A Chance to Win a Free Ticket to Content Revenue Strategies in NYC (and a Free T-Shirt)

Content Revenue Strategies - the most awesome conference ever - is just a few weeks away. For those of you living under a rock, it's 11/5 in NYC at the Javits Center, co-located with ad:tech NYC.

If you want to go to the show, I encourage you to register online here - the price is normally $450 but use the code 1CRSNY1 and you'll immediately save $100 off!

And here's an even better idea: register for the show, and then enter the contest below - if you win, I'll credit you your registration fee.

What's the content, you ask? Well, many of you may recall that Marin Software ran a trivia content in earlier this year called "The Biggest Search Geek" (a content I didn't even come remotely close to winning). This trivia content will be back - I think early next year - and Marin is looking for the biggest and baddest SEM questions out there.

I've already submitted two questions to them and this is your chance to join in on the action. So here's what you need to do: write your question as a comment to this blog post, no later than next Tuesday, October 29th. I'll submit all the questions to Marin and ask them to choose the best question. The winner gets a free ticket to CRS and a Marin t-shirt (and of course the pride of accomplishment that goes along with being a winner!).

So submit your question today - I'm looking forward to seeing your creative juices flowing!

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In a Customer-Driven Society, Doing the Basics is No Longer Enough

I took United Airlines last week because I had to. I have about 200,000 miles that I'm trying to unload so that I can start taking better airlines, like Virgin America or JetBlue.

What's wrong with United? Well, nothing on the surface. They get you from place to place just like any other airline, their prices are competitive, and the seats are more or less big enough for average Americans. Compared to Virgin America, however, flying United is a nightmare. There's no in-flight WiFi, there's no DirecTV, no on-demand gaming. In other words, United is bad in comparison to their upstart competitors. Once you've experienced flying with someone else, you never want to go back to United.

The only way to respond to a better product from a competitor is to meet or beat that product. So United should be working busily to one-up Virgin and beat them at their own game. The in-flight "Hemispheres" magazine on United suggests that they have yet to grasp this. I came across this United article entitled "Sit Back, Relax . . ." (emphasis added):

THERE’S A GOOD CHANCE you’re seated on a United or United Express flight right now. And except for the aroma of freshly brewed Starbucks coffee or the view outside the window, nothing should distract you from this magazine.

Why? Because United has invested significantly in cabin upgrades to ensure that your experience is a comfortable one.

For example, if you fly frequently in North America, you’ll notice new leather seating throughout the cabin on many of our Airbus A320 aircraft. And all United aircraft are getting new, updated upholstery and carpeting.

Notice a brighter, cleaner appearance? We hope so. We’re installing “cool white” lighting on United aircraft and, perhaps most importantly, we’ve doubled the frequency of our most thorough interior aircraft scrubbings. And our cleaning solutions are EPA-rated as environmentally friendly.

We’ve upgraded audio and video systems, and increased the frequency of inspection, maintenance and replacement of seat controls, reading lights and window shades. All of that means that when you want to recline your seat, your seat will recline. When you want to dive into that great new mystery novel, you’ll have a working reading light.

Because when a flight attendant encourages you to “sit back, relax and enjoy your flight,” we want to make sure you can.

So lets summarize here: fly United and we promise that our planes will actually be clean and that the stuff on the plane will actually work! That's great United, but that's not great customer experience. The basics - even if delivered as promised - are no longer enough.

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Brett Brewer - MySpace Founder and AdKnowledge CEO - a Content Luminary

What do you do after you launch a site like MySpace - one of the most popular sites in the known universe? If it was me, I'd probably buy a fishing resort in Alaska and focus on my casting. Brett Brewer, however, decided to go right back to work, becoming CEO of AdKnowledge. I've loved AdKnowledge for years - in fact, when I worked at Adteractive, I told my PPC team to never talk abotu AdKnowledge outside the company, because the quality and quantity were just too good to let slip out!

AdKnowledge works by dynamically serving PPC ads within targeted emails. The advertiser paying the most at the time an email is opened gets their ad showing up. It's really a revolutionary concept, and the Company's exponential growth is evidence that advertisers are joining the bandwagon.

Brett is speaking on The State of Contextual Advertising at CRS NYC on Nov 5 - sign up now and hear his perspective on contextual marketing first hand!

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Jeremy Schoemaker - Performance Marketing Legend

Ten years ago if I had told you that the URL "Shoemoney.com" would be one of the most popular marketing sites in the world, I'm sure you would told me about a bridge for sale in NY.

But today, Shoemoney and its founder - Jeremy Schoemaker - are legendary. Something like 200,000 people subscribe to Jeremy's newsletter and he's also one of the world's most followed Twitterers (if that is a word). When Jeremy has an idea about marketing, people listen. And that includes the biggest names in online advertising, who regularly fly him to Silicon Valley to hear his perspective.

