I researched a sample of 15 retailers (and a few direct to consumer manufacturers) spanning apparel and accessories, school supplies, computer hardware and software, and ancillary consumer electronics/entertainment categories for the period July 2008 and August 2008, the typical Back To School shopping period. I also looked at online advertising activity for these companies for the same period using our AdRelevance service.

It is worthy to note that Dell and Target are the two heavy hitters on online advertising impressions compared to all others in this sample. Although Amazon and Wal-Mart had significantly fewer online ad impressions than did Dell and Target, Amazon saw huge traffic to its site and Wal-Mart saw significant traffic as well. It seems that Dell has invested proportionately significantly more in online advertising during the BTS period to drive relatively lower traffic to its site than the other retailers.

For other retailers such as Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Circuit City, OfficeMax and Office Deport, their spend levels and traffic seem proportionate. Does online advertising drive traffic? There is evidence it does, and there are other critical factors that drive online traffic, such as relevancy of retailer to the specific shopping period or need (here BTS), strength of the Brick & Mortar and/or online brand, etc.

The volatility in the real estate market is concerning, nay alarming, across the board from home-buyers, to lenders, to builders. Moreover, the recent upward trend in home foreclosures has compelled President Bush and the Congress to pass the Housing Bill, which comes as a huge respite to hundreds of thousands of homeowners on the brink of foreclosures and to mortgage lenders who bet heavily on sub-prime mortgages, especially two giants in the game - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, now with books full of bad mortgages.

We looked at the trend in visitation across all Web sites within the Real Estate category and mapped it with the movement of the Case-Schiller Home Price Composite-20 Index. While the average price/value of a home in the US has been decreasing since the summer of 2006 (down more than 36 points), we see a significant growth in unique visitors (>11 million) to sites within this category during the same period. With the downward turn in home sales, it is likely that current homeowners may be visiting real estate sites to check their home’s value, keep tabs on interest rates, and keep abreast of other relevant information. Moreover, it is also possible that potential home buyers may be increasingly on the lookout for affordable homes.

The most traffic has been across a few key sites. Realtor.com has historically had the highest number of visitors and continues to do so. Yahoo! Real Estate and MSN Real Estate sites have seen some steady growth in visitors since 2005, while Yahoo! Real Estate has had a sharp rise in visitors since early 2007. Overall, AOL Real Estate has seen a decline in visitors.

While the number of visitors to real estate portals is on the rise, there has been a steep decline in advertising in the “Financial Services, Lender and Home Equity” category since December 2007, as reported by AdRelevance. For instance, in January of 2008, Countrywide Loans was the top advertiser delivering close to 6 billion impressions online, but since February it has maintained fewer than one billion impressions online. Other top contenders in the category (Citi Mortgage, GMAC Mortgage, Bank of America, Wachovia, etc.) have either completely withdrawn or drastically reduced their online advertising in this category, though the category experienced a slight up-tick in July.

It seems like online research content and news sites are drawing a steadily growing audience, but the advertisers are taking a step back with their investments in online advertising. Stay tuned for how the year winds up!

In early June, Beet.TV was onsite at the Advertising 2.0 conference in New York. We discussed Nielsen’s online video measurement product, VideoCensus in the context of online advertising and what our clients are looking to measure. It comes down to this: who’s watching, what are they watching and for how long? All of which sounds eerily 1.0, doesn’t it? Click here to see the interview.

I’ve been working on a couple projects lately that have me thinking about CGM and its relationship to overall media. Specifically, I’ve been trying to get my head around a taxonomy of online media. This is no easy task. The challenge here is two-fold: First, online media changes so darn quickly, that any construct you create needs to be flexible enough to change with the times; and second, any construct you build is likely to be disputed by just about everyone else who develops Internet research. And, no I haven’t figured this all out, but the process did lead me down a path.

To start thinking about this problem I thought about CGM and what makes it different from “mainstream” online media. This is a bit complicated on its own since CGM is not one thing; it is made up of blogs, discussion boards, video and, some would argue, chat. It seems to me that the unifying factor here is, shockingly enough, the consumer.

