Advertising: Contextual
SEM: You Say Tomato, I Say Disaster – Crisis Management and Search
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 11, 2008 | Share This
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Who would have thought that the least healthy thing on McDonald’s menus might end up being the tomatoes? Certainly not Mickey D’s, which ended up on the griddle during this week’s tomato scare.
Check out the peak in search volume on Google Trends for “Tomato Scare” (my new favorite fake band name btw) and “Tomatoes” between June 8th and June 10th:
Best Practices: Online Marketing Voyeurs and the Consumer Exhibitionists Who Want to Be Watched
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 9, 2008 | Share This
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Cast your minds back to the primordial past – you know, ten years ago when the ‘net was poised to deliver the most personalized user experience imaginable with targeted, relevant advertising at every new page. What happened?
I’ll admit the teeth thing was close to home but my lips are actually quite large. Lip plumping is a very low priority for me. As for moving and storage, I’m not going anywhere or planning on storing anything.
(more…)
Traditional Media Companies Lag in Web Tracking
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 10, 2008 | Share This
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A story published in the New York Times today uses comScore data to describe how companies track Internet users for the purposes of online behavioral ad targeting. ComScore noted the online data-collection potential of 15 media companies like Yahoo and Conde Nast - namely, looking at searches, display ads, videos, and page views along with the number of ads each company can display on its network.
According to the Times, Yahoo’s huge network of sites means the company collects 110 billion “data events” (a zip code or a search query, for example) each month, or 811 pieces of information for each user. In contrast, older media companies with a web presence have far less data. Conde Nast’s websites, for instance, only collect 34 data events per user each month, and the New York Times website’s number is 45.
Below is a breakdown of some of the companies comScore looked at. Note that MySpace beats eBay and is neck-and-neck with AOL. The Times/comScore data is here, along with a little more background.
Note, also, that the comScore data leaves out a couple of very important points of potential data collection. From the NYT’s Bits blog:
There are other ways these companies obtain data that comScore was unable to capture. The two largest ways left out here are ad-serving data (from the likes of Microsoft’s Atlas and Google’s desired partner DoubleClick) and user-volunteered data. By the latter, I mean the information that users enter when they register for sites or e-mail accounts as well as all the juicy details they post on social networking pages.
It’s certain this information could significantly change the chart above, particularly when it comes to social networks. But perhaps bigger than the struggle to wrangle all this data is making people feel okay about their private information being used this way. In another piece, the Bits blog shows that AOL finds an emissary for ad targeting in… a cute penguin cartoon character.
Microsoft, WSJ Sign Ad Deal
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 29, 2008 | Share This
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Microsoft and the Wall Street Journal have just announced on a deal that makes Microsoft the sole paid search and contextual advertising provider for the WSJ’s sites, which include the Wall Street Journal, Barrons.com, AllThingsD.com, and MarketWatch.com. From the press release:
“Relevant and targeted digital advertising is important to our business and to the quality of the experience that we deliver to our users,” said Gordon McLeod, president of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. “Microsoft’s state-of-the-art advertising platform will enable us to dramatically improve our revenues from this key sector, and we look forward to working together.”
“This deal is a significant win for Microsoft for two key reasons. First, it makes the extended Microsoft advertising network the premier destination for advertisers interested in reaching financially minded users, as it complements our offering in this vertical through MSN Money and other syndication partners,” said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions at Microsoft. “Second, this deal is a strong indicator that we’re gaining significant traction with our advertising platform. The Wall Street Journal Digital Network is one of the largest financial services publishers in a very dynamic vertical segment, and we’re delighted to add it to our portfolio.”
According to the AP, the deal displaces the Journal’s old partners, Pulse 360 and Business.com, which had provided contextual and paid search ads to the WSJ, respectively. DoubleClick, which is waiting for approval from European regulators before it can be fully acquired by Google, will continue to serve display ads. Paid search ads will be new to the rest of the WSJ network, writes AdWeek. The AP also reports that contextual links appear on the bottom of each story, while paid search ads appear above the Journal’s search results pages.
