Internet Ad Pioneer: Mitch Joel of Twist Image - The Digital ...

Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image, an award-winning digital marketing and communications agency (although he prefers the title, Media Hacker).? He has been called a marketing and communications visionary, interactive expert and community leader.? He is also a blogger, podcaster, passionate entrepreneur and speaker who connects with people worldwide by sharing his marketing insights on digital marketing and new media.?

In 2008 Mitch was named Canada's Most Influential Male in Social Media, one of the top 100 online marketers in the world, and was awarded the highly prestigious Canada's, Top 40 Under 40.? Most recently, Mitch was named one of iMedia's 25 Internet Marketing Leaders and Innovators in the world.? Marketing Magazine has named Twist Image one of the Top 10 Agencies in Canada for two years running (the only digital marketing pure play to make the list).

?

So, Mitch Joel, let?s get started at the beginning.? You got involved with Mamma.com pretty early on in ?99.? What brought you into this business?

My online business happened long before Mamma, which is weird to say.? I was actually a music journalist and I was publishing music magazines, but the story of my life was I grew up in a family of four boys and my parents were, I?d say, lower-middle class.? Instead of giving these big birthday presents they would buy one thing that we could all share, and as soon as technology came to be, whether it was the early version of Pong or Atari 800 and stuff like that, that?s what they did and we would all share them.?

So I had a computer in my house really early.? I remember having to buy a modem in the U.S. because they didn?t even have them in Canada yet.? Canada is always a little bit behind, and being really into technology I just couldn?t wait.? In fact, when I started publishing my music magazines in the late ?80s, I put them online.? And online back then was really immature; this was the early days of the first web browser, maybe even a bit before then.? It was to the point where there wasn?t even an ISP in Montreal where I live.? I had to call long distance and pay long distance charges into Toronto log-on to what was then the Internet.?

I was involved, and I really felt it from those days because being a magazine guy, my life was spent going to the corner newsstand every week and hoping that there?d be a new issue of Rolling Stone or Rip, or whatever it was that was hot at the time.? Suddenly I would log onto this page and get all the content I wanted, fresh and updated.? I remember one of the early sites I would visit was All Star Music.? It was the nascent days for the web and the kinds of sites that were being developed were simple, but I would be blown away that there would be new, fresh news about the music world every day.? Maybe only four items or whatever, but it was there.? That to me was a staggering realization that if this thing goes, and I felt it would, it was going to change everything I knew about media and publishing and marketing.?

So going from there to editing a local paper, that had an online presence, too ? that was important ? to then joining Mamma.com and helping build the sales team there; I?d been involved in the online world almost from day one, but this was a big step.? I remember seeing that first banner ad on Wired magazine, so for me it?s been a long road.

You definitely took the hard way to get onto the Internet.

If you do a search for me online there are some who think I created the first online magazine ever, because back then there was just absolutely nothing to compete with, and most of those have died and there?s no record of them anymore.? I jokingly tell people who think I became this sudden phenom on Twitter or something, that if you go back and look at the archives on my blog from 2002, there are over 3,000 posts already.? That?s a long hard way to be an overnight success.

You?re a fifteen-year overnight success.

That?s about right!

So you showed an interest in the business.? How did you get into the advertising side?

Being a person who produces magazines, two out of the three are actually free magazines, and the way you make money on a free magazine is advertising.? Advertisers come because there are a lot of these magazines out in the marketplace and they have each garnered an audience.? I knew the model really well; the more people you could put this message in front of, the more value it had to a brand or to an advertiser.? So when it came to the online world, looking at how I was going to monetize it at the time, the same model seemed to make sense online.? Other people were proving this to be the case so it made sense.? It was working for the online magazine websites that I saw and then it was something we helped Mamma.com to explore.? Back then at Mamma we had CPMs to work with because we didn?t really have pay-per-click per se, as it was a bit before that model took flight.?

Mamma was long before Google and Overture and all the rest.? But what we had was the ability to put banner ads up and target those banner ads based on searches and demographics for users.? So if you were looking for something medical, we could put a WebMD banner up there if we hard-coded it into the actual search algorithm, which is a whole other story that talks about how early the days were of the Internet back then.? We knew that the more relevant ads you put up in front of people, the more value they had and so it was this natural fit.?

The challenge with online advertising then, and a little bit still to this day, is in figuring out if we made the right call.? Was the right thing monetizing pages off of putting an ad in front of someone?s face?? I?m not sure, but it was the traditional way that we?ve morphed into the online world.

?

Interested in hearing more of Mitch's interview and his views on the business? ?Check out?Internet Ad Pioneers, available now at?Amazon.com in both physical?and?Kindle?versions!!

Source: http://www.treffiletti.com/blog/2012/12/internet-ad-pioneer-mitch-joel.html

cooking a turkey toysrus nfl standings how to carve a turkey ipad 2 Belk Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade 2012