Darren Herman - Marketing, Advertising, Media and Technology Blog

Disrupting a Disrupted Industry

Darren — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 15:43:18 +0000

When an industry is in the middle of being disrupted, it’s the perfect time to add more logs to the fire. Today, lets concentrate on the music industry. While everyone is focusing on distribution, recording, and digital rights, I’m focused on touring and concerts (btw, a money maker). In the past, I’ve written quite a bit about how important the experience of music is.

See this idea over at inefficiencies. Think “living room shows.” Read the post and would love to hear your thoughts.

A Big Change…

Darren — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:37:24 +0000

This is not an Obama post. I promise. It’s far from it.

It’s about David Matthew Herman, born into the world on November 5, 2008. Sherri and I have welcomed him with open arms (and a lot of pushing on behalf of Sherri) but he’s here now and I couldn’t be happier. The 9 months of waiting were well worth it. Blogging is going to be light over the next few weeks as my spare time is going to be “David” time… hang tight, I’ll be back soon.

More photos continuously updated here. I’m sure Sherri will be posting quite a bit on HermanWeb.

Dot Bomb Expenditures

Darren — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:00:25 +0000

Something that we forget all too quickly:

The “dot-bomb” of the early part of this millenium was also driven by the venture capital dollars driving the online ad market at that time; the largest online advertising spenders were the same venture-backed companies that tended to go belly-up in the fall, taking the online ad industry down with them. Today, marketers of all stripes are spending online, from the largest consumer packaged goods companies to automakers to entertainment brands. Gone are the days when the bulk of online ad dollars are coming from online properties; today, online marketing is an integral part of any brand’s strategy. - Rubicon Project Ad Network Review and Forecast.

Issues with Social Media Advertising

Darren — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:53:03 +0000

Social networking sites face three problems: first, the basic rule of supply and demand. Social networking traffic is abundant, and in most cases undifferentiated from one publisher to the next. This excess supply has driven down CPM prices to a low equilibrium.” noted Raleigh Harbour, the Rubicon Project’s VP of Ad Network Development. “Second, user-generated content (UGC) still “spooks” advertisers. To an advertiser, UGC is an unknown risk exposure that is in constant flux. Real or perceived, this fear factors into pricing. Finally, long user sessions result in lower performance. For example, a typical social networking visitor may spend 40-50 ad impressions deep into a site, versus 5-10 for a typical news or sports site. This lowers the probability that the same user will click (and therefore convert) on an single ad impression, hence reducing the value of that inventory for advertisers.

Stop Looking at CPMs for Health of the Industry

Darren — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:46:59 +0000

It is worth noting that CPMs do not tell a full story regarding the health of the online advertising economy. The pace of growth in the supply of Internet advertising inventory is simply faster than the growth in ad dollars spent. As a result, CPMs are dropping in many areas. If every site on the Internet doubled the number of ad units per page, as an example, CPMs would drop by half, though overall revenue would remain constant. Hence CPM is a relevant metric, but not an overall indicator of market health. Total revenue and ad spend are the correct indicators. - Rubicon Project Ad Network Review and Forecast.

AdTech NY 2008

Darren — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 23:52:01 +0000

Spent the afternoon walking around AdTech. I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of the amount of exhibitors due to the current economic conditions but you would have no idea that we’re in a recession. What I was surprised about was that Google and Yahoo! didn’t have the largest booth… Casale, Platform-A, and a few others took the cake.

The crowd was varied from biz dev folks to only a handful of agency folks… I was surprised at the lack of actual clients in the exhibit hall, but that was to be expected I guess. The amount of performance networks outweigh any other type of exhibit but what I found most interesting was the folks over at the Akamai booth and the Rubicon Project. Too many performance networks.

If you head over to the exhibit hall, make sure to check out all the floors - too many people only go to the first floor and don’t walk up stairs. On the 3rd floor, Friendster is there. Yes Friendster. About 5 booths away from FriendFinder. Fitting.

Lastly, I love how all of the companies who are at AdTech revolve around the advertising industry and I only met about a handful of people who work at agencies…

IAB Ad Ops Summit Recap

Darren — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:06:57 +0000

I went to the IAB Ad Ops Summit yesterday here in New York. The attendance was broken out as follows: 80% pubs, 15% agencies, 5% clients. Not ideal as all sides of the equation should be represented when we’re talking about best practices and having an open conversation about them.

While I didn’t really find anything earth shattering, I liked hearing from other agencies and the publisher side about they are doing to make the ad ops process scale so that we can leverage it for all media as it becomes digital.

The IAB did an excellent job putting this together and the event was fairly top notch. Randall Rothenberg, head of the IAB, released some best practices documents yesterday as well… check them out.

Here are some of the latest Tweets on the IAB

Quotes from the conference:
1.      “Recession is our opportunity” - Randall Rothenberg
2.      “Everything is going digital” - Google
3.      “When people are happy, I’m nervous. When they are nervous, I’m happy.” Warren Buffet
4.      “Agencies have yield management, the same way networks do, they should be structured as such.” Michele Burnham
5.      “Our industry is like an iPod with a parrallel port.” Benjamin Reid
6.      “Digital is the primary media for advertising in the future.” Google
Key takeaways:
1.      Ad Ops folks are the guardians of profit as they optimize revenue flow and remove costs out of the equation
2.      Eliminate friction, maximize efficiencies (what Google wants to shift in the ad world)
3.      2003 was the first IAB impression standard
4.      Talk of Interactive tearsheets
5.      Best practices conversations are all about documentation and overcommunication
6.      The first electronic invoice (television spot) was delivered in 1989 by Grey Advertising
7.      We must reinspect every media business practice down to the human level as our entire industry is changing
8.      Google is revolutionizing an industry that is manual and inefficient.

The Bull Market 2008 Tie

Darren — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:21:00 +0000

I’m a big Vineyard Vines fan (a la my summer wardrobe) and they just released this new Bull Market Tie for 2008. Think of it as a rally cap for Wall Street. If I wore a tie more, I’d pick one up.

Good stuff.

The Band You’ve Probably Never Heard Of…

Darren — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:40:51 +0000

These guys came together for a great cause and their music is now up on YouTube. Yukon Kornelius is a rock band put together for charitable purposes. It consists of Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies, Stefan Lessard from the Dave Matthews Band, Adam Gardner from Guster, and drummer Eric Fawcett from Spymob. On January 9, 2008, the band played their one and only show at the Killington Road Pickle Barrel in Killington, Vermont. All proceeds went to the VT and NH food banks.

I’m really digging them right now. Check’em out here. They have played the upcoming soundtrack to Warren Miller’s new movie, Children of Winter.

Retail Game Cards

Darren — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:30:24 +0000

Such a genius business. Extracted from the original interview.

And why do retailers love these cards? The economics work in their favor.

Now, there’s an interesting fact about these cards. Retailers love them over any other product they have in their store, because the cards themselves don’t take up any inventory.

They’re not activated until they’re purchased, so they don’t sit on the balance sheet of the retailer. They feel like “free money” to retailers. So it’s a very positive business for retailers to get into, and it really lowers the bar for any retailers who are unsure about it, they don’t need to worry about losing money on it.

The really big untapped market for these digital media companies is gift giving. No matter how much someone loves an online world no one is going to say “hey, merry Christmas. I logged into your account and gave you 25 bucks.” Not to mention the impulse buy.