5 days ago
Lola (@EpilepticChihuahua) went as Gizmo for Halloween. No costume required. No leaving the house required, either.
TroubleAndDesire.tumblr.com
Ned Riffle: I want adventure. I want romance.
Bill McCabe: Ned, there is no such thing as adventure. There’s no such thing as romance. There’s only trouble and desire.
Ned Riffle: Trouble and desire.
Bill McCabe: That’s right. And the funny thing is, when you desire something you immediately get into trouble. And when you’re in trouble you don’t desire anything at all.
Ned Riffle: I see.
Bill McCabe: It’s impossible.
Ned Riffle: It’s ironic.
Bill McCabe: It’s a fucking tragedy is what it is, Ned.
5 days ago
Exit Strategy
When I meet an entrepreneur for the first time I like having a conversation about the idea or see the product (or prototype) in action or even a “chalk talk” for those of us that are more visually inclined.
I’m generally not a fan of slides, especially if it’s an early stage company.
But if the founder wants to use slides then I usually go along. Founders should use whatever tools they feel most comfortable.
The one thing I am allergic to is when a founder includes a slide that says “Exit Strategy” and then has a few bullets that says “IPO or sell company to company a, b or c.”
Oy.
An early stage company should be thinking about how to create something great and how they want to get there. How to build value. Not think about exits.
Now most VCs that I know feel the same way about that dreaded slide. But there is a topic where I’ve seen disagreement amongst successful VCs related to the concept of exits when considering an early stage investment. Some VCs will think about who might be the potential buyers of the company.
They do this analysis upfront because most companies never go public. So they want to know if there could be multiple buyers of a company someday. If there aren’t any potential buyers then they it might impact the VCs decision.
I don’t see the world that way.
If you build a great company then you don’t have to worry about exits because you will have many options (e.g. public, get profitable & stay private, secondary offering, sell the company).
I believe there have been many exits where the actual buyer wouldn’t have been on any list at the time the initial venture investment.
This is just speculation on my part but at the time of the initial investment in the following companies who would have guessed the ultimate buyer:
-Flip Video (Cisco)
-Danger Research (Microsoft)
-Daily Candy (Comcast)
-Sling (Echostar)
The list goes on.
Yes, you can imagine the strategic rationale for those deals. But not on day 1 of the venture investment. The world just moves too fast to try and predict this stuff. And it’s not the most important question anyway.
We would all agree, the real question is whether a particular team & product can make something special.
I like Bijan’s posts more often than not, but I think this is pretty disingenuous when the venture capital model is almost exclusively exit-dependent. When VCs stop touting exits as evidence of successes in their portfolios, you’ll stop seeing entrepreneurs with “exit” slides. So I’ll buy the “exits aren’t important” rationale when I see even one term sheet that creates incentives for long-term profit-sharing over a sale or IPO. (I’ve also never been through a full due diligence cycle where the investor didn’t ask the entrepreneur—even informally—about acquisition possibilities.)
via bijan
1 week ago
I feel like the real title of this Shouts & Murmurs piece should be “Lazy Author Doesn’t Want to Promote Own Book and Feels Inclined to Mock Publisher’s Publicity Department, Which Has the Temerity to Suggest That He Might Want to Do So.”**
**And This Might (Godforbid!) Involve Using the Internets. Sorry, Author Who’s More Accustomed to Quill-And-Parchment-Paper Interface!
Gawker Gets Scammed «
The sponsored posts should go for far more than the $3 CPMs on display. They’re taking a premium form of advertising and using it as an add-on, when they should be upselling it. (And there’s no inventory for sponsored posts.)
And in that email exchange, there’s no upselling, just throwing it in for free.
What’s more: this lead CAME to them! Why are you throwing in fries and a drink when the client is clearly willing to pay full price for the stand alone product? I’d understand if this was an effort to build a portfolio of executions for a new product or something… but the “sponsored post” is pretty old hat for Gawker Media, and the “client” is already starting at the 25k line!
What Ryan Brown said.
Because the rebuy is better than the buy. Because you want clients who get real value and keep coming back. That’s how you build a business.
