I’m on my way back up-town after a meeting CNET did during Ad Week 2006.  While cruising along on the subway, I couldn’t help but link to this and add a few comments after the event.

CNET highlighted some research they just completed with Starcom Mediavest Group on “Brand Sirens” a term they coined to describe the super influencers of the 13 to 34.  The research methodology was actually quite impressive.

They described a number of “myths” that the research refuted.  The most interesting to me was that this influential group isn’t against advertising at all.  Instead, they are actually quite comfortable with advertising if it is relevant.

The brand sirens interviewed actually went out of their way to describe how they were comfortable with advertising when it was relevant for them.  They described situations like being on a computer shopping comparison site and seeing ads for computer hardware.  They actually felt that type of advertising was helpful.

Hmmm …. music to our ears at mSpoke!  Well, I’m off to the next meeting …

PS — There actually were a number of other interesting findings.  Including the type of brand advertising that this group responds best to.  (HINT: don’t talk about features)  Anyway, the report is worth a read.

I just watched the Churchill Club’s annual panel on what it takes to build a successful start up.  It was moderated by Guy Kawasaki and had the following panelist:

• Lauren Elliott, Founder, Personal News Network

• Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder and CEO, LinkedIn

• Joe Kraus, Co-Founder and CEO, JotSpot

• Daniel Mattes, Co-Founder and CTO, Jajah

• Alex Welch, Co-Founder and CEO, Photobucket

It was really worth the hour & a half invested.  I especially enjoyed Joe Kraus’s observations on the importance of persistence.  So keep making those cold calls!  (Also, did everyone know LinkedIn is profitable?)

[Found from Post on Guy Kawasaki's Blog]

I received the email below this evening from the Attention Trust member’s email distribution.  It should be great to see what the new team does to advance the mission of AT.org.  

I wish the ‘quartet’ the best of luck! 

——–

Dear AttentionTrust Members;

AttentionTrust is pleased to announce that co-founder Steve Gillmor has returned to take on the role of president and board member. Many of you know Steve from The Gillmor Gang and his new site GestureLab. Stay tuned for exciting news about AttentionTrust and The GestureBank.

We would also like to introduce the new AttentionTrust quartet:

• Curtis Hougland (Director of Communications)
• Cori Schlegel (Technical Director)
• Noah Brier (Blogmaster)
• Jonas Goldstein (Creative Director)</LI. < ul>

  Together they are working with the attention community to expand the rights of users in our post AOL/Time-Warner/fill-in-the next-media-company world of attention data leaks. As one of their first concertos, the team will be launching a new AT.org site to invite even more participation, education and expression.

  Our thanks to Ed Batista for leaving the organization in such excellent health.

  Inquiries to curtis.hougland@attentiontrust.org.

Update: Here is a post from Kevin at the Digg Blog. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t seem to be working for me
http://diggtheblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/integratin…

It seems like almost every blog today uses FeedBurner Flare to have a “Digg This” button at the end of a story.

However, today I saw Guy Kawasaki had actually added a Digg Button in the post itself. Personally, I found this to be much more effective. I assumed he following steps would be how you add one to your blog posts.

1. Go to http://digg.com/submit and figure out what your URL for the story will be
   • This is actually quite easy. Just look at past blog posts & figure out the url for the post you’re currently working on. For example, my blog is in wordpress & uses ?p=XX where XX is the post number. Therefore, since my last post was # 54. This post (#55) will have the following URL - http://profitablesignals.com/blog/?p=55
2. Once you have submitted the URL, just follow the instructions like you would for any other story being submitted
   • Enter a Title, Description & Choose a Category
   • Then “submit” the story
3. Then add the following HTML to your post

<div style="padding: 3px; float: right"><script><!--<br />
digg_url = 'YYYY';<br />
//--></script><script xsrc="http://digg.com/api/diggthis.js" mce_src="http://digg.com/api/diggthis.js"       ></script>

where YYYY is replaced with the Digg URL.  (For example, this story would be http://digg.com/design/Adding_Digg_Button_to_Your_Blog_Posts)

Unfortunately, this does not seem to work?  Any ideas??  If so, please leave them in the comments ...

