Mick Jagger was Right

This blog was previously featured on iMedia Connection on September 29, 2008.

You can’t always get what you want. Hate to break it to you, but it’s true—Mick and the boys were right.

As we continue to grow (and we are—Advertising Week was an unqualified success for us, and I have the hangover to prove it), the online media buying landscape continues to get increasingly more complicated--just like my taxes have over the last 20 years. Remember the glory days of the 1040EZ? It took 20 minutes, I did it myself. Now I’m itemizing, saving receipts, and hiring people to do all this work for me every April—and they have the nerve to charge me for this work. To be honest, I don’t really know what’s going on anymore with my taxes, but I know they get done every year, and I’m not in jail for tax fraud. Although they see lots of reports these days, I think a lot of online advertisers feel the same way.

It’s damn hard to be a good online media buyer these days. There are 4 TV networks and 300 cable outlets, yet there are approximately one million ad-supported websites. In 1998, everybody knew the deal—nobody got fired for buying “the big three”, so that’s exactly what happened. But times have changed.

Today, as this new emerging middle class of quality publishers continues to explode onto the digital media landscape, the “findability” of these publishers is harder than ever. In that IRSish kind of way, we are headed towards an increasingly “itemized” world. That will make the difficult job of buying and managing online media an even tougher task, and it will require an entirely new generation of tools that offer considerably more than an algorithm. Leading agencies are now buying on *thousands* of sites annually (the big three thousand?). For both publishers and buyers, real-time, algorithm-dependent ad optimization means a forfeiture of control—yet maintaining total control over those placements means more work. If you’re a brand-only buyer that is accountable for the environment where every ad appears, then accept the idea that an uber-easy, turnkey, on-the-fly optimization solution doesn’t exist for you. You’re going to need to be involved, you’re going to pay a premium for the right to buy in the “right neighborhoods”, and you’re going to need to find the right management tools that give you the protection you need as you optimize.

And if you’re practicing the noble art of performance-based buying, think twice about your champagne goals if you’re working with a beer budget or pricing structure (confession: I like beer). If it’s only about conversions at the lowest possible price, then you must be willing to forfeit the right to make demands about where your ads appear, and you should quickly relocate to Algorithm City. Publishers will respect your right to ask, so long as you respect their right to say no. As I’ve written before, blind buys are fine...if and only if you’re willing to make the requisite concessions. But trusting an algorithm to optimize a brand-sensitive buy is risky business.

Now…if you’re in the middle of these two kinds of buying missions, you’re a “branded response” marketer. There are more of you every day. You’ll make concessions on acquisition costs in order to control where your ads appear (or more importantly, where they *don’t* appear), and you’re willing to pay a premium to ensure your ads appear in brand-enhancing environments while you continually police ROI. You can’t allow yourself to be at the mercy of the blind algorithm, but performance against KPIs still matters to you as you maintain control over the publishers you work with.

Aside from the challenge of wrangling their clients into signing off on media plans, any savvy online buyer wants it all—free planning and buying tools, perfect workflow that “speaks” to them, a guarantee that they’ve found exactly the right sites for the buy, low prices, never-before–offered placements, total brand protection and transparency, perfect optimization that happens automatically, record-setting conversions, every level of targeting imaginable, and insanely responsive sale reps who never take a day off or call in sick. Frankly, I also think they’d be happy if fax machines were suddenly outlawed and we were forced to get rid of paper IOs. But in a world where you really can’t have it both ways, as the Stones warned us in 1968 (wow—forty years ago), it’s time for us to realize that the old adage is true—you can’t always get what you want.

Regardless of how you buy or sell today, take a good look around the marketplace. Over the next 24 months, the market is going to explode with options for you—tools that offer you the proper balance between automation and control. The marketplace realizes that you want both of them all the time. Keep looking, keep testing, and keep an open mind.

Remember what the Stones taught us. You can’t always get what you want, but:

If you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need.

Posted: 10/01/08 | Responses: 0

The Second Act for Adobe’s Flash Platform

When it comes to the way time is measured by the World Wide Web, it is not cliché to say that what is cutting-edge online today becomes passe virtually overnight. It seems surprising then, even remarkable, that Adobe’s Flash technology has avoided joining other highly-regarded, ahead-of-their-time applications in the digital dustbin.

