Agencies now need math guys

I have been saying this for a long time and this makes these two posts by Paul Kedrosky ring a bell. I started out building a statistics service in the first bubble, did some search optimization (might be called spamming with automatically generated pages and so on ;)) and soon moved on into advertising, building a very good performance marketing play. We are now moving performance marketing into the local market with Ormigo and this really just plays with all the trends I believe in.

In the online world, ads are measurable. As soon as the possibility exists, people will want it. Otherwise you would run branding campaigns without click through urls. An Advertiser will surely say that it is branding what they are buying, but they will still measure the result. This will move further down the value chain as soon as different thing become more integrated. It is also what pushes all the money online because it makes advertising more into a sales channel. The money in a sales channels is potentially endless.

Now that Joost is rumored to become embedded in set-top-boxes, how long will it take till the general trend (not Joost in particular) will make TV Ads more measurable. TiVo is already moving into that directly. All this needs a different kind of system, a different kind of banner server, different kind of management on the distribution side. The ad business is still not really to give up their grip and the agencies will surely always play an important role, but the type of role they play will change. They will become more accountable as things become measurable. And as soon as measurability is there, it opens up new markets. Fun stuff.