Hotspot Advertising

Advertising on hotspot networks enables marketers to target audiences out of home and office. Learn more about this from an AnchorFree VP.

As internet advertising spending continues to grow -- according to the IAB and PxC, projected U.S. online advertising spending is currently expected to hit $36.5 billion by 2011 -- advertisers are eager to find new ways to target their audiences and bring a more personalized experience to internet users. As such, traditional banner ads are being replaced with more engaging and interactive platforms that now include targeted content and even video.

Amidst all the projections of ad industry growth and expanding ad formats, an industry of companies is developing that seeks to unclutter the advertising space by targeting audiences in places they find themselves often -- hotels, restaurants, airports, coffee shops and the like. As consumers become increasingly mobile, better educated and more protective of their privacy than ever before, advertisers must innovate in their methods to bring unobtrusive and relevant messages in unique and effective ways.

Drivers of change
While companies like Microsoft are bringing advertising directly to mobile devices, others have found a way to bring advertisers access to a captive audience of out-of-home users through a new form of Hotspot advertising that effectively geo-targets consumers with 100 percent precision, wherever they may be. Such Hotspot ad networks work by injecting a thin messaging frame at the top of a user's browser, in turn offering consumers free or subsidized internet access and the third party venue with a share of the ad revenue. Additionally, advertisers get access to out-of-home broadband users for an average period of 60 minutes -- much more exposure than other, traditional forms of out-of-home advertising.

So what can consumers expect to see when logging into this form of ad-sponsored internet session at hotels, malls, coffee shops, restaurants, airports and other consumer venues across the country? Users are served with an ongoing "digital billboard" that is displayed at the top of their browser, running relevant advertising from companies such as Toyota, McDonald's, MLB, recent movies or concerts, and others.

Why, you might ask, is this offering appealing to both advertisers and consumers? Besides bringing relevant advertising to internet users that is targeted to their location and interests, a key thing to note is that Hotspot advertising does not interfere with a user's session, nor does it blast him/her with annoying pop ups that have nothing to do with their interests.

Hotspot advertising vs. traditional models
As a point of comparison, Hotspot advertising (over the course of a 60-minute internet session) equates to the same exposure as walking by a mall panel ad 720 times, reading the same print ad 180 times in a row or watching a TV commercial 120 times in an hour. The bottom line is that Hotspot advertising is a huge, yet for the most part, untapped opportunity for advertisers to speak directly to their customers in a format that is much more persistent and consistent than today's more traditional mediums.

The growing market for persistent hotspot advertising
As proof of consumer sentiment, in a survey my company conducted in September of more than 100 individuals at national coffee shop chains, hotels and book store chains throughout the Bay Area, 91 percent of respondents noted that they were aware of at least four free Hotspot venues near where they work and live. More than 90 percent responded they would view advertising in exchange for free Wi-Fi access. And, the majority of users picked the venue based on the offering of free access.

Further, it's worth noting that the majority of respondents were not willing to be presented with any advertising that overlaid or otherwise interrupted their experience, making this new form of online advertising an even more appealing alternative worth adopting.

This is exactly the sort of consumer feedback that is driving advertising innovation. Customers are willing to accept a branded advertising experience in exchange for more freedom and increased internet access points. Hotspot advertising is uniquely suited for an endless variety of industries -- from hotels looking to offer users free internet access while serving relevant ads that relate to their specific location, to malls and airports seeking to enhance the everyday individual's experience, to locally-based businesses simply looking to reach new users. The selling point for advertisers is that this new form of advertising is an invaluable and much more permeating way to reach the right audience at the right place and at the right time.

Mark Smith is executive vice president, strategy & products, AnchorFree. Read full bio.

Browser War Over Javascript?

New browser war brewing over JavaScript?

I’ve been getting lots of emails and calls on this, so I know that at least some developers care about the proposal for a new ECMAScript titled the ES4 proposal (PDF). I am still trying to figure out which side to take in this, but from what I’ve been able to learn there are a few sides to this.

1. Mozilla and other browser manufacturers who are trying to push a new version of JavaScript (er, ECMAScript) through the system.

2. Microsoft, who those browser companies see as dragging its feet. Chris Wilson, architect on the Internet Explorer team gives his side of the story. He also wrote a post on the IE team blog. I’ll just link to Chris Wilson’s stuff because he links to plenty of stuff on the other side so you can get up to date on what’s going on.

