Upon approaching Fish Lake runway in a purring Cessna 185, the valley nuzzled in at a 5,700-foot elevation deep in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area conjured up memories of the Atlantis discovered by Dagny Taggart in “Atlas Shrugged” when the main character crashes her plane in the Colorado Rockies. Alas, a truly remote place. No electricity. No running water save the creek near the old Forest Service cabin. No LED bulbs flashing in billboard signs save the ones in our head lamps. No advertisements can find me here.

That last comment was but a fleeting thought in my mind, as I realize that I, too, am a consumer and advertising reaches me even in the elk-run, wolf-dominated surroundings of Fish Lake, Idaho. I represent a rather coveted demographic - young married female homeowner with two incomes and no children (I’m a “DINK” - dual income no kids). I am becoming more and more difficult for marketers to reach.

I no longer simply read the newspaper and watch network primetime news. I read news online through The Idaho Statesman and The New York Times; I watch John Stewart and Steven Colbert; I listen to NPR on the local radio. “Google” has become a verb in my vocabulary. As the market continues to fragment down the long tail, reaching me requires using advanced market research, indexing tools and the Balihoo Agency Edition to know what media vehicles are available to me in my market.

After a day of fishing for cutthroat in Moose Lake, hiking 1,000 feet into the Bitterroots for the delectable local treat called huckleberries, I sit among the slowly swaying spruce and subalpine fir and return to my mind’s musings on my position as a consumer. Some great brands come to mind that have served the outdoor sportsman…

In my current state of being, I thank Patagonia, The North Face and Arcteryx for giving me durability and warmth in the bitter cold of the Bitterroots. The outfitters with their 25-deep mule train sharing this valley are all adorned in Carhartt. How did we discover and all cohesively choose these brands? Consistent marketing with an integrated approach across several media types, importantly an online presence. I raise my glass to the marketers of those brands for building an image that supports their quality. I must also thank those marketers for finding me.

There is a terrific article on The Wall Street Journal website by reporter Richard Gibson about what franchises are doing to attract and keep franchisees in what’s becoming an incredibly competitive landscape:

“[As] competition for new franchisees intensifies, franchisers are using … innovative tactics to ensure their own longevity and success …The intention is to help its franchisees attract industrious employees and keep them longer, says Mike Bidwell, president of Waco, Texas-based Dwyer. ‘And if a person does move on to buy a franchise,’ he adds, ‘we get a better-quality franchisee, who has a higher probability of success.’”

You can read the entire article here.

A key benefit that franchisors can offer their franchisees is support with local marketing and advertising efforts. Let’s face it - the franchisor knows their business better than anyone else and has already invested significant time and effort in their branding and messaging. The challenge is to enable local franchisors to benefit from this hefty intellectual capital in a way that targets specific local audiences with key messages across all media. And, oh yeah, is easy to use and manage.

Balihoo Marketer Edition (which is officially launching in September) provides franchisors and distributed marketers with the ability to offer their franchise partners an intuitive, easy-to-use platform to plan, purchase and execute customized advertising campaigns across print, online, television, radio, direct marketing and more. Thanks to the Balihoo platform, many franchisees are dipping their toes into the world of online advertising for the first time and feeling empowered like never before. We’re extremely psyched about the positive feedback we’re receiving with this program. If you are currently using the platform, we’d love to here from you. You can email us at svaughan@balihoo.com.

Demo is almost complete!

If asked to list as many franchises as you could, you would likely be able to list brands until you were blue in the face.  - And I’m not just speaking to people in the marketing/advertising industry (we recognize that we occasionally come across as being a slightly brand-fixated lot). Regardless of whether you are the VP of Marketing , a flight attendant, a chef or a carpenter - at the end of the day brands are not only an ever-present part of your life but also something that you readily recognize,  rely  upon and even thrive off of.  I would wager that even people who claim to “hate franchises” have a few brands that they feel a tad warm and fuzzy about. 

So when it comes to a franchise – do you envision the corporate, C-level executives as the face behind the brand or do you envision the location that is a few blocks from your office? 

