On november 9 I’ll be speaking at Microsoft Innovate in Stockholm on how to create banners that does the job properly, both in terms of branding and/or direct response. The main idea, as always, is that the best way to improve ROI (however you define it really) for any ad campaign is thru better creative, rather than targeting or other media levers. Also, I’ll evangelize for the banner some more, which is getting more and more politically correct, since people are literally investing tens of billions of dollars into improving banner ads as we speak.

Sign up to see the circus for yourself!

This is a post I made over at the Burt blog – it’s an update on Copybox and a quick rant about my feeling on creating ad tech vs. lightweight web apps, so I figured it might be relevant here aswell.

Last year we presented Copybox at Techcrunch50. But so far, the number of people we’ve let on is very limited. Partly because Jacob Nielsen tells us to, but mostly because we’re the target audience ourselves and still know plenty of stuff that need fixing. Also, since the economy went south we’ve had to focus most of our limited resources on Rich and other platform part of our products that generates enough money for us to stay in business.

(quick rant on the hardships of building an ad tech business is coming up – ok to skip if you just want the state of Copybox haha)

Burt’s platform sofware is often mission critical to the campaigns we run, and need to be able to scale from hundereds to tens of thousands of requests per second, with zero performance loss in minutes. For real. Add that SLAs that require four nine uptimes are not uncommon, and you realize that we deal with different challenges than the average web startup. Ad tech requires massive scale from the first user, and bailing out using the fail whale just isn’t an option. The people talking about how building a web business these days is “easy”, “cheap” and “fast” certainly haven’t tried to build what we’re doing

One big challenge is that creating great advertising technology incorporates the most demanding parts from both B2C and B2B at once, meaning that we need to make products people actually want to use (like in B2C), but feedback cycles are often long and reliability is crucial (like in B2B). Not to mention that working capital can be a real bitch… little depending on your business model I guess (simple licensing deals for instance are not included), but in most cases getting the really attractive gross margins requires a big dip in working cap on your behalf. Not even Amazon or Akamai can save you here. It just costs plenty of money to build the ad exchanges, trading systems and demand side platforms that everyone (incl. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) are having wet dreams about controlling

In case anyone is keeping score, these are the main reasons why you see lots of ad tech startups raise tens of millions of dollars, still with nothing to show for it. But it’s also the reason we’ve seen a handful of multi billion dollar deal purchases in our market the last two year’s alone, so I guess that’s ok from an investor POV

But let’s get back to Copybox! Constrained resources or not, as it turns out, revolutionizing creative writing is a lot harder than we thought. Which is probably one of the reasons that the word processor has been untouched for 20 years. But we are making progress. Burt is probably in iteration 10 or so after Techcrunch50, one big change being that we’re now on the desktop.

Don’t worry “I’m a PC” fanboys, we’ve got it for you guys too. Also, we’ve started to rework the design with (not so little) help from Andreas and Jaan to push a less dark and gothic feel to something you might actually like to spend 8 hours a day looking at.

We’ve also realized that for the first full release of Copybox, creating dynamic content is not enough to deliver the kind of organic idea growing (trippy…) kind of experience that we’re aiming for. So we’re adding features that will be part of every writing tool – (good) outlining, remixed “undo/redo” functionality and a (working) set of language tools for grammar, spelling etc. And no in-document formatting, just structure. There are tons of super awesome design tools. Use them.

But first, we’ll release a version of desktop Copybox with dynamic content. ETA 6 weeks. You probably won’t (but it’s not impossible) put a dent in the creative universe with that version of Copybox, but at least you’ll have tangible proof that someone is actually working on making your creative writing tool smarter, better, faster and stronger.

Booyah.

(This post is ripped from Burt’s blog. Make sure to check out the video from my presentation)

Update: The video from our presentation is up. Check it out here.

So last year we had a blast presenting at Techcrunch50, and earlier this year we had a great time talking about Burt at Plugg. And now it’s time to make an appearance on the mother of all launching conferences, DEMO. And since the last Swedish company presenting a product there was Skype, this naturally feels kind of cool

So on wed. 23 sep at 12:25, we’ll present Rich, a campaign analytics tool focused on creative agencies. The idea is to give agencies everything they need – and nothing they don’t – on one simple report page, that answers critical questions such as “was the ad visible?”, “how long was it visible?” and “did people notice it?

Using campaign metrics to improve your campaigns thru trial-and-error is not a new concept. In fact it’s been around for over ten years. But despite this, most creatives – the art directors, copywriters etc. making the ads and that would have the most to gain from using these tools – have yet to take advantage of one the most prominent features online media has to offer.

But it’s really no wonder considering that the reporting tools were never built with these guys in mind. The tools were created to satisfy the buyers and sellers of advertising, not the creators of it.

So we thought “what if we created a tool specifically tailored for the creative agency, with metrics that makes sense for them?”. As it turns out, that made all the difference.

