web 2.?

Distribution revolution? By Even Aas-Eng

2009-10-01T10:20:00.003+01:00

Since the arrival of the world wide web we have had three different phases of how we filter information (web sites).

First we had the web portals that gathered useful sites so it would be easy for people to navigate to the information they were looking for. The number of sites where off course very limited and if you tried a search engine to find something else you usually ended up on a porn site! As an advertiser the only real way of reaching a lot of people where through display ads or text links on the portals.

Then search engines (with less spam) changed the game completely. All websites became accessible through a search and a click. Great news for mankind and great news for advertisers that could add paid keywords and search engine optimization to their marketing mix.

Today we are well into phase three, social media. Filtering has again been taken over by humans (facilitated by technology) and social networks and user generated media are increasingly controlling our click streams and influencing our online decisions.

I am not writing this because we need yet another rant on how important social media is and how we can utilize it. What I would like to do is to emphasize one particular innovation, Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect is a single sign on-service that enables user to logon to web sites outside Facebook with their Facebook login. Facebook Connect was launched in December 2008 and competes with openID and similar services. The difference being that Facebook is the Google of social media and a lot more powerful. For users Facebook Connect means that the actions they do on affiliated sites can be shared with their friends on Facebook. So again, great news for surfers of the web and a massive opportunity for advertisers.

Facebook Connect gives advertisers access to the most powerful distribution platform we have seen since Google took off early in this millennium. Here is why:

1) Facebook Connect lowers the threshold for participation. Who wants to create a new username and password? No one, we have way to many as it is. Using the connect service in advertising campaigns, on smaller niche communities or corporate sites you increase your signup rate massively because most people already have a Facebook account. (The Fluent 09/Razorfish report states that there is a 35% increase in the will for signing up via Facebook Connect)

2) Viral. Everything that you do on a Facebook Connect affiliated site can potentially be shared on Facebooks newsfeed or you can send a Facebook message. So if just ten people make an action and share it thousands may potentially see it. Someone will probably “Like” it and someone will probably comment on it.

It’s that simple and that important.
Try thinking about how you would attract new members to a niche community or how you would recruit users for an online competition with and without Facebook Connect and you will understand the importance of this feature.

I think Facebook Connect represents a distribution revolution, its one of the most important innovations we have seen in years and It will be a game changer.

Who thought that a DVD rental would be the coolest place to work? By Even Aas-Eng

2009-08-06T13:20:00.006+01:00

Today I picked up an article in a TechCrunch newsletter about Netflix. The American online DVD rental service apparently has a very interesting corporate culture that everyone now can read about after the management added their “Reference Guide on our Freedom & Responsibility Culture” To slideshare.

Some Highlights from the guide are:
- Netflix Vacation Policy and Tracking: "there is no policy or tracking."
- "There is also no clothing policy at Netflix, but no one has come to work naked lately."
- Netflix's policies for Expensing, Gifts and Travel: "Act in Netflix's Best Interests."
- Netflix on compensation: “When top of market comp done right... Nearly all ex-employees will take a step down in comp for their next job.”

So if you work at Netflix you can go on vacation whenever you like, show up naked in the office, receive a 50 inch LED TV as a gift from a Netflix partner (if it’s in Netflix best interest that you accept it) and while you are doing all this you will get the best compensation in the market!
I guess by now you really want to work with online DVD rentals!

Jokes aside, I think the presentation was very interesting. Its miles away from our Nordic “social welfare state” corporate culture, but it’s also miles away from most big American corporations excruciatingly boring “code of conduct”. What surprises me the most is that Netflix is not a small company. They are around 2000 people and their listed on NASDAQ. Alternative corporate cultures aren’t exactly uncommon in cool, tech start ups but they have a tendency to disintegrate as the companies go public.

Most companies like Netflix uses stock options as a way to keep the best talent. Google is a prime example, they gave all employees various number of options. Their strategy was never to be leading in compensation. When they went public in 2004 the initial offering was 85$, in 2007 Google hit 700$. Between 2004 and 2007 Google hired about 10 000 people, all got options. Because of the continuously rise in the Google stock its most have been a very effective way of keeping the best talent. There are two problems with this model though, its volatile and short term. Today Google shares are hovering around 450$.

Netflix offers stock options to those who want them but their strategy to keep the best talent is to offer them the best compensation in the market and let the employees decide what to do with it. The get rich quick opportunity disappears but you get long term stability and safety. I think most people would prefer the Netflix way.

Personally I have worked in India where I couldn’t wear jeans at the office except on Fridays and I have worked for Google where you got an incentive to buy a bike to save the environment… I prefer McCann here in Oslo where we have a mix of Nordic welfare stat socialism and IPGs code of conduct!

You can find the preso here: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

Innovating pitch process

2009-06-30T11:27:00.001+01:00

McCann in Turkey are currently in a pitch process with Turkish Airlines (TA) and the process has been very different and innovative. TA has placed clues online on different social media sites that the agencies involved has to find. You can read more about it here on McCann Turkeys blog: http://www.digithell.net/post/Now-We-re-Taking-Off!.aspx

The Bing project completed… By Even Aas-Eng

2009-06-15T11:38:00.000+01:00

The last two weeks I have used Bing as my default search engine. The mission here was not to look at new features or functionality that only are available in the US version but to see if Bing could handle the day by day stuff.

So here is a little recap of my two weeks with Bing. I started off uninstalling my Google toolbar and got ready to install the Bing. Easier said than done… A search for Bing toolbar in Bing gave no results but I did manage to find a Live toolbar. It didn’t look good, no search history and no search suggestion. Two days after I installed the toolbar it mysteriously vanished…

Ok, let’s move on to the actual search results. I was astonished after searching for Facebook and not finding it on the first page. How is that possible? A search for “Aunan” (A salmon fishing camp at the Orkla river) gave no results at all, a search in Google and their homepage was at position number one.

When you search for a site using the complete domain ( for example VG.no) Google sends you directly to the site. Bing doesn’t and it’s annoying.

Today I was looking for a hotel in Oslo for a business contact who is visiting on Wednesday. I searched for the hotel name (Gabels hus) in Bing and got no relevant result on the first page. The same search in Google and the hotel web site hade the top rank.

The last two weeks every newsletter from TechCrunch has had at least one article praising Bing and talking about how great it is that someone tries to give Google a run for its money. There seems to be a lot of people wanting change in the search game. I am definitely one of them, but I can’t change my default search engine to something that is untrustworthy for the easiest requests. So for now its bye, bye Bing and welcome back Google.

Going completely Bing! By Even Aas-Eng

2009-06-02T09:38:00.002+01:00

After seven years of Googling I will from now Bing things instead. If it’s not good enough I will change back in two weeks.

I will let you know.

www.bing.com

The link between display and SEM. By Even Aas-Eng

2009-05-13T08:35:00.002+01:00

Online marketers can be divided into three categories:

1) Those who believe the display ad is dead and think SEM will solve all your problems
2) Those who believe the display ad is everything
3) Those who believe that the world is not black or white and that it might be interesting to look at marketing across media channels and platforms and that different companies might need different strategies.

Of these three categories it’s my feeling that unfortunately nr 1 is growing, luckily nr 2 is declining and nr 3 is growing but not fast enough.

Aegis owned SEM agency Iprospect recently released a survey that concluded that display advertising has a positive effect on your SEA campaigns and that display advertising could work even though people don’t click on your ad. Revolutionary stuff…
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that Iprospect did the survey, I hope many people read it and I hope we will see more surveys like this in the near future, but it scares me that we are not more advanced in how we utilize new media.

