Mobile
Mobile: What Marketers Need to Know About Google’s AdMob Deal
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Written By Noah Mallin | November 11, 2009 | Share This
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The rapid growth of mobile platforms this year has put to rest any doubt that digital marketers may have had about jumping in. The recent successful launch of Android coupled with the continued growth of iPhone sales (even as the recession continues) point clearly to a continuing transformation in the portability of the online experience for most Americans. Google’s deal to buy AdMob serves to reinforce this wisdom.
After all, it’s not just about AdMob’s ad-serving platform. So much of Google’s success in the world of search advertising has been built on the back of analytics - how they cull and act on data in-house and what they offer to advertisers and consumers as a benefit of service. There is no doubt that whether or not Google’s own mobile OS dominates, AdMob’s platform agnostic nature gives them directional insight into mobile as a whole.
Here are the basics that every marketer and advertiser should know:
The Year in Search and Social Media: Predictions 2009
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Written By Noah Mallin | December 31, 2008 | Share This
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After a tumultuous and fascinating 2008, what might be in store for 2009? We interrogated our best sources using enhanced techniques (bright lights, bamboo and the music of John Mayer were all deployed) before turning to the entrails of a goat (the vegans on our staff settled for an artichoke) to bring you our predictions for the world of search and social media in 2009. We make no guarantee of actuality. Void where prohibited.
In the Year 2009…
Horizontal is the New Vertical - The first wave of vertical search engines such as Business.com or Shopping.com was launched with the intention of starting search businesses from the get go. What’s interesting about the new breed of search engines is that they weren’t originally intended to be search engines at all. Instead, they were born out of the need to sift through the mass volume of content being produced on social media sites.
The need to retrieve and categorize user created content is already leading many social media platforms to become alternative and relevant search indices for specific needs beyond the general search engine results page. For example, Twitter search gives you visibility into “now”, Facebook search scours people (while LinkedIn offers more professionally oriented info), Flickr search delivers a better, more diverse image result set than Google images while YouTube features superior video search results.
Marketers will take notice of this trend to the horizontal in 2009 and these platforms will respond with more compelling SEM offerings to help lure them in.
The World of Online Ad Networks will Finally Consolidate – with many companies merging in an effort to survive, while others disappear altogether. This gives Google AdSense the opportunity to suck up even more of this market, resulting in:
1. Higher overall revenues for Google, but…
2. Lower revenue shares for smaller online publishers as Google takes a bigger cut of the pie and it becomes harder for them to monetize.
3. The collapse of online companies with no clear monetization plans.
Analytics becomes the Chocolate to Social Media’s Peanut Butter – Spending on social media marketing will rise despite the recession as more marketers discover useful analytics tools to measure success across the distributed web. Clients will be impressed by YouTube visitor counts, bit.ly’s url tracking and Omniture’s ability to track behavior in iPhone apps. This improved capability to test social media campaigns and see results before committing to major spends, helps open the floodgates and deliver real meaningful value - and revenue – for the first time.
Social Media Will Help Make Us Better Citizens - Phase one of online activism was powered by applications that allowed people to spread the word about their causes (e.g. Facebook “Causes”), phase two will be powered by microgiving services (e.g. Tipjoy and Microgiving) that allow people to put their money where their mouth is. As a result, funds given to charity through social networks will finally get more in line with the number of people who profess to be interested in them. The integration of Paypal into these services will help facilitate these transactions.
Furthermore, as the recession drags on and access to credit becomes increasingly difficult, Paypal will play a larger role in many online transactions including peer-to-peer lending, replacing some traditional banking services.
Is the Domain Friendfilter.com Taken? - As “friending” continues to gain momentum (and dilute its real life meaning), context becomes more important than ever. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed will need to empower users with more parametric filters so that they can publish – and parse - information to and from different groups of people. For example, a person may have various interests ranging from social software to hockey to comic books – giving that individual more control of the distribution and consumption process will eliminate noise from the social graph and provide more meaningful connections. The web is filled with nooks and crannies of niche content, so there’s no reason the social networks, or the ecosystem born of out of them (for instance, services like Stocktwits) shouldn’t better enable those subject specific communities.
Mobile Voice Search Increases its Long Tail – People don’t speak the same way they type – we tend to be fluid and wordy instead of terse and structured. When you mosey down to the car dealer to look for a new ride (or a “whip” as the kids call them), the tendency is to ask something like “What do you have that gets good mileage but can haul a kid’s bedroom set and won’t make me look like a total tool?” rather than to use Search-ese like “SUV, fuel efficient?” Therefore, it stands to reason that as voice recognition software creeps into mobile search apps, the searches we conduct on our cell phones are going to start to look a lot less like those from traditional search engines. Spoken questions are longer and phrased differently than online search. Advertisers who hope to simply use their existing search keyword lists to reach mobile users are going to be in for a surprise.
Then again, we might be getting ahead of ourselves – 2009 will not be the year that advertising for voice search takes off. The user experience still needs too much work for mainstream adoption.
Yahoo is Broken Up – No year-end list is complete without a gratuitous Yahoo swipe – here’s ours: Microsoft reunites many Yahoo search refugees’ posteriors with their former chairs by acquiring Yahoo’s search business at a fire sale price.
The Phrase “Google Killer” Will Become the New “Munson” – The term becomes synonymous in hip-hop to describe a hyped young rapper who steps to the big guns only to come up short and be forgotten. When was the last time you used Cuil?
