Having been involved in online advertising in some shape or form for 14 years now, I’ve come to a realization: everyone is trying to rip each other off. That’s right, everyone is out to pull a fast one on each other, and it all boils down to one simple metric: pageviews.

Publishers think they can game their pageviews by using silly tricks like making me generate 50+ pageviews just to see a bikini slideshow (don’t judge me, it was research…). Of those 50 page views I’m responsible, how many ads do you think I saw? Likely several hundred. How many of those ads do you think I remember? How many of those ads do you think I clicked on? ZERO. What did it cost the advertisers? assuming a $10/CPM on those ads, it cost them $.05 to be a blur in my memory.

Advertisers are also responsible for this global tomfoolery being propagated. They aren’t demanding quality time in front of their prospective customer eyeballs. Sure your eCPM is cheaper now than it was 10 years ago, but is that really relevant to your marketing metrics if you’re not getting the same conversions/sales from these ads? They should be looking at what MSNBC.com is doing and take note. MSNBC has killed pageviews in favor of time on site/sessions. Its simple enough these days to do it, so lets start shifting our thinking on ads.

Since its not enough to complain and not propose a solution, I suggest we start looking at metrics that involve time exposed per user. Own a user throughout their browsing session. I’m pretty sure they already have these called takeovers, but now lets charge by time in front of a user. Now I know this argument isn’t new, since myspace was notorious for this a few years ago.

I feel like this could lead to higher revenues for the publishers, as well as higher ROI for the advertisers.

I was amongst the throes of people who were captivated by Old Spice & Wieden+Kennedy’s intense ad campaign that exploded all over the web the last few days. These types of things “should” be happening all the time, but it seems like most big brand ad agencies still haven’t grasped why this campaign worked so well, and garnered so much attention.

Why did the Old Spice campaign resonate with fans?

• They took time to develop the character (curated over 6+ months)
• They handed over the reigns to the audience
• They gave ownership of the character and the brands to the fans (maybe accepted reality of ownership)
• They went everywhere their fans were (Digg, reddit, twitter, facebook, youtube, even 4chan!)
• They didn’t cheap out. $$$
• They took risks.

What made me wonder though, why haven’t other brands made their spokesperson “characters” interactive before? Where is the “King” from Burger King? Why haven’t the folks at Crispin Porter done anything to build up this character recently? There were some great foundations laid a few years back with the “wake up with the king” campaign, then nothing.

Dos Equis was another character which could have benefited from a campaign like this. Imagine making the most interesting man in the world into the worlds most interesting advice columnist? The content that could come out of that would be hilarious.

I have no doubt in my mind that Old Spice will clean up at whatever sycophantic awards ceremonies the ad-industry organizes. I just would love to see big ad agencies curating their social media efforts and not making them disposable one off projects.

With the big iPhone OS 4.0 announcement today, one of Apple’s big announcements is iAds, their mobile ad network (which was built from their acquisition of Quattro a few months ago). So why did they pull a facebook today? In what analysts will be calling a truly fucking brilliant move in a few months, they managed to do exactly what facebook is doing. Selling INTERNAL traffic redirection.

See facebook has been doing this for a while, with their ridiculously profitable ad network that sells ads to their fan pages and apps. So Facebook charges private companies to move traffic from one part of their site to another. Traditionally in online ads you are paying to move traffic from Site A to Site B, not Page1 on Site A to Page2 on Site A. So Facebook increases traffic/pageviews on its site while getting suckers to pay for it. Brilliant.

Today Apple announced they are doing effectively the same thing. Using their iAds network, which was borne of Quattro, they are replacing in app ads for many apps with new smarter suggestions to other apps in iTunes. So you’re getting internal traffic redirected, and apple monetizing the whole bit. Ge-ni-us.

So Apple’s stock is at $240/share right now. These new updates won’t affect their earnings for another 2 quarters at least, will have to check back in 6 months.

So you’re sitting at your desk at your traditional ad agency, marketing firm, or public relations agency and you notice that every day there are more and more empty desks around you. Hmmm I wonder why? Well there is a simple way to keep your desk from being the next empty one: adapt.

