Generating buzz—getting people talking about our products or even advertising on their own—is the goal of many ad campaigns today, even television commercials. (Case in point: the Super Bowl.)

Online, buzz seems to be the Holy Grail: going viral, getting evangelists, having people talking/Tweeting/friending/following you. But assigning a value to that can be hard. We’re driven to assign an ROI to social media, but we’re having a hard enough time even monitoring success.

General Sentiment, a sentiment analysis company, has come to the rescue. Using media prices, they’re looking to answer the question “How much would it have cost to attract the same media exposure through traditional advertising?” And they’re putting a $ sign in front of it.

Starting with the Top-100 Global Brands from the 2009 Interbrand Report, General Sentiment looked at the buzz those companies were getting on news media, social media and Twitter (why they’re separated from social media, I don’t know, but it’s cool to look at their results on their own). They calculated how much these companies would have had to spend on traditional advertising to attract the same level of attention. General Sentiment published the top 20 in their Q4 Media Value Report

Company	News Media	Social Media	Twitter	Total	Trend
1	Google	$244,593,000	$402,279,000	$22,756,000	$669,629,000	Down
2	Microsoft	$184,473,000	$452,006,000	$12,252,000	$648,732,000	Down
3	Sony	$80,574,000	$207,907,000	$5,825,000	$294,308,000	Down
4	Apple	$63,947,000	$223,657,000	$5,632,000	$293,237,000	Up
5	Yahoo	$50,324,000	$236,087,000	$5,354,000	$291,766,000	Down
6	Intel	$93,665,000	$189,880,000	$2,139,000	$285,685,000	Up
7	Ford	$145,369,000	$39,082,000	$1,453,000	$185,905,000	Up
8	IBM	$62,683,000	$85,957,000	$1,740,000	$150,381,000	Up
9	Citigroup	$105,614,000	$24,961,000	$749,000	$131,326,000	Up
10	HP	$46,249,000	$67,222,000	$2,423,000	$115,896,000	Up
11	eBay	$50,179,000	$56,889,000	$4,672,000	$115,740,000	Down
12	Oracle	$43,413,000	$70,838,000	$1,435,000	$115,686,000	Up
13	McDonalds	$80,579,000	$32,842,000	$1,840,000	$115,263,000	Down
14	Disney	$67,166,000	$35,811,000	$4,411,000	$107,390,000	Down
15	Nokia	$28,560,000	$71,843,000	$2,369,000	$102,772,000	Up
16	GE	$75,452,000	$24,536,000	$885,000	$100,864,000	Up
17	Dell	$34,491,000	$43,990,000	$1,553,000	$80,035,000	Down
18	American Express	$56,576,000	$19,803,000	$648,000	$77,028,000	Up
19	Cisco	$41,579,000	$25,273,000	$735,000	$67,588,000	Up
20	Blackberry	$22,706,000	$41,678,000	$2,038,000	$66,422,000	Up

The trends are (I believe) based on the change from the Q3 Media Value Report.

What do you think? Any brands you’re surprised to see in the list? How accurate do you think the values are?

[marketingpiligram]

Glam Media, the fast-growing online media company catering to mostly women, has raised another $50 million from investors — to help it expand before going public over sometime in the next one to three years. More impressively, the company is now valued at $750 million by its investors.

I spoke to chief executive Samir Arora earlier today, and he confirmed the financing amount, including many of the details surrounding the company’s business. Notably, the company has managed to both expand its revenue at a rapid rate during the economic downturn and become profitable at the same time. The company is especially active in serving display advertising, a sector that was expected be hit hard during the economic downturn. Glam appears to have bucked expectations. Indeed, Arora said the company broke even (EBITA profitability) in during the fourth quarter of last year.

We’re also hearing that the company generated revenue of about $19.5 million in the fourth quarter of last year, up from about $15 million the same quarter of the year before — representing about a 30 percent growth over the year. That’s significant when you consider that most other media companies are struggling to grow, let alone be profitable. Glam’s business began largely as an advertising network focused on women, whereby Glam served ads to third-party content sites that it does not own, but with which it has an exclusive advertising relationship. Over the past two years, however, Glam has built more of its own content, to the point where it now owns about 1,400 publishers (of which about 900 are standard content sites, and 500 are blogs) that have generated half a million articles.

