Is the shift by merchandisers to on-line advertising media going to continue? Two privately held investment funds certainly think so.
Kevin Delaney and Emily Steel of the Wall Street Journal report today that two bellwether internet media companies, Glam Media and Adconion Media, are having no trouble completing funding rounds that may fuel additional expansion in online advertising. Each company manages a very healthy on-line advertising network.
California-based Glam controls its own websites and a lively U.S. ad cooperative that includes as partners other Web publishers. Adconion, headquartered in London, is principally an on-line ad network expanding from Europe into the North American market. Both companies have turned to venture funds to continue their expansion.
But is investment in online marketing schemes still a go-go, given reports of weakening consumer demand around the globe?
It would certainly seem so: Glam, which is hardly two years old, is boldly projecting revenues for 2008 of $100 million. That’s enough market confidence to draw venture capital – to Glam and to its competitors.
According to Glam chairman and CEO, Samir Arora, the company’s equity-financing round gathered up $84 million and is led by Huber Burda Media. Others along for the ride include GLG Partners, Duff Ackerman & Goodrich Ventures and existing investors Accel Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Walden Ventures and Information Capital. All have a track record for bold investments in Internet networks. Hercules Technology Growth Capital will provide the debt financing.
Says today’s release from Glam: “The new funding will fuel Glam Media’s aggressive global expansion in 2008 across new territories and categories, focusing on transforming brand display advertising on the Web as the market shifts away from the dominance of portals and destination sites to the distributed media network model that Glam Media helped pioneer. The funding will also be used to make strategic acquisitions, invest in technology to grow the distributed media model and further global growth.”
Delaney and Steel this morning scooped Adconion’s own announcement, formally made later in the day, that it is also in motion in financial markets, enticing Index Venture and Wellington Partners to invest a combined $80 million in its growth plans.
We all know that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo are continuing to pour money into expanding the online ad-network business. But we probably pay too much attention to those giants rumbling around in this still-young market … and perhaps too little attention to the little guys like Glam and Adconion who can constantly tweak their business models inexpensively until they hit pay dirt.
Glam and Adconion are still both privately held companies, but keep a close eye on these two. I think they are what the ad world and Wall Street are coming to.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
GOLIN HARRIS IS THE SECRET SAUCE AT MCDONALD'S
I don't know if you noticed, but just before the turn of the year, that corporate senior citizen, McDonald’s Corporation, communicated it was boldly going up against Starbucks with the selected addition of expresso counters.
Starbucks quickly blinked in January and revealed it was selling cheaper cups of coffee for as low as $1 in markets where frisky McDonald’s is already pulling away caffein customers with a quality brew sold for $1.39 a pop.
Then, in global results announced February 8, McDonald’s Corporation delivered more feisty financial news, reporting an unexpected rise in January sales worldwide of 5.7 percent.
Is there some sort of magic rejuvenation formula in the secret sauce at Mickey Dee's?
We all know the destructive side of capitalism that makes even the mightiest global company prey to innovative upstarts. But how come some companies like McDonald’s just soldier on, going through several generations of leadership – this company is more than 50 years old now – and can somehow still find fresh competitive formulas to serve the public?
McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc is long gone from this planet and even his generous wife, Joan, has passed on, leaving Ray’s hamburger billions to the Salvation Army. There is, surprisingly, still a single and continuing individual who has played a key role in creating the community-facing persona of McDonald’s … and who keeps that engagement alive even today, half a century and more later.
Maybe the secret sauce is Al Golin, founder and still CEO of the GolinHarris PR firm.
GolinHarris is now itself a global company, with more than 30 offices from Beijing to Tehran and Jeddah. But Al, who signed up Ray Kroc in 1957 when the Burger Master was operating out of a tiny office in Chicago, is still providing personal counsel to a current generation of McDonald’s leaders half his age.
Ray Kroc was not Al Golin’s first client – Al began as movie flak for MGM – but Ray was one of the first. It all started with a cold call to Ray by the largely unknown upstart PR guy ... and together they took on the world.
Take a few minutes and watch the video of McDonald’s own salute to Al, done last year, that honors that relationship and shows Al bounding up the stairs like a gazelle to accept the audience’s applause.
Is there any other client-agency relationship in the PR industry that comes close this enduring partnership? I think not. When Ray invited Al to come by the office those many decades ago, he gave the young publicist a daunting mission – make McDonald’s a household word. Ray was willing to pay Al $500 a month even though Ray and his top managers weren’t yet taking full salaries themselves.
If McDonald’s is today a trusted face in communities around the world, it is largely because of the brand trust work recommended to McDonald’s year in and year out – and done over time for McDonald’s – by GolinHarris.
GolinHarris, guided by the boss, did then and still does the block and tackle of marketing PR for McDonald’s – store openings, product launches, and the like. But Al also introduced McDonald’s and its franchisees to local community service.
