AffiliatesNeeded.Com What's New In Affiliate Marketing

That say that imitation is the highest form of flattery…well Google thought that Bing might be “imitating them” in the form of copying their search results. So the Google engineers rigged a “sting” to catch Bing in the act.

Google engineers set up random results on their site for a series of unlikely search terms, such as “hiybbprqag.” (Google arranged for the nonsense word to point to a Los Angeles theater seating plan on its search engine.)

“Within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing,” Google said in a statement on its official blog Tuesday.

Google is trying to position Bing’s activities as offering up recycled search results from a competitor, while Bing is positioning the practice as one of over 1,000 different signals and features in their ranking algorithms.

Bing’s Corporate Vice President, Harry Shum comments regarding Google’s sting? “a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment.”

Looks like they are both complementing each other… imitation and creativity!

Social Shopping is clearly heating up!  Rumors are flying that Google is prepared to pony  up $6 billion dollars for Groupon, the market leader in local deal sites.  This would mark Google’s largest acquisition to date and value Groupon at nearly 2 times the $3.1 Billion Google paid for DoubleClick and almost 3.5 times the value the Google paid for YouTube!!!

For those of you who may not fully understand Groupon’s Business Model, they work with local establishments (Like the Bohemian Belly Dance Company displayed here) to create a unique deal that Groupon can pre-sell online to their local geographic targeted base of customers.  Customers buy the Groupon online and can then redeem it at the local establishment.  Local companies get increased exposure and traffic to their store by offering these deals through Groupon, allowing for some very niche markets to get a lot of attention.  As you can see in the screen shot (right), over 400 people have pre-purchased the Three Belly Dancing Classes!

As of today, Groupon’s site reports a total of 18,402,734 Groupons purchased.  With the rumored $6B potential selling price, each Groupon purchased to date would have been worth $326.04 in value.

One site estimates Groupon’s 2010 Annualized revenues to be approximately $300M.  If that number is  true (and that is before they pay the local advertisers their cut, and other operating expenses), then this deal would value Groupon at 20 times gross sales!  At the time of acquisition, DoubleClick’s revenues were expected to be $150M, so that could be what is creating the valuation, both at 20 times revenues.  I’m sure that Groupon pays at least 50 percent or more of the sales to the local advertisers though.

Google has recently started promoting coupons and deals through their local offerings, and Groupon has been working on a business model that would enable them to offer a lot more coupons than their typical 1 per day model.  This all comes at a time when Facebook has also made a push into local coupons and deals through their places offering.  This move could signal Google’s intentions to move more heavily into social and Facebook’s territory.

So Is Google Crazy for paying $6B for Groupon? Honestly I don’t think Groupon is worth $6B “today”, but the truth is they are making money hand over fist, and are growing rapidly. Local advertising has always been a hard nut to crack, and Groupon seems to have come up with a great local advertising business model. I can certainly see why Google want’s Groupon and I am sure that together with Groupon’s business model and Google’s traffic they can make A LOT of money with this deal. So bottom line? Good opportunity for Google and Groupon, but I think Groupon may be price gauging quite a bit because the buyer has a lot of cash!

If a marketing professional walks up to the founder of a company and says: “I am so confident that I can generate sales for you, I am willing to risk my time and my own money to market for your company and am willing to only get paid if and when I generate results for you”; the founder of the company will often see a great opportunity.

If the same marketing professional were to talk to someone in the company’s marketing department and say: “I am so confident that I can generate sales for you, I am willing to risk my time and my own money to market the your company and am willing to only get paid if and when I generate results for you”; the response is often, “We already have people generating sales for the company…”

This is no joke, we hear these types of conversations all the time. Why do you think pay-for-performance marketing/affiliate marketing gets such a bad rap?  Are internal politics squashing true business opportunities? Are internal marketing teams defending their turf? Is there more to the story?

Share with us some of the responses you’ve heard as a performance marketer or if you are on a company’s internal marketing team share some of the responses you’ve given.

