I’ve been a bit slow to update this site lately, as my return to Federated Media, and preparation for the CM Summit and OpenCo NYC, have pretty much eaten up all my time lately. But I did want to repost a few things I have written elsewhere, starting with this article in Ad Age, written two weeks ago.
Titled Publishers, Ad-Tech Firms, Marketers Need to Connect, Build Trust (no, I didn’t write that headline, if I was in charge, it might have been “Hold Hands or Die Apart” – pageviews, ya know?), the article argues that our industry is not yet prepared for what the market is going to demand – solutions that integration adtech and brand marketing. Here’s a sampling:
Something troubling has jumped out at me. There’s an extraordinary asymmetry of information among these three important players in our industry, and a disturbing sense of distrust. Brand marketers don’t believe that ad-tech companies view brands as true partners. Ad-tech companies think brand marketers are paying attention to the wrong things. And publishers, with a few important exceptions, feel taken advantage of by everyone.
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(image) Back in 2005 I whipped off a post with a title that has recently become relevant again – “Traffic of Good Intent.” That post keyed off a major issue in the burgeoning search industry – click fraud. In the early days of search, click fraud was a huge problem (that link is from 2002!). Pundits (like me) claimed that because everyone was getting paid from fraud, it was “something of a whistling-past-the-graveyard issue for the entire (industry).” Cnet ran a story in 2004 identifying bad actors who created fake content, then ran robots over AdSense links on those pages. It blamed the open nature of the Web as fueling the fraudsters, and it noted that Google could not comment, because it was in its quiet period before an IPO.
But once public, Google did respond, suing bad actors and posting extensive explanations of its anti-fraud practices. Conversely, a major fraud-based class action lawsuit was filed against all of the major search engines. Subsequent research suggested that as much as 30% of commercial clicks were fraudulent – remember, this was after Google had gone public, and after the issue had been well-documented and endlessly discussed in the business and industry press. The major players in search finally banded together to fight the problem – understanding full well that without a united front and open communication, trust would never be established.
Think about that little history lesson – a massive, emerging new industry, one that was upending the entire marketing ecosystem, was operating under a constant cloud of “fraud” which may have been poisoning nearly a third of the revenues in the space. Yet billions in revenue and hundreds of billions in market value was still created. And after several years of lawsuits, negative press, and lord-knows-how-much-fraud, the clickfraud story has pretty much been forgotten.
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A year or so ago a friend and colleague approached me with a crazy idea – what if we tried to re-invent the tech conference, expanding it to become a celebration of all innovative companies that are inspired by the values of the open Internet? And further, what if it wasn’t a conference at all, in the normal sense, but more of a festival, a combination of an artist’s open studio, a music festival, and a business event?
That’s what became OpenCo, an “inside out” conference where instead of sitting in a stuffy hotel ballroom, you go our into the modern working city, to see founders talk about their companies in their native environment.
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The agenda for our seventh annual CM Summit is live. And it rocks. You can read all about it here. I am really looking forward to this conversation, mainly due to the quality of the folks who are coming. Oh, and the theme, of course.
I won’t beat around the bush. I want you all to come. I’ve lowered the price, because I heard from many of you last year that the ticket was too high (it sold out anyway). But this year, the conversation is too rich for anyone to cry poor over. Come and join us.
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Over on the LinkedIn Influencer network, I’ve revealed how I manage my often-overflowing inbox. It’s not exactly rocket science, but enough people have found it interesting that I thought I’d share it in a professional context. If you’re interested in stuff like this, give it a read and let me know what you think. From the post:
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Whenever I hear a friend or colleague complain about how their email inbox is “out of control” I take the opportunity to toss out a humblebrag: I never go to sleep before getting my inbox down to ten or fewer messages. Every so often, I even get it to zero.
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(image) Last week I was in Salt Lake City for the Adobe Summit, on a stage the size of a parking lot. After some opening remarks about how the world is increasingly lit with data, I brought out Adam Bain, President of Global Revenue for Twitter. (He Vined it, natch.) Five thousand or so folks in the Internet marketing and media business were in attendance, behind us was a 7,000 square foot HD screen (I kid you not). I’ve been in front of a few big crowds, but this one was enormous. You could have parked a few 787s in the space.
My point is this: Bain knew he was in front of a lot of people, including nearly 200 journalists. As we worked our way through any number of predictable but important topics – Twitter’s revenue (growing but no numbers), the acquisition of BlueFin (TV analytics and more), etc. – I asked Bain to distinguish between Twitter and its competitive set. This was a relatively politic way of asking the inevitable “What about Facebook” question. It was then that Bain uttered what I thought was the most interesting comment of the day: “[With Twitter,] there’s no algorithm between you and your feed.”
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Starting a business is a journey, as any founder will tell you. When I started Federated Media Publishing almost eight years ago, I did my best to collect all the lessons learned from Wired, The Industry Standard, and Web 2 Summit, and apply them to my new venture. One of those lessons was that it’s OK to step away when the time is right. Several years ago, I did just that, becoming an “active Chairman” at FMP and handing the operational reigns over to an accomplished executive, Deanna Brown.
Since making that decision, FMP has grown dramatically, but it’s also had its challenges. Last year, for example, we made the difficult but important decision to rethink the company so as to lean into our two most promising lines of business – content marketing (which we lay claim to inventing as “conversational marketing” some seven years ago) and programmatic marketing (which we invested in heavily last year, after acquiring a very fast growing business in Lijit Networks in Fall of 2011). It meant stepping back from something we had been doing for some time – directly selling standard display banners – but it proved to be the right choice. FMP is having a great first half of 2013, and I couldn’t be more excited about our roadmap and potential for the rest of the year and beyond.
The funny thing is, even as I became “just the Chairman” at FMP over the past two years, I never stopped thinking about the company. It woke me up nearly every night, tugging at my sleeve, asking me questions, demanding my best thinking. Deanna and I would meet every week to talk strategy, review numbers, or just plain chew the fat. Running a company with hundreds of employees, top notch investors, and a big top line revenue number is damn hard, and Deanna not only ran the place, she made it hum. I am in her debt.
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