It likely differs with the brand – however, in general you likely associate different franchises with specific locations. Which from a local company’s standpoint is the goal – they want their customers to readily identify with their specific location – a local spot that is a part of their community.

So how does a national brand go about maintaining a unified front while also fostering to its individual franchisee’s need to connect with its local community…

With Balihoo’s Marketer Edition national brands, franchisors and co-op marketers have the ability to consistently implement distributed demand-generation efforts by centralizing the management and execution of all local marketing activities.  Local dealers are given access to corporate-approved creative that is completely customizable and available across all mediums.

In a nutshell – companies that are part of a national brand have the ability to immediately access corporate-selected creative for their marketing needs.  Then the fun begins – they can take that perfected creative that their C-level folks carefully selected and customize it to add local, distinctive, special flare - thus helping them resonate with their local audience.  Everyone wins!

Your customers are local and we can help you connect with them while also maintaining your national brand name and image. While it is true that we are currently living in an increasingly hyper-local culture I would argue that the yearning to be locally-focused is nothing new and certainly not a trend destined to dwindle away.

We will be announcing a major client who is currently utilizing the Marketer Edition very soon – stay tuned!

Just two weeks after we announced our product for Publishers and only 4 days after TechInsights launched their implementation, Sports Illustrated and eBay have teamed to launch the SI Media Marketplace. 

Regardless of the competitive issues (I’ll get to that later) it’s great to see more players in this space.  My advice to publishers in a recent post, the Ad Network Conundrum, called for publishers to be looking at other ways to more efficiently and effectively sell their advertising inventory.  These two announcements are great examples of forward-thinking publishers pushing the envelope and taking the next step in ad sales - a step that doesn’t sacrifice 90% of their revenue (or their brand).  To see a great example of how TechInsights is positioning TechInsights Direct to their media buyers, check out this link (fancy flash video).

Now, although this announcement is obviously a good thing for the industry and Balihoo, I can’t let it go without calling out some of the specific differences between this solution and Balihoo Publisher Edition: 

• This is an auction-based site (hence eBay) while Balihoo Publisher Edition is fixed-pricing.  We feel a fixed-price system is more representative of how premium publishers want to represent their brand and their inventory.
• Mark Ford, President of Sports Illustrated, stated that actually closing the deal after the auction required human intervention.  This is not the case with Balihoo, the entire buy can happen in a self-service model (although a user can talk to a salesperson if needed). 
• Although they dance around the issue a bit, it seems this product is primarily for time-sensitive (hence expiring soon) inventory.  Balihoo Publisher Edition is designed to do a equally good job at selling all inventory - premium, standard or remnant. 
• It’s unclear exactly what’s offered in the system - but one of the key benefits of Balihoo is the ability for a publisher to bundle inventory together across mediums and properties

This is a case where it’s great for us to see another player enter the market, it’s good to have competition!

In Product Management, the Product Roadmap is often thought of as the centerpiece to this function, however in practice roadmaps can hinder or mislead the organization more than they help depending on how they are used. With software, product road maps become even more difficult to manage and maintain, especially as you move into agile development methodologies. The very thing that makes agile effective, works against a typical product road maps (if there is such a thing). Furthermore, couple this with a market such as advertising, that is undergoing drastic changes, and creating a product road map becomes a challenging exercise.

Software product road maps are typically linear presented on some type of calendar view read from left to right. They often resemble a project plan in Gantt chart view, and there is little distinction between a product roadmap and a technical release plan. However just like with project plans, the further out you plan, the more the plan breaks down and becomes vague and unusable. The problem is that project plans, and roadmaps organized like project plans give the illusion that it is humanly possible to plan out a year or two in advance. In my experience, even with seasoned project managers, and a solid vision, project plans begin to break down as early as 4-6 weeks from the date they are built or revised. Second, product roadmaps have a completely different audience, and objective than a release plan does.

So, what is a product manager to do? Sales and marketing still need to be able to talk about what’s coming to the market, prospective clients, as well as current clients. Engineering needs to understand the vision for the product so they can create an architecture that will support future growth, and the company as a whole needs to understand where the product is going so they can get behind it and help create ideas to make it better.

