Lots and lots of years ago someone realized it wasn't just a good idea to trade one guy's wares for another's. Money was invented to make these transactions easier by trading a commonly agreed upon currency. Great idea. Fast forward to May, 2010, in Miami, FL.
Last week I had the pleasure of attending Compete, Inc's CMO Summit in Miami. The CEO of one of the major WPP companies suggested that the need to find a common currency for measuring online and its delivery is one of the biggest things holding us back. Someone also mentioned this while asking a question from the audience. While developing currency thousands of years ago was a good idea, we still see the value in having various currencies around the world rather than a one-world bank and currency. There is a reason for that, and to suggest we should adopt a single "currency" online, not to mention the fact that it's the biggest thing holding us back, has got to be one of the scariest and regressive proposed behaviors I've ever heard come across in our industry. There are two major reasons for this.
First, there is a need for currency in general but simplifying everything... Read more
Archive for Jay Friedman 
How Seeking A
Reckitt Bensicker Wows Online Ad Community
Wow, big news about RB's $40MM online video buy! For those of you who don't know, RB is the manufacturer of products like Lysol, Woolite, and Clearasil (says AdAge). The bigger news here – far bigger than the fact that they're spending $40MM in online video – is the fact that they're "demanding" $2 CPMs. This demand was so low that YouTube originally sat out the buy. Think about that. YouTube, where the majority of videos are still at the quality level of people jumping off their house onto a trampoline, wouldn't even dip this low. So why is demanding this CPM such a big story? Nope, not because it's going to set a new industry standard. Not because RB will help single-handedly drive down the cost of online video. It's because it shows that despite the vast and rich quantities of available online metrics, most marketers are still using traditional media tactics to negotiate and purchase their media – all their media – including online.
It's funny. Articles continue to pop up about the inability to truly measure online video because we can't convert it backward 50 years to the TRP metric. Yet, with TV you can't measure how much... Read more
3 Free Tools You Should Be Using In Digital Marketing Right Now
I had the pleasure of speaking to a great group of music industry executives and promoters yesterday at Canadian Music Week in Toronto. The panel I moderated was called "Data is King" and we were to speak about using data to enhance the understanding, targeting, and results of digital media. The panelists included smart folks from Radian6, Nielsen, SkyTide and BigChampagne. Before we went up on stage we were huddling and realized that there was a real possibility that many in the audience had a total annual marketing budget that would be smaller than the smallest one of our products. So, I made this the first thing I asked when we got on stage and indeed, just five people in the audience had a marketing budget of more than $20,000.
Audible. Green 33, speak about free. Hike. First question for the panelists: What is the one free tool you would recommend that marketers on a very tight and limited budget be using today (and don't say, "yeah, what he said.") I got four very good answers.
1. The first and most obvious is Google analytics. Knowing where your visitors are coming from, search terms that drive them there, and the geography... Read more
