First Round Capital CEO Summit Presentation: Online Advertising

Opportunities in the Advertising Ecosystem

Darren Herman // @dherman76Chief Digital Media Of!cer, The Media Kitchen/kbs+p

www.mediakitchen.tv

Initially presented at the First Round Capital CEO Summit on Jan 19, 2011This version has been modi!ed for public consumption

I was asked to lead a breakout session to discuss the agency point of view of opportunities within the advertising ecosystem.

In no way is this presentation comprehensive of everything that is needed; it was supposed to be 30-45 mins, biased towards what I am passionate about, and what we are focused on at our agency, The Media Kitchen/kbs+p. Additionally, there is no order to these ideas, so don’t think one is more important than another.

Please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you have a solution to one of these areas or want to introduce yourself. My email is [email protected] and my Twitter account is @dherman76

Instantaneous Awareness: Credited to Barry Lowenthal (@barryl530), President of TMK. How do we immediately position a clients product/service/offering into popular culture? Within 30 minutes, the world knew who was driving this White Bronco. How can we deliver this type of Instantaneous Awareness for our clients?

Portfolio Allocations: There has got to be a better and easier way to understand how to allocate advertising investment dollars. As the world moves towards frictionless buying (driven by exchanges, digital, etc), how can we create models which show media vehicle portfolio allocations with yield curves in a quick and simple way. This can be done today but it’s very manual and extremely laborious. Big opportunity here.

Playing Nice in the Sandbox: Agencies are really good at organizing chaos. Every partner an agency works with has their own respective agenda and it’s the agencies job to get everyone aligned. I’ve found unique opportunities where having competitive partners work together on a single campaign have resulted in exponential results for clients. If everyone puts short term gains aside, looking at the long term goals for our clients is most bene!cial. We all however do get caught with our head in the sand from time to time, but that’s natural.

A Billing System that Understands Digital: Billing systems within agencies are extremely important because internally, it provides orders to hundreds/thousands of Invoices each month which allow us to pay all of our partners on time. The biggest frustration we have is that we have yet to !nd a billing system that understands the nuances of digital media and the inef!ciencies that these systems have cause troubles internally for us which lead to delays to some of our best partners.

Not Every Brand Can Discount: Lots of chatter around deal/day type sites. These are tactics and not overall strategies. Additionally, many of the customers of these sites are deal seekers which might not be a “good” customer for your brand. While these types of sites have a role within speci!c plans, they will not take over the world like many expect. (too much hype! - giving 50% off a $20 coupon to a global brand is of course going to do well!)

Infrastructure: Data management and campaign infrastructure plays an increasing role across today and tomorrow’s media plans. As more and more of our media vehicles become digital, managing and using our campaign data exhaust is going to be a big business in itself. There was lots of chatter around this in niche circles in 2010 and we’ve seen recent acquisitions (Demdex/Adobe, Neteeza/IBM) recently, but expect a lot more of this in coming months.

Simple and straight forward. If I ignited a thought or two, please do not hesitate to reach out.

-Darren