I think it’s funny how SEM fanatic’s have trashed the display ad for years while their favorite company Google in the same period have invested BILLIONS to build the largest display ad network in the world. As mentioned before on this blog, the display ad isn’t dead it has just been revitalized.

I have been a SEM evangelist in the Norwegian market since 2003 but I never meant that display advertising don’t work. If you compare display and SEA by looking at CTR, CPC and conversion rates you are looking at two different planets, that doesn’t mean that one of the planets are about the be blasted out of the solar system. The role of advertising is to create demand and that is possible to achieve trough a social media concept, a display ad, a SEA campaign, a newsletter, a viral movie, a TV commercial, a social media ad, a web site, a DM, or a combination of all or some of the above.

Why box yourself in by just having faith in one type of advertising?

Iprospect survey: http://www.iprospect.com/about/researchstudy_2009_searchanddisplay.htm

The next pot of gold for the agency industry. By Even Aas-Eng

2009-05-05T14:08:00.001+01:00

The SMB´s of the world have always been a key driver in online advertising growth. Google’s success being the prime example of how “uninteresting” companies suddenly became the backbone of their business model.

SMB´s are spending more and more dollars online and their perspective on what is “advertising” is getting broader and broader. Their web site is often their only communication platform towards their clients and it’s easy to understand its importance. This study that I stumbled upon shows that 2/3 of the marketing professionals in these companies wants to spend more money next year in the “media” channel “my own web site”. The next wave of new corporate web sites is a huge opportunity for marketers. Finally the market will approach the job wanting to create value for users and not only show off the new fancy logo and the CEO!

The blurring lines of what is advertising is critical to understand if you are in the agency business today. One side of the coin is a huge opportunity the other a big threat…

The report is here: http://www.borrellassociates.com/report_details.aspx?prodID=173

Gulltaggen 2009 a great event. By Even Aas-Eng

2009-04-17T11:18:00.001+01:00

Norway is a small country, it’s close to the north pole, there is no people here, shops are closed on Sundays, we are not a member of the EU and the rest of the world couldn’t care less about what happens here. All this according to my Swedish wife and unfortunately she is probably right…

So I thinks it’s worth mentioning when someone puts together an event in Oslo that truly is of high quality even on a international scale. INMA (IAB Norway) arrange this conference and award show every year and this time the lineup is just great, sensational considering that its taking place in Oslo. Chris Anderson, Seth Godin, Jack Myers, Lars Bastholm and Nigel Morris are just a few of the names on the speaker list.

The event gathers a wide specter of Norway’s new media industry and it has really become a “must be” venue every year. Apparently also in 2009 even though most companies are cutting back on their “extra curricular” activities.

So I just want to honor the INMA team that makes this happen and encourage all foreigners to attend the conference. You now have a good excuse to visit Norway.
(shops are still closed on Sundays…)

Check out the event here: http://gulltaggen.no/?nid=14202

A dash of hope in all the despair. By Even Aas-Eng

2009-04-01T12:56:00.002+01:00

IAB`s US spending report for 2008 is out in the open and contains some encouraging figures. Year on year the growth was 10,6% but more interesting is the Q4 figures that shows a growth of 4,5%
Search increased its market share from 42% to 45% and display related kept its position at 33%

The report also shows that CPG (Consumer packaged goods) share of internet revenue increased a staggering 60% in 2008. A very good sign for the years to come as this industry vertical traditionally has been skeptical to online media.

Read the report here http://www.iab.net/about_the_iab/recent_press_releases/press_release_archive/press_release/pr-033009?o12499=

Is advertising failing on the internet? By Even Aas-Eng

2009-03-24T15:23:00.001+01:00

My good friend Aleksander Rosinski at www.finn.no sent me this article by Eric Clemons: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is-failing-on-the-internet/
Clemons is a Professor at Wharton and he is not a big fan of advertising… I thought the article was interesting but I disagree with him, a lot!

Clemons don’t believe that advertising dollars will not migrate online or to other digital channels, instead he believes that the internet will unveil the failing history of advertising and shatter all attempts at influencing consumers. Clemons says “It is not trusted, not wanted and not needed”
The advertising doesn’t work discussion seems to never end. Normally when this arise it’s a online marketing wizz behind it saying that SEM, affiliate marketing and a good old list of email addresses will solve all your problems but Clemons takes it one further and even dismisses search as a “Monetization of misdirection”!

His article is a long one so I will focus on his three reason on why advertising will fail

Consumers do not trust advertising. Clemons graduated from university in 1971 so he might think that advertising still looks, acts and feels like a Mad Men episode. We might not trust advertising to make important decisions in our life but we are not enemies of advertising. When Nike launches a new trainer, consumers that are exposed to Nike advertising may have thoughts on the design, colors or the price of the product but they don’t accuse Nike of trying to sell them a crap pair of trainers. Consumers don’t trust companies that promises something they don’t deliver and they don’t trust bad advertising. The internet is a transparency tool and the rise of social media means that companies no longer can risk being untruthful in their advertising without the consumers picking them apart, but the idea of truth in advertising is not something new. McCann’s mantra “Truth well told” is almost 100 years old…

Consumers do not want to view advertising. This is definitely true for a lot of “push” campaigns out there, but it doesn’t mean that we are not influenced. Let’s take a horrendous example. inkclub.com has annoying display ads everywhere you go online and I don’t know how many times I have been exposed to their ads. I don’t have a printer but if I did I would surely by both ink and toner from inkclub.com. Why? I don’t care about ink, I don’t want to spend time looking for ink and I certainly don’t care what other people mean about ink, so if I remembered the name of someone who sells ink I would buy it there. If inkclub has a positive return on their investment is a different story but it does work even though it’s annoying.
Then there is all the types of advertising that people like to view. Who doesn’t like the text ad from the wonderful little beach bungalow that was smart enough to be there when I searched for a beach hotel at Boracay or what a about the 240.000 consumers (campaign was shut down after two weeks) that participated in Burger Kings last campaign where you could dump your Facebook friends for a free burger.

Consumers do not need advertising. They don’t, but that’s hardly the questions here. Companies need advertising and the economy needs advertising to stimulate demand. Increase in demand leads to profits and innovation and that again leads to increased material welfare. I don’t know about Mr Clemons but I certainly don’t mind. Clemons own research shows that people use UGC sites like Tripadvisor when they make decisions and therefore they don’t need advertising. People do use Tripadvisor and similar sites and we are experiencing a influence revolution but this influence is not enough to drive the same amount of demand as you can with a successful advertising campaign. It is definitely possible to influence consumer behavior, advertising is one of the tools companies have at their disposal. Let’s take an example from the travel industry. With the arrival of low cost airlines consumers travel behavior in Europe has changed drastically. In a small market like Norway there are three direct flights to Vilnius from Oslo weekly, that means that 450 people fly there every week. I don’t know what the number was before Norwegian Airlines started their direct flight but I am pretty sure it was less. So by convenience, affordable prices and marketing Norwegian airlines has been able to increase demand for airtravel to Vilnius. How would they fill their flights without advertising and how would I know that they fly to Vilnius without any kind of advertising? And please don’t say word of mouth…

Internet will not kill advertising. On the contrary it will provide us with more relevant models for push marketing so that inkclub doesn’t have to waste money on me and it has already given us the opportunity to create even more relevant, valuable and successful pull campaigns. And the best thing, it will only get better.

“Interest-based advertising”, the rebirth of behavioral targeting. By Even Aas-Eng

2009-03-13T09:57:00.001+01:00

Two days ago Google launched their new display product with new targeting options. You will now be able to target user based on their browser history, the site they visit and the pages they view.
The service is still in beta but will soon be launched across Google’s massive adsense network and give it a long overdue facelift.

