iMedia Summit: AOL Platform A

AOL Platform A gave a comprehensive presentation on the many opportunities and developments as this company makes strides in providing that “Everything you want, in one place” solution that truly defines the vision behind the company. My key takeaway from the presentation is the strength of their many online site brands – they really do offer leadership presences in many of the key verticals that consumers are interested in today.

As they constantly add new properties to their quiver of assets, they also offer the cutting edge targeting and other technologies that can make a difference – and indeed are making a difference – for so many brands today. Also, lemme give you a reminder that AOL Platform A is one of the biggest sponsors of iMedia, event after event, year after year. So special props for that, folks!

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iMedia Summit: Agency Day’s Agency RX

The core activity of agency day was AgencyRX, the launch of a year-long project to remake the agency model by defining real actionable solutions for issues and opportunities to enrich the value that agencies provide clients. There were five key areas of focus:

- Agency Value: How can we materially enhance the value that clients realize from their agency relationships?
- Reporting Revolution: How can we improve the reporting process that we can focus more time on strategic insights and optimization and less on the mechanics of producing reports?
- Collaboration: How can we make different discipline areas come together to make truly remarkable marketing programs, and how can we foster real, accountable collaboration between agencies that serve a client?
- Emerging Media: How can we improve how emerging media opportunities are evaluated, tested and implemented on our businesses?
- Training for Excellence: How can we develop cross agency solutions to improve expertise in our people?

Each area was addressed by a core team that outlined the key issues, an action plan, and a timeline to make our ideas come to fruition. Thanks in particular to those attendees who were asked to lead and facilitate each group!

At the end of the main session Dave Smith updated the group on the activities of The Aspen Group and launched the voting for the "Aspies" Awards.

What I was most struck by was how enthusiastic was every attendee in finding the solutions our business so needs to achieve its potential -- to be the business we want it to be! It really was a continuation of the spirit begun many years ago by The Aspen Group, and a demonstration that people are just as committed now to working together as they were when the tradition of an agency day began!

You’ll be reading more about Agency RX both here and on iMediaConnection.

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Digital Marketing Factoid Of The Day: US TV Usage Trend

From MediaWeek:

TV viewing is at an all-time high. According to Nielsen's second A2/M2 Three Screens Report the average U.S. home had the TV set turned on 8 hours and 18 minutes per day, a record high since Nielsen began measuring TV in the 1950s.

As of third quarter, the average person in the U.S. watched 142 hours of TV in one month, a 4.1 percent increase over the same period last year. Time-shifted viewing was also up to six hours and 32 minutes, a 52.5 percent increase.

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Curtain Call for UPS Regifter!!!

I love a good viral minisite, and UPS has one in their UPSRegifter.com, a web presence built around the second oldest tradition of the holiday season -- giving away crap you don't want to people you care about, but not very much.

Here's the intro video:



And then there is a gallery of regiftables, along with the essential regift a friend system.

Holidays are a great time for this sort of viral, and I think UPS really hit it right by taking the regifting idea to its logical online splendiferousness.

Oh, and also nice visual cues tying it to the whhiteboard campaign. Nice to know that the brand cops at UPS are on the scene. Often, stuff like that gets forgotten in viral. Even the narrator CD guy is featured, using a Flowbee!

Bravo, UPS. I'll be sending you a fruit cake as a prize for this great effort. Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

‘Sup Over At Linked In?

Linked In is a site you either love or hate. I am in the love column. I find it a great alternative to a rolodex, and have gotten connected to some great people and opps through it. It’s also a sure fire way of knowing if someone is contemplating a job change – just check to see if they have friended 137 people in the last week.

Quantcast reports 5.5 million monthly uniques for Linked In. The company has not made other Quantcast data public, as is their right.

The Linked In model was never designed to make it the biggest soc net around; rather it was to be focused on a highly desirable professional audience – one with which the company could garner strong CPMs.

It was a pretty staid environment for a while, but more recently they’ve begun to offer groups, a sort of B2B Yahoo answers, and even the opportunity to do research studies against specific job titles and categories. Of that last opp I can attest to how difficult it can be to find sufficient samples of highly specialized job functions – so this giant database will prove very helpful to me in the not too distant future.

One of the really positive things, in my opinion, has been Linked In’s expansion to having a strong beachhead in many job functions and industries, versus the usual online suspects of IT, DBA, and the like. This not only enriches the community; it also helps make them immune to temporary business fluctuations that may adversely affect certain advertising sectors.

