In the midst of news of tightening belts, declining sales, and destabilizing markets, comes the realization that change is around the corner. The exact nature of that change is still uncertain of course, but the fact that consumer societies are experiencing a shift is undeniable. One reason is the upcoming presidential election where regardless of which candidate is ultimately elected, each camp undoubtedly brings a new perspective on a myriad of issues. Another is the prospect, admittedly somewhat frightening, of a recession. A recession will certainly shake things up, give way to change, and in doing so provide new challenges as well as new opportunities.

Thankfully as advertisers and marketers we possess the skills to rise to the challenges and capitalize on the opportunities. This is not to say that we can throw caution to the wind, but a recession is as good a time as any to use creative problem solving skills to make our brands come out on top. In fact, a recession is arguably the best time to continue aggressive advertising. As overall consumer spending decreases, there will likely be upheaval felt by some existing products however consumer spending will not disappear. In fact, spending can shift as consumers reprioritize and refocus their own financial efforts - providing space in the market for innovative new products and creatively positioned existing brands.

This is where things get exciting. As marketers and advertisers we know how to think creatively and find opportunity in adversity. Every day we investigate new ways to increase awareness of our brand(s) and to strike the right chord with customers. The change we now face may foster new approaches to reaching our respective target audiences. One key element may be the continued strategic and creative planning of seamless multimedia campaigns. Balihoo’s cross-medium platform can help achieve this goal. By providing increased efficiency to the RFP process and agency-wide campaign dashboards designed to communicate current decisions and maintain institutional memory of previous campaigns, Balihoo allows agencies to shift their time to the strategic and creative aspects of their campaigns. Change is coming and Balihoo can help….exciting times indeed.

Sources:
http://adage.com/abstract.php?article_id=125877
http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/12/advertising-during-recession.html

Since Chris Anderson formally introduced the “Long Tail” in October 2004 in an article in Wired and his subsequent book of the same title, it has become part of familiar business vernacular in many industries; media is no exception.

Balihoo prides itself in housing not only the head of the media buying landscape (the most popular, widely viewed and widely purchased media properties) but also the extensive and growing tail. The concept of the long tail as it applies to the media industry is that it consists of highly niche media properties, which may have less overall eyeballs but can and will be much more targeted based on content or demographic.

Great in theory, but the problem is that in today’s fast pace world of media buying, clients are demanding high impressions on their product, along with high ROI in less and less time. A media buyer may be able to get a much more focused set of eyes on a product if they dive more into the tail, likely producing a higher overall ROI on a media buy. However when push comes to shove, planners are usually forced back into the head due to volume and timeline demands. The extra time it would take to find the niche media properties just isn’t available, and frankly for young media buyers, it’s risky. Challenging the status quo often isn’t worthwhile for a junior buyer who is most worried about just completing plans in always-compressed timeframes.

I wanted to use a quick example to illustrate the point. Balihoo is currently in the process of an advertising campaign for our software product. We did a mix of online media, including some large well-known sites and some niche players including blogs. Interestingly enough, one of our blog buys is producing much more traffic than the larger sites at a much lower cost! The reason for this, we presume, is that the readers of this blog are much more representative of our target market. Now imagine the ROI and cost savings advertisers could get across much larger media campaigns if a buying agency was able to always find sites so closely aligned with your target.

Part of the reason this doesn’t often happen is that much of a media planners time is spent on non value add or low value add tasks in the workflow. Examples of this include:

• Time spent on the discovering new media properties,
• Time spent verifying information about media properties within a consideration set
• The administrative tasks around sending out RFP’s and the subsequent collection of that data from various sources into a single location for analysis
• Time spent looking finding and extracting data from previous buys made with specific media properties

The Balihoo product seeks to lean the process down and remove this waste; thereby allowing media buyers to spend time on high value add tasks of analyzing media properties and focusing on the highest ROI for their clients.

Marketing Daily had an interesting article this week on creativity (see article here).  The main point of the piece is to offer hope that while creative work, especially on the Web, can often fail to inspire (or even disappoint), there are examples out there of getting creative right.  That creative work can focus on more than ringing up another sale.  Marketing succeeds most profoundly when a relationship exists between the company and its customers.  That’s where loyalty is fostered.  To create and nurture that relationship, effort must be taken to develop that intangible yet powerful idea we call “brand”.  I’m not talking about your logo or your snazzy tag lines or even your strictly sales purposed work.  I’m talking about creating a connection between consumers and who your company is… not what your company does. 

