Hey guys – my name is Jason Shen and I’m proud to be the newest addition to the isocket team!

Today, July 12th, is my first official day. But it feels like longer because I’ve been getting to know these guys through interviewing and training.

My job title is Customer Scout. You’ll be seeing more of me if you are interested in working with isocket or at local events. I’ll be playing counterpart to Ryan’s Customer BFF role. He and I are both part of the “Customer Team” – our job is to provide excellent service and help spread the word about isocket.

A little about my past:

Until last month, I was cutting my teeth in advertising as the business manager of The Stanford Daily. I oversaw operations, the ad sales & finance teams and the financial performance for our 118-year old independently incorporated newspaper. I also saw how powerful (and lucrative) premium display ads could be for our organization – which is part of why I’m so excited about isocket.

Before the Daily, I cofounded a microfinance oriented social venture, got a BS & MS from Stanford University, and spent 10 years as a nationally competitive gymnast. I was proud to be the Captain of the NCAA Div I National Championship Men’s Gymnastics team at Stanford.

I’m super excited to start kicking butt at isocket – we have an awesome team, a really useful product and some big plans to build toward. If you have any more questions about me or know of any publisher who wants an easier way to do direct and self-serve display ads, drop me a line at jason at isocket dot com.

Although we tend to stick around the office most of the time, there are a few things that can pull us away from our computers. You know, things such as walking our dogs around Burlingame, taking trips to the local Pez Museum and going to job fairs. Of course, one other thing that we really like going to are the tech events that seem to be going on all the time here in the Bay Area (which is why we all love living here) — especially the really good ones, which are sometimes hard to find.

Lucky for us we have some friends who just happen to be putting on a couple of awesome events that are coming up later this month, which makes it a little easier to decide whether we should take the tome to go or not. The two events that we know we’re going to be making appearances at later this month are Brian Zisk’s The Future of Money and Technology Summit on April 26th and Franck Nouyrigat’s Bay Area Startup Weekend in San Jose on the weekend of April 30th. In fact, we like the Bay Area Startup Weekend so much we’re an official sponsor (which we’ve done a few times before).

If any of you out there are planning on attending either of these events, please let us know so that we can connect up while we’re there. We’ll be easy to spot, just look for a bunch of guys wearing these shirts.

Here are some more details on these two upcoming events and if you have any questions about either of them, please feel free to ask us in the comments and we’ll help you out.

I know that we don’t talk much about our investors, but I thought that this might as good a time as any to start. To everyone’s surprise (well, not really), Dave McClure, one of our investors who is never too scared to get his groove on, decided to show off some of his interpretive dancing skills at the Chic Meets Geek event last week in San Francisco.

After being on the mic for a few minutes he decided that his time would be much better spent dancing than talking.

“I might be a geek, but one thing I can do is bust out the moves like nobody’s business.”

Personally, I would have to agree with him, but take a look at the video below or check out this direct link to UStream if you want to decide for yourself.

This past weekend John and Zak had the opportunity to speak at the Teens In Tech Conference, which was held at Google’s San Francisco offices. They met a ton of great people throughout the day and were super excited that they had the chance to positively impact so many young entrepreneurs. Both John and Zak both started their first businesses in their early teen years, so they jumped at this chance to give back to an excited group of kids who are ready to take on the world with new ideas and innovations.

A few of the highlights of the conference included meeting a 16-year old who had a full business plan put together for a new airline he wanted to start, getting some sweet swag (ex. a sweet, new RickShaw Bag) and of course the one thing that tops them all — getting to meet The Woz (the co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak).

The Woz was there to check out what all of the kids were up to these days and was more than happy to sign several MacBooks throughout the day. Check out the video below or over here on ReadWriteWeb to see John get interviewed and to see the Woz in action.

A huge thanks goes out to Daniel Brusilovsky for putting all of this together and for inviting us out to join in on all the fun.

I’m not sure why, but for some reason when John and I saw the Pez Museum as were walking back from lunch last week, it was something that I just couldn’t seem to get out of my head. So much, in fact, that I kept on thinking about ways that we could incorporate the newly discovered ultimate mecca of all things Pez into our company culture here at isocket.

You see, creating a fun and creative work environment is something that I plan on putting a lot of my own personal time into and is also something that both John and Zak feel is very important to the overall success of our business. I know that creating a great company culture isn’t all about doing not-so-ordinary things with museums that are dedicated to bite-sized candy, but it does give us some great stories to tell in the future.