Al Golin was the first to suggest its continuing relationship with Jerry Lewis’s Muscular Dystrophy telethon. Al was also behind the idea for a McDonald’s All-American High School Band and the annual All-American High School Basket Ball Game. He named Hamburger University.
But if Ray Kroc has moved up a seat or two in heaven, it is because, after Ray’s death, Al Golin recommended and then nurtured the development of the Ronald McDonald House Charities. These safe homes, where parents can temporarily stay, keeping close to the remote hospitals treating their desperately ill children, have transformed the health care experience for hundreds of thousands of families around the globe.
Another secret to the long client-agency relationship? In the words of one McDonald’s executive last April: “Al, you’ve always treated us like you just got us. You never took McDonald’s for granted.”
You can thank Al Golin for that.
As for me, I still thank Ray Kroc for the lasting quality and consistency of the food – which is nonetheless more different than you might imagine around the world.
I have traveled the globe as a publicist to some of the most remote and exotic ports of call imaginable. But I am far from a sophisticate in cuisine.
My constant comfort and my joy – whether I am in Shanghai or Saratoga or Saint-Tropez – is a quick visit to McDonald’s ... to see what’s on the menu.
Starbucks quickly blinked in January and revealed it was selling cheaper cups of coffee for as low as $1 in markets where frisky McDonald’s is already pulling away caffein customers with a quality brew sold for $1.39 a pop.
Then, in global results announced February 8, McDonald’s Corporation delivered more feisty financial news, reporting an unexpected rise in January sales worldwide of 5.7 percent.
Is there some sort of magic rejuvenation formula in the secret sauce at Mickey Dee's?
We all know the destructive side of capitalism that makes even the mightiest global company prey to innovative upstarts. But how come some companies like McDonald’s just soldier on, going through several generations of leadership – this company is more than 50 years old now – and can somehow still find fresh competitive formulas to serve the public?
McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc is long gone from this planet and even his generous wife, Joan, has passed on, leaving Ray’s hamburger billions to the Salvation Army. There is, surprisingly, still a single and continuing individual who has played a key role in creating the community-facing persona of McDonald’s … and who keeps that engagement alive even today, half a century and more later.
Maybe the secret sauce is Al Golin, founder and still CEO of the GolinHarris PR firm.
GolinHarris is now itself a global company, with more than 30 offices from Beijing to Tehran and Jeddah. But Al, who signed up Ray Kroc in 1957 when the Burger Master was operating out of a tiny office in Chicago, is still providing personal counsel to a current generation of McDonald’s leaders half his age.
Ray Kroc was not Al Golin’s first client – Al began as movie flak for MGM – but Ray was one of the first. It all started with a cold call to Ray by the largely unknown upstart PR guy ... and together they took on the world.
Take a few minutes and watch the video of McDonald’s own salute to Al, done last year, that honors that relationship and shows Al bounding up the stairs like a gazelle to accept the audience’s applause.
Is there any other client-agency relationship in the PR industry that comes close this enduring partnership? I think not. When Ray invited Al to come by the office those many decades ago, he gave the young publicist a daunting mission – make McDonald’s a household word. Ray was willing to pay Al $500 a month even though Ray and his top managers weren’t yet taking full salaries themselves.
If McDonald’s is today a trusted face in communities around the world, it is largely because of the brand trust work recommended to McDonald’s year in and year out – and done over time for McDonald’s – by GolinHarris.
GolinHarris, guided by the boss, did then and still does the block and tackle of marketing PR for McDonald’s – store openings, product launches, and the like. But Al also introduced McDonald’s and its franchisees to local community service.
Al Golin was the first to suggest its continuing relationship with Jerry Lewis’s Muscular Dystrophy telethon. Al was also behind the idea for a McDonald’s All-American High School Band and the annual All-American High School Basket Ball Game. He named Hamburger University.
But if Ray Kroc has moved up a seat or two in heaven, it is because, after Ray’s death, Al Golin recommended and then nurtured the development of the Ronald McDonald House Charities. These safe homes, where parents can temporarily stay, keeping close to the remote hospitals treating their desperately ill children, have transformed the health care experience for hundreds of thousands of families around the globe.
Another secret to the long client-agency relationship? In the words of one McDonald’s executive last April: “Al, you’ve always treated us like you just got us. You never took McDonald’s for granted.”
You can thank Al Golin for that.
As for me, I still thank Ray Kroc for the lasting quality and consistency of the food – which is nonetheless more different than you might imagine around the world.
I have traveled the globe as a publicist to some of the most remote and exotic ports of call imaginable. But I am far from a sophisticate in cuisine.
My constant comfort and my joy – whether I am in Shanghai or Saratoga or Saint-Tropez – is a quick visit to McDonald’s ... to see what’s on the menu.
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