I have to admit, I’m a little worried about the companies and the people that earn their living based on TV advertisements. I am seeing a gradual decline in the necessity of paying any attention to TV advertisements at all. Even the peak of SuperBowl commercial hilarity has come and gone. The consumer has undergone plenty of innovations to help them avoid commercials:

Good: services like DVR (or PVR for you Canadians, eh?) and TiVo allow you to record your favorite shows and watch them later.  The bonus: you can fast forward through commercials.  The advertisers aren’t crazy about this, obviously.  At one point TiVo even talked about superimposing ads on the screen while you were fast forwarding or rewinding; I don’t know if they ever implemented it.  In spite of the fact that I bought a lifetime subscription for my device, it died within a few days of the warranty expiration (and the license, at least at the time, was not transferable to a new device).

Better: some cable companies are offering normal television programs through their On Demand menu.  Forgot to record Heroes last night?  It’s okay, the cable company has your back.  Missed a segment of last Thursday’s CSI?  No problem, you can catch up.  You usually have to wait a day or two, and you still have to fast forward through commercials, of course, but recent episodes are not lost forever.

Best: Verizon FiOS, at least in my service area, combines the best of both worlds.  You can record the shows you want to watch within 24 hours (I often do this when I am going to be home late but still want to watch that night’s shows).  If you want to wait a day or two, you can get most programs (minus the entire Fox lineup) from the On Demand menu.  Huge bonus here: on some programs, FiOS even strips out the commercials for you.  I was shocked by this the other day when several breaks in a show had no plugs at all, and a couple of breaks simply had one promo for an upcoming show on the same network.  How are the advertisers okay with this?  I’m not sure.  There must be some kind of kickback system in place.

Now, for those of you who don’t like paying the cable or Verizon guy, web services like Hulu and Apple TV let you watch pretty much any TV episode you want; however, unlike the services above, they can force you to watch some commercials.  While I cannot vouch for my fictional price points, a good business model might be something like: give me 2 minutes of commercials per video for free, 1 minute of commercials for, say, $5.99 / month, and no commercials for, say, $12.99 / month.  For those that watch a lot of their TV this way, the additional cost (especially if it eliminates a cable bill) might be worth it - but expect to watch sports and other live events at a buddy’s house.  Through some kind of kickback scheme, the agencies et. al. will still get their money, and as for the advertisers themselves, well, there may be a need for advertising around the video player, or for better product placement in the shows themselves.

The report shows that UK brands spent £ 1.75 billion dollars for online advertising just in the first 6 months of 2009…and 60% of that was spent for search advertising! Of course Google, one of the world’s largest Internet search engines, has been the driving source behind the UK’s rise in online advertising.

It’s a give-give situation with the UK and Google - the UK gives Google more advertising money than any other country in the world, and Google gives UK citizens a chance to step away from TV and print ads and into the abyss of the Internet.

So, what’s your take on the UK’s first place finish over the US in online advertising and search?

You can read the entire article on Telegraph.co.uk.

I recently came across an interesting post on Springwise.com titled “Portals for brand conversations, led by brands“.  Launched by Seth Godin, Brands in Public is a new site that aggregates all those diverse conversations on the web and presents them through a unified public-facing dashboard that gives any brand the chance to lead the discussion….for a price ($400/month). 

At first this seemed like an interesting idea to me.  However, when you look beyond the “Seth Godin Hype Machine” and actually spend some time looking at the brand dashboards, there is nothing that exists that brands could not easily execute themselves on their own domains (where I believe the conversation really needs to take place).

The site is powered by Squidoo, and brand pages are nothing more than a collection of  feeds that are pulled from Twitter, Google News, Google Trends,  Google Blog Search,  Yahoo! News, Quantcast, and Bzzscapes.  There is some embedded functionality like threaded conversations and twitter sentiment analysis. Each brand page also has embedded feeds from the brands own blogs.

So my question….why here?   I just can’t get past the reason why a brand would spend $400/month to post messages here as opposed to engaging in the conversation via their branded web assets or directly where the conversation is taking place.   What do you think?

A few weeks ago, I poked fun at the overreactions to Gmail’s service outage on September 1st.  At the same time, however, I made it clear that, for some people, such a disruption can be a seriously harmful event.  The follow-up conversations from that blog post were not exactly what I intended, but I am glad they took place nonetheless.

This past week (Thursday, September 24th, to be precise), Gmail had another unplanned outage.  It wasn’t as serious or prolonged (mainly affecting Contacts and Chat, though many were without e-mail as well), but it did not go unnoticed, both within our office walls and on our twitter feeds.  And while many are sounding the Chicken Little alarms again, there are others who have a more positive opinion about what this means for the longevity of this type of software as a service.  For example, Phil Wainewright over at ZDNet had a great article entitled, “Why you should be glad about Gmail failures” — a must-read for anyone using Google’s enterprise offering, or having doubts about its viability.

Despite the flashy headline, not enough tech people are blogging.