With all of this in mind we decided to make a scheduled stop at the Pez Museum so that we could get some shots with the it’s biggest claim to fame — the world’s largest Pez dispenser ever made. We stopped by after a tasty team lunch to say goodbye to our super-intern Toh Hong Pang (HP) as he is heading back to his home country of Singapore here soon, so we thought that it was only appropriate he be the first recipient of the monster-sized Pez snowman.

Of course, the world’s largest dispenser of Pez doesn’t just give out those tiny, little candies. Instead, it dispenses a numbered and certified snowman Pez dispenser that properly commemorates the special moment. Here are some pics we took during our first (but not last) trip over to the museum, including the official Guinness Book of World Records certificate for being the biggest Pez dispenser in the entire world. Enjoy.

HP makes isocket history with the first official Pez pic

Yes, it actually works…

The Kodak moment for HP

Getting up close and personal with some Pez

John strikes a pose


Zak cheeses it up real nice for the picture

Nick looks a little confused

Even John’s dad got into the Pez spirit!

In case you didn’t think that it was legit

We are very excited to announce and welcome TechCrunch as the newest addition to our private Beta! Just in case you are new to the internet, TechCrunch is one of the largest, most influential blogs in the tech and start-up world and is read by over 2 million people per day.

We are honored that TechCrunch would choose isocket to power their ad sales. They see a lot of technology companies and had their pick of the litter, so their faith in us was humbling and motivating. You can read their announcement about isocket here.

If you’d like to be a part of our private Beta as well, you should sign up for the waiting list on our homepage! We’ll be sending out invites on a first-come, first-serve basis in the coming weeks and months.

You should definitely take a look at TechCrunch’s ad sales pages. Here is the direct sales page on their website and here is their isocket profile / Media Kit page. They are also offering a 20% launch discount on all their ads! If you make your purchase during the month of May, you can apply this discount to any campaign through the end of 2009!

One of the coolest things that the TechCrunch team wanted to accomplish by moving their ad sales onto isocket was to make it easier for more advertisers, especially start-ups, to have the chance to advertise on TC.

Since isocket makes it easier to buy and sell advertising, TC is able to offer more options, including new ad packages that run for a day. For example, you can promote the launch of your startup or product by purchasing all of the premium ads on TechCrunch’s main page for one day, and all it takes is a few clicks on isocket (you can watch a video sneak peak here)!

We’d like to thank TC head hacker Henry Work for sourcing and championing us, Heather Harde for giving us the chance, and Michael Arrington for supporting startups both on and within TechCrunch. Laguna is pretty awesome too. They work hard over there but have a great time doing it.

As an ad seller, what can you do in times like these to increase your sales and attract new buyers? What can you offer to local or small businesses who might be shrinking their ad budgets?

You often have more types of inventory to sell than just web banners. By offering different inventory, whether it’s unique and wacky or phsyical and offline, you’re able to cast a wider net in your sales efforts. And as more local and small ad buyers are moving online, combining those banners with other opportunities puts you in a great spot.

One of our beta testers, IndyMojo, has built a full time business around selling ads to local small business owners. IndyMojo is a local community website based in Indianapolis, Indiana that has about 7,000 members and quite impressive numbers for a local community portal. What’s even more impressive is how they’ve handled their ad sales.

The guys at Mojo have done a great job building a sales process. They also understand that selling an ad is no different than selling a physical piece of inventory. As such, they’re working hard to make it easier for buyers to find and buy their inventory. You can see their internal sales page here and their isocket brand page here.

Because of the nature of the IndyMojo brand and audience, IndyMojo sells ad opportunities that expand beyond banners. It makes sense for their business because they offer more than just a website – they offer conversations, real world events and the ability to reach a very targeted group. For example, they have created VIP cards that give card holders discounts at participating local businesses. Other examples:

• Email newsletter sponsorships

• Directory listings

• Network forums with discussion

• Classified ads

• Calendar listings

isocket helps IndyMojo runs the sales for all these different ads through one place, rather than managing 5 different types of services for each option they offer. This makes it easier for both buyer and seller – less overhead, less email tag, less checks to write, etc.