The WSJ has been going through significant changes since it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation last year. Most recently, Murdoch is moving the paper’s offices to News Corp’s Midtown headquarters, launching a lifestyle magazine, and adding a sports section. But there’s one thing he won’t budge about, and that’s refusing to get rid of the paid online subscriptions. In fact, it might get a little more expensive to read some parts of the Wall Street Journal online, Murdoch said.
Searchviews: Week in Review
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 18, 2008 | Share This
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In this edition of the Week in Review, the Facebook news keeps coming, MySpace tries to wrap its arms around the whole child online safety thing, and it might start costing more to watch video online than just to buy it in a store.
- Hasbro, the company that makes Scrabble, demanded removal of the very popular Scrabulous Facebook application this week, and is going after a Boggle-style game on the social network, too. More on Facebook: CEO Zuckerberg appeared on 60 Minutes, the site got some German funding, MySpace is still leading in traffic, and the British government wants to know what happens with deactivated accounts (and so do we, actually…).
- Contextual search startup Proximic adds a huge inventory of auction listings.
- Widget developer Slide was valued at $500M just today. Bubble?
- Compete revealed winning 2007 sites and their loser counterparts.
- MySpace teamed up with state attorneys to put in place some new security features protecting minors.
- We explored ISP censoring earlier this week, then Time Warner announced they’ll test a “metered” model that charges broadband users by how much bandwidth they use instead of a monthly “buffet” fee, potentially making music and movies extremely cost-prohibitive to download or stream.
- Some in-house news: we’re on Facebook, and we’ll be in San Diego for the Online Marketing Summit next month (Also - last call for discount tickets).
- OpenID, the organization/consortium/movement to eliminate username overload, got a boost from Yahoo’s support this week. Another exec left Yahoo this week. And is there more to come from Yahoo in mobile this year? Their ad deal with T-Mobile suggests so.
- Popular microblogging format Twitter is going to Japan. They still have some kinks to work out here in America, as this week all the tweeting over Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote crashed the site (and Jobs’ talk tanked Apple stock). Other international bloggy news: Blogger’s now available in Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew.
- In non-profit news, Wikipedia turned 7 this week; what did we ever do without it? For history buffs, the Library of Congress put two of its collections on Flickr. And take note, Google.org applicants: the search giant’s philanthropic arm has a roadmap now.
Proximic Adds eBay, Yahoo Auction Listings to Contextual Network
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 16, 2008 | Share This
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German contextual advertising startup Proximic has signed deals with Yahoo Shopping and eBay-owned Shopping.com to start serving auction listings on its network, reports VentureBeat. Proximic is comparable to Google’s AdSense, but its technology relies on something called proximity matching–deciphering text patterns and word shapes on a webpage–rather than AdSense’s keyword matching, and thus delivers more relevant ads, according to MarketingVOX. Proximic serves ads via a widget that publishers can add to their sites, and also via a Firefox browser plug-in.
Should Google be worried? Probably. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld notes that click-through rates for Proximic ads are as high as 1.5%, much higher than those of AdSense, and that Proximic is creating a hybrid contextual search and affiliate marketing model, with 70% of revenue going to publishers after Yahoo and eBay take their cut. Also, the deals give Proximic a massive inventory of 50 million ads; according to Mashable, the company says Google AdSense only has 1 million ads in its inventory.
Proximic sounds like the kind of company that Google should think about buying, if only for the proximity matching. But perhaps Yahoo, having signed an ad deal, has its eye on Proximic now. Either way, the technology and all the ad inventory would be a boon for either Google or Yahoo.
Search and Social Media: 2007 in Review
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | December 20, 2007 | Share This
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The year’s almost over, which means it’s time to look back on search and social media in 2007 and take stock of what happened and what it all means. It was a big year in search and a pretty big year for us at Reprise Media, too: OMMA deemed us Best Search Agency for 2006, we turned four years old, we joined IPG, and we started giving back.