The so-called “mezzanine round” of financing is the company’s fifth. A mezzanine round is so named because it the last round of capital that a company takes before it anticipates going public. The company has now raised $130 million in total.

The round was led by Aeris Capital, and included existing investors Burda Digital Holding (of Hubert Burda Media) and Mizuho Capital.

It has received about $50 million in this fifth round, led by Aeris Capital, the European fund, with existing investors Burda Burda Media and Mizuho Capital also participating. The valuation, our sources say, is around $750 million post-money. This is round brings the total cash raised by the company directly to about $130 million.

Of the $50 million invested, up to $15 million went to buying shares from early investors and employees. The remainder will be used to build an R&D center to keep innovating the company’s interactive ad offerings and allow Glam to also make some strategic acquisitions. The company plans to expand internationally, too, beyond Japan, the UK and Germany, after stopping those expansion plans last year in order to weather the downturn.

While large companies like Yahoo are seeing their display advertising tumble about 15 to 20 percent during the downturn, Glam has remained relatively insulated from the worst of the recession due to its focus on women. Brands wanting to reach women have curtailed their online ad spending by about two to three percent, compared to the broader cut in other areas (tech, auto, finance) of about 15 to 20 percent.

Glam had more than 72 million unique visitors for in the U.S., making it the 11th largest U.S. web property. Globally, Glam has about 160 million uniques.

While the company hit an annual revenue run-rate of $80 million at the end of last year, the company says it expects to grow. You can expect it to argue to investors that its fast growth, if it can be sustained, should let the company be valued at a multiple of about ten times revenue. In addition, valuations are usually done on future years (2010 or 2011), so that if the company can earn $100 million in revenue by next year and argue that it should be valued at ten times that in the market, it could be looking at $1 billion market value. Indeed, its only that sort of value that could justify the valuation of $750 million that investors are currently giving it.

While a $1 billion market value is huge when you consider the valuations of other “media” companies Glam’s size, it actually becomes more reasonable if you look at the valuations of other “advertising” companies, such as Admob, which commanded a $750 million valuation when it was acquired by Google and was arguably smaller than Glam at the time.

[venturebeat]

L.E.K.’s Media Consumption Survey polled over 2,000 consumers, asking them about their general media “diet,” from ereaders to online video. The results? Ereaders are big, older folks are into the Internet, and online radio is finally reaching the mainstream.

Most of this isn’t huge news but the statistics are pretty striking. For example:

• 32% of users listen to an average of 5.8 hours of Internet radio a week, a huge jump.
• iPod owners consume 8.9 hours of media per week while e-reader owners consume 18.2 hours of new media per week. That means e-readers have a captive audience.
• Folks aged 50-64 use 8.3 hours of Internet per week compared to 24-39 year olds who use it for 6.8 hours.

In related news, kids are huge multitasks with at least 30 percent reporting they watch TV and listen to music while online. The study also concluded that TV is the media of choice for most folks while box office numbers are highly fragile and there is a chance that theatre and box office sales could tank in the next few years.

Obviously 2,000 respondents is a fairly low sample size but even given issues of self selection and potential skewing towards the an middle class audience it seems they got some fairly decent data on browsing and media consumption habits. Now excuse me but I have 3.6 more hours to surf the Internet to meet my age quota.

1-19 LEK_presentation_hidden_opportunities lv -

[techcrunch]

The Internet is hogging more of our time than ever, but advertisers aren't spending an equally proportional amount of their budgets on the web, notes JP Morgan's Imran Khan in a report he put out this week.

As you can see, adults are spending 29% of their time on the web, but advertisers are only putting 8% of their ad spend on the web. Meanwhile, newspapers only get 8% of our attention but 20% of the ad dollars.

These numbers are from 2008, so the ad spend on newspapers is lower today. However, it's not low enough, considering how little time we spend with them.

As advertisers wise up to where the eyeballs are, this will change. Writes Khan, "the rectification of this will help drive internet ad spend in 2010."



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