MySpace has a new ad boss: former marketing head Jeff Berman. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch canned the last one, Mike Barrett, for his inability to reach aggressive revenue targets. To avoid the same fate, Berman seems to have decided to follow a strategy we've heard MySpace has been following since at least last fall: Copy Facebook page by page.
As a part of a new "blogging services" strategy, blog software firm Six Apart has acquired social media applications builder Apperceptive and launched a new ad network. SAI questions whether the world needs another ad network. It doesn't. But we also wonder about Six Apart's timing. Why not launch the ad network during Ad:tech a week earlier? The Moscone Center crowd might have liked to lay some bets on some SXSW-style kickball action organized by publicly snarky, privately earnest Six Apart marketing guru Anil Dash. All we got were booth babes in fishnets.
Revision3 videoblogger Martin Sargent began the closing keynote at Ad:tech — also a live taping of his talk show Internet Superstar — with a video tour through the conference floor. The best part was when Sargent walked over to a booth. "So you're Smiley Media?" he asked. "That's us." Sargent: "What the fuckk are you so happy about?" The Daily Show's Rob Corddry couldn't have done it better. It was a good moment for Web TV, made especially sweet by the fact that hundreds of ad buyers — Revision3's prospective clients, many of them — were looking on from the audience. Too bad that was the keynote's last watchable moment.
Target's ad buyer, Stephen Dwyer, said the Valley needs to better educate buyers by sharing data. Coca-Cola's Tara Scarlett agreed and added that website owners have to explain to ad agencies who their users are and why they're valuable. Or, as two ignorant bloggers explained to David Spark at last night's Revision3 party, "Ad buyers, they're like junkies. And the people who sell advertising are like drug dealers. Facebook needs to better explain how to pack the crack pipe and smoke it."
William Hesketh Lever once said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the trouble is I don't know which half." For over a decade, it's been promised that online advertising will fix that. On that note, we made nice with Brooke Hammerling, the bicoastal tech insider who observed that no one can agree on metrics, whether you're talking click fraud or online video downloads. (We've picked ours — pageviews — and we're sticking to it.) Companies like Kiptronic, which hosted the Revision3 party last night, have engineered interesting technology for counting videos, but in any case, you still need humans to move the inventory. At the Adroll party at Slide, silver-tongued founder Jared Kopf was seen giving his pitch — "price discovery algorithms" and "social discovery" — to Alan Cutter, CEO of ACLion, an ad-sales recruiting specialist. Cutter told us that he has a database of over 150,000 ad-sales executives; he's the guy you go to when you need to hire a salesperson in New York. Photos of some of the people who sell every last slice of the advertising pie, and convince you that the half that doesn't work tastes just as sweet:
Facebook today removed the choice between a "thumbs-up" or "X" icon it used to give users for each item in their News Feed. The icons let them vote for or against each item, and in the process train Facebook on which items to display. Taking this feature away was not a good idea. Just today, a prominent ad executive singled it out for praise.
BrewPR's snacky flack Brooke Hammerling penned a guest column for Silicon Alley Insider, arguing that the Web video industry needs to come up with a strict viewership metric. Though she doesn't mention it in the piece, New York-based online-video startup NextNewNetworks is a Brew client. (It's disclosed, in tiny type, at the end.) We could ask why Henry Blodget is giving a self-interested company rep a soapbox, or why they couldn't fix the red eye in Hammerling's photo. But the real question is why Hammerling suddenly cares about online video analytics.
Ad:tech San Francisco is on and I'm disappointed. AdWeek's Brian Morrissey promised me Ad:tech would be full of "random, sketchy lead gen ad networks who hire booth babes." Instead, I'm stuck in a session with panelists explaining how Google could better sell search advertising for offline brand advertising campaigns, which sounds boringly profitable. And I've encountered precious little sleaziness yet. Except for one guy and his two friends from Blow4Free.com. And the 13 others I met, in photographs below. A warning: The last two pics are probably too hot for your office manager to handle.
NEW YORK — I told a friend of mine at DoubleClick Google that I'm flying to San Francisco next week for Ad:tech. His response: "Hahahahahha. Have fun with that." Worried, I reached out to conference veteran and Adweek writer Brian Morrissey. His words were kindly reassuring. "It's very, very sales-y," he said.
