Managing the Gray – Positive Advice That Everyone Can Use to Succeed

Intro: Welcome to the brand new world of digital marketing consumer-generated media and no control PR.  The rules of engagement are no longer black and white.  You need to change, to evolve, to manage the gray, and how do you do that?  You let C.C. Chapman help you.

C.C. Chapman: Hello, everybody.  Welcome to Managing the Gray #20.  Yes, we have reached a milestone here and I could not have done it without all your support.  Thank you this past week to everybody who sent me emails and audio comments and talked to me in person wishing me congratulations on the launch of Crayon.  It was a big deal.  I am very excited about it.  Already there are exciting things happening.  I am jazzed about that.  I had one person go, “Man, Managing the Gray is not going to turn to a whole show about Crayon, is it?”  Of course not.  Managing the Gray is still Managing the Gray.  It is your place for new media insights and what is going on in the world.  When I can tell you something about what is going with Crayon or something cool that we saw then, of course, I am going to talk about that too but everything that Managing the Gray is about is right here.  So, do not tune out, just stay right here.

Today, one of the cool things I have always talked about is I want to do interviews and insights.  Now, I have given you lots of insights over the past 19 episodes, but I have not given you any interviews.  One of the reasons for that is I hate doing Skype interviews.  I do not trust the technology, not Skype.  I just do not trust the recording technology on the PC side sometimes because whenever I do something important, something goes wrong with it.  It drives me nuts plus I much rather sit down face to face with someone and have a conversation.  There is nothing that beats face to face.  When you really want to have a conversation with someone, you record it.  Today, I got that chance.  I finally get to sit down with Alex Laats who is the CEO of Podzinger.  If you are not familiar with Podzinger, you may want to pause here, fire up your browser and go to podzinger.com.  Think of them as — this is my description of them.  They are Google for audio and video content.  You type in any word imaginable and you are going to be pulled back with video and audio content that has that in it.  They have this proprietor software that is amazing stuff that indexes it and does — I do not know how it works.  I did not ask it either because I did not want to get you technical, but it is something you need to be paying attention to because it is very slick, it is very cool and it is going places.  Today, I drove down to Cambridge, Mass., which is down the road from me and sat down with Alex and had about a half-hour conversation.  Here it is.  It is all unedited.  The only thing I edited out was the beginning when I am setting down the recorder.  We just kind of talked about a lot of different things and I hope you enjoy it.  I am so excited.  I am very, very pumped about giving this interview.  I have finally done it.  It is something that we have been trying to set up for a long time and our schedules have just conflicted every time we have tried to make it happen.  Here is about a half hour with me and Alex.  I hope you enjoy it here on Managing the Gray.  Afterward, we are just going to roll the credits right at the end of it.  So, we will see you next time.  All right?  Managingthegray.com for all your comments, concerns and questions.  Talk to you soon, guys.

[Interview with Alex Laats]

C.C. Chapman: We are sitting with Alex Laats, CEO of Podzinger.  Today, we are just going to talk about what Podzinger is, why my listeners should be using Podzinger, why everybody needs to know about Podzinger.  I am a big fan of the software.  How do you classify Podzinger?  If I were to ask you what is Podzinger, what do you say?

Alex Laats: When we say Podzinger, it is an audio and video search engine.  The Podzinger consumer-facing site, Podzinger, is focused on content in RSS format so video podcasts, audio podcasts, but we also provide Podzinger service for third parties under their brands.  We call those white label deals.

C.C. Chapman: Okay.

Alex Laats: We have a very — I do not mind saying it, Googlesque business model where we have the consumer-facing site and we have Powered by Podzinger sites.

C.C. Chapman: Right.  Okay.  I do not want to think that the reasons I think podcasters specifically should be using it or businesses should be because I have a vanity search through Podzinger where every morning in my bloglines it tells me — they say C.C. Chapman ever, which I think is a very powerful tool.

Alex Laats: Right.

C.C. Chapman: Why should marketers be aware of things like that?

Alex Laats: Actually, one of the things that we do even for our white label partners who are not fundamentally working in podcast formats they just work with us…

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Alex Laats: Is we “convert” the content into RSS formats so that you can still have that ability for us to basically perform a live search on content as it emerges and deliver as part of the RSS episodes that contain your desired search terms.  One of our white labels is weei.com in Boston.  You go to their site.  You are a big sports fan.  Anytime there is a Belicheck or Brady is mentioned or Curt Schilling you want that to come to you, you use RSS to do that.  Now, their content — and we set that up that way.

