PORK BELLIES VS. DIAMONDS: A FALSE DICHOTOMY

An
Ecosystem 2.0 Post-Mortem

Those of you who were part of the sold-out crowd know that IAB’s just-concluded Annual Meeting in Phoenix was a soaring success: We made news repeatedly, we celebrated the difference-makers who are building the interactive industry, we facilitated deal-making among member companies, and – most importantly -- we brought into the open, for public debate, the sorest, most troublesome issue for our membership: Are advertising and the media that convey it just another commodity, or do they have transcendent value for marketers and consumers?

My answer: Both.

The debate was exquisitely captured over the three days in a thrust by IAB’s new chair, Wenda Harris Millard, and a parry by Doubleclick executive Michael Rubenstein. In a widely blogged comment in her speech opening the Annual, Ms. Millard, the president, media, of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, told the packed house, “We must not trade our advertising inventory like pork bellies.” Mr. Rubenstein, the head of Doubleclick’s new online advertising exchange, responded two days later, during his appearance on a panel debating the pros and cons of exchanges. Noting that the trading mechanism and the value of the traded product are distinct from each other, as they are in the gem exchanges of Antwerp, he said: “We like to think of our publisher impressions as diamonds, not pork bellies.”

Please note that at the end of this clog, I intend to give a major-league plug for our March 31 conference that is devoted solely to this subject, “IAB Marketplace: Networks & Xchanges,” an all-day deep dive in New York. But now (and over the next several weeks, if I can hold to a schedule), I’d like to offer some history and analysis about the progress of advertising, and why the IAB has made the evolution of our value chain a top strategic priority for 2008.

Portals Become Platforms

Midway through 2007, I became aware of tonal and contextual changes in the way many corporate leaders in the interactive industry were speaking. Chief Executives of several “portals” were rebranding their companies as “platforms.” A portal, according to Wikipedia, is “a site that functions as a point of access to information on the World Wide Web… [and] offer[s] other services such as e-mail, news, stock prices, infotainment and various other features.” Central to their user-friendliness in the early days of the Web, “portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether.”

In other words, portals portrayed themselves to consumers as the only interactive resource they would ever need – hence their attractiveness to financiers and advertisers in the late 1990’s, and the fear they struck in the hearts of branded media incumbents. The widespread belief was that one or two portals would establish themselves as the Web’s operating systems – closed structures with enormous influence over consumer and business behaviors.

Platforms appeared to be something different altogether, and in conversations over the course of last year with Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and AOL CEO Randy Falco, I heard the language of control being replaced by the language of participation. At the Right Media Open last October, Mr. Yang defined a platform as “a business that has a set of standards that allows a set of companies to participate and find benefit from it.” He added: “Yahoo will have to embrace openness.”

At roughly the same time, Mr. Falco, less than a year into his tenure as Chairman and Chief Executive, unveiled what seemed a similar strategy for AOL. “With the increasing fragmentation of online audiences, the best way to serve advertisers is to enable them to harness massive advertising networks that reach across the entire Internet, not just our AOL websites," he said. The new aggregation of third-party sites and tools and services for advertisers and publishers would become its own business inside AOL, called Platform A. “With the launch of Platform A, we are unleashing this powerful network to deliver unrivaled transparency and return on investment for our marketing partners,” Mr. Falco said.

Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, now running a social-network facilitation service called Ning, confirmed that the shift from control to openness was more than linguistic. “A ‘platform,’” he wrote in a widely-circulated blog posting, “is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform's original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.”

“The key term in the definition of platform is "programmed,” he added. “If you can program it, then it's a platform. If you can't, then it's not.”

Network of Fear

But there is a problem, Houston: A lot of the intended beneficiaries simply do not believe the behemoths. In most of my conversations with branded-media providers in our membership, the old fears of portal control are still extant and, if anything, more jagged in the dawning era of platforms. Everywhere they turn, media incumbents are seeing threats to their ability to hold their audiences, or price their ads appropriately to the value they deliver: Online ad exchanges are driving their advertising prices down… Widgets on social networks are decontextualizing their expensively-built content… Online networks are delivering ads to tiny sites, many of which are built on links to the major media sites whose lunch they’re eating… Behavioral targeting technologies are divorcing ads from context entirely…

That open platforms seem as much of a danger as closed portals became clear when I started doing formal interviews with members of IAB’s Board of Directors to prepare our 2008 strategy and operating budget. To the question, “What new technologies, platforms, or application categories do you see as potentially disruptive threats or opportunities to your business?,” the answers – from both our network-based members and our branded-media members – were startlingly consistent: Behavioral targeting vs. contextual targeting… Pricing challenges… The value of the differentiated user experience… Supply chain efficiencies in an increasingly fragmented media environment… Interoperability standards that could synchronize millions of sites and hundreds of agencies… Agreement on core metrics… Teaching marketers, agencies, and media alike about the new opportunities and challenges…

Thus was born the theme for our Annual Meeting, Ecosystem 2.0. The interactive industry needed a place to air its concerns and showcase its opportunities – to ourselves. And that means all of us – platforms, publishers, marketers, and agencies – for, as became abundantly clear through the multiple presentations last week, the boundaries that once cleanly separated buyers and sellers, clients and agencies, service providers and customers, are shifting, even eroding.

Benjamin Franklin argued a variation of this challenge when he urged the 13 fractious colonies to come together and declare independence from Great Britain. “We must, indeed, all hang together,” the Colonial pop philosopher said, “or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

At our conference, though, Federated Media founder (and IAB Board member) John Battelle argued it more succinctly. “We’re all in each others’ shorts,” he said.

Heat and Light

Mr. Battelle’s contention wasn’t a complaint; it was a simple affirmation of truth. It echoed the refrain Ms. Millard repeated throughout her keynote: “My space is your space.”

But if you listened closely to what Ms. Millard was saying, you realized that she was doing more than describing our evolution: She was issuing an invitation.

Let’s not minimize the tensions in the marketing-media ecosystem. Forbes.com CEO and IAB Board member Jim Spanfeller opened the onstage debate we structured on the role of online exchanges by charging that “the fully-executed concept of networks and exchanges is to disassociate content from the advertising.

“That’s not good for the end user or for the advertiser,” he said.

