Note To Start-Ups: Advertisers Could Not Care Less About Your Site, App or Widget
June 5th, 2008 by Marisa GallagherTags: ad agencies, animoto, aqka, bigstage, blog, cnet, coca-cola, crowdspring, curse, jacked, mediaforge, nesting.com, pluggedin, rga, sometrics, start-ups, tide, under the radar, venture capital, verisom, vusion
A few of us attended this week’s Dealmaker’s Forum Under the Radar Social Media + Entertainment Conference in Mountain View. It’s a small conference, but one of the best, as it pushes all that’s great about the Valley - primarily innovation - by showcasing more than 35 great start-ups in compelling, rapid-fire way. Then, the conference brings in the much-needed almost American Idol-style reality check of VC, successful entrepreneur, and media exec judges to remind us all that innovation needs a good business plan to survive.
This year, the Dealmaker folks added a brilliant finish: a fire-side chat with some ad agency heavy hitters. The message to the start-ups was clear: even though big advertisers (think Tide, Coca-Cola) are moving some money to the web, they couldn’t care less about your site/app/widget. They need scale and mass audiences to sell their products and, in all honesty, they’d love to just keep buying media the same way they’ve done it for the last 70 years — without you.
The panel did suggest some options, though, for budding businesses and the best-judged start-ups tended to already be following these ideas:
1) Skip the ads: Find a way to make money that doesn’t rely on placing ads on your site or app (winning examples: Vusion, Verismo, MovieSet.)
2) Failing that, find a highly profitable target: MMO gamers, audiophiles, and alpha moms are great examples - make a decent product for them, then scale it as fast as you can so you become an acquisition target and/or potentially eek out a meager, but profitable ad-based living (winning examples: Curse.com, PluggedIn, and Nesting.com.)
3) Or, go for more of a platform play: Create something that solves advertisers’ online advertising problems or at least captures their imagination (winning examples: MediaForge, Loomia, Sometrics, Animoto, BigStage.)
That said, I did see a lot of great stuff, but my personal favorite was Jacked: a great second-screen (web-synched-to-TV) experience that dynamically pulls great, in-depth content from across the web, delivers it in a clean, user-controlled interface, and already supports more content (all US pro-sporting events) than I can even watch. It’s no surprise they’ve already got interest from the sports leagues and cable players.
The Under The Radar Blog has the winners.
7 Responses to “Note To Start-Ups: Advertisers Could Not Care Less About Your Site, App or Widget”
Thank you for the post. I really like the Sometrics & Animoto. I\’ve found myself getting into stats, metrics and research more and more lately. The idea behind it sounds very cool and I\’ll keep my eye on both of these tools.
Thanks, Duane. The stats side of the social web really is so interesting, isn’t it - am with you on that. Would be great to hear your thoughts as the tools and the market keep evolving.
Marisa - thanks for the kind words. Our next Under the Radar on November 13th will cover the mobile space - hope to see you there as well. More info can be found at Dealmakermedia.com or undertheradarblog.com.
Great post and such an important point. I have seen two many start-ups that pitch P&G brands based solely on their technology and their \
Hi Marisa
It is… it can tell us so much and help us produce a better strategy at the end of the day, which I crave doing. That\’s one thing I\’ve been trying to do at work is provide better stats to back up what I\’m saying.
One thing I think we need is better global but even more importantly is hyper-local stats when it comes to numbers. Focus on our target and having hyper-local stats to back it up is one place I see a future business opportunity. A lot of research can be very general these days or to US specific.
Great article/blog.
I hope many dreamy eye\’d pure play business entrepreneurs read this and have the reality check they need before blowing their doe.
Sometimes I wonder if any lessons were learnt from early 2000.
Hope you don\’t mind I stole your headline but linked to your blog in the article I posted.
http://stusheridan.wordpress.com/2008/06/11/note-to-start-ups-advertisers-could-not-care-less-about-your-site-app-or-widget/
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