The IAB is calling on all Long Tail Publishers and Online Entrepreneurs to join forces with likeminded individuals at the 2012 IAB Long Tail Alliance Fly-In, held June 4 & 5 in Washington D.C.  This event offers the opportunity for attendees to represent small publishers from across the country who want to meet with public officials and members of the U.S. Congress to tell them how adverse regulation has the potential to hurt their businesses and the online industry.

In addition to meeting with Congressional leaders, attendees at the two-day Long Tail Alliance will:

• Take deep dives into tactics and strategies necessary to grow business in today’s digital environment

• Network with small publishers from across the country, sharing tips and best practices

• Be guests of honor at a special networking reception and dinner at the Google offices in Washington D.C.

Click here to see more photos and highlights from last year’s Fly-In. 

There is no charge to attend the IAB Long Tail Alliance Fly-In.  The only costs are your own travel and lodging.  The IAB has secured a special, sponsored nightly rate of $150 at the Washington Marriott.

This great opportunity to network, learn and advocate for your small business.  If you would like to be a part of this special event, visit www.iab.net/flyin to register and book your hotel.  For more information, please reach out to Chris Glushko, Director of Marketing, IAB, at chris@iab.net or 212-380-4722

Watch the 2011 Fly-In Video

Mike Seiman on MSNBC.com Market Day

In his article, ‘Tech stock market getting a bit fizzy’ , Bill Briggs poses both sides of the ‘Bubble or No Bubble?’ debate using the recent Facebook acquisition of Instagram as a backdrop. Briggs queried a number of ad-tech space execs and CPX Interative’s CEO, Mike Seiman, was happy to lend his thoughts.

You can read the whole article here:  http://tinyurl.com/MSNBCMarketDayArticle 

or…if you haven’t the time…here are Mike’s contributions:

“Yes, many elements point to a second bubble,” counters Mike Seiman, CEO of CPX Interactive, a digital advertising company, who sees similarities to the dot-com bubble that popped in 2000.

********

“There is definitely a changing of the guard,” said Seiman, of CPX Interactive. “The idea of a ‘one-stop solution’ (for information) has been replaced by many ‘no-stop solutions.’”

And with that, a second dot-com surge may be percolating, Seiman said.

“The industry laid low for a while. But in the last five years, the sleeping giant has arisen,” Seiman said via e-mail. “And rather than exercising caution garnered from lessons learned, it has become buoyed by the rejuvenating effects of downing untold gallons of its own Kool-Aid. I’m looking at you, Facebook.”

But he said analysts and entrepreneurs are finally learning that reach, or potential reach, doesn’t necessarily equal revenue.

“Just because everyone ‘likes’ it doesn’t mean it’s worth a lot of money,” he said.

In last week’s post, we talked a little bit about how CPX Interactive is using social media to not only help build our brand, but to connect and build relationships with our customers and potential clients. While we continue to use sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr, it’s the site Pinterest that we’ve been building out to bring to the forefront of our social media collage.

This week, we’d like to introduce our new Pinterest board, ‘Meet the CPXers’. We’ve added over 50 members of the CPX family.  By clicking into their individual photos, visitors to the page have the option of visiting each CPXer’s LinkedIn page, helping our online audience get a better understanding of who we are and what we do.

Take a moment to learn a little more about who CPX Interactive is by visiting our newest Pinterest board, ‘Meet the CPXers’.

As a user of social media, I find the various tools like Facebook and Twitter to be a form of entertainment.  Connecting with friends, sharing photographs, finding out who’s having a baby or who’s getting engaged in real-time is what we use these sites for, right? Well, yes.  But the popularity contest that these tools play on is also what makes them valuable for marketers.  As a Marketing Coordinator here at CPX Interactive, working in the world of online advertising, social media is one of the most valuable building blocks we use to develop the CPX Interactive brand successfully.

