Extending the digital marketing investment and IPO streak we called back in December, today the Wall Street Journal reports that IBM will acquire Unica for $480M.
Web analytics stalwart Webtrends is increasing its ability to measure traffic from Facebook users and iPhone owners with the acquisition of app platform provider Transpond. They see the acquisition as a complement to their purchase of landing-page optimizer Widemile (now Webtrends Optimize).
The Bay Area start-up employs 10, and provides a suite of software-as-a-service tools that lets firms create Social and Mobile apps to extend their market reach. Transpond will be known as Webtrends Apps.
Look around: These *are* amazing times. Who would imagine, in the “Summer of the Great Recession,“ that a digital content start-up and a phone company whose majority of customers pay nothing would be hot IPO news. But that’s the point. These two companies shift the status away from the status quo. And they’re heating up August, which is usually a quiet investment month.
Today Skype announced it would seek up to $100 million in its Initial Public Offiering (IPO). This comes on the heels of last week’s S1 filing that content producer Demand Media seeks to raise $125 million. (You may recall that I predicted a digital IPO hot streak as a 2010 trend. So far, digital has been a hot spot in a largely cool market.)
If the name Demand Media doesn’t ring a bell, you may recall thelengthy feature in Wired that described them as a video content factory. While I love video and at-scale content production, Peter Guber, Chair of Mandalay Entertainment and a board member of Demand Media, surely did not. During his INTA Keynote he explained how he helped counter this pejorative view through media outreach.
Demand Media’s genius is that it figured out that the things people are searching on aren’t necessarily what writers naturally focus on for fun. That’s a breakthrough. Imagine people searching for ways to get wasps out of their sheds, or how to draw a viking helmet. But there aren’t many resources for such specific questions.
I was part of a manic panel discussion on sales strategies for a Web 2.0 world. Amidst the usual Rorschach of social media advice were a few killer moments I have to share.
Framing Idea: What’s the result of an abundance of information?Attention scarcity.
This is what makes insight a premium in the digital economy, and it makes simplicity the good manners of our age.
So What Should We Stop Doing For Simplicity?
My answer was “stop writing so damn much.” I worked in my steadfast mantra “reading is for suckers” and suggested that if attendees cared about their readers and SEO, they should cut their copy in half and make a video or infographic. The goal is to make such a great illustration or video that even competitors wouldn’t be able to resist linking to it or copying it.
This brought a follow-up question: “Where can I see a good infographic?” I probably should have mentioned a nice collection such as the one at Six Revisions. Instead, I offered a single beautiful example, Flint Hahn’s Burning Man Infographic. The next follow-up: “What’s Burning Man?“ Somehow I was taking us way off track.
How Can We Make Email Marketing Work Better In a Social World?
My advice was to build a personal relationships with readers, to be real and relevant, and worry only about making kick-ass communications for the small group that is vital to their livelihood. Again I was asked for a good example. I could have referred to the nice marketing from Marketo that made the whole room turn out. Wouldn’t that have be supremely ingratiating? Do you think I did that?
NASCAR drivers should watch out: the position of Chief Marketing Officer is fast replacing race-car driver as the riskiest job in North America.
According to Business Week, a CMO’s average tenure is only 28 months. Only 14 percent of CMOs for the worlds top brands have been in their jobs more than three years.
That’s dramatically different from their C-level peers:
CEOs overall have an average tenure of 95 months (ITBusiness Edge)
Fortune 1000 CEOs on average last 73 months. (Forbes.com)
Change in Marketing Isn’t Always Good
High leadership turnover disrupts innovation and breeds chaos. New leaders often turn to their firm’s creative efforts to show fast, tangible change. This almost always distracts from thornier interdepartmental issues, which is where market strategy meets the firm. This muddies the firm’s identity in the marketplace, and internally makes the new CMO seem fixated on advertising or MarCom rather than strategy and revenue growth.
There’s also a temptation for CMOs to bring in their own team, which can tank productivity while the new arrivals figure out the business and the remaining crop of young marketers politically showcase their worthiness. Introducing a “hired gun” CMO raises fair questions about the career path for the company’s emerging marketing talent, many of whom will take the lesson that the path to promotion is an external one.
Marketing’s horse power has increased, it now has mechanisms to deliver 1:1 personalized mass marketing, using optimization, social CRM, and elaborate analytics. It is gaining a crew of experts in these disciplines, and more than ever CEO’s look to marketing to lead revenue growth. It no time for marketing’s leadership to be driving under a yellow flag.
Here are my thoughts on what we need to change in marketing — and by “we” I mean all of us: everyone in business.
Truth #1: Nobody Knows What the Hell Marketing is Doing Why do Chief Marketers last one-third the time of their executive peers? The short answer: nobody knows what marketing is doing, and it’s easy for outsiders to imagine they can run the “make-it-pretty department” better. That’s what phrases like “misaligned performance expectations” boil down to.
Recently, numerous political groups have been quite upfront about their intent to exert authority over different parts of the online world. It seems everybody want to rule the Web.
The set of government initiatives to control the web appears far more organized and comprehensive than the users and industry groups these regulations would effect. In short, there’s a boom in government’s aspiration to run the Web. And that boom feels like a power grab to claim turf that today mostly belongs to individuals.
It’s been six months since my post that 2010 investment in digital marketing would occupy an increasing share of marketing dollars. Since then, Oracle, CDC, and Hearst Media have taken the leap.
And now, social business software company Jive has taken a $30M series C investment round from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB). Here’s the press release announcing the investment.
This milestone will allow Jive to move into a new category. Imagine Jive going up against other new social entrants (ie. Salesforce) or providing social tools as an enterprise social platform.
As they ramp this new capability for revenue growth, expect investment in the brand and talk of a 2011 IPO to fuel them way up the hype-cycle.
When you partner with a firm, their weaknesses become yours. So reading an agency and its stress points is a client-side survival skill.
With that in mind, last month I connected the stories of three Boston-area interactive agencies, each of which diversified from selling services to products: BigBad Interactive, Magic Hour and Fable Vision.
To my surprise and delight, former and current employees contacted me to add to my outsider perspective. The post also drew a string of comments focused on allegations of malfeasance, greed, and betrayal at BigBad Interactive. These are the kinds of allegations that the Department of Labor and Attorneys General quoted in the post and were confirmed by news coverage.
Yeah, bigBad had a pattern of stealing from employee 401(k) plans (hence the DOR investigation) and a lack of ethics at the highest level. That the man who ran it into the ground is now in a position to do that to another company and blames everyone BUT himself demonstrates why BigBad, with so much talent, is but a memory.
I’m still a fan of each of these organizations in their heyday. Today, BigBad’s nameplate sits above my desk as a reminder of how fast digital smug-fests can turn — and how easily talent and generosity can be squandered.
So What Should We Stop Doing For Simplicity?
That’s dramatically different from their C-level peers:
It’s been six months since 
With that in mind, last month I connected the stories of three Boston-area interactive agencies, each of which diversified from selling services to products: