Ad Blocking in Perspective

There has been tremendous anxiety in the media world around Apple’s move to allow ad blocking software on iPhones and iPads. After all, eliminate ads from mobile devices, and you take a big bite out most publishers’ ad revenue. Publishers are describing this move by Apple in near-Apocalyptic terms. But let’s get a grip.

First, we need to be clear that this ad blocking capability applies to the mobile web, not to apps. In that respect, this move by Apple is really just a big kick in the pants to build an app and get your audience onto it as quickly as possible.

Second, this move makes a lot more sense when you consider what’s driving it. Apple doesn’t make money from mobile search advertising; Google does. Apple doesn’t like Google for a variety of reasons, hence this aggressive move cuts into Google’s main source of revenue. We’re all just collateral damage in this war of the titans. But this perspective also helps you understand why apps are (and will likely remain) protected from ad blocking technology. The Apple ecosystem depends on apps, and Apple makes a lot of money from apps. Apple is not really against all mobile advertising; it’s against mobile advertising that benefits Google.

Third, some of these new mobile ad blockers will reportedly strip out some content as well as advertising (not text, but some things such as bloated masthead graphics). Indeed, the new breed of ad blockers are really less focused on eliminating advertising than improving the mobile user experience by speeding up page loads as much as possible.

Fourth, once again, publishers are feeling the pain of a self-inflicted wound. By junking up their websites (and by extension their mobile websites) with all manner of trackers, ad networks, auto-play video, re-targeting ads, overlays, and perhaps most ironic of all, ads to get the user to download the publishers own app, we’ve junked up the mobile experience quite thoroughly. When was the last time you recall having a satisfactory (as in fast and easy) mobile web session?

I certainly agree that a lot of people are using ad blocking software out of a sense of entitlement – they truly believe they should have limitless access to content without fee and ad-free. Of course that’s another self-inflicted wound (a topic I’ve discussed many times over the years). But the more important reason that users are flocking to ad blocking software is that it actually improves their online experiences. That’s a sad statement, but the resolution of the problem is firmly under our control.

LinkedIn's New Corporate Directory

In my view, the future of LinkedIn depends on finding ways to get itself inside of business workflow – the essence of infocommerce – because the history of databases that remained standalone reference products is a sad one.

LinkedIn’s first big push to build ongoing user engagement was to add user-generated content, lots of it, creating a B2B Facebook if you will. This is certainly a valid approach, but with the Internet already groaning under the weight of endless content, much of it free, this is a tough road. I think workflow integration is a lot easier and ultimately much stickier. It is, fundamentally, the difference between logging into LinkedIn to “stay current” or perhaps find a useful morsel of information through sheer serendipity, and logging into LinkedIn because you need it to do your job.

Well, LinkedIn took a small but important move in the direction of workflow this week with the launch of LinkedIn Lookup. Very simply, this new app allows you to turn LinkedIn into an internal company directory.

As you can imagine, if you were to filter all LinkedIn profiles by current employer, you would essentially get an internal company directory. And it would be better than almost any company directory that exists given the depth of its profiles and the high level of data accuracy. But the new LinkedIn app does more than just filter listings, it also prioritizes fellow employee listings over your own connections so you’re really using it as an internal directory. Corporate email addresses are shown as well.

Overall, LinkedIn Lookup is a fairly weak version 1.0 app. But if LinkedIn sticks with it, it could take this product in some very interesting directions. Consider:

·        Setting up the product with a corporate administrator could help make listings more accurate (many people don’t update their employer information if they are not immediately going to a new job). In addition, LinkedIn could make this administrator the point person to maintain the company web page as well, helping to insure deeper and more accurate data

·        With listings now used for employment purposes, employees will be more diligent in maintaining their listings to the benefit of both the company and LinkedIn

·        By letting employees see all the connections of other employees, an extremely powerful networking tool along the lines of those offered by Reachable can be offered.