As there are still some who flat out deny the value of social media when building a brand, I’m reminded of entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk, who always responds to the question, “What is the ROI of social media?” with another question, “What is the ROI of your mother”.  Simply put, I can’t graph out all of the things that my mother did for me my whole life that made me the successful person that I am. I can’t put on a PowerPoint slide how cool I felt walking into school on the first day in a new pair of sneakers that my mom bought me and that gave me the confidence to be social with the others in my class.  I can’t create a graph showing you how that confidence helped me get into college and helped me do better in that interview. Even though I can’t show data of the ROI of my mother or the ROI of social media, it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

To learn more about Gary Vaynerchuk and his thoughts on social media, watch his recent interview with Piers Morgan here. 

As a business, vested in the power of online technology, CPX Interactive has fully accepted and incorporated social media into our business.  From Twitter to Facebook to our newest page development on Pinterest, we’ve developed our social media tools to tell the story of CPX.  We’ve been able to connect and learn about our audience and in turn, we’ve been able to communicate the right content that others want to interact with.

If you visit the CPX Interactive Twitter page, there is a wealth of information that is available aside from the fact that we have a true, non-incentivized audience interacting with our tweets.  Not only are CPX Interactive’s followers true followers of the company, but we’ve segmented all of them into categories that make it easy to navigate through groups like: advertising agencies, data and analytics folks and Marketing Gurus all relevant to the online advertising world.

Our Facebook page is where those who ‘Like’ CPX can interact with our team and soon will be able to scroll through our company timeline, which most may not know, extends all the way back to 2000. We also have a Flickr page which serves as a hub for all the pictures we have taken at events, company outings and just around the office.  Our Vimeo and YouTube pages feature all the video content that we have been developing over the years and our LinkedIn page delivers more information about what products and services our company has to offer and for clients to connect with our CPX Interactive team.

Recently, a new contender is pushing its way into the social media world and quickly replacing the ‘Likes’ and the ‘Tweets’ with the ‘Pin’.  The site is called Pinterest, where members are able to create virtual pin boards and are able to ‘pin’ any web page, article, picture, video or anything they happen to find interesting to their page.  As a marketing tool, it’s a one stop shop that helps create a visual of where your brand likes to go and what it finds interesting, online. Pinterest is growing so quickly within the social media world that, in January, Pinterest users were at 810,000. One month later, users reached 2 million according to AppData.

Last month, CPX Interactive developed its Pinterest Page which brought all of our online presence and all of of our social media tools together, in one place, making it that much easier to navigate and learn about all the ways CPX Interactive is moving forward and participating in the online advertising industry.  Through our Pinterest page, we’re able to deliver the very best of our articles, press releases, event highlights, photographs, and videos all in one place.

Social media has proven itself to be a form of entertainment. That entertainment can now be translated into a brand building tool for businesses looking to grow their presence in both the online and offline worlds.  Whether you believe in the power it has to make your business grow or not, it’s still making a profound impact as an emerging medium.  On an even deeper level, breaking down each of the social media sites I mentioned above, we as marketers are able to speak to an audience at different levels, creating a conversation tailored to each page that we’ve created.  With Pinterest, we’re able to move past the ‘Like’ and the ‘Tweet’ unifying interactive materials so our audience is able to fully ‘Pin’ their understanding of the CPX Interactive brand.

A Special Thanks to our Marketing Coordinator, Taylor Hall, for the contribution.

CPX Interactive’s spread in AdAge Audience Buyer’s Guide

The 2012 Audience Buyer’s Guide is inside of this week’s AdAge issue. We encourage everyone in the industry to pick up a copy but it is also available online at the site.

Here is the Audience Buyer’s Guide homepage  and here is CPX Interactive’s spread. 

