You're probably trying to sell the wrong thing

Apple doesn't sell computers or phones.

They sell pieces of the future.

That's why people buy them.

That's why their competition can't actually compete with them and keep making ads that suggest they make phones or computers or whatever as good or better as Apple does.

Well fine, who knows, maybe they do. But nobody cares because that's not what Apple was selling in the first place.

There's a reason people called the iPhone the Jesus Phone, both fans and haters. Because that's how people felt about it. Like they were holding something completely unrelated to a phone. They weren't holding technology. They were holding something spiritual, something they'd assumed was unattainable.

And the haters saw this and mocked them for thinking so highly of a phone. As if it had anything to do with making calls.

They were holding a piece of the future in their hands, and everything else seemed like an antique in comparison.

Blackberries, by contrast, aren't selling you the future. And they're certainly not selling you a phone, either. They're selling you professionalism and formality. That's why people buy them, because it's the closest thing you'll ever get to having a corner office downtown.

And that's why when Blackberry tried to compete with the iPhone they failed miserably. Who the hell wants a shiny bit of technology from them? Nobody. In fact, Blackberry trying to sell the future is off-putting at best.

So when Microsoft says, hey, don't buy a Mac, you can get the same functionality from us, for cheaper, you can do the same things with a PC, it just sounds empty. It doesn't mean anything.

Why? Because Microsoft is selling efficiency and cost, and Apple is selling the future.

People buy PCs because they can't afford to buy the future, or aren't interested in owning it. Or they think that Apple trying to construct the future just makes their products cumbersome and overly flashy (to the detriment of user-experience).

So what are you selling? If you describe your business as selling a product or a service, you're probably doing it wrong.

How to offer sponsorships and co-branding - Part 2

This will make more sense if you're read the first part of this series about offering sponsorships and co-branding on your website.

So I'm going to do my best to address the second issue: Isn't this all just a lot more work for advertisers?

@moreglen and I were having this discussion about sponsorships and whatnot, and he threw out that devil's advocate question.

I mean, instead of just doing some high-reach display ad campaign we've actually got to work. We need to find communities, we need to think up interesting ways to make ourselves valuable, we need to show ourselves interested and invested in these people.

It's exhausting just to consider!

So it's easy to come up with problems, but as I said before about advertising in a down economy, the advertisers and communicators that keep succeeding are the ones that think about these things and do their damnest to come up with cool, new ways to overcome any potential obstacle.

So, of course the first answer to that is, Yes, it's more work, too bad. But a little more work to make a product that's more effective, more interesting, and more helpful for everyone.

The second answer is, Well, isn't there a way to automate much of this?

Think about this possibility: Your marketing department or agency outlines just what type of sponsorships you're able to accommodate. The types of communities you're looking to sponsor, what you can offer, and what the prerequisites are on the part of the publisher/site owner.

Then you set up a site for publishers and site owners. They go, check the list of requirements, and see if their site fits the bill.

If so, they select what types of services/sponsorships/co-brandings would be appropriate for their site, from a list provided on the site.

They submit whatever other terms they have, and a message gets sent to the advertiser/marketer. And then someone is assigned to manage the account from there. That person is also responsible for what we'll talk about in the next post: How can you make sure you're providing an interesting, helpful service to the actual members of the community or site audience?

But all the leg work, the looking for sites, the selecting opportunities, all the more tedious stuff, is placed on the site owner, the publisher.

By doing this you've eliminated a lot of work, and you've shown yourself interested in having more relationships with communities. I mean, you've set up a whole system simply for this purpose.

Right now it's almost always the other way around: Websites put their terms for advertisers, what they require, what they'll accept. But for sponsorships and co-branding's the relationship is necessarily different.

It's closer, it's more delicate.

The site owner and the advertiser need to work together, need to make sure they're a great fit for each other. That should be up to the site owner to assess, as they should know their audience better than anyone else. If not, don't expect advertisers to come in and throw money at you. There's a large burden on you to make sure you're demonstrating a huge interest in your community, and have their best interests in mind.

So that's just one thought about this issue. Got any more? Post a comment, please.

Online advertising in a down economy

In a down economy I'm expecting to see lots of web publishers consolidate and more to just fail and fold outright.

Not a terribly bold statement, I know.

And we'll see our clients demand more bang for their buck. But if there are fewer publishers, that means prices aren't going to drop. They'll likely hold steady or even increase.

So we're screwed, right?

Well, lots of online advertisers will be. The ones that rely on simple, high-reach, high-intrusion, Big Box/Leaderboard/Skyscraper campaigns. The ones that don't get it.