As we said in our last post, “Truly creative advertising engages people…”  Give your advertisers the opportunity to engage with your community in novel ways.  Whether it be via online discussion or an offline meetup in your most popular city, allow buyers to get creative and it will pay off for you.

Last week saw the Tribune filing bankruptcy, the New York Times borrowing against its HQ, Detroit newspapers ending home delivery and an 18% decline in newspaper ad spend. Amidst all this chaos, I wrote an Op-Ed and submitted it to the Wall Street Journal. It was rejected. Enjoy.

Who Will Be The Next Tribune?

Small Changes Can Save Old Media Revenue

This week’s bankruptcy of Tribune Co may well be the first of several large media groups to fall. “Old media” companies have been focusing on the wrong questions and implementing the wrong strategies. The good news? There is still hope – and with a few small changes to how ad inventory is sold and executed, the industry can survive in an ever-changing world.

"All aboard the U.S.S. Failboat!"

In new media circles it is considered passé to discuss old media’s advertising revenue woes, as if it were a foregone conclusion decided ages ago. Like most of our world’s current headlines it was one of those things that many people knew was coming but few attempted to address. Some now consider the Tribune to be the first real, hard-hitting casualty and a validation of these cocktail party narratives.

However, much of the commentary about the “freefall” of old media revenue is misguided. The primary reason for the decline of newspaper ad dollars is not the competition from blogs and web content or the bad habits of new generations. There still is demand for thought-provoking newspapers and great TV shows. As such, the ads placed against them maintain real, tangible value.

The real reason that revenue has shifted towards new media is that the internet provides an easier and better way for advertising to be bought and sold. Online advertisements aren’t magical or inherently superior to old media ads. They are prone to the same problems such as fatigue, conditioning, incorrect targeting, and faulty metrics. But online ads have less friction, are easier for buyers of any size to purchase and offer a wealth of other benefits that only the web provides.

Online advertising has exploded in part because it’s simply easier for both buyers and sellers to conduct their business. Old media overlooked this point as they scrambled to compete with web advertising as a medium – newspapers vs. blogs, TV vs. YouTube, classifieds vs. craigslist – when they should’ve been competing with, or at least copying, the processes and technology that facilitate online advertising. As Brian Wheelis, a SVP at the GSD&M ad agency, said: “If you think about the Web as cannibalizing, you’ve already given up and you’re not ready for it.”

For example, offering a primetime sitcom in HD and as an iPhone download is great for appealing to modern audiences. But if ad sales are still conducted by snail mail, is it any surprise that dollars are voting with their feet? That’s why even as newspapers move their content online, with new projects like the just-announced New York Times’ “Times Extra,” digital revenue still fell 3% in Q3 compared to the same period last year.

Jeff Zucker, the head of NBC Universal, said earlier this year that the media industry had to work so that “we do not end up trading analog dollars for digital pennies.” Pricing economics aside, this isn’t old media’s primary concern. You can’t change the fact that the atomization of content creates more inventory and shifts supply vs. demand. What’s important is building systems that can monetize through scale, similar to online search and display ads.

Perhaps a more appropriate rally call would have been “we should trade analog processes for digital dollars.”

Sure, the Tribune had debt issues and a convergence of factors forced the bankruptcy timing. But it wouldn’t have been in this situation if the revenue was there. To its credit, Tribune leaders at least began to understand the process problem and started to move inventory “into the cloud” with projects like a joint ad network, QuadrantONE. The Tribune just didn’t have enough time. How much do the others have?

Tough times like these are said to craft the best startups by forcing focus, ingenuity and passion. When a group of smart, talented people are stuck in a paper bag in a dark damp corner, they engineer their way out. They don’t play by the rules or abide by what the neighboring paper bag opines.

So far most of old media’s efforts to punch through their bags have been lackluster. However, there have been a few shining examples of progressive thinking and action, such as the online video joint venture Hulu.com – which was once referred to as ClownCo by some in the business.

Enter the silver lining. Given the cautionary tale of the Tribune, old media now has the capital they’ve been waiting for – the justified permission to take radical action and act like a nothing-to-lose startup. Over the last two months some Silicon Valley CEOs have used this same capital to trim the fat through layoffs and alter business models without looking like doomed dot-bombs. Media CEOs now have the same opportunity. Will they capitalize on it?

Start making inventory, whether it’s a radio commercial or quarter page print layout, just as accessible, frictionless, mixable and accountable as an online advertisement.

