Performance Marketing: More than "a Little Skin in the Game."

Kirshenbaum Bond has developed a novel way to put some skin in the game with their clients. They have developed a stock portfolio of their publicly traded clients and will link their financial rewards to the portfolio’s success. See the NY Times article @ Advertising: Agency Combines Clients' Stocks for a Mini-Mutual Fund .

Having an agency link their financial reward to the client’s is a great thing. It aligns incentives and gets the agency focused on the returns the client’s marketing investments are generating. Not something typically seen from large brand oriented agencies, but clearly a winning formula. Hats off to Lori Senecal and the KBS&P team for aligning their rewards with their client’s financial results in this clever way.

But, “hello,” we in performance marketing have been doing just that for nearly a decade! MediaWhiz, and other performance marketing agencies, have been getting paid for results since 2001. We get paid to create the specific customer actions that our clients know, with statistical predictability, will generate profits. In most cases it is not our bonuses that are on the line but our entire fee. It’s not just some “skin in the game” but our financial lives on the line. We live or die by daily market results which determine whether our programs are providing a positive ROI.

As the competition for high quality customers becomes increasingly intense, every dollar a client invests in marketing needs to be productive. Great marketing programs will be continuously optimized to ensure they are creating the customer response that will lead to profits. Aligning the agency’s incentives with the client’s financial results is a strong step toward making this work. It’s great the KBS&P team will get a bonus if their client’s stock goes up. But if an advertiser wants more than a little skin in the game, if they want marketing partners fighting for their client’s profits as if their lives depended upon it, they should add more performance marketing to their overall marketing mix. As a performance marketing agency, we at MediaWhiz understand our financial life, just like our client’s, depends upon driving more profitable marketing. Now that’s alignment!

Death of the marketing budget

In a recent article penned by Mediawhiz CEO Jonathan Shapiro and published by iMedia Connection, Jonathan makes the argument that traditional marketing budgets should be tossed out the window. To his point, the Internet allows brands more visibility into the performance of their marketing efforts than ever had before. Combine the visibility the Internet allows with performance based distribution channels and you'll see there is no cap on what you can spend.

In Jonathan's words;

"Future winners in the online marketing space will understand that success means investing in performance marketing programs of continuous improvement that provide increasing and demonstrable profits. That's performance marketing, and you won't want to cap its success with an annual budget."

Read the whole article here.

Death of the Marketing Budget

Affiliate Summit West Alert

MediaWhiz SEO industry expert John Carcutt is popping up everywhere. This time, at Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, as a member of an expert panel discussing the relationship between SEO and Affiliate Marketing.

Blogger Stephanie Lichtenstein, creator of the influential affiliate marketing blog, stephanielichtenstein.com had this to say about John;

"Since I know a little more about John Carcutt, I can tell you that he is
the real deal when it comes to SEO. He hosts a weekly podcast called
SEO101 on Webmaster Radio every Monday. He also has been in the game for a long time calling himself the, “SEO Oldtimer.”

The details of the panel are listed below.

When: Sunday, January 17, 2010
What: Monetizing Blogs for Affiliate Marketing and SEO
Learn to maximize affiliate commissions using blogging, increasing your
community, and utilizing SEO.
Who:
Kristopher B. Jones, President, Pepperjam Network, A GSI Commerce Company
(Twitter @pepperjamceo) (Moderator)
Drew Bennett, Professional Blogger, BenSpark.com (Twitter @BenSpark) John
Carcutt, SEO Manager, MediaWhiz (Twitter @JohnCarcutt)
Tim Jones, Owner, TheRealTimJones.com (Twitter @TheRealTimJones)
Murray Ross Newlands, Founder, Affiliate Heat (Twitter @murraynewlands)
When: 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Where: Brasilia 1-2 Rio Hotel
Passes: Platinum, Gold

Look for John's video summary =of his panel session on January 17. Stephanie Lichtenstein will also be covering the session and explore MediaWhiz's MonetizeIt business.

A New Year, A New Logo, A New Blog!

That's right. It's 2010 and we here at MediaWhiz are roaring into the new decade with a new logo and a new blog.

In the coming months this blog will be a destination for online marketing thought leadership. We will share our ideas and we hope you will share yours. We will discuss our results. We will utilize the fact that our company is made up of a team working to be the best and the brightest, and we are going to use our tenacious approach to being the best to redefine performance marketing.

We will be showing you our results; In the shape of case studies, white papers, and opinion posts, you will see our performance first hand. You will get a glimpse into how MediaWhiz can help you make the most out of every single marketing dollar.

Were also taking this show on the road. This year alone we will be attending a host of conferences including:

Affiliate Summit West - January 17 -19 2010
IDate2010 -January 27 - 29 2010
LeadsCon Las Vegas - February 23 -24 2010
AdTech San Francisco - April 19-21 2010

This blog will be sharing the highlights of all the stops throughout the year.

We're going to have a little fun too. Check back often for guests, sports highlights, funny stories and online marketing fun.

We hope you are all as excited as we are. It's going to be a big year for us and our family of partners and clients. Time to show tenacity, excitement, spirit and results! Here we go...

ShoppingAds Payment Changes

Hi ShoppingAds Publishers!

Starting this payment cycle we will be paying out Net30- that is, your December 2008 payments will be made to you on February 1st, 2009, and so on and so forth.

We have made this adjustment in order to be able to pay all of our pubs as efficiently and completely as possible.

Thank you all for your continued patience and cooperation!

ShoppingAds News: Moving to a New Datacenter

Due to company wide consolidation, we will be moving ShoppingAds to a new data center this month. We can assure you our technical department is doing all that is necessary to ensure that our network transition is as smooth as possible. Thanks for your support, thanks for using ShoppingAds!

SCRIBEFIRE OFFERS IN-TEXT SOLUTIONS POWERED BY KONTERA’S CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS TECHNOLOGY

Kontera®, a leading provider of In-Text Advertising and Information Solutions for web publishers and advertisers, announced that ScribeFire will be utilizing the company’s patent-pending contextual analysis technology to power In-Text offerings to its vast base of publishers.

Through this technology partnership, ScribeFire publishers benefit from an easy, one-click implementation of Kontera’s In-Text Advertising solution directly from their respective publisher consoles.

Kontera analyzes the content of the ScribeFire®-enabled publishers, and highlights contextually relevant keywords. The technology discovers the keywords on a web page, blog, or widget in real-time and automatically matches them with contextually relevant advertising or information. When a user mouses-over a double-underlined keyword, a contextually relevant ad, known as ContentLink®, is displayed.

The real value of the ScribeFire / Kontera (ContentLink) integration is in its ability to engage users. Publishers running ContentLink experience engagement rates that are higher than with other pay per click advertising solutions. Publishers of user-contributed media regularly report equal or greater click-through rates with Kontera than with Google’s AdSense®.

“Today, bloggers and small publishers are looking for more opportunities to monetize their content,” said Patrick Gavin, founder and President of ScribeFire. “Thanks to Kontera’s proprietary technology, we’re among the first ad platforms to offer publishers the ability to run both high ROI in-text advertising as well as fully optimized banner ads. Contextually relevant ads will generate revenue for thousands of ScribeFire-powered publishers.”

“From reality TV to social networking and the blogosphere, user-contributed media is changing the monetization models for all forms of content,” said Mathew Haugen, VP of  Business Development, Kontera. “With Kontera’s technology being utilized by MediaWhiz (ScribeFire), we’re enabling thousands of bloggers and online publishers of all sizes to tap into a new revenue stream.”