C.C. Chapman: Okay.

Alex Laats: There are a number of different things.  One is the vanity, just checking…

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Alex Laats: Maintaining, understanding your name as your brand.  Understanding what is happening with your name and your brand in the world of RSS-based content so just setting up for that kind of monitoring is useful.  If you are a blogger and you are bringing in other feeds on particular topics of interest to your audience, it is also useful for that.  I do not know, there is a bunch of other — who knows what other uses people use it for, but we actually have seen a very steady and continuous growth of what we call RSS searches.

C.C. Chapman: Okay.

Alex Laats: These are searches that people set up and just run automatically like your C.C. Chapman search.

C.C. Chapman: Right.  Nice.  I have no idea about what you are calling the white label, I did not realize you did that for companies.

Alex Laats: Yeah.  It has actually been a major focus for us.  What we have done is — when you are a startup, it is impossible to have enough money to kind of…

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Alex Laats: Really promote your consumer brand so we have become very respected in the podcast community because Podzinger is enabling podcasts.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Alex Laats: The other way that we are building up awareness and it is kind of the slow and steady path, kind of one customer at a time path, is to enable audio and video search for our white little partners.  We started with Rocketboom back in the beginning of May and they have a lot of attention …

C.C. Chapman: Oh, yeah.

Alex Laats: For their video blog.  We quickly did a few other video blogs like CommandN, which Amber’s video blog.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Alex Laats: Then Hak.5.  We have 88 Slide and a few other…

C.C. Chapman: Oh, cool!

Alex Laats: Kind of interesting video blogs that have the Podzinger search.  We started to get beyond this video blogging to the more mainstream media players who wanted to have search of their audio and video content.  One of the firsts was the TED conferences.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Alex Laats: TED is I think Technology, Entertainment and Design.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Alex Laats: Held in Monterey every February, very high end.  We are a partner of theirs and we could not even get into the main room.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, wow!

Alex Laats: It is that fancy.  Someday we can aspire to actually being in the main room.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Alex Laats: The idea is they take their video assets, which are very valuable assets.  People pay a lot of money for them and then they make them available online as another thing, which benefits their consumer audience.

C.C. Chapman: Okay.

Alex Laats: But also benefits them because they can sponsor this with advertising.  We are the Powered by Podzinger search of the video archives for the TED conferences and they are continually adding new video from their archives.  It is all very high end video.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Alex Laats: One of things that we can talk about is that — one of the things that differentiate us is that we make it possible for people to actually find and consume like longer form, richer content that is why podcasts are great.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Alex Laats: The average length of the audio podcast is like 22 minutes long.  The average length of the video podcast is 7.5 minutes long so we are not looking — this enables search of content, which is otherwise really hard to navigate and find and consume, without the powerful search.  The same is true for folks like TED and then for our radio partners like Entercom Radio.

C.C. Chapman: Right.  We were talking about before we started recording that we see this as something — podcasting is a delivery mechanism.  It is all about content.  I long for the day when I go to a site — I am not going to say if it is Google, Yahoo! or something somebody new where I search for something and I get back every piece of content imaginable.  I am sure you guys dream of that.

Alex Laats: We think of it the same way and I think it is getting better.  It was not that long ago when people would come to us and say, “I don’t want podcast.  I want audio and video.”

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Alex Laats: So, I said, “What do you mean?” because what podcast is — podcasting is just the way of delivering audio and video.  It is a rapidly growing subset of the overall audio and video world because people recognize the power of episodic-based series of content.  It is easy to post, easy to consume.  The consumption is made very easy by folks who are lovers of the iPod, video or audio or whatever.  It is just another format and it is very rapidly growing, but yes, we totally agree.  We think that the world has got to move to a view of this that it is all web-based audio and video.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Alex Laats: The real problems are how do we enable the consumer to very simply and very kind of usefully find the stuff that they want and then make it kind of transition very smoothly into their easy consumption of that; that is where Podzinger has started.  Search into the content and find exactly the most relevant part to you and then let you start to consume it right from there.  The other ones are the content creators.  It then enables them to help build popularity and brand by having people find their content.  Then the third here, part of the triumvirate is really the advertiser and allowing the advertiser to have a means, some nexus between the consumer and the content that that is rational and we think searches that rational nexus between the consumer and the content so that an advertiser can come in and say, “That’s a connection that makes sense to me and I can deliver my brand message in connection with whatever podcast content or audio and video content the consumer wants.”

