I’ve got a Tumblr page setup for micro-blogging… quotes, thoughts, pictures, videos that I find fascinating… generally, they compliment this blog well. Sometimes, they are totally random.

Feel free to check it out. For those of you who are RSS buffs, there is a separate feed for the Tumblr page.

I haven’t blogged about Google’s new Ad Planner so thought that I’d start my week talking about it and sharing a sexy and hot observation I made totally randomly.

What is the purpose of Ad Planner? Media Planners spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out where their brands or clients’ audiences are so that the brand can buy media to reach them. For digital media, many agencies use either Comscore or @Plan; both aren’t perfect, but they certainly help us organize thousands of potential sites for media planning.

Google is entering the world of Ad Planning. Why? I suspect it’s because they make it easy for anyone to purchase media on any site as they come into the Google Network. If you’re on the Google Network as a publisher, then ad dollars should follow as buying media for the small tire shop in Boise or a Fortune 100 brand can now reach you for display based online media.

I took a spin around the interface tonight and looked for Males, Ages 35-44, $150k+ in HHI, and have a Graduate Degree. It’s very intuitive, no frills - and gives a nice site list. If you use DoubleClick’s MediaVisor, you can export this and can finish planning in your preferred tool.

A funny thing happened however as I dug deeper. If you look closely at which sites come up first, you’ll see that the #1 site for this search is BDJGirls, an escort service. I’m all for beautiful women (and there are some on their site), but I don’t think I’m going to be spending my brand’s money on an escort service’s website. After reviewing their site, they don’t even accept advertising.

To add a bit of humor to this, BDJGirls is listed in the Weddings category. Does this mean that these males are looking for dates to weddings?

Maybe Ad Planner needs some refinement?  What’s evident however is that DoubleClick is very important to Google’s future strategy.

Strange thing happened… I was reading the Wall Street Journal during my commute this morning and there was a music article (and recommendation) so I went to find out a lot more about the artist (Girl Talk) as the technology behind the music sounded interesting to me.  Who knew that the business centric WSJ was going to look in-depth at music sampling?

Anyway, I went to check out Girl Talk’s website and it’s pointed to a MySpace page where you can click a link to buy the album.  Following the similar format of Radiohead’s latest release, you can pay whatever you’d like for the album.  I chose to put in $0.00 and on the next screen, the band asks why I was not inclined to pay but they still allowed me to download the album.  Screen shot below… though this was very interesting.

The data they get from this is invaluable.  I’d love to see the breakdown of what people say.

Something really fascinating happened today.

We brought together Madison Avenue and Silicon Alley/Valley at our first annual The Media Kitchen Digital Media Venture Capital Conference (say that 4 times fast). Having spent the better part of my life building digital media startups, I noticed that there was a huge divide between what is happening in the garages and what’s happening in the plush offices of Madison Ave (Varick Street). Since Madison Ave relies on these emerging digital media companies and vice versa, I thought it would be extremely beneficial to bring various constituents together with dozens of brands (clients), press, agency folks, and funds/portfolio companies to sit through a bunch of inspiring presentations and collaborate with each other.

It all started at 8AM at the Tribeca Grand in New York, Union Square Ventures, DFJ Gotham, and First Round Capital spoke about their views on the digital media landscape and where they see it going. There were some extremely insightful comments and inspiring moments… Albert Wenger, partner of venture firm Union Square Ventures was talking about generational shifts and broke them down to, “people who dated before they had their first computer and those who had first computer before starting to date.”

After each venture firm spoke, there were two portfolio companies who presented. USV portfolio companies included Tumblr and Outside.in. DFJ Gotham portfolio companies included Izea and ContextWeb. First Round Capital companies included AppNexus and Pinch Media. Conversations and presentations centered around micropublishing platforms to Internet “plumbing” and social media platforms to iPhone analytics. Hearing from the CEOs/Founders of these companies added a touch of validation and inspiration.

Some great audience questions were asked at the end of the conference and there is one I’d like to highlight: one of the group directors at The Media Kitchen asked all of the presenters if there were any digital media companies who were trying to build sustainable businesses (or were doing real revenue) instead of trying to be acquired. I thought this was very interesting. When we hear of Silicon Valley and Alley based startups, we all wonder what the “exit” will be for that particular company. With close to $10BLN in M&A deals in 2007, we’ve come to expect quick acquisitions… but doesn’t building sustainable companies count anymore?

Lots more thoughts to come from this conference… look for articles/postings across the Internet as people start to blog about the event. Here is a recent posting by Allen Stern over at Center Networks about the videos of the event.

Advertising is going through a significant innovation period right now and it’s fascinating to take part in it. Online advertising (strictly online) was established and tested in the 90s and now has billions of dollars being spent. Brands are spending increasing amounts of money to engage with their audiences in the digital world.

