Archive for January, 2009

We’ve all been thinking it;

WHEN IS MOBILE GOING TO HIT?!

I’ve gone back and forth on this one for awhile now. My gut instinct was that mobile would never become a strong category because it’s interruption based, and I’d always felt like adverts on my phone were a little bit invasive. But I’ve been seeing some products that have converted my view. Let’s take a look.
Here comes mobile.
They know where you are. Exactly where you are. It’s a scary prospect. And they ping you constantly. Text messages, pre-roll on web pages that already load deathly slow. More text messages. Banner that consumes half the page. More text messages.
BUT, here’s the beauty of mobile; good mobile advertising is permission based. There is enormous power in geo-targeting and it’s clearly beneficial to the consumer. I love walking past a restaurant and having a coupon pop up on my phone. That will drive an acquisition. It’s a strong call to action because you’re at the transaction point and you’ve already opted in. All marketers need to do is tell you.
Which brings me to my first ever company of the week! Every week henceforth I shall nominate a company of the week. All that’s required is an innovative product or funky marketing ploy.

MCLEAN, Va. – Mobile Posse, Inc., a leading provider of content and advertising delivery solutions for mobile, today announced the launch of an innovative sales promotion for agencies and brands looking to extend their advertising campaigns to mobile. Mobile Posse’s “Double-Digits Pledge” allows advertisers to trial idle screen advertising risk-free. Participating advertisers are guaranteed a minimum 10% click-through-rate (CTR) on campaigns delivered via the Mobile Posse platform. Advertising fees for ads that do not generate the promised consumer response will be fully refunded to the advertiser, no strings attached.

Got this from Ad Ops Online
Beautiful.
Mobile Posse gets this weeks nomination because they have an innovative product (idle screen advertising – it means what it sounds like) that both eliminates the interruption factor while maximizing the value of mobile adverts. They also get kudos for a courageous marketing move – letting marketers use the platform free with a 10% CTR guarantee. They’re either nuts, or they’ve got something to offer. Check out www.MobilePosse.com.
I’m taking nominations for next weeks contest now! Drop me a line at sean@aclion.com!

Got to this post from Eric Friedman at Marketing.fm and thought it was worth re-posting in full.
The bottom line is cliched but true: Chase your dreams!
“Your idea sucks, now go do it anyway”
“My idea isn’t good enough yet” explained a friend who is thinking of starting his own company. He was waiting for the idea to be completely fleshed our before taking the leap.
Here’s a newsflash: Your idea probably sucks, and it doesn’t matter because your business will probably turn out to be something completely different.
Sounds wrong? Let’s see.
In 1998, a company received $4.8 million in funding to “beam money between Palm Pilots.” I’ll code-name this product: MoneyBeamer.
Here’s the pitch. Alice wants to give Bob some money, but Alice doesn’t have cash or her checkbook. There’s no ATM around. Both Alice and Bob do own palm pilots and they both previously installed MoneyBeamer and, despite having forgotten all their normal modes of money transfer, they did remember to bring their palm pilots. MoneyBeamer will allow Alice to send money to Bob. Well actually it won’t, but it will remember that Alice wants to send Bob money, and once Alice gets back home and connects her Palm Pilot with her computer, and after she dials up to the Internet, MoneyBeamer will contact a server and transfer the money, provided of course that Alice has the money and didn’t secretly change her mind in the meantime.
Would you have invested in them? Not with an idea like that. You’d be wrong though — it was PayPal. Their work with encryption was combined with an idea for a consumer-targeted on-line banking system made it the easiest way to send money by email. They were sold to eBay for $1.3 billion. Today they process $2,000 in payments every second.
….
I’m sure you won’t recognize this web-based sensation:
This is Game Neverending: An in-browser multi-player on-line game “with no way to win, nor any definition of success.” (Sounds like a lot of Web 2.0 companies to me.) It never saw the light of day.
What was most interesting (to its alpha testers) was that people could share game objects by dragging them into chat windows. They saw this as a useful enhancement to chat applications in general, so as plans for the game fizzled out the engineers created a Flash application for real-time chat plus file-sharing with a particular emphasis on image-sharing.
Unfortunately the Flash application was only real-time — your pictures didn’t stick around when you closed it. And this was fatal because it turns out people were interested in the sharing part more than the real-time part. So in yet another upheaval they rewrote the Flash application as a regular website and lo, Flickr was born. Now it’s the largest photo-sharing site in the world with 3 billion photos and 5,000 more uploaded every minute.
….
Of course a rant like this wouldn’t be complete without self-deprecation, so let’s accompany the Ghost of Christmas Past into the annals of my own company, Smart Bear. My first idea was a product called Code Historian; it could dig through the history of a file and show you what changed. Accurate name, but turns out to be almost useless.
Like an adolescent, the company went through many embarrassing stages (forgive the broken images, ’tis the way of the Way Back Machine):
1. Mar 24, 2003: Hideous. “Do one thing and do it poorly.”
2. Dec 22, 2003: Fugly. “Three products… is that enough for a Suite?”
3. Oct 10, 2004: Lame. “Everything above the fold, most expensive first.”
4. Jan 11, 2006: Getting there. “You really need a graphic designer. No, really.”
5. Sep 10, 2007: Ain’t bad. “At least you admit ‘code review’ is all that matters.”
6. Present day: Nice. “Hey, where did those other products go?”
At one point we were selling six different tools; the only one that mattered in the end was Code Reviewer. Perhaps a screenshot will make this clear:
The point of all this isn’t to berate anyone for their crappy ideas. In fact, just the opposite — the point is that it doesn’t matter what your first idea is. First, it’s probably wrong. Second, the only way to find the right one is to try the wrong one and see what happens. You won’t find it by fiddling around with PowerPoint slides and Photoshop mock-ups.
So get out there and make some mistakes! As Neil Davidson said recently:
You don’t need stratospheric growth and a billion-dollar addressable market to bootstrap a software company. A $50,000 market opportunity is enough to get you off the ground — once you get started you’ll figure out the rest.
(Neil is the co-founder of Red Gate. It started as yet-another-online-bug-tracking-system that no one cared about but is now a popular purveyor of fine SQL database tools with 95,000 customers to their credit.)