Bill Wise, the General Manager of Yahoo’s advertising exchange, responded that exchanges like his provide media like Mr. Spanfeller’s an opportunity to sell advertising more efficiently. “There’s a lot of inventory that doesn’t need a sales force,” he offered. But Patrick Keane, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of CBS Digital – and a former senior Google executive before leaving that “portal” for the branded-media world last year – captured the essential concern on the “contextual” side of the industry.

“I remember trying to get Jim and his team to ‘surrender’ premium inventory to Adsense,” Mr. Keane, an IAB Board member, told panel moderator Michael J. Wolf, the former Chief Operating Officer of MTV Networks. Adsense is Google’s advertising network. “Now that I’m on the other side of the fence, I know we have a sales force with great client relationships, and it’s hard to surrender those relationships to the four-letter-word called ‘auction process.’”

Nor could the jockeying for position among the various platforms that occurred during the Ecosystem 2.0 conference have been comforting for branded-content leaders like Mr. Spanfeller and Mr. Keane. While Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker took pains to reassure publishers that their intentions toward them are honorable --- their forthcoming platform, the Advertiser-Publisher Exchange, or Apex, will optimize advertising for agencies and publishers alike, they said – a vision of oligopoly could not have been far from the minds of many. Microsoft Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group Senior Vice President Brian McAndrews calmly predicted that if his company’s bid for Yahoo! is successful, there will be only two platforms in the industry, his and Google’s. That prompted AOL CEO Falco to retort the next day: “"Microsoft and Google can ignore us and leave us off of charts if they want, but they do that at their own peril."

I did find some of the argument a-historical. Television advertising, almost from the dawn of network broadcasting in 1949, always disassociated advertising from content. Once the "Quiz Show Scandals" killed sponsored programming, TV advertising was dominated by spots created to air promiscuously across all forms of programming on all the networks, with only the barest demographic differences entering into agencies' calculations of where to place the ads. That's why the television industry has been able to use an exchange -- albeit an opaque and non-mechanical one -- to sell so much of its inventory. It's called the annual Upfront Marketplace.

Still, for all the drama, it was clear to all during the conference that relationships are changing, as technology allows competition to take new forms and all of us face rivals we couldn’t have dreamed of 10 years ago. Microsoft, the world’s wealthiest technology company, now owns one of the most prominent interactive ad agencies, Avenue A/Razorfish, and in bidding for Yahoo, hopes to take in the largest interactive advertising distribution network and content provider in the world. The WPP Group, the world’s second largest marketing-communications company, is now a media company; its acquisition of the 24/7 Real Media ad network makes it both a buyer and a seller of inventory.

Put another way, both WPP and Microsoft now have units in the IAB and the AAAA. They won’t be the last ones, either: We're all in each others' shorts.

Marketing-Media Hermaphrodites

Many less-recognized examples of these new competitive dynamics surfaced during Ecosystem 2.0. On the Battelle-moderated panel on coopetition, Lauren Wiener, Senior Vice President of Meredith Interactive Media, reported that the venerable women’s magazine company has expanded dramatically into other forms and functions, and is now both a distributor of Kraft advertising and the food company’s CRM agency-of-record. Group M Interaction CEO Rob Norman, in a spellbinding presentation that shifted tone from the comic to the complex, revealed that agencies like his are likely to start buying and trading media for their own accounts.

Face it, we’re living in an industry composed increasingly of marketing-media hermaphrodites. “The media company is rather redefined in digital,” Christopher Vollmer, head of the U.S. Media and Entertainment Practice at Booz Allen Hamilton, said in presenting the latest findings from “Marketing-Media Ecosystem 2010,” the groundbreaking collaboration between the global strategy and technology consulting firm and the IAB, the Association of National Advertisers, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

The Booz Allen research provides startling evidence of the degree to which we’re all in each others’ shorts. Ninety-one percent of the media companies surveyed said they are currently providing agency-like services. Eighty-eight percent say they are providing campaign development and strategic services directly to marketers.

Yet for all that, media still are under-leveraging their opportunities: While two-thirds of media companies are providing consumer insights to marketers, it was only no. 7 on the list of agency-like services they offer. Perceiving an unexploited opportunity, Mr. Vollmer told media companies they should feel anything but threatened. “The antidote to commoditization is to have much more granular data on your consumer,” the Booz Allen consultant told the audience, “almost to the point of managing relationship marketing.”

No wonder Ad Age titled its post-mortem on the conference, “Why You Should Be in the Media Sales Business.”

Marketers Want Relationships

Marketers appear to like the situation: Almost half say they anticipate their relationships with media companies increasingly to resemble the relationships large retailers currently have with major consumer-products manufacturers. That is, they expect major cross-platform publishers to have teams living at General Motors and Unilever, the way Procter & Gamble currently has a team living in Bentonville, Arkansas, to keep the relationship with Wal-Mart successful, profitable, and fully optimized.

Kim Kadlec, Chief Media Officer of Johnson & Johnson, agreed. "Media companies are the most underleveraged resource for insights that exist," she said. She then introduced Tina Sharkey, the chair of Babycenter LLC – the largest destination site on the Internet for new and expectant mothers.

Babycenter is yet another of the hermaphrodites populating our industry: Supported by revenues from multiple advertisers, as befits a leading media company, it also happens to be wholly-owned by J&J, which has managed to keep the relationship between the two companies sufficiently bounded to protect Babycenter’s business and integrity, while mining it for useful consumer insights. As Ms. Sharkey (an IAB Board member) showed in her fascinating (and highly buzzed) presentation, the insights derive from analysis of blogs, observed consumer behaviors, and the myriad other interactions that take place between users and the company, and among users themselves, as they traverse pregnancy and early motherhood.

“BabyCenter has taught us that media companies don’t just sell pork bellies, they sell much more,” Ms. Kadlec said.

Blogger and Edelman Worldwide public relations executive Steve Rubel caught the drift. Publishers, he wrote, are “disintermediating agencies -- even as they all downplay it.”

Interactive Boot Camp

Add up Ms. Kadlec’s, Ms. Sharkey’s, and Mr. Vollmer’s analyses, and you get a strikingly different view of the evolving ecosystem than the commoditization fears convey. Marketers are not looking for cheap inventory; they are looking for relationships. They understand – quite correctly, as my earlier blog post on the history of social marketing, showed – that strong relationships with consumers breed more consumers, and more sales. Individuals talking to other individuals about their preferences and purchases spur more and more enduring sales opportunities than all the “spots and dots” shotgunned across the media. “Advocacy trumps awareness” is how Booz Allen summarized the new view of marketers toward media.

