A limited liability company, CNMA is owned by IMS Companies.

With access to 150 websites and 75 print business publications, CNMA will provide access to its Mainland Chinese Network. Media buying services and business information to global customers and prospects are also included in CNMA’s offerings along with Chinese language translation.

“China’s population of Internet users has risen by 30 percent over the past year to 132 million, and these are just a couple of fantastic stats about this fast-growing marketplace. From day one, our network of Chinese websites can deliver up to 200 million banner impressions per day, reaching 19 million visitors to this unique website network daily,” stated CNMA president Hector Botero.

Within the 75 trade publications, B2B advertisers are allowed to purchase an entire network or select business newspapers by industry.

Botero added, “Advertisers need expert help to access China and they also need help to efficiently reach their target market. It’s virtually impossible to plan, execute and measure on-line and print advertising campaigns without a local presence and inside China knowledge.”

Maurice Johnson, who holds over 20 years of experience in international advertising, will head the New York office. “Our goal at CNMA is to provide — in China — the resources, knowledge and service that international advertiser’s need,” he said.

Advertisers have a lot of options. There’s the medium — radio, TV, banner ads, podcasts, Internet radio, to name just a few. And then there are the online media exchanges that exist precisely to make the process easier: Bid4Spots, SWMX, Spot Runner and more. Choice is good, right? Only if the process of buying media actually does become easier. And that can only happen if advertisers know what to look for and how to find it.

Since I can’t realistically offer a comprehensive view of all media and all online media-buying tools in the space this column affords, I’ll take one medium — traditional radio — and examine the variables involved. My goal is simply to help advertisers figure out how to determine which variables matter to them — and how to identify the online tools that excel in those areas. Although the examples are radio-specific, the principles can be applied across other media, as well.

For this purpose, we’ll consider these online buying tools for radio:
• Google — Still developing its Google Audio for last-minute (remnant) airtime
• Softwave Media Exchange (SWMX) — Last-minute and negotiated buys
• Bid4Spots — Terrestrial and Internet radio, last-minute only (full disclosure: I am the founder and CEO of Bid4Spots)

My team and I talk to advertisers and agencies every day, and based on those conversations we’ve tried to distill the information-gathering process down to some basic questions that buyers must ask themselves. The bottom line: no single online tool will get you everything you need. But identifying and prioritizing those needs will help you find the solution that’s closest.

1) Which media?
The question seems obvious, but the answer often is not. Television provides broad reach and excellent branding opportunities, but can be expensive. Terrestrial radio offers superb targeting capabilities and is more affordable, but negotiating with various stations can get complex. Most advertisers come up with a media mix based on their budgets and priorities. We’ll assume, for now, that radio is in your mix.

Cingular, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel, the four biggest mobile carriers in the US, also benefit from the mobile marketing phenomenon. With less pressure on voice calls, mobile marketing also affords numerous ways for the ‘big four’ to expand.

Between the media moguls and the phone carriers, there may be discrepancies within which will oversee the relationship with customers and how profits will be dispersed.

Chris DeWolfe, co-founder and chief executive of MySpace, told the Financial Times, “the mobile business model is going to be somewhat fluid, and it will be different in every country, with some having more advertising-based applications and some charging a small monthly fee.”

Currently MySpace is also in talks with carriers from Asia and Europe, while MTV has deals with all the major carriers and plans on publishing more than 600 clips at about 30 hours per month in the United States alone.

It is predicted that 2007 will be a breakthrough year for the mobile marketing and video industries within the US.

Behind every good brand, of course, is an agency willing to sell it—though not all in our exploding interactive era are created equal. With technologies, strategies and content reaching confluence in the digital space, agency roles are rapidly changing. So within the clutter, chaos and opportunity presented by this paradigm shift, the timing couldn’t be better for an agency like Special Ops Media to emerge from the shadows.

But this is no startup, hotshot or flash-in-the-pan operation. Since 2002, founders Jason Klein (left) and Christian Anthony have carefully turned Special Ops into a successful, full-scale company that melds creative, media planning and strategy under one roof. With roots firmly planted in entertainment—though it has expanded into more corporate verticals as of late—, the agency has designed and implemented unique campaigns for studios including Focus Features and Lions Gate, as well as MTV and other major brands.

