MediaWatch Monday: Missing The Point - Publishers Wrestle With Advertising Formats

Perhaps a mashup between "paid for influence" and openyear may be the model of the future...

Although we do not have the tools or systems in place yet, they may evolve in the next few years.

They have been talking about a single world currency for a long time. Some economists and some conspiracy theorists, however perhaps the driver that will bring around a single world currency is the entity that is truly global and singular, the Internet. It is possible that "influence points" could be the seed of this and originally hold no monetary value, however as this type of system became more prevalent, so its value would increase in real terms and by a 1000 small steps we would see a single global currency that does not replace our current coins, paper and plastic, it just starts to evolve with it and integrate into it.

It makes sense.

Already that "influence" has market effects, just not in a way that necessarily is taken into account too much, but then very much is as well. Your hits. The value of impressions is not going to go away anytime soon, no matter how granulated that impression data is.

Influence = Value

We just have not caught up with this new variant of the digital paradigm yet, especially in the news / journo / advertising arenas.

The digital economy was always based on number of users. How influencial is your digital offering?

Now the person who consumes the content does not have to be a "user" / logged in and signed up, to read or access your content, they just can. They only value you gain is the impression. But impressions still count.

Perhaps more on a "logarithmic" type of scale which contributes to the inequalities of this type of driver at the onset.

This is evident in the value of the twitters and facebooks of the world. Their value lies in the number of their users AND importantly, how they have influenced (distrupted) the lives of people.

There is a number of examples in our social systems that show that these type of inequitable social systems tend to evolve to deliver benefit to the whole or they try to and most of the time they do over a long enough time line.

Healthcare for example, although there are examples of very inequalitable healthcare systems, that does not change the fact that societies cotinually try to improve healthcare for all.

Home ownership. Gone are the days of massive inequality between landlords and tenents. There are still examples of massive inequalities. However so have many developed societies seen a massive increase in the number of people that own their own homes. Perhaps this is fairly illusionary as it would be more accurate to say that banks tie in customers and reward the customer after years of loyal service with some bricks and mortar built on a piece of land, that they own. And owning land is about a illusionary as owning a house. No one owns the land. A thing as transient as humanity cannot claim to own the land, the water, the oceans or the air.

Yet our systems need these illusions to operate stably within our current socio-economic paradigm.

Everything shows us that people have value. People bring value and people create value. The original mortgage fixed to a single borrower, whereby the borrower gained value by effectively gaining a customer for life.

Although the banks may be looked on a greedy, self centred, profit machines. Their new found super landlord status serendipitously led to the increased productivity and creativity of the latter part of the 20th century. People had to go out and work and make the house payments. This created fastly developing world, the idea of ownership, a sense of belonging. That changed the world and drove it and it was and still is very inequitable, but it was a very powerful driver nonetheless.

Some things will not change no matter how clever we get technologically, the value of the person.

People = Value therefore Influencing People = Value

For all the hype, the media industry has not changed, the medium and quantity may have. It is still about eyeballs and more importantly it is about returning eyeballs.

Quality still counts, but we live in inequitable systems. It would seem that all our systems start out very inequitably and then we strive to make them more equitable.

In an ever increasingly rapid evolution cycle, it may be true to say that we will continue to see a lot of inequality as we cannot modify our social behaviours quick enough to work in equality before the next thing comes along.

Perhaps it has to be on a whole, this time we have to be the proponent of change, not the system, but us. We need to recognise our own individual value as a person / a user / a consumer and says "I want my piece of the pie".

I help make twitter and Google, their value is based on us, not them. Without them we can survive, they cannot survive without us.

We will never get rid of the inequalities in the online space, but we will try to make those systems more equalitable. Perhaps the openyears and Robert Shillers and Mohammed Yunus' of the world are pioneering a trend.

Remember that fantastically successful AdSense model Google implemented? Would it be possible to scale that out? And change it where publishers sent you little payments for reading their content, visiting their site and a little more for interacting, participating, etc.

Maybe I will experiment :)

Perhaps a little off topic, but carries an underlying message. People are the most valuable thing in any market.

Whatever medium the ad takes on or revenue model that comes along to try and tackle this media world problem is going to have to always take that into account.

Along with the fact that good quality content, good stories will always be valued. Media and journalism has not changed that much. The core is still the same. Everyone is to afraid of this new medium, but the opportunities exist for players to write their own models, innovate and create something new that works for them, their business and perhaps the pay cheque will be a little less. That more equitable spread.

Gary's Take: future trends, a big movie released free on the Internet with a lot of cool product placements in it, done intelligently. The first big budget film to be paid for by advertising upfront. Innovative? Effective? Perhaps. Nike's advertising budget for the 2010 World Cup? Fairly large... large than a big blockbuster movie about football with pre World Cup release and subtly imbued with Nike products and references, life changing sponsporship or development coach... hmmm I don't know, but I think someone may experiment at some stage.

take 2: Influence becoming a more mainstream comodity that has a more monetary value attached to it. New innovative digital ads that take old sales tricks and rehash them, e.g. every "x"th person to watch the entire video ad, gets a free x. (idea there)

take 3: The media industry paying people micropayments for actually viewing and participating in their content.

Now I am going to start working to make my own little piece of the digital equity pie, the sun has risen over the Med and the day has begun (no surf on offer), so we must work :) Thanks Tom you often light a spark in my mornings.

Whatever yo do today, do it well and have a good day.

I think the key issue is that online advertising is dominated by last-click attribution thinking which undervalues the upper-funnel, demand creation part of the equation. Google has clearly benefited from this situation as it portrays their Adwords product as much more cost-effective than it actually is.

Disclosure: I head the Search discipline for Omnicom's Organic network of digital agencies - so I see this distortion on a daily basis.

Upper-funnel drives Lower-funnel, making Lower look very cost-effective to those marketers who don't track multiple click conversion attributions. Marketers who do multi-click attribution already know which of their upper-funnel CPM deals are driving down-funnel conversions, but until we have a system that returns some of this 'assist value' to the most effective publishers, the online content model will likely remain broken.

Best,
Marshall Clark
Group Director, Search
Organic, Inc.

Marshall: Yes, you are right. But I don't see an easy way to do that, and, I don't think there will be enough value returned even if you could do that.