I was listening to the coverage this weekend about the signing of the CALM, or Commercial Advertising Loudness Mitigation. This legislation will require TV stations to reduce the volume on advertisements so that they are more in line with your normal TV programming. Over the last few decades, the decibels have grown and grown, making the distinction between programming and commercials painfully apparent.

This legislation is a good thing, not just for consumers but for advertisers.

Marketers shouldn’t want to continue ratcheting up the noise. I know that historically advertising execs have thought “bigger is better” and that you should “make something that stands out”. But the smart folks I’ve known, and my own experience in the constant test-and-refine trenches of digital marketing, have proved the complete opposite — to be effective, it’s better to blend in, not stand out.

An anecdote. When I was at Quigo, we were in the business of placing contextually targeted text advertisements on online content pages. We were thinking of different approaches to try to improve clicks on our advertisements and someone thought of an idea: why not add movement ot the box? So rather than showing 3 static text links, we would scroll *all* the text advertisements we thought might be interesting to someone on a five second delay– the movement would surely “stand out” more on the page and engage more people.  Wrong. We released the feature to much fanfare and within a day it was clear that fewer people clicked a scrolling advertisement than a static one. Over time, we found more and more evidence to corroborate the notion that blending in beats standing out: the more advertisements complemented the page they were on, in terms of tenor, aesthetics, and topic, the more likely they were to attract consumer attention.

So what does this have to do with television? Maybe nothing–  to be fair I don’t know a lot about TV advertising, I’ve been a digital guy my whole life. But I can’t help but think that people are people, whether online or on the couch. And if so, the research I’ve always done first hand shows that making your marketing message a continuation of the programming, instead of  a contrast to the programming, is the best way to get people’s attention. So maybe lowering the volume will actually keep them listening.

I posted a study over on the Outbrain blog about how we’re tackling the problem of deciding what content to feature to people on publisher web sites. Our overall conclusion is that the traditional tactics are not ideal. It is almost second nature for sites to put up a list of links  related to the content of the page, or to use modules showing the general popular articles of the day. While each approach increases engagement at some level, neither are as successful as finding content that is interesting to the person and somewhat off topic. In the world of content stickiness, finding the interesting is more important than identifying the “relevant”. Check out the full post here.

I was looking for a quick lunch near our Outbrain office in Union Square this afternoon, where two different marketing approaches were on stark display. People were streaming down Park Ave. and a disheveled, tired old man was standing in front of a pizzeria shoving menus in everyone’s face and shouting “free soda with two slices, free soda with two slices!”. We all parted like a river around a rock  to avoid him. He did sneak a menu into the hands of a few of us, but when I looked into the pizzeria, it was dark and bare with only a person or two silently munching away in isolation. They didn’t seem to be enjoying the free soda.

Less than a block further on, there was another interruption in the pedestrian flow. This time, however, it was because a line was snaking out the door and overflowing into the street from a small falafel shop called Maoz.

Of course I immediately thought: this is classic top-down broadcast advertising versus engagement marketing (really, who wouldn’t have thought that??). On the one hand, you’ve got a store pushing their message in the face of people who clearly aren’t interested, trying to make up for a lack of buyers by discounting their product and simply being louder. And it wasn’t working, people were tripping over each other to avoid him, dodging as quickly as you or I move our eyes away from banner ads to the content we actually care about on the web. I myself even had to hand the menu back the poor schmo and tell him ‘No Thanks’, which is what I do by clicking the X button on interstitial ads all day long. Getting in people’s faces doesn’t engage them with your brand – it’s a turn off. One look in the pizzeria would tell you that.

Meanwhile, down the street, what was Maoz doing right? Well for one, they have a differentiated product (falafel) which clearly helps sell itself more easily than a commodity (pizza in NYC). But beyond that, the decor is inviting, cheerful greens and glass paneling that make it bright and cheery. It’s easy to tell it’s a serve-yourself place where you simply take what you want to eat and don’t get stuff you *don’t* want packaged in (free soda anyone? please??).  In sum, it was a brand that had made itself a desirable destination…..people were coming to it, so it didn’t have to come to them.