I think we all have a tendency to get hyper focused on our individual areas of expertise.   We live most of our business lives working in the trenches of our day to day issues and the “weeds” of our particular niches.   It is important every once in a while to pop your head up and take a look around to see what issues others are dealing with in the more broader industry.   I did that yesterday when I attended Digital East 2010 in Tyson’s Corner Virginia (outside of Washington DC).

Digital East was a first annual digital media event whose goal was to promote forward thinking and thought leadership on topics related to internet technologies.  Organized by TechMedia, a leading media organization that has been organizing conferences, media, and networking forums in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions since 2001, the event was well planned, and well attended.

Mobile/Location:

The first session I attended was on Mobile Apps and Location based services.  Panelists included Jason Fulmines (Director of Mobile Products for Gannett Digital), Matt Myers (CMO & Co-Founder of Shooger), Scott Suhy (Co-Founder & CEO of PointAbout), Ken Yarmosh (O’Reilly Author & Mobile Strategist) and was moderated by Matt Gillis (Senior Vice President of Business Development at Millennial Media).

The main take away from this session was that mobile is here and everyone is working on their business strategies of how to thrive in the new mobile and tablet based world.  They had some good tips and advice for building and marketing mobile apps.

• HTML 5 is the future, learn it now.
• Utilize browser detect on your current sites to identify mobile users and promote your mobile apps to them.
• Understand your corporate goals, market and demographics up front before tackling a mobile project.
• Understand the fast pace of mobile adoption
• Do something mobile NOW, start the learning process, get to market, get feedback and look for ROI

The downside to mobile apps: They are disposable, most are not used after 21 days and most are not opened a 2nd time. 99.9 percent of apps won’t make more than $5 thousand dollars.

Usability & Design

The second session I attended was on Usability & Design.  Panelists included Darren Mauro (Director of Product Management for CustomInk), Kelley McDonald (Director of Information Architecture for NavigationArts), Craig Sauerwalt (Director of Online Marketing for Sylvan Learning), Emily Jerome Schroeder (Usability Analyst for AutoTrader), and was moderated by Drew Diskin (Director of Interactive Marketing & Web Strategy for The University of Pennsylvania Health System).

This topic was a big one for the group, standing room only.  The bottom line here was test, test, test.  In this day and age, with all the tools available for usability testing there is no reason why companies shouldn’t be testing and optimizing all the time.  Here are some of the tips and comments:

• No excuses today for not getting real customer feedback
• The Redesign is Dead. Sites are not static objects, you have to always be tweaking and testing for optimal performance.
• Where content is concerned, focus on quality, more isn’t always more, often times in this area less (but good and effective content) is looking better and better.
• Truly excellent content comes from attention to detail, everyone needs to focus more effort on the quality of their site content.
• Determine the purpose of a page before designing it.

Online Advertising

The third session was about Online Advertising.  Panelists included Alycia Kampetis Bar-Av (Director of Online Brand Marketing for Hilton Hotels & Resorts), Gregory Dale (COO, comScore), Bryan Gernert (CEO, Resonate Networks), Edward Montes (CEO, Adnetik), and was moderated by Mary Innis (Partner, Barnes & Thornburg LLP).

The session provided a good overview of the changing landscape of online advertising.  Here are a few interesting nuggets:

• 80 percent of people have never clicked on a banner ad
• There is a major move towards audience based advertising and a need for better management tools in this area
• Privacy and data utilization are a hot topic, the FTC says the industry needs to self regulate or be regulated.  The aboutads.info initiative is trying to tackle this.
• More time needs to be spent on planning, determining what is “success”,  and knowing how you will measure the results before setting up campaigns.

Venture Capital View Point

Unfortunately I missed the Venture Capital session with John Backus (Founder & Managing Partner of New Atlantic Ventures), Philip Bronner (General Partner, Novak Biddle), Don Rainey (General Partner, Grotech Ventures), Mark Rostick (Director at Intel Capital), moderated by Andrew M. Ray (Partner, Bingham).