So with a need to delve further into the ins and outs of a successful entertainment marketing firm, ADOTAS recently sat down with Anthony (right) and Klein at Special Ops’ New York City headquarters. Accommodating, opinionated and insightful, Klein and Anthony reveal how two guys from atypical, divergent career paths ended up becoming unlikely marketing powerhouses. Along the way, the pair shared plenty of thoughts on how the integrated agency approach has made their outfit a hot commodity, what the current and burgeoning trends in online/interactive marketing are, and what changes are afoot regarding agency roles in 2007 and beyond.

Hi guys, so let’s start with the obligatory background question. How did you guys initially sync up?

Christian: Jason and I had known each other through college, and had been four years apart in college. I had started another company, and Jason had come over a year out of med school, which we still kid about. I came from investment banking and Jay came from med school.

It totally makes sense then that you ended up in advertising.

C: (Laughs) Yeah, it was just natural. But I think it brought a different perspective to the industry. We weren’t traditional ad guys. I think if you look at a lot of the companies and some of the mistakes they’ve made, it was trying to retrain traditional ad people as interactive people. Not to say that that can’t happen, it certainly can. But we were coming to this not from an advertising paradigm, and I think that in the beginning and continues to serves us very well. You’re not bound by the way you did things. I think there are certainly parallels between new and old media, of course. But in a lot of ways, new media is different. We really benefited from not coming from traditional advertising backgrounds and continue to benefit from that.

Convergence started really when content was renamed “data” and digitized. By this point, books, music, software, and even video were all being swapped digitally on the internet. Now, voice is also digital data and calls can be placed with your cable company, through internet companies, and of course, your local carrier (remind me again what they carry?)

At a broader level, this means that the same “pipe” can carry content originally intended for any output (this is the convergence part, in case you missed it). But put convergence under a microscope, and you can see that it gives consumers the ability to control how they want that output to look like, whether it’s via a big screen or a little one, a printout of a book or a podcast, and just like space isn’t an issue, neither is time, as the convergence force also conspires against content controllers to empower consumers to enjoy their content willy-nilly on their own schedules. (The scoundrels!)

But convergence doesn’t really end where media like broadcast and print converge; it implies the simultaneous divergence to any channel of content originally intended for specific channels. And when the channel no longer matters, media becomes a business of brand, not distribution; (and distribution a business of commodities (1)).

And this is the key to succeeding in a converged media universe. Sure, getting access to television, radio, internet, and phone data from a single provider who can bundle everything into a nice, neat discounted package makes economic sense, but remember that consumers are irrational and in no industry have they permitted themselves to be willingly tied to and directed by a single provider. So, before we discuss how branding will save your (content) business, let’s discuss how convergence killed it.

(The only answer for distributors of content is to keep doing what you’re already doing and offer everything to everyone; it costs you almost nothing additional — except a little marketing — and it’s already well-proven to work in growing your profit per subscriber after decades of stagnation.

In a few more years, the geographical distances between competitors that once preserved your virtual monopolies will also cease to be an obstacle to convergence, propelling your business models once again to commodity status, where service is the primary differentiator, and pricing the second.)

Why Convergence Killed Your Business

Based on an al berrios & co. analysis of industries, there are certain conditions that need to exist in order for multi-product, single-source business models to fail. One of these conditions is that the products they’re offering, which were previously unrelated, somehow standardize. The other condition is that once standardized, end users have to be able to enjoy them at near-zero or zero-cost (including switching costs) and without loss of (intrinsic) value. And once these conditions are met, they are irreversible.

(Despite media executives’ beliefs, anonymity during consumption isn’t necessarily a condition in order for someone to exploit your product offerings.)

In the travel and tourism industry, the more you fly, lodge, or even spend on credit, the more miles you rack up until you get upgrades and all sorts of free goodies. Because your “spending points” are convertible to miles, then actual, tangible services, travel services no longer possess the same value they used to when they were purchasable exclusively with cash.

Consequently, the travel industry has unintentionally standardized their services by allowing consumers to pay for them with miles, while simultaneously, they’ve let consumers enjoy them at near-zero or zero cost. (Due to the personal “asset-like” nature of miles and points, I can now buy tens of thousands of airline miles at auction sites from others travelers for a couple of hundred bucks, never having actually earned them to use them.)

When banks, stock brokerages, and insurance companies converged in the late 90s, it was hailed as the birth of the financial supermarket, where every conceivable financial product could easily be peddled from a teller’s window. What? Financial groceries? Yea right!

If you are putting together a well thought-out marketing plan, you should include all tools at your disposal. But since clients are often looking for ways to save that proverbial other 50% of their advertising dollars they know are wasted (they just don’t know which 50%), let’s proceed from the assumption that it is an either / or proposition.