The Internet is really the first medium that is enabled by technology, potential for mass reach, and the ability for anyone to aggregate audiences (niche or mass). Television, print, radio, and OOH (out of home) all have significant barriers to entry in terms of both human and capital resource. Because of the lower barriers to entry and the adoption of billions of people worldwide, the Internet has become one of the most fertile feeding grounds for technology geeks and media mavens to innovate within and to make a difference in a short amount of time.

With all of the properties that exist online (web only or hybrid), a common theme for many of them has been monetization by advertising revenue. Over the past decade, companies like Poindexter, Atlas, Overture, DoubleClick, Google, Burst, Sonar, Tribal Fusion, and a whole slew of others have helped brands reach their audiences either through technology or advertising sales (enabled by technology).

Up until very recent years (and in many cases, even today), when you advertise online, you are reaching the audience of a particular website. For instance, if you are advertising on FerrariChat.com, you are going to reach the affluent crowd that visits that particular site. To put this in context, you would advertise (place your media) on sites/properties that have a high composition of your target audience. If a sites composition is 92% (of your audience), it means that for every $10,000 of media dollars spent, you are wasting $800.

Of course, we all like to create efficiencies and limit our wastage. Advertising technologies are in a high-growth phase where audience data is becoming highly sought after and important. Most brands and companies have tons of audience data but generally, it’s always existed in many different silos (divisions of companies) or the technical (or operational) infrastructure was never in place to crunch the data. Now that entrepreneurial visions and technical infrastructure are on the same wavelength, advertising is becoming increasingly technical.

Lets throw away our old models of buying mass audiences.

Lets look at new models of buying single people and I’m sure you see the benefits of this. This isn’t revolutionary but it’s becoming mainstream. Some smart people have been thinking about this for quite some time but there are finally enough media dollars behind this to move everything forward and validation is occuring.

Separate audiences from the page and on top of that, fragment the audiences into singular conversations (impressions).

In order to buy single targeted impressions, you must have data on the impression. Data is key. Dare I say, data is the new king (content)? If you have data and aren’t afraid to roll up your sleeves and analyze it, you can do some really interesting things today. Just having data however does not mean a thing…. quantitative analysis and modeling abilities will allow everyone from agencies to technology companies create unique audience segments and add color to single impressions.

Whether your a venture capitalist looking for your next investment, a media planner/strategist looking to figure out where to spend your ad dollars, or a brand manager looking to grow your P&L, there are no shortage of companies emerging (or have emerged recently) that could provide this data. Just look at the behavioral targeting networks that emerged such as Tacoda, Revenue Science, and Specific Media. Not only do these networks allow you to target based on behavior, but they provide added value in the sense that they show you who your audience really is by analyzing the data they have on the audiences who react to your brand messaging. This data is turned into reports that are given during and after the campaign has run for your brand. Of course, this is very interesting.

Look at Lotame, 33Across, Datran, Media6 and others that have quite a bit of data about users that can be leveraged for reaching audience segments. Matching an impression with a chunk of relevant data can be extremely interesting.

Who will win the near/mid-term advertising game?

This is a very interesting question. I think that there are quite a few players in the market who have quite a bit of data and also have an ad-sales team. Many times, these companies keep the garden walls “up” with this data and you can only receive minor parts of it through your ad buys. I think there are ways to monetize that data individually aside (but maybe not mutually exclusive) from having to buy media. I’d like to see companies leverage all of their data together to make impressions more valuable, whether they are bought from the respective company or a 3rd party.

Where does this play out? In the exchanges, networks, and sometimes, site buys.

Food for thought: While most of this conversation was centered around the Online Advertising world… it’s safe to assume that this will take place for all media channels in the next few years. As we’re one power outlet away from being a fully digital society, we’re going to be able to buy single impressions across television, radio, print, OOH, etc. Data will make this infinintly more valuable. Get excited… I know I am.

Yesterday, we had a fantastic Fathers Day as we went to the Scarsdale Concours in the morning and up to the lakehouse in the afternoon.  I’ve added 2 pictures from the day to this blog post but to see more from the Concours, check here.

For a short while, I had a tab up at the top of this blog labeled “Ramblings.” This tab was for a Tumblr page of mine which I had neglected to update… until recently. It’s officially back but until we figure out how to fit it into the design of the blog, it’ll be accessible from the “My Favorites” area or by going to http://dherman.tumblr.com directly.

I like to use the Ramblings area for qoutes/pictures or other interesting things I find… generally, they are much shorter and w/o analysis… which is what the front page of this blog is for.

You can officially access Ramblings here.

Rock’n'roll.

One of my colleagues in the office told me about a website statistics service named Woopra (he knows I love quantitative data). I had not heard about it prior, so I went a did a little research around the Internet about it. Apparently, it launched on/around May 30 2008, as it’s relatively new, but had a nice little writeup on TechCrunch. I did some Tweet tracking and saw that a healthy early adapter audience was using it.

