alike. So even though there was the usual direct route to the same destination that is often adhered to on the Internet and in other walks of American life, Digg had an interesting way of being more expansive. One felt that they could put up a post about a dog, say riding a tricycle, that would no doubt get a couple of thousand votes from Diggers. This is the kind of stuff that people seem to go for. There is, of course, no real intelligent discussion on Digg or anywhere else on the internet… be assurred that ‘comments’ everywhere are more in line of ‘What color is her hair’ and ‘Is my IPhone saying something to me’, kinds of responses that are endemic to the non-thinking crowd that litter internet sites like Digg.

I do hope that I’m not coming across as unfriendly to Digg. Still I was a member of Digg! Not that that means much. I did get a ‘friend’ who dropped in for a bit. She left me a Fan notice and I quickly added her to my Friend list. But as the day’s wore on I noticed that she didn’t seem to much care about me as a friend. There was just her face plastered there in a little box staring out at me lifelessly. And up above there was that ‘Activity Gauge’ that Digg has of your “Friend’s Activity”, a sort of Big Brother thing that tracks your friends movements on the Digg site. Odd in that these are the very same people who, as they always need to tell us, “Hate Spammers Too”. Yet here they are ‘in control’ at last as they finally have a large and lofty Base of ‘do-gooders’ on their popular site. I finally deleted my ‘friends’ status when she never seemed to shout out to me much. That got rid of her ‘activity report’ up top and deleted her face, which was really very nice, to have that blank space back where it belonged! So then I did keep up with my posts, which I’m truly interested in. I gather content from other sites, but I do often link to them and I don’t just put up anything. My own posts go up though, I take a creative stance mostly. But I’m amused by my work and enjoy it quite throughly.

But not Diggers who suddenly sent me this:

*This URL has been widely reported by users as being regularly used to
> spam Digg’s submission process and cannot be submitted at this time.*

Digg Abuse <abuse@digg.com> Sent: Thu Apr 24 8:20

To: thearcan@thearcanist.net Priority: Normal

Subject: Re: Erase Me Type: Text

Alert: The users email-address has been added to the addressbook

The account has been deleted.

-Digg Support

thearcan@thearcanist.net wrote:
>
> *This URL has been widely reported by users as being regularly used to
> spam Digg’s submission process and cannot be submitted at this time.*
>
> **
>
> *———————–*
>
> **
>
> *I got this odd thing during a Digg Session. Your readers aren’t to
> bright. *
>
> **
>

And there is my reply. I knew then just what Digg was doing. They actually are allowing their readers a voice in the operations. Very, very weird. I did suspect as much at first, and wondered if it would take Digg long to make up its mind. They did so all to easily. Even if my posts were Spam… it doesn’t matter one bit. Who on Earth could possibly care what goes through the mill over at Digg? It’s just content and if nobody cares then the score never rises… so what? I was quite pleased to put through quite a lot of posts… in fact I found out that Digg is more useful as a posting service than anything else. I saw that my posts were receiving good Google placement…. sometimes at the top of it’s pages by submitting them through Digg. The number stuff is very cool, don’t get me wrong! If I had gotten a 10 on any submission I’d have been extremely happy… not because of anything other than I’d get some cool visitors to my site! Still I saw that by submitting all of my posts I’d be able to surmount Googles’ submission guidelines. Improving my prospects in the future.

Still, I sure felt that I was doing Digg a good turn as well. My post on Gardening were very good for Digg. They don’t get many posting on Gardening! And the other subjects as well. I expanded Digg without them knowing it. Honestly, I’m sure that the creators of Digg are pretty cool folk. I’m just too tough for them. I don’t think that Digg’s agreement with its members is a very good way to run their business. They will, indeed, come to this realization, someday soon if they are lucky.

After my ending with Digg I searched the internet for a bit to see If I could replace Digg, with another service. I saw that it will be awhile until there is something else along these lines. But Digg needs a Pepsi.

Digg just isn’t big enough for me… Sadly, it’s way too small.

Spamjammer.

12% Off any order over $12 with code: MAYOFF12. Ends 06/15/08.

A Dallas County woman has filed a lawsuit against Blockbuster Inc. alleging the video rental chain violated her privacy by transmitting her personal information to Facebook.com through the site’s Beacon marketing program.

The lawsuit, filed April 9 by Cathryn Elaine Harris, claims Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI) shared information about her video rentals and purchases without her consent, which is a violation of Video Privacy Protection Act.

Dallas-based Blockbuster denies the allegations.

“Our alliance with Facebook included numerous levels of privacy protection built in for our online subscribers,” Blockbuster spokesman Randy Hargrove told The Associated Press.

Facebook launched its Beacon advertising program last year. The program allowed Facebook to track users’ activities on other Web sites, including online purchases. After users complained about the feature, Facebook modified it so that users must opt into the program.

