Burt blog

Exchange Wire, leading online publication that tracks data driven display in online advertising, media buying trends and the advertising technology industry in Europe and Asia Pacific will be holding a premiering ATS Stockholm event at the end of this month.

Gustav von Sydow will be one of the speakers at this very first Nordic all day event on data-driven advertising.

It seems as if all really successful, large scale advertising formats have three things in common. These rules apply to everything from the beautiful pages of *Vogue Magazine* to the relevant sponsored links at *Google.com*:

1. The format is a native, natural part of the experience

2. The format is simple enough for anyone to understand

3. The format is consistent across properties and over time

Some thoughts on advertising in social media from our CEO Gustav von Sydow:

Just finished reading a GigaOM article on the value of social ads (or lack thereof). Typical quotes being:

The point is that Facebook is a social medium, not an advertising one, like search or display. It certainly is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful branding medium. It is, however, a word of mouth or PR medium. You interrupt social conversations with commercial messages at your peril.

and

Can Facebook and/or Twitter manage to prove that social advertising isn’t an oxymoron, but a crucial new way of getting your message to potential customers? Billions of dollars in market value are riding on that question.

So. It seems our industry is finally converging around the idea that social media in it’s current form is sort of like e-mail, telephone, word-of-mouth, “buzz” and PR, but more structured, shapeshifted into one experience and put on steroids. At least in the context of marketing, and especially the outbound variety. Identification, payment, customer service, consumer research etc. is obviously a whole other deal.

Tomorrow I’ll be holding a 2 hour workshop at Cannes Lions, the world’s biggest advertising festival where 25 000 delegates from 90 countries spend a week on the french riviera doing high fives over the year that just went by and worrying about the next.

The topic of my talk is “Agile advertising”. For you startup geeks out there I guess you can say I’m giving advertising the “lean startup” treatment. For those of you with real jobs, I’ll be talking about how we can reduce the risk and increase our output for campaigns where  media fragmentization and hyper competition are significant factors.

This is the first in a series of blog posts on online advertising metrics.

Agreement on what different metrics mean is key to put them to productive use. We are currently in the middle of writing up a dictionary for Rich, so that our users can better understand what they are looking at and make easier for them learn how to improve. But getting a proper definition of metrics is not easy, and looking at how other companies use their metrics is not much help.

Last year we presented Copybox at Techcrunch50. But so far, the number of people we’ve let on is very limited. Partly because Jacob Nielsen tells us to, but mostly because we’re the target audience ourselves and still know plenty of stuff that need fixing. Also, since the economy went south we’ve had to focus most of our limited resources on Rich and other platform part of our products that generates enough money for us to stay in business.

Chris Dixon’s blog has lately emerged as one of the best blogs we read. Lately Chris’ posts has been a lot about early stage funding - something we think a lot about. More recently Chris has been talking about business models, and more specifically advertising based business models.

This post discusses that advertising money is spent where people spend their time. Reach a huge audience and sell your advertising spots expensively. The biggest events gets the most expensive advertising spots: CPM for the Superbowl is closing on $35, a 50% - 100% premium depending on how you measure.