The perception, then, is that Twitter is useful for what the ad types call “top of the funnel” marketing — building brand awareness and so on — but that it has yet to deliver paying customers in the way that GoogleAdwords can. Today, though, it appears Twitter has responded with a new ad product that will make it easier for brands to assess what they get for their marketing bucks.

The product, called a “Lead Generation Card,” lets marketers post expanded tweets that invite users to sign up for stuff right inside Twitter. The company showed what this might look in a blog post describing the product:

According to a spokesman, the idea reduces friction in the marketing process because Twitter already has users’ email addresses and other contact information — meaning that it takes just one click for a user to connect with the brand.

The move comes as Twitter continues to expand its ad products, including its self-serve platform, ahead of a rumored IPO later this year.

“This shift from what I believe to be mass communications to a mass of communicators has created a strong fundamental shift in the way brands are going to be built going forward,” he said. “They’re going to have to figure out how to engage with people instead of advertising at them.”

For Dachis that means direct engagement with people influential in their field through social media channels. Those influencers can then, in turn, amplify their message through the same social media outlets, he said.

Speaking on the same panel as Dachis, Google VP of Partner Business Solutions Bonita Stewart took issue with the idea that older formers digital marketing were ineffective. Contrary to popular belief, Stewart said, some display CPM rates are increasing, and Google’s publisher partners are seeing a lot of success using a combination of traditional advertising and new social marketing tools such as Hangouts.

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on paidContent .

In a recent twist on content and social media marketing, companies like Johnson & Johnson and P&G are sending out samples and asking consumers to complete “missions” based on the products they receive. One recent example, known as “the Juicy Bird Mission,” asked participants to brine their Thanksgiving turkeys with Kikkoman soy sauce and describe the experience online.

The concept is the brainchild of Social Media Link, a startup based in New York that offers brands access to its community of “influencers” as a way to amplify their marketing messages.

According to CEO Susan Frech, 300,000 people have signed up to be “influencers” on the company’s Smiley360 site and more than half of them have completed at least one mission. Potential participants are screened by an email survey and those selected receive a product and mission card in the mail. Out of curiosity, I asked Frech to partake in a mission and soon after I received a package containing this:

The attached mission card asked me to give away one of the pens and to use the other one to try my hand at a four-color picture. My mission also asked me to ‘like’ Bic on Facebook and to upload my handiwork to the internet. I failed. But it looks like some of my mission compatriots persevered:

I confess the whole process felt odd to me, but I may not be typical. According to Frech, 75 percent of participants are women (“chief purchasing officers” in brand speak) and many live outside metropolitan areas.

In any event, Social Media Link is faring well. Frech says the three-year old company is profitable and that it has run dozens of missions for major brands with deals valued near six figures. The company has also had social hits, including for the “Juicy Bird” soy sauce Mission, when thousands showed up at an hour-long “Twitter party” and caused a hashtag to trend.

For the participating brands, Frech says the appeal of the campaigns is the chance to reap social media buzz among a user’s community and, on some occasions, to test out new products.

The process also offers a way for brands to get positive reviews without falling afoul of FTC rules that require marketers to disclose if they have received any form of payment. As part of Social Media Links’ “mission” rules, participants can write what they like but have to state they have received the product for free.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Social Media Link works with Kraft.

(Image by Franck Boston via Shutterstock)

Like it or not, however, this phenomenon is becoming more and more commonplace — and not just at new-media ventures like BuzzFeed but also at traditional publishers like The Atlantic. Is it the savior of online media, or just another mirage in the advertising desert? This is a question we are going to discussing at length at paidContent Live in New York on April 17, including a panel entitled “The future of native advertising: Blurring ads and content.”

If it’s useful, does it matter if it’s sponsored?

The principle behind what some call sponsored content and others refer to as “native advertising” (and newspapers and magazines called “advertorial”) is that marketing messages and other forms of advertising are more successful when they look and feel just like the other content that surrounds them, rather than an annoying and/or irrelevant interruption. If you can make your message useful, the theory goes, then users are more likely to click or remember.

