AdOn Blog

The Urge to Merge

In the movie “You’ve Got Mail,” Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) is an executive with the fictional FoxBooks bookstore chain. Its mission is to dominate the market and make the local neighborhood bookstore — in this case, The Shop Around the Corner, owned by Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) — obsolete.

Aside from the sappy love story (OK, who didn’t smile when Joe’s dog came running over the bridge in the last scene and you knew they would finally get together?), one of the side plots involved the battle between the mom-and pop-stores vs. corporate America. Depending on your perspective, there were pros and cons to both business models. (For the record, I tried to come up with an analogy from a more testosterone-driven movie like “Gladiators” or “Braveheart,” but it was just too much of stretch — even for someone in marketing who should be able to put a spin on anything).

Kathleen’s Shop Around the Corner provided a personal touch, a trusted relationship and a depth of knowledge on children’s books that can’t be matched by the 19-year-old clerk with the logo’d polo and khaki pants over at FoxBooks. But the larger store offered a much larger selection of books, a wider variety of products, a nicer locale and really comfy chairs.
This storyline is certainly not a new one, and it plays itself out in every line of business as companies compete for market share. Whether the method is driving competitors out of business or acquiring them, the result is the same: less competition.

Over the past year, we’ve been watching a similar storyline playing out in the online ad network space. During that time, we have seen a number of small to medium-sized networks gobbled in the rush to gain market share and dominance in the lucrative online advertising world.
Here’s a brief list of some of the more notable acquisitions:

• Tacoda purchased by AOL
• BlueLithium aquired by Yahoo
• aQuantive swallowed up by Microsoft
• DoubleClick assimilated into the mother ship (Google)
• Adify under the new ownership of Cox

With the skyrocketing purchase prices and hyper-competitive nature of this industry, it would seem that the acquisition frenzy would continue into the foreseeable future. In fact, investment bank Petsky Prunier reports over 193 M&A transaction totaling $11.4 billion for the Marketing, Advertising and Digital Media Industries in the first quarter 2008 alone. To further the point, a recent article from The New York Times looks at the next wave of consolidations that may be on the horizon.

This leads us to the big question: Is all of this consolidation good for the industry - and, more specifically, for publishers?

Let’s examine some of the pros and cons of ad network consolidation, as well as the rise of the ad network giants.

Pros:

• With a smaller universe of networks to work with, it is easier to evaluate the competitive landscape and understand the strengths, weaknesses, capabilities and specialties of each of the larger networks.
• Larger networks provide broader reach for advertisers and offer publishers access to a greater selection of advertisers.
• The combined technologies/services from consolidated networks offer more one-stop solutions for publishers (i.e. the behavioral targeting technology that BlueLithium brought to Yahoo)
• If the solutions and greater reach offered by large networks make it easier for advertisers to set up their campaigns, publishers ultimately benefit because they have a larger pool of advertisers to run on their sites, which can target their specific audience.

Cons:

• Too few players in the ad network space can have a negative effect on the overall competitive climate of the industry.
• Larger networks typically dictate the rules by which we all have to abide. Their business models are built on the efficiency of scale, not necessarily the ability to meet the needs of a wide variety of clients with unique needs and requests.
• While large networks cater to the needs of larger clients, small- and medium-sized businesses can be forced into a self-service model that lacks the one-to-one customer service, and even handholding, that many of them need to be successful online.
• Potential conflicts of interest exist as larger media companies acquire ad networks. If you operate a Web site for a Comcast property, for example, would you want an ad network owned by Cox to control your online advertising?
• Fewer choices and decreased competition can lead to less innovation and unfavorable business terms for advertisers and publishers, particularly small and medium-sized business with little market leverage.

Regardless of which side of the fence you fall on this issue, I think we would all agree that there is obviously a need for both large and small networks to meet the wide range of needs from a vast array of publishers and advertisers. Even in this climate of consolidation, we continue to see new networks sprout up as quickly as others are gobbled up, so there seems to be no need to fear that the innovation and competition spurred by the entrepreneurial spirit is in danger of fading away… yet.