There is a lesson in this for online marketers: you need to provide people with a destination so they have reason to come to you. In the digital space, top down broadcast advertising is exceedingly difficult to pull off successfully. It’s usually perceived as annoying, even more so as the medium moves faster and faster toward personalization (my facebook stream, my selected apps, my start page). If someone does not invite you onto their screen, your message just doesn’t have juice.

Good agencies and brand marketers are figuring this out and developing new ways to create destinations that can attract and build interested audiences. Facebook fan pages and twitter updates with really useful information are one avenue, giving bloggers something to talk about in a new way that touches on your brand is another. Or creating really compelling editorial content that is adjacent to your brand (not *about* your brand for heaven’s sake…..that will flop) with brand marketing/sponsorship in the periphery. All of these tactics are useful ways to move marketing from a push model to a pull model, and all succeed or fail based on whether they can provide something of interest to people, whose attention span is fleeting.

So to all of us in the space, let’s keep working with good differentiated products while creating engaging environments that will have people coming to us. No one wants to have to hire that crusty old man with the menus.

If you work in online publishing, you will have no doubt noticed the growing focus on producing slideshows and photo galleries.  The reason behind this trend is pretty clear: it generates a lot more page views than long form content. People arrive on slideshow pages and click through tens of pages in a row to snack on the little morsels of content packaged into bite sized bits. Yahoo even generated more search share recently deploying this tactic (see WSJ article), as ephemeral and meaningless as this “share” is.

While many folks in the digerati bemoan these approaches as the dumbing down of content (I admit to rolling eyes at it myself), it is rooted not in editorial preferences but in the backward economics of online advertising. If you read my last post, admittedly penned many moons ago, I discussed how high quality content is not financially rewarded by the dominant online spenders, direct response advertisers, allowing content farms to create more near-term profitable businesses. Well,  I’m sorry to say that publishers of long content are likewise punished by the misguided economics of current online brand advertising.

Brand advertisers buy CPMs — cost per thousand impressions. They ought to be buying a different type of CPM– cost per minute.

Advertisers looking to saturate a market with their messaging should not continue to be duped by thinking that a million impressions at a low cost achieves their goals…..not all page “views” are the same. Someone flipping quickly through ten pages of a  slideshow may see your banner 10 times, but for 1 second on each load. Someone else seeing it only once on a long analysis piece on the New York Times, however, may have that brand message in front of them for a full five minutes. Which is worth more?

Now, I know many people will say that the market prices in these differences, agencies will pay a higher rate for placement on a site like the New York Times vs. sites with “snackable” content. But in reality this doesn’t happen most of the time. Ad networks backfill a huge percentage of advertising space on all web sites, including “premium” sites, and sell in volume blocks with little to no placement distinction. And if you look at the relative CPMs between publisher sites, you’ll quickly see the price variances have more to do with the type of content (verticalized, commerce oriented, etc.) than the format of the content.

We have the technology to price by minute of viewed time. It’s relatively simple to track how long a piece of media was shown within the visible area of a web browser. Moving to a cost-per-minute model, rather than a per impression model, would have the following benefits:

• Align better with brand advertising’s  overall goals of measurable audience saturation
• Normalize for page placement automatically. That is, a banner far at the bottom of a page beneath the fold would automatically cost less than a banner closer to the content, simply because it was viewed for fewer minutes. No more negotations needed about whether one placement is worth a $3 CPM and the other $.50…..you could price based on the value of the site audience alone.
• Reward publishers who deeply engage their audiences, keeping them on site longer
• Reduce the “gaming” many sites do to manufacture page views, which both annoy users and rip off advertisers

This is not to say there is no place for slideshows and the like in publishing. Offline magazines have been running “Top 10″ lists for decades (Cosmo, anyone??), and there are audiences who love that format and value it. In a cost-per-minute world, sites whose audiences appreciate this format will still have pricing power, as long as they are keeping people on site for a significant period of time. But other sites whose readers appreciate long articles– Slate, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, etc.–  would not be punished for engaging their own readers in a way that resonates with them.