Keep the parts that are special, standardize the rest. For example there are some ad mediums that will never have the measurability or results-based pricing that online ads can deliver. But a search engine ad can never entertain you the way a well-done commercial can.

Focus first on accessibility. Identify and remove the barriers and frictions that make inventory less attractive than a web ad. Make it easier for buyers to find, purchase and execute inventory as part of larger 360-degree campaigns.

This is accomplished by moving ad inventory “into the cloud.” In other words, moving the inventory and processes behind it onto the web, allowing for connectivity and smoother transactions. Inventory doesn’t have to be put into commoditized marketplaces or conform to the rules of some ad network. Nor should old media build multimillion dollar proprietary solutions without fully addressing the issue of scale and interoperability.

Old media must turn to the web and the thought leaders behind it for answers, or they risk becoming the latest punch line at those new media cocktail parties – or worse, a bankruptcy headline.

The first application built on the isocket platform is a direct sales application for web display ads. In simple terms, its a tool for website owners to sell banners on their own without using an ad network. This is what most of our current private Beta testers are using – in fact, you can see two demonstration ad spots (125×125′s) in the right column of this blog.

This “economic crisis” has caused a lot of discussion about the decline in the ad market and what 2009 will be like. There are a few areas, like newspaper and radio (see tomorrows post about this topic) that have really tanked.

In the online ad market, some doom and gloom predictions talk about a decline of 1 or 2%. The average prediction is that the market will grow only 2 to 3%. While that looks bad when compared to the 20% or more growth web ads experienced over the last few years, 2% growth in this climate is still growth.

What we wanted to highlight is that it’s not always the top-line market numbers that are important, but the shifts happening within that market.

Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson wrote a great post about how display advertising works differently than search. The important part:

The basic insight from the report is that display advertising does not normally result in an immediate click. That makes sense because the ad is not being presented in a moment of purchase intent, like a search ad is. But the ad does create interest in the product or service which is realized at some later date in the form of a site visit, a search query, and possibly on online or offline purchase.

This jives with a study that showed display advertising metrics may not capture all of the value or results.

A Specific Media study finds the presence of display advertising significantly affects click-through and search style across both paid and organic searches. Findings suggested consumers exposed to display ads are more likely to search for brand terms (like “BMW”) and segment terms (like “635 CSi”) than unexposed ones.

A new report called “No Improvement on Horizon for Standard Online Advertising” outlines the minimal/flat growth over the next year. But look at the two graphs associate with that post:

While everyone is focused on the top-line decline, advertisers that want to reach “local” audiences are spending more than ever before.

“Local” should include niche, targeted and small business advertisers – they all want to buy display advertising, but don’t have the budget or the need to buy national level campaigns. Direct sales, where an advertiser and a website publisher work together to buy/sell an ad, is the best way to achieve this.

But “local” advertisers still have a hard time with web ads. As buyers want more narrowly targeted display ad audiences, they will need an easier way to purchase those ads.

And that’s exactly what isocket does. Our service makes it easier for those “local” buyers and sellers to connect and conduct these more narrowly targeted campaigns, without all the mess and hassle that usually comes along with it.

A few weeks ago we announced CPM based direct sales for web display ads. We wanted to give some advice on which method was right based on a seller’s needs. This was our comment:

If your site either has high traffic numbers or a large amount of flow through traffic, CPM is usually better. If your site has a more tightly defined / niche audience or your traffic is very sticky / recurring, then selling in blocks of time might make more sense.

We recently stumbled upon another blog’s post that described this choice and included numbers from a survey, and we wanted to share it with you. From the post:

Direct ad space sales bring in some of the highest revenues but also require the greatest effort to arrange. In Scott’s recent interview, Jeremy from Shoemoney describes how he sells ad space on his blog using a fixed price monthly tenancy rather than using CPM, CPC or CPA rates.

We surveyed the OpenX community to find out how they package their inventory for direct ad sales:

• 45% charge on a CPM rate (payment based on the number of times the ad is displayed)
• 38% sell a tenancy (payment based on displaying ads for a fixed period of time, regardless of the number of impressions)
• 13% charge on a CPC rate (payment based on the number of visitors who click on the ad)
• 4% charge on a CPA rate (payment based on visitors which click on an ad and go on to purchase a product / service)

via OpenX blog