Just wanted to post a link to where I am blogging now. I feel this format has gotten to be too much for me to handle with work so I am switching to the more flexible Posterous format. Here is the new URL.
Winston Churchill once said, “There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.” So would that thought in mind this blog is going to change yet again. For the past couple years, I have been writing my thoughts and ideas on digital marketing and my industry. Its been a great ride and I have taught myself so much but with every great learning comes a new one.
That new learning is that my infrequent blogging habits have gotten even less frequent. So with that in mind, I am going to suspend activity on the blog except for the occasional rant or posting. I may also move this over to the domain stemato.com/blog in the coming days and attempt to make my TLD more about me.
Why?
Because life is about change. We change jobs, apartments, food, clothes and just about our minds daily. And as I have learned the digital marketing world from display ads to search one thing has always been missing and its design.
When I was in college I learned design from top to bottom. Much of it was concentrated on making pretty pictures. So when I graduated I struggled to understand the concepts of design holistically and how the fit those it into the rest of the digital world. I only wanted to make pretty things.
Boy! Was I confused 
There fore, I am going to change my website so that I can soak in more of my creative side and take myself down a new path. How am I going to do it? I am not sure yet but stay tuned…
I meant to post this a couple days ago but here it is. I saw that Bing is posting live real time stats for NBA players as they score. Did anyone else notice this? I think its excellent and a great step forward in real-time search; an area I think Google is particularly lacking in.
Digital marketing has ushered in a new wave of analytical marketing where everything can be measured right down to the click. But unfortunately its is not without its faults and the issues come in all different shapes and sizes. Everything from complex coding to simple human error is common place. And in my role at Microsoft Advertising, I see a wide variety of these issues ranging from the mundane to the utterly complex.
One of the most common errors I see that leads to more client headaches than any is publisher implementation. These varied errors cause more wasted time than any other type of error when investigating differences between publisher and client. The good news is they almost always can be prevented by a little thought and preparation before hand.
Here are a few simple and easy rules to make sure your tag is implemented correctly.
This is certainly not all the possible implementation issues I have come across in my time. However, I would say it accounts for the bulk of them. Not to mention, its always a terrific idea to QA these first and foremost as you can almost always save yourself some time on the back-end when your reporting shows up with gaps. Hopefully this provides a good starting point for publishers and advertisers alike and happy implementing!
Last week, I went to the NASDAQ to attend the Microsoft closing bell ceremony. It was quite an honor and a great way to spend my afternoon. Not to mention Windows 7 is a great product! I have been using it for a couple weeks now on my work PC and its really sharp. It is so much easier to use and packed with great features that have made me more productive at work But I digress.
I don’t want this to be a shining endorsement of Windows 7 but a congratulations to all the folks who put such hard work into turning out this product. It was truly an honor for me to be able to represent you as a fellow Microsoft employees at the NASDAQ for the closing ceremony!
PS- Can you spot me in the Photo?
I wanted to write a quick thought I had about the relatively new Facebook Highlights section. I have been using the new redesign for quite awhile now and for the most part its still as annoying as it was when it rolled out. I do like some of the features but the chat is still horrendous, the constantly updating feed is distracting and photos are harder to upload. But the one thing that is so annoying and just a complete waste of good website space is the ubiquitous Hightlights section.
It sits on the right hand side of your screen eschewing more useless information than the United Nations at a security counsel meeting discussing Iran. Have you hidden folks from your normal feed? Not to worry they will eventually find their way to your highlights section! Its kind of like the kid you don’t invite to your party but he shows anyway.
Before I start to rant too much. I wanted to mention a curious behavior I noticed about this feature. It has become so useless to me that I have developed a form of banner blindness to it. I barely if ever even take a glance at it and even click on the links less.
Oh - how I wish I could just turn it off or replace it with some relevant advertising…
Lately, I have been reading tons of data about everything from ad revenue plummeting to the health care verticals fast exit from the search business. All the data we have provides us with supposedly crucial insights into the current state of situations within our economy or otherwise. But lately, I have wondered if we have so much data that it is starting to contradict itself. For instance, what does it mean when Comscore says Google has 77% marketshare? Is that even true? What does it mean? Does it mean that only 3 out of 4 searchers use Google?
Then I read this article in the Wall Street Journal that left out a crucial point about the data it cites. In it he states, “Display-related advertising–which includes display ads, rich media, digital video and sponsorship–totaled nearly $3.8 billion in the first six months of 2009, a 1.1% decline from the same period in 2008, the IAB said.” While this may be a decline from year over year spend, it neglects too mention that CPM prices have plummeted in the past year while volume has increased. With these increased volumes has come a seemingly endless supply of ad space across millions of niche sites that can leave a media planner stumped.
This significant uptick in both quantity and inventory, while prices decline, is leading to a hyper deflation of online ad valuations and an overall obscured view of the landscape. So when the Wall Street Journal posts that ad revenue dropped year-over-year it’s not exactly telling you the whole story. In fact, it’s only one part of a much more complicated story.
