Our arrangement with Yahoo!

From the New York Times today, written by Stephanie Clifford:

YAHOO plans to announce Friday that it has formed a partnership with the WPP Group, the advertising holding company, that will give WPP’s clients a broader swath of Web sites where they can aim their messages.

Under the deal, the thousands of Web publishers that use Yahoo’s advertising auction service to sell space on their sites will get more direct access to WPP’s clients. Those clients, in turn, will be able to funnel their messages to Web site visitors who might be particularly receptive, using technology from an ad-targeting division of WPP called 24/7 Real Media.

WPP’s clients will also benefit from the extra information the agency will be able to collect about the behavior and demographic profile of people who visit sites on the Yahoo auction service, which is called Right Media. Those details will enhance the database that GroupM, which is WPP’s flagship planning and buying agency, collects about customer behavior.

The deal is “about enabling WPP’s full range of agencies to buy digital display advertising across the entire Internet in a much more efficient way,” said Hilary Schneider, executive vice president for global partner solutions at Yahoo. The companies would not disclose the financial terms.

Although the deal is one of many similar partnerships that each side plans to make, it comes at a significant time for Yahoo. Having just rebuffed a takeover bid from Microsoft, the company now faces a proxy battle by Carl C. Icahn, the activist investor who is trying to strong-arm Yahoo into selling itself to Microsoft.

WPP’s chief executive, Martin Sorrell, said in an interview last week that he was disappointed that Microsoft and Yahoo had not reached an agreement.

“Anybody who is a customer in the marketplace likes to see balance in it,” Mr. Sorrell said. “No one likes oligopolies. Search in America is imbalanced. That’s what Yahoo and Microsoft offered, a bit more balance.”

Perhaps Mr. Sorrell and his company are looking forward to a day when WPP’s clients can enjoy the full fruit of not only Yahoo’s sites, but Microsoft’s as well. The idea of the partnership is to combine the technological expertise of 24/7 Real Media, which directs ads to relevant Web pages, with the broad reach of Yahoo’s Right Media advertising exchange.

The bigger the 24/7 network, the more likely it will detect users it recognizes, and will then be able to deliver specific ads to them. Then its sister agency, GroupM, will be able to collect more data about how viewers behave when they see an ad.

“Basically, the network gets smarter and smarter the more data points it gets added to it,” said Rob Norman, the chief executive of GroupM Interaction, which handles GroupM’s online buying. “We believe we’ll be able to do greater customization of campaigns.”

For example, say GroupM is working for a car company, and knows through its research that people who have visited the company’s site are likely to respond to a rebate offer for a car. People who visit the car company’s site are tagged with a cookie, or small piece of code, so that they can be identified by 24/7, which tracks the cookies, when they visit other sites.

Then, after GroupM bids for ads on Yahoo’s exchange on behalf of the car client, 24/7’s targeting technology can show the rebate ads to the appropriate users — people who have visited the car site in the past — as they surf different sites across the Real Media network.

WPP’s digital approach has been threefold. It is trying to add digital abilities to its existing companies, and investing in outside technology companies (GroupM, for example, recently took a minority stake in Invidi Technologies, which targets ads on cable and satellite television). Finally, it has acquired companies like 24/7 Real Media, for which it paid $649 million a year ago.

And WPP already has thought of ways it could work with services that compete with Yahoo’s Right Media — like Microsoft’s DrivePm advertising network.

”It’s not implausible that 24/7 could do a very similar project with DrivePm in the Microsoft world,” Mr. Norman of GroupM said. “Clients need to have access under the best possible circumstances to the best possible range of inventory in the marketplace.”

 

The upfront - where the men are men and the shrimp are terrified

It’s that week again. When I arrived in the USA in 2005 the upfronts seemed like an anachronism; I rashly described them as a conspiracy of the damned based on the decline in TV audiences and the inverse increase in the quality of the associated presentations and parties.

In a somewhat counter cyclical way I now see their importance. As the supply of premium inventory falls and the integration and online extension opportunities rise it is more important than ever to secure options over positions with the potential to create market advantage, and to take a long view of what is required to achieve marketing goals.

Of course the real trick is to do this while accurately predicting supply and demand across the trading period. The truth of course is that despite the overall decline in TV there remains no competitive media that can induce as significant and rapid shifts in attitude and awareness.

At GroupM our ship is piloted by Captain Scanzoni and First Mate Schwartz. That is a very good thing. Good luck chaps.

Subway series - New York’s finest

Friday night. Yankee Stadium. The last year of it’s life. Johan Santana (the Mets new and highly compensated ace) on the mound. What could be better?

The joy of local match-ups bewteen old rivals (or derby games as us Brits call them) is that they utterly transcend the almost perfect current mediocrity of the participants. The Yanks have the 9th best record in the American League, the Mets the 6th best in the National League. On the night, however, none of this will matter. Pitch by pitch, hit by hit, error by error the game will assemble itself and for a few hours for 55,000 fans the center of the known universe will be located.

For the curious Brits the game will be played under American League rules to the disadvantage of the Mets. Mr. Santana also happens to be handier with a bat in his hand than most pitchers yet will not be required as the American League allows the use of designated hitters who show up each time the pitcher is due to bat and do it for him. Regardless the triumph will be ours.

Let’s go Mets.

