Well almost. LexisNexis unit Martindale-Hubbell this week formed an alliance with Spot Runner, an Internet-based ad agency, to provide Martindale-Hubbell law firm customers the ability to buy cost-effective local television advertising campaigns to promote their offerings in their specific regions.

Spot Runner touts the ability to offer advertising on major networks, such as CBS, CNN, ESPN and Fox News, as a lower cost than traditional ad agencies. Law firms will be able to select their ads from a collection of pre-produced ones that cover a wide range of practice areas. Spot Runner will personalize the ads with a firm's information, logos and images. With budget and market information from the firm, Martindale-Hubbell will work with Spot Runner's media planning platform to create an effective media plan for the firm--one that will enable it to target clients by demographics, networks and neighborhoods.

Martindale-Hubbell's overarching goal has been to provide a way in which to help customers promote their services to potential clients. Perhaps sensing customer demand for a multi-media approach, Martindale-Hubbell formed this alliance with Spot Runner. Overall, this is another good example of an information provider becoming a complete service provider for its customers. In a sense, Martindale-Hubbell has added "ad agency" to its list of credentials. It's a great way for the publisher to further engage its customers and it will be interesting to see how many of those customers actually participate.

Join us at InfoCommerce 2007 for "Turning Data Inside Out." Confirmed speakers to date:

Jeremy Anwyl President, Edmunds Inc.
Tom Aley President & CEO, Generate
Judy Luther President, Informed Strategies
Mike Orren, President and Co-founder Pegasus News
Hugh Owen, President, Owen Media Partners
Robert Hawthorne President, Hawthorne Executive Search
Bryan Burdick Chief Operating Officer, ZoomInfo
Jim Fowler CEO and Co-Founder , Jigsaw Data
Jeffrey Killeen Chairman and CEO, GlobalSpec
Shannon Holman Director, Content Strategy and Development, ALM

Labels: infocommerce 2007

Back in 2005, I wrote about the A9 search engine owned by Amazon, and its plan to differentiate itself by not only showing maps of local businesses, but photos of storefronts as well. To accomplish this, A9 sent fleets of robot-controlled camera trucks down the shopping streets of major cities. While I questioned the value of these photos, I did give A9 high marks for creativity. I also wondered aloud if there wasn't some product placement money changing hands, since a large percentage of the photos I viewed were obscured by UPS trucks making deliveries.

The A9 search engine hasn't exactly thrived in the interim, but that's done nothing to cool the Web 2.0 frenzy around photography, both aerial and street- level. If there's a geographic aspect to a website these days, expect a big part of the user interface to include photos, the coolest being to plot geographic points on an aerial photo rather than a map.

The novelty of looking at grainy satellite images of rooftops wore off quickly, and the race is on to get photos that are up-close and personal. Google is already there with a product called Street View that provides street level photography. It's already creating a bit of a stir on the privacy front. A New York Times article today describes the experience of a woman who found that Street View delivered a crystal clear photo of her cat sitting in her second floor apartment window. That's a little creepy, but it can be possibly be written off to Google needing to get its camera angles right. But there is no shortage of others who want to go further.

One example, a new service called Fatdoor, released recently as a beta, wants to tell you about your neighbors. It does this with extremely low level aerial photography (ever wonder what's behind your neighbor's fence?), overlaid with data from InfoUSA that puts names on each home. It's unquestionably a nice piece of programming, but it's another site that I think has a big CQ -- creepy quotient.

The notion behind FatDoor is apparently that people prefer to learn the names of their neighbors from a website, and want to post and exchange information about each other online, as opposed to walking outside and ... gasp ... talking to them. Call it a cross between Zillow and FaceBook with all the loosey- goosey accuracy issues of Wikipedia. If there's a business here, it's driven by some very sad social commentary.

The new capabilities being provided by Web 2.0 technology are marvelous indeed, but too much talent is being expended doing things "because we can" as opposed to "because there is a need." That's not only a waste of resources, but ill-considered aggregations of visual and textual data is sure to lead to unanticipated consequences. This rush to be the coolest comes with not inconsiderable risk attached. It's a lesson to us all to stay focused on solving problems in the marketplace. If we don't, we run the risk of creating problems for ourselves. And if the idea of building websites and whole businesses not anchored to real needs conjures up dot com memories, then 'nuf said.

Labels: A9, aerial photopgraphy, FatDoor, Infocommerce, infoUSA, maps, Street View, Web 2.0