I would be curious to see the difference in prices today, as opposed to three years ago. I would suspect it costs more than 50% less than three years ago. This, along with rising inventories, is a perfect storm for destruction and ultimately redefining the entire market. But one can only hope…
Today I ran across the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan from my apartment and along the way I had some time to reflect on a few things. First off, it was five years ago today that I moved to New York from Florida. I remember being so full of anxiety and anticipation. What would happen? Would I find a job? Would I like it? (Considering I had only visited here once before moving here)
Well, I can say with some confidence that I have made the most of my time here and still seem to be in love with New York. Its funny all the change I have seen in my short time I have lived here. I worked my way to Microsoft (my current work), visited quite a few countries (China is still the best), attended a few weddings (Congrats to you all) and watched my Little Brother graduate from College and move onto Medical School (Congrats Dom). All these things were truly great but not all things have been this good. Here are a few of the bad. My grandma got sick (the worst thing ever - I hate seeing people get old), I still feel homesick every so often, I gained some weight (not much but jeez its hard to get back to high school weight when you are 34) and I am still single.
Anyway, I am digressing from my thought. I wanted to take this time to say thanks to everyone I have met in the five years since I moved to New York. Its been truly great learning from everyone and I look forward to five more years of learning. I read a Dale Carnegie tip a few months ago and I have tried to eternalize it. It says “Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime.” So in the spirit of that quote I am going to leave this post open. I will from time to time post personal thank you messages to people I meet and have met as kind of a memorial to my thankfulness.
Check back often and if you want to say thanks to someone please feel free to leave it as a comment.
Stephen
My list of thanks.
#1 - Mom and Dominic - thanks for all the support since I was a kid. Its truly the cornerstone of all that I am and will be.
Dynamic logic recently released a study that says graphic ads integrated into the content of a campaign drive better brand awareness than so-called framing ads that are on the edge of pages. Interestingly, these ads to seem to stick in my mind more but not because they are driving brand awareness but because they are interrupting my experience. An interruption that ultimately undermine’s my confidence in the brand.
It sometimes feels as if we just took everything that did not work in television advertising and applied it to the web. Saying that it was ultimately better because we could slap fancy analytics on the backend and show ROI. The web is not TV. It has infinitely more opportunities for engaging users and requires a different mindset. One recent advertisement that I particularly like is the one my company Microsoft did with Federated media called Exec Tweets. Basically, they aggregated biz exec tweets into a Microsoft branded background. Useful, not interrupting and excellently done upholding the brand’s integrity.
I wonder why more companies are not exploring these type of branded experiences with their media. Perhaps its fear of challenging the status quo or maybe its just ignorance to these models. When will we learn by raising your hand the highest you are not always getting the teacher’s attention in a good way?
A few years ago, I started working at Nielsen Buzzmetrics which eventually became Nielsen Online. I remember the first days there being so full of enthusiasm and pride in working for such a cool innovative company. One of the coolest things, I remember about Buzz back then was BlogPulse the free blog indexing tool that was built a few years prior.
It has so many cool innovative tools to help in trending everything from popular blogs to topics of conversation amongst those blogs. I would look at BlogPulse and immediately know the days news and how folks felt about that news. In a sense, it was and still is a quick glance at the collective ideas of the online world. Its really quite fascinating and I was proud to be a part of the team.
As things go, I moved on from Nielsen to Microsoft and BlogPulse faded into the back of my mind only to be visited rarely. So you can imagine my excitement when I read via Twitter that BlogPulse had relaunched. My mind immediately wondered what cool new tools would be in store for BlogPulse in this incarnation. Would it remain the innovative tool that it was? Would I start visiting more frequently to use these tools in new and wonderful ways?
More than 3 years in the making BlogPulse has a new skin and its much cleaner design than the old one. I appreciate the efforts that were put into making it much easier to find and sort through the mountains of information that are digested daily through BlogPulse. The design is really nice. One thing about the design that I found peculiar was the lack of obvious linking back to Nielsen the parent company of the tool other than a small link in the footer of the page. I see the big logo in the upper right but its not clickable as a link. If this was to avoid obvious marketing by Nielsen than I definitely applaud it.
The other area that I found particularly strange was that other than calling out a few trends in a new upper left hand box the site offers no particular innovations. Essentially its a new skin on an old site that took a number of years to complete. I would have really enjoyed seeing Nielsen bring some new tools to the site or a blog that explained the changes and brought a personal spin to it. In a world, of AJAX and Javascript that would have enhanced trending tools Nielsen really could have pushed this to the next level. Instead its really the same BlogPulse with new clothes.
In any event, cheers to Nielsen for modernizing the design and helping me to remember BlogPulse and its cool tools. Hopefully in the next incarnation we will see some more innovations but for now it looks like we will have to be satisfied with a new look.