Marketers have been crystal clear that relationships are what they are seeking. When H.J. Heinz invited the IAB to facilitate our Interactive Boot Camp for Senior Marketers for its entire senior marketing team in Pittsburgh recently, the revered food marketer owned up to one primary interest: Using social marketing and social media to build closer alliances with its consumers and customers. We brought a senior executive from Myspace, as well as DDB CEO Chuck Brymer, to help teach them the ropes.

“Companies will need to train themselves with a new ‘dialogue’ skill set and build expertise to leverage a whole new set of available tools,” Heinz CMO Brian Hansberry told us afterward. “IAB's marketing boot camp enabled us at Heinz to begin that work.”

But note something vital here: We brought a great agency executive in that room along with some great interactive media companies. Even as the competitive boundaries change, the importance of classic, discrete skill sets remains undiminished. It is unlikely that media companies will be able to hire enough strategic marketing expertise to fill clients’ needs. And even as the best agencies help their clients develop sites that look, sound, and feel like infotainment (as Digitas has done for Kraft, to cite one ready example), it’s unlikely that agencies will be able to insource all the independent, audience-gathering skills that the best media companies manage.

The media agree; they don’t want to take on the burden of providing most agency services. While they intend to compete in generating insights – “It’s a competition for good ideas, and good ideas get funded,” IAC Media and Advertising CEO Peter Horan explained at our conference -- by a 3-1 ratio, media execs told Booz Allen that creative production should remain the province of agencies. They are equally sure that communications planning and media planning are the agency’s responsibility.

Clients see it the same way. “We don’t need media companies to be our agencies,” J&J’s Ms. Kadlec told the IAB crowd. “We need media companies to do what they do best: Create great content, and draw audiences to it.”

Networks & Exchanges

It is not a simple charge. Drawing audiences now fragmented across tens of millions of sites is hard, hard work. That challenge will only grow more daunting once addressable television enters our dens. And creating great content? If that were easy, every blogger would be a best-selling author, and every Youtube uploader a James Cameron.

Which is why I believe the dichotomy between environment and commodity – as represented in the debate between branded-content sites and platforms, or the contest between behavioral targeting and contextual targeting – is a false one. Both have their place, each serves different marketer needs, and neither is likely to be able to exist without the other. To create advocates, marketers require the relationships that engaging content creates. They need the trust forged by The New York Times, the comfort purveyed by Martha Stewart, the style identified with Conde Nast, the technological savvy conveyed by CNET, the wonder associated with Disney.

Marketers also will need to go deeper into those attachments, which is why they and their agencies will use networks to find the smaller sites, many of them without direct sales forces, that inflame the passions of consumers everywhere: The laughter generated by FunnyorDie.com… The nesting tips on Askthebuilder.com… The insider gossip on Gawker.com… The felinophilia of Icanhascheezburger.com… and on and on, ad infinitum (or so it seems). For these reasons, marketers and agencies will use networks – vertical networks for depth, and broad networks for reach. Yes, reach: As important as relationships are, marketing cannot live on advocacy alone.

Already, we are seeing the merger between the seemingly opposing forces of context and commodity. Many branded-media sites are launching their own vertical networks – catching portions of the Web’s long tail and sheltering them within their brand environments. Indeed, the clean segmentation that used to characterize the media is breaking down. The Booz Allen research shows 84 percent of media companies offering contextual targeting services, 70 percent offering behavioral targeting, and about half providing clients with performance marketing services, email marketing, or both.

For such reasons, I expect many branded media will start using exchanges to help lower their average cost of sales, freeing capital to invest in the enhanced services, insights generation, consultative services, and audience gathering that marketers and agencies need.

Marketplace of Ideas

Which is why IAB is inaugurating a new type of conference on March 31. We call it “IAB Marketplace.” It aims explicitly to take a developing segment of the interactive media marketplace and to provide marketers, agencies and media companies close-in views of that segment as it evolves in real time – as well as introductions to providers they may want to partner with. We chose “Networks & Xchanges” as our first marketplace to showcase for one reason and one reason only: It’s the most controversial.

And as Ecosystem 2.0 showed, IAB loves controversy – because out of heat comes light. “It’s one of the most exciting conferences I’ve ever attended,” Doubleclick research and industry relations director Rick Bruner wrote in his blog. Thanks, Rick! But it’s nothing next to the excitement of our ecosystem as it evolves before our eyes.

Imagine the shorts we'll be wearing!

Why You Need to Be at the IAB Annual Meeting

Perhaps the signal moment at Hubert Burda Media's wonderful DLD Conference in Munich, Germany last week occurred on the morning of the second day. DLD -- it stands for "Digital, Life, Design," and the conclave is modeled in part on the venerable TED Conference, albeit with a distinctly European flair -- has grown in only three short years into the premier event for all-things-interactive in Europe. It sports an eclectic mix of speakers and attendees (members of the European Parliament, fashion models who blog, famous architects, unknown Israeli physicists, et al) and is, truth be told, kind of wacky. Its diversity and centerlessness fits the culture of DLD's sponsoring company: Burda is an extremely successful German periodicals publisher, among whose 260 properties are some of the largest news, womens', and lifestyle magazines in Europe, yet whose attitude is less businesslike than familial. One of Burda's core competencies is networking, and the annual DLD meeting networks together a curious and intriguing group, one absolutely devoted to touting the digital future. Needless to say, all speakers project that future to be quite rosy.

Which leads me to the moment in question. It occurred immediately after a swarm of speakers had completed their presentations to a packed house on, as the session titled it, "TV Reloaded." The presenters were a gallery of latter-day interactive video stars: Dina Kaplan, co-founder and COO of Blip.tv; Suranga Chandratillake, CEO of Blinkx; Niklas Zennstrom, co-founder of Joost; and Patrick Walker, head of content strategy and partnerships for YouTube in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

The panelists were fulsome about the imminence of traditional television's defeat. "What we're doing is very threatening to traditional TV networks," declared Ms. Kaplan, whose company specializes in episodic online video programming. "Too much is exploding," said Mr. Zennstrom (who, having helped to launch Skype, knows from explosive technologies). All this revolution needs to ignite it, Mr. Chandratillake suggested, is a way of navigating the new televisual cornucopia, and his company, a search engine with 18 million hours of video spidered and index, is that "next- generation remote control."