The most obvious example of this is the kind of advertising that both Twitter and Facebook offer: namely, features like “promoted tweets” and “sponsored stories.” They appear in a user’s stream just like any other status update or message, but they are advertising that is based on — and in some cases even includes — the activity of a user around specific topics (although Facebook’s version has caused some controversy over the inclusion of status updates).

BuzzFeed, whose president Jon Steinberg will be on our paidContent Live panel, is one of the leading proponents of this concept: co-founder Jonah Peretti has talked about how the startup decided from the beginning not to use traditional banner ads and other forms of advertising, but to pin its hopes on sponsored content. But critics like Sullivan have complained that the sponsored content is too hard to distinguish from the regular content at BuzzFeed.

Another form of native advertising is the kind that Forbes magazine specializes in, with its BrandVoice program. In a nutshell, the magazine provides marketers and advertisers with a platform that is indistinguishable — apart from the brand names and disclaimers that are posted on their pages — from the content that appears elsewhere on the magazine’s website.

Advertising is just another form of media

Forbes‘ chief product officer Lewis D’Vorkin, who will also be on our panel at paidContent Live, has written about the idea behind this platform, and the idea is that branded or marketing-related content should be given a status that is equal to that of the magazine’s traditional content, and that it should succeed or fail based on whether it is actually useful to readers or not. So the blog written by someone who works for a brand or corporate sponsor looks and functions almost exactly the same as any other blog written by a Forbes staffer.

A whole separate category of sponsored content or native advertising is what some marketers like to call “brand journalism,” and Kyle Monson of Knock Twice — a former journalist who used to run the “brand journalism” practice at JWT in New York — is going to be on our paidContent Live panel talking about that. This approach sees brands like Coca-Cola and Qualcomm and Intel creating their own content or journalism around topics that are of interest to their customers, without making it explicitly an advertising message.

So with brands becoming publishers and producing “brand journalism,” where does that leave traditional media companies? And are the blurring lines between sponsored content and traditional media a problem, or are critics like Andrew Sullivan just reluctant to embrace this new way of doing things online? Those are just some of the questions we will be tackling at paidContent Live on April 17, so I hope you can join us to continue the debate.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock / Gl0ck and The Everett Collection

This is about more than just some tinkering with the machinery that underlies the content we consume. As Felix Salmon notes in a post at Reuters, virtually every media entity — from behemoths like the New York Times to the smallest independent online player — is being forced to reinvent how they generate revenue because digital advertising is not paying the bills (Note: We will be discussing alternative monetization methods on a number of panels at our paidContent Live media conference on April 17 in New York).

Another battle between algorithms and humans

Like most of the other changes in the media industry, this shift didn’t just just happen overnight. Instead, it’s a wave or a series of waves that have been building steadily over the past several years. As with so many other elements of the disruption in digital content, Google arguably triggered this particular tsunami with the introduction of its search-keyword based auction process — an idea it borrowed from Bill Gross and Overture — but the ripple effects of that decision have continued to grow and expand in force.

In a nutshell, advertising has become yet another battleground for the fight between humans and algorithms: the human beings at ad-buying firms and ad networks who used to buy and sell banners and other traditional forms of advertising, and the algorithms that drive “programmatic” buying based on keywords, topics that are trending in social media and other factors.

As we described earlier, this is something the New York Times has been experimenting with via an in-house tool that tracks which stories are seeing the most activity on Twitter, and then offers advertisers the ability to insert their ads into those stories. It’s no longer about where that content appears in a physical product like a newspaper, or even what the story is actually about. Instead, it’s more about who is engaging with it, and where, and how.

Part of this shift is the transition from what some marketers call “outbound” marketing — which includes direct mail, banner ads and other methods that try to reach out and grab the attention of potential customers — to “inbound” marketing, which relies on search-engine optimization and other content-based strategies that make it easier for users to find a brand or advertiser without being bombarded by ads (Demand Media and other “content farms” have tried to apply this approach to content, with mixed results).

