Cheers to my first blog post ever!

My inspiration comes from my recent attendance at the Ad2 Orlando event (http://www.ad2orlando.org/).  My idea to do this came from me spending about 50 hours a week thinking about it as well as some careful meditation when I found the time.

An introduction:

I have the chance to meet with a lot of different kinds of technology, media and advertising companies each week for my job.  While I get to actually utilize a few for my clients, there are some that because of the timing, money, etc involved, we never get to see their full functionality.  So I want to be able to make a place where 1.) I can remember who I’ve all met with that I’ve really like in terms of the product or reps, 2.) I can use my strategic noodle and my future community of followers’ to find homes/clients for these new opportunities, 3.) I can showcase my mad skills as a media planner and marketing strategist.

Wow, I just noticed there are a lot of “I can”s.  What will you get out of this?

Well, I hope that you’ll follow me for a few reasons.  Maybe you’re a rep who I’ve seen and want to add to the conversation about your product that I may have missed.  Maybe you’re a fellow media planner that may not get to meet with everyone you’d like to because of time constraints on your job (and we all have those moments).  Maybe you’re a marketing person who is looking for new opportunities and either you don’t have an agency, or your media people aren’t cutting the mustard in terms of bringing you new ideas.  For any case, I’d like to help.  As you’ll soon be able to tell, I love this industry, and I love sharing new things that I learn with others.  So welcome!

Now onto the good stuff:

Isn’t interesting how the universe works in providing people and technologies you need at the right time?  This week I learned a few new things about new re-targeting capabilities and “in-banner” (but not really) video and engagement capabilities from three different companies.

Netmining – www.netmining.com

This was funny actually.  Not the company, but my reaction.  I was like a giddy school girl once I heard about their re-targeting capabilities and how they use activity rates from your site to determine how qualified a person is to receive your retargeting messages.  It works best if they can hard code their tags on your site, but it also works okay through third-party ad serving.  They have this chart that, in real time, shows you all of the people on your site and their potential for conversion or retargeting for conversion.  What I learned is that with most re-targeting platforms, if a person lands on your homepage for even just ten seconds and doesn’t convert, they’ll get hit with ads later.  Netmining follows them deeper into your site and so not only qualifies them better, but depending on what path they’ve taken, you can serve them different ads later! (Insert giddy school girl noise here.)  Check their site out for a demo.

meebo – http://www.meebo.com/ and Firefly – www.fireflyvideo.com

I combine them together, but they are not associated with each other and are sort of competitors.  But depending on how recognizable or compelling your display ads are, one or both could work for you.

meebo started as a social chatting aggregator and so if you try to check out what they do, you’ll initially just find this and wonder what the heck their advertising (I know this from experience).  But their big USP is that they’ve partnered with a TON of different top-tier web sites and created “catfish” type ads that live at the bottom of the screen and enable social networking through chat and sharing.  (See http://www.adweek.com/) I really like this idea for recognizable brands that I’ve seen recently like GroupOn and Secret.  Depending on how you demo/geo, and because it’s a Cost Per Engagement, you’d get A LOT of exposure with either your ad or i-framed web site.

Firefly video has the same ad takeover kind of unit, but it’s actually enabled through banner advertising.  So, you get more ad space to brand, if you need it.  They can also make it social or just use an i-frame of your site.  It’s also Cost Per Engagement.

I can actually see reasons to be able to use both companies.  Because meebo bases its impression number on how many sites they are attached to, they are more than happy to attach their catfish bar to your site… and then you can get your partners/clients to buy into exposure on your site more to have a bigger presence than they normally do, which is an excellent way to generate revenue on your site.

To summarize – they have similar technologies for showcasing ads, but their network and how the ads first start out are a little different.  So go check them both out, RFP them, and let’s just see what kind of programs they come back with.

Thank you for reading my first blog post! Let me know what you think about my direction, if you have anything to add, or if you have any questions or comments about what I’ve written.  Take care and talk to you next week!