At which point the moderator handed the microphone to a gentleman in the front row. His name is Martin Sorrell, and he is the chief executive of the WPP Group, one of the world's largest marketing communications companies, and an engineer of the megamerger phenomenon that transformed and globalized the advertising industry in the 1980's.

"If there's a phrase I loathe, it's 'business model,'" Sir Martin said. "In my company, we have 102,000 people working in 106 countries. Our world is made up of revenues, costs, profits, and cash flow. I've heard a lot from this panel on what will be. But we do an enormous amount of business, much of it growing, with broadcast and cable television networks around the world. Can each panelist precisely say what their revenues, profits, and cash flows are today, and what they will be in a few years?

"Please," Sir Martin added, "be precise."

Unfortunately, almost no one was.

To be fair, Mr. Chandratillake, whose Blinkx is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange, did say that he expected the company to achieve revenues of some $4 million in its current fiscal year, with costs running at twice that -- although, with IPO costs factored out, it would be close to break-even. But each of the others ducked. "In our first year, we came close to breaking even, mostly on software licensing," Ms. Kaplan said. "We will be profitable this year." Mr. Walker would say only that YouTube was rising "from low CPM's to $10, $20 CPM's," but would not go further.

Get-Real Time

The reticence was, and is a shame. It is time to get real. The IAB's Annual Meeting -- which we are theming around the primary development of the past year, the emergence of new forms of competition and collaboration across the value chain, a phenomenon we term "Ecosystem 2.0" -- is all about getting real, growing up... and grabbing share.

Make no mistake, we are entering into a reality-checking moment -- the second in the 15 years since the Mosaic browser was launched, ushering in the modern Internet era. The first reality check was the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2001-2002. Now, as then, we face a recession and a slowdown in marketer spend. Likely, too, is a tightening in the availability of investment capital, as financial institutions retrench in the wake of the subprime mortgage debacle.

But other factors are quite different. The dotcom bubble was fueled by public equity financing, with individual and institutional investors accepting mad valuations and buying shares based on insane metrics. The 2003-2007 growth surge, by contrast, was financed with real cash looking for real revenues and returns. Whereas the recession of 2002 included a technology-market collapse (in no small part because IT spend had been boosted artificially for years by Y2K compliance considerations), tech companies (telecoms excepted) look to be weathering this downturn, as businesses embrace the productive and connective power of Web-based communications.

Finally, it appears now to be universally accepted by all segments of our ecosystem -- media, agencies, and marketers alike -- that marketing-communications is becoming a fundamentally digital enterprise.

For the past four months, I have informally been asking IAB member executives the single most insistent question on all our minds: In the event of a recession or significant economic downturn, what happens to interactive advertising spend? Almost universally, they believe a recession will not hinder the continuing growth of our industry.

$60 Billion Path

One week ago, queried thusly at the annual Bear Stearns Virtual Advertising Summit, I reported that finding to the analysts in attendance. They agreed that a recession will prompt a flight to accountability, and considered compound annual growth rates of 25% between now and 2011 entirely feasible -- leading to an industry that will reach $60 billion in U.S. revenues over the next four years. At that point, interactive will have become the nation's largest ad-supported medium.

Certainly, the bets have been large -- grand, even. Microsoft closed its $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive in August; CEO Steve Ballmer has said he expects a quarter of Redmond's revenues eventually to derive from advertising. Google anticipates closing its $1.6 billion of Doubleclick within the next few months; its CEO, Eric Schmidt, recently told The New Yorker's Ken Auletta that he believes Google now is "in the advertising business." Sir Martin last summer paid $649 million for 24/7 Real Media, an online ad-network pioneer; 20 years earlier, WPP had paid about $100 million less (unadjusted) to acquire the entire J. Walter Thompson global agency network.

But Sir Martin's call for precision in projecting, calculating, building and delivering is timely and apt. As the money -- not just investor money, but advertiser money -- gets large, there is a hunger for understanding and communicating the new rules of the road. What are the success stories? What is a fair price for value delivered? How will the new partnerships among agencies and media companies on behalf of marketers shape up? How will the regulatory environment affect our operations now and in the future? The people paying the bills want to know, and it's incumbent on the interactive industry to provide answers.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau's "Ecosystem 2.0" conference is designed to provide those answers, in an intimate setting where giants and startups can mingle together, leader to leader and team to team. This is the first industry gathering since last spring's and summer's explosive M&A activity to bring together the architects of media and marketing's dramatic reshaping. The focus will be on how the evolving relationship among platforms, publishers, agencies, and marketers is adding value to the value chain -- upstream, to the agencies and clients, and downstream, to branded content creators, analysts and insights generators, and service providers.

Yang, Falco, McAndrews

CEO Jerry Yang will keynote on Yahoo's evolution as a platform -- including its acquisitions of online ad exchange Right Media and ad network Blue Lithium. AOL CEO Randy Falco will sit down with me to describe the reasoning behind his acquisitions of the Tacoda behavioral targeting network and other networks, and the organization of a new ad platform business, appropriately named Platform A. Brian McAndrews, formerly aQuantive's CEO and now Microsoft's SVP of Advertiser and Publisher Solutions, will explain what he and his team have done to create cross-industry value in the six months since aQuantive climbed through Windows. Rob Norman, CEO of WPP's Group M Interaction, will explain how ad agencies are adapting -- and possibly leading -- the transforming industry. Hulu Chief Executive Jason Kilar will describe vividly how online video is attracting consumers and advertisers now. With an introduction by Johnson & Johnson Global Media Officer Kim Kadlec, the chairman of Babycenter LLC, Tina Sharkey, will showcase how media companies are becoming "insights engines" for their customers. In her first major speech since leaving the top U.S. sales role at Yahoo for the media presidency of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Wenda Harris Millard (IAB's new chairperson) will outline a worldview shaped by alternate lives in a platform environment and in branded media.

"Ecosystem 2.0" also will feature substantive debates:

• In an industry first, leaders of two online ad exchanges will challenge leaders of two branded media companies on one of our industry's roiling controversies: whether networks and exchanges commoditize media and advertising.
  
