“Control your own destiny or someone else will.”
Jack Welch

If there’s one thing we’re not short of in London’s media hub, it’s bullshit. Plenty of it has been generated in the last few days following on from i-level’s quick but not painless death. So here’s three things I understand about what happened:

The Good
I-level had a decent business and they did great work for their clients. Even though they weren’t the same machine they were a few years ago, it doesn’t mean their capabilities had vanished. It’s true that larger agency networks have made great strides over the last few years in their digital expertise, but to say they’d overtaken i-level, or other digital specialists, isn’t true. For all the talk of integration you might hear, the reason most clients go with a large agency network is to save money on fees.

The Bad
The elephant in the living room of course is the COI. Any company that counts one client as nearly half its business is sitting on a time-bomb. Plan A is to aggresively pitch for as much business as you can to right the ship. Plan B is to get acquired by that client. Plan C, which you hope you never have to resort to, is to be able to ruthlessly reduce costs (i.e. sack a lot of people) if that client decides to move on.

I-level was already trying Plan A. Even if Dennis Skinner became PM, he wouldn’t nationalise i-level, so Plan B is a non-starter. Did they execute Plan C? I’m not sure.

The Ugly
In April 2008, ECI, a private equity group, bought 60% of i-level. Part of that deal placed a large amount of debt, around £32m, on the books. Turnover had already started to reduce just after that deal, and with the loss of the COI, the original valuation of £46.5m looked ridiculous. So the private equity people decided to call time on their investment, get back what they could then get out. A large amount of cash was in the business in the form of media billings from clients, still to be paid out to media owners.

Private equity investors always get first dabs on their debt when a company is put into administration, so they took the money that should have gone to pay for media. Thus the coffers were empty with i-level still owing millions to media owners. Liquidation was the only option that remained, and some media owners will be scaling back their summer parties.

A Fistful of Dollars
So there we are. An unglamourous end to a pioneering business. Don’t criticise ECI; they place bets, and when they don’t look like paying off they make sure they limit their losses. Your pension probably has a stake in them.

Perhaps the original founders could have used their payoff to step in, but either didn’t want to or they didn’t have the liquidity to move quickly enough.

As ever, Bob Willott wrote a great financial analysis last week. Mark Palmer has come to the same conclusion as me, but put in the effort to find a footballing simile. Stephen Rust, out-going CEO, has blogged on the good and the bad already. Hopefully we’ll get the ugly later this week.

So that’s my view. What happened doesn’t tell us much about specialist versus generalist, differentiation in the market or, heavens forfend, the future of digital media. David and Goliath continue to battle it out. But it does give us a sad tale of the perils of business finance. Perhaps you agree or think it’s more bullshit. Either way, let me know in the comments.

The IAB UK released its 2009 Internet Adspend report this week, declaring that £3.54bn was spent on online advertising last year.

Paid search took a whopping £2.15bn, 60.7% of the total. My previous analysis on Google’s financial results suggests Google made £1.912bn in 2009. That’s an 88.9% market share.

The share is broadly in line with Efficient Frontier’s quarterly reports too, which measured Google’s spend share between 85.9-87.6% last year. The EF report focuses on large scale enterprise advertisers who push their spend across Yahoo and Bing too. SME advertisers skew towards Google, which probably explains the difference.

From these numbers I also estimate that Yahoo took around £162m and Bing around £76m. Google’s domination continues.

I’ve not managed a post since March, and this one will be the only one in May. I’m afraid other things have kept very busy, including exciting changes at Efficient Frontier.

But the main thing that’s kept me busy is something else. I’ll let this man hint at what that is:

Spotted by an EFer in this morning’s London Metro.

I wonder what the ROI on the ad is?

Here’s a couple of really good videos I’ve seen from Google and Microsoft in the last day or two.

Ten Years of Google
I saw this yesterday at a conference as part of Mark Howe‘s keynote presentation.

Microsoft Advertising Intro
Perhaps the best explanation (to an advertiser or agency) I’ve seen from Microsoft of what their entire advertising proposition is. Thanks to Mel Carson.
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:47eacd2b-25e9-4dbc-8c6f-6e38854b85c9&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Microsoft Advertising Intro">Video: Microsoft Advertising Intro</a>

Sometimes when working with Adwords Editor, you might just create a few dummy ads while you work on another aspect of the campaign. It’s important not to push those dummy ads live.

Google graduated its Suggest tool out of labs last week. A couple of blogs have listed the Google Alphabet (ie what Google suggests for each letter) in English and French.