Some are.  Those that are blogging usually write posts that fall into one of four categories:

1. elaborate posts describing how they set up a process, or solved an engineering problem, from beginning to end;
2. brief descriptions of something someone else wrote about, and a link;
3. a collection of URLs (links of the week); or,
4. things non-techie related, or at least outside their main discipline.

There are, of course, some other posts (and entire sites full of posts) that don’t fall into these four buckets.  Two that stand out to me, and that I don’t really qualify as “blog posts” at all:

• One is where another site simply slurps your RSS feed, regurgitating your excerpt and linking to the full article on your site.  This is kind of in category 2 above, but it is all automated… the person typically does not proactively say, “Hey, this blog post was really cool; I’m going to publicize it!”  They’re usually using software that merely attempts to mimic that functionality, and of course there is no commentary provided along with the link.

• Another category is quite similar, but instead of showing an excerpt and providing a link, they simply copy the entire article, without permission, and perhaps don’t even provide proper attribution to the original author.  I call this theft.  So does Brent Ozar.  And so does WikiPedia. It sounds ludicrous, but many sites are doing this - in the SQL Server realm, it seems every week there is a new site out there that is aggregating a lot of the more popular SQL Server bloggers, simply to drive traffic (and therefore ad revenue) to their own site.  This keeps readers from visiting the original authors’ sites, where the people who did the actual work might benefit (never mind that if they make updates or spark dialog on their own sites, the aggregators are typically not going to update their own stolen content). Now, keep in mind, some bloggers intentionally do this — they syndicate their posts on multiple sites (including some where the site owners charge for access).  I pointed out one such case to a colleague recently and, while he didn’t confirm to me that it was the case, I can only assume by his lack of response that it was intentional, or at least that he was already aware of the issue.

But back to the point of my post: not enough tech people are blogging.  And I’m not sure why.

Let me qualify my statement, because it is rather subjective.  There are plenty of technical people blogging.  The problem is that they’re not all blogging quality content, or at least not all of the time.  There are some bloggers out there, who I know personally, who are quite gifted and could share a lot of their technical knowledge to the benefit of many of us.  But they blog about things like what they’re having for dinner, a commercial they just saw on NBC, or how many songs they now have in their iTunes library.  And then there are others in that same boat who aren’t blogging at all.  For obvious reasons I don’t want to call anyone out directly, but let’s just say it’s a common observation.

A lot of people are afraid to blog because they feel they are just using the technology, and don’t feel they have much to offer that isn’t already covered in the documentation or in someone else’s blog.  I beg to differ.  It’s perfectly fine to regurgitate documentation or to expand on someone else’s writing.  As long as you are not performing huge Copy + Paste jobs, you will be adding your own spin to the content… maybe sparking ideas for how the product or technology could be improved, how your readers could make better use of what’s already there, or your experience with the technology that falls outside of what might be explained in the documentation.  Even if you just have links to sites with further details, by posting about them you are improving their discoverability.  And maybe just the way you interpret the documentation and write about it in your writing style will help people better understand the topic or reinforce what they interpreted on their own.

For example, imagine the following blog post about advanced memory management in SQL Server didn’t exist, and you needed to find out allof this information on your own.  Imagine how many different searches of MSDN/TechNet you’d have to exercise before you could assemble it all?  And still it wouldn’t necessarily be explained in the right way, because the documentation for extremely advanced topics such as this are usually (and sometimes necessarily) cryptic:

Fun with Locked Pages, AWE, Task Manager, and the Working Set…

Another example is a recent blog post I wrote.  I created a stored procedure that would assist with dynamic memory management in a multi-node cluster failover scenario.  There is nothing genius or revolutionary about the code that I wrote, but now if someone is searching for a way to do this, they can borrow from my blog post instead of re-inventing the wheel and writing the code from scratch:

Managing Active/Active cluster failovers with different hardware

So why aren’t you blogging? 

Are you nervous?  Are you not sure where to start?  Brent Ozar has some great posts on blogging, including a 5-part series describing ways you can blog better.  Need more inspiration than that?  Dustin Marx had a great write-up a couple of weekends ago, explaining his thoughts on why more tech people should blog.  I recently touched on some similar points also, over on sqlblog.com.

So again, why aren’t you blogging? 

Jump in.  Write about the things you know about.  Write about things you’ve tried, whether or not you were successful.  But for the sake of all of our sanity, please don’t blog that you are microwaving a Swanson chicken dinner, or that you just got back from the busy mall.  Save those little tidbits for your Twitter or Facebook status updates.

While this is smart technology, it caused some difficulties for agencies that wanted to confirm their ads were running correctly.

Luckily, last week Bing introduced an Ad Preview Tool. It is available within the adCenter UI and complete instructions are available at the adCenter blog. The tool still requires some updates, as it does not currently support geo-targeting. The ads are also currently not clickable, and only available to users signed into the accounts within adCenter.

Google has an Ad Preview Tool, which has been out for a while and does include geo-targeting capabilities. It is also available to anyone, even outside of an account.

Based on the adCenter blog, it sounds like they are continuing to enhance the tool to include geo-targeting. This is a great example of search engines incorporating advertiser feedback, and we look forward to seeing refinements in future editions.