• Booz Allen Hamilton U.S. Media & Entertainment Practice Leader Christopher Vollmer will unveil exclusive results from the consulting firm's "Marketing-Media Ecosystem 2010" study, zeroing in on how media companies are competing and collaborating in the new interactive environment.
  
• In another first, a cross-ecosystem panel -- leaders from Ogilvy, Meredith, IAC Corp., Google, and Federated Media, joined by the Chief Marketing Officer of Computer Associates -- will respond to the study findings, grappling with who is disintermediating whom in the battle for revenues and share.
  
• The brewing regulatory battle over behavioral targeting -- and its consequences for marketers and media -- will feature in another panel.
  

The IAB Annual Meeting also will provide a chance for the interactive media industry to celebrate itself, in several surprising ways we will announce in a few weeks -- not to mention in informal meals and at least a bit of partying.

With only a few hundred seats on offer, we anticipate an affair as comfortable as it is substantive. As unbridled opportunity and economic constraint collide, "Ecosystem 2.0" is what media, marketing, agency and service-provider executives need now: two-and-a-half days filled with news-you-can-use, sidebars for deal-making, and a chance to mingle with the leaders who are making a difference right now.

The full conference agenda is here.

Registration information is here.

And I hope to see you there.

Ecosystem 2.0

A day before the always-stimulating Google Zeitgeist conference at the search-engine giant's Mountain View campus a few weeks ago, I had the privilege of participating in a day devoted to advertising agencies and marketing inventiveness. My role was simple: I was to moderate to panel on innovation, featuring five pioneering interactive companies, all of them, in their own ways, direct or indirect competitors. The panelists were Tim Armstrong of Google, Randy Falco of AOL, Brian McAndrews of Microsoft, Mike Murphy of Facebook, and Michael Barrett of MySpace.

But as we prepared for our two-hour session, I was worried. As much as our hosts wanted to talk about innovation, there was, I knew, an elephant in the room: industry consolidation. Microsoft's acquisition of aQuantive (of which Mr. McAndrews had been the CEO), Google's pending purchase of DoubleClick, the rise of social networking, the mainstreaming of digital video, to name just a few trends, were generating apprehension across the marketing-media value chain. The concern was captured in the now-famous term the WPP Group's Chief Executive, Sir Martin Sorrell, applied to Google at the Zeitgeist conference just one year before: "frenemy."

“We must show a willingness to address consolidation, disintermediation, reintermediation, ‘frenemization,’ and all manner of these Latinate concerns,” I suggested to my fellow panelists, “else we'll be accused of ducking.” All readily agreed.

Came the panel. Finished with introductions, I turned to the table of 10 advertising-agency executives -- an assembly of the most accomplished men and women in the business, gathered from creative agencies, media agencies, diversified services agencies, regional agencies, and global agencies -- and put the matter to them. We will address everything that interests and concerns you, I said, but what would you rather take up first: innovation or consolidation?

The immediate reply: “Innovation.”

And no matter how many times I tried to bait the agency executives, no matter how many times I tried to get them to start a “frenemy” discussion, they just would not rise to it.

"You must understand," said one, "that we understand what's happening to the landscape, and while there are obvious concerns, we really need to know more about the opportunities. What we want to know most is how you can help us build value for our clients."

“Teach Me” Moment

We are in what I call a "teach-me moment." Everywhere I turn, the apprehensions of a year ago are, if not banished, significantly diminished. In their place, across the value chain, is a desire to learn, to improve, to acquire new capabilities, and to collaborate in unfamiliar ways to build customer relationships and new business opportunities.

I call this revised view of marketing-media coopetition “Ecosystem 2.0.” I suspect it will dominate our waking hours for the foreseeable future. And I know that we at the IAB will be paying close attention to it – for we intend to make it a centerpiece of our association’s 2008 strategy.

I’ve talked in previous posts about how and why the new complexities and opportunities of marketing require unfamiliar forms of collaboration across the value chain. It was clear the message resonated: IAB’s MIXX Conference & Expo, which was themed around the new collaborative landscape, sold out for the first time in its history.

But there’s increasing evidence that this evangelical message is winning converts, even in more orthodox precincts – including marketing departments. In “Marketing-Media Ecosystem 2010,” the study done by the global management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton for the IAB, the Association of National Advertisers, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies, one of the key findings was the degree to which marketing executives are seeking new types of relationships to buttress their own capabilities.

For example, more than half of the most digitally savvy marketers believe that having direct relationships with media companies – “publishers,” in the surprisingly jejune industry parlance – is more important than going through an agency. More than 40 percent of these digital leaders believe the marketer-media relationship will increasingly resemble the relationship between retail giants like Walmart and their main consumer-product suppliers – that is, major media companies are likely to have consultative teams embedded at marketing companies to aid with insights development, program creation, and cross-platform utilization. Indeed, almost three-fourths of digitally savvy marketers are adding positions to help them optimize publisher relationships.

Hence Booz Allen’s conclusion that in the transforming marketing-media ecosystem, “media is the new creative.”

Agencies Want Guidance

Agencies increasingly are aware that they have to rise to this challenge, and gain capabilities that will enhance their value to their clients. The AAAA has placed emphasis on the development of “consultative selling” capabilities at agencies. And more and more, I see agencies turning to interactive media companies for guidance, even capability-building help.

Publishers must learn how to respond. "We need you [interactive companies] to come to us in a different way,” one agency president said at the Google roundtable I moderated. “Instead of just sending your salespeople to talk to our media planners, we need you to send your savviest technology people to talk to our creatives. We need to get your analytics experts to talk to our account planners." His fellow agency executives agreed.

The agencies, though, need to match wishes with actions. As much as their leaders profess deep interest in learning more about applying interactive platforms, applications, brands and opportunities to their client work, their troops aren't necessarily following. Many IAB members say that when they try to set up broader meetings at agencies, the right people too often do not come to the table. At the media agencies, in particular, discussions still center predominately on price, not value.

Agencies need to bring senior team leaders into the room. They must strive to break down the walls that not only have kept publishers, too frequently, in their traditional place -- as “dumb” conduits for the agencies’ ads – but have kept agency functions siloed from each other. Cross-functional collaboration must begin at home, else it will never take root between and among companies.