It is always good to hear what the VCs are seeing and doing in the marketplace.  Here are some of the tweet highlights from this session:

• Interesting opportunities in the cloud computing space and small business tools for e-commerce.
• Biggest 2011 Trends in VC: Consumer-driven health-care, e-commerce driving business strategies & time spent on mobile devices
• There is more innovation than ever today and the need for venture capital to get in early is greater than ever.
• The best companies are born in the hardest times

Social Media

The social media panel was very well attended.  Clearly social media was a hot topic.  Many pre-panel tweets were hoping to hear about more than Facebook and Twitter, but of course the social behemoths were hot topics.  On the panel were Shashi Bellamkonda (Director of Social Media for Network Solutions), Jon Carpenter (Director of Marketing for LivingSocial), Alexandra Nicholson (Social Media Strategist for USA Today), Sean Whiteley (VP of Product Marketing for Salesforce.com), and was moderated by Stephanie Quay (Director of Business Development for Meebo).

Here are some of the highlights:

• The opportunity to surprise and delight your customers is very high with social media and should be an important strategy
• According to Bellamkonda “The best time to enter social media was a year ago, the 2nd best time was yesterday!”
• A Facebook post is 6 times more valuable than a tweet
• Look for Facebook optimization to be the next big thing.
• Facebook Connect is a very powerful platform both for authentication and information sharing
• Don’t fail big, start small

ESPN Keynote

Over lunch there was an engaging keynote from John Kosner, Senior Vice President and General Manager of ESPN Digital Media.  John sees ongoing market pressure to commoditize content and advertising.  Their challenge is to continue to create premium content and enhance the fan experience.  Their goal is to continuously surprise, excite and engage sports fans.

Kosner says that every time they launch a new service or app he is called into meetings to discuss potential cannibalization of other channels, but each time they improve the experience for the customer they audience always grows!

The most interesting and ingenious idea, in my mind, that Kosner shared was about the metric they use to measure success.  He said back in the day all the sites used to use “hits” as the measurement of site success and then drove ad sales based on these hits or unique visitors.  When AOL and Yahoo jumped into the sports game, their total site visitors were higher and they started attracting more advertising dollars.  ESPN decided that a more accurate analytic measurement would be visits multiplied by time on site.  This figure would more accurately show audience engagement and was a measurement that would allow ESPN to put it’s best foot forward to compete for ad dollars.  It also turned out to be a better measurement overall for content sites.

Analytics

Another standing room only session was about analytics.  On the panel were Peter Corbett (CEO of iStrategy Labs), Adam Guy (Vice President of Client Services for Compete), Ted McDonald (Web Analytics Manager for CARFAX), Amy Sample (Director of Web Analytics for PBS), and was moderated by Gary Scruggs (Director of Digital Marketing Analytics for iCrossing).

Good analytics specialists are hard to come by and play an interesting role in today’s companies; they are part time quantity jockeys and part time politicians.   I continue to see real world examples where internal politics are killing some of the best opportunities for today’s companies. The analytics professionals are right in the middle, being asked to provide the data to support each internal group’s personal agenda.   The biggest issue they all face appears to be lack of resources.  For an online world where quality measurement, testing  and optimization are critical tools to beating your competition, companies appear to be underfunding the departments that best able to provide the critical information they need. The call for having an analytics professional in the c-suite was loud and clear.

Here are some interesting take-aways:

• In the new world of social media and Facebook pages, site side analytics are able to show only part of the story.  Use of panel-based analytics and tracking codes make may offer some additional insight.
• Site Surveys are becoming critical tools for getting real feedback and helping to prioritize internal efforts.
• Large improvements can be gained by the continuous use of testing tools to better segment and target customers.
• Attribution seems to be the political mantra of choice for internal teams fighting for budgets.

eCommerce

On the eCommerce panel were: David Horgan (Online Marketing Specialist for Smithsonian Folkways), Gio Hunt (CEO of Koofers.com), David Moldavsky (VP of Web Strategy and Operations for The Graduate Management Admissions Council), and was moderated by Scott Silverman (Co-Founder and VP of Marketing for ifeelgoods).

eCommerce is still growing!  In fact, the average online retailer is growing around 10 percent per year.  In 2010 eCommerce will reach 170 billion.  When you look at the market caps of etailers vs traditional retailers, the power of eCommerce becomes clear.  Amazon has 29B in revenue and a market cap of 73B, while Macy’s has 24B in revenue and their market cap is only $10B.  Gio Hunt from Koofers.com was interesting to hear and Koofers.com is an interesting company to watch.  It was nice to hear how they are utilizing performance marketing to drive revenues and value to their college student audience.