I’ll be in NYC for all next week (Sept 25 to 29) for Advertising Week.   Drop me a line (profitablesignals@gmail.com) or call my cell phone 412.401.0037 if you want to get together.  I’m hoping to get to use Deutsch’s Bail card at least once to connect with someone during a presentation

My last post, asked the question - is money what we really want in return for our attention?

This is an important question, because what I perceive to be the leader in the marketplace, Root Markets, appears very focused on developing an attention service with that mission. 

This is an area I would love to see some other companies innovate and come up with other ways to exchange value for your attention. Interestingly, all of the Incognito Attention Services seem focused on other exchanges of value for attention.

Which leads to the point of this post - if you are a developer, you can actually download the attention toolkit and quickly create your own service.  It is a light-weight LAMP app to start building record attention services right out of the box. 

Any developers up to the challenge - leave a comment.  I’d love to hear about your progress!

About a week ago, I wrote a post that in my opinion Attention Services (at least in the Attention Trust sense) have not yet “crossed the chasm”. 

Interestingly, this week Business Week wrote a story on Root Markets titled “If I Had a Nickel for Every Click“  The article contains a lot of great information.

Seth Goldstien (founder of Attention Trust & Root Markets) follows up the article with a detailed post, Breaking News: ROOT + CBOT = $ for Lead Futures, describing how his idea was born & grew.  He opens by saying:

I am excited to announce the first official gesture in the financial securitization of Attention

Marshall Kirkpatrick (from TechCrunch) weights in on the concept & event positively, noting:

In the future, ROOT is likely to offer chunks of attention data that consumers have chosen to expose to prospective buyers in a futures market. It’s very experimental, but I think it’s fascinating … The news that CBOT has invested in the company and its CEO has joined its board is a very important validation of the Attention Data concept. …

It’s a very complicated and experimental situation. If the Attention Economy goes the direction that some of the key players participating want it to go in, today’s announcement of the CBOT investment in ROOT will likely go down in history as a key event in the emergence of users in control of our data and more widespread appreciation of that data’s worth.

Marshall is correct, one of the Attention Trust principals is economy and states:

You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Your attention has WORTH.

Now Seth is a wicked smart guy and I have a tremendous amount of respect for him.  (We have met twice over the past year.)  He is a serial entrepreneur, who also has a great grasp on the history of technology, broad understanding of capital markets (he founded an independent research boutique - Majestic Research).  He also has been extremely influential in evolving the concepts around an attention economy.   He co-founded the Attention Trust.org  and was the first person to start a commercial company around the concepts.  His series of posts (first one here) on attention over the last year are must reads!

However, I’m not sure the value we want to receive in return is money.  I see two problems with this:

1. It takes some time to reach critical mass.  Right now, there just doesn’t seem to be enough people using his recorder to generate a meaningful market.
2. They revenue from the futures market will either be difficult to explain to users or easy to game.  This is probably worthy of another post this week.  But at a high level, the problem is you either have to:

• Aggregate all revenue received and share it among the group (like Squidoo does) — This is complext and difficult to explain quickly to users. 
• OR - Share directly a part of the revenue generated from my attention & leave yourself vulnerable to fraud.  A real example would be visiting mortgage sites through the day to make sure my “futures” were worth a lot.  – You can see this manifesting itself today in click fraud.

Instead, what I think you need to do is ensure that your attention has value to users in more indirect ways - such as saving time.  Marshall in the TechCrunch post actually uses this as his example of receiving value:

I hope to be able to use services in the future that take my exposed Attention Data and run it through any number of value added services for my reuse. “Computer, bring me the best articles I’ve read on Attention from the five people I’ve communicated most recently with about the subject.”

It seems to me services like the one Marshall describes above are much more likely to create interest about downloading & using their Attention Service.  If I were Seth (and I should caveat this by saying - if I had achieved his level of advancement, I would consider myself a great success), then I would keep the team at Root.net much less focused on ”the financial securitization of Attention” and much more focused on creating real IMMEDIATE value (saving time for example) with people’s attention. 