3. Web developers, who are scared that they are going to have to support yet another version of JavaScript and test their sites on yet another platform.

Where do you find yourself?

Google, last week, told me it was about to announce a ton of things for developers that would be based around JavaScript and CSS. I wonder what it thinks about this conversation?

I’d love to have developers on my show who can explain both sides of this argument to me and also explain what the new JavaScript will do for the Web and for end users, since that’s really who I care about. I don’t have a dog in this fight, so would love to give both sides equal time to explain what’s going on. Anyone game?

UPDATE: Brendan Eich, head of Mozilla, writes back to Chris Wilson about this issue.

Top Tech Strategies for 2008

Gartner Inc. has put "Green IT" at the top of its list of 10 strategic technologies for next year, and the research firm says that if businesses don't improve data center energy efficiency, the government may force them to do so.

But social networking technologies are also on the list, along with some further-off technological developments, such as server designs that use a resource-sharing approach called a computing fabric.

A strategic technology is something that may have an impact on a business. And impact could mean driving an investment or posing a threat, said David Cearley, a Gartner analyst. If your competitors adopt one of these technologies "does that put you at a competitive disadvantage?" he said at the Stamford, Conn.-based firm's ITexpo in Orlando.

Here's a look at Gartner's list:

1. Green IT. This is a path that more and more companies are taking as a socially responsible strategy. A green approach is multifaceted and can affect data center operations in a number of ways, such as moving workloads based on energy efficiency and using the most power-inefficient servers only at times of peak usage, said Carl Claunch, an analyst.

But data centers also face the threat of regulatory action to curb power usage. The problem, said Claunch, is you can't predict what may trigger regulation or when mandates will arrive.

"Some event somewhere, a popular movie, some shift in election politics, and suddenly you are forced to change dramatically and it comes with little warning," he said. "You need to be thinking what to do."

2. Unified communications. The move to unified communications systems is happening as the world shifts from analog to digital over IP networks. But it's not just the obvious things that will converge, such as telephony and messaging. Companies may make security videos part of this convergence, which may give businesses, for instance, new ways to analyze a retail outlet's traffic patterns. This video data would require a lot of storage, so using it in this way could prompt IT managers to introduce the security team to the networking group.

3. Business process management. This is not a technology, its a way of using technologies to enable companies to simulate, model and design the processes that run their businesses. A key trend is the evolution of the business process management suite, Cearley said. This may include, model-driven development, content and document management, collaboration capabilities, system connectivity, business intelligence activity monitoring and management, rules and systems management.

4. Metadata management. This is becoming important as companies integrate data -- for instance, customer and product data and warehouse data.

5. Virtualization. Virtualization technology is critical, but not just for consolidation; it also offers a way to mirror production systems for disaster recovery. In Gartner's view, Virtualization is now into its 2.0 version, as software vendors begin to ship their software in virtual machines with the operating system and needed middleware. This approach avoids the "deleterious effects of one piece of software on another," Claunch said.

6. Mashups. Mashup tools allow users to take things from multiple Web sites and combine them together to create a Web-centric composite application. "You want to start building mashability into everything you do," Cearley said.

7. The Web platform. This is the model for services in the future. An example, said Cearley, is the cloud computing announcement this week by Google Inc. and IBM, which are jointly offering a platform for use by universities for application development initiatives, including Web 2.0 projects. "Put this on your radar screen," he said.

8. Computing fabric. A server design that is still a work in progress, computing fabric involves treating memory, processors and I/O cards as a pooled resource instead of a fixed arrangement. Blade servers allow you to do some of this pooling with I/O, Claunch said. "Be aware of this, because blades are not the final step," he said.

9. Real World Web. This is the name of the computing experience made possible by ubiquitous access to networks of even-increasing bandwidth via mobile technologies. Thanks to the Real World Web, users can have ready access to all kinds of information, including travel information or the location of a jar of pickles in a grocery store.

10. Social software. Social software includes podcasts, blogs and wikis -- anything that fosters the development of social networks.

One IT manager at the session, Ted Stoddard, director of operations at Federal Signal Corp. in Oak Brook Ill., a company that makes security and safety products, said he suspects that many people, as he has, have already assembled their strategic plans for next year.

While some of the items on Gartner's list, such as virtualization, are part of his plan, he hasn't considered others, such as social networking technologies like blogs. Those are probably worth looking at, Stoddard said, "but there are more important things to work on now."