So let’s say you were faced with the choice of buying a 30-second spot on a prime time television program or spending that money on social media outreach, what would you do?
A little background is in order here. The Internet is not just another medium like television or radio. People interact with the Internet differently than they do with other media. Television is passive at best, barely acknowledged at worst. For a lot of people, the TV is background noise and they engage and disengage as needed. Maybe they are watching and then a child wanders by asking for some juice. Or maybe they recorded the show on TiVo and just fast-forwarded through your expensive 30-second spot.

On the other hand, people go to the Internet to engage. People go to the Internet to shop, share photos of the grandchildren, send emails, and IM friends and family. You can’t be passive on the Internet — you search, discover, communicate and share on the Internet. That’s active behavior. In other words, there are no couch potatoes on the Internet.

At its root, commerce is about conversation — or as Doc Searls put it, all markets are conversations. The Internet is often compared to the Agora of ancient Greece and it’s an apt analogy. The Agora, or public square, was where the citizens met for everything from commerce to politics to religious and philosophical discourse. New ideas, or memes, spread with the flow of commerce, across the civilized world. Now this flow of ideas takes place on the Internet.

By comparison, the mass medias of the 20th century targeted an audience that was mainly passive. TV became background noise and radio something you listened to for distraction on long drives. There was no interaction — you just received the message.

Of course, as recently as five years ago (before the advent of the DVR), if you wanted to watch a certain program you had to be in front of the box at a certain time and if you were distracted you missed out and had to wait until the summer repeats. Now with TiVo and iTunes you can watch “Battlestar Galactica” or “Lost” whenever the mood hits you. But that’s a topic for another article.

To get back to my initial question — where would you put your money? If you are selling dish soap to busy moms, you could buy 30-second spots on Oprah and Doctor Phil. Or you could dive into the mommy-blogger world, sharing your new product with the likes of Dooce, Suburban Bliss and the hundreds (more like thousands) of women who blog about their lives as mothers.

Maybe not as engaging as your favorite appointment TV, but interesting nonetheless, are the once-a-year TV upfronts. You know what I’m talking about. The one time each year when the networks trot out their biggest stars, hype their new programming and sell advertising before anyone has had the chance to see the finished product.

This summer, I eagerly read about the venerated TV upfront and the impact digital media has had on early sales and overall marketing budgets. As we all know, upfront sales are not what the networks hoped for as varying percentages of TV marketing budgets are being reallocated to online media.

Personally, I am excited about this shift because it means that online advertising is finally being taken seriously. On the other hand, I feel a bit of trepidation because it means we have to rise to the challenge and make very few mistakes. The pressure to deliver a positive ROI is even greater when the advertiser is brand new to online.

The online advertising industry has been expecting this news for years and I had to ask myself again why we care so much since we know that marketers don’t like the upfront buy. It might not have started that way, but over the years, over-zealous networks have left marketers feeling a bit bullied and vulnerable, and they were happy to have a good reason to reduce their participation.

So knowing that, why would we want to be in this position? We’d love for media buyers to plan a year ahead. In the online world, sometimes we’re lucky to get one week’s notice, so naturally, we’re jealous. There’s also nothing bad to be said about having a structured opportunity to talk to all of your clients on a regular basis.

So why isn’t this the best problem online publishers have ever had? It’s simple. Like most large sites, we’ve been selling out of premium inventory since the beginning, but now we’re facing shortages even of our least targeted, least costly run-of-site inventory. Because online marketing works so well we’re now faced with the problem of it working too well. Theoretically this would be a great problem to have. Simply raise rates across the board and assume that the market will bear the cost.

So why the concern? If we raise our rates whenever we need to in reaction to previously oversold months or quarters, we risk damaging great relationships with our long-time advertising partners, without any real guarantee that other buyers will pay the new prices and fill any possible shortfalls. That’s a big gamble for a publisher to take, but for now we don’t really have other options if we want to guarantee full delivery for all of our campaigns, which we do.

Periodic rate-raising creates an unpredictable marketplace for media buyers and publishers alike. Media buyers can’t put a site in their media plan and build useful ROI models if their top performing, larger publishers are constantly shifting rates upward, and publishers can’t assume that buyers will be willing to pay their new rates just because they’re selling out. It’s a no-win situation.

