Back Seat Marketers

Contextual marketing has no page in Wikipedia, funny isn’t it? Funny in the sense that contextual marketing is at the core of Google’s AdSense platform. Google has redefined, and will continue to drive, efficiency and metrics into the advertising arena moving its influence from search to radio and to TV. While efficient advertising continually focuses on “the” desired target audience, advertisers will begin to turn the question from efficiency and effectiveness metrics in ad delivery (=push) to determining deep ad-sponsored relevance.

Google’s Actions

In fact, Google itself has blazed a trail doing exactly that, just this week. Google’s long tail user base is entrenched in blogging, video, and online publishing. The Google acquisition of Feedburner has strategic and financial rationale from an ad delivery standpoint, but its decision to make Feedburner a free tool shows another intent: increased relevancy to its core user base. Feedburner is part of the Google brand, and is now part of the Google ad-network experience. User advertising relevance is going to take on a whole new world well beyond the mere “push” attitude that exists in the current market definition, inclusive of most contextual ads.

With so much to be said about the $ size of the advertising arena, a contrarian opinion is to seek out advertising relevance covering sponsored activities, and not ad supported ones. Sure, in a way this can include things like in-game advertising, but in actuality, it is far more than that.

Advertising relevance in a world full of sales and brand messages will need to shift from ‘telling the consumer information’ to ‘providing the consumer with the tools of discovery’. These tools of discovery lead to the following framework for brand relevant advertising experiences:
1. Educational and beginner advisory content;
2. Customizable and configurable experiential software or venues;
3. Social elements for publicity, critique, guidance and/or networking and perhaps
4. Means for the user and host to profit.

The above four elements are technology agnostic as they could easily be in a store as online.

Businesses spend a wide range up to 30% of their sales on marketing, awareness, brand recall and promotion. For many businesses, this budget is well into the millions, or hundreds of millions annually. During the past 3 years, the costs of developing online technologies has dropped dramatically. With FOSS, versions of Digg and eBay can be downloaded for free and customized for a few thousand dollars into a niche social network. As a result, ad spots on the ever growing impression blocks stay very cheap, and inventory will continue to be hard to sell. Content will continue to explode, and choices on where to place ads will continue to grow in complexity.

Google and Yahoo benefit from complexity in the online ad marketplace. First, capturing and retaining cached content is a growing barrier for Ask.com, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft. Second, the growing number of long tail publishers, relevant ones, makes individual selection of online publishers less possible each month. While TV and radio may be “all or nothing” shot guns with a difficult set of metrics to verify payback, online advertising’s inefficiencies are click farmers and brand connections to extremely poor quality publishers.

An Escape

Thinking differently, businesses should consider doing as Google does, . Google’s purchase of FeedBurner and the free-ware decision will foster loyalty and increased usage. Seth Godin astutely noted the same with Google Analytics. Analytics is not for boosting egos by showing big viewing statics, it is for attaining measurable and profitable results.

What about contextual meaning? I started on this topic and now I’ll come back to it. With the arrival of low cost open source technology and communities of interested people looking to get engaged (=buzz word), creating a move into this experiential world to drive business should be considered as an alternative to traditional and interactive marketing. Caution, this should be done in a credible way by the right players in the value chain. For example, how will bloggers feel about free Pro Stats from Google? I know how I feel, happy (thanks, Google, seriously).

Facebook’s API isn’t All That

Honestly, Facebook is a great networking tool. Its move into the lives of lots of people is having an impact. Many people, college kids and professionals, now have a new home that is an open market with guard rails. Very cool. It will be a place where users can push messages, but will Facebook create a world where people can learn, create and share?

Facebook’s widgets are billboards that allow users to have 1-way push of messages (=music preferences, videos, etc.), push of products (=Amazon, Gap, etc.), push of blogs and other info. As a result, “profitable” Facebook users will be ones that view the platform as a means to push messages to monetize it (more on this in another post). Do you have friends that sell to you? I don’t mean refer you to things, but want to make money off of you. As a note, I’m no fan of a world of being a “referral friend”, where my friend makes money on that deal.

Looking to Education + Customization + Sharing

Gary V. at the Wine Library has gotten some buzz for a story worth digging into, deeply. Understand that case study, apply it to your industry, win.

Wrap Up

Contextual marketing should be defined as the fusion of education, customization and sharing. The buying or creating of website portals that do all three of those things to the right audiences will be where web 2.0 gets monetized, and it won’t be because those websites had great advertising revenues.