Spending will shift even more quickly to search and Cost-Per-Click (basically all performance-based tactics) in continued attempts to maximize the efficiency of budgets.

Some of us, though, are going to think a little harder. Not just provide our clients with more of the same, but try more and more different, new things. Things that no one's thought of yet. Things that publishers don't quite know how to value and assign outrageous prices to yet. Opportunities that we'll invent.

We'll be working with our publishing partners to create more effective, more innovative, and at the same time less intrusive and annoying advertisements and sponsorships. That's a tall order, I know. But it's exciting.

Ask your current or potential advertising firm what they think about the future of online advertising. If they're excited about the new opportunities they'll be ever more compelled to invent, then they're one to stick with.

The new game will be coming up with entirely different tactics instead of waiting for someone else to, and then buying something pre-packaged. That's an old game that can't work when there's less money to go around.

Are you excited?

Social media IS NOT its networks

So stop saying it, please.

Your social media strategy is not to start using Flickr and Facebook to spread your message, okay?

First, a tactic is not a strategy.

Social media strategy is about figuring out, first of all, why people should care. It's what Mark Earls calls the "What For?" of a business:

"Put really simply, the Purpose-Idea is the "What For?" of a business, or any kind of community. What exists to change (or protect) in the world, why employees get out of bed in the morning, what difference the business seeks to make on behalf of customers and employees and everyone else? BTW this is not "mission, vision, values" territory - it's about real drives, passions and beliefs. The stuff that men in suits tend to get embarrassed about because it's personal. But it's the stuff that makes the difference between success and failure, because this kind of stuff brings folk together in all aspects of human life." - gapingvoid.com

So that's how a strategy begins. Now, if you can understand that, and still think that executing a strategy just has to be about using social or peer networks, you've still got a problem.

In the phrase Social Media, "social" is the keyword.

The media is interchangeable.

Social media can take place on the good old sneakernet.

The reason that social networks are used in social media is because they enable people to connect to so many people so quickly. But it's their usefulness that makes them so widely used for social media campaigns, not because the terminology or strategy necessarily demands it.

So please, stop writing what you think is your "social media strategy" by starting off with a list of websites you need to post your content on, as if the media will create the society. It won't.

Communities create networks, not the other way around.

Bad reasons for advertising on your site

Few things annoy me more than sales reps telling me I should advertise on their site because my colleagues in other offices do.

Even fewer things annoy me more than telling me I should because my competitors do.

I’m trying to beat those guys, not join them.

If you think “because the other guys are,” is a good reason, I’m not interested. It might be good information to know, but no decision should hinge on that.

Suggesting that it might greatly affect my planning is insulting, so don’t do it.

And it sort of suggests that you don't have any better reasons.

How much should you charge to advertise on your site?

If you're trying to figure out how much you should charge to advertise on your site, it's actually pretty simple:

First, take the going rate of meat. Multiply that by the cost of fuel, and then, finally, divide by the number of people.

Easy, right?

Maybe not!

Wow, that was a lot of sarcasm, even for me... I apologize... That may or may not have been more sarcasm. It's hard for even me to tell sometimes.

So, as you may have suspected (or, entirely possibly, you may not have) I've been asked recently, several times, how much a site should charge for its advertising space. I've heard this question posed (well, it was related to me by a colleague) by someone who works at a radio station trying to get their site to start, you know, not losing them money anymore, and by a friend who had to do a business plan for school.

In both cases, the question, essentially, was,

"How much should we charge?"

That's, first of all, the wrong question you should be asking yourself, and advertisers. The first question you should ask yourself is, "How much would somebody actually pay for this?" Which, of course, leads you to start thinking about value, the value of the space and the value of the audience who will see it.

Like meat, fuel, and other incredibly general terms that describe so much and nothing, advertisements are not created equal, and do not have equal value. A big box on one sports website and a big box on another sports website absolutely do not necessarily command the same price.

So what's the difference?

Are we talking bacon, or prime rib steak?* There is no "market value" for meat. There's no market value for ads. Each is assessed on an individual basis depending on quality and demand. A terrible ad space on a website with an incredibly important and high-spending audience demands a higher price than great space on a website no one goes to, obviously.

You may have noticed something.

I've written a lot of words without telling you how much to charge for your ad space.

You're right. Give me more information about your site and then we'll talk.

For now, you've asked me how much food costs, and I've said, "Money."


*Wow, for a vegan I'm strangely drawn to analogies about dead animals.