The chase for the almighty page view would come to an end, replaced with a more important standard: how much time are people really spending with my content? And by proxy with my advertisers’  messaging?

Here at Outbrain, we just released a new program called OutLoud. Check our blog post here for more information. The idea behind OutLoud is to allow anyone to submit content they want people to read– then we take that content and find where it should be recommended across the thousands of sites where our recommendation platform is installed.

There are a lot of reasons I really love this product (wouldn’t have wanted to help build it otherwise!). Here are just a few of them that may be slightly different than what you’ll see on our web site:

1) I love that we’re pioneering a system for great content syndication and finding ways for marketers to leverage content. In all my years working in online advertising and marketing, I’ve always had mixed feelings about the quality of some of the “offers” that monopolize publisher pages. While I totally saw the value from the advertiser’s perspective, I wondered how many real people got something worthwhile from these ads. Obviously enough people *did* find it valuable to make the advertiser’s ROI work, but most marketers needed only only 0.2% of people to engage to make the media buy profitable — they could leave 99.8% of people annoyed or simply disengaged with no negative ramifications.

With OutLoud, we are a *content only* network. We only accept articles, videos, etc. that allow people who are reading and consuming content on other sites to continue that activity.  I really believe this fits a big hole in the digital publishing landscape by allowing publishers to profit by helping their users find interesting content, which is what publishing (and reading!) is all about.

2) I love that the marketing applications of content amplification are so broad. Picking an article or two that you want people to read can benefit all kinds of businesses and people in ways I probably haven’t even thought of yet. For instance, I’ve already come across one person who wants to use OutLoud to expose larger audiences to her scientific research (which has practical implications for the types of devices we buy). I’ve know an artist whose work was showcased in a well known interior design store and wanted people to read about that. I’ve got a brother who just wanted to rub salt in the wounds of a rival sports team when they were mocked online on a well known blog, and for $10, he was happy to share the love.  And of course we run into small and medium sized businesses every day who are putting out interesting content– or being covered in other publications– and want to get the word out. Almost everyone I tell about our program seems to have a use for it…..and the majority of them are not Internet marketers. It’s exciting when you can’t totally predict how the world might use what you’re creating.

3) I love that we’re allowing any piece of content, no matter how “small”, to be showcased on some of the biggest web sites out there when they are likely to be interesting to a specific audience. As we all know, content proliferation on the web is a beast….100,000 new blogs created a day, some say. And yet it’s impossible to find 99.9% of it. If you are like me, then you probably visit a handful of content sites day in and day out who as a rule you’ve learned to trust. You know there’s a lot more great stuff out there but don’t have time to sift through the layers and layers of noise to find it, and so you live in a self-contained echo chamber. With our program, we’re trying to bridge that gap: an article written by your next door neighbor can be showcased on Chicago Tribune, or Seattle Times, or USATODAY as long as  it’s highly relevant and as long as  readers tend to respond to it positively. So for all those people who, like me, spend most of their time reading the same 10 content sites, there’s now an opportunity to be introduced to really interesting stuff from places they would simply never find on their own. And that’s pretty neat.

So that’s my self-promotional plug for the day. But hey — if you can’t get excited about what you’re working on, you shouldn’t be working on it.

Every so often (ok, maybe quite often) I decide it would be great to get away for a few days. I shake my pockets, determine I’ve got a little change I’m willing to spend. And frankly, I don’t much care where I go– I just want to go somewhere. And yet when these impulse moments strike, I find it nearly impossible to weave through the labyrinth of travel web sites to discover something and so– sadly–  I end up going nowhere. What I need isn’t another travel search engine that responds only to my exact input. That functionality is pretty well commoditized and I can find the same flights, hotels, car rentals on several web sites. What I need is a travel “discovery” engine that reveals great possibilities that I wouldn’t have thought to ask for. Ideally, I would provide the following info:

1) My dates of travel with the ability to add plus/minus days on either side (ala Kayak.com)

2) I know my departure cities/airports

3) I do *not* know my destination…..this is the “discovery” I want the site to bring to me

4) I know number of folks traveling with me

5) I know that I only want nonstop flights. With kids at my side and a short trip, I ain’t laying over and wasting time in transit.

