Online Advertising Industry Orientation

From: Cliff Kurtzman <moderator_at_o-a.com>
Date: Thu 20 Jan 2005 13:44:59 -0600

Hey Gang,

A client of mine recently asked me to prepare for its
employees an orientation to the online advertising
industry. They are a rapidly hiring performance-based
online advertising company, and found that the people
they were bringing into their organization often did
not have a consistent perspective on their industry
and the rules for working within it. Last week I got on a
plane and went to give the 90-minute orientation presentation
to four groups of approximately ten employees, and the
response seemed quite positive... a couple of the
employees went so far as to tell me the content was more
useful to them than what they had learned attending
AD:TECH New York this past November.

I'm considering the possibility of continuing to expand
on the presentation and then seeing if other companies
would find it of value. I'd be interested in the
perspective of members of this list as to what other
content I might add to the presentation as I expand it,
in order to increase its value.

The current version of the presentation consists of four
parts.

The first part of the presentation consists of a brief
overview of 34 of the players in the online advertising
industry. I covered companies that provide Ad Networks
(Contextual/Non-Contextual), Performance-Based Affiliate
Networks, Co-Registrations, Ad Serving Technology, AdWare,
Incentivized Models, Email Marketing, Niche Lead Generation,
and Search Engine Marketing. Most of the companies I
covered were AD:TECH exhibitors. I spent about one minute
talking about each company... defining their roles in the
marketplace, where they have headquarters and offices,
when they were founded, and to the extent I was able to
get the information, I talked about things like the number
employees, revenues, net income, market cap, and significant
recent news. As brief as the overviews were, the attendees
found them extremely useful in orienting themselves as to
how they and their company fit into the industry.

The second part of the presentation is an overview of general
industry trends. It looks at trends in ad spending,
online and offline; trends in search engine marketing;
trends in email usage; trends in rich media ads; etc.

The third part of the presentation provids an overview of
the legal landscape that anyone working in the online
marketing industry should generally be aware of... we
covered copyrights, trademarks, patents, trade secrets,
defamation, libel, slander, privacy rights, special rules
when marketing to children, the role of the FTC, CAN-Spam,
the National Information Infrastructure Protection Act,
the Economic Espionage Act, the Electronic Communications
Privacy Act, the California Online Privacy Act, the
California Direct Marketing Disclosure Statute, the
California Consumer Protection Against Spyware Act, other
pending anti-spyware legislation, phishing, and likely
future legislation... all oriented towards how all of
these things could potentially impact anyone working in our
industry.

The final part of the presentation consists of links to
articles, online resources, publications, discussion groups
and bulletin boards where more information could be found.

I'd welcome ideas on other topics you would want to know
about as part of a general industry orientation, if such a
presentation were to be provided to yourself, your
co-workers, or your employees.

Thanks,

--Cliff

Clifford R. Kurtzman, Ph.D.
CEO
ADASTRO Incorporated
A Starhold Enterprise
http://www.adastro.com
(281) 480-6300

Business IS Rocket Science



Received on Thu Jan 20 2005 - 13:44:59 CST