Just a quick note to let you all know that (a) yes, I’m back from vacation and (b) I’ll be at ad:tech Chicago next week…. If you’re not, or even if you are and know of any good Italian or Vegetarian restaurants, please recommend ’em!

Brief messages, varied creative, interstitial ads, and making sure you understand and respect the audience to which you’re advertising are all excellent points of wisdom here…. Frankly, if you were to take all of his advice and roll it together, most folks would wind up with a different answer: give the host of the show talking points and let them deliver the ad in the style and context of their show.

I was reading Dave Slusher’s site this afternoon, and as one of his new year’s “resolutions”, he said that he would be removing sites from his RSS aggregator that didn’t offer the full text of articles in their RSS feed…. This way people get to peruse the site in their aggregator and, if they find something interesting, come to the site to participate more and, “pay” for the content they’re reading (by “pay” I mean “allow us to show them advertisements of our choice”).

As you probably know, we just launched the BackBeat Media Podcast Network. I wanted to explain exactly what we’re doing and where we’ve come from, and as I thought about it, it made a lot more sense to do as a podcast than anything else, so it here it is (7.4MB and 10 minutes long)! […]

Yep, that’s right, we — that would be Greg Snyder, my business partner at BackBeat Media, and I — have taken the business model that has sustained us and a hefty handful of websites for the last 6 years and applied it to Podcasting…. It’s just that now we do it with Podcasts which, for today, happens to be a big buzzword.And while the buzzword cachet will definitely fade as all buzzwords do, we certainly believe that podcasting (or whatever word you want to use for time-shifted portable media) will never go away.

this thing is bigger than all of us. We all need to take a big step back and accept that the pie is going to get sliced up, the direction is going to be decided by everyone involved, and some things may happen that piss some of us off…. Hell, The Mac Observer shows up, too, and we throw our own kick-ass party, but that doesn’t mean we don’t invite the folks from Macworld to it.

That’s a very dispassionate way of saying that he and I started that business together nearly 6 years ago and Greg has been pouring his blood and sweat into it ever since. Now you, lucky blog-reader, have the opportunity to see first-hand what I’ve been seeing for years: Greg’s got some great ideas, expresses himself in an amazingly focused yet thoughtful way, and is well worth your time to read (heck, I’d read his blog over mine!).

We over at BackBeat Media have been doing the “smart web ads thing” since the day we hung our first shingle…. Red Herring is simply looking to get some momentum for themselves going by preaching to a growing choir, and you can’t blame ’em for that.

…or at least Fred Wilson thinks so, and I (obviously) couldn’t agree more. People — whether they know it or not — have always wanted relevant ads, and that’s exactly what we started doing with BackBeat Media 5 years ago, albeit with a better model than behavioral targeting. We found that by targeting niche markets […]

They actually performed a case study with (presumably) a real client, and compared the click through rate (CTR) of a given advertising campaign with its overall reach…. As they found:”The search engine [campaign] delivered a grand total of 4,000 impressions [with a high click through rate]; though many of those bought the product, in the end only four thousand were exposed to the campaign.