Work History: Web Production Manager

This post is part II of a series in which I talk about my professional experience. See also Part I, where I talk about being the publisher of an interactive literary magazine.

My last full-time gig was as Strategic Program Manager at Federated Media. In a nutshell, FM is a business broker for the most successful blogs in the English language; blogs like BoingBoing and Mashable. If you are a big corporation, and you want to get involved in this crazy social media thing that all the kids are talking about, then FM is the company to help you.

As an SPM, I was in charge of planning, executing, analyzing, and optimizing social media marketing campaigns. Read the rest of this entry »

Federated Media Conversational Marketing Summit 2008 Day 1

If for some reason you’re not familiar with Federated or the conference, you’ll want to start here.

Some nice moments:

Battelle breaking off in the middle of his own introductory speech to say “I’m announcing a new phone,” momentarily disorienting at least 50 people in the audience who were, on some device or other, simultaneously following Steve Jobs’ 3G iPhone speech going on at the same time on the west coast.

Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, Interactive Advertising Bureau, starting his speech with “I’m here to scare you,” and shortly after, standing in front of yellow writing on blue background: “Activists Hate Digital Media And Marketing.” (After a polarizing, us-vs-them speech, Rothernberg was the only speaker to leave the stage without taking questions.)

Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu, pronouncing: “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room,” an astute observation that he topped a few minutes later with “Most websites look like Tokyo at night,” a potentially offputting metaphor for a number of reasons, although I thought the point was well made.

Of all the speakers, Louis Giagrande, Senior Online Marketing Manager, Samsung Electronics America, really stood out in a good way: articulate, frank, and insightful.

During the networking sessions, had some great conversations with Rob Walk of NovaRising, Michael Burke of appssavvy, and Daniel Mintz of MoveOn, as well as many Federated staffers and authors.

More detail after tomorrow’s session…right now I have to get to sleep, as it starts at 8:30am.

Note to self: Get a real camera.

The Long Tail Of Remnant Ad Inventory

I’m disappointed to see that Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, has made another post in which he completely misinterprets industry data to justify his ideas about the way online CPMs work. (See also Chris’ last post on this subject, and here’s my comment on it.)

Chris references some PubMatic survey results indicating that large websites are getting lower CPMs these days than smaller websites.

Unfortunately, he chose not to address a note from the PubMatic page: “The pricing data reflects net publisher monetization via ad networks and excludes ad networks’ share of ad spends as well as inventory sold directly by publishers to ad agencies or advertisers.”

Here’s what that means: Read the rest of this entry »