Lookery.com

“Lookery Resurrected: Audience Networks For Pubs Calling it “Lookery Prequel, Inc.,” Scott Rafer has rolled away the stones of the Lookery sepulchre to introduce a new company from the dust of the former Lookery. Rafer writes on the Lookery blog, “If you are a publisher network, category-leading publisher, brand, or agency, we’ll run through walls to help you become an self-reliant Audience Network.” Is this another step toward the SSP (supply-side platform)? It’s certainly a part of it. Read more.”

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Lookery Resurrected, Offering Audience Networks For Pubs For Everyone by Any Means Necessary

Rafer sez:
Love the mention. Thank you, but DSPs? SSPs? No. We’re making money for clients — and ourselves — this year.

“I think we’ve begun to see this already in how Bravo, HBO and others have jumped to partner with FourSquare. Imagine if these networks knew about all the other great stuff out there. I think we’re going to see a lot more deals where the pipes (or audience aggregators) look for great product to bring to their audiences. “Content is King,” is a flawed chestnut, because history has actually shown that Distribution is King. But to the extent that Content is at least Duke, and Services are the new Content, I think we arrive at the corollary: Services are Princely.”

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Services are Princely (and More Cowbell) | Jon Steinberg

Rafer sez:
Wow, nice. In Lookery Prequel, I noted that site presentation networks must evolve to audience networks. JonS has found a second path: evolution into App Representation networks!

“I think we’ve begun to see this already in how Bravo, HBO and others have jumped to partner with FourSquare. Imagine if these networks knew about all the other great stuff out there. I think we’re going to see a lot more deals where the pipes (or audience aggregators) look for great product to bring to their audiences. “Content is King,” is a flawed chestnut, because history has actually shown that Distribution is King. But to the extent that Content is at least Duke, and Services are the new Content, I think we arrive at the corollary: Services are Princely.”

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Services are Princely (and More Cowbell) | Jon Steinberg

Rafer sez:
Wow, nice. In Lookery Prequel, I noted that site presentation networks must evolve to audience networks. JonS has found a second path: evolution into App Representation networks!

Everyone’s sick of hearing Cancel, Sawicki, and me whine about being too early with Lookery. So here I finally am with a constructive update — six months to the day after the Couldery Shouldery post in which we surrendered Lookery to the Deadpool. In those six months, the rest of Lookery has scattered to hot shops like Performable, ICanHazCheezburger, Sweepery, etc.

Lookery was so 2012. Here in 2010, there are a maybe a dozen scaled, data-orthodox opportunities for horizontal Audience Targeting winners (e.g. Google, Facebook, … Collective, Blue Kai, and Exelate), but there are a few thousand opportunities to build Audience Networks, from Glam and Federated Media to Halogen Network to Dogster to a couple of orthodontist audiences that I’ve never heard of.  The Audience Networks and their vendors will use the big guys’ data, exchanges, and clouds as raw material suppliers, layer highly vertical and client-specific information on top, figure out the nasty data-sensitive creative issues, add a good ole dollop of human customer service, and serve.

Deadpool Lookery was very picky about what sort of Audience Network infrastructure we were willing to offer. Lookery Prequel isn’t. If you are a publisher network, category-leading publisher, brand, or agency, we’ll run through walls to help you become an self-reliant Audience Network. If you’re a vendor, we’ll help you conform your existing marketing product/service to what Audience Networks need and will pay for. We’ll start the conversation around building you a proprietary targeting system of your own, that lives on your AWS account and your content delivery network account, but if you need us to do business development, vendor analysis/selection, data acquisition, market positioning, investor positioning, or whatever, just speak up.

We already have Halogen Network and Sprout signed up. The tech side is handled by Cloudspace, which includes MyBlogLog co-founders Todd Sampson, John Sampson, and Steve Ho.

While Lookery Prequel is a consulting business and not a product company, we do need focus in order to build value. To get there, I’m constructing a handful of customer tenets that will form the core of our work. We’ll do all sorts of gigs, but they need to move the market forward in at least one of these five ways…

Thou Shalt Have No Other Follow Before Me
By popularizing Follow, Twitter fixed friending both for humans and businesses. One way Audience Networks need to grow is by adding followers. We’ll be helping.

The Best Privacy Policy is Authentication
Similarly, the output of Audience Network marketing will often be an authenticated relationship between marketer and ‘Net user, most frequently using TwitterAuth or Facebook Connect. Online marketing and explicit identity are going to become increasingly linked.

UX beats Dotcom
Creative matters. Data-driven and personalized creative matter more. At the same time, destination sites are no longer the end-all be all, hence the rise of APIs and Mashery. Site representation isn’t dead but it had better evolve. To wit, check out Disney’s Alice in Wonderland promotions (authored by Sprout). They sing, they dance, they might even screech — but they don’t give you a link to click back to disney.com. The campaign is completely self-contained.

Cookie Proliferation — You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
Diversity of marketing services vendors is good for everyone that we care about. That means dropping a heckuva lot more cookies than are dropped today. Get over it. For that to work well performance-wise, the infrastructure for dropping cookies has to be a lot better configured. The infrastructure doesn’t need to be replaced, but big publishers need to start imposing far stricter content delivery network (e.g. Akamai, CDNetworks, Internap) guidelines on their marketing partners. Once content delivery network approaches are correlated and guidelines enforced, we’ll find that the current infrastructure can support a lot more cookies and regular old publishers can start glomming a few strategies from  the big advertising exchanges. (Coincidentally, we’re offering content delivery network audits and related services to publishers.  ;)  )

Goosing Everyone’s Numbers with Owned&Operateds
What works for the goose works for the gander. Our clients on all sides of the table really should own some of their distribution. We should too. For our clients, that generally means owning content sites or having exclusive deals with publishers. In Lookery Prequel’s case, we’ll be creating a series of single-purpose publisher and advertiser tools delivered as Javascript. Each will stand on its own as a small freemium/e-commerce business when they aren’t directly boosting our clients’ results.

Please Get in Touch
In addition to Halogen and Sprout, this quarter we’ll sign another customer or two of the half dozen qualified leads in our pipeline. I’m out looking for another client or two beyond that as well as our first commercial hire so we can expand further. No matter what your agenda, the form below is for you.

*Prequels are what science fiction authors write when they either can’t see any further into the further or when their last story lacked context — or both. If it can work for Battlestar Galactica, it can work for me.

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