Disclaimer:
The opinions blogged herein represently only those of Rick E. Bruner and do not reflect those of his employer, persons or companies mentioned herein, or anyone else.
July 22, 2004
We Have a Winner!
Congratulations to Jack Hodgkin, Jr., who sent me a screenshot of Google having blocked 5,045 pop-ups. He didn't follow my contest instructions exactly, which asked entrants to use the NYTimes.com page (not the NYPost.com, as he chose), but whatever. I wasn't exactly overwhelmed with responses.
Also, a couple of you sneaks pointed out that there's something called Photoshop out there, which made my methodology of submitting screenshots a flawed system, but I'm going to assume Jack was on the up and up. (Eric, for future reference, if you really wanted to play me, you should have picked a number of pop-ups lower than 9.2 million; that raised my suspicious; there aren't enough hours in the day to have surfed enough porno for that score.)
Anyway, I've sent Jack his $25 gift certificate. Keep on surfin'! --------
July 15, 2004
NYTimes.com Planning to Go to a Paid Model?
That's what a little birdie told me. Of course, don't take my word for it; believe it if/when you see it. (My sense, in any event, is nothing is imminent but something under serious consideration.)
But the argument goes like this: Sure, New York Times Digital made a 23% profit last year, but its overall revenue of $88 million accounted for only 3% of the NYT Company's total $3.2 billion in revenue. So, as much as NYTD is a darling in the online sector, it's a zit on the ass of the parent corporation. Moreover, it's a zit that some senior management at the company are itching to pinch, still concerned as they are about online's 9 million readers canibalizing the print paper's 1 million daily readers.
In particular, NYT Co's president and CEO Russell Lewis, former SVP of circulation, apparently really doesn't see the point of giving away the paper's content for free when online readers contribute only $11 a year to the paper's overall revenue compared to $900 for print readers, according to this timely Wired piece.
But as I say let's not take my word for it. It may well be only idle speculation (or...not). Imagine, however, if this did happen (the Wired piece quotes teenage hacker Aaron Swartz, who coded the Times' link generator, with a fascinating thought: "A far more sensible position for the Times would be to charge for new news, not old news"); what profound impact do you suppose it would have on the web publishing industry if the #1 news site suddenly went from 1.5 million visits a day to 50,000? (WSJ.com, for all its "success" in signing up paid subscribers, is not profitable, let's not forget.)
At least in that case NYTimes.com would probably stop serving those annoying pop-under ads...
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July 08, 2004
Latest in Invertising: Lego-Spiderman Ad
Here is the coolest thing to hit the Internet since Subservient Chicken: a high-production-value annimation of Spider-man II with LEGO characters, 'Spider-Man: The Peril of Doc Ock.' The film was produced by Spite Your Face Productions, which describes itself as "The Severed Nose of the Film Industry." The official press release makes clear that LEGO's is sponsor of the advermovie, though its not clear what role Marvel or Columbia Pictures had in its making, although their logos do appear with copyright disclaimers at the end of the four-minute film.
I am a huge fan of this kind of use of the Internet for original marketing: "invertising," I call it — ads that people go out of their way to watch. And we haven't seen the last of this particular ad yet, either. The press release warns: "The film will be be making numerous other appearances in the coming months, on tv and in stores world wide - with a special surprise due for later this year."
Bring it on!
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June 30, 2004
'Who Is Marshall McLuhan?'
I'll spare you the context, but I just had an exchange with a PR person for a major media organization who wrote, in response to something I'd written, that she had no idea who this Marshall McLuhan person was to whom I was referencing, and I should probably leave that out as it was too obscure.
Let me repeat: a PR person of a major media organization who did not know who Marshall McLuhan was. Marshall McLuhan, I am sure, would see the irony of that!
(Here you go dear: Marshall McLuhan on Wikipedia and Google.)
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June 25, 2004
Long Live The Hughtrain Manifesto
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Seeking Conference Bloggers for Ad-Tech Chicago, July 12-13
Wanna blog for no money but for access to the Chicago At-Tech conference? See here for details.
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How Many Obnoxious Pop-up Ads Has Google Blocked for You?
I'm hereby sponsoring a little contest. I'll award a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate to the person who emails me a screenshot of their Google toolbar having blocked the most pop-up ads. I ask only one thing: take the screenshot against the NYTimes.com site, which should, at this late stage in the game, know better than to keep spawning these hateful creatures. (Also, get it with a fresh exclamation-pointed star, as it makes a prettier picture.) Accepting entries through July 15. Google toolbar only; no substitutes.
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June 09, 2004
MarketingSherpa Readers Pick Adrants as Best Marketing Blog
Mad props to my good friend Steve Hall for winning Best Individual Blog on the General Topic of Marketing and Advertising for his excellent (if slightly T&A-obsessed) Adrants blog, by popular vote among 826 MarketingSherpa readers.
