Change is painful

Change is painful; taking action will make it easier. Decide if you accept or do not accept the change, then take action.

Discussion on browser evolution

Thanks for the good feedback on the highlight of the new browser! I read about Microsoft’s Gazelle browser that you mention ( http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=79655 ), seems like it has stronger focus on security and resource protection than on showing smarter results? Keep me posted

The new browser

I wrote yesterday about the new competitor to Google and Live Search. Analyzing the situation, I can’t help but wonder what marketing means they will use to get users to switch from Goliaths like Google and Live Search to the new browser. Habits are hard to change, even when getting a better alternative… I’ll keep you posted on the marketing mix or non marketing mix they’ll use.

Hulu No. 2 Online-Video Site after YouTube

by Michael Learmonth Published: March 12, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — One year after coming out of private beta, Hulu crossed a significant milestone: By one measure it’s now the No. 2 video site in the U.S. behind YouTube, and the biggest purveyor of professional video on the web.

Hulu saw a 33% surge in traffic after its first attempt to market itself to the general public.
The site hit that mark in February, according to unreleased figures from Nielsen Online’s VideoCensus, after a 33% surge in traffic fueled by a Super Bowl ad, Hulu’s first attempt to market itself to the general public.

That growth spurt, with 309 million video views, shot Hulu ahead of Yahoo and MySpace. Unique viewers were also up 31% to 9.5 million, but Hulu disputes Nielsen’s unique-visitors figure, and ComScore puts it nearly three times as high.

The new figures put into context what NBC Universal and News Corp.’s joint venture has achieved, and the growing power of TV content on the web. NBC and Fox programming got Hulu off the ground, but now it has 130 deals with networks and studios. Its player has been embedded nearly 4 million times on more than 100,000 websites.

Higher CPMs for TV shows
In the grand scheme, saying you’re No. 2 in online video is a bit like saying you’re the tallest midget, as YouTube boasts 5.2 billion views a month. But it’s still significant, particularly given that TV shows can garner ad rates as high as $40 to $50 per thousand viewers online, and as Hulu makes its second tour of agencies for pitch meetings as part of its informal upfront sales push.

The challenge now for Hulu is to keep growing and pad its lead. To that end, Hulu is saying hello to social networks, with a community feature it calls “Hulu Friends,” which allows users to import profile information and contacts from Facebook and MySpace, as well as e-mail clients Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. Hulu Friends will allow users to see what their friends are watching, and make recommendations.

The point here is to encourage users to spend time on Hulu itself, rather than third-party distributors such as Yahoo TV and TVGuide.com. Hulu gets a higher percentage of the gross advertising sold against viewers on Hulu (30%) vs. those watching Hulu on partner sites such as Comcast’s Fancast or TVGuide, which take a 10% cut. Community functions will also keep viewers around longer, and allow Hulu to show them more ads.

“From an ad perspective, this is about bringing users to Hulu and having them spend more time on the service,” said J.P. Colaco, Hulu senior VP-sales.

Targeting users
But there’s another upside: It will encourage more users to register, which will allow Hulu to target them based on demographics, location, viewing history and preferences. So far, Hulu execs said several million users have registered to receive customized recommendations.

As part of its distribution deals with content owners, Hulu can’t sell individual TV shows such as NBC’s “30 Rock”; rather, it sells demographics, so the ability to target a large number of users across many shows is Hulu’s proposition.

Soon, when its exclusive distribution deals with NBCU and News Corp. expire, Hulu will be one of many sites, including Veoh, Fancast and CBS’s TV.com, with roughly the same or similar content.

That means Hulu is in a race to make itself essential to online TV viewers through features such as search, recommendations and community, and to advertisers through targeting.
Share

A new competitor to Google and Live Search

http://www.wolframalpha.com/
Share

Help in adapting to big changes

Going though major changes in your personal or business life? Changing job, position in the firm, personal status, changing country or do you just want to be able to cope better with all the small obstacles that are thrown your way? Give yourself a small reward every day, even if you don’t have anything to celebrate. This will give you a positive break to look forward to. The reward will motivate through your day and also help you get the stress out of your system. My daily reward while quitting my beloved job and moving to a foreign and stressful country, is to go to the local coffee shop and by a grand cappuccino with extra shot. My colleagues thinks it’s exclusive that I go buy a coffee every day that costs nearly 5 euros, but I’d pay the double if necessary and this daily coffee break helps me cope with the big changes in my life. Share

Difference between French and English management

Some days ago I talked to a Swedish guy working as a CEO in France, about the thorough processes in France. We both shared the same opinion that the French way of doing business is very ineffective and are a source of less income for businesses and less wealth for the French state.

In Scandinavia and also in England, you are used to everybody (not just the managers) giving their opinions and everybody taking a responsibility to drive the project forward. In France, a project management is often divided in two parts, the actual project management and then the process management. Yes you’re thinking, that makes sense and yes it does to some extent, but not if the process management takes 50% of the projects timeframe. In France you have a meeting about what do discuss in the actual meeting. In England or in Scandinavia, you’d cut right to the chase and have the meeting without wasting time on deciding what to say in a meeting before the meeting! The outcome is that in France, normally nobody contradicts the manager. The employees do as the manager decides and often they’re either too afraid or to busy climbing the career latter to share their knowledge.