BEHAVIORAL MARKETING: IN FOCUS

Social media marketing's unfulfilled promise

Not long ago, MySpace announced it was going to use the personal details in members' profile pages and blogs to better target advertising on the social networking site. The information culled was in addition to users' registration data, potentially offering a powerful combination of demographic data and personal preferences, interests, likes and dislikes. But the promise of targeting advertising to brand advocates and potential customers based on social media consumption (and more importantly, production and participation) remains largely unfulfilled.

In theory, this type of targeting should be both highly effective and highly desirable to advertisers; yet, the reality is social media marketing is driven more by publishers' need to de-commodify their inventory and less by advertiser demand. Participation in social media remains unproven as a targeting metric. While the two are not mutually exclusive, behavioral targeting provides a more compelling solution to advertisers for finding consumers in non-contextually related inventory, at least for today.

Why does behavioral targeting trump social media? What are the barriers to a larger marketplace for social media as an advertising platform? Will marketer demand increase?

Advertisers are averse to new marketing platforms

It's no secret that social media holds potential as an advertising platform but is also fraught with difficulty. Social media such as blogs, social networking sites, social news and bookmarking sites have struggled to find a successful advertising-supported model. Much of the problem is related to advertiser reluctance to relinquish control. If most (or all) social media is consumer-generated, advertisers fear abdicating control to consumers, lest they appear with "offensive" content or, even worse, brand critics. Until advertisers become more comfortable with less control, or believe the assurances social media companies are making, demand for social media impressions will remain anemic. The biggest barrier to transforming social media into a marketing platform is its newness. Put simply, advertisers are risk-averse with new marketing platforms.

Social media's success is also its downfall

In some ways, social media is grappling with the same issues free web-based email and chat sites faced a decade ago. Sites such as Hotmail also had registration data, an almost unlimited number of impressions, significant reach and a strong brand name. Yet the value of the inventory was questionable. No one was signing up to refinance their mortgage while they were reading their email. Similarly, advertisers on social media sites today face the quandary of reaching a highly dedicated, highly desirable audience that generally refuses to be distracted by advertiser entreaties. Social media sites were created to meet the social, cultural and intellectual needs of consumers, not to meet the demands of marketers. The very thing that makes social media a success is the same thing that hampers it from becoming an effective marketing platform.

Social media are not commerce plays from the consumer perspective, and only a small part of the spectrum of social media is directed toward purchasing research. There is no natural affinity between advertiser and content on most social media sites, (and this is particularly true for social networks) since consumers, quite simply, are busy doing other things. Additionally, advertising on these platforms tends to be justifiably non-intrusive. The solution to this problem is behavioral targeting.

Publishers are not selling social media effectively

The problem with monetizing social media doesn't just rest with advertisers' lack of demand. Part of the problem is that there simply isn't a compelling social media marketing solution available yet. Social media, as a consumer-generated platform, doesn't have a sales force or a repping firm; at least not in the same way that behavioral targeting does with TACODA or Revenue Science. The world of social media consists essentially of an enormous scatter market. It is huge, unwieldy and difficult to productize as an advertising platform.

The large media companies with vast reserves of social media inventory, such as FOX Interactive Media, are still selling social media by channel or vertical, or by run-of-site or by dumping the remnant inventory into ad networks. For a company possibly valued at $10 billion, Facebook's revenue is still estimated to be just $150 million for 2007. Google, with social media properties such as YouTube and Blogger, could potentially mine social media as a marketing platform, yet the company is still selling most of its inventory as contextually targeted.

BT created expressly as marketing platform

There is a chicken-and-egg component to social media. Marketers and publishers have a vague sense that there is value to be mined from the information that can be gleaned from blogs, personal profiles, consumer-generated media, comments, product reviews, podcasts, social bookmarking and wikis. But no one has moved beyond that to convincingly productize that information.

Unlike social media, behavioral targeting is a marketing platform created expressly for advertisers. It is a solution generated to solve a problem and meet a market demand. Essentially, consumers do not generate enough premium contextual targeting opportunities. As a result, behavioral targeting is able to exploit additional inventory that might have been deemed less valuable to advertisers. In comparison to social media and consumer-generated content, behavioral targeting is a relatively mature marketplace.

BT and social media can work together

As mentioned previously, social media and behavioral targeting are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, social media should be a significant component of the range of behaviors catalogued by behavioral targeting vendors. Social activities are part of the universe of networks such as Tacoda and Revenue Science, but they are one part of the larger tapestry that inform patterns of consumer behavior.