I totally agree. But I haven’t noticed any disparities between re-ups from clients that are getting traditional campaigns and re-ups from clients who are paying for non-traditional campaigns. If anything, the latter are more responsive and invested. If you’re charging for non-traditional features and they aren’t adding any value and the client doesn’t want to come back, that’s probably just bad execution. Your “value adds” are neither.
via mikehudack
1 week ago
Gawker Gets Scammed «
So sponsored posts are ostensibly higher value than the standard IAB spots in the margin, but at Gawker they’re “value-add” on top of a standard display buy? The appeal of sponsored posts for publishers is that they aren’t CPM driven (unless you want them to be) and you can charge more than for regular display. So Gawker’s just throwing them in as an add-on? Why, exactly?
This is a guess at something I know much less about than other things I’d speak boldly about, but:
It’s a cheesy tie-together. It’s not entirely unlike when a supermarket sells frankfuters in packs of 10 and buns in packs of 8. Even if you intend to get 8 hot dogs, you’re going to end up with two cold hot dogs that you didn’t want - the IAB slots - and that benefits everyone in the retail supply chain except the customer. If the IAB slots were the add-ons, they would probably end up as dead inventory and would be phased out of the site design by mid-2010. The way that they’re doing, it, though, they can sell BOTH inventories to people who want only one. If no one complains, it’s a good racket, right?
That’s not what I’m saying. The sponsored posts should go for far more than the $3 CPMs on display. They’re taking a premium form of advertising and using it as an add-on, when they should be upselling it. (And there’s no inventory for sponsored posts.)
And in that email exchange, there’s no upselling, just throwing it in for free.
This is actually pretty common. IAB units are easier to peg to CPMs than unique placements like sponsored posts because they are standardized across multiple publishers.
Sponsored posts and other non-standard opportunities are custom and therefore require additional work on the part of agencies (or not). Media buyers loath engaging their stretched-thin creatives to build custom units and they have no way to compare prices of a sponsored post on Gizmodo to a custom program on FM. When you lack the ability to properly price opportunities, negotiating leverage is lost. Couple that with units that you need your creative team to build from scratch and all of a sudden this opportunity gets scratched from the media plan and the Gawker Ad Sales Guy is losing budget.
As soon as it’s value-added it brings down the eCPM. Then the Gawker Ad Sales Guy throws in their own creative resources to build it and all of a sudden he’s just succeeded in upselling the original program and maintaining his company’s hard-fought premium CPM margin on the “boring” IAB units.
If and/or when sponsored posts become more of a standard I’m sure you’ll stop seeing them value-added in favor of the next custom program.
Well, my experience of doing non-standard plays is that the publisher always does the creative. Might be different for you guys, but never once has an agency handed me anything other than display creative. But they nearly always ask for something beyond that. And they’re willing to pay for it.
So I think creative services are no longer an option for publishers; they’re a necessity.
Part of having a good sales team is having people who can sell non-traditional packages, because that’s where the highest margins are right now—even when you have to do the creative in-house. My feeling is that if you can’t sell that as stand-alone or as an upsell, you’re going to be in trouble if/when CPMs keep sliding downward in major categories. And particularly so if we end up in a post-CPM environment where brands decide the IAB standard spots are irrelevant. (I don’t think we’re at that point yet, but I hear a lot of frustration about how increasingly ineffective they are.)
via geisen
Gawker Gets Scammed «
The sponsored posts should go for far more than the $3 CPMs on display. They’re taking a premium form of advertising and using it as an add-on, when they should be upselling it. (And there’s no inventory for sponsored posts.)
And in that email exchange, there’s no upselling, just throwing it in for free.
What’s more: this lead CAME to them! Why are you throwing in fries and a drink when the client is clearly willing to pay full price for the stand alone product? I’d understand if this was an effort to build a portfolio of executions for a new product or something… but the “sponsored post” is pretty old hat for Gawker Media, and the “client” is already starting at the 25k line!
What Ryan Brown said.
via ryanbrown
Gawker Gets Scammed «
So sponsored posts are ostensibly higher value than the standard IAB spots in the margin, but at Gawker they’re “value-add” on top of a standard display buy? The appeal of sponsored posts for publishers is that they aren’t CPM driven (unless you want them to be) and you can charge more than for regular display. So Gawker’s just throwing them in as an add-on? Why, exactly?
