Stream of Consciousness

I’ve stayed mostly away from political discussion in this blog, but I suppose it was inevitable that we got there eventually….

Like many of my peers, I consider myself to be a social liberal and and a fiscal conservative. I choose to vote most often with the Democratic party because, generally speaking, questions around social values are the political issues that I personally care more about. (That said, fiscal concerns are making a strong comeback with me considering the current sad state of our economy.)

However, as with any coalition, there are elements of the Democratic party with whom I just cannot reconcile my own beliefs. Top of that list for me? Teachers Unions.

I read this New Yorker piece while on vacation in the Far East. It made me so angry that I wanted to fly back and start beating people about the head.

And then this afternoon, I read this opinion piece by Joe Klein.

I am struggling to keep an open mind here. Maybe these unions are being unfairly maligned…?

But I’ll tell you what – if half this stuff is true, then I’m ashamed to associate myself with these people. As incomprehensible as they are to me, at least the right-wing religious conservatives can claim that they are taking a stand for something they believe to be right. Whether or not I agree with them, I can at least respect their fidelity to principle – something that is increasingly hard for me to say about the apparent naked and destructive self-interest of the teachers unions.

So – members of the teachers unions out there – please, set me straight. What am I missing? Why is there more than meets the eye here?

A lot of attention has been placed recently on the demise of the newspaper as an advertising channel and what that means for marketers. At this point in time, the general consensus seems to be that this is now more a question of when, not if.

So let’s talk about something else.

I think that the $60 billion direct mail industry will soon undergo a similar shift.

Reasoning: direct mail is/will be under assault in two directions – cost and effectiveness.

I don’t know about you, but the amount of snail mail that I send has fallen to virtually nothing over the past few years. If you think about it, I’ll bet you’ll notice a similar decrease of your own. Personal correspondence is now almost exclusively via email (wedding invitations and holiday cards being the minor exception), and virtually all of my bills are now sent via email, and paid electronically.

This has two effects.

One, as mail volume continues to drop, the fixed costs of the postal system are spread out amongst the remaining participants. It’s a safe bet that this has played a huge part in the seemingly endless hikes in stamp prices over the past few years. Each time postage prices go up, it’s an irritation for the average consumer, but I’ll bet it’s a big problem for direct mailers, who have probably been pummeled by repeated increases in what has to be a major cost center. (I think I remember seeing that postage is about 40% of direct mail expenditure – someone correct me if that’s off.)

Two, as the amount of ‘good’ mail plummets, the ratio of junk mail goes up. In the real world, this means that I check my physical mailbox maybe once a week now. Why? Because there’s almost never anything of value in it. Result: direct mail is less effective than before because it’s not delivered amongst the mail that I actually do wish to receive.

Taken together, this means that direct mail returns are under siege on both the numerator and the denominator of the ROI equation.

As I said before, with costs going up and effectiveness going down, it’s only a matter of time until we start to see major shifts in spend. My bet is that the vast majority of that spend comes online.

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Very, very interesting news today regarding upcoming integration between Yahoo! and Facebook.

I will look on with interest to determine if there will be any combination of targeting data.

Such a deal would combine the two greatest sources of online targeting data in the world – truly a combination to be reckoned with.

The Fall and Rise of Media

Choice quotes:

“That feeling of age, of a coming sunset, is tough to avoid in all corners of traditional publishing. Earlier in November, the New York comptroller said that employment in communications in New York had lost 60,000 jobs since 2000, a year when the media industry here seemed at the height of its powers.”

“Few of us could have conceived that in the next decade some of the reigning titans of media would be routed. Profligate dot-com ad money that had fattened print went away in a digital wipeout, and when digital media came back, it was to dine on the mainstream media rather than engorge it.”

“So what do we get instead? The future, which is not a bad deal if you ignore all the collateral gore. Young men and women are still coming here to remake the world, they just won’t be stopping by the human resources department of Condé Nast to begin their ascent.”

I admit it. I’ve been more or less crowing about the opportunities in New Media caused by the death of Old Media. Now, a part of me just kind of feels depressed.

Ah well, I suppose I don’t have much to complain about. At least I’m not on the other side.

From Chapter 1 of The Effective Executive, by the godfather of management writing, Peter Drucker:

But there seems to be little correlation between a man’s effectiveness and his intelligence, his imagination, or his knowledge. Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They have never learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work. Conversely, in every organization there are some highly effective plodders. While others rush around in a frenzy and busyness which very bright people so often confuse with “creativity,” the plodder puts one foot in front of the other and gets there first, like the tortoise in the old fable.

Hanging out for Happy Hour on Friday, I heard something that bears repeating:

It’s not enough for DSPs to integrate only to Exchanges and other sources of remnant inventory. This seems like an obvious statement, but you would be shocked at how many DSP value propositions essentially assume that the entire inventory world consists solely of remnant and non-guaranteed.

Folks, the waves of Exchange adulation continue – and it is justified – but there’s a reason that guaranteed inventory is still going strong. If your DSP plans to optimize only against a secondary set of inventory, then prepare for a rude shock when you match up results against a DSP that can optimize against both premium and non-premium inventory.