 

Global Warning

At La Guardia today I spy a new TSA restriction at security: ‘No snowglobes, read the website.’

The imagination runs wild. Assuming there are no actual recorded instants of snowglobe attacks against commercial aircraft you wonder why the TSA is planting this brilliant notion in the minds of evil doers.

What really matters to advertisers - a salesman’s playbook in emerging media

With the opportunities that abound in new and emerging media, here are a few criteria for sellers who wish to get the attention from the world’s biggest advertisers and their agencies and persuade them of the value of their property:
 

REACH

• What is it now? What might it be? What are the constraints? Is that reach unique or of particular value?

CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE

• Is this a fad, a trend, or a structural change to user behavior?
• What behaviour might it complement or replace?

REPUTATION

• What might participating do to our reputation?
• What insight might we gain about the conversation surrounding our brand, category or audience?
• How can we influence that conversation and at what price?

TRANSACTION POTENTIAL

• Is this a marketing channel, or a channel to market, or both, or neither?
• Is its value in the short or long term effect of marketing?
• What part of the purchase funnel might this site affect?
• Which sales channel might this site affect? Is there a direct link to trial?
• Is there a direct link to retail?
• What proxy for a sale (what ‘revenue event’) could we stimulate?

VALUE

• Is there some advantage to being a first mover?
• What is the price of entry?
• What are the comparables?
• What is the minimum investment required for learning?
• What is the minimum investment required for sales effect?
• What measurement criteria are practical?

ENGAGEMENT

• What is the best way to make our commercial communication work? Should we engage as advertiser or sponsor? Should we integrate product or content? Should we create a community, or just join one?

All these aspects are worth considering, in a market of near infinite choice the information bar is set to high.

Aegis - the importance of being de Nardis

Aegis has lost its second PLC director in the same number of weeks. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde; ‘once can be an accident, twice is careless.’

My friend (a declaration) Mr de Nardis is the most passionate of managers, far from flawless, but deeply comitted to the craft and particularly to the multi-cultural world we live in.

The reasons for his exit are unclear but shareholders of Aegis should be aware that they won’t - for better or worse - find another one like him.

At least this time he has a bigger garden in which to spend his leave yet one wonders if this really is the last word on the subject and if M. Bollore is content with this turn of events. Perhaps we will need to paraphrase Bob Dylan for the next episode ‘how many Rodes must a man walk down?’

Bye Bye Beijing

Time to go. A fleeting glimpse and a poorly informed opinion that this city has taken a view that a certain amount of history is just about OK just so long as you can build a wall around it, take it out of plain sight, and ensure that it is not an obstruction to construction. Chinese walls I suppose.

As for the history that is accessible I leave the summary to Irwin Gotlieb, CEO of GroupM:

“I suspect the Forbidden City was more interesting when it actually was forbidden.”

 

Wendy Clark live in Beijing - the client speaks

This is a somewhat schmalzy post. No apologies.

Wendy is SVP Advertising for AT&T and our largest client in terms of advertising expenditure and revenue.

Listen up people.

Wendy describes a principal goal of AT&T marketing as ‘creating an iconic enabling brand’.

That brand is tasked with maintaining leadership in wireless and broadband, to frive TV penetration and return to leadership in business telecom services.

At the macro level she argues that more and better connectivity drives the velocity of business and ultimately economic growth.

We are delighted that Wendy is our client and should stretch ourselves to be (in our small way) the iconic enabling brand that supports these goals.

Yahoo! What happens next?

Microsoft has pulled its bid. Yahoo stock tumbles. And the winner is…………. Well, to start let’s not rule out the transaction happening anyway. The Microsoft bid now looks much better than it did 48 hours ago for most Yahoo shareholders so a return to the table with or without the Yahoo management is a distinct possibility.

As for Yahoo’s options, there are many but a Google transaction cannot be one of them. The principle applied to determining monopolistic control of a market has to do with the potential to abuse a monopolistic position. It is crystal clear that such opportunity exists which is not to say that Google has any intent to excercise that potential. The more subtle question is at what point such a position can be determined to exist.

 

Let’s say for a moment that Chevron and Exxon Mobil decided to combine the distribution and retailing of gasoline in all states beginning with the letter D without merging the companies. Monopoly or not? What if it was all states A through D? Even if the scenario led to a benefit of lower prices at the pump it has the potential for price fixing and price increases with or without a full merger.

You can see where this is going. Imagine that all the keywords A through D on all of Google and Yahoo were subject to a single bid process the same situation exists. In my view you can no more execute this partial merger than conceive a partial pregnancy. You are or you ain’t.

Today the market is confused and that needs to stop for the benefit of all the players. The FCC, and or the DOJ, needs to show its hand preemptively. If it is minded to allow a merger then the market and marketers should be given an audience. If it is minded to stop it the market should be informed to remove a wild card from the process that is causing massive swings in shareholder value at a time in the economic cycle when focus rather than distraction are required.

Four in the morning, tapped out and yawning

Well the good news about a 12 hour time change is that you don’t have to change your watch.

Beijing has a sense of intimidating scale like no other city of my experience. It appears that everything that was here has been swept away by highways and construction to create the new model megalopolis.

So far (and that’s just a drive from the massively modern airport) I get no sense of character or the people and can’t imagine what living here would be like.

It’s a long way from home Toto.