Hubspot, which specializes in inbound marketing, says it is more or less taking over the online world, and the consequences for traditional media companies are fairly obvious:

Automated buying vs. human-created content

So what does all this have to do with the Twitter advertising API? In a nutshell, the API is a way for companies to automate more of their ad spending. At the moment, the list of official partners isn’t that long, but it will presumably grow — and the API combined with Twitter’s self-serve ad platform will theoretically allow advertisers to promote tweets based on what is trending and where the activity is. Twitter is also likely providing a host of information around users and their interests.

This is essentially the same game Facebook is playing, and while Google doesn’t have an open API for Google+ yet, it is likely thinking along the same lines. For social networks, in which the content generated by users is almost indistinguishable from the advertising — and in the case of Facebook, actually becomes part of that advertising, through features like sponsored stories — offering tools that let advertisers automate their spending based on hard data is potentially far more lucrative than another generic banner ad.

The problem for many media companies is that this is a game they are ill-equipped to play: for the most part, they have little or no data about their users that can compete with the granularity that Facebook or Twitter can offer, and they have no APIs or other automated, self-serve features to offer even if they did have that kind of data. On top of that, brands are setting up newsrooms and becoming content publishers in their own right, and further disintermediating the media.

This is part of the reason why so many players like The Atlantic and even Gawker Media have been focusing on alternative methods such as sponsored content or “native” advertising or affiliate links. But as Salmon notes in his post, these kinds of approaches are often labor-intensive (if you want them to be effective), and therefore high cost. In some ways, the market seems to be bifurcating: on one side is a growing business driven by algorithms, and on the other is a human-driven business based on customized content. Is there room for both?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Everett Collection and Borrell Associates

One of the reasons why this incident has drawn so much attention is that Popova seems like a great example of the kind of self-sustaining media entity many bloggers — and even traditional journalists — aspire to become. While she may not be in the same league as Sullivan, who employs a team to run his Daily Dish blog (and who will be speaking at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17), the idea that someone can make a living by simply curating excellent content in return for donations is inspiring.

Are affiliate links a sneaky form of advertising?

The Popova case has also become a flashpoint because as traditional advertising becomes less lucrative, publishers are turning to alternative forms of advertising such as “native” or sponsored content — something that caused a similar firestorm of criticism for The Atlantic recently — as well as affiliate-related content. Gawker is hiring writers to create what it calls “commerce journalism” that is designed to drive revenue from affiliate links. But standards on disclosure and other elements of these new forms of advertising are all over the map.

In a number of profiles, including a glowing one in the Sunday New York Times, Popova comes across as a highly intelligent and motivated individual — a former recreational bodybuilder from Bulgaria who started Brainpickings as a way of collecting interesting links to books and other content. The reputation of the blog seems to have spread fairly quickly, to the point where luminaries like former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter said they support her through donations in the same way they support National Public Radio. And Popova has said repeatedly that she is proud to be advertising free:

“It doesn’t put the reader’s best interests first – it turns them into a sellable eyeball, and sells that to advertisers. As soon as you begin to treat your stakeholder as a bargaining chip, you’re not interested in broadening their intellectual horizons or bettering their life. I don’t believe in this model of making people into currency. You become accountable to advertisers, rather than your reader.”

That rosy picture got a little blurrier over the past couple of days, however, after an anonymous blogger (later revealed to be Tom Bleymaier, founder of a startup in Palo Alto, Calif.) posted on Tumblr about Popova’s liberal use of affiliate links — that is, links to books and other products on e-commerce sites (primarily Amazon) that provide her with a payment if one of her readers clicks through. The anonymous blogger extrapolated from Popova’s traffic numbers and estimated that she could generate between $200,000 and $400,000 a year from those links.