I assume that the “interest-based advertising” service is based on Doubleclick technology. If that is correct this is the first significant outcome of Google’s takeover of the company in 2007. It has taken two years to take the new display product to market, it must have been frustrating!

I think it’s funny that the term “behavioral targeting” seems to have disappeared after the US congressional hearings last fall about online targeting and privacy issues. In order to stay away from the heat Google has also implemented a lot of user friendly features to their new service. You can choose categories of advertising and you can off course choose not to be targeted at all. No one will probably ever discover these opportunities but Google’s has its back free.

So make no mistake behavioral targeting is back but it has a new name, “interest-based advertising”

More info can be found here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/making-ads-more-interesting.html

God, I was wrong! By Even Aas-Eng

2009-03-12T17:03:00.002+01:00

This blog has been dead for a bit over a year now and this is an attempt to bring some life back to it.

One of my last articles was titled “Recession is here” and was posted on January 22 th in 2008. The post was a rant on how a recession will speed up the transition from “old” to “new” media and how the online advertising industry would benefit from this. I was also offensive enough to recommend a few tech companies as potential winners in the stock market during a economic downturn, I wish I didn’t… The concerned companies was Google and Tradedoubler and the stock price at the time was about 500USD for Google and 123 SEK for the Swedish affiliate marketing player. Today Google is trading at 318 USD and I just sold my Tradedoubler stocks at 26 SEK a share…

Well I was right about one thing, the recession was really creeping up on us and we are now experiencing the most severe global economic downturn since the big depression. This has obviously impacted the digital business as well and my rosy prediction from a year ago looks ridiculous today. But I am not going to use this blog to post doomsday prophecies. We live in interesting times of change and transition, new ventures arise and old business models dies, fortunes are made and lost. It’s the age of opportunity.

So the blog is back and the first real post will be ready soon (hopefully) I already know the title, “Black Swans and Creative Destruction”

And I got rid of the sleazy picture!

Microsoft buys Yahoo! (maybe) by Even Aas-Eng

2008-02-04T16:16:00.001+01:00

Its pretty clear what’s the talk on the town at the moment, here is my take on it.

This is a big but expected move. I will try and touch on the different relevant areas.

Search: Google is number one in search in most markets except where local competition has triumphed (China,Russia) Microsoft has failed spectacularly, there is very little traffic and adcenter don’t have to many clients either. As everyone knows Yahoo! is the number two player in search. The problem is that Google is so dominant that even a Yahoo!/Microsoft merger won’t be adequate to challenge Google. In the US market where Yahoo! is very strong the market share including Microsoft will only reach 33 % (comscore figures) In many large European markets the two companies will only have single digit market shares even after a merger, in a market like Spain for instance Google has a market share of 90%+
But all this doesn’t mean that Microsoft or Yahoo! can/should give up search. Search is growing and SEM is growing and we don’t know how long Google’s crusade around the world will last. But it will last for a very long time if no one tries to compete with them.

Clients: Google didn’t not invent SEM, Bill Gross did! He started Overture and sold it to Yahoo! years before Google copied the model and invented Adwords. My point is that Yahoo! much like Google has clients and partners all over the world that has been spending ad dollars for years. These client relationships are worth a lot. Yahoo! like Google has dipped in to the long tail of advertisers, Microsoft has focused more on the agency world and large clients. If the merger becomes reality Microsoft will suddenly have a much larger client list, they will instantly make more money on adcenter and Yahoo! search will get new larger clients that already cooperates with Microsoft on their advertising products. So even if “Microhoo” doesn’t instantly capture new market shares they will instantly make more money.

Display advertising: This is where it really gets interesting. Google has Adsense and Google bought Doubleclick. Microsoft bought Aquantive but they don’t have a large enough inventory. Well they do now if this merger happens. As advertising dollars goes digital the display ad segment will grow immensely in the years to come. Technology will enable advertiser to reach their target groups across the WWW, but you need to own that technology and you need an ad network. Yahoo! has developed a competitor to adsense but it has had limited success but Yahoo! has portals and various content verticals (Sports,finance, etc) plus the fact that they are one of the largest email providers on planet earth. In other words, they have a lot of inventory to sell. Combine this with Microsofts MSN portals, IM, xbox and Hotmail you have one big online advertising platform with global reach and local presence. This platform obviously needs to be complex and fitted to all sorts of clients, well if you are Microsoft and you just bought Yahoo!, Aquantive and FAST you should have the opportunity to create something spectacular.

What happens now: I think that this “war” is mostly about two things, technology and eyeballs, with an emphasis on eyeballs. Both Google and Microsoft have the technology which means that this race now is all about the eyeballs. I therefore assume that we will see more companies swallowed by the two giants in the years to come. Who is next? My guess is vertical ad networks and affiliate networks. The rest of the world’s media companies thought they had their hands full with Google, now it looks like they have two giants to fight with. It will be interesting to see if they will be more willing to join resources with Microsoft than they have with Google. “Google-phobia” has infected many of them, will they get “Micro-phobia” as well?

Steve Ballmer declared last year that he was an advertising man; I think he just placed his money where his mouth is!

Recession is here! By Even Aas-Eng

2008-01-22T10:07:00.001+01:00

Everyone who has money in stocks or funds has had a terrible 2008. And it continues today, as I write this Asian markets are down between 5 and 10% and the stock exchange in my home town Oslo is down about 5% today.

I guess this is interesting enough itself but since this is a blog about online media I will try and look at this from a different perspective. The media industry always gets hit hard by recession. Advertiser slash their budgets to save money and agencies struggle because the last thing on a CFOs mind is to put money aside for the next big brand campaign. I am sure that we will see this happening during the next years but with a twist! In all markets online media is experiencing a massive growth. In mature markets between 10-20% and in more undeveloped markets between 20-50% (undeveloped markets here doesn’t necessarily mean undeveloped economies)

The last couple of years I have said many times that I welcome the next recession so that online media finally will have its final and mayor break trough. This was obviously said with a smile as I also save in the stock market and I have very little to smile about at the moment… But I really think that my joke brings some matter of truth to the table. The staggering growth of online media spend will continue and in some cases I sincerely believe that the growth could be further increased by the wobbling state of the world economy. Why? Well as advertising budgets gets slashed and CMOs are pressured on their ROI it’s not totally off to think that they will allocate more money to the most predictable, accountable and cost efficient media channel. It might be a bit naïve way to look at things but it could happen. During the last years of growth, online media has taken big market shares but companies haven’t spent less money on other media channels. On the contrary, they have spent more. It’s my guess that most companies are in a position to save money on their marketing budgets without risking growth in sales or their brand. And it’s also my guess that they won’t save on their online campaigns.

So if it’s true that we will see further growth or even an increase in growth for online media spend it might be possible to make a buck or two in the stock market as well! For those who read the following you should keep in mind that I am NOT a financial analyst!
Google is down about 20% this year and I guess they will be down even more after today’s trading. Google is definitely a company that has many years of fantastic growth ahead of them. In many markets Google is still enjoying growth rates above 100% and Asia and Eastern Europe hasn’t really started yet. They don’t in the US but the US market is less and less important for Google. So Google might be a good buy if the market continues to slide.

The Swedish company Tradedoubler is also an interesting case. Last year AOL tried to buy the company for 215 SEK a share. Shareholders turned the offer down and the stock reached an all time high of 235 SEK. At the moment they are trading at 123 SEK! Tradedoubler is in the affiliate marketing business and they are doing well, so is affiliate marketing and everything seems to indicate massive growth in the years ahead.

