All in MeVertising

Advertising vs. Licensing: How can you tell what is appropriate?

Charlie O'Donnell
MeVertising

Here's something I don't quite understand the economics and protocol of...

MLB pays to advertise, right?  Whether it's the league or teams or whoever, I see baseball ads in the subway.

Yet, if you want to use MLB stuff in a video game, you have to pay them for the license.

But, when MLB wants to be in Second Life, that's free, except for the product costs of hiring someone to contruct the virtual ballpark.

So let me get this straight.... MLB pays to advertise in old media channels that people are paying less and less attention to, only pays minimal production costs to play in what a lot of people believe is the future of online, and then gets paid to be in a growing market where attention is full and engagement is off the charts?

Am I missing something?

If you don't live socially online, you're not going to get social media

Charlie O'Donnell
MeVertising, Venture Capital & Technology

Was having a conversation with a friend today who feels a lot of pressure from her PR firm to learn about all of these new social media tools so that her clients can take advantage of them.

She's also given 10-20% of her emerging media time for education, and her emerging media time is only 50% of what she's supposed to be working on for her clients...the rest is on traditional media.

Meanwhile, the folks that make social media attractive... the movers and shakers of MySpace and the blogosphere... they're doing it fulltime.  They're tagging and reblogging and connecting and pasting cool widgets into their pages everyday.

Anyone who doesn't live in that world everyday, not as work research but recreationally, because they love connecting and discovering new things online, is simply going to fall behind. 

It's actually pretty funny, that a lot of these young people who are social network junkies don't realize that the skills they possess are highly sought after by marketing and PR firms.  They have an innate understanding of what flies in this world.

Whether you work for a VC firm, PR firm, in marketing, for a brand, a media company, etc. you need to find a way to integrate these tools into your real life, otherwise it's always going to be something "extra" that you never get to or don't fully understand because you're just a casual user.  There's no blog you can read to get all the answers.  No conference that will help you get it.  What also won't work is hiring a bunch of interns that you think are "cool", because no single intern is going to be representative of anyone else.  Unless you live in this social media world, be prepared to watch it pass you by like an outsider.

Get your money for nothing and your... oh... wait.. I used that one already. Um... "Freebird!": Ads and Social Networking

Charlie O'Donnell
MeVertising, Venture Capital & Technology

 Scott Karp writes a great blog called Publishing 2.0 and he's talked several times about paying for advertising in a world where lots of content can be created and published for free.  What's the point?  Why bother?  Why not just throw some free ads up and let virality take its course?
It's a great point, but I have a few counters.

In the instance of Wendy's creating a MySpace profile, which anyone can do for free:

"What if Wendy’s won’t pay? Will MySpace have to tear down the page? That would be a great advertiser relations program — policing for unpaid commercial pages and tearing them down."

Actually, that's entirely fair and should be expected.  There are lots of instances of software and APIs that are free for non-commercial usage but paid for a commercial license.  If you are using MySpace to make a buck, doesn't MySpace have a right to take a reasonable piece of that buck?  There would have to be tiers, of course...     My local pool hall shouldn't have to pay much more than the price of a Yellow Pages ad for their profile.

Plus, going paid for commercial, just like Craigslist is doing for NYC commercial real estate, gets rid of a lot of spam. 
What's the value of paying?  Think of MySpace like the RedHat of the ad world.  RedHat packages free Linux with a service guarantee and support.  That's what I think of when I think of Advertising 2.0...  sure, viral videos are free to post, but you want more than just a single number--hits.  You want demographics.  You want to see what other types of videos people are watching.  You need data and there's where the MySpaces and YouTubes should really be ramping up.  Give me a whole reporting package that I can show my boss when I create a commercial MySpace profile that tells me a lot about the users.  What's the #1 band of the people who friend me?  Age?  Race?  You can't do that with a free profile but that's very valuable data.

That's one of the things we're focusing on with our upcoming consumer product.  Anyone can sell a virtual t-shirt direct to consumers or as a sponsored ad buy, but I think the difference is in the data and ongoing relationship you build with the users.  Businesses thrive on consumer data and I think that's going to be a major asset of Advertising 2.0.  If you can put a viral video in front of someone, cool... but what you really need if you are a business is a call to action to convert those folks into customers or at least some useable data.  The platforms have, need, or are definitely working on building out those tools.

Commercialize? No. Participate? Yes.

Charlie O'Donnell
MeVertising

If you are doing anything in interactive marketing, you should be reading Rohit's blog. His position at Ogilvy gives him a lot of insight into how the role of PR and marketing is changing as digital media changes.

The other day, the terms he used for the role of brands in social media really struck me.

Participate

Commericalize

At the end of the day, brands all want the same thing...   influence, attention, sales... whatever.   This is capitalism and we are all aware that all the free stuff on the web comes at some kind of price. 

But how we encounter those brands can vary dramatically.

"Participating in a conversation" is a very human thing... and for a brand to do it, they need to act more human.  This includes sharing, mutual respect, openness... all sorts of things we come to expect by the actual people around us.  If brands can't do this, it is unlikely we are going to sacrifice any attention that we normally give to our friends in social media.

Every brand manager out there should take out a piece of paper and write down three ways that their brand "participates in a conversation".  If they can't think of any, they should talk to people like Rohit, because they're probably commercializing.

Sitepal avatars pitching Russian brides... another creative marketing usage

Charlie O'Donnell
MeVertising

And you thought I was kidding.

I think we should have a contest... what is the most bizzare *legal* service you could sell with a Sitepal avatar.

I have to admit, this site is slightly compelling if for nothing else than the fact that Russian accents are sexy.  I think it's a James Bond thing...    

"She loves me... she stabs me in the leg with a poison tipped shoe-knife... she loves me... she stabs me in the leg with a poison tipped shoe-knife."

We've got a money back guarantee on these characters, so I'd like to issue a challenge for someone to come up with a product a Sitepal can't help sell...

Custom and Creative versus Canned and Scaleable

Charlie O'Donnell
MeVertising

AdSense is easy.  It takes minutes to create a text link and then you can blow out as much advertising as your bank account can take.  That's scaleable.

Banners are a little harder.  Someone has to draw it.  It might take an hour or two, but once its done, you can repurpose.

When you do something a little more creative, it's harder.  Things you can only use once don't scale as well, but they can be a lot more entertaining.  Plus, its much more appealing to the consumer.

Rich media is a great example.  When TV commercials get reporposed for internet video, its mindlessly easy to setup.  However, the level of ease is only matched by the level of hatred people have for TV commercials following them onto the web.  Easy to setup, easy to fail, to alienate... easy to never click a video again.   When I hear the talk about YouTube monetization, I'm hoping we'll see some really creative advertising appear within this unique community, but I also recognize that it might be difficult to make happen.

Or, on the other hand, aren't brands looking for unique?  Don't they want different?  Certainly the agencies should be pushing this, no?  For them to come up with unique applications for all of these web communities, it would be more revenue and more work... but hopefully better results as well.

So how do you create a tradeoff?  Are creative campaigns destined to become more niche and more specialized, making them more appealing, but also less profitable and more people-heavy.  Are there even enough talented creative types around to think of these creative brand interactions?  How does creative and unique scale? 

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