There are companies, such as Lotame, that understand the need to overlay behavioral attributes and social media activities to create a compelling marketing solution. Traditional behavioral targeting tends to track passive consumption of media -- it's based on what consumers are looking at. A more comprehensive behavioral targeting solution will need to gather new types of data sets that track participation, engagement and involvement in ways that are unique to social media.

Similarly, the metrics used to evaluate success will need to evolve. For years now, the industry has been clamoring for better metrics than clickthrough and conversion rates. At the same time, engagement metrics are trumpeted as more relevant to marketers. The unique advertising environment of social media means marketers need to gauge success based on consumer intensity, interest level and duration, particularly as ads become richer.

Topic: Browsers

Firefox Coming To Your Phone
Erick Schonfeld
35 comments »

firefox.jpegGet ready to throw out that WAP browser on your mobile phone (if you haven’t already). The iPhone, with its fully-functioning Safari browser, showed us that mobile browsing need not be a compromise. Now, the folks at Mozilla are working on a mobile version of Firefox.

A Firefox Web browser already exists for the Nokia N800, but this effort will expand Firefox’s mobile reach to many more handsets, especially as they come standard with more memory. (64 MB of DRAM seems to be the minimum that will be required). Mobile Firefox won’t be available until next year, at the earliest. But just as on the desktop, it will be an open platform on top of which anyone can build add-on applications. And that’s good news for mobile computing.

The decision to throw Firefox into the mobile ring is just one more piece of evidence for something that is becoming increasingly clear: The phone is the computer.

As a Mac laptop user, I used Safari for years, until I switched to Firefox. At a certain point, it just eclipsed what I could do on Safari (primarily because of all the add-on applications that became available and the greater flexibility of the core browser). I expect the same thing will happen eventually in the mobile space—if Steve Jobs allows Firefox on the iPhone, that is.

But my guess is that he will have to because it will be available on other phones, and the iPhone will never be able to afford to be seen as lagging in the mobile browsing arena. Of course, this assumes that Firefox quickly will get to the point where it can provide a better mobile browsing experience than the mobile version of Safari. But judging by history, I think it will.

Topic: Advertising

Published: October 10, 2007
One ad network is not the answer
John Ardis

ValueClick's VP of corporate strategy takes issue with the assertion that working with more than one network is a waste of time.

Much has been written about behavioral targeting, and the information about the technique seems to be proliferating as it gains in popularity. Unfortunately, as tends to happen with each exciting new development in marketing, the resultant flood of information often brings more confusion than clarity.

Such was the case with the recent article in iMedia Connection by Advertising.com's Brent Halliburton regarding behavioral targeting. To summarize the piece, Mr. Halliburton suggested that if you go with the largest display ad network there was no need to use any other networks or properties because of audience overlap. That's it -- it's that simple -- just always go with the biggest. At best, this rationale is naïve, and at worst it's deceptive and irresponsible.

In a stunning oversimplification of a complex issue, the article in essence refuted the approach that direct response marketers have refined over decades; the recognition that there are no absolutes, no guarantees, and that you must test to prove.

To follow Advertising.com's recommendation to its logical conclusion, a marketer or agency should also never test direct mail or email lists; rather, he should just go with the biggest one because, as we all know, everyone has all the same names. Also, since many consumers use multiple search engines, marketers should only use Google since it's the biggest. Or since Yahoo! is the largest portal, marketers should only buy media with it (I wonder how Advertising.com's parent company TimeWarner/AOL would like those last two assertions!). The flaw in this thinking can be used in every marketing channel, both online and offline. The fact is, bigger is only better if it can provide both the scale and the desired results, and a marketer won't know that until it is tested.

Don't get me wrong: reach is important. Indeed, ValueClick Media takes great pride in having the largest reach of all independent ad networks. But in reality, reach is only one component of a successful campaign. Advertising.com rightly notes that as ad networks have grown, a substantial number of the same visitors appear across multiple networks over the course of a month. However, each network is composed of different combinations of websites, and because every network's composition is different, and each network's capabilities are different (more about this below), each produces different results for different marketers.

More importantly, each network only sees a fraction of each visitor's total monthly internet activity. Since most networks see a large percentage of their visitors only once each month, intelligent marketers try to reach their audience multiple times, engaging multiple networks, portals and solo media properties. And Advertising.com's stated concern regarding frequency capping across placements has been easily and inexpensively accommodated for years now via third-party ad servers (which also provides the benefit of consistency of serving and tracking as well as enhanced reporting and other extras).