Basics of selling ad space on your site - Part 1

Here are a few basic tips if you're trying to increase ad sales on your site, or if you're thinking about starting for the first time.

1. Know your audience
Do surveys asking people about themselves, and work out your site's demographics. If your site has some form of membership, or accepts donations, you should absolutely have information about those people. They're your most devoted visitors -- know who they are and what they're interested in.

2. Know your audience's value
If your site serves a niche, know how much of a niche it is. And if your site isn't very popular, make sure that there's something about your audience that makes them different from the audiences of other, more popular websites. Know your audience's value, and know exactly why I should buy on your website instead of someone else's.

3. Know your ad space's value
Once you've determined the relative scarcity of your audience, know how much to charge for your ad space. If only a small number of people go to your site (low reach) and you're charging a lot of money, your site had better be the only website on the internet they visit. Because, remember, chances are I can find your audience elsewhere. So price accordingly. Have a niche, and charge an appropriate amount based on the scarcity of your audience, and the reach to that audience that your site has.

4. Charge by the CPM
This is harder than charging by the week/month, but it gives some guarantee to your advertiser that people will actually see their ads. You might not be able to do this at first because it does take some management and administration, but it's something you should be working toward.

5. Be picky with your advertisers
If you become known for having pointless, irrelevant ads on your site, that space becomes less valuable to other, more appropriate advertisers because they'll know that your audience expects ads in those spaces to be irrelevant -- so why would they ever look at them? The ads on Penny-Arcade are an excellent example of being picky with your advertisers. Those ads are incredibly relevant to their enormous audience.

6. Use standard ad sizes
I know, I know, I've complained about standard ad units plenty, but this advice is for people looking for advertisers, not advertisers looking for brand new opportunities. Assume the advertisers you want already have ad units created and don't want to spend money making new ones just to fit into the ad space on your site. Be able to take ads they've used elsewhere and use them on your site.

More to come!!

What do you wish big brands knew about the web?

This is a total cop-out of a blog post, I know, but I'm genuinely looking for some advice here.

I've been going around to some of our clients and, well, explaining the present and future web to them, and how it relates to marketing. And also, more importantly, how their audience expects to interact with their brands.

On Tuesday I'll be at one of our major clients and, at this point, I'm a little at a loss of what direction I'll take the presentation. Likely I'm suffering from an embarrassment of riches when it comes to things I could help them with, and that may be precisely the problem. Large companies seem especially likely to misuse or misunderstand this whole interwebernet thing, and it's tough to find a good way to get a lot across without just coming in with a million bullet points (not on slides, because bullet points on slides are awful and you should never use them) of what could be done better and just overwhelm them and myself with information.

So, take a large company, particularly in this market, and tell me what they're doing wrong with the internet. Be it their advertising, their website, or the way they're handling (or, more likely, simply ignoring) social media.

Please...?

You'll be my total BFF if you help me out.

SEO in Halifax

I recently proposed SEO services and was told that my company's rates were much too high. Which was a little shocking because I'd basically cut the price in half because I thought it would be a really interesting project to work on, and a great win.

The impression I got from my contact is that they essentially ended up going with the proposal with the lowest price. Not an entirely rare thing for a company to do, but SEO and internet marketing in general seem to be really overlooked and misunderstood means of advertising in this city.

Halifax is in Atlantic Canada. According to comScore, Atlantic Canada leads much of the rest of the country in the per captia people online, and the time they spend online. Canada is a world leader in these same measures. Meaning Atlantic Canada is a world leader. And yet they just don't get it...

If you're a business in Halifax, you need SEO. If you're a business in Halifax, you should be advertising online. That's where your customers and prospects are, for almost any product or service you might offer.

People here are online, a lot. It's really that simple.

Obviously much of the numbers for the region could be skewed by the fact that we have so many post-secondary education institutions, meaning that we have a disproportionate number of the most web-savvy demographic in this city. But those people have friends, they have parents, so even if they might not be your audience, they know your audience. If they see your message they can inform the people who need your message.

To neglect the internet is a silly, silly move. No matter what target you're after.

This is how to do a site wallpaper

The Dark Knight wallpaper/companion execution on imdb.com is pretty rad. This is some great site wallpaper, people. All your typical imdb content is there, unobstructed, but you've still got incredibly effective advertising.

Yeah, it clashes with the imdb colours, so it's all a little ugly, but the visitor gets their content, and is served an ad, all at the same time. It might be a touch annoying, but nowhere near as frustrating and intrusive as a voken. Wallpaper's the way to go, ya'll. Keep that in mind when you're making your commercial websites.