Basically, Rich is Google Analytics for banners and widgets. It’s third party that runs on top of ad servers such as Atlas and Eyewonder. It can be used for premium inventory or on ad networks and ad exchanges. And the installation is dead simple, it just takes a second or two to track ads with Rich.

The last few weeks have been crazy busy to get Rich in decent shape for Rich. There’s no way that we could have done it without the help from our friends at eLabs – Ruby boutique agency extraordinaire – and CP+B – our favorite agency that has not only provided invaluable feedback on how to design Rich, but also did a huge contribution to the final design. Thanks guys!

But enough talking, there is enough of that going on in marketing analytics as it is. Using metrics to improve your work is a contact sport. So get over to richmetrics.com and get your invite and start getting the insights you never thought possible, in a report you can actually understand.

Another year, another Techcrunch50. This year we didn’t present though, adding ourselves to the massive pile of fanboys.

Most companies presenting were very well polished, but still kind of dissappointment since, well I actually understood what most of them did

Seems to me that companies with products in the very early stage should really give you a “WTF – is this it?” kind of feeling. At least if a company is trying to hit it really big. I doubt that I would be even close to understanding the potential of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. after hearing a 5-10 minute presentation – which often includes introduction, market, problem, solution, demo and summary btw. – when they were showing their product for the first time.

It would frankly be interesting to just see some solutions to problems I didn’t even know existed.

But Techcrunch50 is great fun, I tell you that. Nice people, decent parties and kind of unreal to discuss what Burt is up to with people who’s products you depend on every day. It’s a shame that we don’t see more European companies on stage or in the audience.

Also, I had an excuse to grab coffee with Jaan Orvet, the super awesome web maniac who’s helped us out with Copybox lately.

Next week, we’re heading to DEMO in San Francisco, which I haven’t visited before. But considering that the tradition and track record of DEMO is quite insane, it should be great fun.

To kill time before San Diego, I’m cruising along Highway 1 for a weekend in LA with the rest of Burt’s core team. Life could be worse, I guess

So I’m in Oslo, enjoying my last calm minutes before going on stage to talk about “reactive ads” and how data can be mashed up to create more entertaining, persuasive and creative ads. Should be good fun, I’ve always enjoyed talking in Norway. Only thing that annoys me is that I missed Paul Ansett’s and Brian Solis’ talks. Usually great stuff.

Anyways. Here are the slides, enjoy!

…for convincing Daddy to sell their agency. And congratulations Daddy I guess, since they’re getting paid a handsome amount for doing so.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky is recognized as the world’s best agency, being the creators of classics such as Whopper Freakout, Whopper Sacrifice and Subservient Chicken (yes, it seems as BK has been a good client). And now they’re venturing into Europe by purchasing Daddy, with the objective of creating an innovation powerhouse in Gothenburg, Sweden, of all places.

This is naturally exciting stuff, mostly because I’m happy for all the founders/partners at Daddy, but also since I’ll get the chance to see how the industry’s best and brightest are working up close. I attended CP+B’s Digital Peep Show in NYC last week and I was extremely impressed by how they approach things!

Again. Congrats Björn, Jonas, Gustav and the rest. You deserve it!

Yay! Two new speaking engagements coming up:

Creative Summit, Sweden (17-18 june)
I’ll be speaking strictly on Burt’s products, the business case for why online advertising needs a creative injection and what our plans are for this year. It takes place waaaay up north in Sweden and includes speakers form Coke and Disney so most likely it’ll be totally awesome.

Webdagene, Norway (10-11 sep)
This will be a talk on constrained creativity, remix as an innovative process and how technology will revolutionize online advertising. Yup, big words. Looking forward to meeting Paul Annet from Clearleft, one of my heroes when it comes to web UX.

Both events look like they have rock solid organisation so I’ll probably post videos of both!

It’s not easy being in advertising these days. Not only does our industry consist of professionals with an exceptionally high level of existential anxiety – being paid to sell out to the highest bidder will do that to you – but we’re also under constant attack from people in other parts of the value chain. Not that this is anything new, advertising has been under siege both from the inside out for the last fifty years.

This time, it’s Jorge over at Spectator Bytes asking “Will Advertising Spending Be Another Victim of the Digital Media Transformation?“. More specifically, Jorge brings up the idea that many Internet services have reached broad adoption with little or no ad spend and asks:

What if this formula of success extended beyond Web products into other types of businesses (e.g., autos, food, appliances, toys, hardware devices, etc.).

It’s a interesting notion, which I suppose could be killed off just by pointing out that a web company’s capital and operations management is a tad easier than that of a say, electronics manufacturer. A web site can increase the “product inventory” by adding a new server (or just launching a new instance on EC2), an electronic manufacturer have to build a new server. And this is a luxury problem of course, since this implies that demand overshoots supply. The Internet industry learned the hard way how bad things can get if we have the inverse situation, that supply overshoots demand… capacity planning is a bitch, anyone from the dot-com-crash will tell you that. And the rest of the world still don’t have commodity hardware, VPS hosting, cloud computing etc. to decrease the risk of scale. But they do have advertising, that decrease the risk of scale by ensuring that demand meets supply. And that’s worth a lot.