I’d like to hear from you on this subject. How do you feel about ad network consolidation? Is it good for the industry as a whole, or is it just good for the investors who are cashing in on the land rush?

by Kory Kredit -- Published May 9, 2008 on MediaPost's Online Publishing Insider

The AdOn Network Traffic Team is here for you

In order to continually expand and diversify our network, the traffic team at AdOn Network has a seasoned group of dedicated individuals focussed on our publishers and traffic providers. Here are some of the traffic team’s important roles:

• Managing all of the AdOn Network traffic sources
• Daily maintenance and support of all our traffic sources including any troubleshooting that may arise
• Provide client support to all of our AdOn Network traffic source partners
• Monitor and analyze the incoming traffic and look for ways to better monetize the sources for our advertisers
• Communication with the client and our account managers and sales reps

What does this mean for you?  Your ads are placed on more sites with excellent options to optimize your campaigns to run on the most effective traffic sources. A significant point of focus for our traffic team recently has been adding more Direct Publishers covering a specific vertical categories. We have a large concentration in the entertainment industry but also cover a wide variety of additional categories that our advertisers are bidding on (dating, finance, news, travel, cars, blog, etc….).

With our growing network of publishers, the new traffic settings features that we launched recently to go along with the unmatched customer service from our traffic team, account managers and sales reps, getting on the right sites for your campaigns is easier than ever.

AdOn Network & PV Media Group Team up to Fight Cancer

A team of golfers from AdOn Network and parent company PV Media Group recently joined forces to participate in the 3rd annual FORE NOAH charity golf tournament, in honor of Noah Nelson, to benefit the Children's Neuroblastoma Cancer Foundation (CNCF). (View photo album)

The annual event raises money for cancer research to help find a cure for a rare form of cancer called neuroblastoma. This year, the golf tournament raised over $83,000 with 100% of the proceeds going to CNCF. Over the three-years that this tournament has been held, it has raised in excess of $250,000 to help fund much-needed medical research projects and support families with children that suffer from this disease.

The AdOn Network / PV Media Group foursome put together a record-breaking round of golf in the best-ball format to surpass the field by a whopping four strokes...for the highest score of all 35 groups on the course. As one of the fearsome foursome, I stand by my teammates and co-workers to proudly declare our collective incompetency in the game of golf. Anyone can finish in the middle of the pack but it takes a lot of courage to stand out and finish dead last.

While all of our individual golf games need a lot of work, the event was a huge success and our companies are proud to have played a small part in helping raise money and awareness for such a worthy cause.

Lost in Translation

(Article posted on MediaPost's Online Publishing Insider, by Kory Kredit)

What is the value of an established print media name? Let's take a simple test to find out. Which of these URLs do you recognize?

• www.desmoinesregister.com
• www.eastvalleytribune.com
• www.drudgereport.com
• www.perezhilton.com

For those of you who claim to recognize the first two, you are either lying, or you have lived in both Iowa and Arizona, as I have. While both the Des Moines Register and the East Valley Tribune are print newspaper companies that have been in existence for decades, you've probably never heard of them or visited their Web site unless you live in those metropolitan areas. Even if you do live in those regions, the chance that you've never visited one of these sites increases as your age bracket skews younger.

Ask any college-age or 20-something man or woman where they get their news/information/gossip, and he or she is increasingly likely to cite a pure-play Internet site like DrudgeReport.com, PerezHilton.com, a favorite news aggregation site or RSS feeds before listing a local print media outlet.

While national newspapers like The New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today are growing, local newspaper sites are loosing market share to pure-play Internet sites like Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN, as well as aggregation sites like newsvine.com and topix.net, as reported in a 2007 study from The Shorenstein Center at Harvard  University.

This raises a perplexing question for local newspapers, which are more and more reliant on their Web sites for advertising revenue to either supplement or replace decreasing revenues from their offline product. Does a traditional media brand name (i.e. Seattle Times, Kansas City Star, etc.) provide significant value to an online audience, or does its value get lost in translation somewhere between the printed word and the 19" flat-screen you're currently staring at? 

As circulation rates and ad revenues drop across the board in the newspaper industry (ad revenues in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006), the brand recognition of the local newspaper drops along with it. It has also proven increasingly ineffective to try to apply the traditional offline business model to an online news site.

Gone are the days when the local newspaper was the self-appointed guardian and exclusive voice of news and information for the masses. In traditional media, the journalist and the media outlet handed down the news to the public and that was typically where the story ended, with the exception of the filtered and approved-for-print Letter to the Editor that might follow in a day or two.

In the Internet age, news is now a "shared enterprise between its producer and its consumer, according to Jonah Peretti, founding partner of The Huffington Post. To be successful, Internet news and media require an ongoing conversation, multiple methods of engagement, the addition of user-generated content and a wide variety of opinions and views.