Way back in January 2007, Searchviews predicted quite a few things that came to fruition, among them that Google would keep growing (okay, that was an easy one) and that Panama would be good for Yahoo. The key theme this year was media convergence, with an emphasis on acquisitions and blurring the lines between search and social media. You’ll have to come back tomorrow for our 2008 predictions, but to refresh your memory, here are the big developments of 2007 that we’ll keep close to our hearts… until next year’s big stories overshadow them.
Yahoo
It was a tough year to be #2, especially for the ever-beleaguered Yahoo, which kicked off 2007 with some bad press courtesy of Wired. The magazine skewered the company’s spotty strategy and its then-CEO Terry Semel. No big surprise, first quarter earnings were disappointing, and Semel was replaced with Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang over the summer. Yahoo released some interesting 2.0 tools and bought some others, but this year it mostly floundered when it came time to pull together a cohesive social network strategy that would truly leverage its existing gajillion or so users.
On the search front, Yahoo had a slightly better year: its introduction of Panama was a great move (here’s our full report), America said it loved Yahoo the most, and improvements to its search engine were a step in the right direction. Now Yahoo’s signing up publishers to serve contextual ads in PDFs, and the company also bought Right Media and BlueLithium to expand its ad network. Here’s to putting the ! back into Yahoo! in 2008 - in a good way.
Google
Every year we ask Google, is it possible to be so successful? Really? If it wasn’t for everyone’s favorite upstart-in-shower-slides, Mark Zuckerberg, and all the press and industry upheaval Facebook inspired, I’d say this was Google’s year.
Unlike in 2006, though, Google’s growth didn’t come without costs — 2007 saw the rise of Google as a true world power, wherein Google became everyone’s best Frenemy - i.e., the company we all hate to love (though Zuckerberg seems to be gunning for top spot in the frenemy category for next year). Google managed to get sued for $1 billion over YouTube, had some antitrust trouble over its acquisition of DoubleClick (apparently now resolved), inspired the ire of both librarians and newspapers, served us some questionable ads, introduced shady “preferred cost bidding,”and without really launching it in a meaningful way, introduced OpenSocial, a consortium that looks like its sole aim is to take down Facebook.
On the other hand, Google also created a super-cool mobile platform/operating system (maybe cooler than the iPhone, maybe not), kept monetizing everything (this could maybe also go in the list of bad things, but we’re all marketers here), and got its hands dirty with TV (not yet a smashing success). Not to mention, Google also continually improved its already supremely useful services (Gmail, Analytics, Reader, etc.), bought and integrated Feedburner, launched iGoogle, and kept us sated with free versions of expensive stuff. Probably in his 20% time, Google co-founder Larry Page even came up with a plan to save the planet and Google funded it. All in all, not bad for a year’s work. Plus, of the top 3 engines, Google’s social network efforts seem most promising and logical. We’ll be watching you, Google, and we know you’ll probably be watching us.
Microsoft
Microsoft was on the defensive (or is that the offensive?) much of this year, especially because Google beat them out for DoubleClick and surpassed it in site traffic. MSFT paid a whopping $6 billion for online ad company aQuantive to help nurse its wounds and then drove Facebook’s valuation to $15 billion by paying $240 million for a small stake - exemplifying its strategy this year, which was to buy or partner up wherever it made sense. Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista, launched with much fanfare but also to mixed reviews. We’ll have to wait and see with this one.
Ask.com
Ask.com is tiny but worked hard this year, introducing contextual ads and getting props for its proactive privacy policy. Its parent company, IAC, decided to be less confusing by breaking up its holdings into a few smaller companies, which should benefit the search engine, and Ask also secured $3.5 billion deal with Google.
Facebook, Social Media
Arguably the leader of the social media pack, Facebook’s high value as a communication vehicle became clear when, after shootings at Virginia Tech, students used the site to share information faster than the news networks could. That paradigm shift continued when the site opened up its API to allow outside development of applications - a move that made VCs sit up and that forced direct competitors and even other industries, like notoriously draconian mobile providers, to follow (in rhetoric, at least).
