iMedia Connection Blog

Venture capital is always a hot topic in digital media. After all, heavy investment from the VC community has brought us now ubiquitous online platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare. VCs, by their nature, are always looking to the future, trying to get a sense of which digital companies will resonate with consumers and eventually become viable businesses.
Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures and one of the most well-known VCs (thanks to his A VC blog) sat down for an ad:tech keynote discussion and shared some insight into his investing process, and where he thinks digital media is going.
Here are a few nuggets from Wilson’s conversation with Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan:
Build network and audience first.
Throughout the discussion, Wilson emphatically endorsed a business plan where companies build scale before turning their focus on monetization. “If you spend all of your time on monetizing, you may never get the scale. That’s why this order makes sense,” he said.
Different user experiences will change advertising.
Old display models will fade away, which will force agencies to evolve and develop new ad solutions. “People say they hate advertising. People don’t hate advertising. They hate bad advertising,” Wilson said. “They hate interruptive advertising, and... Read more

To the casual observer, music and sports don’t have too much in common. But in online video advertising, these are two of the most sought after kinds of content, thanks to large, dedicated consumer devotees, and the ability to deliver a high quality experience.
CBS Interactive has found that music can deliver big audiences online. Its Live on Letterman program has garnered 130 million views in the past 18 months by streaming concerts from artists like Foo Fighters, Taylor Swift and The Killers live from inside New York’s Ed Sullivan Theater.
But it’s not just the big-name artists and songs that attract an audience. It’s the professional production. “This could be streamed on TV – it’s that level of quality,” said Ken Lagana, Senior VP, Sales, Entertainment at CBS Interactive, speaking at an ad:tech New York session on How to Create & Syndicate a Stellar Campaign.

For Daniel Bueckman, Managing Director of Mindshare, finding the right online content to connect with ads is one of the most crucial components in online video. “There’s a lot of content out there,” Bueckman said. “Some of it’s good, some of it’s not. Quality does matter.”
In fact, quality is one of the key considerations, according to... Read more

One of the biggest stories in the group-buying craze came this past September when Whole Foods offered a $20 voucher for $10 via the daily deal site LivingSocial. The offer made headlines, but it also raised questions from marketers, who wondered if these daily deal offers were actually beneficial for the brands involved. Some wondered if $10 off a $20 purchase was enough to bring new consumers to stores, and if those shoppers would return after they redeemed their voucher.
At ad:tech New York on Thursday, Mitch Spolan, Senior VP of National Sales LivingSocial, put all the doubts to rest by sharing the numbers.

1 million vouchers sold out in 14 hours
“Whole Foods” and “LivingSocial” were both Twitter trending topics throughout the day
“LivingSocial” was Google’s top search of the day (“Not because of us, but because of Whole Foods,” said Spolan.)
Nearly every online media outlet covered the story

Users were also turning to Facebook, where the shared the deal with friends and, more importantly, talked about exactly what they’d buy, whether it was guacamole or salad. In doing so, they gave Whole Foods earned product endorsements that the brand simply couldn’t buy.
In the end, Whole Foods revealed that shoppers who used the voucher... Read more

In his opening day keynote at ad:tech New York, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz briefly surprised the assembled digital marketers by talking about the transparency of pants.
He wasn’t talking about see-through trousers. Instead, Leibowitz was explaining how his daughter could easily go online and get all the information she wants about a pair of pants – size, color, price – in just a few clicks. Why then, does it often take so many more clicks to get through an online privacy policy or an opt-out page?
Concern over potential FTC regulations or a “do-not-track” list has grown over the course of the past few years, and several online marketing companies and trade groups are leading a self regulation effort that is now hitting a critical mass.
Still, the chairman kept his keynote speech at ad:tech on the light side, peppering it with jokes and referencing ad:tech’s ever-vibrant party scene. The FTC doesn’t want to shut down the party happening online, Leibowitz said. The organization just wants to make sure that consumers understand that free content is paid for with targeted advertising, and it’s up to the marketers assembled at ad:tech this week to make transparency their number one priority.

When comparing online advertising to other media, the word "measurability" comes up quite often.  But one of the problems about having so many metrics is that marketers are often inundated with numbers. More often then not, they have trouble understanding what's truly relevant, and which numbers show any return on investment.
Metrics experts try to make sense of everything but, according to Shelley Sanders, Digital Analytics Strategist at Carmichael Lynch, sometimes even the experts get mislabeled too. According to Sanders, she's been referred to (jokingly, of course) as "the person who works the numbers to make campaigns look successful," but that line of thinking isn't getting anyone anywhere at the end of the day.
In a session called Measuring Digital ROI: Are Your Ad Dollars Boosting Your Bottom Line?, Sanders and a panel of experts tried to help marketers unravel the mystery and understand their ROI.
One of the key things is to get the focus back and examine the difference between metrics and goals, according to Stewart Pratt, Director of Data and Analytics at SapientNitro. Instead of measuring the actual return, marketers just keep adding more metrics that show how we get to the return. The rise in social has forced online marketing... Read more