That’s it: I want to enter this and get a price sorted list of flight and hotel combinations. I do not want to sort through a bunch of packages with date restrictions which make the price listed meaningless, or get far into the process only to find out that actually the flight is full (this happens all the time). Just give me the straight dope, 1 click to purchase, and you’ve got my CC out and me on a plane.

I know discovery engines are more complicated than search engines — I’ve worked on, and with, both. But it’s this kind of functionality that is still sorely lacking in the travel world and where, I think, a site has a great chance to extend the overall market (people would travel more) and break away from its peers. If anyone knows a site doing a good job let me know….and maybe I’ll make some plans this fall after all.

I was sad to hear the news that Yahoo will be folding its Search Submit Pro (SSP) program at the end of the year. It was fairly predictable, given the new Bing/Yahoo tie up and Microsoft’s not too-ancient history of jettisoning paid inclusion when they broke free from Yahoo in 2004. However, I agree with Matt Kain that SSP was a misunderstood program that unduly received a bad wrap. For years I worked directly with Yahoo helping customers submit millions of URLs of content to the SPP program and developed a pretty good sense of its pros and cons.

The argument against SSP has always been that allowing companies to pay for inclusion in organic search results   “pollutes” the purity of search and leads to bad user experience. I admit this argument has visceral gut-level appeal (fox guarding the hen-house and all that), but those deeply involved in search and Yahoo’s implementation of the program also saw the other side of the coin:

1) By permitting web sites to submit their content via feeds, Yahoo was better able to control what it indexed. Unlike web crawlers that need to interpret web pages to find what’s most important, and which is always susceptible to black hat SEO tricks and the like, Yahoo was able to force participants to abide by certain standards. If these standards weren’t met they simply rejected the content. Anecdotally, I remember being frustrated at times that my paying clients were  being outranked by less relevant organic listings. The reason? The organic sites were playing black hat games, getting away with it, and were not as easily identified and controlled as folks participating in paid inclusion.

2) Anyone who thinks companies are not paying to be in Google’s organic search results is naive. The amount of money spent on SEO experts to help companies restructure their site, their internal linking, their external link strategies, etc. is enormous. Now you can argue that Google isn’t being paid and this makes it different…..but the point is, there is gaming going on on that side as well which clutters Google’s results and leads, often, to bad search experiences.

3) Those companies that game SEO to rise high on Google were not those participating in Yahoo SSP. They weren’t the type of companies that are generally willing to pay for traffic, they are looking for a free ride. Yahoo was able to screen which sites could be included in SSP and make sure that those with a track record of abuse were barred from the program.

4) On the technical side, SSP had the potential to accomplish a great thing : it theoretically allowed web developers to design for user experience without worrying about SEO impact. The conflation of these two objectives often leads to twisted web design. Content publishers forced to make simple article headlines, rather than pithy ones (which may be the site’s authoring style), fashion sites moving away from rich media so they are more easily crawled and indexed, etc. By divorcing descriptions of web pages  from the pages themselves, SSP really allowed more flexibility and innovation in web design techniques. Of course, because everyone was running after Google rankings, it didn’t much matter. But the idea of submitting structured data to search engines, rather than waiting for them to come to you, could be really helpful. Google Base has been an attempt at a free version of this but the ambiguity of how content submitted to Base is used in organic Google.com results makes it fairly useless.

So in sum, I am disappointed to see the end of SSP.

Sure, there were always problems with the program, for instance editorial rules were not enforced by Yahoo’s algorithm as well as they should have been (they relied too much on people police, not tech policing). But overall, it had good potential and served a good purpose. Best of luck to those Yahoos who worked on the program and to those SEM/SEO pros who were expert at using it.