This can come to down to banal outcomes and one example is; to change your desk, you’ll have to get approval from the top CEO. If you don’t get approval, you can experience that the CEO invites you into his office telling you that next time you want to change your desk, you’ll have to ask him first. This goes back to my first article on the French and differences from the English – see link here; http://tonjeaaroe.wordpress.com/2009/01/30/difference-between-the-english-and-the-french-and-a-norwegian/ , In France they love discussing every small detail, wasting time and forgetting time is money.  

The Swedish CEO and I talked about the difference in effect, revenue and total turnover, if the company’s destiny was not dependent on just the top managers but also the great assets of the company’s employees.  A good manager hires an employee that is sharper and knows other business areas than her/him. He had amongst others experienced that he could not perform his work since he had 4 managers not managing to agree on what direction to go in a project. What a waste of time and money.

Share

Inspiring speach

From Obama’s address to Congress 24th of Feb; “I think about Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the young girl from that school I visited in Dillon, South Carolina, a place where the ceilings leak, the paint peels off the walls, and they have to stop teaching six times a day because the train barrels by their classroom.

She had been told that her school is hopeless. But the other day after class, she went to the public library and typed up a letter to the people sitting in this chamber. She even asked her principal for the money to buy a stamp.

The letter asks us for help and says, “We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself, and one day president, so we can make a change to not just the state of South Carolina, but also the world. We are not quitters.”

That’s what she said: “We are not quitters.” These words…”

More on clicks

Did you know that in the final two days before a sale or conversion, consumers see an average of five and a half ads?

Why click is the wrong thing to measure

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The great paradox of the web is that it’s an interactive medium and everything can be measured. And that’s wonderful — unless you’re measuring the wrong thing.

In the past several months, there has been increasing evidence that the most easily measured metric on the web, the click, is not the right metric to use for many advertisers. And that’s good news for publishers struggling to monetize their content with online ads.

Simply put, many advertisers in the past gave most of the credit for a sale or conversion — which in the web world could include anything from visiting a website to printing an online coupon — to the last ad clicked on or seen by a consumer. But that means brand-focused sites such as NYTimes.com and MarthaStewart.com and even social-media sites such as Facebook and MySpace lose credit because they are often not where a consumer will see that last ad. And when they lose credit, they lose advertisers, and when they lose ad revenue, well, you’ve read that story.

“Publishers have a lot to gain,” said Steve Kerho, VP-analytics, media and marketing optimization at Organic. Mr. Kerho has been doing lots of analysis on how online-display ads affect search and conversions and found that in some cases, a display ad can increase a search ad’s click-through rate 25% to 30%. If he had simply measured the clicks from search, he would have missed the display ads’ influence.

The evolution toward better attribution models has been occurring over the past several years. Yet by some informal estimates, as many as half of all online advertisers are still measuring using rudimentary models, such as the click, which is hurting publishers.

Circular problem
John Squire, chief strategy officer of web-analytics firm Coremetrics, which today is launching a service that helps marketers give proper credit to their many online ads, likens it to an offline example: You’re headed to the supermarket and on your way in you see the big sign in the window advertising ground round for $3.99 a pound. You need some anyway, so you buy it. In the online world, which measures the last ad seen, that sign alone would be given credit for your purchases in the store. But it’s quite likely that you were going shopping in the first place because you saw something in the weekend circular that you wanted to buy or maybe you heard a radio ad. Under the last-ad-attribution model, the circular is worth, at worst, nothing, and at best far less than the ad for ground chuck in the storefront.

“[Online advertising] is not, by any stretch, always direct-response advertising,” said ComScore CEO Gian Fulgoni, whose report, “Wither the Click,” has been making the rounds in the marketing industry since he introduced it in December at a Wharton Business School conference. “In the offline world, media analysts don’t think of an immediate reaction to TV or print ad.”

The ComScore research, which studied 139 online ad campaigns by marrying data from its panel of U.S. internet users with shopper data, found online ads, even when they didn’t result in a click, increased a consumer’s likelihood of making a purchase at an advertiser’s retail store by 17% and increased visits to a marketer’s website by an average of 40%.

Microsoft’s Atlas has been touting an alternative to last-ad accounting for the past year and research it’s introducing today found that in the final two days before a sale or conversion, consumers see an average of five and a half ads. In the 90 days leading up to a sale consumers see 18 ads for a product.

“Virtually any seller that’s not a search engine or affiliate [network] is not getting the proper credit for their ads,” said Esco Strong, market research manager at the Atlas Institute. “There’s a disconnect in terms of the actual work that’s delivering people through that [sales] funnel and the sale and there’s a disconnect in how advertisers are measuring their ads and planning their campaigns.”

Analytics, optimization
Randy Rothenberg, the CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, calls it “blunt-force mass buying combined with direct-response measurement metrics.”

One solution for publishers? Organic’s Mr. Kerho suggests they embrace analytics to help clients figure out how much to put in each bucket.

“Come to the table with solutions to reach the right audience with the right solution at the right time,” he said. “There isn’t a client we sit down with that isn’t about analytics and optimization.” Share