Along with the rise in the importance of social media is the rise in the need to manage your social media presence on search engines. Google has recently begun to include listing from the likes of twitter and facebook in their SERPs, and our Director of Search Marketing, Adam Riff penned a great article on the topic for DMNews that can be found here.
Look for more great thought leadership in the coming days from the Mediawhiz team
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!
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 they have 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.
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.
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…
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!
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!
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.”
We are proud to announce that ScribeFire QuickAds, our ad optimization product for web site publishers, will launch out of beta today marking three months of significant business growth and technological innovation. Quickads is the first ad platform to enable publishers to serve both optimized banners and in-text ads on their sites via a single platform. Since its launch in July of 2008, more than 5,000 web site publishers have signed up with QuickAds to increase their revenue earning potential.
ScribeFire QuickAds greatly simplifies ad inventory management with a powerful optimization decision engine, which matches each impression with the highest revenue producing ad. Ads are selected from the MediaWhiz ad inventory pool, which is fueled by MediaWhiz’s experienced sales team and relationships with over 100 ad networks.
ScribeFire’s advanced in-text advertising solution guarantees site publishers the highest degree of relevancy between content, keywords, and ads. In-text ads appear as double underlined keywords that reveal a relevant advertisement upon rollover. It is an easy way to add subtle, contextually relevant, and eye-catching advertisements to a web site.
ScribeFire’s display advertising solution accepts high impact Flash and Video banner ads, along with static JPEG, Pop-Unders, and animated GIF ads in IAB-standard ad sizes (e.g. Leaderboard: 728×90, Wide Skyscraper: 160×600, and Medium Rectangle: 300×250).
“It is very exciting to launch ScribeFire QuickAds out of beta after just three months,” said Patrick Gavin, President of ScribeFire. “Small publishers the world over now have a powerful and incredibly easy way to generate top dollar for their web site’s ad space.”
“ScribeFire is making it easy for websites to optimize all the ad networks, and take advantage of our substantial and highly experienced sales force,” said Jonathan Shapiro, CEO of MediaWhiz. “To be the first ad platform to offer publishers the ability to run fully optimized banner ads as well as high ROI in-text advertising is a remarkable accomplishment by the ScribeFire team.”
“Any blogger, with any level of technical know-how, can get these ads going and start making money on their blog…almost immediately,” said Barry Schwartz of the Cartoon Barry Blog.
“I am thrilled with this new discovery… it has opened new avenues (for web site publishers) to earn money from (their) blog or website,” said Jobin Sebastian of TechMartini.
Shane of Ask Shane.org wrote, “I’m really impressed with the QuickAds interface. Very clean and easy to use…they’ve definitely worked hard (and successfully) to create a very nice system.”
ScribeFire QuickAds is available for FREE download at the ScribeFire website.
MediaWhiz announced a new payment option for its web publishers that provides their earnings on reloadable, Prepaid MasterCard® cards. The service is provided by Payoneer, Inc., an approved Member Service Provider of First Bank of Delaware.Publishers that use MediaWhiz’s highly successful link marketing product, Text Links Ads, and its innovative blog product-review network, ReviewMe, can elect to receive payments to fully functioning Prepaid MasterCard cards instead of standard paper check or PayPal options. The cards can be used worldwide at any store, ATM, or online location where Debit MasterCard is accepted.
Payoneer’s service provides a global-friendly alternative to checks, wire transfers and other online payment methods. Publishers benefit by having immediate access to their money while avoiding the hassles associated with lost or stolen checks, hold times and fees, and the lack of availability of PayPal in certain countries. Additionally, cardholders can spend and/or withdraw funds in their own currency without the need for a bank account.
According to MediaWhiz, publishers who opted for this payment method during a six-month trial rollout reported tremendous satisfaction with getting their earnings faster, lowering foreign currency exchange rates, and gaining 24×7 online account management access from anywhere in the world.
This service allows MediaWhiz to turn the payment process into a brand-affirmation opportunity. Cards bear the MediaWhiz logo, reminding publishers of where their earnings came from with each use. MediaWhiz also found that Payoneer was a significant cost-saving option considering its large number of publishers, 40% of whom are located outside the United States.
“Publishers perform just about every business function at online speed and expect the same when they get paid,” said Jonathan Shapiro, CEO of MediaWhiz. The company paid nearly $100 million to its network of over 30,000 publishers in 2007. “Our publishers love their co-branded cards from Payoneer because they get paid faster, and the overseas publishers can keep more of their earnings. We love it because it lowers our processing costs, and keeps an important community of ours happy.”
Patrick Gavin, President of MediaWhiz Display added, “Payoneer integrated simply and easily into our existing payment infrastructure – and let us use payment as a marketing advantage, especially overseas.”
“We see tremendous growth opportunity for the use of reloadable Prepaid MasterCard cards as recurring mass payment vehicles through service providers like Payoneer,” said Alonzo Primus, President and Chief Operating Officer of First Bank of Delaware. “We are eager to help industry leaders such as MediaWhiz gain a competitive edge with innovative payment solutions.”
Yuval Tal, CEO of Payoneer added, “As the Internet makes a global player out of every web site, Payoneer can help online advertising leaders like MediaWhiz take exceptional care of their publishers, and their own bottom line.”
