When we moved out of Manhattan at the end of last year, I was ready. The city wore on me, and I was desperate for a change of pace. However. now that I am around seven months removed, I think I can really look back fairly at the experience of living in the big city for a year. Going into it, I really had no idea what to expect, and what resulted was a crazy, exuberant, enlightening and exhausting 12 months of our lives.

We found a great loft apartment in Tribeca, which is in lower Manhattan, within walking distance to the MediaWhiz offices in the financial district. When we moved in it was very cold, and I figured I should be a true New Yorker and take the subway to work. I of course had no real idea what I was doing, but did a little research, and thought I had it figured out. I walked a few blocks, read some signs when down some stairs and was standing on the platform, waiting for what appeared to be the correct train going in the right direction. The doors open, people get out, the train was rather crowded, but there was a standing spot available, so I squeezed in. I looked up at the map, confirmed my guesses were correct, and I was on the right train. I then noticed a lot of people were huddled together, but nobody was really bumping into me. I didn’t pay much attention to it until a man in a suit said, ‘hey buddy’ to me and pointed down. On my inaugural subway ride I was standing in a nice puddle of vomit. Welcome to New York!

My wife said to me that she thought it was a bigger adjustment moving to New York than it would be moving to another country. Everything is done differently in the big city. Transportation, shopping, restaurants, and just about everything are entirely unlike that of anywhere else. I went from driving places my entire life, to no longer having a car. We started ordering our groceries online, or we would walk to the store, and the groceries would be delivered. Nicole accidentally ordered 15 half gallons of milk once online, not a mistake you would make by physically going to the grocery store. We would be setting up dinner reservations at 10:30 pm, I was normally sleeping by that time.

After a few months, I started to get the hang of the city to a certain extent. I loved going out to strange places, bizarre bars & restaurants that you wouldn’t see anywhere else in the world. As suburban America turns into Applebees, TGI Fridays and Olive Garden, New York holds on tight to the non-chain restaurants that serve great food. You could eat at a different oustanding restaurant every night for years. Some of the places were so original, it made me constantly say or think in my head, “Only in New York City”. One comical bar was called Burp Castle. It is supposed to be a shrine for beer made by monks. They have strict rules, that you must whisper. If your conversation gets loud, the bartender and patrons will quickly “shhhhhhhhhhhh” you. There are too many crazy eclectic places to name, but going out in the Big Apple was an adventure every night.

We saw some amazing concerts at Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden, not to mention a Yankee/Mets game at Yankee Staduim for Sunday Night Baseball. The passion and language that New Yorkers have at baseball games is admirable. It was truly intense, but probably not a great environment for kids. When you see a concert or a sporting even in NYC, it feels like you are seeing the best of the best, and you probably are.

Having a two year old in the city is also an interesting proposition. Going to the park in NYC is more of a job than it is relaxing. There are so many children that you have to keep constant focus on yours to be sure they are still around. Charlie was able to partake in many interesting classes that probably are not available anywhere else. I knew the kid was turning into a true New Yorker when we were walking down the street to get some food one night last fall, and he looked at me and said, “Dad, I don’t want to walk anymore, lets get in a taxi.”

People call the United States a melting pot, but Manhattan is the ultimate for diverse cultures. When walking down the street, you could hear five or six different languages. it was the dream of immigrants 100-200 years ago to arrive through Ellis Island and see the Statue of Liberty, and many parts of the world still feel that same way. People always asked me how it was dealing with rude New Yorkers, and that is a large misconception. First of all, most people in Manhattan, didn’t grow up there, and secondly, just about everyone is friendly. Nobody makes eye contact with anyone else, but you could stop anybody on the street and ask directions, and they would stop and go out of their way to help you. People take great pride in the city, and they want to share that with others.

