Inside Intel’s Effectiveness System for Web Marketing – Advertising Age – Digital.

Thanks to AdExchanger.com for this story. This isn’t a novel approach – my former colleagues in analytics at MRM created a similar methodology. We were able to get it sold into MasterCard as a means of measuring their digital activities – similar situation to Intel in that they were heavy consumer marketers, but didn’t hold one-to-one consumer relationships.

Nonetheless, credit OMD and Intel with using their Value Point System as a means of attribution, i.e making sure the right web marketing assets get the right credit for conversions, whether that means an online purchase (B2C), lead generation (B2B), or even greater brand awareness and engagement (B2B2C environments like Intel or MasterCard).

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Updated: It’s Official: New York Times Will Adopt Online Meter—But Not Until 2011 | paidContent.

Yawn.

I’ve been telling people this for months: The New York Times is done. Finished. Kaput. Doesn’t matter which revenue model they’re playing with this year.

Why? It’s simple: media outlets that insist on cost-prohibitive newsprint operations cannot compete unless they have a high-end niche. The reason the Financial Times and The Economist can make money is that people are willing to pay to read them. Part of that comes from their excellent journalism, but just as much comes from the fact that both appeal to an affluent reader. The New York Times does neither. But hey, they appeal to everyone…which is a great way to lose money when you insist on using a printing press.

So the Grey Lady or Old Lady or whatever it’s called can roll out whatever monetization plan it wishes, but until it goes all digital or becomes something more specialized than “all the news that’s fit to print,” it doesn’t stand a chance in this day and age.

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A couple of Tim’s points stood out to me and inspired some additional thoughts:

• “Phase Two: Build a target profile of your audience …To do this effectively, you’ll develop a profile of the audience that responds to your marketing. Identifying your highest potential customers will allow you to target your ads as tightly as possible. Highly targeted ads are more relevant and more likely to succeed. (Just like search.)”

This is an area where pre-existing customer data adds tons of value. Database marketers in particular have an edge – perform RFM and segmentation analyses on your customer data to determine who’s been most profitable and likely to buy. Look at the demographics and geographies of these customers to develop a starting point for a target profile.

• “Phase Three: Find the most efficient way to reach your target audience …Should you target people or pages? You should use both! This is like asking whether you should use exact match or broad match in search. Targeting people, much like exact match keywords, provides access to a tightly defined audience but can be expensive and limited in scale. Targeting pages is more akin to broad match keywords: it’s usually only a loose proxy for the audience you’re trying to reach, but it’s easier to build scale and often more efficient.”

Targeting pages also allows you the opportunity to further refine your target audience profile. For example, say you’re a crafts retailer, and you initially set your target as “Women 34-45 who have at least one child and have been to a photo-sharing site.” But instead of just buying this audience, you also buy certain sites: Aol Living, NYTimes.com Home & Garden, etc. Let’s say performance via these sites show that “young single urban women 22-25” significantly outperform other audience segments of these sites – you can now refine your target audience and optimize the campaign to better reach this segment .

For anyone who’s ran a campaign: how hard is this in practice? Would taking the steps Tim prescribes help you better target your display advertising? Any success in leveraging your existing customer data?

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Fascinating piece from Technology Review: The New News

The fact that some journalists actually claim that “routine” makes for good journalism is indicative of just how out of touch most news properties have found themselves. News doesn’t occur according to a routine, and now that we live in such a connected society, reporting of said news shouldn’t follow a routine either.

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A couple of days old, but I found the story interesting, yet oversimplified. Oversimplified because there’s more than one route for digital agencies to follow – one is indeed becoming more of the “agency of record” for brands (as opposed to simply “digital agency of record”). I think an agency like R/GA is particularly well-positioned to make the leap here.

But digital agencies can also go a different route and double down on their digital expertise, going beyond marketing to fuel a client’s broader technology strategy – think everything from IT to enterprise collaboration to digital marketing. I think that was Sapient’s idea at one point – although now they seem to want to go the “agency of record” route. The agency that stands out above all others here is Razorfish: because of their strong technology heritage (and the manner in which they’ve inspired loyalty amongst employees, which CANNOT be overstated), they can address a larger range of issues than their peers. Does being part of Publicis change that? Not if Publicis is smart and continues to invest in and play to the firm’s strengths.

I’ll say this: the digital agencies that are poised to lose are the ones that don’t know their identity and as a result, can’t convey why a client should choose them over any other agencies out there. To borrow terms from Bain, you can build adjacent strengths around a core (as R/GA is doing), but that first requires you to know where your core lies.

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Profile on craigslist, Craig Newmark, and Jim Buckmaster in Wired: http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/17-09/ff_craigslist?currentPage=all

Best quote:

“Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting staff work at craigslist. There is no business development, no human resources, no sales. As a result, there are no meetings.”

It’s amazing – craiglist’s success flies in the face of best practices from any number of disciplines: usability, business strategy, technology strategy… It seems that their stubbornness in sticking to doing one thing really well plays a role. Or perhaps a takeaway from the success of craigslist is the importance of motivations – by Craig not being motivated by money, notoriety or the like, he and Jim are able to, put it simply, focus on their “place to list stuff.”

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This topic is so fascinating to me. On the one hand, I embrace all of the new, mostly digital, methods we have to connect. On the other hand, I’ve often feared that these new methods of connection have come to serve as imperfect proxies for real deep relationship, particularly in urban centres. As someone who believes that being known deeply is essential to a healthy lifestyle, this concerns me.

I guess I’m not alone. Christine’s post ends with the rather sobering question, “As we continue acculturating ourselves to new means of virtual connectivity, are we losing our understanding of how to do it the old fashioned way in the process?” Interestingly enough, I posed a similar question in my Facebook status a few months ago, and all respondents said no. Still, it can’t hurt to consider who, if anyone, knows us intimately and how we continue to invest in those relationships beyond a DM on Twitter…

(If you haven’t seen it, I’d recommend watching Kevin Slavin’s presentation at the PSFK conference in April. It’s excellent)

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