Though Peter works for the competition, I am quite lucky to consider Peter a personal friend. And while I’m sure Macworld’s sales team was as ecstatic as I was when the article went live, I can guarantee you they were of no direct influence here. Peter writes this from the heart, and really from the angle of wanting to ensure that excellent applications don’t fall by the wayside simply because developers neglected the need to actively promote their products.

Bravo, Peter. And bravo to all of you who follow this advice. We’ll be sharing this around to our clients at BackBeat Media, and I’m sure they’ll be seeing it from the competition, as well. Good for one, good for all. And in the end, good for the consumer.

iMedia Conection published an article by Scott Medrum of HypeCouncil entitled, “Make the click worth their time” today that is absolutely fantastic. In it, Scott shows examples of good and bad banner design, and talks about including the “consumers as branding partners” throughout the experience.

Definitely worth a read — just be careful to scroll down on page 2 of the article. The “bad banner” examples he uses are *so* bad that you might think the article is over and ignore everything below them!

Go ahead… click. This one’s *definitely* worth your time!

But that hasn’t stopped you all from asking us about this. So I am going to share some semi-related information we have here in hopes that it stems this tide: The last day that BackBeat Media-brokered ads will appear on Think Secret is February 14th, 2008, and content will be posted on the site regularly at least until then.

You’re still free to call us and ask about this or anything else, but please know that the above constitutes everything we can share about the situation.

Today a different site partner, Hadley Stern of Apple Matters, pointed me to a related article where Aline van Duyn at the Financial Times says basically the same thing. Nice to see someone agrees with me! Now lets see if the rest of the market follows suit. I still predict it will.

iPhoneAlley.com is a site created and published by Michael Johnston, focusing directly on Apple’s latest gadget and its impact in the market. Already iPhoneAlley has posted some great scoops, including an AT&T customer manual, a live WWDC keynote stream, and a live unboxing of the iPhone on the day it was released. Michael has long been helping us by converting our Mac Geek Gab podcast into Apple’s enhanced AAC format, and we’re looking forward to the sharing the fruits of this extension to our relationship.

Published by Adam Christianson, The MacCast is one of the very top — and one of the first — Mac-focused podcasts. Adam’s loyal listener base has already proven to be a very successful market for us, due largely to Adam’s personable and detailed approach to his show. We’re proud to have partnered with him in this venture, and envision a long and successful road together.

If you haven’t had the chance to check out both of these publications yet, do yourself a favor and give them a visit. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Technorati Tags: iphone, podcast, advertising

Of course, you all know I like to remind you that tracking clicks of online ads is about as valuable as tracking the number of cars that crash into billboards, but it was *some* metric, and it likely did help the whole market lift itself from the ashes.

And to tie it all together: though I originally dismissed it as positive spin on Jupitermedia’s recent stock price decline, further reflection leads me to think Alan Meckler’s post this morning about increasing numbers of Internet-focused billboards on Route 101 being a barometer of the amount of fluff in the Internet space may be true. Perhaps the DoubleClick purchase is Google’s hedge bet against cars crashing into their click-based billboard that’s stood so strong for the last few years.

Technorati Tags: web advertising

His goal is sound: to truly rate success and failure on the web, one must measure everything simultaneously. Focusing on one metric at a time yields nothing, hence the need for Integrated Path Analysis.

Unfortunately, Brandt’s goal of “end-to-end” analysis falls short because, well, he’s *starting* at the end by beginning his analysis when someone clicks on an ad. Why did they click on that ad? Was that *single* ad impression the sole deciding factor that lead them to click and then be comfortable purchasing from said vendor?

I doubt it.

Chances are, they had seen other advertising for this vendor, and all of that *in total* added up to the customer’s comfort level being high enough to move forward with the purchase. Heck, they might have seen the ad last week, and visited the site by typing in the URL today to purchase. No clicks to track happened, but a sale did. That’s still success, right?

Branding matters, folks. It always has.

Ad clicks are an over-used metric, and a horrible spot to start analyzing most campaigns. After all, when was the last time we measured the success of a billboard by counting the number of cars that crashed into it each day?

Technorati Tags: branding, click tracking, web advertising

Technorati Tags: ad:tech, Chicago, vegetarian, web advertising

Of course, in the article, he was preaching his company’s product (automated canned spot insertion) and I’m here preaching ours (BackBeat Media’s talking points model).

Technorati Tags: advertising, backbeat media, podcasting