All effective advertising -- behavioral targeting included -- seeks to reach the target audience the optimal number of times across the optimal placements in the optimal channel mix to affect the desired result, which is significantly more complicated than simply making a placement on the largest-reach property.

In addition to the errant notion that unique reach is all that matters, Advertising.com's approach contains another fundamental error: It assumes that all other components of campaign execution outside of reach are equal. Besides insulting the intelligence of marketers and agencies with this reasoning, this viewpoint also pales in light of the overwhelming evidence against it. For instance, the following is just a partial list of key differentiators between ad networks (as well as portals and solo media properties) that intelligent marketers compare before placing a buy:

• Targeting logic: While most networks offer similar targeting options (e.g., demographic, geographical, daypart, et cetera), the logic within their targeting engines varies greatly. For instance, some context-focused networks serve ads based on guaranteed delivery. Thus, even if the ad is not relevant to a particular visitor, to meet their delivery quota they decide to show it anyway. The best targeting engines base their decision on relevancy of the creative to each visitor. 
  


• Optimization logic and frequency: The ability to refine a campaign intra-flight, the data and logic used to do so, and the speed with which this can occur needs to be taken into consideration. For instance, some networks process data only once a day, which means they are slower to improve than those networks that process data at least once an hour.
  



• Transparency: This is a hot topic these days, as networks continue to evolve and as large brands continue shifting budgets to the online channel. There is a wide disparity between networks as to the degree of site revelation they provide to marketers.
  


• Pricing model and pricing level: CPM vs. CPC vs. CPA is certainly an important aspect of a network buy that varies greatly across networks, as well as the actual level of the price itself within those pricing models. Ultimately, as noted above, the flip side of this coin is the ROI that the program achieves.


• Service: Another important consideration when choosing network partners is the customer service you will receive. We've all had occasions in which we've bought something from the biggest, most well-known provider of something, only to be greatly disappointed at being treated like a number. Size and service have no direct correlation. For instance, an important question to ask your network partner is how fast it can make a change in its system once a campaign has begun delivering. Many networks take longer than 24 hours to make the requested change to a live campaign, which may not seem like a long time but it results in wasted media dollars.


• Advanced capabilities: Do the networks being considered have additional, proprietary data they can apply to further enhance your behavioral targeting? Do they offer full rich media and/or video advertising capabilities? Can they accommodate highly personalized messaging that can be generated by compiling all available data on each consumer in real-time? These and many more capabilities further separate networks and other properties from each other, and can make or break a campaign.

Ultimately, marketers don't care if you're the biggest. They care if you're the best, which is determined by your ability to solve their marketing challenges to their satisfaction. This is accomplished by a continuous cycle of testing, learning and refining. To suggest otherwise, as Advertising.com does, is to suggest that Behavioral Targeting for Dummies is the right approach. To change that to Behavioral Targeting for Savvy Marketers, what is needed is replacing sales spin with sensible education, sound marketing strategy and, of course, performance.

John Ardis is vice president, corporate strategy for ValueClick Inc. Read full bio.

Topic: Behavioral Targeting

Published: October 08, 2007
The missing link in the behavioral equation
By Dilip DaSilva
More by this Author


Advanced analytics hold new promise for optimizing the latest wave of targeting and delivery innovations for your brand. Exponential Inc.'s CEO explains.

Behavioral targeting is this season's new black. Not a day goes by when there is not at least one article on the subject of behavioral targeting, and TACODA's recent acquisition by AOL was another big step in legitimizing this approach to targeting users online.

Regardless of all the hype, behavioral is proving itself as an approach that can work consistently for advertisers. Yet, some advertisers have had frustrating experiences, and others are simply overwhelmed by the complexity of the different vendor offerings.

At the heart of the discussion about behavioral targeting is the very promise of online marketing: the ability to target a user in the most receptive moment with a marketing message. Yet the discussion about behavioral reduces the online marketing equation to one dimension: purchase and interest behaviors. While these are powerful indicators, they are just a part of the equation, and they leave aside several important considerations.

We are entering an unprecedented period in our evolution as an industry. Marketers can now target their online advertising with greater precision than with any other medium. Specifically, advertisers can target people online anonymously based on the type, recency and frequency of content they consume; by demographics and psychographics of their audience; by interest data submitted to a website, even by offline purchase behavior and a host of other variables.