Industry Fragmentation Continues to Dominate Industry Conversations

by CPX Marketing Coordinator, Taylor Hall

“An event where the speakers and the sessions were just as good as the networking and connecting.” That was the feedback we heard from most of our colleagues about the 2012 Digiday Agency Summit at Deer Valley Montage Resort in Park City, Utah this past March 27^th through the 29^th.  Agency folks were in full form as we heard from top industry execs in the industry (including our own CPX Interactive chief revenue officer, Jonathan Slavin, who also presented a “Pitch-a-Kucha” presentation on day one of the event) offer their ideas and insights for helping to evolve the “Modern Agency” and what innovative technologies and current trends will have the power to change the ways Agencies do business.

Among all of the topics covered, I was surprised to hear one particular topic continue to float up in conversations, industry fragmentation.  Each speaker gave their point of view, sharing ideas about innovation and the rise of digital but somewhere in every presentation arose a common blaming of the complicated display landscape as the reason that dollars have not shifted as quickly into the online advertising space. One telling sign of the obsession on fragmentation is the the number of times we saw Terence Kawaja’s Display LUMAscape  chart, in one form or another, throughout most of the event.  It may have been around for quite a while now, but it is clearly still in the forefront of the minds of those trying to wade thru the muffled pipe that exists between advertisers and publishers. All the discussions that incorporated Mr. Kawaja’s chart left one clear impression, we really need to put the pedal to the medal to create a better line of communication, more integrated data and technology development and of course, a better attribution model in an increasingly cluttered landscape.

Event Review:

Here are some of the interesting speakers from the Digiday Agency Summit who each had their own take on the cause and the solution to online advertising’s hurdles.  You can check out more pictures from the event by visiting our Flickr page.

(Below) Digiday’s highlighted conversations began with the first workshop from Rose Ann Haran, CMO, Pulsepoint and her discussion about complexities of technologies and the consumer centric world.

(Below) Brian Morrissey, editor-in-chief, Digiday (Left), sat down with Clark Kokich, chairman, Razorfish (Right)  to talk about the decline of traditional marketing and advertising.

(Below) Jonathan Slavin, chief revenue officer, CPX Interactive, shared his thoughts on the fragmented landscape, the decline of cookie targeting in the display advertising space and the new and interesting ways CPX is facing the ever evolving industry.

Topping the event was the opportunity for afternoon activities such as skiing, snow tubing, snowmobiling and even a ski race, sponsored by adapt tv. Deer Valley Montage Resort had the most breathtaking views of the snowcapped Rocky Mountains while we enjoyed a balmy 58 degree forecast and a light snow shower on evening two of the event.  The weather was just perfect to sneak in a little one-on-one time with attendees by way of outdoor activities offered by the resort.  The CPX Interactive team was able to take in the fresh air with a few attendees from agencies: Deutch, St. Jacques, Merkley and Partners and Data Provider, Bizo.  On day one after the conference we all got together and did a little snow tubing and ended the day with hot cocoa, smores and a light snowfall as the sun went down.

Meeting all the great agency folks was something slightly new to me and it sure made for great in-depth conversations.  I also found that hearing from this side of online advertising world brought me a new perspective on things.  The presentations at the event connected the issues facing the fragmented industry and its evolution to the conversation about current digital problems and solutions.  Many thanks go out to Digiday for putting such a great event together, and of course, for hosting the event at  America’s #1 Ski Resort deep in the heart of Utah’s Rocky Mountains.

CPX Interactive Creates Advertising Technology Incubator  to Support and Grow Industry Start-Ups

CPX Interactive has announced an incubator initiative to support the advertising technology space. CPX will review start-ups in the sector that are in need of early funding and overhead support and infuse the selected companies with capital and resources to help clear typical early-stage hurdles, including: core employee salaries, sales and marketing efforts, ad-serving execution, creative development, technology, and more.

CPX is specifically seeking projects in the following areas:

• Social gaming and app development
• Yield optimization
• Data and analytics
• Demand-side platforms
• Mobile ad-serving and optimization
• Social targeting and optimization
• Rich media and dynamic creative

Read the Press Release HERE.

Submit your idea/business for consideration HERE.