C.C. Chapman: Right.  It goes off.

Alex Laats: That is my cellphone.  Sorry about that.

C.C. Chapman: No problem.  That is perfect segue because I know you recently launched an advertising model on Podzinger.  This is where podcasters can sign — I am not that familiar with — are you putting the ads on a search angle or is it actually in the — where does the advertising fit in?

Alex Laats: Yeah.

C.C. Chapman: I know podcasters can sign up.

Alex Laats: Yeah.  There are several elements to it.  I will start with the technology element to it.  We have enabled an ad platform, which is based on some technology, which we licensed in to manage campaigns of advertisements, but then some technology which is ours, which is technology which allows us to classify content, the idea being that if — much like consumers want to find relevant content, advertisers want to deliver their messages in connection with content that is relevant to their message in some way, right?

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Alex Laats: Which increases the power and value of the ad.  In addition to doing the speech detect technology that we do, we have enabled content classification technology that allows us to say, “Okay, is this content, sports content or is this content, technology content or is it entertainment content?”  All of that is kind of hidden underneath the surface right now in Podzinger because that is the platform that has been implemented.  That is the technology component.  The way that we implemented it, both for our white labels partners and for podcasters on Podzinger, is we have now the capability of delivering relevant video ads in connection with your content, but on Podzinger we made a specific decision.  We said, “Look, we’re going to treat all content like it’s creative commons license.”  So, we search for it and we allow people to find it and consume it and download it from your site or wherever you host it.  We are just going to do that because that is kind of the search function, but if it is the advertising function, we will assume creative commons and if we are going make money connected with advertising then the podcaster needs to opt in to that.  That is the opt-in program that we allow.  What that applies to is this whole new category of ads that we are basically needing to charge, which is the ad — what we call the playback ad, which can play in connection with that content.  When you find content, click on it and play it, you will be able to play that content.  Like when I say iPod and someone searches for iPod, if I have an advertisement that I have sold for iPods and you, C.C. Chapman, have opted into the program, if someone searches for iPod and an advertiser wants to advertise in connection with iPod, we will have an ad — in essence, it is like a pre-roll, but it is playing at the place where I clicked.  We call that a playback ad.  It is not pre-roll ad, it is a playback ad.  When that happens, if your content become more and more popular, you will get more place, we will tally the place and once we have got enough to send — actually, it is PayPal.  Once you have got enough to justify a PayPal transaction, then we will send a PayPal transaction.

C.C. Chapman: I realize if people are listening and they have not used Podzinger, they are not going to have a clue of what you just meant is one of the neat things is when you use Podzinger — if I, C.C. Chapman, and I go to the feed, I do not have to go listen to the whole podcast to hear that part.

Alex Laats: That is right.

C.C. Chapman: You enabled it so I can — I click a button and it magically — I know it is a black box, but it magically works where it jumps right to that part of the podcast whether it is audio or video.

Alex Laats: Right.

C.C. Chapman: You get to consume it immediately, which is a huge time saver for any companies because they do not have to, “I just download an hour podcast.  Where does it say my name?”  It jumps right there, which I think is a key thing about Podzinger.  I realize people may not understand that that is what you do, which is really slick.

Alex Laats: At the simplest level, we like to say that in the world of audio and video, the words in the audio and video are generally black spaced to search engines.  So, we make that black space and we shine the light on the black space, right? I am sticking with the analogy.  So that you can actually get into that and find what is relevant using search-based technology.  The premise is that we have all over the last 10 years become used to search as our means of connecting with useful information and content that we want.  The Podzinger bet, if you will, in the market is that search will be just as important in the world of audio and video as it has been in the world of kind of a text-based web.

C.C. Chapman: I think definitely because — we have [unintelligible] where it is all just there.  Give me every bit of content I can about what and give it to me on whatever device I want.  That is where we are all headed.  We cannot wait.

Alex Laats: Right.

