AAN Association of Alternative Newsmedia

The Media Oxpecker: Advertising 'On Demand'

august 31, 2012 12:04 pm

Every week we round up industry news you may have missed.

What common problem do Facebook, Groupon, and Yahoo all share? "All three companies monetize their users via 'Demand Generation' advertising," says Nat Kausik:
Demand generation, as the name implies, is when the advertiser pushes a product or a service offering at the user in order to create demand ... The real problem is that Demand Generation is not a viable format for building a profitable business on the Internet, and is in secular but permanent decline. Each screen has hundreds of links screaming for the user’s attention. The user will only look at things that are relevant to them, and will only click on those links that promise substantial value. Such relevance and value is possible primarily in Demand Fulfillment, when the user has an explicit need and is in the process of fulfilling that need.

Kausik says that companies like Google, Amazon, and eBay — where users typically enter in a search term to find what they're looking for — are primarily in the "demand fulfillment" business and are thus better positioned for the future.

Eric Koester says the web "check in" is maturing into something useful for marketers:
I've finally come around to recognize the real power of location is from the combination of location, history and social context. Those three elements together have grown to create a powerful fabric Foursquare is working to leverage. In addition, Facebook (and, to a lesser extent, Twitter) hold location-based data that could be utilized for its users base.

Yes, the check-in is starting to grow up. And now marketers, retailers and businesses are realizing there is a promise of something great in its application: the rise of geo-marketing, geo-social marketing and loyalty marketing. And it's this reason why the fortunes may be turning for the check-in.
Twitter is giving advertisers the ability to target users based on their interests:
Its new product, which was beta-tested by brands including Walgreens but launches today, consists of about 350 specific interests in 25 broad categories. Those categories are populated with users based on the content of their tweets (but only retweets or mentions that Twitter classifies as an "engagement"), whom they follow, and Twitter's own black-box algorithms that can make educated guesses about user interests, according to head of product marketing Guy Yalif.

James Fallows says the mainstream media is finally adjusting to the "post-truth age" and calling out the political campaigns when they flat out lie:
Reporters are happiest, safest-feeling, and most comfortable when in the mode of he-said, she-said. "The president's critics claim that he was born in Kenya; administration spokesmen deny the charge." But when significant political players are willing to say things that flat-out are not true -- and when they're not slowed down by demonstrations of their claims' falseness -- then reporters who stick to he-said, she-said become accessories to deception.
Gawker's Hamilton Nolan channels his inner Thomas Friedman in a series of dispatches from the RNC in Tampa.

Are you too drunk to hit publish on that blog post? A sobriety check courtesy of Ann Freidman.

A profile of the Hawaii Independent, "a profitable co-op rooted in the community ... like the Green Bay Packers."

Craigslist is testing embedded maps on housing ads in San Francisco and Portland reports TPM's Carl Franzen.

And finally, "Our New Shrines," by Craig Mod, who writes, "The most important asset of a contemporary publisher is strong community. What if you focused on that, first?"