I love a good competition. Nothing like the thrill of the chase to drive one nuts. If you’re reading this blankly then let me elaborate by saying that I am now one of two finalists in the $3,000 adtech content revenue strategies giveaway which includes a trip to New York to attend the conference.

This is something I really, really want and I am forced to rely on you to help me get what I want. Basically it’s now down to public voting and your vote will determine who gets to go. Please can you head on over to Shoemoney’s blog by clicking this link and cast your vote for Justin in the vote box?

Voting ends on Friday morning and I’m competing against a really great guy so your vote is important and really will help to make a difference.

I must thank everyone who’s voted for me so far. The support has been amazing from you all – thank you!

So why is this important to me and my business and why do I feel that I should attend over all the other potential candidates? Well there are two main reasons which I’ll highlight below.

Adgator – Africa’s first blog advertising network

Afrigator, the company I co-founded and now the largest niche aggregator in Africa, pioneered the first blog advertising network on the continent called Adgator. We launched Adgator almost a year ago and we’ve had some great response and varying success. In particular, what I’ve noticed is that we’ve solved a critical need to connect advertisers with bloggers (vice-versa) and for the first time there is a simple solution for brands to advertise and communicate to a social media audience in Africa.

While we’ve certainly solved many problems we are the first to market and this has come at a hefty price. There have been huge learning curves for us and as the market isn’t as big as say the U.S. we’ve had to be disruptive in our innovation in order to succeed. For me ad:tech would help us to learn from people a whole lot smarter than us, connect with highly influential people in the market and ultimately give us valuable insight into the state of play.

All of this will help us apply what we’ve learned and the insight we’ve gained to a market that we ultimately understand. I’d imagine that attending this conference would leap-frog our business to a completely new level and this is critical to our survival.

Working with the U.S. Government

Back in August 2009 we were contacted by the U.S. Government and together we formed an interesting partnership. We worked very closely with the Department of State, the SA Embassy as well as America.gov to assist them in showcasing the work the U.S. is doing in Africa.

Together we launched a pioneering social stream in time for Sec. Hillary Clinton’s seven nation trip to Africa and not only did this showcase official content from America.gov but it also showcased the conversation happening in real-time across all the social media platforms. We’ve long built up a relationship with African bloggers and content producers and it’s relatively easy for us to pull all of this together and we aggregated everything from Afrigator (i.e. blog posts), Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Delicious that related to Sec Clinton’s trip.

As a result of our very close connection with the U.S. I think it’s imperative that I finally get the opportunity to visit the land of the free as I’ve never been to the U.S. before. As America continues its mission in Africa and we continue to work with the U.S. Government it would be hugely beneficial to understand both markets and not just the one we live in.

So, Jeremy, you could possibly chose someone else but I think your best candidate is staring you squarely in the eyes.

This marks yet another move by a big media company to secure an agreement with Rapt and they now join the ranks of the Dow Jones and Fox Interactive Media in the plight to digital revenue.

What these three super-powers all have in common is the realisation that online advertising revenue is of critical importance to their survival in a previously dominated paper-based environment. The only way to achieve this revenue is to scrap the subscription based models and offer free content across their platforms and the agreement with Rapt ensures the tools are in place to effectively serve advertisers within the marketplace.

I found Rapt’s Vice President of Marketing, Ben Crain’s comment on the agreement very reflective of the shift we’re seeing in Global Media today. Crain is quoted on Wired.com’s Epicenter as saying

“These folks are industry leaders for a reason – they have great content. But the nature of digital media is unique, given the infrastructure required. All of those things combined present a problemset that can’t be solved with Excel and good intentions. The relationship between newspapers and their market is changing from the doorstep to the browser – and with the recent news of the end of the subscription model, the industry is exploring. If giving away content for free is the best way to use that asset, so be it.”

There is little doubt that there has been a slow uptake to online advertising in South Africa, quite simply because publishers have struggled to demonstrate the value to advertisers, however big media players need to gear themselves for the reality that is looming just around the corner. It’s not quite the evolve or die mentality just yet however, ignore at your peril.