Here are some highlights:

• Don’t overlook email marketing!
• Facebook marketing can be great, but you need to approach it differently than other marketing channels.  Success advertising on Facebook takes considerable patience, methodical testing, and the use of different forms of creatives than other display advertising campaigns.
• Ads with social features for sites that are social enabled could be a big area to watch going forward.

Search Marketing

The search marketing panel consisted of Heather Dougherty (Research Director for Experian Hitwise), Jordan Glogau (Search Marketing Director for 1-800-Flowers), Benjamin Rudolph (President & CEO, Relevance Advisors), Jiyan Wei (Dir Product Management for PRWeb), and was moderated by Andrew Bates (Manager of Client Services & Social Media Practice Lead for EyeTraffic Media)

I only caught about half of this one because I also wanted to peek my head into the Demo Showcase of new companies.  There were a few good take-aways and comments:

• Google is the only product that when it doesn’t work we blame ourselves (typing in a new search query)
• 59 percent of Fortune 1,000 CMOs expect to train search experts in house.
• Companies need to cover paid and organic search for top keywords.  Think about it like the Yellow Pages, the organic listings are your alphabetical listing, and the paid listings are your ads.
• PR supports organic search
• Focus on conversion! It’s easier to double your conversions than it is to double your traffic.
• Keep an eye on Social in the search results.  Real-time search and Facebook Bing partnerships will change the landscape.

DEMO Showcase

7 different start-up companies had the opportunity to showcase their new businesses in short elevator pitch style presentations.  I caught presentation for ZoomSafer, a smart and timely application that will save lives and help companies reduce their liability exposure by preventing corporate employees from texting and driving.  ZoneSafer’s patented technology suppresses text messages and disables all but the legal hands free calling capabilities of your phone while driving.  Other companies presenting were Giv.to, ifeelgoods, Peruzer, RankAbove,  Soundtrackr, and Vertical Acuity.  I plan on spending some time to go back and visit their sites to see what they are up to.

Online

The last session of the day that I attended was about online video.  On the panel were Lee Givens (Principal Product Manager for Mobile Applications at AOL), Kurt Merriweather (Director of Digital Media Business Development at Discovery Communications), Jeff Rule (Chief Interactive Strategist at Hanley Wood), and was moderated by Jeff Parsons (Director of Video Operations for the Associated Press).

The online video panel was top notch, even though it was at the end of a very long day.  Understanding that online video is now the 2nd largest online activity and that YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, it is clear that video is an important topic for any online media company.  Here were some of the key highlights and takeaways:

• H.264 has won the video web standard
• 90 seconds to 3 minutes appears to be the sweet spot for videos
• Keep an eye on mRSS, Video Syndication Sites and Video Meta-Data
• HTML5 is important, check out http://diveintohtml5.org for a good resource to learn more
• 300 percent increase in time spent when video content was added according to Lee

After the sessions, Digital East attendees were invited next door to CustomInk.com’s offices for some food, drink and networking.  It was great to see CustomInk’s offices, and it is amazing how big they have grown by offering the ability for people to upload images and get custom t-shirts printed online.  They claim to be the first company to offer online customizable screen printing.  Way to go!

Thanks for a great day of education and networking at Digital East.  If I didn’t meet you but should have, give me a shout!

I think we all have a tendency to get hyper focused on our individual areas of expertise.   We live most of our business lives working in the trenches of our day to day issues and the “weeds” of our particular niches.   It is important every once in a while to pop your head up and take a look around to see what issues others are dealing with in the more broader industry.   I did that yesterday when I attended Digital East 2010 in Tyson’s Corner Virginia (outside of Washington DC).