Each day when I would talk to or from work, I would see well over 100 pictures being taken by tourists. Lower Manhattan played such an integral role in the development of our country that it is hard not to be moved by walking by the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall every day. When walking home from work, I would go right past these two places and head up Church Street past the six blocks of the hole of what was the World Trade Center. It is a breathtaking site to see the enormity of the area which was destroyed September 11, 2001. I had no clue of the sheer size of the area until seeing it with my own eyes. Our apartment was about five blocks north of the site, and we could see the cranes plain as day out of our bathroom windows. Many times, I wondered what it would have been like if we were there that horrible day that the world changed. Out of all of our experiences in NYC, the whole situation of the World Trade Center touched me more than anything else. To walk by there and see people protesting nearly every day, reminded me of the gift we have of free speech, regardless of what is being protested. There would also be family members placing flowers, and pictures and saying prayers while thousands of people were walking by to their trains, buses, jobs, etc. It is mind blowing that nearly 2,800 people lost their lives that day for no reason. New Yorkers are resilient, and they will never forget, but they know that the city must push on.

The story that sticks with me the most came from one of my co-workers, whose golf buddy was killed in the attacks. The man worked in Wall St. and not even at the Trade Center, but didn’t come home that day. It wasn’t until weeks later after going through receipts to know that he walked down the street to a Starbucks then an ATM near the towers, and must have ran over to help his fellow New Yorkers, and lost his life in doing so. On September 11 of last year, the anniversary was commemorated with two giant flood lights shining into the night sky where the towers once stood, and it could be seen from almost anywhere in the city, and Nicole took this picture from Soho.

I do feel like I am home now that my family has settled back in Cincinnati, but there will always be a place in my heart for New York. It was an amazing experience, and awesome item to add to my ‘Life Resume’. There is no other place in the world quite like it, and I know I am a better person after going through it.

The online world has had all kinds of controversy over advertisements within content. The Kontera product has been mentioned a lot, as well as other products even closer to home. It is an interesting debate, and I can see both sides of the argument. Publishers want to do everything they can to monetize their site, while at the same time, the user wants a clean experience, and be able to discern the difference between actual content and advertisements. I feel that sometimes people within online advertising become a bit pigeonholed and it sometimes helps to take a step back and look at other types of advertising.

That being said, the true growth of in content advertising has been on television. it has gotten to the point where it makes me laugh when as an example, you sit down to watch a sporting event. Much of the NBA playoffs were on TNT, and I am guessing the have a show called Tyler Perry’s House of Pain. I had never heard of the show, as I don’t watch much television, but I felt like I was life long friends with the characters on this show after the one hundred commercials and in game promos the showed over the course of each NBA playoff game. I thought to myself that TNT might be better served showing commercials for their other shows, but I guess they felt that pounding this show into the heads of NBA viewers, was the best choice of that valuable air time. I can appreciate that to an extent, but what they did next, really blurred the lines of content and advertisements. During the Western Conference Finals, TNT decided to show the celebrities in the crowd at the Staples Center coming to watch the Lakers and Spurs. They show Jack Nicholson, David Beckham, Eva Longoria, then “Tyler Perry, from TNT’s Tyler Perry’s House of Pain”. I couldn’t help an out loud laugh when they did that. I’m sorry, but it was an egregious use of self promotion. I think Fox started this fake placement of their own network stars back at the World Series a few years back when the entire cast of “House” was scattered at different parts of the ball park so the cameras could pick up on them and plug the show.

The other new fad is the endless amount of logos on the screen while a show is being televised. All of my examples go back to the NBA because it has really all I have been watching on television, but during game four of the NBA Finals, I was watching it on ABC HD. I happened to look up at the screen and noticed that there were three separate translucent logos on the screen at once. What makes it even worse is that the logos are not even in the corners of the screens. I did a little research and it is because many people don’t know how to properly use high definition and put the TV in 16:9 mode, and if the image is put out in 4:3 mode, the logos would get cropped off. My television was then covered with the upper somewhat right being the ABC HD logo, bottom right side being the Cincinnati Channel 9 logo, and the topper was on bottom left where it read “Save Money on Gas, News 9 after the game”. It is hard for me to believe that ABC allows the local affiliates to do such a thing, but it was rather comical. Pretty soon our television screens are going to look like the side of a Nascar.

Endless advertising within all mediums is here to stay, so we better get used to it. If it wasn’t for the insatiable need for companies to be advertising their products, I wouldn’t be where I am at today. The world is forever evolving, what will be the next big advertising vehicle?