C.C. Chapman: Actually, I have a question from one of my listeners.  He heard I was talking to you today.  He is like, “All right.  Ask him this.”  Chris, who hosts the podcast called the Financial Aid Podcast, he wants to know if there are any plans from you guys to open up APIs so that coders can plug in to Podzinger.  He was specifically asking, he was like, “I would love that Podzinger automatically spit out transcripts of my shows and brand it, say, done by Podzinger.”

Alex Laats: Yeah.

C.C. Chapman: Have you guys thought about going down that road?

Alex Laats: We have had a few folks ask us about that.  In general, we try to tell people that what we create is not a transcript, right?  It is a means to enable search.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Alex Laats: The reason is that we take advantage of the best speech detect technology in the world.  It has been developed based on defense department funds over the last several years out of our parent company, BBN.  It is truly world class, but it does not create a transcript.  It creates a text index.  In some cases, when we speak very, very clearly and we do not interrupt each other, it actually creates very close to a real transcript, but it is not a real transcript.  Now, have we run up against a kind of a clear use that would justify our way for us to think about how to enable podcasters with that text index — we have not figured that out yet.  We are all ears.  At some point, that may become crystal clear, but in the meantime what we do for podcasters is that we have — if you want to be able to have search of your content from your site, anybody that registers their content with Podzinger, we send them an opportunity to put the pods in the search box on their sites so that they can search their content within the Podzinger environment from their site.  That is all free, simple piece of HTML that we enable.  We process all the content for free.  When people have enough volume of listeners then we will think about white label type deals where really then it becomes much more of a negotiated transaction.

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Alex Laats: In those cases, maybe there are certain things that we can do with respect to the text index itself, but in terms of opening it up for kind of everybody, we just have not quite figured out the best way to do that that benefits both the creator of the content and the kind of consumer audience.

C.C. Chapman: One of the things I think is really cool is you guys started doing Spanish, right?  The Spanish podcast or content — excuse me, I want to stop saying podcast.  Now, I assume there is going to be other languages coming down?  I think it is great because it is a global environment.

Alex Laats: It is a global environment.

C.C. Chapman: It is going to be a huge problem.

Alex Laats: Yeah.  Yeah.  Our capability goes to almost any language, but the question is there is a certain amount of expense for us for training the system on a new language.  We have the Spanish capability that is already launched as part of Podzinger for our white labels that are Spanish-based.  We have a number of conversations underway with some reasonably large Spanish-based media creators.  Beyond Spanish, the markets are really interesting so it is a matter of picking the markets.  We kind of covered North and South America and we really need to get Portuguese, which is not necessarily obvious to all of us kind of up in North America, but Portuguese really will expand and cover the base of South America and then we are going into Europe and then going into Asia, Chinese.  The people there are creating audio and video content in Chinese language, which is growing very rapidly.  Japanese is very advanced.  We have been approached by large portals in Korea about enabling this functionality for their Korean language-based audio and video functionality and then obviously the European languages because of our roots with our parent company, BBN.  We have a large base of experience in Mandarin Chinese and Arabic, but this is really a function of just expanding where the sources allow it.

C.C. Chapman: Oh, yeah.  You guys you seem to me like a very scrappy startup like you are hungry for everything.  I felt the energy the minute I walked in the office.  I was like, “All right.  I like this place already.  It has got a cool vibe to it.”  Great paintings on the wall.

Alex Laats: Okay.

C.C. Chapman: So, what is the two-year plan?  People say five-year, but five-year — who knows?

Alex Laats: Five years in this space, who knows?

C.C. Chapman: Five years — what are your goals in one or two years from now?  Where is Podzinger going to be?

Alex Laats: Well, I think that one of the things that — we do aspire to broadening the Podzinger capability across — well, we are already pretty much comprehensive with respect to podcast content that is on the web but that is growing.  That is pushing.  That will soon be at a million episodes of content…

C.C. Chapman: Wow!

Alex Laats: Within the next several months.  We have reached the point where we are pretty comprehensive, but expanding the functionality to a broader range of content on the web, audio and video that is not in podcast format as well as the word user-generating content I think opens it up into a much broader audience and some people that are looking for different types of content.  One of our goals in connection with that is to increase the total audience for the Podzinger’s service online whether that be through our white label partners or through the site.  Our aspiration for the next couple of years is to do everything to kind of continue to improve the Podzinger functionality to build that audience both directly through the consumer site and the white labels and by doing so create a very robust revenue environment through advertising to really improve that model.  I think we should be at a point in two years where we can look back and say, “That revenue model is a successful model and audio and video search is a crucial element in enabling that advertising model.”