.@underoak @moorhen blogs that bring in money should have on-site disclosures about where it is coming from. cc @brainpicker

—
Staci D Kramer (@sdkstl) February 14, 2013

Disclosure is always better if you want trust

Given that kind of income — from something that is pretty clearly a form of advertising, although perhaps a non-traditional one — the Tumblr critic argued that Popova’s claim to be “advertising free” is clearly inaccurate. He also argued that some of her donors might think twice about giving her money every month if they knew that she was deriving a substantial amount of income from affiliate links, something that Popova didn’t disclose before or after a reader clicked on one of those links (Note: She has since added disclosure to her donations page).

Reuters blogger Felix Salmon followed up with a post about Popova, repeating some of the financial claims made by Bleymaier and adding some of his own. Popova has since responded to both Salmon and Betabeat — which also published a critical post about her practices — saying she doesn’t see affiliate links as advertising, is open about using them, and doesn’t make anything close to what Bleymaier said she does.

“Those numbers are ludicrous! If Amazon gave me even a tenth of that a year after Uncle Sam takes his fair share, I’d be delighted. I’ve been completely honest about the Amazon links with anyone who’s ever asked – and have many, many, many emails I’m happy to forward – and have brought it up myself multiple times in talks and on Twitter.”

Many of Popova’s supporters have said they are happy to have her get revenue from her writing in any way possible, and don’t mind the lack of disclosure about her use of affiliate links. Others, however, have questioned why she wouldn’t attach a simple disclaimer to her site — especially on the donation page — to note that she uses them (and some have even pointed out that this kind of disclaimer is arguably required by law, due to FTC regulations on disclosing marketing-related content).

I think the main point that Salmon makes in his post on the issue is a good one: namely, that if you are relying on donations from your fans for your livelihood — as Sullivan is, and others such as musician Amanda Palmer are — then it behooves you to be as open as possible about your financial arrangements, in the interests of increasing the trust your readers or fans have in you. Sullivan and Palmer have both been extremely forthcoming about their financial situations, an approach Popova might want to imitate.

Note: Since the original version of this post appeared, Popova has added a footnote to her site at the bottom of each page that describes how she uses Amazon affiliate links, which says:

“Brain Pickings participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on here, I get a small percentage of its price. That helps support Brain Pickings by offsetting a fraction of what it takes to maintain the site, and is very much appreciated.”

This story was updated to note that Popova has added disclosure of her affiliate links to her donations page, as she noted on Twitter, as well as a note in the footer of her site.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Igor Steganovic and Brainpicker

In case you missed it, the moment came during a surreal 34-minute blackout in the second half that left the players milling around while the announcers tried to fill the void with “analysis.” That’s when the public broadcaster jumped in with this:

This might be a good time think about alternative programming. #SuperBowlBlackOut #WeHaveDowntonPBS—
  (@PBS) February 04, 2013

According to Marketing and Communications Director, Kevin Dando, the timing was fortuitous because PBS was already in the midst of a weekly discussion in which Downton lovers gather on social media to discuss the show. When Dando tweeted the invitation for SuperBowl viewers to come on over, he says his phone almost blew up.

“Within seconds, we saw hundreds, then thousands of retweets,” said Dando, including from celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis and from Time magazine’s TV critic:

I'm game! “@PBS: This might be a good time think about alternative programming. #SuperBowlBlackOut #WeHaveDowntonPBS”—
Giada De Laurentiis (@GDeLaurentiis) February 04, 2013

Carson wd have brought up candles by now MT @PBS: This might be a good time think about alternative programming. #WeHaveDowntonPBS—
James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) February 04, 2013

Dando says the SuperBowl invitation was one of PBS’s two most popular tweets in the last 12 months. The other came in October when the network rushed to defend itself after Mitt Romney questioned the value of Big Bird during the Presidential debates.

Last night, PBS was one a handful of brands, including Oreo and Audi, to “newsjack” the so-called #BlackoutBowl. These nimble moves on social media typically garner a flurry of free publicity but it’s unclear how much they change people’s intention to purchase or watch something.