·        Non-public fields could be made available for corporate directory purposes such as reporting relationships, and this could in turn enable real-time organizational charts

·        The product could offer links to a company’s payroll system (as many internal company directories already do), to help insure even higher levels of accuracy

And that’s just a starting list. Indeed, an enormously powerful product platform exists for LinkedIn to exploit with only some additional programming effort. And this product, properly evolved, is certainly one LinkedIn could charge for. No company wants to maintain its own internal directory if it can avoid doing so, and LinkedIn would bring to the table features and functionality no company could duplicate on its own because of its connections data.

Best of all, as companies adopt LinkedIn as their internal directory platform, LinkedIn automatically becomes a stronger database as a result. Employees who haven’t yet built a profile will do so; and those with existing profiles will be motivated if not required to keep them current.

Sure, there are some data governance issues that will need to be addressed and doubtless some technological and structural bumps in the road will emerge; as the saying goes, “hierarchies are hell.” But these issues will come to the fore because LinkedIn is simultaneously becoming more important and the end result of that is a more comprehensive and accurate database for LinkedIn, that will give it the basis to chase even more data-driven workflow opportunities.

If LinkedIn wants to offer high quality user-maintained data that gets accessed frequently, there’s no better way than to help it enable daily business activities. LinkedIn Lookup can be an important first start in this direction.

Value Versus Volume

A recent article in Digiday entitled “Why publishers struggle to monetize their paywall data” lays bare one of the great inconsistencies of the digital marketing era: despite the ready availability of great targeting data, advertisers and their agencies still put more emphasis on quantity than quality.

Don’t get me wrong: advertisers want to target their messages, and will pay a premium for the ability to do so. But they also want push-button simplicity, which invariably means they favor those with the largest audiences and the biggest networks. A single price, a single invoice, easy management and analysis: that’s what advertisers seem to value most highly. If the audience quality isn’t quite as good, it’s still worth it to them.

And thus it has ever been so. In the heyday of postal direct marketing, everyone talked quality and sold quantity. Back then it was the tyranny of per thousand pricing at work. If you sold your product at a per-thousand rate, you had to move a lot of volume to make meaningful money. Indeed, the clever publisher who could identify 50 perfectly targeted prospects for an advertiser probably couldn’t even sell those names at any price – it was just too much work in an industry that tested its lists in quantities of 10,000 names.

Online marketing and improved user data was supposed to change all this. And to some extent it has. We now have a bifurcated publishing world with some publishers still selling their audiences on a cost per thousand basis, forcing them into a world of almost unlimited supply, meaning low prices, meaning they have to still make their money on volume. Quality occupies a tenuous position in this business model.

The other group of publishers has changed their focus to lead generation. By using a variety of different approaches, these publishers get individuals in their audiences to raise their hands and indicate they are likely buyers of a particular product or service. An individual lead can sell for a lot of money, and this has allowed publishers to move away from commodity selling with per thousand pricing.

And this would ordinarily be a happy ending, except that advertisers are now demanding their sales leads in quantity. They’re indicating it’s not worth their time to work with publishers that can’t reliably generate a certain quantity of leads per week. Once again, quantity is starting to take precedence over quality. What makes this even more odd is that many advertisers are gorging themselves on sales leads, buying so many that they can’t handle them effectively without expensive marketing automation software that itself demands more and more leads in order to work effectively.

The seemingly unavoidable conclusion from all this is that most advertisers aren’t really that good at marketing and sales. If correct, it seems logical that publishers should assume more of this role for them. And indeed, we are seeing movement in this direction with growth of marketing services, content marketing, lead qualification and appointment setting – all things that arguably roll up into what’s being referred to as the “full stack” business model.

If things play out this way, we’re looking at another round of profound, wrenching change for the publishing industry. At least with this round of change those who survive it will seemingly emerge with strong, high-value businesses and bright prospects.

There's No Substitute for Structured Data

Cloud-based contact management software provider Nimble recently introduced a new feature called its “Smart Contacts App.” Load the app to a supported browser, and if you see the name of a person or company that interests you, whether reading a news story or in Facebook or Twitter, just highlight the name and Nimble constructs a full profile on the fly. In addition to basic background information, Nimble also searches a number of social networks to find matching accounts. The goal is to build the richest possible profile of the person or organization, and it’s all real-time. With one more click, you can load the profile into your Nimble contact manager.