I regularly check in on the Online Advertising Professionals Group on Linkedin to see what’s going on in our world, but I’ve never posted before. However, I came across this question by Brandon Desch, HR at Adbrite and thought I had to respond. See below: What do you think? How would you feel about having a commission only job? Would love to hear your responses!
From Brandon:
Hiring “commission-only” ad sales professionals
AdBrite is looking to add commission-only sales professionals to our team in the greater metropolitan locations: NY, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, LA, San Francisco. These folks will sell online advertising within our performance-based network. Commission rate is 10% on new business (all business is new for 6 months), and 5% for accounts that have been spending for > 6months. $2M in recognized revenue is what we see from strong performers.
Interested in peoples’ opinions of this structure, and would welcome discussions with folks looking for an ad sales role.
Thanks,
Brandon
Here’s my response:
Hi Brandon,
I’m pretty much inclined to agree with all the folks here, with some additions. AC Lion has been placing sales people at online companies for the past 12 years (no worries, this isn’t a pitch), so we’ve pretty much seen it all at this point. While you may be able to get folks to agree to a commission only structure, you’re leaving yourself vulnerable on several points. These are some of the issues we’ve seen with non-standard packages.
* RETENTION: Keeping your employees will be a major issue – even the best sales people prefer some sort of guaranteed income
* COMMISSION: 10% is competitive, but probably not competitive enough to get top performers to leave jobs with $100k+ salaries and double up backends. A $2million quota translates into a $200k job, which is not that hard to get in online media sales
* CONTROL/ MANAGEMENT: An employee without a base doesn’t owe you anything. They won’t feel as compelled to respond to management directives, come to meetings, or show up to the office every day. Managing sales people is difficult enough, factor in lack of incentives and it could get pretty messy.
*COST OF HIRE: It’s an irony of a commission only role, but definitely a reality. Cost of hire goes up. When sales people are commission only, hiring managers tend to loosen up on their hiring and are quicker to pull the trigger. Non-performers, or poor performers, calling on potential clients can end up doing more damage to your biz. High turnover for AdBrite will be noticed by clients and it will make them doubt your services.
Feel free to drop me a line to discuss in greater detail. I’d be curious to see which direction you end up going in.
Good luck on the search!
Sean
www.aclion.com
UPDATE:
Got this response from Brandon today (1/8/09) and he agreed to let me share it.
Hi Sean… I agree with all of your points. I neglected to mention in my original post that we provide a nominal monthly draw (just a bit over $2k), full healthcare coverage (employees to contribute to the monthly premium), and stock options. The package is designed to have the sales folks feel tied to the organization, but give them the autonomy and accountability to drive sales.
As for turnover, that is something we’re monitoring closely. There is risk, you are correct. We’re also maintaining a pretty thorough screening/interview process and not lowering our standards much as we do recognize the cost associated with bringing folks on, helping them get ramped, etc.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Bd
___________
Here are my follow up thoughts……….
Let’s see what happens!
Keep me posted Brandon.

Well, no, it isn’t. I’m working on a ‘Job Hunters Anonymous’ 12 Step Guide to Non-Anonymous Job Hunting.
Or something like that.
Anyway, came across a few blogs on interviewing at new media companies (very different from interviewing at old media companies)
Here are a few tasty morsels (or nuggets?)
“Dress Code:
There can be none. I want to show up in shorts or a basketball jersey, or have my tattoos be visable, it shouldnt matter. After all, are you hiring me for my looks or for my production?”
From http://learntoduck.com/business/hire-me
Or I really like this one:
“What are people’s misconceptions of you?
This is almost a trick question. It’s not intended as a trick, but nearly everyone gets stumped by it. I think its a critical competency for any successful executive to have a good degree of self-awareness in how others perceive them and what their own tendencies are. The only way to authentically answer this one is to actually know the answer.”
Brought to you by http://walterknapp.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/12/a-couple-of-thoughts-about-interviews.html
I’ll post more as I come across them.
Anyone have any good ones they’d like to share…