So before we dive into me teaching you how to adapt, I am going to assume you are smart enough to know that you need to learn about online marketing (u know that lil thing the kids call the “internets” has been around for over a decade now). I am also going to assume you have a background in traditional marketing, PR, or advertising.

So everything you learned in your marketing classes isn’t completely useless, actually, it is still quite useful, it just needs to be adapted. You have to start somewhere though, so lets start with some basic terminology.

Blogs – A self published journal, newsletter, etc. Usually supports visitor comments/feedback, rss, and trackbacks. Do you need one? Only if you have customers whom you want to talk to, and value their opinion (these opinion things, are pretty important these days). If you are writing an email or physical newsletter you send out everymonth, you should be re-publishing this as a blog on your domain/site. Also things you find too minute for newsletter publishing, but are still useful or valuable to your users/customers, should be posted on your corporate or client’s blog.

Microblogging - think blogging or SMS, but limited to 140-160 characters in length. see Twitter.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing – This is the all encompassing term for everything that deals with buying ads alongside search results on web search engines. Think more off-site work than on-site (your website).

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – This is all about on-site work, and turning your site into something the search engines will love, will understand, and then in turn reward you with higher placement in RELEVANT searches. This is can also be tied heavily into link building. The key is to turn all those years of copywriting experience you have, into something a search engine will understand. So basic things include writing clear and concise content, and avoiding hiding your content from searchers (i.e. inside pretty flash files).

PPC – Pay Per Click aka CPC (cost per click)- A form of online advertising whereby you only pay for leads (clicks) to your website. Google popularized this (but did NOT invent it). If you are on a fixed budget, and want to drive an exact amount of hits to your site, this might be your best bet. Important to note, most PPC systems are designed as auctions, with bidders buying up exposure and demand dictating the prices dynamically.

CTR – Click-through rate: The average number of clicks per 100 views of your ad. Think of this as the number of people who responded to your ad as a percentage of the entire audience. These numbers can tell you how your creative, your copy, or your overall ad are performing.

A/B Testing – Sometimes referred to as multi-variate testing, the idea is that you are comparing several similar creatives, or copies, of a single ad, and trying to determine what is most effective in getting conversions or click-throughs. Because its so easy to create a number of different variations, you can in theory analyze and optimize your message on the fly. Think of it as using the web as your global focus group, and your sites/ads/creatives as the product they are testing and voting on (by either clicking or not clicking).

CPM – Cost Per Mil (Thousand): The amount an ad run costs to be shown in front of 1000 hopefully distinct visitors. There are a number of factors that play into the pricing on this (audience, content of site, site reputation, etc.). This was one of the first models popularized in online banner ads.

CPA – Cost Per Action: Think of this as the easiest form of advertising to measure your ROI on. You only pay when someone completes the desired goal (be it filling out a form, purchasing something, whatever). Lots of affiliate marketing campaigns are built around this idea.

SMO – Social Media Optimization: The idea that you can optimize your content for distribution on social media sites. Effectively fancy way of saying writing interesting copy. Be careful with people selling this service, some are legit and trustworthy, others are snake oil salesmen.

Social Media - Content created by people, not by traditional publishers. Often referred to as user generated content or consumer generated media. Really encompasses everything from social networks to individually created content. The idea being that media/content creation is being democratized and no longer exclusively the realm of traditional mass media creators.

Social Network – A site/service whereby people can create and maintain relationships between themselves and other individuals. The most popular in the US at the moment are Facebook and Myspace. If you are creating any type of product with brand affinity of any kind, you’d be well advised to take notice of social networks, which are fast becoming the top traffic destinations on the web.

Twitter – A revolutionary new (to you) form of communication. Often referred to as micro-blogging, it is really a new means of speaking to and listening to your community (you’ve got a community whether you realize it or not). There will be a follow up post in a few weeks on Twitter for non techies.

Affiliate Marketing – This wasn’t in the original list, but I was reminded of its importance. Affiliate marketing is essentially the idea of enlisting independent third parties to promote your products or services in exchange for a sales commission. Amazon was one of the first companies to start this online (not the first though). The idea being that it allows any individual marketer to come in and start selling thousands of products without owning any physical inventory, or handling any transactions, but still making money.