Hardly anyone will tell you about a cool ad that started covering over what they were trying to read on a website. Almost no one will think it was pretty great that for up to seven seconds they couldn't read what they'd been trying to. At best people will think the ad was pretty silly. At worst they'll be pissed off.

With a wallpaper, at best people will think it was kind of cool. At worst they'll think it was ugly.

Pretty easy choice to make when you have to decide which to go with, right?

Well, it should be.

Sell your site, not your space

If you're trying to get advertisers to buy on your site, remember that it's not about the space you have, it's about your audience. You're not selling blocks of space, you're selling what your site has to offer.

You're selling access to your audience.

So if you want advertisers, you need to know who your audience is. What they're doing online and otherwise. I don't care how much traffic you get, I want to know who those people are. Remember, if it were about traffic I could just buy ads on Hotmail and be done with it.

But it's not and can't be about traffic, and it's usually not about reach. It's about hitting a demographic. It's about finding the people most likely to be interested in the product I'm trying to sell them. And I need to know if your audience is in that demo. If you don't know that, then I'm not interested.

And that means that you also need to find the people most likely to be interested in buying your product. You need to be reaching out to advertisers with the information you have, and you need to find compelling reasons for them to buy on your site.

Too many publishers think that just because their site is popular, or has a niche target, that advertisers will suddenly be interested in buying.

I can find your site's audience somewhere else.

Nobody only reads one site on the internet. I can always nab them when they're checking their webmail. Come find me and tell me why it would be better for me to advertise to them when they're on your site, and then I'm interested.

Skinning -- The Anti-voken

First of all, a voken is an ad that appears over top of the content that you're trying to view on a website. They're Top-Layer Animations, Flash animations that are meant to make it impossible to ignore the advertiser's message.

And they're really annoying.

Because people can so easily ignore typical banners (people have basically learned to ignore the first 100 pixels or so of a website, greatly reducing the effectiveness of top-of-page leaderboards), vokens are often used to seize the visitor's attention. It's usually hoped that if the creative is interesting or entertaining enough, the user won't mind that they're being content-blocked. Odds are greatly stacked against that happening, though.

Skinning, however, is like the anti-voken.

You get the same attention-grabbing effect without the outrageously annoying intrusion. Remnant space on either side of the page content is branded with the advertiser's message or colours, and the wallpaper may fill the whitespace within the content.

Skinning can make a website look like it's "brought to you by" the advertised brand. If the site is highly-trusted and has good visitor engagement, the brand may be looked on quite favorably.

Of course, the opposite could easily be true as a site's loyal visitors could see it as a takeover attempt, or an attempt to siphon some of their goodwill toward the site.

In either case, though, skinning is a better idea than a voken. Vokens, yes, can be interesting and entertaining, but always at the cost of the visitor's time.

With a voken, you aren't grabbing a visitor's attention, you're hijacking it.

So if you're a publisher looking to increase ad revenue and invite interesting executions from advertisers, offer things like skinning or wallpapers. Allow content to be sponsored, "brought to you by" the advertised brand, which is definitely not the same as allowing content to be controlled or affected by the advertiser.

People like me are always looking for new, interesting ways to advertise our client's brands online, and smart publishers with solid ideas for executions stand a much better chance of landing on a buy than a site that's just trying to pitch us on hijacking their users' engagement.

Have great reps!

Most of the time my decision to buy on a site is based on these criteria, in this order:

1) Will it hit my demo?
2) Do I trust the rep?
3) Price.

That’s right, my relationship with my rep is usually more important than the price. A good rep saves you time, and comes up with ideas that create greater value. That can effectively make it cheaper to buy on a more expensive site with a great rep. A site with a low CPM and a rep who’s only interested in getting the contract signed and who seems to disappear once it is can cost you more time, and therefore more money, in the long run.

This is of course not unique to web advertising, but nobody seems to stay put for very long in in this industry, since it's so young. So if you’re selling ads online and use sales reps and account managers, try to keep them where they are! I tend to banter with my reps (well, I fill their inboxes with long-winded questions peppered with attempts at humour), and the better the rep is at addressing my concerns quickly, and exceeding my expectations of service and trust, the more likely I am to buy on the site.

If you have to charge more so that you can afford to pay your staff well and keep them around, that should be okay. I’ll still buy because I know I’m getting a much greater value in the long run.

Oh, and they should humour me when I try to be funny. That’s crucial, too!