But let’s say that open source hardware, just-in-time production, 3d-printing or whatever solves this dilemma, so that every industry have the same elasticity in scale that we do. We could kill the whole notion of “advertising is no longer needed since we have cracked the WOM-formula” by pointing out that Apple – the most buzzed up company on the entire planet – spent about 500MUSD on advertising last year. On a sidenote, this is (roughly) on par with what Microsoft normally spends in a fiscal year (in relation to revenues). But that would be somewhat unfair and I do think that Jose has a point. Relying on a blanket of ads clearly isn’t the most efficient go-to-market strategy for launching new products, or – even more so – new brands and companies. Using a PR- and WOM-driven strategy is.

Relying on PR and WOM in the initial stages of a launch makes sense from a trust perspective – the new ideas (products, brands, companies etc.) are coming from someone you “know” – but also they make complete sense from the perspective of allocating scarce resources. When an idea is new, there is a natural “story” to sell to press/bloggers and for people to talk about. It’s an opportunity that you only have when your idea is new. So naturally, resources should be allocated to leverage that “newness”. The problem starts when you’re not new any more. And with the velocity of media attention and social objects these days, this is a matter of days, or hours. And this is where advertising comes in.

Advertising leverages and accelerates the initial platform of awareness and trust that we’ve created thru PR and WOM.

But sure, for advertising to be really effective, it needs that initial platform. And to create that platform we need to have a product that walks the talk. It needs to be really, really good. But the increased pressure on product quality that information transparency has brought upon us doesn’t mean that the corporate budget will shift to product development and customer service – for the most part they already have a large chunk of the budget. Advertising actually accounts for quite a small part of the corporate budget in comparison to what it’s supposed to accomplish (sell a lot for a high price).

So it’s not a matter of advertising OR product, it’s advertising AND product. My guess is that if someone is going to get squeezed it’s the product guys: “we’re spending so much money with you, and this is all you have to show?”. So instead of advertising becoming more like product development – the in-meme right now – maybe it’s a matter of product development becoming more like advertising?

So the Economist has an interesting article up on how many large consumer web sites are having problems monetizing their audience’s usage. The point being that advertising isn’t ramping up enough revenues so these services now have to start charging for their services, which is difficult since barriers to entry are low and the user’s will then flee to some copycat service providing the exact same service but for free. And this service will do this for a while and then they will have to start charging and people will flee to another service, etc. etc. etc.

The article is somewhat ironic considering that it’s available for free, on a page surrounded by ads Put that aside, I think that the article misses the mark somewhat since it assumes that Google AdSense is the the be-all-end-all approach to online advertising. And if that didn’t work, nothing will.

But AdSense only caters to the part of the marketing budget that is focused on channeling existing demand, and most advertisers (regardless of the economic climate) still want to invest the majority of their budget into creating new demand, driving new behaviors etc. And we still have no AdSense for that. But for whatever reason, there has been very little innovation in terms of ad technology since AdSense was launched, and most VCs and startups have been focusing on increasing usage, not improving technologies to better monetize that usage. The “solution” lies in enabling a more creatively driven approach to advertising, making it easier for agencies to leverage all that technology that we’ve created over the last few years. Much like what we’re trying to do with Burt.

My guess is that this downturn will lead to a surge in companies that focus on how to better monetize usage. And that the end-result for driving revenues will be a hybrid model, that charge money from both end-users and advertisers. Hum… where have we heard that before?

Besides the odd keynote, Burt’s been pretty quiet since the Techcrunch50 presentation, specially considering the time since Techcrunch50 has actually been quite astounding in terms of sales and product development. We’ve also tweaked the concept and product portofolio based on feedback from our advisory board, consisting of some of the world’s greatest advertising entrepreneurs and creatives.

So we know our pitch makes sense for the ad people, but what about the techies? Well, today Burt is presenting another beauty contest for startups so in a couple of hours I guess we’ll know

This time it’s Plugg in Brussels, spearheaded by the extremely friendly Robin Wauters of TechCrunch. So far, the impression is that Plugg is more relaxed and cozy, but it might just be that I’m a tad more comfortable on this side of the pond

Plugg is pretty scary, they give you a 2 minute slot, and 3 companies (of 20 total) are invited to present another 10 minutes the afternoon. It’ll be interesting to see how the pitch for Burt lands. Our business relies on the assumption that techies and ad men have a communication problem so talking about the Internet from the perspective of an ad man at a tech conference obviously poses a challenge.

I’ll put up my slides after the pitch. Wish me luck!