Tim Cadogan, GoTo.com alumni, heads OpenX and raised $10M.  Good job!

Listening to comScore’s State of the U.S. Online Retail Economy in Q1 2009 webinar and twittering at the same time.  Here are some of the bullet points / soundbites:

• “A dollar saved is a dollar not spent” — Online spend of “older” folks and higher earning bracket are not growing as much. Probably trying to save more and reduce discretionary spending to offset losses in the stock market.

• eCommerce categories growth year-over-year. Winners: Sports & Fitness, Books & Magazines, Video Games, Computer Software. Losers: Office Supplies, Music/Movies/Videos.

• Survey says: 74% of consumers somewhat or very likely to pre-shop online before purchasing online or offline.

• Importance of Online Features: Most=product details, purchasing incentives. Least=online chat.

• Mobile is becoming important. 9.2M people visited an online retail site via mobile in March 09. Mobile users with smart phones are also in higher income brackets.

• Online Display Ads.  Dell 1.3B ad views vs. HP 166M.

• Online site categories that have high influence on purchasing behavior: Classified, Comparison Shopping, Social Media (including an obligatory showing of the Twiter user growth hockey stick).

• Coupon redemption rate has gone up, as in any recessionary times.  Consumers redeeming coupons are not necessarily in lower income brackets.

I’m watching Lockhart Steele interviewed by Jason Calacanis on TWiST live streaming.   Lockhart Steele talked about a special type of blog advertising where a listing agent can put a listing for a cool apartment in NYC on Curbed NY site.  The “ad” will appear in the stream of blog entries and will flow with the blog as the day moves on.  This insertion costs a one time $250.

So, I poked around Quantcast.com to see what sort of page view estimates it has. Reading the graph shows about 120,000 page views per day.  Alexa.com shows about 27% of users go to Curbed NY.  So, it’s 32K page views for the NYC.  The CPM for this type of special Ad Unit works out to be $7.80 for a highly contextual ad.  Not a bad deal.

According to this article on AdAge, infomercials may get cheap enough due to the economic downturn to be a profitable business model (again). From this article “…air them on late-night cable at $1 per thousand viewers.” Yes, that’s right $1 CPM on TV.

Unrelated, but interesting, fact reported in this article: 24 million units of PedEgg at $10+ a pop. That’s one for every 12 people in the US.

This article about Jason Calacanis offering to “sponsor” a position on the twitter new user page has tons of numbers to make my mouth water. In short, Jason offers $250K for a two-year slot on the page of suggested users to follow for new twitter users. The belief is that new twitter users want to follow people (other wise a blank twitter page is pretty boring). If you get a position on this page of suggested twitter users, you are bound to get some clickthrus.

TechCrunch suggests that one can get 10,000 new followers every day from being listed on this suggestion list which adds up to 3.6 million in a year. No idea whether they can support this claim. Other famous people/entities on this list (e.g. Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Kevin Rose, etc.) have only 250,000 followers.

To keep the math simple, I’ll use 1.0 million followers. This is less than the 365 times 10,000 suggested by TechCrunch but 4x that of actual and popular twitter users. One needs to tweet regularly but not too much to keep the followers. Let’s say it is 5 tweets a day times 365 days a year. So, for a cool $250K, you get to “touch” each of your followers 3,650 times over two years.

The CPM works out to be $250,000 / (3650 * 1,000,000 / 1000) = $0.068

Assuming that you can really amass a million followers, this is not a good deal, it is a great deal! Even if you only get a quarter of followers like the 250K followers of NYTimes and CNN, the CPM is still around $0.25, the range of many social media.

This is quoted from an article about iPhone application usage: “Specifically, the average free app would need to earn $8.75 CPM (an advertising term that means cost per thousand) in order to equal revenues that paid apps receive on average, but the market is currently standing in a range of 50 cents to two dollars CPM.

The conclusion is that unless your application is very good at monetizing via advertising (and not the typical $0.50 CPM from ad networks like AdMob or Pinch Media), you should just take at least the minimum charge for your application through Apple AppStore.

Average 30-second spot gone for $3 million. Latest report on viewership is 95.4 million people watched the Steelers vs. Cardinals game. The CPM works out to be $31.44.

There were a lot fewer ads than before. The majority of the ads were of the following categories:

• Beer: The usual suspects.
• Chips: Doritos, Cheeto
• Job Search: Ladders, Monsters, CareerBuilder

They all look like cheap thrills in this economic hardship.

My favorite has to be the hulu.com commercial where Alec Baldwin plays the alien commander of why hulu is evil.

Marketing budgets are hit the same way as any other expenses as recession hits. When dollars are tight, those in charge have to examine how best to spend what remains.

Shifting the Marketing Dollars – Companies with good brand awareness (e.g. HP for computers, Century21 for realtors) don’t need more exposure. Marketing dollars are not cut, just shifted to other media (online, paid search, social media, etc.).

From Marketing to Bread-and-Butter – Brick-and-Mortar stores have to compete with online stores such as Amazon or the deep discounters like Walmart. Companies like Best Buy reallocates their marketing dollars towards beefing up their physical stores, more helpful sales people, and (of course) their online bestbuy.com web site.

Smarter TVs – CES showcased a few web-connected TVs.  With the amount of video content available on the web, it’s natural to bundle Internet into TVs.  But the side-effect of this is that people have more control on programming.  Just like TiVo lets viewers redefine prime-time, web-connected TVs will enable viewers to redefine what’s TV programming.

For more details about Maverick CMOs (at least partially) ditching TV ads, see this article.

In a little bit over two weeks, it will be Superbowl Sunday.  I’m not a big football fan, but I’ll watch it for social reasons.

NBC which carries the game on TV gets to sell the half-time commercial spots and gets to set the ad rate.  Historically, this is the most watched sports event and the half-time ads is what companies use to launch new products.  The original Macintosh was launched during the 1984 Superbowl.

In a latest report quoting NBC Universal, a 30-second ad spot will start at $3M, compared to the average price of $2.7M during the 2008 Superbowl which Nielson reported a viewership of 97.5M.  Let’s just give the viewership a slight round up to 100M, minimum CPM for Superbowl XLIII is going to be $30 CPM.  Is there something wrong with my math?  That’s not bad at all! CNNmoney listed ad rates is from $113 to $177 CPM.  Infoworld, with a more focused tech audience, listed a $200+ CPM for interactive advertising units.

Some guy is selling 10 Facebook profiles each with at least 200 friends. He even outlined the “formula” on how those profiles were created. The opening bid was $0.99 with only one bidder before the auction was shutdown by eBay.

Suppose the deal actually closes at $0.99. For 99 cents, you get access 2000 friends. I’m going to assume that you can spam, um, I mean broadcast, to these “friends” 5 times before the realize that they are being marketed to and unfriend you. So, 2000 friends times 5 impressions = 10,000 impressions for $0.99, i.e. about $0.10 CPM.

I’m making a lot of assumptions here based on wild guess. Anyone who uses “managed profiles” (a.k.a. fake profiles) to do real marketing can contact me directly and let me know how effective it is. I’ll summarize anonymously so you can keep doing what you are doing.