Media companies are similarly challenged. For years, “branded publishers” have maintained a wary distance from “the portals.” They have worried that these eyeball-aggregators are using their “front door” status as well as search engines, free email and other services to legally tap into the publishers’ content to amass audiences and sell advertising that otherwise would go to the content sites. Now that the portals are evolving into platforms, the apprehension, in some quarters, is growing.

I believe it’s wiser – certainly, it’s more realistic – for publishers and agencies alike to determine how and where they can play with the platforms to enhance their own capabilities, and thus their value to clients.

The Platform Environment

Platform, admittedly, is a vague word – “a swirling vortex of confusion,” Netscape founder and Ning chief Marc Andreessen says. But Mr. Andreessen offers a simple explanation. “A ‘platform,’” he writes, “is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers – users – and in that way adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had the time to accommodate.”

To one degree or another, the major Internet giants appear to be following Mr. Andreessen’s definition. Several of them are evolving into platform companies that are building advertising exchanges -- stock-market-like mechanisms that connect advertising buyers and sellers, price available inventory, and clear it in real time -- and integrating them with their growing multi-site advertising networks. These platforms, in effect, marry a liquidity mechanism to a pool of inventory, a continuing flow of behavioral data, and analytics and optimization tools that can automate many of the expensive people-centric processes that have typified advertising for generations.

AOL’s acquisition of Tacoda (and, just last week, Quigo) and the consolidation of it, Advertising.com, and other services and network businesses is demonstrably an effort to position AOL as a platform – hence the name of its new business, Platform A. Google’s development and acquisition of various open platforms and its pending purchase of Doubleclick (which is starting up an ad exchange) is another example of platforming. So is Microsoft’s acquisition and integration of aQuantive, the AdECN exchange, and other services. And so is Yahoo’s acquisition of the Right Media exchange and its services buildout.

Could platforms represent another threat to content sites – an effort to aggregate and monetize their audience without them? Sure. But it’s very telling that the intended transformation of the social networking site Facebook into a platform has been accompanied by enormous interest by major content developers. Every day, it seems, heralds a new Facebook application from The New York Times, the Washington Post, Conde Nast, or another premium publisher. They believe that open platforms can represent opportunity as much as threat. In a dramatic turnabout, they a chance to take the aggregator’s audience and enhance the publisher’s brand, reach, and stickiness.

Indeed, rather than positioning themselves to “own the world,” as branded publishers feared during the era of the “portals,” the new platforms seem to be wanting to develop scalable businesses that can add value to others’ businesses in the marketing-media value chain.

“Live by Openness”

At the Right Media Open last month, I had the privilege of conducting an on-stage interview with Yahoo’s co-founder and new CEO, Jerry Yang. He was explicit about his platform’s value proposition to others. He defined a platform as “a business that has a set of standards that allows a set of companies to participate and find benefit from it.” The key to success, he indicated, would be the platform’s availability to players across the value chain. “Yahoo will have to embrace openness,” Mr. Yang told me. “We must live by openness, leverage the data to be smarter and improve upon our partnerships with important companies like Comcast.”

I like Mr. Yang’s definition of platform more than Mr. Andreessen’s, if only because the latter, focused as it is on systems, seems more of an engineering construct than a social construct – and because, ultimately, the value-additive collaboration that Mr. Yang foresees will require tapping into real human needs, emotions, and satisfactions. I’d even go Mr. Yang one further: A platform is a collection of scaled or scalable services that help players up and down the value chain grow their customers’ businesses, and their own businesses in turn.

While there is reason for publishers and agencies to feel threatened by the evolution of the platforms, more and more of them seem to be perceiving them as opportunities, as Mr. Yang would have them do. Mike Walrath, the founder and CEO of Right Media, the exchange that was acquired earlier this year by Yahoo, spoke directly (albeit with background noise on the Flip camera) to the issue when I queried him specifically on the subject of advertising exchanges and commoditization at his conference.

Joe Fiveash, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Weather.com and a member of IAB’s Board of Directors, agreed that the opportunities presented by the platforms must be explored. While aware of the pitfalls of commoditization, he, too, saw more to embrace than to fear in the ad exchanges and the platforms.

Small players are arising to realize the advantages Mr. Fiveash foresees to grow the overall marketplace. As Yahoo’s Developer Network Director Matt McAllister blogged at the Right Media Open, there is “an interesting market of middlemen that I didn’t know existed. For example, I spoke with a guy from a company called exeLate that serves as a user behavior data provider between a publisher and an exchange. There were also ad services providers like Text Link Ads and publishers like Jim Mansfield’s PhoneZoo all discussing the tricky aspects of managing the mixture of inventory, rates and yield, relationships with ad networks, and the advantages of using exchanges.”

My point is a simple one: As Ecosystem 2.0 evolves, we’re likely to benefit from thinking more about symbiosis than about victory. If you’re looking for an image to carry you through a 2008 that will be at least as tumultuous as 2007, I’d recommend one from my scuba days: Not dolphins and sharks, but clownfish and anemones. It looks scary, but it’s mutually beneficial.

IAB's MIXX Makes the Blogs!

The Interactive Advertising Bureau's sold-out MIXX Conference & Expo was blogger-friendly this year, and "citizen journalists" had a field day, especially with the on-stage fireworks among agency and publisher executives. Herewith, a wrap up with links:

On the Ogilvy-Carat-Publicis "Showdown"
Gale Executive Recruiting: In the MIXX: The New Strategy: "The Interactive Advertising Bureau's MIXX 2.7 Conference and Expo opened with a bang, as three industry heavyweights squared off in a panel discussion about how best to organize creative and media shops for the digital age. Carat Americas CEO David Verklin came down on the side of full integration. "Digital media has to be the core of every strategy," Verklin argued, suggesting that this could not be accomplished without the top to bottom integration of digital and traditional approaches to creative and media buying..."

Agency Spy: "Gary Leigh, Chairman and Chief Executive of Ogilvy UK, has some thoughts about the digital program over at the death star agency, which echo Ogilvy co-CEO Carla Hendra's comment during her public spat with Carat Americas CEO David Verklin on the opening panel at IAB’s Mixx Conference..."

On Interactive Industry Consolidation
Revenue Source: Yahoo Unenthused About Google, DoubleClick: Color us with the 'unsurprised' crayon, neither Yahoo nor global advertising power WPP want to see Google walk away with the queen of the ad network homecoming ball.