Digital East was a first annual digital media event whose goal was to promote forward thinking and thought leadership on topics related to internet technologies.  Organized by TechMedia, a leading media organization that has been organizing conferences, media, and networking forums in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions since 2001, the event was well planned, and well attended.

Mobile/Location:

The first session I attended was on Mobile Apps and Location based services.  Panelists included Jason Fulmines (Director of Mobile Products for Gannett Digital), Matt Myers (CMO & Co-Founder of Shooger), Scott Suhy (Co-Founder & CEO of PointAbout), Ken Yarmosh (O’Reilly Author & Mobile Strategist) and was moderated by Matt Gillis (Senior Vice President of Business Development at Millennial Media).

The main take away from this session was that mobile is here and everyone is working on their business strategies of how to thrive in the new mobile and tablet based world.  They had some good tips and advice for building and marketing mobile apps.

• HTML 5 is the future, learn it now.
• Utilize browser detect on your current sites to identify mobile users and promote your mobile apps to them.
• Understand your corporate goals, market and demographics up front before tackling a mobile project.
• Understand the fast pace of mobile adoption
• Do something mobile NOW, start the learning process, get to market, get feedback and look for ROI

The downside to mobile apps: They are disposable, most are not used after 21 days and most are not opened a 2nd time. 99.9 percent of apps won’t make more than $5 thousand dollars.

Usability & Design

The second session I attended was on Usability & Design.  Panelists included Darren Mauro (Director of Product Management for CustomInk), Kelley McDonald (Director of Information Architecture for NavigationArts), Craig Sauerwalt (Director of Online Marketing for Sylvan Learning), Emily Jerome Schroeder (Usability Analyst for AutoTrader), and was moderated by Drew Diskin (Director of Interactive Marketing & Web Strategy for The University of Pennsylvania Health System).

This topic was a big one for the group, standing room only.  The bottom line here was test, test, test.  In this day and age, with all the tools available for usability testing there is no reason why companies shouldn’t be testing and optimizing all the time.  Here are some of the tips and comments:

• No excuses today for not getting real customer feedback
• The Redesign is Dead. Sites are not static objects, you have to always be tweaking and testing for optimal performance.
• Where content is concerned, focus on quality, more isn’t always more, often times in this area less (but good and effective content) is looking better and better.
• Truly excellent content comes from attention to detail, everyone needs to focus more effort on the quality of their site content.
• Determine the purpose of a page before designing it.

Online Advertising

The third session was about Online Advertising.  Panelists included Alycia Kampetis Bar-Av (Director of Online Brand Marketing for Hilton Hotels & Resorts), Gregory Dale (COO, comScore), Bryan Gernert (CEO, Resonate Networks), Edward Montes (CEO, Adnetik), and was moderated by Mary Innis (Partner, Barnes & Thornburg LLP).

The session provided a good overview of the changing landscape of online advertising.  Here are a few interesting nuggets:

• 80 percent of people have never clicked on a banner ad
• There is a major move towards audience based advertising and a need for better management tools in this area
• Privacy and data utilization are a hot topic, the FTC says the industry needs to self regulate or be regulated.  The aboutads.info initiative is trying to tackle this.
• More time needs to be spent on planning, determining what is “success”,  and knowing how you will measure the results before setting up campaigns.

Venture Capital View Point

Unfortunately I missed the Venture Capital session with John Backus (Founder & Managing Partner of New Atlantic Ventures), Philip Bronner (General Partner, Novak Biddle), Don Rainey (General Partner, Grotech Ventures), Mark Rostick (Director at Intel Capital), moderated by Andrew M. Ray (Partner, Bingham).