“We’ll find out from the ratings if it helped,” said Dando.

The company, which is best known for measuring TV audiences,  is now backing Pereg Ventures, a new venture capital firm that plans to invest in startups in the U.S. and Israel in market intelligence and advertising.

As part of the arrangement, Nielsen is taking a minority stake in the VC and its executive vice president for global business development, Itzhak Fisher, will serve as a partner and chairman for Pereg.

The venture firm will operate independently of Nielsen, but will use Nielsen insights and, Fisher told Crain’s New York that Pereg will help Nielsen focus on technology that helps marketers close the gap between “watch and buy.”

“You have the ability to get much better ROI for your advertising money [with these tools], and these are the kinds of services Nielsen is getting into,” he said.

While it’s clear that people increasingly consume all kinds of content on all of their digital devices, advertisers are struggling to monitor that behavior and reach them most effectively. The approaches to analytics are slowly changing – in October, Nielsen introduced its new Cross-Platform Campaign Ratings to measure the number of people who saw a campaign on TV and digitally and, last month, comScore unveiled a new set of metrics that considers mobile and traditional web traffic. But it’s still early days and Nielsen’s hope is that entrepreneurs and startups will be able to help them give marketers and edge.

It’s expected the Pereg will raise $50 million and invest in about 15 startups that are beyond the early seed stage, Crain’s reported. About 80 percent of the investments will be domestic, with the remainder in Tel Aviv – a hotbed of digital innovation, especially in ad tech.

That mark has already been passed in some countries, but not on a worldwide basis.

The group reckons the internet attracted 15.2 percent more ad dollars globally in 2012, though total cross-media ad spend grew only 3.3 percent.

ZenithOptimedia reckons internet ad spend will growth at 14 to 15 percent per year going forward and will be taking 23.4 percent of all advertising money in the world by 2015.

By that time, online display ad spend will be on the cusp of overtaking search ad spend for the first time.

This is not purely a digital growth story — print ad spend has been declining. But the worst of the cliff-drop, seen at the height of the 2008/09 downturn, has bottomed out, leaving more modest print cuts going forward, ZenithOptimedia projects.

Television remains the most lucrative advertising medium.

But I think we may be back, baby. After only a few hours at the Monaco Media Forum this week, I was struck by the enthusiasm displayed around a clutch of companies — especially those like BuzzFeed, Vox Media, Buzz Media, Thrillist and Tumblr — that suggests, just as Bill Gates said 16 years ago, content is the next hot business model again.

Theirs is a quite different approach from legacy media and, for many, effective monetization is at yet unproven. But a confluence of prospects appears to light the way, for a content template, at least for a certain sub-set of new-wave players. The ennui setting in around networks like Facebook is giving way to excitement about creation platforms like Tumblr. For an industry that was supposedly on its knees, this seems refreshing.

Here’s what I’ve been learning about why:

1. Branded content may be the money-maker

Everyone is talking about “branded content”, “sponsored content” or “native advertising”. While advertiser-funded articles, video and so on are not necessarily new, many old-line publishers had, until recently, been cautious to blur lines too far.

What we are now seeing, however, is a wave of pure-play online publisher with far fewer hang-ups about unifying church and state — and an old guard that, spurred by ongoing decline and recently-relaxed European rules, is following suit.

Marketers themselves are also bullish. Excited about growing publisher willingness and desperate to get their messages across unobtrusively, advertisers are super-keen to pile money in to content creation of their own.

Good timing. “The banner is about to die and is already cratering,” BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti said during a panel discussion in Monaco, channelling the community’s shared concern about falling rates. “Now more brands are coming to us saying, ‘We want to be more like a publisher and you know how to do that.’”

For publishers that can both amplify advertisers and retain readers’ trust, this could emerge as a realistic new revenue model to help sustain the content creation sector going forward.

2. Social is content’s best friend

Nobody is operating in old vacuums anymore. Content publishers are fortunate now to benefit from a massive traffic hose, the social networks.