After having this not so brilliant insight, I thought about the blogs I read most days – BoingBoing, DeadSpin, Gothamist, Gizmodo, RazzBall, Freakonomics, Diane Mermigas: On Media and Online Travel Review. In at least six of these cases (BoingBoing, DeadSpin, Gothamist, Gizmodo, Diane Mermigas: On Media, Feakonomics), the writers of the blogs are not consumers, they are professional writers. Writing these blogs either makes up some part of their income, or is part of their broader work, much as this blog is for me.

With this said what happens to this construct of CGM, when the consumer is not in the middle, when it is a professional writer? What is the unifying factor? The frequency of updates? The platform itself? The tone? The format?

I then began to think about one of my favorite sports writers, ESPN’s Bill Simmons. For us Boston sports fans, Bill is a bit of an icon. He started writing a very blog-like column on his own site bostonsportsguy.com long before there was something called blogs – but it definitely had the “blog” tone, and it too was updated frequently. Bill’s column for ESPN.com and ESPN the magazine retains these qualities, particularly that of tone. Few people, however, would call him a “blogger” per se.

This thought process led me to the idea that blogs are subset of CGM is a fallacy. To understand what I mean, see the graphic below:

From a stylistic standpoint, one could make an argument that a blog is in all four quadrants above. One could also argue, however, that the concept of “consumer” implies amateur status and mainstream media sites do not employ amateurs (if they were employed, they would no longer be amateurs). If you use this construct to think about blogs, only a specific percent of blogs are truly CGM, specifically those that fall in the lower right hand corner.

Other than this being an academic exercise that bores the pants off people at cocktail parties, why is this important?

Two of the chief topics of concern in the CGM space are the following questions:

-How do we monetize CGM?

-How do we measure CGM?

These questions are too big, and too broad to answer. Breaking apart the construct of what is CGM, and what is a blog allows us to focus the questions and get closer to an answer. The fact is, we pretty much know how to monetize and how to measure all of the quadrants other than the lower right. So the problem isn’t how do we measure and monetize CGM, the problem is, how do we measure and monetize small, fragmented, amateur websites. This becomes a problem we can begin to think about solving – and frankly becomes much more of a long-tail question than a CGM question.

Ad networks anyone?

This is clearly a work in progress, and one could argue with pretty much all of my assumptions. I would love some help refining the concept. If you have any thoughts please shoot me a note or post in the comments section.

Greetings from the Sports Marketing Conference in beautiful Chicago. I just sat down after my panel where we discussed, yes, you guessed it – online GRPs.

This seemed like an opportune time to pick up on my series discussing the ins and outs of online GRPs. In my last post, I outlined three core reasons why I dislike the concept of online GRPs. Those reasons are:

1. GRPs tell you very little about an actual campaign (Isn’t the net of reach and frequency just impressions?)

2. GRPs do not take into account the efficiencies brought about by Internet delivery (How do I measure waste and make it relevant across media? Targeted rating point, I think not!)

3. GRPs will not be comparable across media (What is the equivalent of a 6 minute qualifier online?)

In part 2 of this series I would like to pick up on the first point, GRPs tell you very little about a campaign, and in fact might be misleading.

GRPs, in their simplest form, are reach multiplied by frequency. So let’s take a hypothetical buy and see what would happen if we flighted it on 6 different sites: MySpace, Weather.com, ESPN.com, Facebook, CNN.com and NYTimes.com. Using May Netview data see what happens:

Okay, that’s interesting, but what does it tell us? Well, it tells us that MySpace has the most inventory right? But we knew that anyway…

Let’s look at this a different way:

What we’ve done here is kept the GRPs standard. If a buyer wants 10 GRPs there are multiple ways for that to be provided. However, we know that the optimal frequency (depending on who you talk to) is somewhere between 2 and 5 – which is the reason why advertisers like frequency caps. Given that, should we be valuing 10 GRPs at a frequency of 7 the same way we should be valuing 10 GRPs at a frequency of 4? Probably not. A typical response is, okay, I’ll just provide GRPs with a frequency cap. We’ll, if that’s the case, you’re basically just selling reach, not GRPs!

Let’s even take this one step further, let’s look at MTV.com streaming audience. They had about 1.6 million streamers in the month of May…

Wait a second, you mean if I buy 10 GRPs I am still buying the same number of impressions no matter what?

If this is the case, what do GRPs in fact tell us that we don’t already know…nothing.