Meanwhile, AdLand won for Best Group Weblog on the General Topic of Marketing and Advertising, while our MarketingVOX won an honorable mention.
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May 24, 2004
Return of the AdTechBlog
It's AdTech time again, and that means the AdTechBlog is back!
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May 11, 2004
Blogger, New and Improved: A Lukewarm Review
This post is brought to you but the new Blogger.com. In fact, I have been beta testing it for a few weeks (which you can see from my archives is a grand total of about 2-3 posts).
Short version, nice effort, but I'm underwhelmed. Long version, see what I wrote on BusinessBlogConsulting.com
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May 04, 2004
Executive Summary Selected by Seth Godin as Top Online Resource
I'm very please to note that Executive Summary Consulting has been included in BullMarket 2004, a new free ebook of marketing resources selected by Fast Company magazine and marketing guru Seth Godin. You can download a copy of the free ebook here.
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April 25, 2004
The Webbys Nominations
Here are the latest nominations from the Webbys.
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April 23, 2004
Happy Birthday, Executive Summary Blog
Two years ago today, this blog was born. (Yes, that was one day after I started my personal blog.)
I know I've slacked off a bit blogging here in the meantime. In case you're new or haven't been paying close attention, that's because I've been distracted with several other blogs, including my personal nonsense Bruner Blog, the Internet marketing news aggregation blog I co-founded, MarketingVox (which I also blog at less these days since Tig Tillinghast has capably taking the lead there), and, most recently, at BusinessBlogConsulting.com. In fact, I have other blogs, too, but I'll spare you.
Anyway, let me take this occasion to pre-announce a long-overdue redesign of this site coming in the next month or so, I hope. One change you'll notice right away at that time is that I'll be moving the blog to an internal page of the site and making the homepage cleaner to promote my consulting service.
Here is my thinking about what I post to my various blogs: silly stuff, personal stuff, political rants, and the like, should all end up on Bruner Blog. Internet marketing industry news, especially when it's timely, goes on MarketingVox. Examples of business blogs and related resources go on BusinessBlogConsulting.com. That leaves Executive Summary for the more thoughtful (hopefully) commentary on Internet industry trends. Problem is, thoughtful commentary doesn't come along every day.
So do stay tuned for good content here, but set your expectations more along the lines of a few posts a month. Meanwhile, look for me popping elsewhere around the web when and where you least expect me.
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April 20, 2004
Seeking Conference Bloggers for AdTech San Francisco, May 24-26
AdTech is the leading industry event for the online advertising and marketing industry. At the last occasion of the conference, last November in NYC, MarketingWonk and I helped AdTech create the AdTech Blog, where a team of bloggers provided coverage of the event.
More details here.
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Pushing the Envelop With Online Campaigns
By now, you must have seen Subservient Chicken, Burger King's weird site that looks quite a bit like an amateur porn site gone wrong (e.g, man in chicken suit -- MarketingVox provides a roundup of news coverage). Well now comes something even creepier.
The Public Radio International program Marketplace reports on a very edgy online ad campaign (click here and scroll down to "Bleeding Edge Advertising?"). It tell of how, if you go to Google and search for "cloning," you will see an ad off to the right for the Godsend Institute. What is that? It is a cloning clinic. Yes, they clone human beings. Testimonials on the site tell stories about how grieving families recreate dead children.
The site is very well put together with lots of details. Only thing is, it's a hoax. But one you have to look at it very carefully to realize that. It's actually a promotion for a new movie from Lions Gate Films, Godsend, starring Robert De Niro and Greg Kinnear. The hoax site goes so far as to invite people to call for further information, where the curious here a voice mail that still sounds like the real thing. Only after they have left their name and number on the voice mail recording does the studio call back and explain it's a movie promotion. (There is also at least one link to the movie site on the hoax site, so those who look more carefully may figure it out.)
The Marketplace story quotes Ad Age columnist and Bob Garfield, who says the promotion crosses the boundaries of good taste. He suggests that we should imagine a grieving parent finding this site and considering the real possibilities of it only to find out it is a hoax, at which point, Garfield says, "it becomes genuinely grotesque, a grotesque exercise in creating false hope."
I tend to agree. Thoughts?
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April 18, 2004
BusinessBlogConsulting.com
My latest blog project: BusinessBlogConsulting.com
Business Blog Consulting is a site devoted to demonstrating how effective weblogs can be for communicating with customers and marketing to new customer prospects. You will find here lots of examples of business blogs, as well as resources to help you learn more about the topic.
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BloggerCon Wrap-up
A few thoughts on attending BloggerCon II this weekend.
