Advertising: Distribution
Search News: Google Spreading Tentacles Wider into Ad Exchanges?
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Written By Shivan Durbal | September 17, 2009 | Share This
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Rumor has it that in the near future, possibly within the next two weeks, we may see Google’s invitation only DoubleClick ad exchange marketplace door swung wide open to all buyers and sellers. This is according to ClickZ, but as such it’s still only rumor. As Mia Wallace said in Pulp Fiction “When you little scamps get together, you’re worse than a sewing circle.”
Still, assuming it’s true; Google could bring the worlds of search and display marketing closer together than ever and finally impose tools and measurement on display that we’ve been using for years in the search marketing field.
For those search marketers out there that are unfamiliar with ad exchanges in the display advertising space, in effect they are a support structure for the sale of undervalued, unused or remnant banner advertising inventory.
Search News: YouTube Tests Embeddable Search Bar – Can Ads be Far Behind?
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Written By Noah Mallin | November 14, 2008 | Share This
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I think I have mentioned Google’s incredible …um…testiness before. They love to try out new ideas before sending them into perpetual beta (hello Gmail) or actually launching them as real offerings. This has been less evident over at Google-owned YouTube — though with all of the fretting over making their investment back it’s only a matter of time before they begin to randomly beam “Chocolate Rain” into people’s cerebellums. Just to test the technology out.
This morning came word via eagle-eyed Anthony Iaffaldano, Reprise Media Marketing Director, that YouTube had actually sprung a little test action on his watch. While embedding a video on a totally non-geeky message board he was surprised to find that his embedded clip came with a search toolbar:
Social Media: Technorati Expands its Search Niche, Becoming Mini-Google
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 26, 2008 | Share This
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Technorati has always been a strange beast – neither fish nor fowl. Often mentioned in the same breath as Digg and Delicious it’s used by many passively as an aggregator of blog postings. Here’s how Technorati describes their mission:
Technorati is the recognized authority on what’s happening on the World LiveWeb, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.”
Search Advertising: Is Google Using the Election to Set Up an Advertising Searchtatorship?
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 21, 2008 | Share This
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Google has made a big to-do over several election related product launches lately – most recently with their dedicated Power Readers section of Google Reader that aggregates stories handpicked by Obama and McCain’s campaigns (what, no Bob Barr and Nader?) as well as high-profile political reporters. There is also a Google Maps election maps mash-up thingamajig. Naturally Google wants to make sure the public at large and not just us residents of Searchistan know about it so they’ve gone and advertised some of these offerings on their search results pages against generic election search terms. So, public service right?
Online Advertising: Grasping an Ad Network’s Reach
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 14, 2008 | Share This
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One of the great things about search advertising is that there is a wealth of hard data out there that can tell you how many people are searching for a particular keyword before you bid on it. When you serve advertising on a search engine results page you reach people who are searching in order to take an action either now or later.
On the other hand, advertising on publishing sites more closely resembles other forms of traditional print and television and share with those mediums a degree of uncertainty over whether the people seeing your ad are actually intereste din your message. The uncertainty grows when dealing with ad networks which can claim, as one former ad network employee tells me, to “reach 90 percent of the Internet” — an astounding and meaningless figure.
Online Advertising: Will Google Prove That Size Does Matter In Measurement Tools? Ad Planner Gives Glimpse at Vast Data Banks
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 24, 2008 | Share This
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Google’s announcement of their new Ad Planner product today sounded innocuous enough:
“To make your life easier, we’re introducing Google Ad Planner, a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan.”
Well, gosh! How thoughtful, it’s all about making my life easier. Of course I’m not comScore , a company whose primary business is aggregating data for their clients for much the same purpose.
Industry News: Yahoo Investors Blue over MicroHoo but… What’s that over There? Say Hello to YahOogle!
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 13, 2008 | Share This
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Well it’s hard to avoid addressing the big news that broke yesterday evening in the world of search. YouTube engineer Geoff Stearns did indeed accede to his girlfriend’s pleas and got himself a haircut. Oh yeah, there was also some to-do about Yahoo and stuff. It goes a little something like this: In an effort to forestall a shareholder revolt and growing signs of irrelevancy in their core market Yahoo attempted a Doug Henning like slight-of-hand, ”Don’t look at Microsoft rapidly backing away from our company over here when presto! It’s a deal with Google!”
Search for Branding - Learning to love the Click
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Written By Drupad Sil | May 1, 2008 | Share This
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Interesting article by Jack Neff at AdAge. For those of you without subscriptions, the premise here is that consumer package goods (CPG) companies are unhappy with search marketing. Not because they don’t believe it’s a good branding vehicle. In fact, the article goes out of its way to assure us that CPG companies have been sold on the branding properties of search - instead, they’re upset that their traditional methods of buying media (wielding giant budgets in order to negotiate preferred placement and rates) don’t fly in an open auction marketplace.
