Morpheus Media Mlog » internet

Affiliate Marketing

Samantha Raizen — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:21:02 +0000

Affiliate Marketing has recently come of age and should be strongly considered a viable option for any vendor looking to increase daily conversions and heighten their brand exposure. Although it possesses a rather checkered past, Affiliate Marketing has grown into a cornerstone of many successful digital campaigns.

According to Wikipedia, “Affiliate Marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.” In layman’s terms, affiliates act as salesmen for the vendor by promoting the vendor’s website. The affiliate then receives a monetary compensation for any sales they generate. Affiliates act as a publisher in many ways as well, by putting banners on relevant affiliate sites and sending traffic through to the vendor’s site. However, affiliate marketing is often called “performance marketing”, referring to the typical affiliate commission structure that is based on this sales-like structure of compensating sales & conversions rather than clicks & impressions.

Affiliate marketing today has matured into a well-respected form of commercial media. This is a drastic change from the early days when a lack of control over industry affiliates was abused by some, leading to a bad name for the entire industry. Affiliate marketing still lacks an overall regulating body; with no legally binding rules and regulations Affiliate marketing can be dangerous waters to navigate.

The rise of Web 2.0 has been essential in shaping the industry into what it is today. In addition to allowing vendors a closer (and much simpler) connection with their affiliates, the rise of new media has led to a self-policing environment. This new environment is more conducive to operational transparency: any questionable activity is made known to the affiliate community and can be halted with much greater speed and efficiency.

The benefits of Affiliate Marketing are numerous. By using a set commission structure based on the concept of Revenue Sharing, vendors maintain a steady ROI creating an affiliate “sales team.” Affiliate marketing also enables a vendor to generate sales for their site from entirely new sources, and offers an unparalleled branding opportunity that can flow back as sales through other marketing channels.

Like many other online marketing practices, Affiliate Marketing/Performance Marketing will not work the same way for every vendor looking to increase conversions. The obvious loss of some control over the brand presence online is the deal breaker for many vendors. The unique branding opportunity and access to a huge network of new salesmen is a convincing argument for the industry on the other hand. There is no doubt, however, that Affiliate Marketing is one of the hottest new approaches to interactive marketing.

A Guiding Light

Eric Herbel — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:17:26 +0000

Anick Jesdanun recently wrote an article that discusses the evolution of ad targeting and behavioral marketing. In the article Jesdanun expands on the approach digital marketers are now taking to infer relevance through the expanded collection of personal data.

Although this process of information harvesting has been in affect for some time, the level of sophistication and depth is increasing at an accelerated pace. With the recent backlash Facebook has received for its Beacon advertising, every good marketer should be keeping a watchful eye on this trend.

We here at Morpheus Media are lucky enough to have our very own all-knowing eye, Adam Broitman. Mr. Broitman who is Morpheus Media’s Director of Emerging and Creative Strategies was recently involved in the before mentioned Associated Press piece found here on USA Today.com. As always Adam’s insight and knowledge place him as a true industry authority.

As organizations such as Yahoo continue to demonstrate that data mining can be a useful tool for marketers new and innovative approaches can be taken to alert the world of the benefits of your brand. So as the digital marketplace is successfully taking all of the guessing out of the guesswork we here at Morpheus are thankful we have Adam Broitman to keep us well informed.

AntiSocial Media (Faceplant)

Eric Herbel — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:19:43 +0000

In case anyone has missed the writing on the wall over the last few weeks, Facebook’s new advertising adventure Beacon has finally run aground.

In an attempt to justify (in my opinion) a way over inflated valuation of $15 Billion Mr. Zuckerberg must continue his foray into cloak and dagger marketing techniques. Angry over the alignment of opting in versus opting out a percentage of Facebook users have struck back through the auspices of MoveOn.org. It is reassuring though to know that the same group that gave us General BetrayUs earlier this year is now after Mark Suckeredusberg.

At the heart of the issue is the assertiveness of Facebook’s willingness to air everyone’s laundry whether it is dirty or not. With Microsoft looming large over Zuckerberg’s head an effective advertising channel needs quantifiable ROI. So sure Facebook ruined everyone’s Christmas this year. But how else would you be able to complain about it to your friends if not via Facebook. Myspace? I don’t think so.