There are many, many other interesting cases around. Companies that operate in the ad technology sector, tracking and web analytics companies, search engine marketing technology and e-mail marketing are all interesting.

So I guess my final conclusions are that there are many opportunities out there and that online media will not be hit by the sliding global economy.

God, I hope I am right!

Microsoft buys Fast search and transfer, by Even Aas-Eng

2008-01-09T15:35:00.001+01:00

It’s not very often that Norway is the centre of events in the digital world but yesterday there was an exception.
Trading in Fast was stopped on Tuesday and something big was obviously about to happen. On Wednesday morning the news broke.

For those who doesn’t know Fast I will give a quick intro. Fast is (or was) a Norwegian software company who has specialized in search technology. Enterprise search has been their core business but they have also created other interesting solutions. I will get back to that later. The company sprung out around a tech school in the city of Trondheim. Norway actually has a search technology hub in that city, besides Fast both Google and Yahoo has engineering offices there.

In statements made by Microsoft regarding the acquisition they say that they bought Fast because of their technology and their standing in the enterprise search market. I am sure that is true but I also think that there is a reason beside this that have more to do with media then with technology.

Early in 2007 Fast launched a product called Fast Ad momentum. This product resembles Googles adsense technology, it’s a long tail tool that makes it possible to commercialize your total inventory. It’s perfect for companies like Schibsted that has many websites and search engines but no technology for automated ad sales. Since there are a number of big media companies around the world that are desperate to copy Googles success but they are dead scared of cooperation with Google the ad momentum product could be an interesting one indeed. It was at least the reason that I bought Fast shares!

Microsoft is also a company that is increasingly becoming a media player and they have not been very successful in trying to match Google. I would not be surprised if Microsoft will use the Fast ad momentum to get some momentum of their own!

For other media companies Fast is now history as an independent software maker, so I guess its time to by stock in other companies with the same competence. Did anyone say autonomy?

2007 top digital events by Even Aas-Eng

2008-01-03T14:37:00.001+01:00

Here is my very subjective take on 2007.

1) Google buys doubleclick
The number one in search and the company with the largest ad network on the planet decided that it’s was time to put some (ad)sense into it! Buying doubleclick Google looks set to become the worlds leading display advertiser. I am already looking forward to what the Mountain View people will buy this year.

2) Facebook launches social media ads
Zero to one million members in Norway in one year is not too bad. But for me it was the launch of their advertising concept that was the big story. Global reach, local presence with endless targeting possibilities. Still in its infancy it can only get better and I project a 2008 packed with news from facebook.

3) Microsoft enters the online advertising race buying Aquantive and a small stake in facebook
2007 was the year that Steve Balmer decided that he would not only talk about Google but actually try and do something. The Aquantive deal will bring opportunities across Microsoft channels that hopefully can give many of them a boost. What Microsoft and facebook are up to, I don’t really know.

4) Marketer’s world wide realizes that Second life is just that and that they won’t have to close shop in real life just yet!
Thank God this hype worn off during the first part of the year. I am not saying it’s not interesting, I am just saying that there is so much else more interesting.

5) Iphone
It came, it looked good and it conquered! People bought it and they started to surf the web. Numbers from UK shows that 60 % of Iphone users move about 25 MB of data back and forward per month. Only 2% of other mobile phone owners move the same amount of data. The floodgates are open, the ad dollars will start to move towards the cell phone in 2008. And did I mention that it looked good?

6) Search conquers Europe outside UK
Staggering growth numbers all over the continent and finally the media agencies and big advertiser are starting to see the light. The only problem is that many of the newly convinced see SEM as the only online solution, need to stop that! Mantra for 2008: SEM targets existing demand it doesn’t necessarily create more demand.

7) How difficult it was to find enough people!
Young people all over the world unite! Come and work with online media, we need you!

Not exactly Fawlty Towers, by Even Aas-Eng

2007-12-11T12:49:00.001+01:00

This blog is about the digital environment but I have taken the liberty this time to talk about something completely different. I think that we can call it marketing!

In November my wife and I went to Prague for a relaxing long weekend. As usually we had spent numerous hours online researching hotels and we ended up with hotel Icon. The Icon is a sleek, cool, boutique hotel just of the main street and their main selling point was that they had Hästen beds. A good selling strategy indeed!

The hotel was great, very cool rooms, great food and they served breakfast 24/7. Why anyone hasn’t done that before is beyond me!
But the most fantastic thing about the hotel was the service. The Icon is a small hotel and has a very intimate feel to it and it’s the absolutely amazing staff that provides this feeling. Service not only with a smile but with a genuine smile.

Ok, so we where very happy with our stay and we where absolutely sure that we would book again for our next trip to Prague. Then we where hit with some serious CRM!
Yesterday I received a letter from the Icon hotel. I thought they finally had found out that we had emptied out the mini-bar during our last night and here was the bill…
But no, the letter was no less than a happy birthday card from the Icon hotel (my birthday is today) and it was signed personally by all members of the staff.

So easy, yet so effective. The Icon went from being a great hotel to the greatest hotel in a split second.

I promised you some marketing and here it is. If you are going to Prague you most stay at the Icon hotel. It’s by far the best hotel in Prague and one of the best in Europe. You might think it’s expensive but you are wrong! A suite is about 200 EUR per night which is a bargain considering that you sleep in a 2x2 meter hästen bed and are pampered by the greatest hotel staff anywhere in the world.

Ok I maybe went a bit over the top there but its really a fantastic place, check it out at http://www.iconhotel.eu/en/welcome.php or look at the tripadvisor reviews here: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g274707-d646535-Reviews-The_Icon_Hotel-Prague_Bohemia.html

Just disregard the first review from some old stuck up Americans!

Merry Xmas!

Facebooks flying start, by Even Aas-Eng

2007-11-14T17:03:00.001+01:00

Things move fast in the online media world. So fast that the product facebook flyer pro that was launched a couple of weeks back is already gone and replaced by facebook social ads! But it’s still the same product so it doesn’t really matter. So my plan with this post was to dig a bit deeper into what effect facebooks latest move has on the online advertising world. I briefly touched this in my last post and I will go further into details in this one.

So what is facebook social ads? Well it’s a mix between a text and a simple display ad. Whats “social” about it? You can target your ad based on “social” parameters. When you create the ad you first pick the country you want to show it in. Then facebook tells you how many people that have a profile in that country (940.000 profiles in Norway) After that you start with your segmentation. You decide if you want to target females or males, you choose age, political views, education background, religious view and relationship status. If you like you can also target people based on interest and where they work. You can segment your campaign all the way down to 20 people.

So how will this work for a brand advertiser? Pretend that you are the Swiss watch maker IWC and that you have a few people in the Norwegian market that are potential clients of yours. You create your facebook ad by choosing the following:

Country: Norway
Gender: Male
Age: 30-65
Education: College Graduate, Major in Business
Political views: conservative
Relationship status: singles and people in relationships
Interest: investing, watches, wine
Workplace: ABG, Artic Securities, Orkla Finans, Glitnir, Enskilda

The point is that you can define your target group pretty precisely. And I am pretty sure that hypothetical campaign above would be quite successful. Now think about how much a company like IWC would be willing to pay for such segmentation… Obviously this is just an example and a profile like this probably doesn’t exist in Norway but it makes a point.
You can use the system for extremely targeted campaigns like my example but also for campaigns where reach is key. If you want to reach Norwegian females between 20-35 you have about 250.000 profiles at your disposal. So it’s a tool for large brand advertisers and small local businesses and it’s a tool for targeted niche campaigns and those who need volume. It covers both the head and the end of Mr Andersons long tail…

In my last post I mentioned something about facebook flyer being an adwords killer. It isn’t but it will be one of the only alternatives to Google’s adsense system that has huge reach and targeting possibilities. So it’s not a threat to Google but a great supplement for advertisers. If it where to be a threat they need other publisher than just their own site.

