Nano, Nano

Article from a Duke alum, a kid I had in class.

Don't think Josh learned much from me, though. He was always pretty advanced.

Excerpt:

The modern Internet bears little resemblance to the Internet you experimented with in cycles past. Change is happening so quickly that half of what a four- year technical student learns their freshman year is outdated by their junior year. There were as many Google searches in the last two months of the 2008 cycle as there were in the entire two years of the 2006 cycle.

In 2008, both Harris and Pew reported that more than 80 percent of adults are regular Internet users, and according to an IDC report, the average Internet user spends nearly twice as much time online as they do watching television. Digital advertising will not replace television any time soon, but the huge chunk of us who are exposed to digital ads are the same people who have TiVo, so it’s time to take this inventory seriously. Some have. This cycle the savviest campaigns used search, context and display advertising for acquisition, by putting donation and e-mail sign-up appeals in front of people interested in their race. Unfortunately, this acquisition model is limited because it only grabs the “low- hanging fruit.”

Thanks to Democrat Al Franken’s Senate campaign, we now have a proven model to move beyond these strategies. We do it by tapping into the concept of the “long tail,” an Internet marketing theory popular in the corporate world. It’s based on the idea that the Internet audience is extremely fractured. So, instead of identifying the most universally persuasive messages and broadcasting them to a wide audience, in the long-tail model you take the most persuasive messages and nanotarget each one to the right niche.