Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Category: Advertising

  • MySpace Marketing in the Post-Bot Era

    MySpace Marketing in the Post-Bot Era

    Hat tip to Social Ham for documenting what everyone knew was coming: MySpace cracking down on the providers of MySpace automation software. For MySpace, it’s a big step towards cleaning things up a little. For independent marketers and promoters, it’s the tragedy of the commons – the spammers effectively destroyed their own tools, and took a lot of tools away from people who were using them in relatively ethical ways. (i.e. Friend requests from bands who sound like bands you like…)

    Of course, some bots will continue to function for a little while longer, until the next major code shift at MySpace. Some bots are open-source, meaning that independent developers savvy in the language the bots are written in will be able to adapt. For the most part, for the bands, promoters, marketers, and podcasts that don’t have the technical firepower to keep up with MySpace, this is pretty much the end of the line for MySpace marketing 1.0.

    The big question now is – what’s next? What comes after the era of MySpace bots? Three guesses: arbitrage, hub concentration, and whore trains.

    Arbitrage. There are already some outsourcing firms that offer to manage your MySpace profile for you, including friend requests and messages. Workers in labor markets overseas handle all of the mundane work of managing your profile manually, and you get billed a service fee. These services will probably start to take off, since there’s really no way to stop them – at the end of the day, it’s a human at the keyboard instead of a bot. The arbitrage is taking advantage of exceptionally cheap labor overseas to be able to bill at a reasonable price.

    Hub concentration. Your profile will take a lot more work to market now if you don’t have access to automation tools, which means that marketing on MySpace will likely take on a more LinkedIn-style, where you endeavor to attract and befriend as many major hubs as you can – people with gazillions of friends.

    Whore trains. Expect this relatively pointless pastime to suddenly become relevant again. Without automation tools, you’ll have to rely on friend of a friend networks, and whore trains are the fastest way to bridge networks quickly, at the cost of a friend base that is less relevant and focused.

    Where’s the smart money? Refocus your efforts on your own destination site first, and add links to the relevant social networks as appropriate. The window of opportunity to use social networks themselves as promotional vehicles is closing rapidly, so extract the last value out of them that you can, and then use them as brand extenders, but not as lead generators.

    Where’s the next big thing? Remember the conversation we had on Marketing Over Coffee. In the beginning, there was word of mouth at the market fair. Mass media brought mass marketing – advertising. Google brought us the Third Age of Advertising – search. Now we enter the Fourth Age, characterized by community and prediction. Community and prediction are two sides of the same coin – your database. We as marketers will live or die, profit or lose, flourish or flounder on our database, because as permission marketing gets tougher and tougher, we’ll need to mine our databases more carefully and more thoroughly, more humanly and more accurately. We’ll need to predict the needs of the people in our database, as well as use the data to predict the needs of new customers, and do it in a way that invites them into our community, and not just another row in the customers table.

    Marketing 2.1 just had a fatal error. Time for a service pack to Marketing 2.2. Are you ready?

  • Action is all that matters

    Action is all that matters.

    The podcasting world has been obsessing about metrics lately, and I thought I’d pitch my two cents in as a podcaster whose show makes a fair bit of coin in the world of student loans. Here’s the rub:

    Action is all that matters.

    Forget audience size. Forget CPM, PPC, Adsense, and all of the monetization strategies that are being bantered around, because unless you’re already a highly successful web entrepreneur with a large web-based audience, these strategies will largely waste your time.

    Why? Most advertising models are based on mass media. They’re holdovers from the radio and televison broadcast days, when there was no clickstream, no digital tracking. You slapped up a billboard in Times Square or ran an ad in the Washington Post, and they told you how many people roughly might see it, and charge you a rate based on those numnbers.

    Those numbers are largely unhelpful. Why? Because podcasting is a high engagement, narrow band communications mechanism. If you want mass media audience sizes, then go work for the mass media and use the existing, established tools that work in mass media systems. Podcasting is not mass media – it’s niche media.

    Here’s a question: if you sell Gulfstream airplanes and you want to reach your goal of selling one every two years (which will feed a family of four and house them VERY nicely), how many audience members in your podcast do you need? The answer is: one that buys a plane from you every two years. If you have 100,000 listeners or viewers and none of them buy a plane, you effectively have no audience for monetization purposes. If you have 5 listeners and one buys a plane from you every six months, you have all the audience you’ll ever need and then some.

    Action is all that matters.

    I sell the services of the Student Loan Network. That means that my audience listeners need to get connected with our services. If I have 100 listeners and 99 are customers, my podcast is a success. If I have 1,000,000 listeners and none are customers, my podcast is a failure.

    What if you don’t sell airplanes or loans? Find something that fits your audience well and pays decently, and if you can’t find anything, either start a podcast in one of the industries that pays well, or find a different model to pay the bills and put food on the table. At PodCamp NYC, I mentioned during the marketing session that you already have over 10,000 advertisers at your disposal through affiliate programs, or pay-per-action. Instead of trying to sell artificial sweetener on a technology show, sell technology on a technology. It will better suit the needs of your audience, and will likely put more food on your table.