Linked In has also become very active on the modular content/widget front, offering units that detail user profiles, contacts to companies described on a page, job listings, and the like. Their 1 month traffic figures show a strong uptick – no doubt due both to these innovations and the soft job market.

Yes yes, yes, there are lots of people using FaceBook for professional networking. But Linked In does offer one critical advantage over FBs: it is 100% zombie and vampire free.

So lots going on over there, as there needs to be to compete with FB and others. But it is nice to see them energized and innovating after a couple of quiet years.

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Billing Revolution: Credit Card Buying By Phone

If the phone is rapidly becoming most people’s digital conduit, it’s natural that a number of companies are trying to make it easier to buy through the phone. For years people have been hicker dickering with pay through the phone bill, but it causes a number of problems, not least that it involves the carrier and that means they’ll want a significant cut. It also means that the carrier will likely require double or even triple confirmation of a purchase, and each go-round gives the user time to lose interest in a purchase.

An interesting company I’ve been hearing more about is Billing Revolution, which has an offering that changes this dynamic considerably. Their focus is on delivering secure pages to your phone that collect name and credit card info just as would a web page viewed on PC. Here’s how they describe themselves:

What we do

Billing Revolution provides credit card payment technology and services to the mobile industry. Are you looking to sell products and services through the mobile channel? Our turnkey solution is just the ticket and it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.
Whether you’re a mobile game publisher, online retailer, small business owner, national retailer, media company, advertising agency, publisher or an individual looking to sell your creations, we’ve got it covered.

So what’s so revolutionary? Ever tried to make a web based purchase from a phone? Ouch! Till we came along it required a user experience first aid kit. “Text the 12 digit code to the 5 digit short code, sign up online, click to call, run home and open up your email..” or “take a picture of the billboard and we’ll get back to you.”. Or, how about this one; you have your shopping cart full with 10 products, you click “check out” and up comes that familiar link: “click here to call now.” Okay, so maybe you’re not ready to buy a diamond ring from your phone… Can you buy a movie ticket? Yes!

Billing Revolutions technology solves the major challenges that have held mobile commerce back...

Secure Purchase Page

Mr Phone doesn’t like secure pages and we’ve solved this issue through our proprietary technology

Single Click Checkout:

Ama-who? That’s right; we’re pioneering the mobile single click check out. Jump on board cause the train is leaving the station folks. But seriously, no sign up, no pin, no user name, no chatting with the nice folks at the call center. When you make your first purchase, we “tag” your phone and we recognize you when you come back to buy your favorite product. It’s that easy. We’ve not only invented mobile commerce, we’ve enhanced it with “single click” ease!

No Online Sign Up required!

We understand the mobile channel and we’ll never tell you to go back to your desktop computer-we get it and the only thing we have to fear is: is “text to buy”. How about text to punt?

Their model works both for virtual goods and physical goods – there’s an easy tool to create merchandising pages, and an API to integrate commerce and fulfillment through your regular website.

I haven’t seen their solution in action but based upon the web site they are definitely addressing the key bottlenecks of the mobile buying challenge. Another really important aspect of this solution is that the transaction cost is low – just 50 cents a purchase with no minimum. That’s valuable because the credit card company is already getting their percentage cut – adding another big cut on top of that would destroy the business model. Happily, they are going for volume over ring. Pun intended.

Great concept – definitely one whose time has come. If you sell stuff online, they are definitely worth a look as a way of anticipating and capitalizing on the mobile commerce “revolution.”

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Kontera’sNew Deals With Scribefire and Pubmatic: More Ad Options, No Added Complexity

I have always liked the Kontera in-text ad offering, and believe in their approach to site selection and participation – which is to identify and sign publishers with the most passionate audiences online.

As they battle with Vibrant to sign the best sites and the biggest advertisers, Kontera’s latest deal points to an effort to mitigate complexity for publishers while offering additional ad opportunities for pubs and advertisers alike.

Specifically, Kontera announced new partnerships with ad optimization engine Pubmatic and blog ad network ScribeFire. Under these deal,the partners can offer Kontera’s many text based and rich media in-text solutions to their existing customer bases. More ad opps and revenue with no additional complexity.

In a world of ridiculous complexity, it’s nice to see companies making a conscious effort to expand their business without adding to that environmental rat's nest.

Kontera already has an in text ad solution for individual bloggers but this effort to bundle with an existing ad network is a great way to rapidly boost impressions and share in the all out war with Vibrant. By making it easy to sign up lots of smallish wb presences without individual outreach, they also dramatically simplify their own BD needs.

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