The Praized Blog

(via Springwise)

Montreal-based Brandfame has launched itself as a product placement agency for YouTube and other online video sharing platforms, connecting makers of online videos with brands that want to be integrated into the next viral video blockbuster.

Advertisers can list products they’d like to have featured in videos, and search for upcoming videos by producers to find a match for their brand. Producers indicate which productions they’re willing to integrate products into, and can search for brands or products they’d like to work with. Once a deal has been made, the advertiser pays the producer, and Brandfame takes a cut. The startup is also working on an auction system for advertisers to bid on product placement in new videos by hot producers.

What it means: first time I hear about this company from Montreal. According to these web sites, the founders are Nadim Elgarhy and Sebastian Gary. I like the concept because it replicates a model that’s already very successful offline. Main challenge will be getting enough video producers & usage to make it attractive to brand owners. I think ad agency relationships might be the key to a successful deployment. Similarly, Business 2.0 had showcased NextMedium last year, a firm that wants to automate product placements in offline movies.

Update: eMarketer talks about product placement.

Scott Karp from the Publishing 2.0 blog lists five arguments explaining why mobile is not yet very exciting:

1. Wireless carrier networks are SLOW
2. Public WiFi access is a SCAM
3. Sites aren’t formated for small screens
4. Mobile device screens are too small
5. Advertising gets in the way

What it means: I agree with his assessment, especially in North America. I’ve often been asked by traditional media publishers: “How do we leapfrog Google, Yahoo, MSN?”. I think one of the potential answers is Mobile. I’ve never been really excited by mobile’s potential until I attended the Web 2.0 Expo last April. I got the feeling when I was there that mobile is about to become real. Something in the zeitgeist, about the convergence of the various interests of hardware manufacturers, content publishers and the technological community. I think we’re still 24 months away from tangible results but, if you operate a local media business, you should be thinking hard about mobile today. You should have a couple of dedicated resources working on the mobile strategic plan, thinking about user experience specifically adapted for mobile browsing and the 3-inch screen, thinking about what kind of ads will be most efficient in that medium. Send that team to Japan or South Korea to see what people are doing with their mobile devices there. Invest some dollars now. Mobile is all about local and you can’t afford to miss that wave.

Update (& related topic): my friend Colin talks about overpriced mobile data plans in Canada

Today, I celebrate my first year of blogging. When I started, I had an objective of writing at least one blog post per business day. Mission accomplished! I now have written close to 300 blog posts on a variety of local search and/or social media topics. I’ve met many new friends and blogging has become a very important part of my professional life. I currently have 416 RSS subscribers and I think I’ve found my blogging “voice”.

To celebrate, I take a look back at my top 5 blog posts that generated the most comments and trackbacks in the last year:

1) “Robert Scoble is Media“, July 14, 2007. By far my most popular blog post. I stumbled upon a major meme with “I am Media”. Lots of people have talked to me about that one and have told me they now understand Facebook because of it. If any book editors are reading, I think this could be a great business book…

2) “What Micro-Blogging is All About?“, September 13, 2007. Re-reading one of my favorite Douglas Coupland book, I found this excerpt which poetically describes what micro-blogging is potentially all about. Mashing-up Douglas Coupland with Web 2.0 earned me some great reactions.

3) “Google Opens an Office in Montreal“, January 25th, 2007. Major buzz in the Montreal blogosphere as I was the first blogger to discover that announcement in Montreal’s La Presse.

4) “Chronology of a Successful Facebook Group: The “Save Business 2.0″ Example“, July 19, 2007. Chronicling my efforts (with Colin Carmichael) to save Business 2.0 magazine using Facebook. That one was a lot of fun and offered some great learnings. We unfortunately did not save the magazine (I got my last issue today…)

5) “Web 2.0 Startup Praized Media Inc. Secures $1,000,000 in Seed Funding“, September 18, 2007. The announcement of our seed round of financing was welcomed by the local search blogosphere.

I’d like to start my second year of blogging by thanking all my Year 1 readers! Thanks and here’s to another 300 blog posts!

If you’re not a RSS subscriber, click here to add my feed to your favorite reader.

Nicholas Carr reports on a Guardian story about a site called YouDeparted.com. According to the article, users of the site “can issue posthumous instructions for everything from their funeral to feeding their pet, cancelling bills and magazine subscriptions, organising their will and other financial matters, sending final letters to friends – and foes – and delivering a valedictory video address summing it all up.”

This new service reminds me of a conversation I had last week at the Kelsey conference with Peter K. and some folks from Quebecor Media. I was discussing my interest in a web site called Find a Grave where you can search and find famous graves from all over the world. I started to wonder about the opportunity in online obituaries classified ads. It must be a good revenue generator for newspapers and I suspect those revenues can only go up.

While researching the subject, I found that many important US newspapers are using the outsourced services of Legacy.com. They describe themselves as “the leading provider of online obituary solutions for the newspaper industry. Legacy.com enhances obituaries with guest books, funeral home information, and florist links, providing a community-oriented, content-rich solution for more than 400 newspapers. Visited by more than 7 million users each month, Legacy.com provides links to obituaries published by the company’s network of newspaper affiliates. Through this network, Legacy.com posts obituaries and Guest Books for one in two people who die in the U.S. each day. ”

Founded in 1998, the company has many investors including Tribune Company. According to this Chicago Sun-Times article, Legacy.com had 50 employees and $10M in revenues in 2005.

