Being a VC, it’s easy to fall out of touch with mainstream consumers.  I spend so much time with geeks and early adopters that I sometimes forget that most people have no idea what Foursquare, Blippy, or OMGPOP are.  Some companies emerge into the mainstream, but not the majority of companies that I think about every day. 

What some of these companies DO think about is how to get mainstream brands and advertisers to pay attention to them.  That requires some understanding of the mainstream consumer but equally important is an understanding of how brands think about advertising and the process they have to go through to deploy their ad dollars.  

Luckily, I’m married to a marketer who manages consumer products that do over $500M in annual sales.  She’s launched products to both men and women and has worked with both very large and rather small advertising budgets.  It’s been a huge help to get her feedback.  I often think about advertising with a particular startup as a “no brainer”, until I realize how ignorant I am about what consumer product managers really care about.

So I’m going to do a little series on lessons learned.  These may be no brainers to folks in the advertising industry, but they have been eye opening to me.

I’m also doing this because I think there is a HUGE gap in the way that CPG’s (consumer packaged goods) are currently able to use the internet to market their products.  CPG’s  are the biggest advertising spenders BY FAR.  Yet online, they are the sixth largest category, and way behind  retail, telecom, financial services, and autos.  I think making the internet a better suited advertising medium will go a long way towards closing the time spent / dollars spent imbalance that everyone has been talking about for years.