In thinking through the goals for an effective software product roadmap for Balihoo, I came to the following needs:

• ensure the product features support strategic objectives of the company
• indicate relative importance of features (revenue potential, market appetite)
• an approximation to timing
• indication of how ‘robust’ the feature should/will be

So how did it turn out? I took a visual approach that resembled planets orbiting around the sun. The sun in this case represents the strategic objectives of the company, and the orbits and the planets represent high level features that are currently being planned for the product. Distance from the strategy sun indicate timing, and with that relative importance as well. Coloring of the feature indicates how robust or ‘enterprise class’ the feature needs to be based on current market expectations/needs.

In addition to being a great visual representation of the product for inside and outside the company, I think it also presents a more realistic picture of a product in a changing landscape. In addition, as the strategic objectives of a company change it becomes easy to shift the features up or down to represent the changes. It may not have all the details that a traditional product roadmap has, but it isn’t meant to, and furthermore that detail belongs in a release plan, not in a product roadmap.

Products in a dynamic market cannot be mapped out like a project plan. They need to be continually monitored adjusted with a shifting market. The product roadmap needs to be able to shift easily with changing needs, and yet still present a view of the product that stakeholders can understand, convey to others, and provide feedback on to ensure that the product will continue to provide optimum value to the customer.

In addition as with any new idea, this product roadmap design will also continue to evolve and meet the changing needs of the business.  Thoughts are welcome.

Balihoo’s COO and published author (who also serves as a walking, breathing human thesaurus) Vince Martino (author of The Marine Corps Way) has written another article for the Idaho Statesman. His latest article touches upon a topic that he deals with each and every day – selecting the best employees to not only support but fuel a start-up business.  Below you will find the third article from his ‘Starting Up’ series:

Starting up: How do you go about finding employees with the right mindset?

In a previous Starting Up column, I discussed the importance of hiring for organizational fit and seeking character and intellect over skills alone - put another way, hiring for mindset over skill set. I received some interesting questions and feedback on that article, mainly soliciting ways to implement this advice.

Of course, it is always preferable to find someone with the perfect pairing of skill set and mindset. But this is rarely the case at my company, Balihoo, a Boise startup that last year launched an online search engine for advertisers.  

Many positions go unfilled for long stretches. For example, the position of media buyer remained open after several months of searching for experienced applicants but finding none who fit into our organization. Thus, we altered course and began searching exclusively for entry-level people who were self-driven, fit our culture, demonstrated comfort in fluid environments, and showed a high degree of aptitude to learn.

First, we had to determine how to reach these people. Posting to standard career Web sites was yielding resumes that didn’t match our needs. We asked some of our recent entry-level hires where they looked for jobs. The answer was unanticipated: college career boards and nontraditional Web sites-turned-recruiting-tools like MySpace and Facebook.

We already maintained a company blog that somewhat spoke to this audience, so we complemented it with MySpace and Facebook pages and revised the job description to better resonate with the target audience. As a result, we were quickly flooded with resumes from the right applicants.

Next, we constructed a multipart screening process to evaluate applicants in three main areas: Balihoo core values, role-based competencies and cognitive skills. Since we could not use previous job performance to assess an applicant, we developed behavioral questions to determine how past experiences would lead to future success and case studies designed to measure candidates’ critical thinking abilities.

For example, our case study challenged candidates to solve a pared-down but real-life media buying problem and make a recommendation to the interviewer. Media buying knowledge was not a prerequisite to solving the problem - just quick thinking, sound logic, and confidence in presenting an answer.

Once we hire a person - we hire about 1 in every 200 people who apply - it’s time to “over-invest” in them. We purposely use the term over-invest to signify the commitment needed to train and develop inexperienced employees. Most of the training we do is on-the-job. While there is formal training available from third parties for some of the roles, we’ve found the best way to learn is through shadowing experienced people. Having the new person “jump in head first” is a great way for them to learn in a very quick and focused manner. Many of our new employees are serving our most important clients and completing mission-critical tasks just days after starting.