It is always good to hear what the VCs are seeing and doing in the marketplace.  Here are some of the tweet highlights from this session:

• Interesting opportunities in the cloud computing space and small business tools for e-commerce.
• Biggest 2011 Trends in VC: Consumer-driven health-care, e-commerce driving business strategies & time spent on mobile devices
• There is more innovation than ever today and the need for venture capital to get in early is greater than ever.
• The best companies are born in the hardest times

Social Media

The social media panel was very well attended.  Clearly social media was a hot topic.  Many pre-panel tweets were hoping to hear about more than Facebook and Twitter, but of course the social behemoths were hot topics.  On the panel were Shashi Bellamkonda (Director of Social Media for Network Solutions), Jon Carpenter (Director of Marketing for LivingSocial), Alexandra Nicholson (Social Media Strategist for USA Today), Sean Whiteley (VP of Product Marketing for Salesforce.com), and was moderated by Stephanie Quay (Director of Business Development for Meebo).

Here are some of the highlights:

• The opportunity to surprise and delight your customers is very high with social media and should be an important strategy
• According to Bellamkonda “The best time to enter social media was a year ago, the 2nd best time was yesterday!”
• A Facebook post is 6 times more valuable than a tweet
• Look for Facebook optimization to be the next big thing.
• Facebook Connect is a very powerful platform both for authentication and information sharing
• Don’t fail big, start small

ESPN Keynote

Over lunch there was an engaging keynote from John Kosner, Senior Vice President and General Manager of ESPN Digital Media.  John sees ongoing market pressure to commoditize content and advertising.  Their challenge is to continue to create premium content and enhance the fan experience.  Their goal is to continuously surprise, excite and engage sports fans.

Kosner says that every time they launch a new service or app he is called into meetings to discuss potential cannibalization of other channels, but each time they improve the experience for the customer they audience always grows!

The most interesting and ingenious idea, in my mind, that Kosner shared was about the metric they use to measure success.  He said back in the day all the sites used to use “hits” as the measurement of site success and then drove ad sales based on these hits or unique visitors.  When AOL and Yahoo jumped into the sports game, their total site visitors were higher and they started attracting more advertising dollars.  ESPN decided that a more accurate analytic measurement would be visits multiplied by time on site.  This figure would more accurately show audience engagement and was a measurement that would allow ESPN to put it’s best foot forward to compete for ad dollars.  It also turned out to be a better measurement overall for content sites.

Analytics

Another standing room only session was about analytics.  On the panel were Peter Corbett (CEO of iStrategy Labs), Adam Guy (Vice President of Client Services for Compete), Ted McDonald (Web Analytics Manager for CARFAX), Amy Sample (Director of Web Analytics for PBS), and was moderated by Gary Scruggs (Director of Digital Marketing Analytics for iCrossing).

Good analytics specialists are hard to come by and play an interesting role in today’s companies; they are part time quantity jockeys and part time politicians.   I continue to see real world examples where internal politics are killing some of the best opportunities for today’s companies. The analytics professionals are right in the middle, being asked to provide the data to support each internal group’s personal agenda.   The biggest issue they all face appears to be lack of resources.  For an online world where quality measurement, testing  and optimization are critical tools to beating your competition, companies appear to be underfunding the departments that best able to provide the critical information they need. The call for having an analytics professional in the c-suite was loud and clear.

Here are some interesting take-aways:

• In the new world of social media and Facebook pages, site side analytics are able to show only part of the story.  Use of panel-based analytics and tracking codes make may offer some additional insight.
• Site Surveys are becoming critical tools for getting real feedback and helping to prioritize internal efforts.
• Large improvements can be gained by the continuous use of testing tools to better segment and target customers.
• Attribution seems to be the political mantra of choice for internal teams fighting for budgets.

eCommerce

On the eCommerce panel were: David Horgan (Online Marketing Specialist for Smithsonian Folkways), Gio Hunt (CEO of Koofers.com), David Moldavsky (VP of Web Strategy and Operations for The Graduate Management Admissions Council), and was moderated by Scott Silverman (Co-Founder and VP of Marketing for ifeelgoods).

eCommerce is still growing!  In fact, the average online retailer is growing around 10 percent per year.  In 2010 eCommerce will reach 170 billion.  When you look at the market caps of etailers vs traditional retailers, the power of eCommerce becomes clear.  Amazon has 29B in revenue and a market cap of 73B, while Macy’s has 24B in revenue and their market cap is only $10B.  Gio Hunt from Koofers.com was interesting to hear and Koofers.com is an interesting company to watch.  It was nice to hear how they are utilizing performance marketing to drive revenues and value to their college student audience.