This is a guess at something I know much less about than other things I’d speak boldly about, but:
It’s a cheesy tie-together. It’s not entirely unlike when a supermarket sells frankfuters in packs of 10 and buns in packs of 8. Even if you intend to get 8 hot dogs, you’re going to end up with two cold hot dogs that you didn’t want - the IAB slots - and that benefits everyone in the retail supply chain except the customer. If the IAB slots were the add-ons, they would probably end up as dead inventory and would be phased out of the site design by mid-2010. The way that they’re doing, it, though, they can sell BOTH inventories to people who want only one. If no one complains, it’s a good racket, right?
That’s not what I’m saying. The sponsored posts should go for far more than the $3 CPMs on display. They’re taking a premium form of advertising and using it as an add-on, when they should be upselling it. (And there’s no inventory for sponsored posts.)
And in that email exchange, there’s no upselling, just throwing it in for free.
via brianvan
Gawker Gets Scammed «
lock:
Interesting thing here isn’t the scam, but the bits of Gawker ad sales intel in the exchange with Del. (For bonus points, contrast revenue strategy in email thread with Batty kicker in AdAge story today.)
Ha. Bonus points! Per Lock, the Batty kicker:
Chris Batty, vp, sales at Gawker, said the bar for many advertisers was to achieve more views for their posts than the editorial posts on the page. He pointed out that a sponsored post on Gizmodo that promoted the movie District 9 by highlighting the “Arc gun” used to keep alien creatures at bay in the movie got about 30,000 views. Over half of Gawker ad campaigns now include a sponsored post element, Batty said.
“I know that’s what’s driving all the lift,” he said. “That’s where all the reader attention is, not ads in the margin.”
From Gawker Ad Sales’ guy’s email:
We can also execute a sponsored post for you at the 25k level as added value, which is an amazing way to integrate your messaging into our editorial flow. As the name suggests, it is a post that moves down the page just like a standard story on one of our sites, but instead of being written by one of our editors it is written specially by our advertising copywriter with direction from your creative team.
So sponsored posts are ostensibly higher value than the standard IAB spots in the margin, but at Gawker they’re “value-add” on top of a standard display buy? The appeal of sponsored posts for publishers is that they aren’t CPM driven (unless you want them to be) and you can charge more than for regular display. So Gawker’s just throwing them in as an add-on? Why, exactly?
via lock
Thrillist Junket Fallout: Times Freelancer Mike Albo Fired «
fek:
fek:
(via soupsoup)
This is fucking absurd.
Look in the Krucoff, Foster. LOOK IN THE KRUCOFF. What do you see?
Give me a break.
Freelancers have to take junkets. They get jobs using junkets. Publications don’t have the scratch to support their writers - and especially their freelance writers - giving publication-backed assessments of places unless you’re the Times; to compete, you have to take a junket, or else all rate-and-review coverage goes to Yelp, which, as we all know, is for retards. Truth. But just because you take a junket doesn’t mean you’re indebted to vis-a-vis coverage, and if you give it to them, you’re an asshole, and your publication’s probably fucked anyway because it sucks. Even further: most publicists still won’t deny you future junkets if you slag them on one press outing after another. I’ve seen it happen because I’ve done it to them. How is this different from movies, plays, concerts, etc? Film and theater critics get +1s to all of these things, but nobody gives a shit because, what, there’s less cash on the line? Complete and utter bullshit.
Every major travel mag sends writers to places where they get free services. It’s not quite a junket when you’re only sending one writer, but it’s the same thing in principle. You go to a big fancy hotel, and the big fancy hotel gives you accommodations for free. (There are junkets too, but travel writers with regular gigs generally don’t want to do the same story that’s been exposed to thirty other writers.)
I’m sure it’s a problem with some writers who use that advantage to fund an extravagant lifestyle they couldn’t otherwise afford (and tend to give subjects good coverage as encouragement) but on other hand, if travel mags have to pay market rates to send writers to five star hotels in far flung destinations, it probably wouldn’t be financially tenable to run a real travel magazine. They’re all struggling as it is.
I think writers (travel or otherwise) should disclose when they get free services in articles where they’re writing about said services, but I’m not sure it’s realistic for anyone but the Times (whose travel section is completely dispensable) to nix junkets altogether.
And for what it’s worth: I’ve never been on a junket. (And I get pitched them pretty regularly.)
via fek