So remember this list is for those of you who have experience working in traditional advertising, and just need a quick glossary of online keywords.

So I’ve been looking everywhere for info on ads that were served by time/impressions, like my HyCT idea (naming needs some work, I know), and realized I couldn’t find any that weren’t video ads, soooooo I built one: Twitbin. Twitbin’s ad system revolves around time viewed by individuals, not just views as in traditional CPM.

What this means for advertisers: typically in cpm based ads, you are lucky if your ad is there for more than 30 seconds, thus resulting in abhorrently low click thru rates. So our solution was to make sure you get more exposure, since we don’t have pageviews in twitbin (its all AJAX) we had to take the next logical step and use the technology available to us. So we decided to rotate ads based on the time viewed and correlate that to the cost.

Hopefully after a few more weeks of testing, we’ll be able to share the results of this grand experiment with you and the rest of the world. If things go well, we’ll know whether or not exposure based ads work, and how well.

For those of you who read this site, you might have noticed I’m a big pontificator on ads and models of ads. If it was up to me, some company would pay me $200k a year + stock to come up with cool new ideas for monetizing sites. If you have that job, or would like to create it for me, email me . Anyway, as pageviews are dying, and CPC is rife with click-fraud (its inevitable, don’t ignore that), we as a money loving community need to keep ahead of the curve. So in that spirit, I am going to propose several new ad models right here for your own enjoyment.

Hybrid CPM/C – aka HyC (that sounds catchy)
Hybrid CPM/CPC henceforth to be referred to as HyC is a model based on CPM based ads that give extra bonus to the publisher for action being taken. So lets assume that pageviews are getting cheaper (assume under $10CPM), but companies are still looking to reduce their risk, hence a hybrid CPM model. Take a now cheaper CPM model (less basic risk to the advertiser) and pair it with a direct action compensation model (CPC) and the publisher’s lower potential revenue are now potentially better. The reasoning behind this poorly eloquated idea is the digg effect. Digg visitors are notorious for not clicking ads, but draining your bandwidth. So this model would compensate both camps, the massive influx of visitors from the social sites, as well as the potentially interested customers who click through. So you have a hybrid branding/sales model.

Now you might be thinking, well HTF (how the ….) do we develop this model properly? Well it takes some interesting math skills to balance the equation necessary for this model to work well. Why do I ignore CPA in this model? Well unless you have access to the entire sales chain, its shit. So HyC= CPM+CPC = happy publisher. So I promised you multiple ad models, well…

HyCT – Hybrid CPM/CPT
You know I’m not sure CPT is a commonly used term yet (maybe there is another I’m missing), but for me it means cost per time (tiempo?). What does the HyCT model mean? Well its really an answer to the death of pageviews. With ajax proliferation, pageviews are going down, but time spent on sites is in fact not. I would take a wild guess and say people watch netvibes for hours per day, or Youtube…. So what’s the solution? I hinted at it before (can’t find the link). But the new model is one that employs some old models and new ones. The traditional ad on tv is fixed at timeXviews, it seems to have worked well over time, and it would be easy to implement in the modern era. Using that same ajax/javascript that is reducing pageviews, ads can theoretically be rotated periodically. Why not sell an ad based on time of exposure. If you’re typically getting visitors on your page for 3.5 seconds per visit, why not charge ads in a 3.5 second increment per pageview? i.e. someone reads the page for 7 seconds they should generate 2x the revenue….

So how would you change advertising? And do you have any other quirky acronyms or labels for your ads?

So while surfing collegehumor today (so what if I’m not technically in college…) I saw this “super cool, edgy, extreme, 2.0″ ad (at least thats how I assume the agency that made it pitched it). I thought to myself, wow, wonder what this could be for? Is it for some awesome new contest? hmmm sadly it was for health insurance. Apparently the fine folks at blue cross and blue shield think 18-24 year olds aren’t smart enough to understand or pay attention to normal health insurance stuff. So are they going to start advertising life insurance and investment funds this way too???