It was alright. Obviously, the best part was meeting so many smart, interesting people. Jeff Jarvis was dynamic doing his very popular Blogs as Business session, as was David Weinberger doing his Blogging in Business session. Had a nice chat with Oliver Willis, who's pretty funny. Caught up a bit with buddies Henry Copeland and Steve Hall. Rode up from NY with Paul Frankenstein and Amy Langfield and back down with Jason Calacanis and Judith Meskill. Shook hands briefly with Dave Winer, though I doubt I made any impression on him (first time we've formally met), which is just as well. Chatted for a while with Seth Finkelstein, who is really, really smart. Heard bits of Rebecca MacKinnon's fascinating life story (former CNN reporter, who lived for years in China and Japan). Stared moon-eyed at Meghan Stier for a while. And so on.
Basically, it was all about schmoozing and name dropping, as far as I was concerned. As for the content, well, imagine getting a few hundred bloggers in the same space for a day talking all about blogs, and you pretty well have it. If you're interested in more thoughtful analysis, check out this list of who blogged about it on Liloia.com.
My biggest complaint about the whole event was how much the event's own blog stinks. For one thing, the URL is obscure, while it's not clear what's going on with BloggerCon.com. More significantly, though, the event's official blog wasn't updated at all during the conference. Importantly, I felt that they should have included a wiki on the site where people could have self-identified their own blogs so we could follow what everyone was writing about the event. There were a lot of people who couldn't attend the event in person discussing the sessions live on IRC, but I haven't seen those transcripts posted anywhere. I appreciate it was a lot to bring together and was all done on a volunteer basis, so no surprise that it was somewhat ad hoc, and from the event's standpoint, everything I witnessed came off pretty well without a hitch, but I was disappointed that they didn't go the extra effort to organize a record of it online, considering, after all, it was a conference about blogging.
The most significant conclusion of the event, to my mind, was Jarvis leading his overflowing session to agree to try to start an an "industry" assocation to help measure the impact of blogs on the web, provide some guidelines for common standards, and otherwise try to provide a regular forum interested parties can join to help give common voice to this movement, particularly for those bloggers who would like to try to earn some money off their efforts. In the spirit of community support, I registered BlogAssociation.com and .org, which I will gladly donate to any such organization, if it ever comes to fruition. I also told Jeff I'd be interested in helping organize such a body.
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April 14, 2004
MarketingSherpa Calls for Best Marketing Blog
MarketingSherpa has called for nominations for the best marketing blog:
We're launching MarketingSherpa's Reader's Choice Award for Best Blogs on the subjects of marketing, advertising and PR. A blog must have been regularly updated for at least the past 90 days to be considered. Winners get a review and hotlink from our site, plus a MarketingSherpa Blog Star t-shirt.
To enter a Blog you author, or are a fan of, email our Managing Editor Anne Holland by April 30th. Then we'll collect reader votes in May (hey it's a great way to get traffic to your Blog), and announce winners in June. Please put "Best Blog" in the subject line of your nomination email and send to anneh@marketingsherpa.com.
With all due respect, if MarketingVox (aka MarketingFix, Up2Speed, MarketingWonk and MarketingWhatever) fails to win this, there is no justice in the world. Lots of other marketing blogs are good, but MarketingVox simply stomps ass on all of them.
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April 07, 2004
Dodgeball.com
The latest in social networking, this might actually stay cool longer than 10 minutes (doubtful, but maybe): existing social networks meet cell phones.
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Boing Boing Seeks a Revenue Model
In what could be a watershed moment for blogs, the hilarious and fantastically popular Boing Boing is appealing to readers for ideas about revenue models. It seems that the site is growing in traffic so fast that its bandwidth costs are threatening to bankrupt it.
What a great problem to have. They've so far made the wise step of asking their friend John Battelle for ideas, he who co-founded Wired and founded Industry Standard. Here's what I advised:
1) Micropayments. The key to charging for content is DON'T charge for everything, just charge for some percentage (10%; 1%, for example) of premium content.
2) "Recommended donation." Like a museum. People can give nothing if they like, but suggest what they should donate. Keep track. Make them register for more than the most basic form of content. Then cookie them and keep a running tally of what they owe. Say, 1 penny per page view. After they've viewed 50 or 100 or 500 pages, remind them politely (e.g., with a page intercept, a flashing notice in the corner, an email) that they are obviously a regular reader and you ask your regular readers for a donation. Sure, many, or perhaps most, will ignore it, but in all likelihood a significant percentage will give something. Some will give what you ask, some will give less, some more. In any event, you'll earn more than you earn now.