But your boss wasn’t always a complete nincompoop. Back in the old days (1980s) when your boss was “cutting his teeth” (whatever that means — sounds painful), there was still one fail-safe way to get people to your product — TV, and that’s all your boss knew. Radio worked, but it was way too splintered to do anything on a national scale easily and worse, people only listened to it in the car on their way to their most hated place or most loved place, not exactly the right times to get them to buy your stuff; billboards sorta worked, but there’s never been a consensus that’s influenced your boss on OOHs real effectiveness; print worked, but the masses didn’t really read, so it really couldn’t be relied on to sell to anyone but those with the highest of brows. If your boss wanted to get numbers, TV never let him down.

And everything was so much simpler for him to understand, too. No TiVo, no satellite, no Treos; in fact, one or two phone calls and a great meal later with his good buddies over at the network, and he’d have accomplished his objective for the week (defined innocently as just “getting the message out”). Everyone was his age, but they were never thought of as “too young”, and branding and research into consumer attitudes were still pretty useless because your boss always “went with his gut” (he calls it “experience” today). Ah yes, those were the days. Too bad you were still in grammar school then. Or not even born yet.

You’ve finally come to terms with how truly clueless your boss really is in today’s marketing environment and how utterly futile it is for him to pretend to be doing his homework to catch up to your expertise. Yessir, it’s a different world and what your boss doesn’t quite get is that traffic ain’t just sitting around waiting to buy your company’s stuff. You actually have to work for their attention: come up with really interesting creative which supports a brand, not a sale; plan an actual media mix that encompasses no less than millions of choices; remember to invest in new fangled research, which you then actually have to use. And you have to do it all for the same budget your boss used in the 80s.

You’re not scared of what’s happened and have fully embraced it all. But your boss is scared and he’s absolutely lost. In the desert. At night. It’s because he’s the boss that he can’t afford to appear incompetent. He may get “Freston’d”. So, to prove that he’s on top of it and still useful, he orders up a viral campaign one day. But the next day he’s not sure about the results, so puts the brakes on it.

Of course he’s not sure about the results! In his heyday, “viral” was something you contracted or an excuse to take a sick day. He has no clue what to measure because all he wants, all he needs, all he knows, is traffic. And he doesn’t just want any type of traffic; he wants “sexy” traffic. This is the unfortunate extent of his familiarity with this new marketing environment, familiarity that directs you to toss money at search engines for their traffic, disregarding all of the other media choices, and what you get from these choices, because if your boss wants traffic, you’re going to give it to him. You’re almost positive he wet his pants from excitement when a certain former-search-engine-turned-online-portal recently purchased an auction-based “exchange to help buyers and sellers trade digital media more efficiently”.

We have a modest size media buying department and I am shocked at how challenging it is to purchase media. In fact I am now debating whether media buying is actually harder than media selling; I’m leaning towards buying. Sure, you would think that spending money would be so much easier than asking for money. Spending money is so easy in day to day life, but being a media buyer is more like working as an auctioneer than shopping at Walmart. The supply, demand, price and type adjust and change rapidly and since everything is in motion you can’t rely too heavily on the past to be a predictor of the future. You have to be an amazing negotiator, organizer, and relationship expert to survive in this marketplace.

Working closely with the media buy department has taught me a lot about salespeople, too. You would be shocked at how many sales people drop the ball on an hot or fresh lead. Our buyers sometimes have to call, leave voicemail or email multiple times to get a simple response, occasionally we never hear from them at all. Sales people reading this column would say, “I never drop a lead”, but I assure you it happens many times. In addition it’s common for ad campaigns to not get live on time or in the right way. It’s a common complaint I hear frequently from other companies.

It would be interesting to get feedback from heads of sales and media buying on the time it takes for their organization to respond to a lead, or follow up to a request, or get a campaign live. I wonder how many know or have those key indicators at hand and are optimizing them. When media buying becomes harder than selling you know we’re in a healthy marketplace and I believe it has much more room to grow. However, I hope sales people will welcome the demand from buyers by managing the relationships professionally and closely. We want to buy, do you want to sell?

“Factory as a group of individuals, has a huge passion for the Audi brand,” said Factory Design Labs CEO Scott Mellin in a statement. “Audi has an incredible schedule of new models to be introduced in the next 15 months and we are thrilled to be a partner in this very exciting chapter of Audi. We have a huge respect for the brand, know the product line in great detail and have a fantastic relationship with our local dealers.”

Factory will be handling all media planning and creative aspects of Audi’s online North American brand.