Insider Chatter: Google to Marketers: Give Us ALL Brand Assets, For Eternity: While Microsoft takes $6 billion aQuantive aim at Google’s ad supremacy, Mountain View is digging in its online advertising heels, eagerly creating a Google stranglehold over brand marketers. In New York City this week, from OMMA to MIXX, all levels of the Googleplex totem poll were represented and all faithfully conveyed CEO Eric Schmidt’s favored notion that the advertising “power law” is in Google’s powerful favor.

On Amex CMO John Hayes Call for Collaboration
Adranium: Digital Teamwork? "The move to digital media is proving startlingly complex for marketers and agencies, pushing the need for increased coordination and collaboration among the many parts of the marketing ecosystem. That was the conclusion voiced at the opening sessions of the MIXX Conference, which the Interactive Advertising Bureau is holding here as part of Advertising Week. In an opening keynote, American Express chief marketing officer John Hayes said the many facets of digital marketing is forcing his company to insist on collaboration with and between its agencies..."

Useful Lunacy: "Lesson learned. Finally. According to a piece on Adweek.com today, this whole digital marketing evolution that's been transpiring for at least the past 10 years is -- wait for it - changing the way advertisers and marketers work together... That was the conclusion voiced at the opening sessions of the MIXX Conference, which the Interactive Advertising Bureau is holding here as part of Advertising Week... It's good to see the advertising and marketing industries are finally figuring this out. For a second there, I thought I was reading The Onion, not Adweek ."

ON: Digital + Marketing: "I spent the day at the Mixx conference for the most part of the morning. I will say that if you are a person who spends her/his time at the leading edge, walking the floor of the Expo was not where the action was. As a matter of fact I would say it was a line up of the usual suspects. That said, the workshops and the opening remarks made the Microsoft rubber chicken worth while..."

Speeple: "This the first morning KeyNote sessions, from John Hayes, CMO, Amex. As always, slightly paraphrased. I was extremely impressed by what he had to say, hitting many of the truths that are said about the marketing company and really believing them."

On What WPP Thinks About Google
Adfreak: It sometimes seems like the specter of an all-powerful Google is never far from the braintrust at WPP Group. Sir Martin Sorrell, after all, memorably labeled the Internet giant as a 'frenemy.' Now the Google juggernaut is taking on a celestial role. During a panel at yesterday’s MIXX conference, WPP Digital CEO Mark Read was asked one of those impossible conference questions..."

On the Seth Godin-Charlie Rose Keynote Interview
Technology News Blog: At Mixx, Seth Godin pimps Squidoo: "I'm at the Mixx 2007 online-advertising conference here, marveling at the brazenness of author and entrepreneur Seth Godin. "How do we use this medium in the way it wants to be used?" he asks, as he's interviewed by Charlie Rose. He's speaking, of course, about the Web, but he might as well be talking about the medium of the conference stage. And he's using it to promote his new website, Squidoo..."

On Interactive Political Advertising
Dawn's Media Blog: According to the article “Political Candidates Stick to Traditional Media” published in MediaWeek, political candidates from both parties are demonstrating a stubborn devotion to traditional media, along with a cautious streak that is holding them back from truly embracing the Web as an outlet for political ad dollars. Even though Americans’ media habits are rapidly changing a group of panelists that spoke during the Mixx Conference predict that most spending will remain on TV and other tried and true outlets. Richard Kosinsi, vp of political advertising estimated that most candidates were planning to spend around one percent of their total media budgets online, versus the seven percent that most mainstream brands typically spend on the medium.

On the Crowd
Adverganza: "After the Ad Club of New York luncheon (see below), I decided to stop by the Interactive Advertising Bureau's MIXX Conference at the Crowne Plaza in Times Square, and though I sat through a fairly engaging panel on "Content without Borders" (I'm a geek—what can I say?), the most interesting thing about the conference was how completely packed it was...

Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen: 5 differences between a NY ad conference and a SF web 2.0 conference: "Just a couple random observations from my first day at MIXX, which as a NYC advertising conference, is probably exactly the opposite from a SF web 2.0 conference..."

On Microsoft & Facebook
News and Stuff: "Microsoft is wearing its social media heart on its sleeve this week. The software company is in talks to acquire a stake of up to 5 percent in Facebook, the social networking site, the Wall Street Journal reported today. A look at Microsoft’s booth at the MIXX conference and expo this week at the Crowne Plaza Times Square shows how much the company is flirting with social networking..."

Uwe's Blog: "Still more than 3 days to go but the highlight of Advertising Week took place today at the MIXX Conference: Charlie Rose interviewing Seth Godin. A few topics covered: Advertisers can't act as terrorists anymore and hold consumers hostage..."

On Creativity Online
Shift Market: Mixx snippet -- Kraft & Avenue A: Awesome validation from the Mixx 2.7 conference.

On the Halo 3 Debut
License to Roam: "I just won an Halo3 Xbox and a copy of the Halo 3 game at the MIXX IAB conference I’m at (put your card in the bowl and see what comes out)..."

IAB's MIXX Makes News!

Apologies to those of you who couldn't get in to the Interactive Advertising Bureau's sold-out MIXX Conference & Expo in New York Monday and Tuesday. You missed fireworks on multiple topics, from the consolidation activity roiling the ad and media industries to the "business model wars" among agencies. Herewith, a wrap up with links:

Ogilvy, Carat CEOs Clash on IAB Panel: Carla Hendra, David Verklin Spar Over Agency Structure at MIXX Conference
September 24, 2007 -- Sparks were flying between Ogilvy North America co-CEO Carla Hendra and Carat Americas CEO David Verklin on the opening panel at IAB's Mixx Conference. And no, they weren't those kind of sparks. (Ad Age) (Click here for video)

Single-agency strategy does not fit all, IAB panelists say
New York—In the new age of digital media, marketing strategy needs to be orchestrated, but agency executives on a panel Monday morning at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX Conference & Expo 2.7 diverged on how to find the perfect harmony... (BtoB)

Yahoo, WPP join Microsoft in questioning Google-DoubleClick merger
Microsoft isn't the only one questioning whether a Google-DoubleClick merger would be good for advertisers and consumers. During a panel on The Changing Landscape at the MIXX 2007 Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) conference in New York on September... (ZDNet)

