Advertising Companies Fret Over a Digital Talent Gap
When the Ad:tech advertising technology conference hits New York next week, marketers, advertising agencies and recruiters may spend less time listening to the panelists and more time working the floor to find new employees.
A talent gap is growing between the skills that many new advertising jobs require and the number of people who have those skills. The dilemma, one familiar to many industries across the country, is particularly acute for jobs that require hard-core quantitative, mathematical and technical skills.
The talent pool, advertising technology company executives say, is not a deep one. And those who have the skills are in high demand, often fetching annual salaries that can reach $100,000.
“There is pain for hiring in digital at all levels,” said John Ebbert, managing editor of AdExchanger.com, a Web site dedicated to advertising technology.
“The marketers, the publishers, the ad tech companies, the agencies, data management companies — they’re all going for the same type of employee.”
Read More: NY Times
64% of Digital Ad Spend Controlled by 5 Companies
I was doing some calculations for my own purposes and wanted to find out what percentage of the digital media ad spend (search, display, mobile, etc) is controlled by Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, and Microsoft. Well, after searching through their 10K’s, it’s about $40.1B, or roughly 64% of the worlds digital media ad spend.
According to a ZenithOptimedia press release on October 3, 2011, worldwide digital advertising accounted for about $64.03B.
Google generates approximately 364% more revenue from advertising than it’s next closest rival, Yahoo!.
With Facebook at $1.86B in advertising revenue (excluding virtual currencies/goods) for 2010, it puts them at right behind Microsoft but ahead of AOL. With Facebook only now starting to monetize their platform, you can start to see how big an impact they could have on the dominance of the digital advertising landscape.
And of course, you can really see how dominant Google is.
Read More: Darren Herman
5 Things That All Digital Marketers Should Know About Audience Targeting
had the opportunity to attend a conference on target marketing last month. There was the usual slate of vendors offering up solutions that cater to various aspects of ad serving, data management, campaign analytics, and other resources. However, what grabbed my attention was some of the suggestions that had less to do with the bells and whistles surrounding the technologies being used to find and track audiences online and instead had more to do with the fundamental philosophies behind why these solutions even exist to begin with.
If, as a marketer, you were asked to answer the question “why should you target audiences?” coming up with a suitable answer is pretty easy. At the core of any effective marketing campaign, online or off, the ultimate goal of any campaign is to get the right message (offer) to the right person at the right time. Good targeting allows marketers to better control campaign outcomes to make sure that they reach their goals.
Understanding the “why” is a no-brainer. What’s a lot harder to broach is the “how” associated with audience targeting.
The following best practices will hopefully help you to gain a better understanding of the targeting landscape if you’re currently unfamiliar with it. This is by no means a complete list of what digital marketers should know in order to most effectively run their digital campaigns. But this is a good starting point or foundation to better understand how these technologies can be approached and understood so that marketers can take advantage of many of the tools being offered today.
Read More: ClickZ
LinkedIn Adds Job Button
Facebook in the last year has used a set of social plug-ins, including the “Like” button, to extend its reach across the Web. Now, LinkedIn is planning to introduce a professional plug-in to let people apply for jobs on third-party sites with information from their LinkedIn profiles.
Expected to launch later this month, the “Apply With LinkedIn” button would streamline the application process by letting LinkedIn members use profiles as resumes, according to a GigaOM article today, citing an unnamed source briefed on the feature. LinkedIn declined to comment on the report.
The story explained that after clicking the “Apply” button and logging in, a user can edit parts of their profile and contact information and might be asked to answer questions from a prospective employer. Once an application is submitted, a confirmation message is displayed.
For their part, employers would be able to add up to five questions from a template, including whether a job candidate is willing to relocate, eligible to work in the U.S., or wants to add a cover letter. Companies can also add questions specific to a particular position and have applications sent to an email address or Web site, among other options.
Read More: MediaPost
Tech jobs boom like it’s 1999
SAN FRANCISCO — Some 20 recruiters sized up Scott Mersy as they would a star high school running back. But instead of timing his 40-yard dash or checking his percentage of body fat, they were interested in his stats in cloud computing and online marketing.
Prospective employers from Silicon Valley to New York lined up for the 5-foot-11 225-pound Mersy, who weighed offers from several of them before settling on Service-now.com, a cloud-computing company in San Diego.
“It’s as close as I’ll ever get to feeling like an athlete of any sort,” Mersy, 40, says, laughing. He joined as senior director of customer acquisition and industry marketing in February.
Tech workers like Mersy are coveted commodities as the high-tech industry undergoes its biggest hiring binge in more than a decade. Not since the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s has competition been so fierce. Would-be employees are being enticed with fat contracts, hefty bonuses and such freebies as iPads, meals, sporting events and shuttle services. These and other perks are in play to hook top talent in engineering, social media, website development, product design and management.
Read More: USA Today
Ad Industry: The Year Of The IPO
The advertising industry likes to think 2011 will be the year of mobile, but with improving economic conditions and a crop of companies bringing in new clients and better-than-expected earnings, they will likely look back to see a solid stream of initial public offerings.
Expect to see an influx of companies go public this year, including those supporting online advertising, according to venture capitalists. Positive economic conditions pave the road for everything from rising stock prices to returning appetites for investors willing to take risks, says one VC.
Conversely, eMarketer principal analyst David Hallerman says the growth and trends promoting digital ad companies to go public point to a crowded market for vendors and other Internet players needing to raise more money to be competitive. And because it’s a crowded market, the original investors see now this as a good time to cash out before some companies die.
When Responsys’ stock begins trading on the NASDAQ Global Select Market, it will trade under the ticker “MKTG.” Earlier this week, the company set the pricing of its IPO at $12 per share of common stock, selling 6,619,654 shares.
Read More: MediaPost