After leaving Cincinnati in January of 2007, we have returned. After Text Link Ads was acquired in November of 2006, we sold our house and moved out to New York City. It was an exciting year in the Big Apple, but we were ready to get back to what we consider ‘home’. We purchased a home in the same area of Cincinnati known as Hyde Park. We spent some time in Florida this spring while we were having some work done on the house, and we returned to Cincinnati in mid May. I will be working remotely for MediaWhiz and continuing to do everything we can to integrate and grow the company. I am stealing this idea from Shoemoney, and my office has nothing on his, but it was fun to put together. Here are a couple of shots of latest Cincinnati branch of TLA. When we sold the business, I added that Text Link Ads sign from the picture into the contract. I wanted to hang it in my home office someday, and that someday is here. I must say it is a bit strange to be back in Cincinnati and drive past our old office which is now a gaudy art gallery, but life is nothing other than constant change. Cincinnati will be a great place to raise a family, and it is nice to get away from a place that charges $9 for a beer…

Between people I meet and my family I have been asked about a 1,000 times how Text Link Ads started. PG did a nice job of a summary of the events with his version of the History of TLA. I am going to try to add a little flavor to the story with some interesting anecdotes.

I feel like I am an old man as the internet is pretty developed, but my first email address was in college, and it was 272991@xu.edu. Why they gave us numbers I will never know. The more important question would be why I still remember the address, and I have no clue. I was enammored that you could find endless information and keep in touch through a computer. I can remember sitting in the Xavier computer lab and listening to music through the internet and looking at sports scores thinking it was the greatest thing in the world.

I bring that up because it was probably 1996 when I started to grasp the power of the internet and I was hooked right there. It really was a brand new frontier for communication, education, shopping, etc. Looking back at it now, I think we got in at just about the perfect time.

Skip forward to the end of 2001. After the success that PG had of helping market his family business, Historical Bricks, we got together and simply thought, “if it worked that well, why couldn’t we offer that service to other people?”. That thought brought us to the original name of the company, Marketing the Past. We tried to play off of the genre of historical renovation products and services. We bought a giant book, I think it was the 2001 “Home Restoration Guide”. I still have it as a nice memory. The business model at this time was to create and manage a customer’s Overture Pay-Per-Click account. We actually were getting started right when Go-To.com changed their name to Overture, and even before AdWords was started.

At this time, I lived in a Chicago Suburb at the old Ovaltine Factory, and PG lived in Iowa City. I was just getting started with another job at ISR, where I was managing the design and installation of home automation systems into luxury homes. I oversaw the state of Texas and managed projects inside the homes of rather big names such as Michael Dell, Jeff Kodosky, Tom Bernhardt, and Steve Rohleder. It was a fun job, as I have always been into gadgets and technology, but the thought of having my own business was my motivation. We slowly gathered some clients by buying advertising space ourselves at Overture. Our big break actually came from what now seems to be an odd source. We had the owner of a large online pharmacy company come to us asking to manage his Pay-Per-Click campaigns. At the time, I was traveling for work for a week, but from the moment I got back to the hotel, I was adding keywords into the Overture system. I think it took me 40 hours of data entry to get everything up and running as this was before the days of easy spreadsheet uploads. Our client got to the point where he was spending upwards of $15,000 per day on Overture, and we were making a small percentage off of the spend. It was the break we needed, as both of us had ‘real’ jobs and we were not taking any money out of the business. We utilized this welcomed revenue to spend more on marketing to acquire more clients. We set our customer up on every PPC engine imaginable at the time, Overture, Adwords, FindWhat, Sprinks, Kanoodle, LookSmart, AskJeeves, the list goes on and on. It was at this point where we saw the most relevant traffic coming in from Yahoo and Google, and the next light went off…

If our client was able to spend that kind of money on advertising everyday, can you imagine how profitable it would be if he has solid rankings in the natural listings of Google and Yahoo, and wasn’t paying per click? We started learning about natural Search Engine Optimization, and began offering this service as well. This is the point where we realized that we really weren’t dealing in only historical products, and we probably should come up with a new name to fit our company. We settled on the name which I still love today, Positioned 1. We also took advantage of that revenue coming in to create a handful of our own e-commerce stores, many of which are still up and running today. One of my best memories was in late December of 2002 sitting in an airport looking out the window talking to PG on the cell when we decided that the business was doing well enough for me to go full time. I remember hanging up the phone and staring off into space thinking, “wow, we really did something here”. It was after that call that I was able to leave the corporate life for quite a few years.

To Be Continued…