Thanks to Facebook, it’s not enough to have a site, you’ve got to have a platform. Applications became microcosmic indicators of Facebook’s massive success, and the site made its first acquisition in July. But the social network was also plagued by a some missteps this year. Users of the site are resistant to overt advertising and Facebook bungled the launch of its newest ad program, Beacon, shaking the faith of its advertisers and causing some (minimal) unrest among users, though it continues to secure funding.
Media Convergence, Money, and Ad-Model Growing Pains
ComScore introduced new engagement metrics this year, and social networks added search-like, CPC ad structures. A rash of acquisitions made it clear that everyone was eager to get into the social media game, even if they didn’t know quite how: Ebay bought StumbleUpon, and CBS snagged online video show Wallstrip and music service Last.fm.
This year’s housing market crisis had many worried that the economy’s headed for downturn, but we didn’t think online advertising would be drastically affected, and so far, we’re right. Traditional offline industries (music, TV, and newspapers) continued struggling with web monetization. Steve Jobs railed against DRM, and Radiohead practically gave away their new album as an experiment. The New York Times got rid of paid content online, successfully, but the rest of the newspaper industry seems not to have figured out how to make enough money. In TV, the writers’ strike is still underway because networks aren’t giving writers a cut of online profits, while networks experiment with ways to distribute content online.
And Other Top Stories Worth Remembering…
- For the third year in a row, we evaluated big advertisers for their search-savvy in our Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard. The winners made search an integral part of their campaigns, ensuring that millions of dollars spent on TV campaigns didn’t get lost when it came to the search box. Here are parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of that feature.
- Taco Bell, dirty as their restaurants may have been, proved they know how to leverage search to make the best of a horrible health and PR nightmare.
In sum, a lot of growth for the search industry, the emergence of social media as a real force, and still some hobbling by traditional media companies to catch up or keep up - 2008 will definitely be interesting. What stories do you think will still matter next year? What would you add to this list?
Yahoo Contextual Ads Now in Adobe PDFs
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | November 29, 2007 | Share This
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CNET reports Yahoo and Adobe have teamed up to serve Yahoo contextual ads in Adobe PDFs, extending Yahoo’s PPC model and distribution. Similar to Gmail, they will pick up the content of the PDF to determine relevant ads. From CNET:
The text advertisements appear in a panel to the right of the content in the PDF and are subject matter matched using keywords and analysis of associated concepts. The ads are dynamic, meaning different ads can pop up at different times and clicking on an ad takes you to the advertiser Web site.
TechCrunch wonders if this service will be popular, but acknowledges opportunity for (further) e-book monetization:
On one hand contextual advertising in PDFs probably falls into the “why didn’t they think of that before” category, but on the other hand there’s probably a reason this is a new concept, because I can’t see there being a stampede of people wanting to use the service. It will be interesting to see however whether the ads convert, and it may provide an additional revenue stream for ebook sellers and similar online users and creators who regularly provide PDF downloads to visitors.
Personally I think the ads seem ugly and intrusive (somewhat like the feeling of clicking on a link only to find it’s a PDF - so maybe this partnership makes perfect sense), but they’ll probably just take some getting used to. I wonder, too, if the way that people interact with PDFs - lots of scrolling and clicking within the document - will mean a higher percentage of invalid clicks? Here’s a screenshot:
Wired is among the sites that has signed on. According to Computer World, the new system has some limitations (second paragraph):
Melissa Webster, program vice president of content and digital media technologies at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, said the new service should prove to be a “risk-free” way for publishers to tap into Yahoo’s extensive ad inventory and partner network. She said the value of dynamic ads and content on the Web is key, since users tend to tune out the data when it is displayed a second time.
Webster noted that dynamic advertising requires that readers maintain an Internet connection and that publishers will likely want significant control over which advertisements are displayed on their sites. “They may not want competitor ads. The current beta release doesn’t do that,” said Webster.
Does Google Practice Ethnic Profiling?
