Catharine P. Taylor moderates a panel discussing the future of Facebook were they to launch an online ad network.
Tag: Social media marketing
Introducing Kinetic Conversations
Introducing Kinetic Conversations. This link is to the introduction I wrote for my company Kinetic Social‘s new blog, “Kinetic Conversations.” The blog is pretty cool (I’m biased of course). I cover off very briefly on who we are, from our launch to our recent Series A, and then talk a bit about what we hope to achieve with this blog.
Here is a snippet from my introduction:
The purpose of our Kinetic Conversations
We operate in an industry that has – to put it diplomatically – a high opinion of itself. Silicon Valley overall and the ad:tech sector in particular has been accused of cloaking capital accumulation with the fig leaf of “changing the world”. There appears to be no shortage of self-absorbed entrepreneurs more interested in promoting themselves than building real companies, as well as founders who run their companies like feudal lords surrounded by serfs with Stanford degrees. With so much bombastic boasting, it can often be challenging to tell the wheat from the chaff to get to what’s really going on in our industry.
At Kinetic, we’ve worked hard to build a different culture, one focused on providing outstanding client service and striving for excellence in our products, our technologies, and our processes. Sounds pretty basic, right? But you’d be surprised how rarely these “real business” concepts are practiced in our space.
So the purpose of Kinetic Conversations is to talk about the things that actually matter in building what we believe is a real company in this sector: the people we are, the stuff we’re working on, the things brands want in order to build better engagement with their customers in social media.
We’ll also discuss new products and major technology releases – indeed, we’ve got a big one coming soon (so stay tuned)! We’ll have ‘how it works’ explanations, opinions on industry trends, best practices and tips, and we’ll try to do as much of this as possible without the buzz words that annoyingly characterize our space … or, when we cannot avoid it, provide definitions of tricky industry-speak.
Most of all, this blog will be a showcase for the talent that makes up Kinetic. More than any other company I know, our team is a dedicated group with a real passion for the business. Those can be throw-away lines at many companies. But at Kinetic, it is the real deal, and it is why we are who we are.
So, thank you for checking us out and hopefully you’ll find enough reason to come back again! And please give us feedback along the way.
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Don Mathis is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kinetic Social, a company launched in 2011 with a core mission of making sense of the world’s ‘social signal’ on behalf of large brand advertisers. He also serves in the active reserve of the US Navy, where he is the Commanding Officer of a highly deployable, selectively staffed, joint-service combat logistics unit that supports forward deployed war-fighters.
“It’s the Advice, Stupid”
By Don Mathis, Kinetic Social CEO
Earlier this week, we began to hear more details regarding the changes Facebook has made to the Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program, in particular as these changes will relate to both the initial application to the PMD program as well as to the recertification process for existing badge holders.
Of all of the new requirements, I believe the first one mentioned by Zach Rodgers in an AdExchanger article will cause the most difficulty amongst the existing PMD community: “Going forward, all PMDs must demonstrate ‘the ability to advise marketers on ad spend to amplify word of mouth and ensure success of brands on the platform.’” (Read the full AdExchanger piece here).
Did everyone get that? To keep your PMD badge, you better be able to help your client understand not simply what to buy, but why they should buy it. It isn’t enough to be a smart buying platform. In fact, that’s becoming the price of admission to the game … to be an effective (preferred) marketing partner for Facebook, you better be good at providing outstanding strategic client advisory services.
Facebook is looking for partners who are able to help clients create holistic campaigns that take full advantage of the FB platform. Just arbitraging “Likes” for a cheaper price than the next guy does not equal effective campaign management or genuine brand building, and increasingly won’t cut it. That’s been true with the more sophisticated brand advertisers for a while; it is becoming true with Facebook now too.
Why should that be so hard for many of the PMDs? Because most PMDs were created as “platforms” to engage in the social media equivalent of programmatic buying. As a general rule, the PMD community has focused sharply on trying to be social trading desks and/or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms for social media buying.
There is nothing wrong with that, per se. In fact, to be an effective badge holder, a company must be very good at providing differentiated, optimized programmatic social media buying. But having a strong technical skill-set and platform which interfaces with the FB API is not enough.
The PMD community seems to operate as if they attended a big venture capital summit in 2010 or maybe early 2011. At that summit, some prominent VC made a speech along the lines of, “whatever you do, DO NOT claim to be in the media execution business. You’ll get a crappy agency-like multiple when you sell the company … instead, be a SaaS play! That’s the path to a 4-5x revenue multiple exit!”
And while I’m sure no such thing actually occurred (or if it did, we weren’t invited), the industry certainly seems to act like it. Don’t believe me? See how many times the word “Platform” is repeated on the websites or in the marketing materials of the badge holders. “Platform” has replaced “Optimization” as the ad:tech word of the year. Thankfully, the buzz phrase “Social Graph” is already starting to die.
But as I spoke about in my post last week, Facebook is the inventory aggregator in the social media ecosystem, not the publisher. Facebook’s one billion users are the publishers … and in this ecosystem, Facebook makes the buying easier – like an exchange, only better – and the role of the PMD ought to be to help the client access the FB universe effectively. Not just buying, but buying smartly to build a brand.
Bottom line: if you want to hold a PMD badge, you better be good at helping your clients grow their brands.