Today's savvy online consumers also want control over what they read. They want to customize their entire experience for their personal preference. Not only do they want to choose the stories that are relevant to them, they want to modify the layout of the site and the navigation to suit their needs, as they can on sites like newsvine.com, topix.net and netvibes.com.

In an effort to recapture some of their local readers on the Web, newspapers might consider abandoning their traditional print brand online, reinventing an entirely new media brand for the Web. This allows a great deal of autonomy to operate — much the same as an Internet company, not a newspaper company with a Web site.

The challenge that lies ahead is whether or not traditional newspaper companies can become agile enough to adapt to this new paradigm. Can they leverage their most important asset, which is their depth of news and information at the local level, and deliver it in a way that engages and interacts with readers, giving them more control over the experience?

Simply relying on their offline brand recognition to draw readers to their Web site will prove to be a losing strategy as readers continue to gravitate towards pure-play Internet sites that cater to the preference of an ever-savvier online audience.

Can newspapers adapt quickly enough to remain relevant — or are they doomed to become this century's version of the telegraph machine?

ad:tech wrap up

Thank you to everyone who stopped by the AdOn Network / JargonFish booth at ad:tech San Francisco. We had another great week meeting new people and connecting with current advertisers and publishers already in our network.

For a closer view of the week in San Francisco, check out the ad:tech SF 08 photo gallery.

Congratulations to our iPod Nano prize drawing winners:

• Ryan Zimmerman, CkickSpeed
  
• Sara Kwak, AdEngage
  
• Beth Kahn, eZanga
  
• Michael Weiss, MGM Migage
  
• Sam Moffett, Red McCombs
  

We look forward to seeing you at ad:tech New York in November.

New Traffic Settings Now Live

AdOn Network has launched a new feature call Traffic Settings. You may ask yourself "What does this do for me?", one word: Optimization. With these new settings you have more robust features within your account to manage your campaign options including Traffic Source Selection, Geo Settings, Day-parting, Start/End Dates, Frequency Caps, Contextual/Behavioral targeting, and Spending Caps. This will allow you more control, more optimization and greater success. This is especially beneficial if you run multiple campaigns, because it allows you to create unique traffic tags for each of your campaigns, which makes optimization even easier.


If you have a campaign that is running pop-under ads, you can now create individual campaigns to run on either desktop sources only or publisher sources only. Keep in mind that if you had an existing pop-under campaign that runs both desktop and publisher sources you will need to make two separate campaigns and two separate traffic tags (one for desktop and one for publisher).

Make sure to take full advantage of this powerful new feature to maximize the success of your campaigns! If you need assistance with the new Traffic Settings feature, please contact your advertising services representative.

AdServices@AdOnNetwork.com
866.258.9245

Will we see you at ad:tech?

AdOn Network will be exhibiting again at the Spring ad:tech event in San Francisco in April, but the real question is will you be there?

At ad:tech, you can keep up to date with the newest players in the industry, learn the latest industry trends and focuses, and possibly take in a few ad:tech parties.

It doesn’t matter if you are a long-time client, new to our company or someone interested in using our services; we would like to meet you at ad:tech. Stop by our booth (#5768) to meet with one of our ad sales or business development representatives, JargonFish team members or someone from our senior management team. Make sure to pick up one of the coolest giveaways at the show, the JargonFish mini aquarium, and register to win an iPod Nano when you stop by.

ad:tech San Francisco
Location: Moscone Center
Conference ($1,695): April 15-17
Exhibit Hall (FREE): April 15-16
AdOn Network / JargonFish booth: 5768

For a 20% Discount code for the conference, use the code: SFEM20

See you at ad:tech!

Overcoming The Unpleasant Stigma Of In-Text Ads

(This was posted on MediaPost's Online Publishing Insider)
by Kory Kredit

In the movie “Pleasantville,” there was a social stigma attached to anything that represented change, or that failed to measure up to a pre-defined idea of what was, well…pleasant. For the citizens of Pleasantville, pleasant meant roads that don’t go past the city limits, colors that don’t vary from the approved palette, and books with no controversial ideas.

If we fast-forward from that black and white Mayberry-like town set in the ’50s to our current online media culture, we see new stigmas developing just as quickly as we dismiss old ones. Such is the case with in-text advertising.

If we were to adapt the standard definition of a stigma to the online world, it might read something like this: The phenomenon whereby an Internet technology contains one or more attributes, which are deeply discredited by Internet users, and is thereby rejected as a result of those attributes.

So what are those attributes that Internet users and some publishers find such disdain for with regards to in-text advertising? I recently conducted an informal market research survey to gauge people’s attitudes towards in-text technology to find out what they liked and/or disliked about it.