What is Woopra you ask? Very simply: MyBlogLog meets Google Analytics and has a baby, and then morphs into a Bloomberg Terminal of the next century. Very, very interesting, at least to me it is. I’ve taken some screenshots of my Woopra Terminal and put them below for you to see:

What I like about Woopra is that it gives me information in near real-time and tells me where my audience is going and where they have been on my website. Generally, all of the data exists on server logs, but I like the advanced graphical representation of my data. In the screenshots above, you can see the ticker on the bottom of the page that scrolls with data from the server.

Woopra is going to run into some issues when large publishers start signing up. They are in beta right now which is very smart and limiting their service to publishers who are less than 10,000 page views. I’m speculating that the reason for this is because the amount of resources it takes to crunch all of the data is fairly intensive and that they want to work out all of the kinks before they start charing. I’m interested to learn how their infrastructure is built - are they using Amazon’s EC2?

What I’d like to see is Woopra share network data information.  Meaning, if I track a view on my site and rename them, I’d like to see that “renamed” person across the entire Woopra network.  There is a lot of information in the larger “network” - lets see if Woopra pools that data.

I also give them credit for the slick interface.

I braved the 95+ degree heat to head out of the office midday to head down to the Ritz-Carlton in Battery Park to speak on a panel full of agency executives.  Federated Media bankrolled the summit and they spared no expense and was completely impressed for the hour or so that I was down there.

When I came back to the office, I checked Twitter to see who was talking about the CM Summit.  Low and behold, there was some tweets about the conference and PaidContent had already released an article talking about our panel and used a quote of mine.  I’d like to add some color to that quote and finish the conversation that we started up on stage.

The quote is a as follows:

– Sorting intelligence: Darren Herman, Media Kitchen’s head of digital media: “There will always always be specialist firms in marketing. That’s true on Wall St. Every medium is becoming digital. And when you’re looking at digital TV, online and mobile, there will have to be separate marketing tracks to address clients needs according to those different outlets.”

Let me add some color and context:  First off, this question stems from my original call-out when I asked readers of this blog to raise questions/comments about what they want covered on this panel.  One of my friends from P&G raised a few questions (as seen here) and the above quote was the response…   I believe that there will be specialist firms who eat/breathe and sleep about a specific problem/need.  This could be about social media.  This could be about search.  This could be about auction based display media.  This could be about radio spots.  Etc.  Brands or agencies will still have to manage these agencies as it’s not going to get any easier, but there could be more efficient ways of doing so.  Now that technology has proliferated most of our lives, it could be via a group video chat, a meeting in Second Life (a la Crayonville), instant messaging sessions, etc.

Will there essentially be an agency that oversees agencies?  That’s a question I don’t have an answer too, and honestly, no one has answers to all of this… the beauty of it is that we’re going to figure it out as we go.  There are no right answers, every single client likes something a bit different and we’re in the business of servicing our clients and continuing to push the innovation limits.

I was asked to accompany my wife to Destination Maternity, a store which primarily sells clothing to pregnant women this weekend.  For those of you who don’t know, we’re expecting in November.  To be honest, I wasn’t thrilled to go, but because of logistics and where we had to be afterwards, it made sense to join her.

The Destination Maternity we visited was located in White Plains, NY across from The Westchester, a large mall with Neiman Marcus, Nordstroms, and other high profile stores.  Upon walking in to the store, I noticed that it carried three brands:  Mimi Maternity, A Pea in the Pod, and Motherhood Maternity.  These three brands don’t really cannabilize each other as they appeal to different customers, much like Old Navy, Gap, and Banana Republic do.  After studying foot traffic through the store (and my wife’s buying habits), they actually compliment each other very well.

Destination Maternity understands that a large number of men do not like to shop but are usually schlepping their wife’s around maternity stores.  Setup in the center of the store was a couch and a few comfortable leather chairs around a large LG flat-screen television which was displaying the news (and sports).  I thought this was a nice tough for men who do not want to walk around the store while their wives shop.

Right next to the sitting area, there is an indoor play area for children.  While no children were in the store while we were there, I can see how busy it could get in there (sort of like an indoor sandbox) as they had quite a few toys.

Across from the sitting area, there was a separate windowed room where there was a yoga class in progress.  I counted about 9 women partaking in maternity yoga and they all looked like they were having a great time.  Because Sherri was taking her time in the store, the yoga class which was originally in progress  when we got there ended while I was sitting in the chair and I watched the mothers walk around the store directly after the class and 8/9 of the women purchased something.  Yes, 8 out of the 9 purchased at least one item from the store.

Lastly, while the pregnant women walk around the store, the staff hands out bottled natural juices (Orange Juice, Apple Juice) and waters - and I even scored myself a drink.

Destination Maternity gets it. This retail location goes beyond the traditional “sale” and creates an environment that solves the needs of pregnant women in many capacities.  I was extremely impressed with all of the classes, lectures, sitting areas, child areas, and clothing options.  Luxury women’s maternity clothing looks like it may be a great industry to be in (note, I’ve not done any research other than anecdotal).