Boston, Mass. and Reno, Nev. (Sept. 14, 2009) – One to One Interactive (OTO), a Boston-based digital marketing firm recently ranked by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing private companies in America, announced today a definitive agreement to merge Twelve Horses, with operations in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno-Tahoe, Nevada, into its OTOi and OTOlabs divisions.

The merger expands One to One Interactive’s comprehensive suite of digital marketing services, technology and media offerings by incorporating Twelve Horses’ agency practice and innovative marketing products.

The move represents the fourth time OTO has grown through a merger or acquisition, a strategy the company embarked on beginning in 2005. The addition of Twelve Horses gives OTO a significant presence in the West and Twelve Horses’ many East Coast based clients will welcome the OTO East Coast footprint. Both OTO and Twelve Horses service accounts in Europe and Asia. Twelve Horses, frequently recognized for its innovative work in the travel-tourism industry, also services such global clients as J.P. Morgan Chase, Deloitte and Bill Me Later, a PayPal company.

The western-based Twelve Horses will integrate its trademarked and patented technology platforms, including MessageMaker™, which delivers multi-channel direct digital communications to customers via email, web, mobile, voice and fax messaging, into current One to One Interactive offerings. As a result, OTO clients, which currently include Comcast, Rite-Aid, McGraw-Hill and Partners Healthcare, will be able to leverage the company’s expanded portfolio of services and tools in executing their one-to-one digital marketing strategies.

“Our merger with Twelve Horses enhances and extends OTO into the type of unique firm brands seek in today’s digital marketing landscape, one that can come to the table with leading marketing services strategy and execution capabilities as well as a full suite of proven technology products to integrate and deploy quickly and efficiently,” said Ian Karnell, chief executive officer of One to One Interactive. “By leveraging the platform capabilities and innovative intellectual property we’ve acquired through our expansion efforts, our clients can expect greater efficiency in strategy execution and in speed to market, which is essential for remaining at the forefront of the marketing evolution.”

With its newly expanded product and service lines, nearly 30 percent of revenues will be driven from the firm’s unique portfolio of permission based digital messaging  technologies, which include multi-channel messaging platforms for email and mobile marketing, content management systems, ticketing and event management, desktop widgets and plug-ins for improved workflow. A large portion of the remaining revenue stream will continue to be generated from services such as branding, web site development, customer relationship management, search engine marketing and social web strategies.

“At a time where every marketing services firm is being asked to bring more to the table, our clients benefit from this merger by having immediate access to a broader organization with incredible experience and depth in quality, customizable technology products and solutions,” explained Twelve Horses CEO David LaPlante, who will serve as OTO’s Senior Vice-President of Sales & Marketing. “Our newly combined company significantly enhances our ability to accommodate our client’s broad and often unique set of marketing services and technology dependent requests, as opposed to simply providing a one-size fits-all-solution.”

The merger is designed to accelerate growth and innovation, including a new management structure to help achieve that vision. One to One Interactive Chief Executive Officer Ian Karnell and President Jeremi Karnell will remain in their roles, while Twelve Horses executives Steve Spencer and Martin Gastanaga will serve as senior executives for its OTOlabs division. The company will remain headquartered in Charlestown, Mass., with additional offices in Baltimore, Reno-Tahoe, Salt Lake City and London.

About One to One Interactive
Complete One-To-One Solutions for Brands, Agencies, and Publishers

Established in 1997, One to One Interactive is the first enterprise to assemble a complete solution for brands, agencies, and publishers executing one-to-one marketing strategies. By bringing together one of the nation’s leading digital marketing agencies, the worlds most comprehensive portfolio of permission marketing platforms, performance marketing solutions, and cutting edge neuromarketing research techniques, the companies of One to One Interactive build informed and creative customer/constituent strategies on the belief that digital media’s ability to enable engaging one-to-one dialogues is the future of marketing.

One to One Interactive has recently been ranked by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing private companies in America, one of the Top Interactive firms in the United States according to B2B Magazine, and one of the world’s 20 hottest independent digital marketing firms by Ad Age.

Please visit one of One to One Interactive’s web sites for more information:

    * One to One Interactive: www.onetooneinteractive.com

    * OTOi: www.otoi.com

    * OTOlabs: www.otolabs.com

    * OTOnetworks: www.otonetworks.com

    * OTOinsights: www.otoinsights.com

About Twelve Horses
Twelve Horses has historically been a global provider of Web site design and development, multi-channel marketing, business process automation, customer relationship management (CRM), search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Operating as an online brand marketing and messaging technology agency, Twelve Horses assisted businesses in translating and transforming their brands online.

Twelve Horses provides One to One Interactive with operations in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno-Tahoe, Nevada.

Twelve Horses has been recognized for being a “Top 30 Innovative Company” by Utah Business, and “Technology Company of the Year” by the Technology Business Alliance of Nevada.

Please visit Twelve Horses web site for more information: www.twelvehorses.com

For more information call 1-617-425-7369 or visit www.onetooneinteractive.com

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