We're very lucky to have Jeremy speaking on "contextual marketing case studies" at CRS NYC on November 5th. I'm expecting a packed room for his session, so get your ticket now and show up early!

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Bryan Minor - Rocket Scientist and Google Content Network Expert

Bryan Minor is a rocket scientist - literally. He has a B.S. in Physics, M.S. in Nuclear Science, and a PhD in Computational Physics. And now he spends his time trying to crack the Google Content Network algorithm. The company he founded - ScienceOps - has a product called AdMetrica that he says can increase your volume on GCN by up to 10X or more, all the while maintaining or decreasing your cost per client acquisition.

I've seen a demo of the product and I'm impressed, so much so that I'll be doing a test with a client shortly.

Bryan's speaking on the Content Targeting panel at CRS NYC on November 5th. If you want to learn about AdMetrica first hand, join us in NYC!

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Oded Itzhak - Quigo and AdSide Founder - He Basically Invented Contextual Advertising

I'm very excited to have Oded Itzhak speaking at CRS NYC on our State of Contextual Advertising Panel. Oded is the co-founder of Quigo, which basically invented the concept of placement targeting, which in turn propelled Google to create a similar product on the Google Content Network.

His new Web site - AdSide - is trying to create a similarly high-quality network focused on in-text advertising.

Just to put Oded's knowledge in perspective - Quigo started around 2000, AdWords Select (the PPC version) was launched in 2002. Nuff said!

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CRS Conference - 30 Speaker Profiles in 30 Days

On November 5th in New York City the second ever contextual advertising and marketing conference - Content Revenue Strategies - takes place. The show was formerly called AdSpace but we've decided to rebrand the show to better reflect the intent of the conference.

Over the next 30 days, I'll be posting brief profiles of some of the incredible speakers who will be speaking about how you can integrate contextual networks into your advertising campaigns. My hope, of course, is that by reading about these great thought-leaders you'll be inspired to join me at the show. You can still register at the early bird rate of $395 until October 9th - so get to it!

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What Should I Write About Next? Help Me Choose

Well, it's been a busy September, what with trying to run a business, plan a conference, raise a toddler, manage a LinkedIN group, and even occasionally try to write about Hawkeye football! As a result my blog posting has suffered.

But all the while, I've had some good ideas for what to write about, once the time miraculously appears. So to help me prioritize these articles, and to show me that there are people besides Digant, Jeremy, and Steve who read this blog, add a comment to this post about the topic you most want to read. Here are the nominees:

• Google is like an early-stage VC, Amazon is like a private equity firm. An analysis of how the two companies take different approaches to building products, and which one will be more successful.
• SEO is easy, SEM is tough. Why SEO can be done by anyone but SEM cannot.
• Advice for young start-up employees from a middle-aged cynic. Lessons I've learned to help you avoid joining the wrong start-up.
• Is network marketing a scam or not? Trying to figure out whether there is *any* value to network marketing schemes.
• Google - good at telling you when you aren't spending enough money, not so good at telling you to cut your spend. The "innovations" from Google AdWords always seem to be one-sided.

So what do you think? I'm all ears and I've got some plane trips coming up, which is always a good time to finish a blog post!

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Got Terror?

Fun terrorism shirts - well now I know what I'm getting people for Christmas!

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Google AdSense Welcomes 3rd Party Ads. Publishers Rejoice, Middlemen Replaced?

Just got this little email from the Google AdSense team. It reads, in relevant part:

We're writing to let you know about an upcoming update in your AdSense account designed to help you generate the maximum revenue from your ad units. You'll soon be able to allow multiple ad networks to show on your pages, which means that advertisers from external Google-certified networks will be able to compete with AdWords advertisers for your ad space.

If you're unfamiliar with what ad networks are, they're companies that partner with advertisers and publishers to buy and sell ads on sites they don't own themselves, similar to AdSense. Ads from these networks will compete with Google ads to show on publisher sites, and the ad generating the highest revenue for publishers will be displayed.

So what does this mean? In a nutshell, this is basically Google's way of improving optimization and revenue for their publishers while simultaneously nipping in the bud middleman optimization companies like Pubmatic, YieldBuild, and Rubicon Project.

One might also speculate that this leads the way for Google to persuade these third party networks to let AdSense into their networks as well, thus enabling Google to gain incremental revenue by increasing CPMs for their publishers, as well as gaining incremental revenue by increasing the distribution scope of the Google Content Network. Smart move.

So now Google has the DoubleClick network and the expanding Google Content Network, Yahoo has YSM, Right Media, Blue Lithium, and their AdReady self-service partnership, and AOL has Quigo, Advertising.com, and an upcoming self-service bid management tool. Let the exchange/network wars begin (er, continue to get more intense!)

Complete email screenshot is here:

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