Although Facebook continues to be the social network of choice there are only so many aggressive pushes users will accept until they finally pull away for good. Although the American entrepreneurial spirit is one of two steps forward one step back. I believe Mark Zuckerberg has out paced himself on this one. Beacon was four steps forward, resulting in five steps back. It will take time to see if users are willing to accept such an aggressive approach to divulging personal content. In the interim if anyone knows of a good alternative to Facebook, friend me, please.

Don’t outreach your outreach.

Eric Herbel — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:35:08 +0000

So you think you’ve built yourself a pretty good website? Your content is not only relevant and insightful it is concise and optimized? Your tags are terrific and your landing pages leap out? Now how do you get the word out?

Once you’ve created your site you may have thought the toughest part of the operation behind you, but be weary.
Building great content is only the first step of the often-dangerous endeavor known as interactive marketing. The most treacherous element of your digital journey has yet to begin. Outreach.

Ask any professional in the interactive arena and they will tell you that content is king. What they won’t tell you is how to effectively spread the word to the digital community. Standing on your chair and screaming that you are relevant is no longer a viable option (if it ever was). How then do you build readership, drive traffic, and create conversions?

The simplest answer of course is the most effective, hard work.

Many tactics exist that allow marketers and public relations professionals to reach a large target field with minimal work and effort. Most of these efforts involve bulk emails driven by purchased target lists that claim accuracy.

Be careful.

Recently Chris Anderson editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail took more than 300 professional communicators to task by publicly outing them as industrial spammers. With over 300 response comments posted on his blog he obviously touched a nerve.

The uniqueness of your content in combination with the added value it provides your readers will eventually gain you a following. This being the case do not get yourself blacklisted before you are even out the gate.

By taking the time to understand your vertical and appreciating what editors are looking for you can initiate a productive outreach campaign

Mediapost Behavioral Marketing Forum– Behavioral in the Media Plan

Toby Evers — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 19:51:01 +0000

All the surveys show great interest among agencies and buyers for more precise targeting and BT in particular. But is BT making inroads with media planners?

Carrie Frolich, Digital Practice Lead, Mediaedge:cia
Michael Winter, Media Director, Agency.com
Mark Egan, VP, Group Account Director, MediaContacts
Joseph Weaver, Associate Director, Interactive, Media Storm
Moderator: Anna Papadopoulos, Interactive Media Director, Euro RSCG

At first BT was more like a nuclear collider
What is behavioral targeting really?
- Targeting after any online action
- Many flavors of behavioral targeting
Are their advertiser types better suited for BT?
- Tends to be a DR focused channel
- Frolich- “It works best for patient advertisers”
Custom creative is essential, you must have a control group to compare how well it did
Who are the top three partners?
- (I don’t think anyone wants to answer this one)
What are the key obstacles in adopting behavioral?
- Getting creative and account teams to think more about behavioral strategy
- Client adoption
What are the metrics for success?
- DR metrics
- Attitudinal Studies
- Levels of engagement

Tags: Anna Papadopoulos, Euro RSCG, Media Storm, Joseph Weaver, Mark Egan, MediaContacts, Agency.com, Michael Winter, Mediaedge:cia, Matt Straznitskas, Media Planning, Agencies, Mediapost, OMMA, Behavioral Targeting, Carrie Frolich

MediaPost Behavioral Marketing Forum– “Effective Targeting” Research on the State of the Industry

Toby Evers — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 19:49:58 +0000

A report on ad buyer attitudes toward BT and growth projections.
Emily Riley, Analyst, JupiterResearch

What does this really mean when you are trying to reach your consumers?
In five years 11% of all ad spend will be online
The static banner is going away and rich media is taking over
Information overload is a bigger issue than not enough info about audience
Only 16% of advertisers have used behavioral targeting, while 30% have geo-targeted and 33% have demo targeted
Advertisers are twice as satisfied when using BT
BT is becoming more popular for both brand and direct response advertisers. These advertisers are becoming the same.
Consumers are not as concerned with “spying” as they are with viruses and identity theft
Increasing the use of search behavior within BT is the key
Automotive leading the way in BT
80% increase in banner impressions online in the last two years due to social media
Verticals with long purchase cycles will begin to embrace BT more thatn contextual etc.

