Moog's Viewpoints

Two excellent presentations about Social Influencers

| View | Upload your own

| View | Upload your own

Cookie Cutter Thinking

A very smart friend of mine made an interesting observation to me earlier this week.  He said that many people who lack experience dealing with a certain type of circumstance will apply a cookie cutter approach when thinking about the solution.  The point he was making was that complex problems are usually not the same and have many different variables.  If you apply a cookie cutter approach to the problem you are likely not thinking deeply enough about all of the variables that could effect the outcome.

You have heard people say, "I have seen this movie before".  Well, when it comes to strategic business decisions there is a strong chance that this movie might appear to be similar, but is really different.  Maintaining the self awareness and humility to know that you have may been taught something, told something or even experienced something your self, you should always ask your self the question, "what is different this time than last?"

My friend called this advanced pattern matching.  You are not just looking for 70% of the variables to be similar because, more often than not, a few, or even one, of the variables will have an out sized impact on the outcome.

A very cool version of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" on the Theramin

A friend forwarded me this video this morning.  My father had a very early association with the Theramin and this really made me think of him.

Why I Love Software As a Service

Six months ago I left my position as CEO of Q Interactive an Interactive Marketing Services company that I helped start ten years ago.  I ran it as a public company for the last five years and we took it private in December 2005.  We had 160 employees and last year reported revenue growth of 78% to $68 million.  Within two weeks of leaving in late July, I started a new company called Viewpoints Network and four weeks later had secured the first round of funding for $4.8 million.  This post is some of the nuts and bolts lessons I have learned about how to take advantage of the numerous new companies who offer their services as a “Software as A Service”.

First a little bit of background.  After having raised $100 million to launch and grow my previous company, I wanted to take a more measured approach this time.  I have come to appreciate and value very lean and efficient businesses that “stick to their knitting” and focus on improving their unique value add.  Therefore, I intended to keep the company very small (less than 15 people) for as long as I could.

Jefferies 3rd Annual Internet Conference

Jefferies 3^rd Annual Internet Conference

NYC - February 28, 2007

I attended this conference and here are my notes from the presentations.

Interesting PEW study from today

http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/201/report_display.asp

I originally saw this study mentioned at Church of the Customer blog. Although tagging is popular as part of several popular web services, it has certainly not hit mainstream yet.  These stats show that is is clearly on its way.

How can lead gen be declared dead?

Check out the post and discussion on Jeremy Liew's blog.  Some good thoughts about Lead Gen.  I did not see Jason's original post but I don't understand how someone can say lead is dead when it represents at least 10% if not 20% of interactive ad spending. 

What do you think?

Welcome

Today is January 30, 2007 and this will be my first post on this blog. I am launching this blog to contribute to the on going conversation about interactive marketing.  I spent the last ten years at CoolSavings/Q Interactive, the last five as the CEO.   The staff and I spent the majority of our time either buying or selling interactive marketing services. We booked $250 million in revenue from 2000 to 2006 and spent a considerable portion of that revenue buying media and sharing revenue with distribution partners.  Our model was similar to Advertising.com, ValueClick and others who built large ad networks by creating sophisticated targeting and optimization technology and applying a large sales effort against the resulting inventory.   These companies brought value to publishers because their scale allowed them to invest more heavily in sales capacity and technology optimization.

I left Q Interactive in August of 2006 and launched a new company called Viewpoints Network that is less direct marketer and more publisher.  We are totally focused on the consumer and meeting their needs so that our site grows through repeat usage and word of mouth.   We are attempting to build a next generation publishing company that is based on what I would loosely call "distributed publishing".  More on that in my next post.

In any case, I look forward to opening a dialouge with the Interactive Marketing community and addings somethign to the conversation.