Harris’ lawsuit claims Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook still receives personal information from participating Web sites, regardless of whether the Facebook member has chosen to disclose the information.

“To this day, Blockbuster online members remain unsuspecting victims,” she said in the complaint.

Philip B. Anti-Flake Reflief Shampoo

Search is dead. Or at least that’s the opinion of one tuned-in venture capitalist I’ve been getting to know this year. We were recently discussing the drawn-out Microsoft-Yahoo-Google showdown and its larger implications when my fellow futurist issued his bold statement as a sort of summary dismissal of the whole multi-billion-dollar battle. In his opinion, Silicon Valley’s Big Three are fighting over the scraps of the last decade of innovation while there’s a sea change taking place in the way people use the Internet—one that may leave the Web’s biggest players holding all the cards to a game nobody wants to buy in to anymore.

Such a prediction probably seems ridiculous when Google has a market capitalization five times that of Ford and General Motors combined. After all, Google has developed a superfast, highly efficient method of making sense of the most overwhelming mass of data mankind has ever created. What’s more, the company has set an extraordinarily ambitious goal for itself to increase the overall load of data by digitizing every book ever made. All this, while reinventing the business of advertising as we know it.

So what is my VC friend talking about? The larger the Web grows, the more important search becomes, right? That’s probably so, and as a note of clarification, he changed his statement slightly to say, “Search, as we know it, is dead.” What he means is that, with the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Second Life, LinkedIn and even Google’s own Orkut, the next generation of Web users may find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm. After all, the people in your online social network should know you better than a mathematical equation, right?

Actually, the issue is even larger than searches and social networks. The Web is, in a sense, maturing into a different medium than the one that search engines were originally designed to tackle. Allow me, for a moment, to oversimplify the issue in the interest of making a point: Until now, the Web has largely been a resource for information organization and consumption, with the user functioning as a consumer. In this scenario, a search engine is an ideal tool—you need some information (a restaurant address, the name of a song stuck in your head), but you don’t know where to find it, so a search engine is the natural first stop in your online journey.

But in the past few years, a bunch of sites have begun to pop up based on the philosophy of user-generated content—a phenomenon often referred to as “Web 2.0” (a term, which, if I had my way, would be violently abolished from the lexicon). Flickr, for instance, is predicated on the notion that people don’t want just to look for photos but to share them. Same goes for YouTube, more or less. This, in turn, led to an explosion of online communities—once you’ve amassed a bunch of content to share, the natural next instinct is to create social bonds around it. This, of course, is the online equivalent of what people have been doing for centuries: finding other people with similar interests and forming social cliques, or vice versa.

This is not a totally new phenomenon. The Web has, since its inception, been used as a social tool, with community discussion boards for tech heads, bird-watchers and so on. But what is new is that the interfaces have changed to allow each member of a community to have their own microsite—an identity on the Web that is unique and centralized. And this focus on online identity is what could turn search upside down.

Udi Manber, Google’s vice president of engineering in charge of search quality, spoke with me about this phenomenon—and his thoughts on Google’s goals as the reach of mobile devices, advertising and more expand—in a rare interview this past week. He suggested that Google’s search could quite naturally evolve to embrace the data produced from social networking. “Search has always been about people,” Manber said. “It’s about getting people what they need. The art of ranking is one of taking lots of signals and putting them together. Signals from your friends are better, stronger signals.”

But what may turn out to be the strongest signal of all is the footprint you make with your online identity. Consider how much information you voluntarily provide on your Facebook profile. Now imagine if you could combine that with your Netflix renting and Amazon buying habits. Then throw in the suggestions of your friends and the pages you visit the most often. All those various sources of information about you are currently stored in different locations—on your computer’s browser history, on your Facebook page, on the servers for Netflix and Amazon—but just imagine how accurate a search could be if every time you had a query, the mass of data about you that exists on the Internet could inform the results. (Google and Yahoo already do this to a limited extent by tracking your search history to refine results, and surely startups will try.)

In fact, as we each carve out our individual niche on the Web, the logic of search may well flip inside out. Since we are essentially meta-tagging ourselves through our social networking memberships, shopping habits and surfing addictions, it’s conceivable that the information could attempt to find us—the old concept of push media, but in a far more refined way. As new content enters the Web, it could tumble through the various filters that you set up around your identity and then show up on your home-page news feed, or in your in box, or pop up on a ticker that follows you around as you browse from page to page.

The point is that even though Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon and others all have elements of this new relationship with users, nobody owns this space the way Google “owns” search. And as it evolves, there will be an unholy mess of privacy and security issues to work out. So in the future, the way we are guided around the Web may look very different from search as we know it. In the meantime, search is not, in fact, dead … yet.