To me this is an important topic, that I hope the community can dialogue about. This is significant, because it is key to reaching a large audience (if you will, cross the chasm).  I’m not sure the hope of one day selling your attention in an exchange will do that.

Of course, time will tell and it is never smart to bet against a serial entrepreneur!  Yes, Mom (the only reader of this blog anyway), I hope people say that about me some day.

So - what do you think … Is the financial securitization of attention the problem we should be focused on solving or should attention services focus on other less financial oriented value to share with people for their attention?

(Photo Credit - privateeye on Flickr)

A fellow NextNYer, Darren Herman, wrote a very interesting post today on his blog - I Want It To Succeed  In it he describes an idea he has had for sometime to create

… a niche social network for families with the ability for media sharing and tagging.  Think genealogy 2.0 and digital family archiving.

Interestingly, this is not something he can pursue.  He indicates one of the reasons is his current role as a co-founder of IGA Worldwide Therefore he has decided …

Instead of shelving the idea for the future,   I’ve gone ahead and listed it on eBay so a serious entrepreneur can come in and run with the idea. 

It appears from the post, you’d get …

my thoughts down on paper professionally (scope doc and business opportunity) and built the first iteration of the scaleable technological infrastructure in .NET and Ajax (+SQL 2005).

Kiko’s employed a similar technique and ended up selling for $258,100.   It will be interesting to see what Darren’s idea nets. Obviously, the product never made it into the marketplace & it seems even less refined that Kiko was when it was acquired.  However, if Darren can get a few thousand dollars is this a win?  Especially, interesting if he also gets the satisfaction of the idea succeeding.

Maybe more intriguing is the question in the title of this post … ”is eBay an Idea Banker” (in addition to creating markets for so many obscure goods?)

What do you think?

As I’ve learned more about interactive media over the last year, one thing continues to amaze me.  How often ad targeting is just plain terrible.  The most recent example, which I can’t help but comment happened in my inbox yesterday morning.  I received an email with Dave Morgan’s Online Spin column. 

Dave is the founder & chairman of Tacoda, one of the two leaders in behavioral targeting space.  Ironically, the advertising next to his column is a banner advertisement for the other leader in the behavioral targeting space - Revenue Science.

This is truly amazing!  I’m not sure how Media Post (the publisher of Online Spin) does their ad targeting.  However, this is a regular column for Dave Morgan.  You would think that no matter what my surfing habits (behavioral targeting) or context of the article (contextual targeting) indicates, Revenue Science would rather not show up as the sponsor of a regular column by their competitor’s chairman.

Interestingly, I’m sure this isn’t an ad serving / campaign optimization issue.  I’m sure there is an ability to add “business rules” that would prevent the ad from showing up.  However, somewhere along the way that rule was never entered.  Probably either the media buyer forgot to request it or the operations team didn’t enter it.  Either way, this is a human issue not a technology issue.

I have no doubt we have lots of progress we can still make on the technology side.  (Full disclosure: my company, mSpoke, is working on some of these next-generation approaches.)

However, at the end of the day there is also a long way to go on the human side.  Years ago (2003) at an Information Week Conference, former CIO of JP Chase Denis O’Leary said:

We all need to remember information technology is more about biology than physics.

It was a great reminder that while there is a lot of physics (deep science) left in improving ad targeting online … there is a lot of biology!

A few weeks ago, Caterina Fake introduced a meme into the blogosphere about the appropriate role of business development in a mash-up, open API, & RSS standard friendly web 2.0 world.  This biz dev 2.0 meme spread rather quickly across the echo chamber. 

It continues to be something I reflect on, based on my responsibilities at mSpoke. Apparently, so do others - as NextNY (a group I’m part of and you should join if you live in / work around the greater NYC area) is going to have a community conversation around it soon. 

Therefore, I can’t help but read all the conversations about YouTube & MySpace and feel like this is really effectively highlights the risk of business relationships built without letters of intent, contracts and other ‘blue shirt’ activities.

What do you think?