3) BlogAds. I wrote a piece that came out this week for iMedia about blogs and their revenue potential. I mentioned how BlogAds has finally come into its own. By my estimates, DailyKoz is earning about $3,400 per week from BlogAds (or it was, anyway, until its recently political snafus that have cost it some ads).
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April 05, 2004
Blogging by the Numbers
I have a column today on iMediaConnection about research pertaining to blogging.
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March 30, 2004
Competitive Intelligence With Google Web Alerts
Lots of interesting looking stuff going on at Google these days, including a new look, personalized results, Froogle (shopping search) getting front-page billing (though still in beta, as it has been for over a year), and, interesting from the point of view of competitive research, Google Web Alerts whereby you can get email updates on new pages pertaining to search terms you select.
Doubtless, this flurry of activity is a response to warming competition in search from Yahoo and MSN.
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February 29, 2004
Lazy Public Relations
I just received this email:
Hi Rick,
My name is John Sxxxx of Sxxxx & Associates Inc. ([URL]).
We are a public and media relations agency in Toronto with 14 clients, mostly in technology.
For some reason, you have landed in our contact database. To keep our communications targeted, I would love to better understand your editorial interests - that way we can ensure we limit contact with you, only to those areas in which you are interested.
I invite you to visit our website for a better understanding of our clients what we do.
Many thanks for your response to ensure targeted communications.
John Sxxxx.
[Contact info]
I have complained here before about PR practices that irk me and have been accused by some PR bloggers of having a chip on my shoulder about the profession. As I do each time I write one of these PR rants, let me note that I worked for a year in PR, so I know something of what I speak, and having worked for years as a business journalist, I'll be the first to admit that the role PR folks play in business journalism is essential, much more so than most journalists would probably like you think.
But I also know that it's a service job that requires a certain amount of selflessness, deference and tact that didn't appeal much to an arrogant S.O.B. like myself (a friend recently suggested a better term for what I do might be an "insultant" rather than "consultant"). That is, PR requires a lot of legwork and research, knowledge of the interest and peccadilloes a vast number of journalists -- or at least the skills and resources to find track those down when necessary -- a personable nature, good writing skills and, ultimately, enough modesty to never stand in the spotlight yourself after doing all the hard work to make client look as good as possible and spoonfeed the journalist the story. In short, it's a hard job. Thus, I suppose it's not surprising that so few do it well.
John Sxxxx is, in my estimation, one of those who does not do it well.
This is not the first time I received this same email from John. He has sent me very similar messages at least four times in the last six months. The first time, I replied with a wordless link to a search of my name on Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=rick+bruner
I have been online for a while and have several web sites, am a book author and have done a lot of public speaking, replete with conference biographies, hence, I'm very easy to Google. Anyone looking to learn something about me doesn't have to work too hard at it. That was the message I was trying to convey with my previous rely to John's enquiry.
To see this pathetic note land in my inbox yet again makes me think, John, WTF? It's all I can do to be so civil as to not spell out your last name and link to your site and mock you that publicly.
The point is, why the hell should I do your job for you? "For some reason" I "landed" in your database? You make it sound like it's my fault, like I furtively took a turd there, or something. Might that not have something to do with the fact that you put me in your database, but apparently didn't take the effort to make a note at the time about who I am and what I do? Effectively, you're telling me here that you have no idea who I am. Why the hell is it, then, that you still regularly send me press releases at a rate of about one each week?
I am supposed to go to your web site to see what industries you work with, yet you have my URL right in my email address and still it's never occurred to you to go to my web site and find out what I do and maybe jog your memory as to why I'm in your database?
Get a frickin' clue. Or hire a flunky to call me to ask me on the phone, as we used to do when I worked in PR and were updating our database. Or better yet, please, just delete me altogether.
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February 28, 2004
Conference Blogging
I think conference blogging could be huge. Last time AdTech staged its conference here in NYC last November, myself and a team organized by MarketingWonk created the AdTechBlog (an official AdTech product, with editorial integrity). I would hope it could be something of a model for lots of industry conferences. Bloggers were simply given free passes to attend the event in exchange for pledging to cover a specified number of sessions and other events. I'm pleased to say we'll be repeating the experience at the San Francisco AdTech this May.
Ross Mayfield just posts an interesting analysis of styles of conference blogging over at Many to Many, a great blog covering social networking trends at Corante.
Thanks to Justin Kirby for the link.
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February 26, 2004
DMA Presentation
I promised to put this up from my presentation at the DMA's net.marketing conference yesterday. I had meant to go through this and clean it up a bit and annotate it a bit, as many of the slides are just screen shots that I talked to while on stage, but I'm extremely busy today, so I'm just throwing it up now and will get back to it again later today.
Here's the file (be warned, it's huge: 5 megabytes, in PowerPoint)
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