Here are some highlights:

• Don’t overlook email marketing!
• Facebook marketing can be great, but you need to approach it differently than other marketing channels.  Success advertising on Facebook takes considerable patience, methodical testing, and the use of different forms of creatives than other display advertising campaigns.
• Ads with social features for sites that are social enabled could be a big area to watch going forward.

Search Marketing

The search marketing panel consisted of Heather Dougherty (Research Director for Experian Hitwise), Jordan Glogau (Search Marketing Director for 1-800-Flowers), Benjamin Rudolph (President & CEO, Relevance Advisors), Jiyan Wei (Dir Product Management for PRWeb), and was moderated by Andrew Bates (Manager of Client Services & Social Media Practice Lead for EyeTraffic Media)

I only caught about half of this one because I also wanted to peek my head into the Demo Showcase of new companies.  There were a few good take-aways and comments:

• Google is the only product that when it doesn’t work we blame ourselves (typing in a new search query)
• 59 percent of Fortune 1,000 CMOs expect to train search experts in house.
• Companies need to cover paid and organic search for top keywords.  Think about it like the Yellow Pages, the organic listings are your alphabetical listing, and the paid listings are your ads.
• PR supports organic search
• Focus on conversion! It’s easier to double your conversions than it is to double your traffic.
• Keep an eye on Social in the search results.  Real-time search and Facebook Bing partnerships will change the landscape.

DEMO Showcase

7 different start-up companies had the opportunity to showcase their new businesses in short elevator pitch style presentations.  I caught presentation for ZoomSafer, a smart and timely application that will save lives and help companies reduce their liability exposure by preventing corporate employees from texting and driving.  ZoneSafer’s patented technology suppresses text messages and disables all but the legal hands free calling capabilities of your phone while driving.  Other companies presenting were Giv.to, ifeelgoods, Peruzer, RankAbove,  Soundtrackr, and Vertical Acuity.  I plan on spending some time to go back and visit their sites to see what they are up to.

Online

The last session of the day that I attended was about online video.  On the panel were Lee Givens (Principal Product Manager for Mobile Applications at AOL), Kurt Merriweather (Director of Digital Media Business Development at Discovery Communications), Jeff Rule (Chief Interactive Strategist at Hanley Wood), and was moderated by Jeff Parsons (Director of Video Operations for the Associated Press).

The online video panel was top notch, even though it was at the end of a very long day.  Understanding that online video is now the 2nd largest online activity and that YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, it is clear that video is an important topic for any online media company.  Here were some of the key highlights and takeaways:

• H.264 has won the video web standard
• 90 seconds to 3 minutes appears to be the sweet spot for videos
• Keep an eye on mRSS, Video Syndication Sites and Video Meta-Data
• HTML5 is important, check out http://diveintohtml5.org for a good resource to learn more
• 300 percent increase in time spent when video content was added according to Lee

After the sessions, Digital East attendees were invited next door to CustomInk.com’s offices for some food, drink and networking.  It was great to see CustomInk’s offices, and it is amazing how big they have grown by offering the ability for people to upload images and get custom t-shirts printed online.  They claim to be the first company to offer online customizable screen printing.  Way to go!

Thanks for a great day of education and networking at Digital East.  If I didn’t meet you but should have, give me a shout!

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, AOL and several private equity firms are talking about the possibility of making a bid to buy Yahoo! Silver Lake Partners and Blackstone Group are two of the private equity firms in the discussions. Yahoo and their bankers currently chalk the rumors up to standard market speculation.  A deal like this would really be like David buying Goliath.

AOL’s current market cap is only $2.68 billion, compared to Yahoo’s $20.56 billion, making Yahoo 667% larger!  Yahoo turned down a $45 billion takeover bid from Microsoft in 2008, and has recently finalized an agreement to have Microsoft’s BING platform manage their organic and paid search engine listings.

What would a deal like this mean to the search market share?