Here is a real example of how an employment advertiser can make combined use of these innovations in targeting and delivery. Let's say this national advertiser wants to leverage the new engineering job listings that are coming into its database all the time and target them to the best possible candidates. Behavioral and predictive technologies can identify -- from job site URLs, search terms and areas on sites where a user might be spending time -- users that are searching for a new technology job. Semantic analysis of websites can offer specific page topics to target, for example, "Java" or "Visual Basic" programming languages. IP addresses and publisher-provided, anonymous user data give additional opportunities to select only relevant job offers for a user in a particular geography. Wrapping all these elements together, an advertiser could then use a customizable ad unit to dynamically deliver highly targeted job listings directly from its database to a qualified candidate, in a relevant environment.

At the end of the day, advertisers do not care about how one technology provider characterizes one audience segment vs. another. Indeed, advertisers are frustrated by the needless complexity of different names and segments and by conversations about data; all they want is for their campaigns to succeed in delivering their objectives, be it specific performance or a shift in attitudinal brand metrics.

Advanced analytics can provide important insights into which audiences are responding to an advertiser's message, be it specific performance or a shift in attitudinal brand metrics. These insights can then be used to refine the message as well as improve the targeting of offline media. Advanced optimization can automatically shift inventory to the areas online that respond to an advertiser's offering. Instead of advertisers paying to test out clusters, optimization technology automatically finds the clusters that work.

Finally, ad unit innovations allow for the realization of one-to-one marketing by making it easy to customize the message for every audience cluster. With a simple database and template-driven creative, advertisers can display potentially thousands of different creative campaigns corresponding to different audience clusters.

Since the dark days of the dotcom bust, we have come a long way towards building a better solution for both advertisers and publishers, and we are seeing the fruits or our labor. Advertisers now have high quality, safe and transparent places to advertise online, and can apply the many different types of information they know about their audience to target their campaigns. The real value add in online targeting comes from combining many different attributes so that an advertiser gets a more precisely targeted campaign, with substantial reach and with less waste.

Dilip DaSilva is president and CEO of Exponential, Inc.

Topic: User Experience

This may or may not contribute to the "coolness" factors we're looking for.

Topic: Advertising's (Non)effectiveness

Zach's: Somewhere towards the bottom of the article, Manners talks about "banner blindness". I know I have banner blindness and I wonder how many other consumers do the same thing: navigate the web oblivious to or, worse, annoyed by the myriad of advertisements in their path.

Socialized Media

by Tim Manners

In the mad rush to turn every digital dot in America into an advertising message, we forgot about the most important thing. The most important thing is, what's the point?

Simon Uwins, chief marketing officer of Tesco's Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, nails it in the current issue of The Hub: "Marketers are creating more and more different types of media," he says. "And yet consumers are increasingly fed up with being bombarded by all these media."

That disconnect shows up in sharp relief everywhere we go -- online, offline, in-home, out-of-home, at the store. It's been estimated that the average consumer is exposed to something like 7,000 media messages a day … but only absorbs seven. "It's an interesting problem the industry has," says Simon.

Yes, indeed it is. It's almost comical sometimes, too. In New York City, for instance, where just about everybody carries a cell phone and just about nobody uses pay phones anymore, the number of phone-kiosks is on the rise. Not only that, but the City is moving kiosks from alongside buildings to curbside where they are more readily noticed.

Why? Because advertisers see phone-kiosks as a cheap, if not cheerful, medium through which to spread their messages. The City is only to happy to play along because, according to a story in The New York Times, phone-kiosks generate some $62 million a year in media revenues, of which the City enjoys almost $14 million. That's triple the revenue the City generates from phone calls.

Maybe the City should consider converting the phone booths into latrines. Not only would they be useful, they would double the amount of media space. Plus the medium would at least match the message.

New York City's example would be funny, except that it is emblematic of the mentality that pervades the media business. The idea that anything can be an advertising medium has always been an article of faith in the marketing business. You can't even peel a banana or crack an egg without being advertised to anymore.

Soon, you won't be able to enjoy some the refreshingly ad-free fun on the Internet, either. Take widgets, for example. Widgets are those little "buttons" you see all over the web that you can download and embed on your Facebook page. You might have a widget that keeps you posted on the weather, on sports, stocks or news headlines.

The most popular widget today can be found on Slide.com, whose widget lets you create slideshows of friends, family, vacations -- whatever. The question, of course, is how to monetize this, and Slide.com's founder, Max Levchin, thinks he has the answer.

