Like a lot of folk we’ve been a little distracted for the past ten days or so. We haven’t been blogging much, partly because it’s a bit tricky to know the right tone to strike when there is so much turmoil out there (markets crashing and surging and bail outs and several other similies suggestive of trying to survive rough seas).

So it was refreshing to read Thom Forbes roundup of news at MediaPost today. He struck a nice balance between humor and frank acknowledgement that times may be getting hard, even in the very hottest sectors of the economy like online retail, content delivery, and advertising. There are some good links there, worth reading.

And on the bright side, he points to this pdf chart from Ad Age that in turn points to an old adage. As Forbes puts it: “Could it be that some marketers are finally paying heed to the AAAA’s hoary admonition that lean times are the best times to advertise?”

We think so. We also think that lean times are when lean and agile companies take the lead. We expect that the web sites of these successful companies will be characterized by:

  • high conversion rates,
  • low bounce rates, and
  • extended customer conversations fostered by consistent messaging.

The good news is that the technology is rapidly evolving to make it easier to achieve these three things. We see Monetate as a key part of that evolution so, despite the very real distractions out there in the roiling marketplace, we’re going to continue to focus on moving things forward. And we’ll continue to pass along helpful “lessons learned” as we learn them.