In 2002, Jeremy Allaire, then the Chief Technology Officer at Macromedia predicted that Flash would help facilitate the company’s vision for a next-generation Internet running Rich Internet Applications (content-rich applications that can be deployed on standalone, web-enabled devices). He made those remarks at a time when only 10% of Americans had broadband at home (according to a Pew Internet and Life Project Report measuring broadband usage in the United States), and when the wireless movement (PDAs and mobile phones) was in its formative stages.

As a technology, Flash itself was in its pre-adolescence. Macromedia acquired the simple, vector-based animation tool from FutureWave Software in 1996 and gained an early following from the design community who helped evangelize it’s use on the Web. Over the years, Macromedia molded the product into a proper development platform while nudging their ardent supporters forward. In another shrewd move, Macromedia kept the file size for each iteration of player acceptable for installing on computers that were connected to dial-up modems.

Impact On The Web

By the time Adobe Systems completed its acquisition of Macromedia in 2005, the latest version of the Flash Player had an 85% percent adoption rate. As a tool for communication, Flash had been, and remains, unrivaled in its ability to offer users a multimedia experience that is consistent in all browsers, regardless of operating system.

The importance of this last point cannot be overstated enough. Flash enabled the Internet to flourish beyond a landscape of text-driven web pages. There will come a time when the current crop of Internet users will shudder to learn that the World Wide Web had at one point existed without the ubiquitous video and animation that flow through it.

Flash also has the distinction of helping to recruit technology talent to the Web. Although other technology platforms (Perl and Visual Basic to name a couple) were already associated with programming for the Web, Flash was perhaps the only tool that successfully managed to poach graphic designers from the world of print. And although CSS and AJAX have since muscled into the web development playground, Flash continues to be virtually the only tool that allows designers and programmers to seamlessly play in the same sandbox.

Breaching The SEO Barrier

In spite of its rise to prominence on the Web, one of the main knocks on Flash has always been its lack of SEO support. Traditionally, Search Engine bots such as Google’s, have been unable to index content buried within .swf files (Flash files produced for Web). Developers have attempted to circumvent this short-coming by duplicating Flash content within hidden DIV tags with only modest success.

Fortunately, Adobe through a joint effort with Google, announced this past June that Flash-based content will now be more easily indexed without requiring any modifications by developers to existing Flash files. Pre-existing websites that are comprised predominantly of Flash content should experience better search results once the GoogleBot re-indexes each site.

How RIAs Are Influencing MMi’s Approach To Web Development

Market Maker Interactive believes that the underpinnings of a successful website lie in its ability to communicate the right message to the widest possible audience.

Over the past year our approach to using Flash has moved in step with the emergence of RIAs as previously cited by Jeremy Allaire. We are currently using Flash to build self-contained widgets that encapsulate our clients’ message and brand. In partnership with the Clearspring Widget Network, MMi is able to distribute each widget virally across the Web, desktop and mobile phones.

The announcement that Flash is becoming more SEO-friendly fits right in line with MMi’s core philosophy. Increasingly, we will be thinking about (and acting upon) integrating Flash into complex, content-driven portals. We will also take advantage of our hard-won SEO and Analytics expertise to fine-tune the content we convey within a Flash application.

The Future Of RIAs Has Emerged

Now that broadband access is becoming more common (55% of Americans have a high-speed connection at home), Flash is poised to deliver content to a variety of platforms beyond the web browser.

Adobe has extended the Flash application framework with Adobe AIR, allowing Flash developers to build applications that run natively on the Microsoft Windows and Apple operating systems, and will soon run on Linux.

In regards to mobile, Adobe has depicted wireless service providers as increasingly interested in providing additional subscriber value and improving customer retention. According to a news release in Reuters, there are currently 2.7 billion mobile phones in use worldwide and global market penetration is expected to reach 70% by 2010.

Like the Internet boom that preceded it, Adobe is banking on having lightning strike twice with its Flash player platform.

Posted: 08/20/08 | Responses: 0