From the outside, it appears as if there are two sides to the FM business. One is what we call Conversational Marketing (CM). These are complicated, high-touch, highly-integrated social media executions that involve many moving parts between FM, our publishing partners, the brand, its agency, and the audience. The other side of our business is what is often called “display advertising” – where we sell traditional “ads” placed next to the the great content and communities created by our small number of partners. (Did you know we have, conservatively, more than 24mm uniques in the US, and nearly 45mm worldwide? Yeah, we don’t toot our horn as much as perhaps we should – and those numbers miss a good number of the sites we represent).



Anyway, CM and display are related in very important ways. But more on that in a minute. First, we want to address some confusion that has cropped up recently. Earlier this month, FM announced a minor restructuring. We explained that this restructuring was due to our renewed focus on CM executions. Some took this to mean that FM was moving away from display advertising. One writer even went so far as to say that we were “abandoning” display advertising. No matter the cause or source of the confusion, I’d like to make it clear that this is not the case.

FM does in fact sell display advertising – a lot of it. But that’s not all we do. The CM business model is not simple, and it’s not always easy to explain. But the connection between display and CM is direct: we work with brands to create media executions that are truly valuable (like WePC, MomSpeak, American Express Open Forum, or Toshiba’s Laptop Experts), and we then use display to distribute, amplify, and announce those executions.

We do a lot of innovative things inside that display real estate – like RSS feeds, widgets, video, even chat. Yet we also sell a lot of straight display ads, just like any other major publisher. However, it’s our belief that a business that sells only display advertising, particularly in a down economy, is heading for a commodity game. That’s why we reorganized – focusing on our unique ability to deliver results well beyond the banner.

We know that display advertising works. But it’s clear that the real estate any website gives to display has to deliver value to both the audience and the advertiser. As I’ve argued before, algorithms don’t replace community. There are hundreds of companies competing to deliver that value through behavioral and contextual algorithms, and we work with those we consider to be the best. Combined with CM, display becomes more than just ads adjacent to content, it becomes an invitation to a value exchange between marketer, publisher, and audience. In the coming weeks, expect more from us on these issues. It’s an exciting time to be in the media business, to be sure.

But FM is far more than that. Forbes put out two ego-stroking lists this week. First, their much followed (and often berated) Web Celeb 25 list. And second, a Top Twitter Celebrities list. While I’m not sure that these lists serve any kind of useful purpose, they do at least provide fodder for me to toot the FM horn a bit. FM partners are all over these lists.
FM works with four of the top six Twitter users. And we work with six of the top ten Web Celebs. But remember that the value of social media does not lie exclusively in the “celebrity” crowd. Every FM partner became an FM partner because they produce fantastic content, have an engaged audience and command respect among a community – be that tech, parenting, business, video gaming or otherwise.

In August of 2007, Morgan Webb and her husband launched WebbAlert in close collaboration with FM. It was a visionary project: a daily video blog of the day’s tech news. Unfortunately, this past week, Morgan shuttered the project in order to concentrate on her other gig – G4’s video game review show X-Play.
Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee talked to Morgan about the development and she had some kind words for FM. Well, the feeling is mutual, Morgan! Thanks for a great run. We wish you the best of luck in everything you do.
Via NewTeeVee:

Morgan Webb, the TV host, gamer, and model, threw her hat in the ring for tech news video shows in August 2007, and produced the daily show WebbAlert as a side project with her husband. But the show ended its run this week, with Webb citing the increasing demands of her day job as a host for G4’s video game review show X-Play….
She declined to give financial and viewer specifics, but made it clear that she’s not quitting for lack of revenue…
Federated Media was fantastic at selling us, and I’d like to thank them for helping us do as well as we did.

For many brand marketers, social media is still an “experimental” place. Marketers seem to universally accept the promise of social media, but have yet to dedicate to it the kind of budget that other channels command. But this situation is rapidly evolving as marketers begin to regard social media as a channel on par with other digital media, and indeed, with other traditional channels like TV.
MySpace, for example, rather than competing with other social media outlets, now considers portals to be their main competition. They see themselves as competing with Yahoo, MSN and the like, for 7-figure ad deals.
Via Financial Times:

MySpace is squaring up to Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN internet portals in an attempt to win marketing campaigns from big brands reluctant to invest large sums in social media advertising.
Jeff Berman, president of sales and marketing at MySpace, said many advertisers viewed social media campaigns as “experimental”…
“In the last six months, we have really broken out of that,” he said. “Instead of going up against other social media sites for experimental dollars that might be five- or six-figure advertising campaigns, we’re going up against the portals for seven-figure campaigns.”

For Pepsi, social media is not yet a go-to channel for their marketing efforts. But according to the BrandWeek story below, Pepsi is leveraging social media to define the messages it runs in old media. We’ve seen social media make its way into other areas of the business cycle including product development. Now it’s being used as a de facto creative agency.
From BrandWeek:

PepsiCo today announced which ads will be running during the Super Bowl, sort of. The No. 2 cola giant has readied work for Pepsi, Pepsi Max, SoBe Lifewater and G (formerly Gatorade). However, it is hedging its bets as to which creative to run. Instead it is waiting to see which brands are getting the most buzz on the Internet, according to Massimo d’Amore, CEO, PepsiCo Americas Beverages.
“We’re following the blogosphere,” he said, in order to make “the best possible choice.” The company has vowed to be second only to Anheuser-Busch in terms of minutes purchased during the game. It only gave a range of up to four minutes of ads.

I’m very pleased to welcome Mugs Buckley to FM’s Author Services team, where she runs point for many of FM’s leading publishing partners. As we posted last week, FM has been building strategic muscle in the scaled and high-touch media executions that we believe represent the future of media, and Mugs is yet another example of our commitment to that mission. Mugs also acts as an analyst for TDG and covers the growth of digital video advertising. Formerly, Mugs served as an Interactive Sales Manager for Comcast Spotlight, a division of Comcast Corporation. She began her career at the Discovery Channel where she was the Executive Producer of Discovery’s award-winning multimedia production unit. As ZDTV’s (now G4) first employee, she was Director of Business Development. She served as the Vice President of Business Development for RespondTV and the Director of Business Development and PopTV for Liberate Technologies.

Mugs is an active member of the Producers Guild of America’s New Media Group and a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Interactive Media Committee (Primetime Emmys). Mugs holds a BA from Tufts University and an Ed.M. in Technology in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Welcome to FM, Mugs!

This is a fantastic illustration that delves into how the world of media and brand management has changed over the last 50 years. Though pretty basic, it’s a very powerful tool for educating the few who have not yet internalized the fundamental shift we’ve all experienced.
Via Dave Knox’s Hard Knox Life.

FM today welcomes Mixx into the family. See here for the official press release.
Mixx is “your blend of the Web” with an amazing combination of user-recommended media, online social networking and comprehensive personalization tools. They’ve been growing at a crazy clip for the past two years and now have 6 million unique users who congregate on the site every month.
Mashable covered a recent feature addition here. Here’s some TechCrunch coverage.
Welcome to Mixx founder Chris McGill and the whole team!