Alot of hubub has been going around that youtube is going to start running preroll ads and sharing that revenue with the content producers. Some people are thinking the reason for doing this is to get the volume of content necessary to get advertisers interested in producing their own video ads. This idea that you build the field and they will come, or in this case, you build a hundred thousand fields and they will come is wrong. Here is the fallacy of that logic just because you now have a hundred bajillion stupid videos of creepy guys without shirts on, doesn’t mean people are going to flock to make ads for you.

The real reason people are going to make video ads, and they definitely need to start looking at doing them, is the traffic. Buying youtube gets you the volume of views, not variety of them. Who cares if they have millions of videos. If they can serve up ads on the quality ones, they are golden. The real question is, how are you going to accurately target all those lonelygirl videos. Do I really want to see ads for buyowner homes or something along those line?

The big problem youtube/google is going to run into is revenue sharing for these thousands of individuals who upload copywritten content. OR are they really going to just pay out top tier videos? Anyway, we’ll see. I think I’d like to see adsense integrated into youtube videos as a postroll, similar to adbrite’s video network we talked about a few weeks ago.

The first speaker in this session was Gurbaksh Chahal the CEO of Blue Lithium, an ad delivery/brokerage company that is pushing 10billion ads a month. Basically they’ve come up with an interesting algorithm that relies on immense amounts of data mining to deliver demographic ads tied with behavior pattern analysis. Seems like a fairly smart play, but the big question that has to loom over these companies is: what happens when google decides to compete with you?

Next up was Keith Smith, the CEO of Zango, a video advertising company that works with publishers and such to monetize user generated video content. Their shtick is that they run a toolbar that people need to install to have the relevant ads delivered to them. The play they are making is that video watchers don’t want to watch or click on ads before and after the videos, so why not interrupt their browsing with ads later???? HMMM sounds like adware/spyware or at least dangerously close to it. I don’t know about you, but It seems like this is like 1997 all over again. Key questions to Zango: 1. why would I install your software? 2. Why do you think I would WANT my browser sessions to be interrupted by some interstitial ads.

Anand Subramanian, CEO of ContextWeb, was next, and honestly had the best presentation of the first 3. I’m writing this as he speaks, but I like what he’s saying now. He posts alot of interesting points and is giving an interesting model of publisher-determined pricing. Basically you are a blogger, publisher, anything, and you post your minimum ad sales price, they then go out and sell for as much as they can get, but pay you what you determine is your floor. The only immediate flaw I can see is if they dont share valuations and revenue info with the publishers. I would be very pissed if I set my CPM at $10, and they manage to get $30, but never tell me.

Steve Ellis, the CEO of pump audio, was next up. His company does an interesting task of reselling and licensing indie musicians content to television and advertising companies. This is a smart idea for user generated audio (indie music) and content considering the incredible complexity that IP licensing entails. They also have a super slick method for purchasing and selecting the content. I think overall this is a smart move.

So the last two presenters in this category were Turn.com, and Rovion.com. Quick summary: Turn is another ad delivery company without too much that caught my eye.  Rovion reminds me of sitepal, it places annoying audio ads/videos over people’s pages. I can see this being clever for a big company’s annual report and wanting a personal touch from the CEO, but for that, why not just put a cheaper flash video in there somewhere? Yawn.

This is actually a two-fer today. I was reading Jason Calacanis‘ blog, and saw this amazing new ad format being used on gawker.com today. This thing is 1000 pixels wide and 250px high. Now my first thought was, how the f- can someone pull off something this big? but seriously I really like this ad format and ad in particular too. Now I’m not sure if its going to still intrigue me when the ad unit is being used for “shoot the monkey win $100″ ads, but it does offer an interesting value proposition for the online marketing/branding world. This is the literal interpretation of a billboard on the side of the highway being transferred to the web. Now my question is how do you implement something like this? and how do you charge for this?

The next part of this is really the site this first banner links to: the Monk site on USA Network.com. If you’re familiar with the show, and lots of people are already, they know that one of Mr. Monk’s character flaws is his OCD. So lo and behold who is advertising on the show’s site? WINDEX! Genius ad placement. Who better to pitch your product than someone obsessed with clean.

Do you know of any clever product or ad placements?