Over at Search Engine Land, in a blog post titled “Yellow Pages Will Be Toast In Four Years”, Chris “Silver” Smith (who used to work at Superpages) predicts the demise of online directory sites based on his analysis of specific keyword searches in Google Trends. He extrapolates that, based on current trends, searches for the words “yellow pages” might wither down to nothing by 2011.

He concludes: “I think that classic Yellow Pages sites are going to decline, but the companies behind those sites may evolve and merge with other players so that they will survive in new incarnations.”

If Google Trends was a reliable and trusted data source (it’s not! It’s like Alexa IMHO), I think the only thing you could conclude is that consumers search patterns are evolving and they are using these specific keywords less often. They might in fact be doing more precise local searches (plumbers new york, restaurants chicago, etc.) instead of generic ones. But you absolutely cannot predict the evolution of a whole industry based on that limited information.

In that case, I have to ask, why pick such an alarmist title?

Update: Donna Bogatin offers an explanation: “It is not surprising that Search Engine Land would go the route of sensationalist Yellow Pages extinction headlining, on the eve of its “Local” conference. After all, the conference Danny Sullivan hopes to compete against–The Kelsey Group–addressed “Why Yellow Pages Still Matter” just last week.”

Update2: Chris clarifies some of his thoughts on his blog.

TechCrunch reports on a secret meeting that happened at Google in the last few days. It looks like Google is about to “out open” Facebook by allowing developers to leverage Google’s social graph information.

The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.

On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information – the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more – such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs. And Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform – meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

And that is a potentially killer strategy. Facebook has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook itself. But what Google may be planning is significantly more open – allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications.

That big rumor comes on the heels of another big announcement from Six Apart about open sourcing the Web’s social graph (a la OpenID). If you thought the Web was fragmented, wait until you can start building application on top of Google, Yahoo or MSN’s social graphs…

(via OnlineMediaDaily)

Geospatial data integration company Geosemble announced GeoPrism, a lead generation service that is the first to use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to automatically generate sales leads based on satellite imagery. Using Geosemble’s map fusion and image analysis technology, swimming pools, roofs in need of repair, cracked driveways, large open backyards, etc.–can be “seen” from above, and automatically cross-referenced with city parcel data to extract the names and addresses of their owners. The resulting data are then provided to manufacturers of swimming pools and cleaning supplies, yard furniture, storage unit manufacturers, landscapers, and even contractors vying to fill open spaces with garage and house additions and backyard offices. (…)

What it means: what a smart way to use and potentially monetize existing satellite data in a local context. These guys should try to partner with directory publishers (and vice-versa).

I’m just coming out of the last session of this year’s DDC conference organized by the Kelsey Group. Again, a very good conference with interesting topics and multiple networking opportunities. Here are some random data points from the various speech and panels I heard in the last two days.

• Print media still represents 90% of total directory industry revenues
• 60% of SMEs do at least half of their business with other businesses
• 21% of SMEs have embraced cell phones and VOIP lines (instead of the traditional phone company land line)
• 34% of SMEs ad budget is dedicated to online media (including web site expenditures)
• Automotive represents 60% of Trader Corp’s revenues (Trader Canada)
• Jingle: at least 90% of their revenues come from national advertisers. 5% of their queries are category-based. They have close to 100,000 advertisers.
• White Directory Publishers will generate $3-4M in online video revenues in 2008.
• The optimal length for an online local video ad is 45 seconds.

Charles Laughlin, Senior Vice-President and Program Director at the Kelsey Group, presented this morning an interesting view of what society, media and the directory business will be like in 2020 compared to today.

Today:

• Society today: we drive to and from work in gas-powered cars. We “go” online, We “consume” media.
• Media today: mass media dominates, but user control is emerging. Media are largely priced using fixed rates, with a paradigm shift towards pay-for-performance. The Internet is still a media channel, like print, tv, or radio.
• Directory business today: competition has created “title inflation” as we see more A-Z business directory books than ever. Print represents approximately 90% of the total revenues. Print usage is still larger than the sum of online directories and local search sites.

2020:

• Society: we work wherever we are. When we drive, it’s hydrogen. We “live” online, media “surrounds” us.
• Media: vertical and segmented, 100% measured and heavily performance-based. Internet is not a channel, it is the infrastructure.
• Directory business: the number of print titles will be half of today’s number. Proliferation of specialized vertical targeted print directories, many from non-directory publishers. Print is not going away. It’s going to be more fragmented. Pricing is largely based on a multi-channel strategy, value-based, and supported by ubiquitous call measurement.

I listened this morning to one of the best keynote addresses I’ve heard in a long long time at the Kelsey Conference. Scott Pomeroy, President and CEO of Local Insight Media (a portfolio company of four directory publishers in the US and the Dominican Republic) offered his take on the future of the directory industry.

He believes the future is bright but that the industry needs to embrace new ways of doing business. Amongst others:

• A publisher’s goal should be to put the advertiser’s message in the consumer’s paths, wherever they are going
• You do not need to own all platforms or the consumer experience
• You need to be the most efficient aggregator of traffic and advertising for the SMEs

What it means: in a fragmented online world, those are very sane words. You can’t see the online space with the same eyes as the offline one. Aggregation will be a key success factor. Having a retail and a wholesale advertising & traffic distribution strategy makes all the sense as well. Bravo!