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  • 06 May 2010 at 3:17 PM
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  • Marketing

Why Microsoft’s Bing Is Sponsoring My Dogwalker

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My dog walker has become the latest weapon in the escalating search engine marketing wars.

Since I first met Rodney Dorival, owner of Big Paws Little Claws, I’ve thought he could just be the next Cesar Milan. He’s amazing with dogs, erudite, unfailingly charming, drives an immaculate, celeb-ready ’68 Buick Skylark that he restored himself, and as you can see from the photo he looks like the linebacker who gets the brand endorsement work (the arms come in handy for keeping my skateboard-chewing Rottweiler under control.) So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Microsoft also saw his potential and recently decided to turn Rodney and his staff into a marketing channel, wandering the streets of New York in T-shirts emblazoned with the Bing logo and search box.

I’m pretty skeptical about ambient media. When I was working for Ad Age I was frequently bombarded by press releases from people who thought that their network of hubcap-cum-tea trays or toilet seats that double as frisbees, were the perfect branding medium, and I tend to think this stuff is just commercial clutter best avoided by brands. But for Bing, Rodney’s crew seems a smart choice.

Sean Carver, director of brand entertainment for Bing, explains why he did the deal: “Dog walkers make constant decisions about where to go, and get asked for directions and help all the time too. They’re also inherently expert on their local areas, and we wanted to stress that one of our strongest feature is the ability to find what you want locally. We’re trying to humanize search, to put the person in the middle.” And, as Rodney himself points out, “we’re walking billboards surrounded by dogs that people want to stop and pet, what could be better. I’ve always used Bing’s visual search to research my clients’ pets, so Microsoft seemed like a natural partner.”

PR maestro Keith Estabrook who represents Rodney (yes, my dog walker has a publicist, the same publicist as Lebron James!), connected him with Microsoft, and has helped them get some nice earned media on the back of the sponsorship with Rodney appearing in the New York Times and on CBS’ Early Show, sporting his Bing t-shirt. Bing is now planning to sponsor dog walkers in Chicago and San Francisco, and is also working on a map app that’ll help people find their local dog parks.

Of course there’s a bigger story behind this, in the shape of an escalating marketing battle between the search engines.

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To Truncate or Not to Truncate: An RSS Experiment

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Yesterday we made a decision to truncate the RSS feeds on AboveTheLaw for the next thirty days. RSS subscribers will get a headline and first paragraph, but will have to click to the site to get full stories.

AboveTheLaw.com's shortened RSS feedWe’re far from the first to do it. In fact just recently Gawker joined many more mainstream publishers like the WSJ and FT in truncating its feeds, much to the chagrin of Felix Salmon, who has written extensively on the topic. In our case, the move was prompted as much by my annoyance at the growing group of content thieves scraping our content via RSS (I dealt with two yesterday), as it was by a desire to get some commercial benefit from those readers. We’re a small company with limited resources, and I got fed up wasting valuable time trying to track down these parasites who aren’t only benefiting from our editors’ hard graft but also potentially messing with our search engine results by creating duplicates of our content on other sites.

I say “we” made the decision, but it was hardly unanimous. In fact, our executive editor here, Matt Creamer, bets it won’t work. Here’s an excerpt of an email he sent me on the topic:

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  • 26 Apr 2010 at 7:43 PM

Media Companies Need to Kick Their Ad Dependency

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I recently spoke at the annual conference of the Canadian Media Directors Council in Toronto. It was a good event as these things go, with an impressive speaker lineup (Bill Buxton, Microsoft’s principal researcher, was particularly fascinating), and the only reason I squeaked onto the agenda was that when they asked me if I’d do it, I was the editor of Ad Age – a job I left at the end of 2009 to come here to Breaking Media – and had just written a column on the future of media companies that someone at the CMDC found interesting.

As it turned out, the audience of 700 senior media agency and media owner executives had to listen to the manager of a small, startup digital media company that is still taking its first few tottering steps, telling them how they should prepare their considerably larger businesses for the future. I guess I’m lucky that they were Canadians – too polite to tell the presumptuous little British bloke to pipe down.

The main point I tried to get across (and I think it sort of worked), is that advertising-dependent media companies need to think of themselves as being in the business of providing marketing solutions. Don’t get me wrong. We here at Breaking Media love ads. They help pay our bills and we believe we deliver  an effective suite of advertising services to a growing set of clients who love our highly-engaged, loyal and affluent audience. But a problem arises when the end-all and be-all of a company’s revenue stream is ad sales.

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  • 26 Apr 2010 at 7:00 PM
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  • Admin

Meet Breaking Media

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Hi there. This is the (not-very-)corporate site for Breaking Media and a place where we will post our musings on the media business.

From the Breaking Media Inc. point of view it’s a repository of basic information on all our sites and somewhere to keep you up to date with plans for new sites and developments on the existing sites. It also has a list of our services and useful information for advertisers, such as breakdowns of our audiences and our ad specs. And, of course, there are details on our staff and how to get hold of us.

But as longtime reporters on/students of the media and marketing worlds, Matt Creamer and I also figured we’d use BreakingMedia.com to share some of our thinking on those businesses, and some of the morsels of wisdom and insight we receive from the many smart industry thinkers we’ve met in our careers covering media at Advertising Age and other publications. We’ll throw around some thoughts on professional-content business models, the evolution of media agencies, the application of technology in media, mobile marketing (my latest obsession), and whatever gets our goat on any given day.

We also plan to rope in a few of our staff. Our super-smart editors from AboveTheLaw will offer the occasional insight into legal issues that affect the media business. The influential editors of Fashionista.com will give us their take on the fashion media market from time to time, or we’ll pull in some funding/M&A thinking from Dealbreaker. And, of course, we’ll be seeking contributions from a few of our friends and contacts too. (Want to chime in, just drop Matt or me a line.)

In time we’ll pull this stuff together into a regular e-mail too, not with the aim of trying to rival Ad Age’s Mediaworks or Mediapost – we’ll be lucky if we can muster a story every 24 hours – but more a ‘thought of the day’ type offering for a small, select audience. So let us know if you’d like to be on the list.

Jonah Bloom is the CEO and editor in chief of Breaking Media.

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