What is the pinnacle of your carreer? What defines the greatest achievement for a young entrepeneur like myself? How about writing a report for guys down at Wizards of the Coast? I think so.

I got a wierd random email from Erik of Unity Entertainment asking me how to access the web stats... I thought this was a little out of the ordinary, so I informed Erik that he would have to ask me at the exact time he wanted to see the stats, since I don't have instant control over stats.

In talking to Jeff one time, I was trying to explain that I have to query support every time I need new stats, and he said "Well, why not just buy a server?" I reply "Well, that costs $170!" He says, "As long as we could make money, then whatever!"

I think it would be a bad idea to go into business wiht a client to resell hosting and have to play sysadmin to bunches of users just because I was sharing profits with Mr. Jeff. No offense to him, but... no thanks, Jeff. The end of that is I will most likely be hooking up a Virtual Private Server pretty soon, and I will be getting a small chunk of a server that lets me control it like it'y my own dedicated server, meaning I get root access and i can run scripts whenever.

But back to the topic at hand. My special special report. It turns out the reason why Erik wanted to see the stats is because Wizards of the Coast was running a number of TV ads on Adult Swim with location-specific endings, like the Florida ones apparently advertised my client Unity Entertainment and MY website. SWEET! The goal was to prove that the advertising was driving traffic to the site, and that it would be profitable to run the ads again for future events.

WELL, I knew it would be pointless to start the report until Sunday, since the event was a Friday to Sunday thing. I emailed the dudes Sunday afternoon and asked them to run my stats. Then I got lazy and didn't check very often, so I went to hang with my friends for a little while. By the time I got back, it was after 1 AM, and I still had barely written any of the report. I spent the next three and a half hours cranking away at it, and then emailed it to Jeff, with instructions to wake me up at his earliest convenience. Around 10 AM, I get the call and the instructions to actually write something based on the data. I said "The advertising worked", and I got a pat on the back. Hooray. Now I get to charge Jeff for time well spent.

My report is going to be reviewed by the largest gaming company in the world. I mean, they are owned by Hasbro, and they own almost every major gaming license they could get their hands on, including Dungeons & Dragons. That is major.

I doubt you'll be seeing my name in lights anytime soon, but I feel special today.

This topic was broight to my mind by Paul Colligan and Alex Mandossian of Marketing Online Live, two guys that have a Podcast related to their Marketing Online magazine.

iPods aside, ask anyone in the business or marketing world, 'What business is McDonald's in?', and they will reply, 'Real Estate'. Most people will say, 'I thought they sold hamburgers and plastic toys and... fruit.' Oh no, my unknowing friend, think about it:

• Franchise owners will buy more land than they need, and sell the remainder to other businesses like mini malls. The street corner grows up around the McDonald's
• McDonald's owns more land than Disney. For kids from Florida, that means something.
• Much like a realtor will sign up with a national firm like Watson, an entrepeneur will spend millions of dollars just for the right to use the name of McDonald's.

All that other stuff is mostly there to intice you, the consumer, to want to go to the real-estate and spend your money, and come back to it many times, because you trust the product. You can get the product anywhere—a hamburger, a spongebob toy, a playground, and a clean place to sit. You want the product, but you are investing your time in that piece of real estate.

Now, let's take the iPod. What are Apple and Steve Jobs really selling here? Music? Digital freedom? Podcasts? Photos? No way. If you haven't noticed, when you buy a new iPod, it is empty. You have to buy the content, or rip it yourself. Without good content, your iPod is worth nothing. However, you paid $300, bitch. Why?

You're buying a brand. A brand that is so damn exiting that HP didn't even bother to make their own, they freakin' re-sell Apple's! The thing doesn't even play video! WHY? Because they have got your loyalty. They are McDonald's. Not only do they control your real-estate and your brand loyalty, they also control the means of distrobution.

The smartest thing they ever did was give me something for free. Every week, the iTunes music store gives away two or more songs. In order to download these songs, I have to sit my butt in the seat, open their application, go to their music store (which I can only open from their application), and download the free songs. Now, I don't exactly have to walk in the front door, because I can link to it directly from outside the application, but I am already there. They've got me. And you know what? The songs you buy on iTunes can only be played on an iPod. That means you need to visit their real-estate to use their product.

The same can be said of McDonald's. The only place to get a happy meal is underneath the Golden Arches.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. There is a handy comment form below.

I read this news just a few days ago, and it seems like old news, but it is a viable topic for discussion. Google is obviously big daddy here, but other companies have been putting ads in feeds for quite some time now. Should feeds contain advertising? Is it profitable? Viable? Who benfits?

Posted from eWeek.com (May 17, 2005):

By moving its sponsored listings into feeds, Google wants to remove a common fear among some publishers that they will lose advertising revenue as readers subscribe to feeds rather than reading content on Web sites, said Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for AdSense.

Over the past few years, everyone has come to expect seeing Google text ads hovering at the top or sides of almost every web page. The idea of contextual advertising is certainly not old, but new form of content delivery are now appearing, and new advertising models are needed as the Web evolves.

Scott Johnson of Feedster mentioned in a July 4th interview with InfoTalk that his RSS search engine would be incorporating ads into feeds. One of the best parts is that their brand of feed-vertising will scrape content from the entire archive of a feed, as opposed to just what is being displayed (i.e. tha last 10 posts). This allows them to give you truly targeted advertising, instead of just grabbing keywords.

The Feedster interview took place at the Gnomedex conference, shortly after Microsoft announced IE7 would have support for RSS, additionaly announcing RSS support would be built in to the Vista kernel and each user's profile. For advertisers, that is a fairly large announcement, considering Windows users will have such integral support to viewing feeds, and therefore being exposed to feed-based advertising at every turn.

The place I see this sort of advertising having the greatest effect is in a vertical search or regional search type application, such as my brother's Cable Ridge, where he wants to promote events specifically in South Florida. Placing ads in his RSS feeds for local businesses and services would really target the specific customer base that business is chasing after, therefore maximizing the effectiveness of their ads. On the other hand, of the millions of people subscribed to Slashdot or del.icio.us may be getting ads they don't neccesarily care about. I guess it is better than plain old contextual AdWords, though.

Keep watching your favorite feeds over the next few months. We'll talk about this more after it becomes common practice.