The Advantages Of Consolidation
September 24, 2007 - Just made a quick sprint from OMMA’s Ad Week conference at the Hilton New York to the MIXX 2.7 Conference at Crowne Plaza Hotel to hear the NY Times’ Saul Hansell moderate a panel consisting of participants in the past year’s interactive ad agency buyouts, including executives from DoubleClick, 24/7 Real Media, Right Media and aQuantive unit Atlas. Hansell started out asking what the benefits of their respective combinations will bring to both companies that couldn’t have been achieved separately and moved on to survey the panelists as to whether regulators should approve the pending $3.1 billion merger of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and DoubleClick... "(Paidcontent.org)

Top DoubleClick, Atlas, Right Media and 24/7 Execs Take Friendly Jabs at Event
Sept. 25, 2007 - Top execs from recently-acquired interactive ad industry firms purchased by Google, Microsoft, WPP and Yahoo engaged in friendly sparring yesterday. During a panel discussion at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's MIXX conference in New York, heads of 24/7 Real Media, Atlas, DoubleClick and Right Media talked, sometimes surprisingly frankly, about industry consolidation, potential blockage of Google's DoubleClick acquisition, and potential conflicts of interest resulting from this year's million and billion dollar buyouts. (ClickZ)

Goodby, Silverstein Nab MIXX Honors
September 26, 2007 - Goodby, Silverstein and Partners was the big winner at the third annual MIXX awards presentation held on Sept. 26 in New York, as the San Francisco, Calif.-based agency took Best In Show honors for a rich media campaign for Hewlett-Packard, as well as pair of “gold” awards for Rolling Rock in both the Digital Video and Viral, Word of Mouth and Peer to Peer Marketing categories. (Mediaweek)

'Computer is Personal Again' Honored in IAB MIXX Awards
September 26, 2007 - Last night in New York City, conference attendees witnessed the presentation of the IAB's third annual MIXX awards. These accolades draw attention to outstanding merit specifically in interactive advertising, with dual regard to creativity and effectiveness. The major honor, Best in Show, was awarded to Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, SF for "The Computer is Personal Again" for Hewlett-Packard. This campaign was perceived as the most successful effort in years on behalf of the computer brand. (Vox)

IAB Calls Slowing Online Ad Spending Growth "Torrid"
September 25, 2007 - Online ad spending has grown at "a torrid pace," 26.8 percent, during the first half of this year over the same period last year, Randall Rothenberg told a packed crowd at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's MIXX conference in New York yesterday. The IAB prez said spending hit the $10 billion milestone in the first half. "This is the first time in history this has happened," he gushed. (ClickZ)

Cross-Platform Deals: A Return to the TV Advertising Future
September 25, 2007 - Now, it seems the widest form of cross-platform media deals now comes with just two platforms: TV and the Internet... Still, there are mountains to climb — especially in other media areas. Tom Wolfe, vice president of product marketing & promotion for Comcast Spotlight, said on Monday at the MIXX conference: “Everyone wants to be a pioneer. But not without metrics.” Is that a slap at those Internet metrics, which may or may not be good enough at the moment? Perhaps other media is lacking..." (Mediapost)

Cross-Platform Deals Evolving Slowly From Theory To Practice
September 24, 2007 - The notion of cross-platform ad selling has gone from theory to reality, with agencies breaking down the structure separating TV, print and online. A mid-afternoon MIXX 2.7 Conference session looked at the process of matching sales between a variety of forms are evolving. So while agencies and programmers have been working to revise their structures in a more media neutral way, the challenge is turning individuals to think along those same lines. Moderator Scot McLernan, former ad sales exec at Marketwatch when it was owned by CBS (NYSE: CBS), explored the nature of the dealmaking. (Paidcontent.org)

Political Candidates Stick to Traditional Media
SEPTEMBER 25, 2007 - Political candidates from both parties are demonstrating a stubborn devotion to traditional media, along with a cautious streak that is holding them back from truly embracing the Web as an outlet for political ad dollars, according to a group of panelists speaking during a Mixx Conference session held on Tuesday in New York. (Mediaweek)

MIXX: Presidential Campaigning: Digital Media’s Impact
It will come as no surprise that all the major 2008 presidential candidates have an interactive presence. With the use of news, video clips, and of course the all important donations section, this highly charged political election and digital innovations is something that marketers can also take advantage of. Hear from key representative from presidential campaigns on the use of interactive in driving awareness and creating buzz for candidates. (Behind the Buzz)

MIXX: Audience Counting Blues
September 25, 2007 - Will Web measurement companies ever churn out audience data that can be easily compared? Don't count on it. Executives from comScore, the Nielsen Co., HitWise, and Omniture at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's MIXX conference said Monday they will continue to fine tune how they collect, track, and analyze Web site visitor data and pointed out differences in their methodologies. (ClickZ)

IAB's MIXX Conference Kicks Off Advertising Week With Visions of Digital Future
September 26, 2007 - Attendees of the first day of the IAB's (Interactive Advertising Bureau's) MIXX Conference & Expo, which kicked off Advertising Week on Monday in New York, came away with an appreciation for where digital technology is taking us -- if they attended the entire day's events, that is. Two of the sessions offered insights into exactly where we're going. In 'Content Without Borders,' one of the afternoon track sessions, attendees learned how marketers are taking advantage of new platforms and technologies to extend the reach of branded content... (ShootOnline)

The Expansion - Or Is It Contraction? - Of The Journalist/Blogger Divide
In the final MIXX 2.7 Conference panel of the day, Newsweek’s Steven Levy sought to gauge the changes blogs have had on the journalism space. Scott Meyer, president and CEO, About.com, said that the NYT-owned info-guide falls squarely within the realm of reportage. “What we do is journalism, but we don’t hire people because they’re journalists. About began as user-generated content and it’s evolved. We hire people because they’re experts, such as, they’re a doctor. It’s one space over from what the NYT does. The space isn’t destroyed or ruined by this. The space expands.” (Paidcontent.org)

LittleMissMatched: Seth Godin at MIXX Keynote
September 25, 2007 - If marketing is all about storytelling, then you'd better build a product that's worth talking about. Seth Godin points to LittleMissMatched, socks targeted at 12 year old girls. The company is "tripling in size each year." Why? Because they made socks that make girls say something very powerful to each other... "Want to see my socks?" What's remarkable about the socks? They come 3 to a pack and none of them match. (Boston.com)