Creativity is an essential part of that effort.  We’ve seen examples of this, such as Chili’s Margarita Madness campaign where site visitors created their own art for Chili’s digital gallery.  This wasn’t directly relatable to gaining an order in a restaurant, but the campaign built the brand by engaging customers through creativity.  Or Burger King’s offer to Simpsonize the world one burger eater at a time. 

Of course at Balihoo, we not only embrace creativity in our efforts to build a cutting-edge solution for the media planning industry, but our comprehensive database of cross-medium advertising opportunities is at the ready for any creative campaign you can devise – whether in one medium or across them all.  Additionally, Balihoo’s robust tools allow media professionals to work more efficiently so there’s more time for such creative / strategic thinking.  And that’s something that benefits companies and customers alike.

We just released the below press release this morning.  We’re very excited about the addition of Michael to our board, having already spent some time with him I can tell you that he truly is the “media czar” he’s made out to be!  Welcome Michael!

Balihoo Names Michael Browner to Board of Directors  

Balihoo to benefit from former GM Media Executive’s wealth of experience accumulated during an advertising and media career that spans more than forty years 

Boise, ID; March 17, 2008 – Balihoo, the only on-demand media buying and planning platform that provides intelligent software-PLUS-services to media professionals across all mediums, announced today that Michael Browner has joined the company’s Board of Directors. The CEO of Marketing & Media Consultancy, LLC, Browner has an advertising and media career that spans more than forty years, including his renowned work as Executive Director in charge of Media and Marketing Operations for General Motors Corporation (GM).  

“Michael is a leader in the advertising industry with a wealth of media and advertising experience and we’re thrilled to welcome him as a board member,” said Pete Gombert, CEO of Balihoo.  “We will look to Michael to provide executive level guidance and consultancy as we develop Balihoo into the choice for connecting advertisers and media sellers.” 

Currently, Browner serves as a consultant to Polaris Ventures, LLC, where he reviews investment opportunities involving media and advertising. He also consults for Experience, Inc. and AWS Weatherbug, both Polaris portfolio companies. Prior to this, he served as Executive Director in charge of Media and Marketing Operations of GM until March 2004 when he retired to open Marketing & Media Consultancy, LLC. 

During his 18-plus years at GM, Browner was responsible for directing all media buying and overseeing media plans for more than 50 brands. He managed the operations of GM Mediaworks and Local Communications, Inc. that negotiated all print, broadcast and online media. In addition, he was responsible for the creation and guidance of GM Cyberworks, a dedicated interactive advertising resource that provided strategic counsel, media planning and buying for GM business units. His efforts were credited with saving GM more than $1.5 billion during his tenure along with creating powerful relationships with major media and sponsorship partners.  

Browner also directed the operations of GM Planworks, the agency he created to develop media plans for GM brands.  GM Eventworks, and GM’s regional and promotion/sponsorship agency, GM R*Works, also reported to him. These dedicated agencies are responsible for strategic development of major promotional programs such as GM’s Olympics and major sports sponsorships as well as implementation of all of GM’s local market and regional sponsorships. 

Prior to GM, Browner spent more than 20 years in various media and marketing positions with leading consumer packaged goods organizations, including Lever Brothers, Dow Consumer Products and the N.W. Ayer advertising agency.  

About Balihoo
Balihoo (www.balihoo.com), based in

There was a good article in MediaPost a few weeks ago about the dollar shift away from portals (see article).

One of the foundational premises upon which Balihoo was founded was media fragmentation - there are a ton of advertising opportunities out there, which are growing everyday, but buyers are unable to find and buy targeted sites in an efficient manner. When we first started talking to media agencies a few years ago, the typical response went something like, “We’d like to buy more targeted sites and go ‘deeper’ into the tail, but today we rarely buy outside the top 1000 sites.” At the same time, advertisers (i.e. the clients) are pushing their agencies to consider more products and demanding greater accountability for their brand in media selection.

This article is somewhat old news for Balihoo, but it is nice to see the numbers starting to show the shift to more targeted online media. In anticipation of this shift - and to help enable it - we first built our media search engine. But, we’ve expanded greatly beyond that search engine to provide the tools necessary to help gather, analyze, and make decisions in this increasingly changing media world.

As I write this post (literally) I see an announcement that NBC Universal just acquired 35% of DriverTV (see link). Yet another unique, targeted online opportunity for auto advertisers.