Another idea that’s been kicking around in my head for a while now, finally getting around to posting it. (Credit where it’s due: the inestimable Dave Zinman first mentioned this idea to me.)

“Dynamic Advertising Based Upon Real-time Inventory” is an admittedly bad phrase – if anyone can think of a better name for it, please chime in. Anyway, it goes something like this:

Pretend there is an over-stock of Pop-tarts at Wal-mart Store #100, located at 406 South Walton Blvd in Bentonville, AR. Like any good retailer, Wal-mart wants to sell through that inventory in order to a) make a profit, and b) free up the capital to buy other goods (though maybe not Pop-tarts this time around). Wouldn’t it be great if Wal-mart’s online advertising systems could recognize that localized overstock and begin advertising a sale on Pop-tarts to online viewers who are located within a 2-mile radius of Store #100?

From an advertising systems perspective, all the pieces to make this a reality are there:

1. Dynamically generated ad units that can access other systems for content and messaging
2. Accurate geo-based targeting

And, while I’m no expert in real-time inventory systems, Wal-mart’s famed inventory and supply management systems almost certainly have stock and inventory data at this granularity. (The issue would be how to make that data available in a convenient and safe manner.) Add to that some algorithm that knows how deeply to cut price as the products age, and we’re in business.

The CFO types out there will hopefully see the benefit instantly. By enabling micro-targeted advertising which responds in a rational fashion to local inventory fluctuations, an overall drop in inventory levels is possible. And while I’m not a Retail finance guy, I do know that capital investment in inventory almost certainly has to be a principal use of funds.

So I wonder how that crowd would react if someone asked them how a 2% drop in balance sheet inventory levels would affect their capital efficiency? (My guess is very, very positively.)

Oh, and btw, this type of advertising would be even more powerful for companies that have time and/or service-based inventory that expires immediately: hotels, airlines, restaurants, etc.

Have a good weekend!

A friend of mine posted a quick update to Facebook regarding the 32% tuition hikes announced by the University of California recently. As an alumnus of UC Berkeley, I can definitely sympathize with his views:

32% tuition hike. Where are CA govt. priorities? Outrageous. I’d go protest at UC Berkeley, if it wasnt raining. Anyone else think its ridiculous.

That said, here was my response:

I too am surprised that the jump was so big, but you had to expect that a hike was coming. The real point is this: rational fiscal policy demands that we spend only what we can afford. So in determining if 32% is too big or not, you’d have to know what the rest of the money is being spent on. In the absence of such an analysis, I think it’s tough to characterize the protests as anything but knee-jerk outcry. If California is spending money on wasteful items (pork barrel blah-blah-blah) and forcing students to foot the bill, then, yes, by all means, protest. But if we’re feeding children, paying law enforcement, or (insert other worthy goals here) – then I hope you’ll agree that this may not be so black and white.

I’ve been following the Facebook Monetization quest for a while now, and thought I’d throw up a couple of thoughts on that topic just to get them out there and see what people think.

First, let’s distinguish clearly between audience data and audience inventory (impressions). These two items often come bundled together and are thus often confused to be one and the same. That’s incorrect.

Facebook is a clear example where these two items are linked. They have a ton of both. The role of data is to provide insight into the user. This information is then used to decide a) whether you want to buy impressions on this person, and b) what creative you’re going to show them. Inventory is then in some ways just another opportunity to use data to accomplish some meaningful market objective.

Facebook’s data is great. They have a lot of data about me, and I’m guessing a lot of you as well. Unfortunately, their inventory just blows. In any advertising inventory that is embedded alongside content, one of the fundamental barriers that an ad needs to overcome is the drawing power of the content alongside which it’s presented. Because the content is so personalized and interesting to me, the effectiveness of traditional ads that are presented alongside can be very limited. (For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to cleave away all the ’social advertising’ tactics that have become en vogue recently – that’s a totally separate post. Here, I’m just talking about what to do with the nuts and bolts impression inventory.)

All of this is really not a surprise. In many ways, we’ve seen this movie before with the various online email providers. Think about it. Lots of data (people logged in, registered, whatever) combined with oceans of impression inventory that just doesn’t seem to perform all that well, particularly if you’re using (admittedly shite) metrics like click through.

So then there are two tasks to accomplish.

1. Figure out how to best monetize the low-performing inventory that’s actually on facebook
2. Figure out how best to monetize all that beautiful data.

With regards to the second task, one potential method would be to buy oceans of crap inventory at, say, a $0.50 CPM, add data, and resell it at a $5.00 CPM or higher, keeping the spread, or value creation, or whatever you want to call it.

With that goal in mind, the strategy and tactics become very interesting. Look at this situation through the lens of the emerging trends in DSPs. Where does Facebook, as data provider, fit? Do they monetize by injecting their data into other DSPs directly? Do they aggregate other inventory, add their data, and sell the finished product to DSPs? Or perhaps, they form a DSP of their own with the Facebook data at the core?

I definitely have my own opinions here, but would love to hear what others think…

Have a good weekend everyone!