The Bing/Yahoo search merger is all about increasing market share to compete with Google.  AOL is one of Google’s primary search partners, so any market share gained in the search space would come at the direct loss to Google.  The two companies also have some synergies that would increase the combined company’s market share in the hotly contested display advertising space.

Honestly, it’s hard to see that a highly leveraged takeover by AOL and private equity firms of Yahoo makes a whole lot of sense in creating long term shareholder value.  It might be more likely that Yahoo or Microsoft would consider taking out AOL and that this whole rumor was started as a way to try and get a deal like that on the table.

Google’s Display Advertising Network, formally called the Google Content Network, allows advertisers to target ads across Google’s large base of websites, whose owners have decided to run Google’s AdSense banners and text ads in order to earn money for their sites. Google AdSense is an easy to install java script code that enables Google to target both contextually or behaviorally relevant ads to your site.

According to a recent MediaPost article, Google is ready to release some new tools to help advertisers build and maintain display ads:

The Display Campaign Optimizer is a tool is a placement and bid automation tool that will allow advertisers to target specific CPA targets. Google will then manage placement and bids across the network to try to meet those target goals. This tool will require the placement of Google’s conversion codes on your sales pages, which may make the tool unavailable for most performance based marketers who may not be able to convince their partners to place their conversion codes on the sites.

Brad Bender, product management director for the Google Display Network, told MediaPost that, “typically, the campaign is in a learning mode during the first week. The CPA could vary during that week. Once the system has enough data to shift the targeting and bidding, we start to see the CPA move.”

The Contextual Targeting Tool promises to help advertisers more quickly build out the keyword targeting lists and campaigns for their contextually targeted display advertising efforts. Advertisers will be able to type in a product name and allow the tool to generate hundreds of keyword lists. This tool will roll out in phases and become available to advertisers in the coming months.

Google’s goal in all this is to make display advertising more effective and grow the entire display pie for their advertisers and publishers.

As a performance marketer, earning commissions on sales and leads generated, display advertising has typically not been as cost effective as pay-per-click search marketing due to the lack of targeting and low conversion rates. It has only worked for a handful of partners. As more and more targeting tools become available that allow advertisers to reach consumers closer to the time of purchase, performance display advertising may become more of an option for a larger set of our partners.

Last week in Santa Barbara, CJU attendees breathed a communal, but skeptical, sigh of relief as the media reported an end to the Great Recession. Thankfully, the Affiliate Marketing channel has fared better than most other industries due to its focus on pay-for-performance pricing models.

Kerri Pollard, General Manager of Commission Junction, presented some of the following positive statistics about the current growth of the Affiliate Marketing / Performance Marketing industry and the projected growth opportunities ahead.

Advertising Growth Rates:

• Total advertising spend is projected to grow by 10 percent in the next 5 years.
• Online ad spending has tripled in the last 10 years and is expected to grow by 60 percent in the next 5 years (from $22.7B in 2009 to $36.3B by 2014
• US Affiliate Marketing Spend is projected to grow by 110 percent in the next 5 years (From $1.9B in 2009 to $4B by 2014.

Media Time Spent vs Ad Spend:

The following graph really hit it home for me. We all know that media consumption behaviors have changed, but the advertising spend has been slow to adapt.

Based on these numbers by Morgan Stanley, a clear shift from print towards Internet marketing is happening.  This will accelerate as CMOs, CFOs and other corporate executives fully understand the pay-for-performance Internet marketing model.  The red outline rectangle above equates to approximately $50B in advertising spend opportunity.

eCommerce Sales vs Total Retail Sales

According to the US Department of Commerce, e-commerce sales still only account for a small sliver of the total retail sales channel. This is creating huge market opportunities for performance marketers when these sales move online and as new technologies are created to enable companies to track and pay performance marketers for driving these online sales.

This is all great news for the performance marketing industry. It will be great to watch the innovation and changes to our industry as more of these ad dollars flow online, as the C-Level executives fully embrace the power of pay-for-performance marketing, and as the investment capital community fully grasps this enormous opportunity.