As some users tire of sharing their own baby photos and “likes” online, new-wave publishers think the object of their sharing is, increasingly, becoming “quality” content. As Thrillist’s Ben Lerer said: “The people who stand out are going to be the content creators who create the best content.”

Fahad Khan, CEO of social media conversation manager OnePublic, said during another session: “I don’t have friends who are experts in all fields. They can’t fulfill my interest verticals. I turn to editorial.”

Said Vox Media’s Joe Purzycki, publisher of SB Nation, The Verge and now Polygon: “From a content and marketing perspective, there’s nothing more valuable than social right now. Within three months of launching The Verge, our content was being shared more widely on Twitter and Facebook than our next three closest rivals.”

3. Matching supply with demand

More than just that, we are witnessing the emergence of a class of media company that relies on technology, not just its founding editorial mission, to determine what it publishes. By harnessing what search data says about what web users “want to read”, publishers can create articles to satisfy that need.

It is an efficient system to make a geek proud; journalism as platform, an audience for everything — no article goes to waste. Publishing begins to become a perfectly matched supply-and-demand game, and that minimizes losses.

Peretti: “You can reach millions of people that way, just from making something someone wants to share with someone. There’s an opportunity to build a big media company that’s technology-enabled and socially created for a world of sharing.”

Yet this is a very different kind of content creation from the journalists’ stories that readers don’t know they want but which reporters think must be read. A tail wagging a dog, perhaps. Serendipity, be damned.

Vox’s Purzycki said: “We’re not going to change what we’re writing based on social response all the time. But we use that data daily to drive ‘why was this popular’ and, from a brand standpoint, show them how widely it was shared”.

4. Devices are lighting up a new path

Two brief years in, tablets and mobile devices are giving optimism to content creators who see higher engagement, a straighter-line conversion from print and more attractive presentation

After 15 years in which the web was pretty much the only digital content channel in town, now we are delighting in a diverse number of screens and sizes and modalities, each designed for reading, watching and listening, not computing, and all of which beg, sumptuously, to be touched and consumed.

That’s only going to grow more commonplace. “Thirty-three percent of our traffic is coming from mobile,” Vox’s Joe Purzycki added. “We’re preparing for world where it’s 50 percent. These are perfect reading devices.”

5. Commerce and content can co-exist

Just as brands and publishers alike are beginning to think more expansively about advertiser-funded content, retailers are coming to regard content as one of the best possible drivers of ecommerce conversion.

Brands are being conceived, like fashion-and-beauty’s Asos and Birchbox, that marry articles and sales in the same place. Retailers are realising that, to move people to buy goods, storytelling is a great motivator, and honest, helpful guides are even better.

6. Paid content is really happening

iTunes’ 400 million credit cards on file, growing consumption of pay-for audio and video, and the continuing emergence of sexy new devices with payment mechanisms built in all point to a rosier outlook for business models that rely on charging consumers for content.

Even a start-up darling founder like Tumblr’s David Karp agrees, telling a Monaco Media Forum panel that the economics of content is the next hot investment area.”The ecosystem is at phase two right now – distribution,” Karp said. “The third phase has already started to show its face — the new economics. These people are building huge ecosystems — the next big step is going to be how they profit from it. We’re starting to see that in Kickstarter and in Etsy. I‘d be putting all my money in to that.”

7. Costs are falling

Content-making costs are falling rapidly. New technology platforms are allowing producers to make great stuff on the cheap and several publishers are leveraging pro-am production.

So much of professional content lately has been about cost cuts enacted by troubled big publishers. That hasn’t gone away. But now nimble web outfits are showing large players a plan for how content can be produced on the cheap, making possible content factories that can run at a fraction of their forebears.

This is often a rather different kind of low-grade output than that familiar to trusted professional print publishers — but quality doesn’t always have to fall with costs.

“We were producing broadcast-quality content from a small room in mid-town (Manhattan),” Vox’s Purzycki said.