Month: February 2003

An online survey of the brand preferences of readers of a branding site claims Google is the top global brand, beating out Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Nike, and Nokia. What was remarkable was how many references (CBS Marketwatch, Internetnews.com, Toronto Globe & Mail, UPI, The NYTimes’ Boston.com and Reuters) I keep seeing to this awful piece of fake research.

There’s a kernal of truth that makes this story popular. Google is an important brand (as are Yahoo, Amazon, and Starbucks) that achieved legendary status without advertising. Outside of the realm of consumer packaged goods, the role of advertising compared to actual product execution in building a brand is negligible. We forgot this important lesson during the Bubble.

On the other hand, this story, the forehead advertising story, and the success of Krispy Kreme demonstrate that a little clever hype is often an acceptable substitute for quality.

Fifteen percent of marketing emails don’t reach their destination.

This researcher is mum on the reasons, but you have to believe that spam filters play a role.

How many permission-based emails don’t get read because they’re mistaken for spam?

When will the direct marketing industry realize that it is the biggest victim of spam?

Clay Shirky’s latest essay– Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality–has everyone talking. I think it’s brilliant, probably because it mathematically confirms my prejudices.

Clay says that the popularity of web sites is distributed according to a power low (see the charts on his site). You should also read Jason Kottke’s analysis of this. There are a lot of great comments attached to his analysis. What’s weird and important about this is that the resulting curve is self-similar: it’s true for a subset of sites or for the pages on a particular site.

I’ve been saying for a long time that there are two Webs: the big-money Web and the “some guy with a web site” Web. The future belongs to both. The sites in the middle who don’t have a clearly defined audience are…doomed. Their cost structure looks a lot like the big-money Web, but their audiences are smaller by orders of magnitude. The little guys publish for other reasons. With rare exceptions, they don’t plan to make money from their site. They publish online in support of their offline activities.

Clay goes on to use this analysis to argue that there is no blogocracy of top bloggers. The distribution is too even for there to be an exclusive club. There is some underlying law–although clearly the early bloggers and their friends have some help.

He doesn’t offer an explanation for the power law, and there seems to be signicant debate on the nature of the underlying mechanism. But its a very common phenomenon in a lot of human endeavor. I’ve been trying to reason out what this means for online publishers. Here are some ideas:

• Success on the Web depends on ruthless focus on a target market.
• If you’re going after a much-larger competitor, you must have a well-defined market segment where you know you can beat the.
• You can’t survive as a mid-sized player.
• Don’t try to broaden your market just to get someone else’s low-hanging fruit. You also broaden your competition.

What I’m still puzzling over is whether this implies that it’s simply impossible for middle-market information sites to make money, either on advertising or subscriptions.

The real problem with the ad market right now is uncertainty. No one wants to be the first to bet that the economy is going to recover this year. Until there is a clear signal that the economy is on the mend, the advertising market will be weak and unpredictable.

I strongly recommend getting Emarketer’s free study and forecast of online and offline ad spending. Emarketer does a great job of pulling together estimates and forecasts of advertising from lots of different sources. I spent a lot of time recently looking for ad forecasts and I wish I had known about this study then.

I’d feel a lot more comfortable about the economy and the ad market if we could point to a single reason for optimism other than Bush’s so-called recovery plan or the statement “surely we’ve hit bottom by now.”