A beneficial byproduct of our hiring process is that we attract and select versatile, challenge-seeking individuals - two core competencies we need in an ever-changing startup. While many of our entry-level employees continue to excel and drive change in the roles for which they were hired, others quickly change roles in response to shifting business needs; both types are equally important to our company. For example, a newly hired media researcher quickly turned into a product manager, a marketing coordinator temporarily became a recruiter, and a support associate morphed into a data analyst.

Given the rapid pace of change - sometimes the only constant in any startup - hiring for mindset over skill-set has allowed us to develop our talent base quickly despite market-based challenges and has filled our ranks with an array of adaptable people who have helped us continually grow as the market shifts and opportunities arise. 

What a pickle we find ourselves in when it comes to ad networks.  A recent IAB/Bain & Company study on the industry revealed a few interesting and conflicting facts about these networks that we love to hate: 

1. Usage of ad networks to sell inventory has increased dramatically – from 5% in 2006 to 30% in 2007.
2. The impact of ad networks on prices is dramatic – an average of 90% discount (no, not a typo) relative to the pulishers’ typical prices

So, what does this mean for the major players in the ecosystem? 

Advertisers – They’re obviously happy about the pricing impact ad networks have.  However, many times this comes with significant tradeoffs including blind sites and an inability to have any control over the association of your brand with particular content. 

Agencies – Agencies like the prices, but the most interesting thing for them is the convenience of aggregating impressions to buy from a single source.  However, I would argue that that’s not a particularly long term strategic play – it’s not sustainable (it’s easy to buy from an ad network).  Agencies could add significant value by using tools to streamline their processes so they can efficiently buy highly-targeted sites on an individual basis.  Enter Balihoo Agency Edition. 

Publishers – This is where we hear the outcry regarding the ad networks, they’re feeling the pinch of the pricing discounts.  However, that clearly has not discouraged them from using the networks (given their growth numbers).  My opinion is that Publishers should be looking at other ways to more efficiently and effectively sell their advertising inventory instead of just increasingly relying on the networks – such as Balihoo Publisher Edition. 

You can read more on this topic for yourself at:

AdAge – Ad Networks Drive Down CPM’s

MediaWeek – More Publisher Selling via Ad Nets

GM recently announced what many of us in the industry have seen coming for months and in fact is just a more dramatic indication of a trend that started a couple of years ago – fee pressure. The heady days of 15% commissions are long gone, but the past 10 years have still been very good in particular for media focused agencies. Recently however, fee pressure has become a reality in every contract negotiation. Advertisers only want to pay for the high value work and want the lower value transactional work to be priced as such. Couple this fee pressure with very slow organic growth and top line revenue starts to stagnate or even decline – that is problem number one.

Media agencies are also dealing with a massive shortage of talented people to fill entry level and mid level jobs. I have recently spoken with several C level executives at very large agencies that have on average 25-75 jobs currently open for each of their major city offices. This talent shortage has resulted in massive salary inflation within these positions along with a major turnover issue as entry level people tend to jump ship for another agency (or a publisher sales position) at double the salary within 12-18 months of being hired. One of those executives told me that they are on pace for 40% turnover this year in a particular large market office – that is a spectacular number.

When you couple flat to declining revenue and increasing costs it is not hard to calculate a great deal of profit margin pressure, so what is an agency to do?

The simple answer is to invest. Invest in technology (self serving disclaimer) like Balihoo to streamline the low value repetitive functions that clients are not willing to pay for, but are still essential to a successful campaign. Invest in your people to ensure that you keep the stars and continue to hire the best talent available. Invest in the future. Sever the ties to the past models of doing business and look to the next evolution of marketing and advertising to ensure that you are always one step ahead of the competition.
Some of the most successful companies in the word have either been started or truly found success during recessionary economic cycles and they all have one thing in common – instead of cutting costs and just staying alive, they were investing in the future.

MORE exciting news today - TechInsights (formerly CMP and publisher of Electrical Engineering Times) announced today TechInsights Direct, the first online portal that enables technology marketers to search, analyze, buy and manage online and print advertising programs directly from TechInsights and its’ powerful brands.  Of course, this solution is powered by Balihoo. 

This is actually Balihoo’s first customer announcement of our recently announced Publisher Edition product.  It’s great after having worked on this product and this customer for so long to finally be able to talk publicly about this solution.