Tags: Effective Targeting, Emily Riley, JupiterResearch, Mediapost, OMMA, Behavioral Targeting

MediaPost Behavioral Marketing Forum — Personalization & Targeting Strategies: The Marriage of Technology and Creative

Toby Evers — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 19:48:12 +0000

Forget about behavioral targeting "theory." In this workshop, you’ll learn real ways to quickly and easily deliver relevant and personalized content on your website and in ads – directly from leaders in the space. Jonathan Mendez and Paco Viñoly of OTTO Digital are pioneers in the personalization and optimization space. Using real-life examples from online marketing innovators, this workshop will go beyond the buzz and show you how to positively impact your bottom line through personalization.

Jonathan Mendez, Chief Strategy Officer, OTTO Digital
Paco Viñoly, Chief Creative Officer, OTTO Digital

Discovery of segmentation and affinities
Creative approach to messaging to these affinities
Testing
Different type of segmentation
- Thick slices gives a larger data set to working and optimize off of
- - Small lifts make a bigger impact
- Behavior
- Temporal
- Source
- - Natural search visitors varies from paid search
- Environment
What does the targeting do to the message and vice versa
- The message has to be true to the user
Behavioral/Contextual messaging based on internal navigation
Relevance and reinforcement of intent

Tags: Jonathan Mendez, OTTO Digital, Paco Viñoly, Targeting Strategies, Personalization, Mediapost, OMMA, Behavioral Targeting

SES NYC 2007 – Organic Listings Forum – 4/12/07

Toby Evers — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 17:57:37 +0000

Tags: organic listings, search, SEO, search engine rank, SERPS, black hat seo, white hat seo

Here’s a breakdown of this session…

Panel

Detlev Johnson – Host

Bruce Clay – Bruce Clay inc

Todd Friesen – Rage online media

David Naylor – Black Hat SEO guy, "Viagra" SEO

Jill Whalen – High Rankings

Forum Questions

How do you deal with scrapers beating you with your own material if you are moving off of a blog site host?

Blogger.com platform, hard to move off of, lose rank when you move
Just takes time to build back up.. should start with own server based blog

Can you Differentiate between Multilanguage crawlers?

It’s the algorithm that determines language not the crawlers, they crawl regardless

What about using off the screen div’s and marquee text, or underneath the flash div’s?

Still perfectly ok, as long as it’s content relative to what’s on the site

Social Media sites and spam? (this was my question for the panel)

Seems to be that it might be phased out, due to black hats abusing it
Not going to go away, but will keep changing
Digg users – can be bad, they go in, high traffic, come fast, leave nasty messages and leave. They don’t convert
Now, we can’t ignore it, we must monitor it and watch it. You can certainly drive rankings right now, link building etc…
If you have to play in that space, you have to be careful, it can bring you down with bad ‘press’

How do you get out of cloaking if you are ranking well?

Recreate the site and make the cloaked part visible
Inbound linking is not cloaking and will weigh in your favor
Google webmaster optimizer is like cloaking

Personalized search

This is great for SEO
Changes the way we look at rankings… how do we measure now, they will be different all the time
Good reason to look at traffic numbers instead of rankings
Metrics should focus more on traffic, organic traffic, and ROI

CMS – treating spiders differently than users (time stamp, cookie, etc)

Give the spiders a hard copy
Do not cookie the spiders
Use rewrite module for URL’s (ModRewrite – it’s white hat cloaking)

IP-delivery.com

Gives you all the spider IP information you need

Can you link build too aggressively?

If someone bombs you, not much you can do about it
You can’t really hurt a domain by getting aggressive links, but make sure they are high ranking links

Spider frequency

Hugely dependant on website
Sitemaps, webmaster tools, site builder etc… def. helps
4 – 6 weeks to get a significant portion of site crawled

Hold On To Your TV

Toby Evers — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 11:17:18 +0000

This story is starting to get old. After seeing the quantifiable nature of the Internet, advertisers are beginning to ask for more from the television networks. Will they get it? Can they get it?

Who is really responsible for holding advertisers back from getting more feedback from Television. Is it the technology or the technology providers?

I will reserve my official opinion however this NY Times article sheds some good light on who is really responsible for the lack of granularity in TV ratings metrics.

Tags: NY Times, Nielsen, Ratings, TV, Television, Internet, Media

Do you know your Web 2.0???

Toby Evers — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 21:03:12 +0000

Do you know all the “movers and shakers” of the Web 2.0 boom? If not, you can get a good idea at Movers 2.0. A company esnips has put together this simple website that shows the top 100 or so Web 2.0 sites as per their Alexa rank. It’s interesting to see a site like Orkut performing above Wikipedia. This list gives me a new perspective about some sites that were kind of out of my radar as well.