C.C. Chapman: I was thinking back to the transcript question and the only reason anybody is curious about that and I am curious about it too, I do transcripts of all my Managing the Gray right now.  The only reason is because of search.  I want the current search engines out there to be able to find it.  They cannot find the audio, but as we move forward in a world where search encompasses everything, we will not need that anymore, which will be nice.  I am sure you want that too.

Alex Laats: Yeah.  We are thinking about — like I said, we have not figured it out, but we are thinking about ways to enable people — for example, one of the best applications may be — like I have said, we do not make a transcript.  It is not like a transcript that you would sell as a transcript.  However, we do create words which you can use to expose to the search engine bots in order to further optimize your traffic.  One of the things that we think about is allowing podcasters to expose the words in their content so that they can higher and higher kind of levels of Google juice or whatever it is that drives traffic to their site.  Our kind of goal is to enable that, but it is safe for me to say that you have to be careful because audio and video is not the same as text-based search.  People use audio and video for different reasons. If you were going to buy a new camera, okay?  You might benefit from finding a video clip about the camera, but not likely.  You are going to find a spec…

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.  Reviews and stuff.

Alex Laats: Or see that review, but if you want to be entertained or you want to be part of a community of interest on a particular set of topics, audio and video is really great for that.  It is entertainment.  It is passion.  It is those kinds of things.  The way that this all going to grow and emerge over the next two years is it is going to have its own path that is going to overlap significantly with the lessons learned in the world of broadcast television and radio programming, which is kind of our historical foundation for audio and video entertainment.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Alex Laats: I like to make the analogy to kind of the way that text-based has emerged and how search has been important, but I do not think we would have all the answers as to how it is really going to play out with audio and video.

C.C. Chapman: Right.  I do not think anybody does yet.  It is going to be a lot of fun to watch.  I cannot wait — our kids, when they get into high school and do research papers, it is going to be nothing like what we used to do.

Alex Laats: No, nothing at all.  In fact, one of the interesting elements of Podzinger is the — in the community of teachers and research librarians, they have really recognized — much as they were leaders and the early Google followers, they recognize the value of Podzinger and the implications, right?  So, one of the implications especially in the world of education is if teachers and faculty members start to podcast their content and make it searchable and widely available on the web, then it really enables a meritocracy of content across the web because the best content will rise to the surface and since this is really long form, rich content, it is not the best content like on YouTube where I watch it for 30 seconds and then I share it.  It is like, “This guy has really got it going on in this topic.”  We have discovered that by searching and discovering and then continuing to play and access this content.  Suddenly, the implications in the world of education are — okay, why would you study American history from the faculty member at your university where the best faculty member is actually available as a podcast from some other university on the other side of the country or the world?  So, it has like super big implications for all that and search is critical to that especially with long form content.

C.C. Chapman: Having worked at a college, they are not petrified.  They are rightfully concerned about that exact thing or why would someone come to my school and have this professor if I can get all this content, his or her content on the web.  They are real world questions.  It could really be interesting to see what is going to happen.  Now, you are a young guy.  You are the CEO of this very cool company.  What gets you excited every morning to get up and come to work everyday?  What motivates you?

Alex Laats: I have always been in areas where the frontier was not clear.  One of the things I like about this area is that the frontier is not clear.  What I also like is areas where the opportunity space is really rich.  There are so many problems that are not yet solved.  I think in the world — my first startup that I started over 10 years ago now was in the world of voice over IP.  We built one of the first IP-based PBX business telephone systems which is now 3-com system.  That was a very rich space.  This world of audio and video online is much richer.  We are talking about a big disruption to the way the consumers enjoy and use audio and video content from the traditional broadcast television and radio world to the online world.  We are talking about a big disruption to the way that advertising dollars are allocated.  There is going to be major re-allocation of those advertising dollars.  We are talking about a whole new range of content creators.  You are a content creator with technology, which is high quality, low price, highly portable so that you can show up with a small bag and lay out, not just one-tape system, not just one recording system, but a backup, okay, which does not exceed the size of one palm.

