Mike Siemens posts a great blog entry on Right Media's blog, "'Lower-Tier' Networks Revisited: An Untapped Opportunity"

I think the biggest issue with publishers today is whether they are sucessfully able to differentiate their premium inventory from their non-premium inventory. Too often, it's the same stuff.

How long before Yahoo buys Right Media outright?

CPA Marketing and Expectations

There's often significant confusion amongst buyers about how CPA marketing works. Here a few pointers to keep in mind when planning a campaign.

1. It takes time to get a CPA campaign up.
Your network or agency usually must recruit publishers to run the offer and this can take 1-3 weeks to really get traction.

2. Payout, Creative, Landing Page, and Lead Completion Flow are your most important variables.
Without the right mix, no campaign will succeed.
Landing Pages should have only one call to action and without it, the campaign will likely suffer.

Lead Completion Flow -- aka the user experience from landing page to confirmation page -- should be as simple as possible. As with the landing page, there should only be one action per page.

Payout should be as high as the advertiser is able to pay. Remember that you are competing in a marketplace for remnant inventory and its hypercompetitive. If you do not start a campaign with your best foot forward, your campaign may never start. In general, the payout should amount to 3 months value of the customer to the advertiser.

Creative is critical. Test different messaging, designs, look/feel. Be relentless as this is the one variable that you have the most flexibility in changing.

Google's share of US searches creeped upwards to 47% of all searches in December 2006. According to comScore, the breakout of searches is as follows:
* Google - 3.2 billion
* Yahoo - 1.9 billion
* MSN - 713 million
* Ask network - 363 million
* Time Warner 335 million

Despite the dominance of Google, the door remains open for someone to innovate and gain marketshare. Wikisari, for example, wants to enables users to vote on the quality of the results (Digg style).

On the M&A Front, AOL has offered to buy TradeDoubler for approximately $900 million in cash. I've heard great things about TradeDoubler but I wonder if there are any real synergies between AOL and TradeDoubler. Is AOL hedging its bet?

One of the biggest opportunities in online media is to find a better way to monetize social networking inventory. The amount of social networking inventory available is staggering and every small incremental increase in RPM for publishers amounts to huge revenue increases for the top players.

Whoever creates a data-targeted AdSense will clean up.

AdGridWork.com looks incredibly useful for startups that need more attention before they need extra dollars.

In 1973, a company wanting to reach 95 percent of women aged 25-49 would only need three network commercials. "Today, you would need 92 commercials to reach that same group"
-- Jon Kramer, Group President of EMARK

Proctor & Gamble is cutting back on its TV spending. The WSJ suggests that a bulk of the money will shift to product placement. I'm curious how far we can take product placement without losing viewership and also how much business product placement can really drive. Curiously, none of the news media suggested the money might roll to interactive.

[From LA Times and WSJ]

According to TheStreet.com, Gannett bought PointRoll for more than $100 million. This is an incredibly impressive feat for outgoing founder and CEO, Jules Gardner.

Next week, Mitsubishi will be taking over Yahoo's front page for the day. This effort will generate 100 million impressions and hopefully generate 20,000 leads for the Eclipse. To get this, Mitsubishi needs around a 5% CTR and a 0.40% conversion rate from click-to-impression. That seems doable.

Takeovers are a great way to achieve both branding and direct marketing goals. But I have to wonder, how many impressions does Mitsubishi really need to accomplish this goal?

Owning all impressions on a homepage is guaranteed to bring a smile to any Fortune 500 CMO. It's simple, easy to understand, and fits the high reach model that they're used to buying on. It's also incredibly easy work for publishers and the agencies that negotiate the deals. Yahoo sells homepage takeovers for a flat fee for a full day.

I imagine that the Mitsubishi deal could be a ton more efficient if Mitsubishi set a frequency cap at 1 per user per day. Yahoo is unlikely to do this because it goes against their sales model (which works quite well for them) but I can't help but wonder if Mitsubishi's effort wouldn't be that much better for it.

For a big company, CNET does a great job pushing the publishing envelope. They have given up some significant ground to Gizmodo and Engadget but now the Empire Strikes Back. By embracing the blog empire model (modeling off of Weblogs Inc., which is loosely modeled off Gawker Media and About), they are now embracing niche publishing via their niche blogs. The look and feel can be improved but Nick and Jason now have competition from big media.

"At some stage it becomes more expensive to buy Google than it does network television"
-- Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Innovation Officer, Publicis Groupe Media

Tobaccowala is correct but we're already at that stage. If the minimum CPC for Google Search is $0.05, then the effective CPM per pageview generated from an advertisement on Google is already $50. That's expensive -- and way more expensive than what advertisers pay for network television.

Perhaps what Tobaccowala really means is that, from a total cost perspective, Google may garner more money than network television on the average traditional advertiser's media plan. Frankly, I doubt this will ever happen unless network television completely falls apart. AdWords on Google are already expensive (from an eCPM perspective) and most advertisers buy 10-1000 keywords (unless you're eBay or Amazon and buy millions of keywords) per month. Even if the search volume/inventory doubles, total billings spent wouldn't come close to amount required to compete with network TV billings. Moreover, even if the cost of AdWords doubles, it's not there. Search is a great way to reach a lean-forward audience. It's also an incredible business that may one day overtake network TV in total aggregate billings across all media deals. But unless search evolves into a completely different animal, it's unlikely to take over network TV from a media-billings-per-plan perspective.

[from ClickZ and MarketingToday]