But interestingly enough facebooks ad move probably tells us a lot about what Microsoft and Google are launching pretty soon. Segmentation across communities, news sites, blogs, e-commerce sites and IM tools. This is why they bought Doubleclick and Aquantive. Imagine placing your ad within Google’s adsense network on the criteria from my example above. That makes contextual advertising look kinda bleak don’t you think?

So in conclusion; Hooray for facebook social ads and lets wait for Google and Microsoft

If you want to read more about facebook social ads and their polling tool! You should read this http://www.facebook.com/ads/

A little bit about everything, by Even Aas-Eng

2007-10-29T18:36:00.001+01:00

The problem with writing a blog about online media is that there is so much stuff happening all the time. That means that if you haven’t posted anything in a while it gets difficult to decide what to write about. That’s where I am today! So I have decided to do things a little bit differently this time and provide a summary of interesting events that have taken place the last month.

First Microsoft finally makes a move and invests in facebook. From the outside it resembles Googles deal with myspace a couple of years back. They are paying to distribute display and search ads, they are buying themselves a ad network. Microsoft is buying 1,6% of facebook for 240 million dollars, this values the company to 15 billion in total. This means that the price for social media has had a rising curve the past years… Murdoch bought myspace in 2005 for 580 million dollars and Google bought youtube for 1,65 billion in 2006.

Let’s stick with facebook. There have been rumours for a while that they would launch an ad concept with social targeting possibilities. This month the facebook flyer appeared and yes there are interesting segmentation options. But even more interesting is how this product resembles the adwords model. It’s a long tail tool open for small and medium sized companies and perfect for small local campaigns. You buy based on CPM or CPC with your own credit card. So the concept could really be the first adwords competitor to appear in quite some time. Unfortunately though the people I have spoken with that have tried it says that its full of bugs.

Okay, back to Microsoft. Their new exec Brian Mcandrews (former head of aquantive) has stated the bleeding obvious; display ads will trump search in the years to come. This is off course already the case in many European markets where SEM is playing catch up and I am sure it will happen in the states to. Apparently this is suppose to solve Microsoft’s challenges in the advertising market, it doesn’t. They still has to get into search (buy yahoo!) and they are also trailing googles enormous inventory for display ads (adsense/site targeting, youtube, myspace deal) A good start I guess would be to buy more of facebook so that they can sell display ads in the US as well, this is not covered by the deal mentioned above.

And at last! The daily show with Jon Stewart will revamp its website and actually show their content there! Revolutionizing stuff, apparently advertiser will also be able to buy ads!!
Great news for all Jon Stewart fans and it’s great to see that Viacom is doing something for the users, not just suing youtube!

Finally we are getting somewhere, by Even Aas-Eng

2007-09-21T15:26:00.002+01:00

Myspace has for the past six months been trying out their new ad platform customizing ads to their users based on their psychographic data. Myspace has an enormous amount of data about what their user do, what they don’t do, what they like, who their friends are, who’s their hero’s, what’s their previous responsiveness to ads and a lot of other things. All in all they are now offering advertisers a segmentation tool that we have not seen before.

Let’s walk around the mine field of privacy issues that surrounds this topic and talk about what this development means for the commercialisation of the web.

Three weeks ago I attended a seminar where Jack Myers spoke on the development of US online media prices. He told us that the average price per CPM had dropped significantly the last years. The reason for this being the abundance of online inventory (blogs,communities,chats,etc). The opportunity however is that with good targeting tools we should be able to segment that massive WWW and be able to show ads just to those people we want to reach. This will be positive for advertiser as their ROI will increase, it will benefit media companies as they will make more money on each user and it will benefit the agency scene as campaigns get more complicated and their competence is needed. It’s a win/win/win situation! Why this development has taken so long is beyond me.

We are really talking about a long tail tool here. Ad technology that incorporates user’s demographic and behavioural data will enable advertisers to utilize the long tail of websites. Media campaigns will turn extremely fragmented and complex but they will also be accurate and extremely effective. The technology enables us, human heads makes it a success.

Ad networks will be the big winners. Big pools of traffic gathered in Google adsense or at advertising.com will be split into countries, counties, cities, borrows, gender, age, income, education, professions, hobbies and sold to the highest bidder with a product that matches perfectly. Volume is key or volumes of niches are key, the ad networks have it. The person that I recently talked to in Norway that said she was sceptical to ad networks as a channel for advertising has tough times ahead!

Another winner will be communities. Think about all the info that you have added to your facebook profile. Your favourite music, movies, books, pictures, info about your travels, basically your entire life is there. What a potential advertising goldmine! Facebook is working on a similar product as Myspace and it’s my guess that it won’t take long before we can read about it in ad age.

Search is another interesting area. The logic behind search advertising is really what started this whole trend. Present ads that in some way match the search. Very easy to understand and very effective. Everyone that has Google toolbar have seen the search history box, interesting isn’t it? Don’t you think that your search log says quite a lot about who you are and what you do? Google hasn’t used this knowledge in their adwords technology yet (as far as I know!) but they will and when they do it will make search marketing even more effective.

This all looks a bit scary but it makes perfect business sense! The comforting bit for all users is that they will group us, they won’t come after us as individuals. At least not yet………

Have you seen the Iphone? By Even Aas-Eng

2007-09-17T09:54:00.001+01:00

I am not a gadget freak and that is probably why I didn’t get to see the Iphone in action before I visited NYC a couple a weeks ago. On a rooftop terrace at a slick hotel a New Yorker was kind enough to give me a little tour. And I was impressed indeed. Lets look beyond the fact that the phone looks damn good and that it probably will become an even bigger fashion icon than its mp3 sister. Let’s also disregard all the small flaws and that it’s not customized to European conditions, they can and will fix that.

The real interesting thing about the Iphone is the internet. One of the most boring discussions we have in our industry is web for mobile. What will happen with WAP? Will we see the same growth in mobile advertising as we did with web advertising? You will never use your cell phone as you use your laptop. All these questions where buried when I saw the Iphone in action. Web and mobile will merge and this is the first real step. You can use the Iphone surfing the web, with its zoom in zoom out opportunities you can easily navigate any webpage. So do we need WAP pages and specialized mobile ad-networks, probably for a while but in the long run the web will prevail.

In October Google will integrate their mobile search ad-platform into adwords. They will use the same ads and run the same price model, as an advertiser you would have to opt in or out just as you do with adsense. It will be very interesting to follow the development of this revenue stream for Google (if they will share it!) with more and more Iphones or similar devices on the market I am sure that this will take off pretty quickly.

So the conclusion is: the Iphone is here, WAP is dead and long live the WEB!

The rise and fall of sloggi.com, by Even Aas-Eng

2007-08-29T13:02:00.001+01:00

I guess most of you have heard about the sloggi campaign or visited the site. (probably a lot more than those who admit it)
This summer they launched a contest in order to find the world’s most beautiful bum! User where to take pictures of their own behind and post them on sloggi.com
Here the bums where categorized by gender and country and rated! And yes there are a lot of nice bums on sloggi.com

The concept seems to have taken completely off in eastern European countries and it has gotten a lot of press around the world. The Nordics was no exception where the site got a lot of negative press. And yesterday the (sad) news came; they are shutting down the competition and blocking all users from the Nordics. The campaign will continue in other markets.