This isn’t an entirely new concept, but it’s slickly executed. After putting a magnifying glass up to the various screen captures provided by Nimble, what I think I see is that a lot of the magic depends on LinkedIn. And guess what? LinkedIn is a data product. Nimble’s ability to associate social media accounts is impressive, but still imperfect. Indeed, it asks the user to explicitly confirm every social media account match. Nimble also does a nice job integrating with email so that it can pop up a profile of anyone who sends you an email. Microsoft has offered this for a while now, but this is part of a bigger push by Nimble to have its customers do all their work in Nimble so all prospect and customer data resides in one place, all tightly linked and readily accessible.

I draw two insights from all this:

•  The push to tightly integrate sales prospecting data is serious and intense. The idea of any contact manager (and this includes Salesforce) having a button that says “click to view profile” is quickly getting dated. That means data has to be more tightly integrated into these systems to a degree we haven’t yet seen, and that means software companies will need to license more data from data publishers to get this level of deep integration.
   
• For all its sizzle, this new offering from Nimble isn’t creating data; it’s assembling data from other data sources. To be valuable, Nimble needs data that is accurate, rich and most importantly, structured. You can’t assemble that out of thin air. And that unique characteristic – structure – is what makes data so powerful and so valuable.

Does Co-Dominance Spur Disruption?

Outspoken Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff made headlines this week by using an industry event to publicly describe his arch-rival, Murdoch-owned Move Inc., as “a crappy company.”

There’s no love lost on the Move side either. Move, which operates the Realtor.com real estate listings site, has previously cut off listing fees to Trulia right after Trulia was acquired by Zillow, and now has Zillow in court over its merger with Trulia.

Certainly, the stakes in the real estate listings data business are huge, so bare-knuckle competition isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that both companies are finding success with radically different business models.

Realtor.com has what I view as a very conventional “just the facts ma’am” user interface. It offers basic parametric search, with listings displayed as summary listings, each offering fast access to listings detail. Real estate agents can pay to advertise themselves or highlight specific listings, and are provided with sales leads as well.

Zillow, as you may recall, burst onto the scene with its “Zestimates,” its estimate of the value of every home in the country. This got Zillow immediate interest and tons of traffic, and it quickly became a major player in the market. Zillow also distinguishes itself with a map-based user interface and somewhat different listing detail than Realtor.com. But the “Zestimates” that helped Zillow rocket to the big time are a two-edged sword. Sellers almost always feel they should be higher, and buyers tend to assume they are much more authoritative than they really are. Zillow also sells advertising to real estate agents with essentially the same suite of offerings as Realtor.com.

Does it make sense that both can thrive? Certainly, we see examples of “co-dominance” in many very large BTC markets simply because they are so large. But while more subtle, it appears that the biggest weakness of both sites – neither has 100% of all listings – may be a strength. That’s because lots of people use both products, leaving real estate agents uncertain about where to place their advertising dollars.

It’s the same situation we saw play out in the heyday of the yellow pages industry. Independent yellow pages directories sprung up everywhere as lower-cost competitors to big, established telephone company directories. But advertisers, rather than cheering and running to advertise in the new, cheaper upstarts, found themselves confused and fearful. Which directory did their customers use? Did they use both? Well, the safest course for many advertisers was to advertise in both directories, meaning their cost to reach the same market went up significantly. Not surprisingly, advertisers were not happy with this outcome.

There are rumblings of discontent in the real estate market as well. Indeed, a new initiative called National Broker Portal Project, meant to be run by and for real estate agents and brokers, is gaining steam. It wants to create a major site that will be both dues-funded and run according to rules developed by the brokers themselves. It’s a long shot to be sure, but it shows once again that being the dominant player in a market is tricky, and sharing that dominance is even trickier. We must all remember that disruption in any industry is not inherently a one-time event.