If you're a Firefox 3 user (and if you're not, you really should be) then you can create your own personal alphabet using the Smart Location Bar. Here's mine:

A = Amazon UK

B = FlyBMI.com (who I booked with to fly to San Francisco last month)

C = Cricinfo

D = WordPress Dashboard of this blog

E = Efficient Frontier

F = Facebook

G = The Guardian newspaper

H = Hertz

I = III UK

J = My homepage on the EF intranet

K = Kayak UK

L = LinkedIn

M = Google Maps UK

N = BBC News

O = The Oatcake, Stoke City's fanzine

P = Sikhnet.com, specifically their Punjabi fonts download page

Q = Google Reader

R = RIPE.net

S = Statcounter

T = Twitter

U = United Airlines UK, who actually flew me to and from San Francisco (never again!)

V = Hotel Vitale, somewhere we didn't end up staying in San Francisco

W = Webmasterworld

X = Google Reader again

Y = Youtube

Z = Zagat

There are loads of blog posts recommending Firefox add-ons (aka extensions) for SEO, but what about for those of us who are managing paid search campaigns?  Here are a few of my favourite add-ons:

CookiePie – Tired of constantly logging in and out of different PPC accounts?  CookiePie allows you to maintain different cookies in different tabs or windows.

Customize Google – Does all sorts of things, but I use it because it add links to Yahoo, Live et al on a Google SERP so I can quickly see the results for the same search on another engine.

Google Global – Easily lets you view Google ads for different countries and regions. You might use the Ad Preview tool but this can be run from the Firefox context menu.

HttpFox – Trying to see whether a redirect is dropping a cookie or figure out who that affiliate is? HttpFox shows the details of HTTP requests as they happen.  Live HTTP Headers does the same job, albeit in not quite as a friendly way.

Screengrab! – Versatile screenshot tool that let's you capture an entire scrollable document, just the visible bit or a draggable selection of the page.  Screenshots can be copied to the clipboard or saved to your desktop.  Essential when compiling client presentations.  Fireshot has similar functionality.

WASP (Web Analytics Solution Profiler) – Detects 114 on site tracking tools and gives a detailed report as to how they are implemented on the page.  Great for checking implementation, or just making sure that the right tags on the page in the first place.

I also find Delicious Bookmarks, Greasemonkey and IE Tab incredibly useful, even if they don't have specific uses for paid search (well, Greasemonkey does, but you've got to write the right scripts!).

What Firefox add-ons would you add to this list?

Please, please, stop with the April Fool's stuff, it really isn't funny. Sorry to sound like an old curmudgeon, but the 'jokes' on the web get worse each and every year.  Yes, the PigeonRank thing was amusing, but it's so tired now.

And I'm not just talking about Google, there's plenty of you Colin Hunts out there who think it's all hilarious. It isn't. You know who you are. Don't do it again.

Show some respect to the rich heritage of April Fool's.  Hoaxes that have been crafted, planned and executed with fabulous results, like the Spaghetti Harvest, the Jovian-Plutonian gravitational effect or traveller's tales from San Serriffe Island.

Today, BMW's hoax is hilarious (but also great PR that shows a more playful side to a brand that can be thought of as somewhat serious and masculine).

Anyway, rant over. 

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. Yogi Berra

There seems to be no shortage of predictions around this time of the year.  I find them very enjoyable to read, though I don't take them very seriously.  That's no disrepect to the authors of the predictions, just that forecasting the future is very difficult for even the best informed.

Take a look at this graph of Jupiter forecasting for example:

Notice the spread for 2008.  The 2003-09 forecast puts European Online Ad Spend at €4.3bn, less than half the 2007-12 forecast of €9.1bn.  I'm not trying to embarass Jupiter here; I would expect a similar comparison graph for any other research firms.  My point is that it's just too hard to make these forecasts accurately.

But where's the fun in giving up because it's difficult?  Here's three predictions of my own, in order of least likely to happen in 2008:

Yahoo will close or outsource many of its search marketing operations in Europe. It seems to me that the YSM network across Europe is dying a slow death from which it seems unlikely to recover.  The Yahoo partner network is plagued by low quality partners, meaning that for many campaigns the percentage of traffic that actually comes from Yahoo itself is less than a third.  Yahoo is making the same mistake that MIVA made a few years ago by sacrificing quality for volume.  In Europe, at least, they've lost the war against Google.

Google's gross advertising revenues in the UK will surpass ITV. In Q3 last year Google's gross ad revenues (ie before payments to partners such as Ask and AOL) exceeded ITV1, ITV's flagship channel.  Although ITV's digital channels account for a significant amount of additional revenue on top of ITV1, I expect Google will beat that by the end of 2008.

New business activity for SEM agencies will reach new highs. Next year is the last year for Google's Best Practice funding and I expect the shake-out will start.  Too many agencies add no value and merely exist (and win business) because of the size of their BPF percentage.  When that's gone they will be laid bare.  Advertisers know it and will want to make changes sooner rather than later.  This will gain significant momentum in the lead up to the new financial year in April.

Do you agree with the above?  Or should I have heeded Yogi Berra's warning?