As reported in Fortune, Max's big idea is to, yes, “embed advertising” around these slideshows. He’s already signed up big brands such as Paramount Pictures, AT&T Wireless, and Discovery Channel for the right to offer users the option to “decorate their slideshows with logos, props and other branded elements. A fan of Discovery’s new survival show, for example, could add a sword with the show’s logo to his photos.”

Will anyone actually do that? Max thinks they will: “There are definitely brands that have proven to be extremely successful at connecting with their users,” he says. He hopes that Slide.com is a killer app “for the $20 billion online-advertising industry,` “which doesn’t work very well” because, you know, most people have "banner blindness" (that is, we've trained ourselves to ignore ads on the Web).

Max co-founded PayPal, so maybe he's onto something. But all he's really doing is applying old thinking to a new medium. The Internet has so much more potential than that, if only we free ourselves from the idea that it is just another medium for messages, like television, radio and print.

That message came through loud and clear in a recent survey of 500 marketers conducted by Reveries.com about the potential of online social networks as a marketing medium. A solid majority termed that potential as either big (39%) or huge (18.4%). However, several respondents also warned against too much intrusion by marketers, especially with advertising and other traditional marketing techniques.

As one respondent put it: "If you sell (unless you are a very cool web app), you lose. Don't sell. As a marketer: network. Help people. Advise. Create value and add to the conversation."

Nobody has really figured out how to do that yet. But it's worth considering the possibility that smart marketers won't even attempt to be part of the conversation, much less interrupt it. It could be that the real marketing potential of online social networks is listening, not talking.

The point is, if we're not helping people live better lives, we are not helping ourselves. If all we are doing is interrupting people who don't have time for interruptions, we can't expect their attention. If all we are doing is annoying people who have zero tolerance for annoyance, we can't earn their trust.

If all we are doing is pelting people with endlessly irrelevant messages, we can't claim their loyalty. And if we can't claim their loyalty, we don't have a prayer of a positive return-on-investment.

We can run whatever media-mix model we like, but all we're likely to achieve is a marginal improvement on what is otherwise an unmistakable downward spiral of failure.

We can hope that Tesco will set a fine example when it starts opening its Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market stores later this year. Based on what Simon Uwins says, we can expect a brand experience that is free of irrelevant ad messages and chock full of satisfied needs.

If Tesco actually walks that talk, it will roll over Wal-Mart, Whole Foods -- maybe even Trader Joe's -- in record time. It will do so by doing what good marketers have always done -- listening more than talking, and delivering more than advertising.

The medium is no longer the message. It is the promise. The question is, can we keep it?

Topic: Mobile Advertising

DoubleClick Expands Mobile Ads

DoubleClick Inc. is expanding its advertising services for mobile phones, it announced Monday, as it continues waiting to find out if Google Inc.'s attempt to buy it will pass muster with regulators.

DoubleClick's media company customers can now sell and manage advertisements online and on mobile phones. The new capability is integrated into DoubleClick's publishing service so that publishers can schedule mobile advertisements in the same way that they currently deliver other online ads, it said.

DoubleClick's technology delivers ads that will fit the screen size and capabilities of individual phones, the company said.

Most of the online advertising leaders, including Google, have increasingly focused on the potential of delivering advertisements to mobile phones. Last week Google launched AdSense for Mobile so that developers of mobile Web pages can include Google ads on their sites. Google also has AdWords for Mobile, which allows advertisers to place ads that mobile users see when they use Google search.

Google announced in April its intention to buy DoubleClick for US$3.1 billion. However, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee are investigating the planned acquisition. Privacy groups and Google competitors including Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have raised concerns about the effects of such a merger on competition and user privacy.

While that battle goes on, Google and its competitors continue to develop their mobile advertising capabilities. AOL LLC earlier this year bought Third Screen Media Inc., a company that operates a mobile advertising platform. Microsoft this year bought ScreenTonic SA, a company that delivers location-based ads to mobile phones. In addition, Yahoo launched its mobile advertising network in March.

The online giants face competition from traditional mobile companies, such as Nokia Corp., which recently acquired mobile advertising company Enpocket.

The interest in mobile advertising is fueled by expectations of significant growth. While spending on mobile search and display ads this year should reach around $32.2 million, by 2012 it will hit $1.4 billion, according to a recent report from the Kelsey Group.