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | November 26, 2007 | Share This
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While we don’t have a screenshot to back this up, a Lebanese-American friend of Searchviews (who has an Arabic last name) reports that she recently noticed a Gmail contextual ad for a site called Hijab Girl alongside an email from Banana Republic. Because she says her Arab and Muslim online consumption is largely news-related and her inbox isn’t Arabic-heavy (save for some phonetic Arabic emails from Mom, written in English), it appears this ad is just targeting her because of her Arabic name, which is a lot like ethnic profiling.
Granted, ethnic or racial profiling is more commonly associated with police and terrorism, but that doesn’t make this particular ad any less reductive and creepy. I don’t have a problem with Hijab Girl, but Google’s placement of the ad suggests that their algorithm assumes that all people with Arabic names are hijab-wearing Muslims, and that’s pretty inaccurate, misguided, and presumptuous - in fact, it reminds me a little of recent (now-quashed) efforts in Los Angeles to map all the Muslims to help fight terrorism.
We’ve pointed out before that contextual ads largely suck, and this is particularly evident in Gmail, where ads are supposedly tailored to each user’s inbox but are usually irrelevant at best, and, in this instance, just a bit offensive. Perhaps all the discussion about privacy generated because of Facebook’s new Beacon ad program, which partners with other sites to broadcast your off-Facebook activity in your news feed (e.g., bought a couch on Overstock.com, bought tickets to see “August Rush” on Fandango), should be expanded into a larger conversation about contextual advertising and how to make it better.
This conversation is really necessary when it comes to services like Gmail or Facebook, where the experience is so personal and private and the entity serving the ads has quite a bit of information about the person being served. A simple solution is just letting that person being served provide feedback about the ads being served to them, via a thumbs-up and thumbs-down, for instance. Amazon lets you do it with their recommendations, Facebook recently rolled out a feature to let you do it with your news feed items (though they weren’t smart enough to extend it to ads, as far as my news feed is concerned), and Google - to avoid serving irrelevant and offensive ads - should consider letting its users talk back, too. More relevant ads create a better user experience and because of the higher click-through rates that are sure to ensue, that’s better business. Though sites like Gmail and Facebook claim the right to behavioral and contextual advertising because they’re providing free services, they should also see the value of giving the user a choice in what they’re served.
Google AdSense Changes Click Area
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | November 14, 2007 | Share This
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Google’s AdSense program has significantly reduced the clickable area of its ads. Google Blogoscoped has mocked up the before-and-after, showing that only the title and URL of each ad can be clicked now; ad background will no longer trigger clicks. Google sent a letter to AdSense publishers, explaining why they’ve made the change (via Search Engine Land):
We’re rolling out a change to our text ad formats to help reduce accidental clicks and increase value for advertisers. Previously, users could click on the background and full text of an ad, but now users can click only on the title and URL of a text ad. This new format will match the changes we’ve implemented on Google.com to help decrease the number of accidental clicks and increase the number of ad conversions. A reduction in accidental clicks will keep users on your pages, interacting with your content until they choose to click on an ad. This change will enhance the users’ overall experience with your websites and improve advertiser campaign value, but it’s likely that your click-through rate will decrease.
The change means fewer accidental clicks and probably lower revenue, but Search Engine Roundtable notes Google has already successfully made this change for AdWords:
Does this seem like any old change? Well, it is, kind of. Google implemented the same thing back in April for ads that display on Google.com (i.e. AdWords ads). Yes, this did have a significant impact on advertiser’s spend and earnings. But it obviously is working, because both advertisers seem to have been happy from the change and Google is now implementing this on AdSense ads.
The new system may hurt publishers running AdSense on their pages for a little while, but it’s a boon to advertisers, whose ad dollars will be spent more efficiently. Nick Gonzalez at TechCrunch notes how this move fits with Google’s click-fraud fighting efforts:
Although Google has filters to detect outright click fraud, unintentionally clicking on an ad region may be a less insidious yet hard to detect cause of wasted ad dollars. Last year, Google and Yahoo got into hot water over allegations of click fraud and eventually agreed to an independent audit. Google also wound up paying $90 million in a settlement, a small fraction of any potential earnings from fraud, but a wake up call for them nonetheless.