Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

When we started Supernatural the intent was to break away from working for others and/or providing services to others while they reap the long term benefits. In a zero sum game, providing services or collecting a salary always have a limited upside ceiling while investing in yourself does not.

We currently provide search marketing services to a few good clients as a way of bootstrapping our business so we can eventually focus entirely on our domain portfolio, particularly some in-depth development projects that will be sector leading sites when they are launched. It can be frustrating to take this hybrid route, particularly as we know how much faster we would move if we were entirely focused on our own properties. As Aaron notes in the link above, you’re always going to be better off investing in yourself, in the long run.

The other side of the equation is the ‘those who can’t do, teach’ cliche. We are increasingly being inundated with ‘get rich quick on the web’ schemes where ‘all you have to do’ is create an educational product and sell it for the big bucks. The problem with all of these schemes is that if you really knew the secrets of making millions on the web why would you tell anyone? The smart money stays under the radar, in part to avoid competition watering down the opportunity, and in part because the Googles of the world are constantly on the lookout for schemes based on gaming the system online. If you find one that works, why would you muddy the waters by selling it to anyone with a dream and a few hundred bucks?

Today’s announcement by Google and French global advertising mega-agency Publicis of a partnership to automate the creative aspects of online advertising is interesting to put it mildly. If I were in the traditional agency business (and I have been) I’d be very very nervous.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt offered up the possibility of this partnership creating something called ‘open source advertising’ which I assume means that they will look into developing automated ways of developing effective creative and brand positioning on the web. If this is possible (and I imagine that this partnership is more about finding that out than someone already figuring it out) then the typical agency creative team will be marginalized when it comes to Internet Marketing. Ordinarily one might think this was bad except that the typical agency creative team has already marginalized themselves by pretending that online marketing was some kind of novelty item that was beneath the interest of the brand mavens.

Imagine a scenario where a mom and pop business wants to get the most out of their limited marketing budgets. Because they can’t afford agency rates and their tendency to overspend, these businesses typically let ad sales reps in the local media choose their buys, create their ads and manage their campaigns, for ‘free’ of course. This was the business equivalent of letting the fox manage the chicken coop. Junky ads, lousy positioning, budgets spent with no measurable return and the consequent belief that ‘advertising’ doesn’t work.

Now imagine a dead simple Google process for that business, one that automates keyword selection, creates ads, targets geographically, demographically and by price, all automatically and a system that returns a specific report on ROI, daily. I think our Mom and Pop business owner would dig that (and that growth business owner and those corporate shareholders…).

These guys could own advertising as we know it and as it will become- I’m watching and wondering…an open source marketing network?

If you manage domains and have been following the various discussions of recession-proofing your business then you have to get more advanced and start using the tools available now to develop richer visitor experiences.

We are obsessed with the idea that the future is building sites whose content is delivered automatically while maintaining relevance to the subject matter of the site and the intent of the readers. With APIs, RSS, Google News Feeds and your own original content, it’s possible to build out sites that are legitimate media sites without huge staffs and big budgets.

Jonathan Mendez, always worth a read, agrees:

“In the user controlled medium that is digital advertising success is predicated on delivering relevance. Nowhere is this exemplified better than the success of search where there is a data input (rule 1) and multiple additional rules (geo and behavioral) that results in the delivery of content believed to be most relevant to the goals of the user. There is no question that the race to gain access to more implicit and explicit input data from users and from publishers to create rules will continue to increase the ability for marketers to deliver relevance in the coming years.”

The days of static content and parked sites are numbered, IMHO. Domainers must get more technologically sophisticated and more content-aware. When companies like Oversee (covered ad nauseum in the domaining blogs, no link needed) raise $150 million it is a signal: the big players are coming in and they have big guns- and they’re going to use this money to create sophisticated automated media empires. That’s where this ship is headed.

Scraping, a questionable practice involving writing code that goes out onto the web and automatically gathers data and content from sites, is getting a rethink in this Wired piece on legitimately accessing other people’s datasources.

This interests us because we’re working on using Amazon’s API, a legitimate access point for affiliates and on using RSS to feed content into portal aggregator sites. As a business rule we don’t engage in theft or ‘blackhat’ tactics- the RSS feeds provide relevant links back to contributing sites and Amazon gets new sales channels. What we’re not sure about are the search implications…