Interesting article in MediaWeek this week entitled, “Digital Buyers Lament Ad-Buying Process, Seek Guidelines“. 

Overall, the article laments the fact that there has been a lack of influx of new technology into the advertising industry to reduce the amount of paperwork needed to plan and buy media. 

Naturally, here at Balihoo we couldn’t agree more.  We’re taking several steps to try and help with this problem: 

First, we’ve developed a robust RFP system for media planners.  It’s fully configurable, meaning that you can ask any question you want in any format.  As media sellers respond to your RFP, their responses are automatically aggregated into a single, online worksheet that you can manipulate and export. 

Secondly, this same RFP system saves time and paperwork for the media seller.  Create “canned” responses for the standard questions and focus your time and energy on the in-depth strategic questions and financial details. 

Additionally, for both parties, all of this data and the back-and-forth negotion process is fully digital and the history is captured within the system, no need to print out and save paper files. 

Finally (as of last week) Balihoo is participating on the AAAA (American Association of Advertising Agencies) committee designed to help develop, design and implement standards across the RFP process. 

Simplifying and streamlining the media buying process is critical for our industry.  As we head into a suspected “down time” for the industry, it’s so important that we all work together drive out cost and increase efficiencies into everything we do. 

Some interesting thoughts from our CEO on this very topic can be found here.

I was at the American Association of Advertising Agencies annual media conference this week in Orlando along with a handful of our sales and marketing team.  The show was a tremendous success for us.  We were able to reach a highly targeted audience and spend enough time with them to demonstrate the significant value that Balihoo brings to their businesses. 

Frankly, we were a bit awestruck by the attention that we were given at the show.  Our booth was full nearly all day, both days of the show. While we did attribute some of the traffic to the strategic placement of the booth directly next to the bar, people were most often seeking us out over the booze. 

We were consistently asked a couple of questions which I thought I would answer generically here:

Q.  Are you guys out of beta?

A.  Yes  - we came out of Beta officially December 1^st .  Unlike some products that are perpetually in beta, we believe in beta being a testing phase just prior to production launch.   Our beta was phenomenal and the demand for our solution remains quite high.  On average we have between 10  and 20 agencies and media owners sign up per week.

Q.  Are companies using your software in production. 

A.  Yes – we have had over 700 agencies and 300 media owners register for access to the solution and nearly all are using Balihoo in one way or another as part of their planning, buying or selling process.  Watch for some announcements over the next 60 days as to some particularly interesting relationships that have developed over the past 6 months.

Q.  How are you different from Donovan, MediaBank, MediaVisor, SRDS, Atlas, Quantcast, Comscore, Nielsen and the list goes on and on.

A.  Balihoo is very different from all of these solutions in two significant ways: 

1.       Balihoo supports ALL mediums – no really ALL of them, you name a single place that an advertiser can reach their target audience and we should have it in our index.  If we don’t, let us know and we will get it added tomorrow.

2.       Balihoo is a true data exchange platform.  We have designed our solution for a single overriding purpose – to facilitate the exchange of data that is necessary to complete a transaction between a buyer and seller of media.  We do not measure media, we do not provide accounting / back office software we do not traffic or serve ads.  We deliver information and data to and from buyers and sellers.  We are working with several data providers and will work with any others that are interested.  We are working with several buying tools and will work with any others that are interested.  Same goes for back office tools.  One of the visitors to the booth said it best – “you guys are the pipeline and we provide the oil.”  If it has to do with getting information (rates, demos, ed cals, materials specs, geo coverage etc.) or generating and aggregating RFIs and RFPs - then we are the place.  We firmly beleive that the solution to the issues facing the industry is collaboration, not more proprietary systems.

Hopefully that answers some of the most pressing questions that you may have about Balihoo, it’s just unfortunate that we did not get to meet you down in sunny Florida.  Maybe next year in New Orleans  - by then I am sure the industry will have it all figured out.

The FinancialContent Advertising Network (or FCAN) provides opportunity for buyers to purchase advertising space on newspaper websites throughout the country.

Ads are displayed in conjunction with financial data including scrolling tickers, stock charts, and SEC filings; providing the opportunity for advertisers to reach finance-focused consumers. FCAN’s network includes major newspapers around the county such as DenverPost.com and BostonHerald.com. For more information search for FinancialContent in Balihoo.

Just a quick note to let you know we’ll be at the American Association of Advertising Agencies show in Orlando today and tomorrow.  Stop by our booth (501) and I’ll have something special for you!