So what do we have here, the most successful user generated content campaign the world has ever seen or a dodgy porn site? Its probably a mixture. Creating a UGC campaign is all about the users. If they don’t contribute you have failed. In this case they certainly did and in that matter the campaign is a smashing success. But nobody should be surprised that people submit pictures of their bums and that other people want to look at it. There are thousands of other online examples of that………..

But the question is if this is effective advertising for sloggi, personally I have no idea.

On a peculiar note I would like to raise a question to sloggi. Did you guys screen the photos? I am asking because I couldn’t find a bum on the site that didn’t look good!!

The screenshot below shows you the page views on sloggi.com (blue line), vg.no (norways largest site) and expedia in UK. As you can see, sloggi has surpassed expedias traffic…………

Brilliant Obama! By Even Aas-Eng

2007-08-14T13:56:00.001+01:00

It’s been a while since my last post here. My excuse is summer and that I have been very busy fly-fishing for salmon and getting married!

Know that I am back I would like to tell you a bit more about a subject that I have touched on before, Barack Obama. As you know he is running for president in the US and he apparently has a good web team helping him out. But I did not know how good they actually where!

During a flight to Russia this summer I came across an article in the economist on Obamas very successful donation campaign. Apparently he is miles ahead of Clinton and the others. That doesn’t interest me much but the way he got the money did. Apparently he got a lot of money from thousands and thousands of very small donations. How? He has set up an affiliate program for donations. Absolutely brilliant! Anyone can create an Obama site of their own and have people donate money on it. The minimum amount you have to donate is close to nothing, making the barrier for donation very little. And it doesn’t matter that people donate small amounts as long as Obama has a big distribution platform. The result speaks for its self, Obama is King of online donations.

So what do we have here if it’s not “long tail politics” or the Google of politics? Penny by penny, vote by vote.
It was funny reading the other candidates response to Obamas success, they didn’t have a clue!
The same could be said for the political parties in my own country. I would love to help you out as long as you are not a member of Fremskrittspartiet!

On the macro side of things, by Even Aas-Eng

2007-06-19T08:36:00.001+01:00

The web is growing, everybody knows that. But what is the commercial online potential, how much money can google make? How big will ebay grow? How many people will use Skype in five years? And how many will be fooled into buying a book they certainly don’t need by amazons great cross sell functionality in eight years? I off course don’t know the answer to any of these questions but I know that the potential is huge and we haven’t seen anything yet.

As I once lived in India I am trying to keep up with the digital development in the country and I stumbled over an article last week that describes the potential that I mentioned above pretty good. Here are some quick facts:
- 9% internet penetration among urban Indians (total urban population 336 million)
- 83% broadband penetration of those connected
- No numbers available for rural India, we are taking about 800 million people!
- The internet population has grown about 30% year on year

In other words, we have a long way to go in India and let’s not even get started on China. I think that we will see an unprecedented growth in online usage among the growing Indian middleclass the next five years. So let’s assume that the total number of Indians connected in five years is 200 million and that we have the same number in China. Then we add some millions of new user from other developing economies and suddenly the global online world has grown by almost 100%

If Google keeps their market share they will generate around 60-80 billion USD in ad revenue (I am sure they wont keep it though), amazon will have doubled the number of book sales and so on.

So I think that if you happen to know a company that’s working on the global online arena as a media player or in the ad-technology field, buying stock is probably not the dumbest thing you can do!

Look to Norway! Or not.... By Even Aas-Eng

2007-05-25T16:28:00.001+01:00

My very good friend and COO of Compraventa in Spain (Spains largest classified site) Pablo Martin commented on my earlier post about the ad potential in youtube. He said that CPM prices in Norway have gone totally haywire and that in all other markets the average price per CPM is substantially lower. And he is right indeed.

I suggest that the rest of the online media world should follow the Norwegian online market closely in the times ahead. Why? The last three/four years we have experienced a massive growth in the spending on online media. The growth has mostly been driven by spending on display ads on the big online newspapers and portals. Unlike other markets we have spend little money on SEM/SEO og affiliate marketing (to my despair)
Spending on search is still a mere 10-14% of the total. In some areas Norway is a very sophisticated market in others we are completely lost. Even though this is an interesting discussion in itself lets not focus on that now.

So we spend money on display ads in Norway and we spend a lot. Who are the advertiser, mostly distribution players like the travel industry and other e-commerce companies. They have spent more and more money on the same ads every year as the prices have increased. The total number of user has also risen but not enough to defend the steep rise in prices. The result for the advertiser has been a weaker ROI year by year. But they still spend because they are still in positive territory.

Now it looks like we are getting closer to a tipping point. Prices and the CAC are getting so high that advertisers are starting to think twice about spending their budgets online. There is still growth but I think we might see a halt very soon. So what happens then?

We might experience a drop in media prices or at least a flattening. The other scenario is continuous growth. How can that happen? The keyword is brand advertising. When/If the big brand advertiser starts throwing more money online they might replace the distribution companies as the number one source of income. Brand advertiser has more money, they are willing to spend more money and they don’t measure ROI the same way. This “shift” in advertisers could lead to further revenue growth for online media companies. What will the distribution players do? They will spend more with google, yahoo, tradedoubler, advertising.com and others.

This is why I think that other countries should look to Norway, they might learn something about the future of their business. Or not!

It’s all about the ads, by Even Aas-Eng

2007-04-19T11:04:00.001+01:00

So Google buys Doubleclick, nobody should be surprised really. The price is steep but again it will pay off for Google. Let’s take a few steps back and look at why.

About a month ago Steve Balmer of Microsoft held a lecture where he described Google as a "one trick Pony". I wasn’t there but I guess he was pointing at the fact that Google only has monetized one product, search ads.

Mr Balmer is right and wrong at the same time. Approximately 94% of Google’s revenues are generated by ad sales. Looking at it like that Google doesn’t have many tricks! But what we need to look at is where the ad revenue is coming from.

Most marketing people only associate Google with text ads in search engines. But the fact is that about 46% of their ad revenue is generated through the adsense system. Don’t know what adsense is? Read up here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adsense

Adsense is "long tail" in practise. The adsense system enables Google to commercialize the long tail of web sites and that’s a pretty long tail! Google’s network of niche publishers using the adsense technology consist of several million web sites. And the real beauty of it is that it keeps on growing as the web grows. That is one of the reasons that adsense revenue has risen so sharply the past couple of years. 70 million blogs today, 140 million in one year? Imagine what that would mean for Google’s ad revenue, and they practically have no competition.

Previous Google deals with companies like Myspace and the You tube buyout has all been about one single thing, buying ad inventory. They are buying places to display their adsense ads. As mentioned in an earlier post on this blog this is a traffic sensitive business model. As long as the traffic is high Google will reap the rewards anyway. The acquisition of Doubleclick though is of a different kind.

Adsense ads has up to recently been text ads. Those days are gone and we are now seeing more and more display and video ads. Who buys those ads? Companies looking for brand awareness and companies that wants to communicate with their target audience. These companies are big and most of them use international agencies like the one I work for. Most of these companies don’t live in a "customer acquisition cost" type of world. They have parameters like demography, geography, annual income, gender, that decide where they allocate their budget. All the soft values that distribution maniacs like my self forgot years ago! My point is that the correctly targeted banner ad is not dead, it has just been reborn!