It didn’t take long to discover that there was a predominantly negative stigma attached to in-text, and that there was one primary reason for the negative perception. More than any other attribute or feature, users and publishers are put off by the invasiveness of it-text ad technology. More specifically, they “hate” the fact that the ad automatically launches on a mouse-over (when their cursor moves over a highlighted word).

There were some additional issues that were common among the survey participants such as the lack of relevance of the ad or content in the in-text window, and the fact that it generally doesn’t provide much benefit to the end-user.

Changing Expectations

We’ve established that the negative stigma exists. Now the question becomes, “How do we reverse it?” The only way to overcome a negative stigma is to make a concerted ongoing effort to change expectations.

When you see a highlighted word with a double underline and an icon on a page, what’s your typical first reaction? For most people, you move your cursor to the far left or right side of the screen to avoid setting off all those in-text land mines embedded in the page. In some cases, however, moving your cursor to the side will unwittingly launch a series of flash ads that completely overtake the page or initiate a multimedia ad which blasts out an audio file as you race to find the volume icon on your desktop.

In order to change users’ expectations about in-text technology and remove the stigma that currently exists, there are two simple solutions to consider:

1. Change from mouse-over activation to click activation. The unwanted and unintentional launch of an ad from a mouse-over is the largest irritant for Web site visitors. By simply requiring the visitor to click on the link in order to launch the window, you overcome the largest hurdle for in-text acceptance. If visitors click on the link, it also indicates that they are intentionally searching for more information on that keyword, as opposed to accidentally launching a window because their mouse was in the wrong place.

2. Provide contextually relevant content in the in-text window. Some in-text products show the same ad or content regardless of what keyword it was launched from. While the repetition provides the advertiser value from a branding standpoint, the visitor begins to associate all in-text links with irrelevant ads. If in-text providers feature more relevant content and/or advertising, visitors would find value in the application and be more inclined to click on the link to view the content in the in-text window.
   

If in-text applications adopt these two features, the industry would go a long way towards changing visitors’ expectations and overall acceptance of in-text technology, removing the stigma that currently exists. Wouldn’t that be pleasant for those of us in the in-text industry?

For more information on an adding a contextually relevant customizable in-text solution for your website, go to JargonFish.com and register for free.

Innovation's One Hit Wonders

I ran across an insightful article from Mark Simon in MediaPost's Search Insider about the media's misplaced focus related to Microsoft's attempted acquisition of Yahoo. In his article, Mark makes the point that most of the press has "cast the story as a kind of fable in which a fading, mature technology company uses its raw financial power to scoop up a scrappy, but besieged innovator."

The reality is that technology giants like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, while all founded on the ideals of innovation, have grown to worldwide dominance because of business strategies that were set into motion years ago while most of their innovation has come from acquiring other companies in recent years. Google's success is still rooted in PPC, Microsoft's is in their operating system and Yahoo is anchored to their portal services like email, IM and news. You can read his article here.

This got me to thinking about the value of innovation and how it plays into the success of a technology company. Innovation in and of itself, without the ability to execute and scale is simply a good idea, not a business. How many hundreds of innovative ideas have we all heard of, read about or even originated ourselves over the past several years that have now been relegated to the familiar “one hit wonder” status. “She Blinded Me With Science” may have been a great song (or not - depending on your affinity for 80’s music), but when the smoke cleared no one really cared about Thomas Dolby, just like no one really cares about or remembers the fleeting innovative ideas that never achieve critical mass. That is not to downplay the obvious significance of innovation in our industry, just to point out that innovation without proper execution, capital, or the support of the masses does not automatically equate to success.

AdOn Network Acquired by Prime Visibility Media Group

We are pleased to announce that AdOn Network has been acquired by a newly-formed company named Prime Visibility Media Group (PV Media Group), based in Long Island, NY. PV Media Group also acquired an SEO/SEM company, Prime Visibility.

The two acquisitions marked the formation of PV Media Group, headed by CEO Steve Rosenberg. A veteran studio executive, Rosenberg previously served as president of Universal Domestic Television, the production-distribution unit supplying feature films, first-run and off-network programming to all forms of television throughout the U.S. and Canada, and co-president of Universal Television Distribution, the studio’s international TV arm.

Rosenberg will lead a senior management team that can leverage its experience and relationships in traditional media with the combined company’s ad network and engine optimization search capabilities.

You can read the full press release on the AdOn Network site.