When the CPX Tech team found out that we were heading to Drupalcon in Denver, we knew that we’d be inspired by the amazing speakers at each session, the informative content, and the opportunity to network with the Drupal community. What we didn’t know is how we also wanted to go about reeling in some Drupal talent while we were there.

Having planned so many events in my career, our VP of Strategic Technology, Sara Robertson, looked to me and said “Dana, let’s throw a party.” Sure, no problem, seems simple enough. However most of the parties I had thrown for CPX Interactive in the past were to provide a resource in which our Sales and Publisher teams could sell the products within our business. This time, it was a whole different situation. We just wanted to sell CPX itself, its culture, its lifeline. The strategy had to be different. The focus wasn’t to have as many warm bodies in a room so much as having the right warm bodies, so-to-speak. We wanted to attract people that truly wanted to work with our innovative company and to help us grow. With that, I convinced Sara to let me organize an “interview” party of sorts.

I still needed a bit of inspiration and having never thrown an “interview” party before, I wanted to make sure it still met the right CPX criteria: fun, interactive, successful, and of course within a reasonable budget (there went the trapeze act idea, ha). In reaching out to the various vendors in the downtown Denver area, I came across so many wonderful possibilities. However, one modern Mexican restaurant, Tamayo’s, located at 1400 Larimer Street, in Larimer Square, fit the bill perfectly. I had found out that not only was the restaurant well-known and enjoyed by the locals; but the location was in perfect proximity to the Drupalcon convention center, the food had excellent reviews and the ambiance was fun and festive. So fun and festive in fact, that we decided to customize the theme of the event to fit the feel. Our “interview” party became a “Recruiting Fiesta” complete with cocktails such as margaritas and sangria along with delicious appetizers like quesadillas, flautas, mole chicken skewers, taquitos, and of course freshly-made amazing guacamole!

My event sales manager, Megan Tierney, made the logistics so easy and smooth and her staff was wonderful. So now the hard part…getting people there and what do we do when they arrive? I took advantage of CPX Interactive’s fantastic in-house Creative department to create my invite essentials (online invite, posters, branded DVD, printed invites, etc.). Fortunately, because the Drupal community is so active, I was able to post the invite as an event on the Drupal.org community event calendar and also as an after-hours event at Drupalcon. I immediately received feedback from those who wanted to attend.

Recruiting Fiesta poster on Tamayo's terrace lounge door entrance

This invite-only intimate fiesta was intended to help CPX find the resources needed in order for us to complete the large demands of requests from our clients (both internal and external). We also wanted to make sure that we were finding folks with the right skills who were fluent in Drupal AND had the moxie to work with our team. ;o) The plan we comprised was new to us, experimental if you will, and we were certainly taking a risk. I asked my VP to basically give up her evening of standard socializing and arranged a private dining room adjacent to the beautiful outdoor cocktail lounge. While my coworker, Lead Web Developer, Joby Joseph, and I mingled with the guests, I would be assigning each of those individuals a small slice of time throughout the evening to meet with Sara in the “interview” room in order for them to have their shining moment. After all, we couldn’t expect that a room full of great candidates would be able to capture the CPX tech team all at once. We also didn’t want any of the attendees to miss an opportunity to chat and share their work experience. Yet we still wanted to offer a relaxed, informal and enjoyable setting.

L to R: Boris Chow, Owner, 80 Elements; Joby Joseph, Lead Web Developer, CPX Interactive

What worked out even more for us was the approach that we took as a team in order to make this event a win. Joby would speak to the detailed technical components within our department based upon our clients’ needs. Myself being the Project Manager, spoke to the business side and the importance of communication, organization and the value of relationships. When the attendees were able to speak to Sara, not only did she mirror our joined thoughts, but she was then able to get to the nuts and bolts of what our team needs as a whole to produce outstanding products and customer service. In this environment, all three of us were able to comfortably have an informal conversation in order to get a true sense of the potential folks we wanted to join our CPX family.

