The Internet Marketer's Secret Weapon
I’m a firm believer in contextual advertising – making ads have some very direct correlation to the content that brought the user to the page in the first place. Controversial Tour de France winner Floyd Landis offers a great example of this strategy on his blog.
Check it out…
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Ideas, connectivity and community. Those elements are the essence of One Degree.
When Ken me to Five Questions about a year ago, I was honored to be included on the list. I was the eighth person to be interviewed, only four removed from marketing guru Seth Godin . (That’s is likely as close to 15 minutes of fame as I will probably get.) The roster of individuals for Five Questions has become a who’s who of the digital industry – a huge accomplishment in just over a year.
But there is a glaring omission on the list. It dawned on me that no one has interviewed Ken Schafer. So, after becoming a One Degree contributor myself recently, I told Ken that my next contribution would involve rallying up five industry leaders (also One Degree contributors) and turn the table on him – interviewing the brains behind it all.
So, without further adieu, here are Five Questions for Ken Schafer, one each asked in order by Michael Seaton, Kate Trgovac , Sulemaan Ahmed , Mitch Joel Bill Sweetman .
Seaton: “Ken, what are two major changes you have witnessed in the digital world since launching One Degree that you believe will change marketing forever, and why?
Two major changes in the last 18 months, huh? I know online marketing changes fast, but I’m not sure it changes _that_ fast. 🙂
The two things that weren’t on my radar a year ago were the importance of social media sites and video.
18 months ago when we launched I would have cited “LinkedIn”:http://www.linkedin.com/ and “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/ as my prime examples of social networking. But the concept has now exploded and we’re seeing community, communication, colloboration, and shared wisdom flowering all over the place. I’ve been expecting this for ages but now that the “hive mind” is starting to emerge it is truly exciting.
Video has been on the Net for ages of course but the ascendence of “YouTube”:http://www.youtube.com/, “Google Video”:http://video.google.com/ and video content via “iTunes”:http://www.itunes.com/ has reshaped the online landscape this year in ways I wouldn’t have expected.
My guess is that we’re seeing an acceleration in adoption of new services and business models that will make business that much harder. How do we keep up when sites go from not existing to the top ten most trafficked on the net in a year or two?
Trgovac: “What is your career-planning advice for a high school grad that comes to you and says “I want to get into marketing.”
Dr. Madsen recently joined “Yahoo! Canada”:http://www.yahoo.ca/ as head of marketing programs, to accelerate Yahoo!’s growing momentum in the Canadian market. He previously headed product marketing for Yahoo! Marketing Services, as well as product management for the company’s industry-leading advertising delivery system. In his previous position, Madsen drove Yahoo!’s innovations in advanced ad targeting, analytics, rich media ad formats, and promotions services for advertisers.
Originally a social scientist, Madsen received his doctorate from Harvard University and subsequently lectured there before beginning his marketing career with J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency.
*One Degree: Yahoo! Canada has gone through several different phases since it was launched. Is there a renewed emphasis on serving the Canadian market at Yahoo?*
According to ComScore, three out of four Canadians online each month use Yahoo!, so Canada has long been a big and important market for us. But over the years, we have taken varying approaches to how we manage and develop our business. The approach we’ve been taking in recent years puts a strong team in charge here and keeps it well integrated with functional teams back at our headquarters.
*One Degree: You’ve just recently moved to Toronto from Yahoo’s head office in Sunnyvale California. What are your early impressions of the differences between the Internet industry here and in the valley?*