Especially vexing to these advertisers is the idea that they might actually get penalized for showing up more frequently:
“An executive at one CPG marketer recently noted how perverse the search-pricing model has become for the industry.
‘It used to be that impressions weren’t in the pricing model,” he said. But Google eventually incorporated them in a roundabout way, he said.
‘If you get too many impressions without getting clicks, the price goes up, or they kick out off completely,’ he said. ‘So they thwarted with their pricing model the window we had to actually deliver impressions…because of course it makes their revenue go up. But that makes our value go down – for everybody in package goods.’
He said the company had purposely tried to maximize impressions while minimizing clicks in search ads, though he termed that ‘smart buying’, not ‘gaming the system’.”
To me, this approach seems completely wrongheaded.
Search ads absolutely contribute to branding - having a brand show up in a prominent place on Google or Yahoo’s results page draws a big mental connection between the query and the company. But simply showing up in search isn’t valuable. The ad placement isn’t really where the value is. It’s in the click. The click is what transforms a branding opportunity.
When a person visits a search engine, it’s not because they want to read a bunch of company listings side by side. It’s typically because they want to visit a site that can offer useful information to a question or need they have. The ad itself doesn’t have much value… it’s all about context and intent. “Does this ad answer my question? Let’s click through and find out.” After the click, the user makes a decision about the relevance of the result, and therefore the brand.
Saying that you appreciate the branding value of search and actually understanding the branding value of search are two completely different things. I understand what’s causing the dissonance - CPM pricing is comfortable. They understand it, and it gave them advantages. But this new model isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s provided users with a service that they generally appreciate, and has made more money for the engines than they could have made under the old two-martini-lunch-and-a-handshake model. The smartest brand marketers understand this and have learned to love the click.
ESPN Dumps Ad Networks
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 24, 2008 | Share This
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ESPN is dropping its ad networks, MediaWeek reported today. MediaWeek suggests the sports publishing giant has decided to sever ties with ad networks because, like many publishers, the company sees ad networks as diluting the value of its content. From the article:
“We’re heading down a path where it no longer suits our business needs to work with ad networks,” said Eric Johnson, executive vp, multimedia sales, ESPN Customer Marketing and Sales. Sources say that ESPN would like to rally support from other publishers behind this move and ultimately tamp down ad networks’ growth. Turner’s digital ad sales wing is rumored to be considering a similar move, though officials said no decisions are imminent.
The central issue is whether or not ad networks devalue a site’s content, or if they’re salvation for ad inventory that would be wasted without them. Because they bundle the traffic of smaller sites in a large network, ad networks have recently been pitted as directly opposed to the traditional ad sales model in publishing, which is based on direct relationships with advertisers and driven by premium, branded content. Some online publishers say the benefit outweighs the risk, and it depends on the content (again, from MediaWeek):
“Not all inventory is created equal,” said Peter Naylor, senior vp, digital media sales, NBC Universal. For example, Naylor said iVillage’s Horoscope section generates a lot of traffic but doesn’t attract many endemic advertisers. That’s why he turns to networks. According to Pam Horan, president of the Online Publishers Association, most publishers do just that.
I like Mathew Ingram’s nuanced explanation of the ad network vs. no ad network debate, which is, in a nutshell, that sometimes they’re a good thing, and sometimes they’re not. Or rather, that they’re a good thing until they’re not.
More:
- Ashkan Karbasfrooshan says ESPN did the right thing.
- So does Jason Calacanis.
- Silicon Alley Insider notes that ESPN might not actually have cut all its ad network ties.
- paidContent has good coverage.
AOL Buys Social Network Bebo for $850 Million
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 13, 2008 | Share This
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AOL today announced it is acquiring UK-based Bebo for $850 million. The social network is expected to complement one of AOL’s most popular services, the instant messaging system AIM. From the Bits blog:
As AOL has search for a growth strategy over the last decade, one of the biggest puzzles has been what to do about the AIM system, which allows anyone on any computer to send instant messages, whether they were paying AOL customers or not. Even as AOL’s access service declined, AIM remained the preeminent IM system in the United States, fending off competition from Microsoft, Yahoo, and later Google.
AOL has tried to out social network from AIM, but it was never successful. And Google now integrates AIM in its own chat system, taking advantage of AOL’s network of users. By buying Bebo, AOL now has its own social network which, when married with its robust advertising network (a result of a relatively recent buying spree over the past several months), solidly puts the company in the running with social network behemoths MySpace and Facebook, who are also still figuring out how best to monetize their vast user bases. Bebo has 40 million users worldwide and AOL says it is the third most popular social network in the U.S.
Search Engine Land notes that Yahoo had previously wanted to buy the social network. The company is a search and advertising partner to Bebo and has also been in talks with AOL about the possibility of merger, to avoid an acquisition by Microsoft.
More:
- AOL’s press release.
- Coverage on Techmeme.
- Jeff Jarvis rues the sale and thinks Bebo is done for.