Vinny Lingham’s Blog

“It’s all about relationships”

Tom Vadnais kicks of with a nice slideshow of a few of CJ’s clients. He also discusses that the focus of this years conference is relationships, which is what drives their business.

The Industry – Growth Ahead

• Online ad spending in Q2 2006 grew by 13.8% from Q1 2006 and this trend is projected to continue

• Ad Spending on the Internet is expected to account for 7 percent of global ad spend by 2008, a 76 percent growth between 2005 & 2008

“Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together”

Tom goes through the various ValueClick businesses (CJ, Pricerunner, Mediaplex & ValueClick Media).

Commission Junction – The Industry Leader

Over 40% of the top 500 retailers choose CJ to power their programs over the next two providers combined, next closest provider ranks at a distant 26%.

Commission Junction is the leading provider in over 70% of Internet Retailers catalogs.

Key Efforts over the Past Year

Performance Reporting
Value-Added Services
Program Management
Strategic Planning
Publisher Prospecting
Publisher Optimizing
Blueprint for Profitability
Five live, interactive training seminars
Action Life Cycle

Just announced: CJ launched Web Services
Web Services
Adobe Contest Announced
Q1 2007 Contest
Future Plans
Horizon Awards for Best Web Services Application 2007
More API’s
Looking Forward

Your ability to develop long-term profitable relationships will remain CJ’s priority
Use resources and tools to grow and innovate
Continue to build profitable relationships

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with the Digg Labs, but the Digg team has really come up with some VERY cool flash tools to play with - or have they? If you pay attention to the small print on the bottom of the page, tt’s particularly interesting to note that the development was actually done by a little known design firm (by myself anyways), called Stamen Design in San Francisco. By using Digg’s API (Application Programming Interface) and Flickr & Root.net’s API as well, they have developed some awesome applications for these clients of theirs.

In the “What we do section” they describe themselves as follows:

Stamen’s client work and the research projects we pursue present us with as broad a variety of design challenges as we could hope for: from providing live views of social networks as they happen to covering live bicycle races over the internet, from building collaborative applications for car designers to describing the lifetime output of an all-but-uncategorizable artist/architect.

While we use a wide range of techniques to help us understand this broad range of concerns, our response has most frequently taken two forms: mapping and data visualization.

Anyways, they look like a real smart bunch of guys with a decent enough client list. The real point I’m trying to make that is that they build these cools apps through the use of API’s, the upsurge of which, was predicted on this blog, about a year ago.  In a few years time, we’ll wonder how we ever did without them (if we don’t already).

I can already see sophisticated design, marketing & advertising agencies starting to use API’s the way that Stamen have done with Digg & Flickr and create fascinating flash applications and widgets.  The world of API’s are upon us!!

Those of you who know us, realise why I’m posting a link to this really great article, those who don’t, better start finding out.

Article by Gary Stein, of ClickZ.

Alex Schultz, of eBay UK, and I speak and meet often, and he is one of the foremost experts on API’s, in my humble opinion and he calls next year, The Year of the API. I wholeheartedly agree. incuBeta is building some innovative products, all without which, would not exist with the availability of API’s - primarily, our flagship product, synthaSite. I’ll keep you all posted on any new products what we release (there will be another one next week).

Anyways, here’s a nice pic of yet another group of eBay people - Alex Schultz, mentioned above, is featured below:

From left to right:

Katherine (eBay UK), Elizabeth (CJ US), Vaughan (eBay US), Claire (eBay UK) and Alex at the bottom.

Because my resolution this week was to write a blog a day, I now have blogger’s block - and it’s only Tuesday! Luckily blogger’s block is alot different than writer’s block - mainly because we don’t have editors to weed out the crap, so we don’t hold back when writing it!

One of our developers came to me today and told me the frustrations he had with XML product feeds from online merchants (for those of you who don’t have a clue what I just said, and XML product feed is like an electronic catalog, detailing all the items a merchant offers through his website, with information about the product etc.)

What he is finding is that merchants tend not to maintain their catalog and have duplicates, bad data, bad links etc in the XML feed and this leads to poor results for publishers who use them.

An electronic product catalogue is literally the same as paper catalog, yet those are maintained alot better - why? Probably because it’s taken years to build them up so it’s in a bit of routine to manage them. Companies don’t want to outsource this function, because they think it’s core to their business - wake up - it’s not!! If you can’t do it properly and it’s core to your revenue, let a professional company do it and save yourself the hassle. Online shopping is booming, and if you want a piece of the action, ensure that the websites out there that want to promote your products have what they need, or else you’re not going to make the sales!

Visit DealBay (Still in Alpha Development stage - lots of bugs) for an example of a product search engine that utilizes XML feeds to list products from merchants.

The other issue that’s been overlooked is that most partner websites that will display your XML really want realtime data - they’d rather not send a customer to you if you’re out of stock.

Anyways, on a less technical note, iPods are all the rage at the moment, if you don’t have one - what’s wrong with you? HP has just released an iPod - made by Apple - it’s amazing how brands try to get share of market by following a multi-brand/same product approach. What’s even more amazing, is that it actually works. It’s the usual supermarket dilemna :

You walk into a supermarket and go over to the pasta shelf - 25 different brands, 7 companies, 3 factories - the more shelf space, the more likely you are to make a sale. It’s the same thing online, the more websites selling the same stuff with a different look & feel, the more market share you’re likely to get…

I’m off the V & A Waterfront in Cape Town now for dinner. There is a restaurant called Belthazar there, and it comes highly recommended! Will post comments tomorrow!