• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, March 20, 2008

Online ad money is moving into premium content environments, and the portals and major online ad platforms are probably not going to be the ones selling it. I've written about this general topic several times before. Major brand advertisers are starting to take online very, very seriously; just look at the announcement earlier this week that General Motors plans to shift 50% of its ad spend online within three years. Just look at all of the pioneering online ad work done recently by big offline brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Snapple and P&G. These brands are now making online a big part of their overall marketing programs, and they are not just focused on direct-marketing objectives. No, while performance objectives will always be a big part of the online ad ecosystem, more and more marketers are looking to online ads to help drive consumer perception objectives. Yes, they are using online to drive brand-oriented objectives like awareness, favorability and purchase intent.

That this shift is an opportunity for premium vertical publishers like Weather.com, NYTimes.com, Forbes.com, Meredith and other members of the Online Publishers Association is self-evident. All of these folks have been doing very well selling their best premium environments, many times integrated with offline programs, at great rates. That will certainly continue, but that is not the big opportunity in front of them. Their best inventory -- the high-demand vertical and sub-vertical parts of their sites -- is typically scarce, so these programs never scale to the levels of spend that portals and platforms like Yahoo, MSN and AOL's Platform A can generate. It is unheard of for a premium vertical publisher to command 40% or 50% of a major brand advertisers' annual online spend, but it is quite typical for major portals to enter into partnerships like that with large brand advertisers.

So, what's the big opportunity? As has been well-documented, the major portals have been shifting their online ad focus away from perception-focused premium brand advertisers and more toward performance-focused marketers. We saw this first last year with Yahoo's integration of its sales teams around search. We saw this second with Microsoft's purchase of aQuantive, and its adoption of aQuantive's well-respected and quant-driven Atlas technology and team as the core of its online ad strategy. We saw this most recently with the events at AOL and its Platform A and the integration of its ad sales efforts.

Of course, these actions have been driven by fear of Google and its well-telegraphed efforts to use its search and contextual ad platform to dominate the online display ad market. I think that these folks are walking right into Google's lair -- trying to compete with Google on Google's terms -- and are making the delivery of premium brand programs a lesser and distant priority. I think that this will prove to be a mistake for Yahoo and AOL. At least Microsoft has a chance to make a fair fight of it, given its desktop franchise, its strong technology expertise and culture, and its unparalleled balance sheet. What should vertical publishers do? They should be focused on filling in this void. They should focus on ways to massively scale and upgrade the offerings that they take to agencies and clients.

No, I am not calling for another consortium. The one thing that we can be certain of here is that media consortia efforts will fail and are a massive waste of money, time, market focus and reputation. This is the time for one or more premium publishers to build a new, independent, business-aggregating, premium, vertical inventory and audience, backed by financial investors -- not strategic ones -- focused exclusively on financial success metrics, not strategic ones, and with the full freedom to operate in any market it wants without worrying about potential conflict or competition with any other sales channels.

Someone is going to fill this void. The market need is too great for it to be missed. The company or companies that fill this void may very well find the portals and platforms as ideal partners for their business, since these companies have scale and market-leading technologies, but are losing their premium sales channel positions. We are going to see a whole new round of coopetition and a new breed of frienemies. It's going to be fun to watch. What do you think?