Up to now the adsense system has been limited in many ways. You can’t use third party ad-serving systems, it’s been poor on segmentation and the creative’s has been very limited indeed. This will change with a Doubleclick integration. Doubleclicks customers are the ones that Google now tries to please. It’s no longer the long tail of small and medium size companies or the web-distribution giants that Google are targeting. It’s the big FMCG companies, the automakers, the telecom giants and so on. These companies need data, they need flexibility and they make decisions based on other values than Amazon or Expedia. Doubleclick will provide just that.

So the Doubleclick acquisition will go down very well in the agency world and with the companies we all want to play with. I am sorry Microsoft and Yahoo it was another smart move from Mountain View.

Google buys Doubleclick, by Even Aas-Eng

2007-04-17T10:08:00.001+01:00

I will comment on this when I have time but if you are interested you can check out this FAQ that Google released regarding its acquisition.
http://216.239.57.110/blog_resources/DC_FAQ.pdf

Hello, My Name Is Gord, And I’ve Been Behaviorally Targeted, by Even Aas-Eng

2007-04-16T15:57:00.001+01:00

Here is a great example of why it works and some interesting points on why we should be a bit careful. http://blogs.mediapost.com/search_insider/?p=507

What’s new? Demographic targeting. By Even Aas-Eng

2007-04-11T07:33:00.001+01:00

MSN has for a while offered the option of buying demographic targeted ads. The segmentation is based on passport logins and windows live id. With the introduction of adcenter, Microsoft’s ad words competitor, demographic targeting has reached the search arena as well. And apparently with good results. According to searchenginewatch several clients has experienced a drastic decrease in cost per action using the new tool. And its good news for Microsoft, this is probably the first innovation within search that they launch before Google or yahoo.

So while Microsoft launches demographic search, Google goes the other way and launches demographic banner advertisement in their site targeting network. A interesting move that should suite the agency world well. The data used to perform the segmentation comes from comscore who has gathered demographic information about sites taking part in Google’s site targeting program. So offline segmentation goes online, why did it take so long?

You can read more about demo-targeting in adcenter here:
http://advertising.microsoft.com/demographic-targeting-report

And Google demo-targeting here:
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=33743

Why Google didn’t pay too much for Youtube. By Even Aas-Eng

2007-03-12T12:25:00.001+01:00

Ever since the Google takeover last fall there has been a lot of talk about how you tube will make money and if Google bought the hype and nothing more. Almost all debates have centered around video ads and how to create a sustainable business model without interrupting the fragile feelings of the you tube community!

And yes, there are a lot of uncertainties and a lot of trouble with regards to copyright issues and how to monetize video ads, so lets just forget all that for a moment and look at some figures instead.

According to Google, you tube had 133 million users in February. According to Alexa a you tube user sees 12 pages on an average visit. That means that you tube has around 1,6 billion page views every month. That again means around 19 billion page views in a year. You tube are experiencing a substantial growth so lets assume that the yearly number of page views are 15% higher than that. That gives us a total number of 22 billion page views per year.

So, can you make any money on 22 billion page views? Obviously but the question is how much.

Before the Google buy out You tube was running Google text ads through their AdSense system. Rumor has it that they made 15million$ in 2006. Keep in mind that this was before the takeover and that Google also made money on these ads. Lets assume that the split was 50/50, that would mean that the total ad revenue in 2006 was 30 million $. But still the price of 1,65 billion $ was too high right? not necessarily...

You tube today have four times the number of users compared with 2006. Since the AdSense models only parameter is volume we can safely assume that the ad income will follow the increase in users. That gives us a total ad revenue of 120 million $ in 2007. And then the picture doesn't look that hazy anymore.

Okay, lets look even further into the crystal ball. Google started some time ago to run image ads trough the AdSense system. They are sold on a CPM basis through the normal bidding process. Just like search was a bargain in the early days so is CPM advertising on you tube at the moment. But that is changing as I wright this, the market is doing its job and adjusting prices every second.

In the Norwegian market a normal CPM price is about 25 $ and on some niche sites the price is substantially higher. Now lets assume that you tube are able to sell all their page views to one advertiser at the average Norwegian price of 25 $ per CPM. That would generate 550 million $ worth of ad revenue per year. There will be some cannibalization here towards text ads but lets say the the total ad revenue potential is somewhere in the range of 700-900 million per year. Then it looks like a rather good takeover, doesn't it?

This wont happen this year and not in 2008 either but they will get there. And this is before they have solved the video ads puzzle. The only threat's I see for you tube success is competing sites. Traffic is the only road to success in this business model and that's why you tube want take any chances on loosing users by fiddling with the actual videos.

What is wrong with traditional media companies? By Even Aas-Eng

2007-03-08T12:11:00.001+01:00

My plan is not to post personal outburst on this blog but this time I cant help myself.

On Tuesday there where champions league matches and I was watching Liverpool VS Barcelona. If you follow football you would know that a lot of action took place during the Valencia VS Inter match that was on at the same time. It wasn't football action but never the less interesting!

But I didn't see this as I was busy watching the other game. The next day I read about the fighting in the newspapers and I wanted to see the actual incident. Could I find it on any of the newspapers, NO because they don't own the rights to broadcast champions league football. That's annoying but understandable. So I went to you tube and searched for Valencia Inter but only got old matches between the two teams. Then the real quest started.

I watched the sports news at TV2 online but they didn't have any pictures because the show was sent before the game ended. I tried other newspapers in Sweden and UK, no live pictures there either. Then I went to TV3 web pages, the company that have the rights to send CL matches. What did I find there? Absolutely nothing! Well I did get a short look at what quit possible is the worst website ever made. http://www.tv3.no/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9057&Itemid=954

Then I did get to see the incident at the TV2 daily news show on TV, but they only showed a short clip. The quest continued!

I tried some more news sites before I ended up at you tube again and searched for Valencia, Inter, Fighting, 2007 and found A LOT of clips of the incident.

So my point here is that five of Norway's largest media companies had their chance to provide me with what I was Looking for. I was willing to spend 10 min on their sites being exposed for all their commercials and maybe I would have been willing to pay to see their content. None of them took the chance and I ended up at you tube. Get a grip guys, you are digging your own grave.

And then second life was back again! By Even Aas-Eng

2007-03-06T11:46:00.001+01:00

A week after my last post second life was back with a very funny story. The American presidential candidate John Edwards has jumped on the second life train and has built himself a little mansion there. The funny thing is that the whole place was vandalized this week, presumably by angry republicans with to much time on their hands.

Anyway, it tells us again how important it its to engage community users if you want anything to happen. But I don't think John was very happy with this engagement!!

What happened to Second life? By Even Aas-Eng

2007-02-21T12:19:00.001+01:00

I don't think I opened a single adage newsletter in 2006 that didn't have a second life related article. Reuters, IBM, advertising agencies and embassies all set up shop there and the enormous media hype led to a hike in second life members from 1 million in October to 3 million in January 2007. After new year it hasn't been that much fuzz.

For those of you that don't know Second life you can read up here at Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_life

So they have a lot of registered users but the fact is that only 25.000 people are logged in at once during peak hours. In other words, a fraction compared to other online based video games. Don't get me wrong, I think Second life is a very interesting phenomenon but its not taking over the world quite yet. And how many the active members take advantage of the Reuters in-game news service? Or how many clients have the Norwegian arm of Media.com won with their second life presence? Probably not that many.

One of the best articles on Second life that I saw last year was written by a columnist that had visited all real world companies virtual shops. The picture below is from W hotels virtual aloft suites concept.

As you can see the bar is not exactly crowded! The situation was the same with all the other companies. We can probably conclude that most second life ventures have been created for PR purposes and that if you want to succeed in the world of WEB2.0 you better do business on the users premises.