It’s funny because I believe that the way we handled this important component of our trip was quite similar to how the Drupal community handles their CMS product. Referring back to my last blog post, Rookie thoughts at Drupalcon from a CPX “geek-in-training”, the Drupal product is only as successful as the people who are behind it. Not all contributions to Drupal are committed by just developers…there are several ways that various people can contribute to its innovation. Similarly, the way that our team handled this Recruiting Fiesta, each of us used our strengths to interview these candidates in a distinct way in order to build a better CPX Tech team, which will ultimately benefit our clients. Not to mention, so many attendees came up to us and thanked us for providing such a wonderful and unique “interview” opportunity.

Drupalcon attendees enjoying some drinks during their "interview" process

So far the Drupalcon conference and its content has not only proven to be invaluable as a physical tool for CPX Interactive to utilize in the creation of its many products, but it’s certainly proving to be just as valuable in its structure and design. Dedicated people are what make up Drupal. Our dedicated employees and partners are also what make up CPX Interactive…and we have to remember that each of those individuals pitching in makes a huge difference when it comes to moving forward.

We met a lot of great new Drupalers on Wednesday night and we are definitely looking forward to working with them to help us become a better CPX Interactive. Thanks so much to all of our attendees for coming and to Tamayo’s for helping us compose a great event!

A special thank-you to our own, Dana Posner, Project Manager, Strategic Technology, CPX Interactive, for the contribution.

A special thank-you to our own Dana Posner, Project Manager, Strategic Technology at CPX Interactive, for the contribution.

The CPX Interactive "Angels" are ready to take on Drupalcon!" (L to R: Sara Robertson, CPX VP, Strategic Technology; Dana Posner, CPX Project Manager, Strategic Technology)

A portion of the CPX Tech team left NY a few days ago to attend what is turning out to be one of the most valuable technical conferences I could have ever imagined going to — Drupalcon. When we arrived in Denver, I wasn’t sure what to expect. However, I knew that our VP of Strategic Technology, Sara Robertson, certainly wouldn’t condone this trip unless she truly believed that she and her personal “geek squad” would get something out of it.

So, happily accepting that I am morphing into a mixed breed of geek/human, I intended to understand why Drupal is so important — not just for CPX Interactive, but for the world. Oh, and no worries, I plan to reiterate my thoughts on this conference in human terms… I can’t speak in tech-code just yet, although I may reference some lingo I’ve learned during my stay.

Let’s start with the basics:

What is Drupal? In layman’s terms, it’s another Content Management System with which to build a website.

What is it comparible to? WordPress and Joomla to name a few.

What is different about it? It’s a FREE open-source CMS managed by the Drupal Community. (This is huge and I’ll get into more details later.)

Why does CPX Interactive care? So here’s where it gets interesting. Since CPX Interactive is one of the largest online advertising networks, we’re constantly developing new sites, landing pages and products that live on the web for internal purposes as well as for our clients (both Publishers and Advertisers). As one of the largest players in the market, of course we want to utilize the best resources in order to continue building the most fully-functional products for our clients and for ourselves. Enter Karl Bunch, our Chief Solutions Officer, and Sara Robertson. They introduced Drupal to CPX Interactive when they came on board less than a year ago. In order to understand the big difference and why they adored it so much I figured a case study would be the first session I hit at Drupalcon.

Tuesday morning I hit “The story of Energy.gov: the Ins and Outs of turning Energy.blah into Energy.awesome” led by speaker: Cammie Croft. Just some quick notes on the federal government – they manage between 24-25 thousand government domains. The department of energy manages about 357 sites alone within those domains. So I was truly interested in seeing why such a huge organization would be interested in using Drupal.

Cammie explained that prior to Drupal, Energy.gov did a great job of simply housing numerous logos (lots of sarcasm there). The site wasn’t providing for what Energy.gov can really offer, which is sharing info on energy, science and nuclear stuardship. Moreso, they wanted to make sure that they were connecting their three main offerings with the end user on an individual level. To quote Cammie (who actually quoted the character Billy Beane in the movie Moneyball), Energy.gov was “…gonna shake things up” by utilizing Drupal to create a new standard for federal websites, basically make a statement and just be different. They wanted to provide a website platform which allowed end users to become informed, inspired, act and provide feedback. They also wanted to serve specialized audiences through subdomains and affiliate sites. Lastly they wanted to make sure that they could connect with users where they were already engaged (such as Facebook, etc.)