    Why don’t content producers like the affiliate program model? Simple – it pushes the responsibility for sales to the content producer. If your program sucks, but you’re getting paid on impressions (CPM), then you will still possibly earn a few bucks. However, if you work in the affiliate model, your audience will likely never buy a product from you and you won’t make any money at all. That’s why advertisers are willing to pay more for affiliate programs versus other forms of advertising – the risk has been offloaded to the content producer.

    Make a podcast that rocks the house. Make a podcast that inspires your audience to become a real community, to lend you their trust and appreciation, and then judiciously connect your community to products and services that are a great fit, and you will make frighteningly good money.

    Action is all that matters.

  • Scott Bourne says to avoid PPA – but he may be wrong

    Scott Bourne, author of the PodcastingTricks.com blog, had this to say about PPA recently:

    This allows advertisers to define an expected result such as a user downloading a demo version of software or buying a book. When that action takes place (and only when that action takes place) the publisher of the ad gets paid.

    Here’s the problem with PPA and other recent advertising schemes aimed at requiring online media advertising sellers to perform at levels over and above their competition. . . It isn’t fair!

    Let’s say you run an ad for Visa. The action they are willing to pay for is applying for a credit card online. As the publisher, you only get paid if that transaction takes place as described. For instance, if your audience sees/hears the ad and takes action somewhere else (by calling an 800-number or applying for a Visa card at their bank) you don’t get paid.

    So while the advertiser gets exposure, gets to extend or re-inforce their brand, gets to educate their prospects, you ONLY get paid if the transaction happens immediately at your site.

    Here’s where I think Scott’s conclusion doesn’t work for me. Advertisers are willing – at least the ones with foresight – to pay more for performance, particularly in highly competitive verticals. The further down the funnel a PPA program can go, the more the advertiser will pay, because you’re offloading risk to your content producers.

    As an example, I work at the Student Loan Network, and we have both an affiliate program (which is essentially PPA) and Adwords campaigns. We pay up a fair amount per click via Adwords, but because of constant abuses on the content network, we’ve restricted our spend to the search network only, meaning that podcasters earn NO money from us whatsoever.

    Conversely, for every returned student loan consolidation application we get from you as an affiliate, we pay $100. Given that most podcast web sites don’t drive huge volumes of traffic (thereby making CPM and PPC worthwhile), running media-style impression campaigns still won’t pay off.

    PPA/Sponsorship/Affiliate programs stand, in my view, to be the best bang for the buck for podcasters because podcasters have a close relationship with their audiences – closer than, say, an advertiser in the NY Times or on FOX. If you’ve earned your audience’s trust, when you tell them to check out product X on your web site, you should see high conversion, and with PPA, that means the potential for some serious revenue.

    Are you reinforcing the advertiser’s brand with PPA? Yes – but no more so than with CPM or PPC advertising models. At least with PPA, chances are the payouts will be higher – and if you can’t motivate your audiences to support your show via the advertising channel you’ve selected, then it’s more an indicator that you need to boost your persuasion power with your audience than a flaw in the advertising model.

    But I may be wrong, too.

  • Pay Per Action : Podcasting's Payday is Arriving

    John Wall, Ronin Marketeer extraordinaire, published a blog post talking about the advent and rise of pay per action advertising in the Googleverse, and what it means for marketing online. His conclusions: CPM (cost per impressions) and PPC (pay per click) models are on the way out for the most part, because CPA (cost per action or conversion) will be at the forefront of advertisers’ demands.

    From the perspective of a CTO at an Internet company, CPA is a godsend, because we’ll be able to accurately measure the true results of our advertising campaigns. Ultimately, CPA *is* the bottom line – for the Student Loan Network, signed applications are currency. Clicks on an ad are an expense.

    From the perspective of a podcaster, CPA is going to be a gold mine for podcasters. Why? Because podcasters generally speaking have niche audiences, highly focused, highly engaged. Few podcasters have mega-media reach; if Nielsens were available for podcasters, compared to TV, the ratings for any one podcast show wouldn’t even be a rounding error.

    However, if the advertising model changes from CPM/PPC to CPA, podcasting is going to be a wealth-building business, because the close relationship podcasters have with their audiences will make CPA a home run. No need to run banner ads, no need to relentlessly flog a web site to build clicks – simply mention a sponsor or advertiser in a relevant, high quality way, and even just a few conversions will be the payday that podcasting has been looking for.

    Why? Because most advertisers, including the Student Loan Network, are willing to pay significantly more for a conversion. Example: the Student Loan Network pays $100 per completed, signed student loan consolidation application via the StudentATM program. When was the last time you saw any advertiser paying $100 per click?

    Podcasters: get ready. It’s payday.

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