Personally I hope that the hype has calmed down for good and that Second Life can continue to develop its very interesting social networking/business concept. It will be very interested to see what 2007 brings. For all other companies pregnant with a Second life baby, don't do it if its just for PR, the hype is over anyway.

Even Aas-Eng

Trademark trouble, by Even Aas-Eng

2007-02-19T14:44:00.001+01:00

Google is back in court, this time to defend their advertisers right to buy other trademark keywords. Or to defend how they generate some of their revenue (it depends on who's looking)
This trial has been going on since 2004 and are hopefully drawing towards the end.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197006579

I will start by coming clean, yes I have bought other companies trademarks. A lot of them! When I worked for a Norwegian airline we made a lot of money buying competitors trademarks. It was a fairly easy way to make a buck. A couple of months back one of our clients here at McCann raised a debate after buying Norwegian ski resorts, posting an ad for great skiing in Sweden.

But is this necessarily unethical? Google is not a catalog, when you search for a company or a brand you might end up on pages posting negative remarks about that company instead of the companies own site. Most people don't have a problem with that. And every time we go to a supermarket we have hundreds of competing brands on the same shelf. When you read a newspaper article about P&G there might be a Unilever ad on the same page and nobody cares. So from a theoretical point of view I would say that's its perfectly OK to have your ad appear when people search for other companies. After all its a free market, isn't it?

Well its not that simple either. Most people probably haven't made any conclusions about Google being a catalog or a search engine. They search and expect to get the correct answer. I am sure that many user still don't know that they are clicking on ads every time they visit one of those sponsored links. My point is that we as advertiser have a responsibility towards consumers to think this trough.

So my conclusion is that I haven't got one. What a useless blog post!

Even Aas-Eng

Glocalize your business - look to the travel industry, by Even Aas-Eng

2007-02-14T16:35:00.001+01:00

I first came across the term glocalization as a economic geography student. It basically means a creation of products or services that are intended for a global market but customized to suit the local business environment. In other words, its globalisation but its local!

When I started working with online marketing and business development I soon understood that the WEB is one big glocalization machine. But still very few was taking advantage of it. After all to many years this is about to change and the travel industry in particular are duly on their way.

Before WWW the travel industry worked like this: If you wanted to travel you went to your local travel agent and looked in their brochures. The items in the brochure where provided by middlemen who had taken the time to gather a lot of different hotels, airlines and car dealers in one system so that the travel agent could sell it to the customer. So you had three steps in the chain, the vendors, the aggregators and the sales agents. No wonder travel was expensive!

When the WEB took off people predicted radical changes for the travel industry and they where right but the changes that occurred really didn't change anything. What do I mean, well consumers went online to look for nice destinations and hotels and they even started to book online. So the old travel agency on your local corner went bust but instead travel agencies started appearing online. Smart people started expedia, ebookers, opodo and became a force to be recond with. So consumers went online and new travel agencies went online, but the business model was still exactly the same.

Today this is starting to change. Airlines, hotels and rental car companies want to increase their margins and they want direct customer contact. They want to drop the middleman. The solution is and has always been online. You can target your advertising by geography, by behaviour and by context in all mayor markets and you don't need an office in each country either. Your website is a shop with no cost for shelf space so low volumes is not a big issue. And you can easily make local adjustments.

In other words, companies can "glocalize"

So we can expect a lot more local versions of international hotel chains and airline sites in the time to come. And they will pay to drive traffic to those sites globally. And it makes perfect business sense. When someone in Norway searches for the four seasons hotel in NY why shouldn't they be there to handle that potential customer?
Another effect of this is that global advertising giants like Google will make even more money because hotels/airlines will spend more and the aggregators will do the same to protect their marked share. So good times ahead!

All this doesn't mean that online travel agents will disappear but the once that are not adding any value to their clients might face though times. And can other industries extract any learning from the changes taking place in the travel industry? Surely but this post is to long already, maybe next time.

Web 2.0 politics, by Even Aas-Eng

2007-02-13T13:00:00.001+01:00

US Presidential candidate Barack Obama has launched a campaign where the users can create their own Barack Obama homepage. With blogs and social network features and everything. Very web 2.0 and probably not a bad idea. Having thousands of hardcore Obama fans writing their own Obama blogs, with Obama pictures and Obama propaganda should create a decent amount of google juice!
You can create your own Obama site here if you want to http://www.barackobama.com/

Kill the hype, by Even Aas-Eng

2007-02-12T15:28:00.001+01:00

Chairman of IAC, Barry Diller is slashing the web2.0/community/UGC hype in an interview with ClickZ today. You can read it here http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3624896

I think this is great, finally a nuanced look in the rather extreme media coverage of web2.0 related stories lately.

Keep in mind though that IAC have an organic growth strategy for most of its companies like Expedia and Tripadvisor and that Mr Diller just might be a little upset about his competitors snatching up all the new cool kids on the block, like myspace and you tube

TV commercials and search. By Even Aas-Eng

2007-02-08T09:48:00.001+01:00

Superbowl is behind us and the lucky advertiser who paid a billion $ for a 30 sec ad spot are reping the rewards (hopefully for them)

The aftermath of superbowl has sparked a debate about who maximized their results by bying sponsored links in addition to their tv spots. Some did and some didnt. http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2007/02/07/paid-search-backs-up-super-bowl-ad-efforts/

Its more interesting that this is no issue in the norwegian market at all. As far as I know not one of Norways bigger advertisers has done an integrated campaign on purpose. I can guarantee that every time you run a tv campaign people will search for your brand, your product or messages that you communicate through your commercial. Its a very easy job making sure that you are visible when they do.

In general we are not good enough in utilizing the potential in search engines. What people search after is a reflection of what goes on around us. Mayor news happenings, natural disasters, advertising, sport events, elections, all have an influence on consumers search behaviour. The picture below shows us the search trend for the keyword "Tsunami" no fruther explanation is needed

During last summers world cup in fotball I think two norwegian advertisers bought sponsored links related to the happening. The worlds focus was on this event for a month and yes people where searching. So there is a great potential for advertiser here but in order to gain they have to work with their search engine campaigns a little bit different than most do. You have to be hands on. When something happens that in any way is relevant to your brand or product you have to act by adding keywords to your campaign, changing ad texts or make other necessary changes. But you have to be quick, otherwise you miss the beat!

Good luck,

Even

The power of digitalized WOM! By Even Aas-Eng

2007-02-07T16:31:00.001+01:00

Well this is not something new. Everbody understands how easily a message can spread on web. Trough mail, IM, blogs and communities a message can move across the globe before you can even say word of mouth.

But how fast a message spreads has often a lot to do with general trends in our society not only the contend of the message.

The last couple of days we have experienced just that. As all over the world there is a lot of focus on global warming at the moment. That is probably why a worker at Naturvernforbundet ( an environmental NGO) decided to send out a mail to his friends with the decsription on how to cancel your paper phone book. The mail went out this monday, on tuesday I got it from a friend and today I have received no more than five mails.

It turns out that more than 7000 people have canceled their phone book in the last two days. Thats more than the total number of canceled phone books the last FIVE years!

In addition to influence the number of canceled phone books the mail has also sparked a media debate. The NGO worker who has turned up on radio and in newspapers, printed and online and his story has probably ended up in alot of blogs like this one. So twice the effect.

Before the email was send he wrote a letter to a printed newspaper but they didnt have space for him. Today he is on the front page instead. http://www.dn.no/forsiden/politikkSamfunn/article1017713.ece?WT.svl=article_image

Viral is one of those nice buzz words, but a lot of viral campaigns turn out not to be viral at all. Many creators of viral campaigns could learn a thing or two from this story.

Even