The business strategy was to eliminate wasteful spending while improving digital communications. When Energy.gov began their revamp phase in May of 2010, they realized that they had to utilize the right partners in order to meet their goals. In addition to Drupal, they looked to Huge (for user experience & design), Treehouse, Acquia (for Drupal maintenance & support services) and Blackmesh (for cloud hosting). The right partners were key in making their product a success. CPX Interactive is very familiar with that theory as we utilize various partners on a daily basis and can appreciate the time and diligence it takes in order to meet the needs of our clients’ requests as well. Utilizing Drupal along with their partner integration, Energy.gov was able to increase their uniques by 328% when their new site was launched in August of 2011!

CPX Tech team enjoying the Official DrupalCon Party with partner, 80 Elements." (L to R: Boris Chow, owner, 80 Elements; Joby Joseph, CPX Lead Web Developer; Sara Robertson, CPX VP, Strategic Technology; Dana Posner, CPX Project Manager, Strategic Technology)

However, as awesome as that number is, Energy.gov realized that they weren’t done. Why? Because the space is rapidly evolving and as Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert, summarized in his keynote at the beginning of the conference, we need to always look at continuous innovation like adding new tools, new features, etc. Energy.gov is similar to CPX Interactive in that we’re constantly developing products in order to engage our users, work on new content and figure out how we can make that all function in new spaces (like the ever-so-important mobile space).

Drupal is helping Energy.gov and companies like CPX Interactive meet those expectations because of its structure and foundation. What I learned in one of my other sessions, “Drupal Community: Where are we going & how to get involved?” led by Angie Byron, is that the CMS is built on the backbone of the Drupal community. Filled with people like you and me. No I’m not a developer, but I’m learning that the heart and soul of Drupal is made up of so many different types of people who are talented and generally interested in making lives easier by making products work while being flexible and adaptable in our ever-changing world. Drupal is able to function based upon people who contribute donations, marketing, advocacy, documentation, user support, QA testing (Quality Assurance testing), translations, graphic design, event coordination, bug reports and feature requests, issue queue “farming”, usability testing, and yes, even coding.

Sure you can use another platform to make your product. But you’ll likely have to pay licensing fees for it in addition to paying for any updates you may want later. Again, this is not the case with Drupal as it is a FREE open-source platform which easily allows you to customize your product. If you decide you want some add-ons for your page, Drupal is flexible and isn’t locked into any one kind of technology. It will likely have that module (aka “add-on”) which you’re looking for and/or the community is or will be working on developing one because there are so many people involved. As Angie stated in her presentation, Drupal “operates on wisdom of the crowds, each contributing what they know. The more diversity, the stronger the project.” So think about it, the stronger the project, the more success of the product you’re looking to build if the company you’re working with is using Drupal.

It’s only the beginning of the Drupalcon conference and I’m already so psyched and proud about the work that CPX Interactive is doing utilizing Drupal. We’re certainly going to look into becoming more involved in the community as the CPX tech team absolutely has a lot to offer. Our involvement will only benefit our clients even more…and it’s totally awesome to be at the front line of this Drupal initiative.

Tune in for more real-time updates by visiting us on Twitter @CPXtech until our next blog entry.

CPX Interactive CEO, Mike Seiman, delivered a CEO Showcase presentation last month at OnMedia NYC 2012. 

In this eight minute presentation, Mike discussed the major issues facing the online advertising industry, addressing what the smart players in the landscape have learned from the fragmentation of the past few years. Mike also lays out  the CPX philosophy of creating tools and services that support both advertisers and publishers.

This video can also be found on our YouTube and Vimeo pages