C.C. Chapman: Crazy, yeah.

Alex Laats: All of this stuff makes this really exciting.  We have a technology base in both our search capability as well as our content classification capability, which is truly distinct and differentiated and hard.  Our challenge is to apply that to these big disruptions and to apply it in a way, which benefits each of the constituents, the content creator, the consumer, and the advertiser and allows us to build a sustainable and high growth business so that charges me up is that challenge and the fact that the frontier is not entirely known and the problem space is huge makes it exciting.

C.C. Chapman: It is going to be fun.  The disruptions are already happening.  I cannot wait until this next election happens.  It is not going to be NBC or CNN that is going to crush a candidate.  It is going to be somebody with their Nokia phone, videotaping and posting it straight to their blog from the campaign trail. Everybody can produce content and everybody has got a voice.  You are already seeing the advertising model shift like you have said.  I mean companies are shifting away from television.  There is actually an article yesterday talking about that a YouTube commercial can be more successful than a Super Bowl commercial.  That has got to scare advertisers.

Alex Laats: Yeah.

C.C. Chapman: But it is fun.

Alex Laats: You used the word scare.  It is an interesting word because there are some people that will be scared by this.  Content creators were like “I’m not gonna move aggressively.  I’ll wait to see how this plays out.”  There are going to be advertisers who will say, “I’m scared.  I’m not gonna play aggressively there until I see how it shakes out.”  Then there are going to be those that say, “Look, the best content will continue to build audience.”  For the best content, this is an expansion.  Those who are confident in the quality of their content will win much as those who are confident about the quality of their print content have continued to win and expand by going online.  Sure, maybe there is less like if you are the Boston Globe and boston.com, boston.com is very successful, large subscribers, large user base, enough unique users, Boston Globe is as strong as ever, if not stronger. I do not know its exact base is, but there is great content finding its home in these different media.  That is where we are seeing — one of the reasons we are so excited about our Entercom deal is that there is leading radio content aggressively pushing to deploy their best content online to expand the consumer experience and expand the monetization opportunity.  I think those that are kind of are sitting or thinking, whose first term in their mind is fear, they are in trouble.  They are going to be in trouble in two years.  Those people whose first thought is opportunity, they are going to be reaping the rewards in a couple of years.

C.C. Chapman: I was recently talking to a roomful of marketers and advertisers and they were like, “What are the numbers for podcast?”  I am like “That’s the wrong question,” because if the content is good and rich and people are enjoying it and they are also engaged in that content, who cares if it is on television, radio, a podcast.  If I am listening to or watching content and I am engaged with it, that is where you want your advertising dollars to be spent.  Hopefully, like you said, people who get that are going to succeed.  They are going to adapt and change as we will do, but people who are “Oh, podcasting bad,” gets none of that.

Alex Laats: Right.  I totally agree and there is a large portion of it especially in the — you know this world better than I, but in the world of advertising there is definitely that kind of a traditional audience size, listeners, demographics…

C.C. Chapman: CPM

Alex Laats: CPM.  There is certainly the ability to kind of measure those things but the metrics that can be measured in the world of online audio and video are so much richer.  We know the average durations of content.  We know the topics of content.  We know which content is listened to most frequently.  We know which parts of which content are listened to most frequently.  We know that relationships between the query terms in the contents that a content that is listened to and a lot of other things that come from search of audio and video.  The way that you put together all that data allows you to say, “Hey, I can effectively deliver,” instead of thinking of this as “I can only deliver my brand message to one big audience with one big CPM,” I can be much more surgical about how I deliver my brand message based on micro and very targeted markets where I can say, “This is a market of people that is passionate about this topic, listens to these podcasts for this amount of time, tends to search on these types of words, subject matter of the content is X.”  That is exactly what I am doing and they do that multiple times.  The trouble is that without tools to search for and understand the metrics, you have no way of allocating, but that is where we are trying to make a difference in this space for advertisers.

C.C. Chapman: Excellent.  I think you are doing a great job.  I wish you guys nothing, but the best.  Thanks for sitting down today.

Alex Laats: Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure.  You make it easy.

C.C. Chapman: All right, cool.

Closing: Thanks for listening to Managing the Gray.  Tell your coworkers.  Tell your friends and tell us what you think by leaving a comment at managingthegray.com.

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