Follow Don on Twitter @KineticDHM
Connect with Don on Google+
Don Mathis is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kinetic Social, a company launched in 2011 with a core focus of marrying “Big Data” to social media on behalf of large brand advertisers. He also serves in the active reserve of the US Navy, where he is the Commanding Officer of a highly deployable, selectively staffed, joint-service combat logistics unit that supports forward deployed war-fighters.
Atlas (Socially) Unshrugged …
By Don Mathis, Kinetic Social CEO
I was speaking to an investor in one of the Facebook 
PMD players last year, and he told me that his portfolio company was “going to be the Atlas of Social Media.” My response was that Facebook already was the Atlas of social (at least, of its own social media). Now, it is also the Atlas of Atlas … which means, of the open display & mobile web.
It is a brilliant transaction if Facebook executes well.
Here is what Sanjay Vasdev of Microsoft wrote in a blog post: “Through Atlas’s Click Purchase Path Analysis, [advertisers] can glean insights into where Facebook advertising dwells as an introducer, influencer, or closer across each unique click path, essentially creating a virtual representation of the digital conversion funnel.”
He added: “Accurate measurement will help draw conclusions on the quality of audiences delivered at scale. Marketers will be better informed on the synergistic aspects of Facebook advertising, gain better understanding of its reach and overlap, and aid the movement of marketing budgets to appropriate sources.”
See a great Zach Rodgers / AdExchanger interview with FB’s Ads Product Director Gokul Rajaram discussing the transaction in greater detail here.
What does it mean? From our perspective at my company Kinetic, it is one more mile marker on the path to digital media ad convergence … and it is a step in the right direction for the entire ecosystem. The objective for major brands is increasingly to seek cross-platform integration, because dollar for dollar, a campaign integrated across media channels with a well-balanced (and data-driven) mix provides the best bang for that buck. Measuring the effectiveness of cross-platform integration is today’s challenge; Facebook just made it a little easier, and the Atlas deal will pave the way for brands to accelerate the shift to integrated campaigns.
It also reflects, I believe, a deeper philosophy of Facebook: they don’t seek to be a glorified publisher with social bells and whistles as some believe and as the Street sometimes appears to want. I believe Mark Zuckerberg has a bigger vision: to be the infrastructure and architecture of the global social digital experience. They’ll leave the actual trading of the ad units to their partners.
What does the Atlas transaction mean for the Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer community? If you are a PMD and you do smart media buying / analytics in Facebook and across platforms (social, display, mobile, etc.), Facebook just became a more effective distribution partner for you and your clients. I wrote about Facebook’s continuing effort to improve its ad experience for its users here and here. And full disclosure: my company Kinetic is a PMD badge holder.
HOWEVER … if your goal is to try to become yet one more intermediary layer focused on adding measurement or analysis of other people’s buying and optimization, you should be thinking hard about your next pivot. In the display world of fragmented inventory, there might be a need for an intermediary layer or two that interprets the chaos. There might (might) be a long-term value proposition for an ecosystem with programatic buyers (e.g., trading desks, DMPs); an aggregator of inventory like an exchange, and/or even an SSO aggregating across multiple sources; and of course the supply itself, i.e. publishers.
But in social? Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc. ARE the aggregators. WE – as in, everyone with an active profile – are the publishers. So the opportunity for the PMD community is to be a demand-side player, a trading desk for social and integrated campaigns, helping plug our clients into this ecosystem … not to be yet another intermediary layer adding an unnecessary tolling fee to the ad transaction.
Follow Don on Twitter @KineticDHM
Connect with Don on Google+
Don Mathis is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kinetic Social, a company launched in 2011 with a core focus of marrying “Big Data” to social media on behalf of large brand advertisers. He also serves in the active reserve of the US Navy, where he is the Commanding Officer of a highly deployable, selectively staffed, joint-service combat logistics unit that supports forward deployed war-fighters.
The Smell of Social Desperation
By Don Mathis, Kinetic Social CEO
There is a smell of desperation afoot in social ad:tech. The bloom is off the rose, and ad:tech social marketing is undergoing a period of tumultuous change. The headlines are focused on sell-before-death M&A, shuck and jive (aka “pivoting”) stories, and lay-offs.
I think we are seeing an important evolution underway in the social ad:tech sector: the shake-out that most of us expected to occur is underway, the era of frothy valuations is over for the moment, and the real social media marketing companies are beginning to stand out from the pack.
As the wheat gets culled from the chaff, many of the start-ups listed in Terry Kawaja’s LumaScape will fail, pivot or both over the next 18 months. That’s because anyone with a heartbeat and a Facebook API key could sling social arbitrage advertising in the early days. Now, you can’t shake a stick without hitting a venture-backed social play.
But the companies with genuine added value will continue to expand and thrive … the ones that have invested in real technology development and differentiation. Meanwhile, the companies that raised a bunch of venture capital and spent it mostly on marketing with go, quietly or not, into the night.
AdExchanger had a great interview with LUMA’s Terry Kawaja on this subject, posted a few days ago on February 4th.
Perhaps we are approaching the end of this era?
http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6507690/hardly-working-start-up-guys
Follow Don on Twitter @KineticDHM
Connect with Don on Google+
Don Mathis is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kinetic Social, a company launched in 2011 with a core focus of marrying “Big Data” to social media on behalf of large brand advertisers. He also serves in the active reserve of the US Navy, where he is the Commanding Officer of a highly deployable, selectively staffed, joint-service combat logistics unit that supports forward deployed war-fighters.