Mobile Gets More Social - Time spent logging into social networks from a mobile device will approach 50% of total time spent on social networks in ‘09. In a related event, incidences of hit and run accidents and people walking into open manhole covers will rise dramatically in ‘09 as they use their fancy new iPhones and G1 Android phones to throw snowballs at each other on Facebook.
Google TV Ties Together Recessionary Threads – The two most resilient places for advertising in a recession turn out to be search and TV. How convenient for Google’s fledging offline ad biz as the search model of targeting, accountability, and responsiveness continues to migrate to offline platforms in ‘09. The timing is now.
Fame is Measured in 140 Characters Instead of 15 Minutes – Twitter celebs (plane crash guy, Egyptian jail guy) find fame far more fleeting in ‘09 – it lasts as long as it takes to refresh your screen.
Facebook Connect Takes Off – Brands and marketers embrace the ability to use Facebook Connect as a way to socialize websites cheaply. In fact, it’s already starting to.
Twitter Will Surprise Their Critics With Their Ability to Monetize – We’d explain what that monetization plan will look like in more detail, but unfortunately, we only have 140 characters.
The Year in Search and Social: How Did We Do? Rating Last Year’s Predictions
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Written By Noah Mallin | December 22, 2008 | Share This
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This is the time of year when we at SearchViews like to gather our best minds together to prognosticate on what the next year will bring us in the world of search engines and social media. Before we whip out the Ouija Board to contact Dionne Warwick, celebrity psychic Sylvia Browne, Ms. Cleo, and TV’s Patricia Arquette from Medium, we wanted to look back and see how accurate our last round of predictions were. Or, “Were our predicts totally redic?”, as the kids might say.
So here are our top 3 bullseyes and top 3 fails from last year:
Mobile Search: Phoning the Future
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Written By Noah Mallin | December 16, 2008 | Share This
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There was a great headline on the satirical news site The Onion once: “Earthquake Sets Japan back to 2147.” I always think of that when I read about the cool gadgets and toys that electronics makers flood the Japanese market with. I thought of it again this morning while I elite-ly read this week’s copy of the New Yorker like the Eastern elitist I am. It’s not easy to navigate New Jersey transit with my nosre in the air but somehow I manage.
Anyhow, tucked amongst the clever one-panel cartoons and erudite fiction is a fascinating article by Dana Goodyear called “I Heart Novels”. In typical elitist fashion you must subscribe to see the article online (free is so gauche). Goodyear writes about the growing prevalence in Japan of cell phone novels. By the end of 2007, according to Goodyear, 4 of the top 5 bestselling novels were written for cell phone consumption.
Search News: Mobile Search Comes of Age
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Written By Noah Mallin | December 9, 2008 | Share This
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For a while there it seemed that Google was so big and so flush with cash that they were ready to try out any of their employees 20% time projects regardless of merit or relevance. Now that we are in an economic crunch it seems that the GoogleCopter and Google Brand chewing gum are destined to die in Beta and the Search giant is taking a good hard look at how to make more money from their existing properties and search expertise.
While rolling out the search ad platform for YouTube was one step, rolling out AdWords for HTML enabled mobile search is another big leap forward. You can bet Google wouldn’t have done this if there hadn’t been demand from advertisers.
The demand is coming from the huge new audience of HTML mobile search users being created by Apple’s uber-succesful iPhone. Apple’s almost 7 million units shifted in the last quarter were more than in any other quarter of iPhone sales – combined.
Social Media: Twitter as Training Wheels - Can All the Goodness of Social Media Be Packed Into One Tool?
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 27, 2008 | Share This
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Today I eavesdropped on a conversation between Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Wesley Crusher, I mean Wil Wheaton, and MSNBC’s next generation newscaster Rachel Maddow about podcasts. Apparently they share more than just a hairstyle (see pic). Normally this kind of experience would be bought to me by late night pizza and my overactive dream-state synapses. In this case though I was perfectly awake as it floated down my Twitter stream in between my middle school friend and entertainment PR specialist Ariel’s insights on the music scene in Iceland and former colleague Tom linking to an interview with New York Times ad columnist Stuart Elliot.
So wow, the future huh?
Search News: Google – Knol and Void?
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Written By Noah Mallin | September 24, 2008 | Share This
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It seems like every few weeks Google launches a product – a knowledge resource (Knol), a browser (Chrome), a phone (the G1), a personal deodorant (QScore – the Smell of First Page Ranking) …OK I was joking about the deodorant but still…
When your share price is still north of $400 and you are insanely profitable I suppose it’s your corporate right to launch whatever darn products you want. It ain’t no thang but a chicken wing and all that. The question I have is, once you launch a product are you obligated to, you know, actually continue to develop it?
Skype Announces Unlimited Long-Distance Calls to 34 Countries
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Written By Drupad Sil | April 21, 2008 | Share This
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A big announcement today by VoIP services provider Skype. The eBay-owned company unveiled unlimited calling to 34 countries including
Skype is one of eBay’s biggest divisions and caused the online auction company to take a $1.4 billion writedown last year when it purchased Skype for $4.3 billion. The issue was an inability to monetize largely free Internet calling. However, with 309 million users, there’s plenty to be optimistic about. Mark Evans has more to say:
“Consider Skype’s first-quarter results: another 33 million users came on board…year-over-year revenue climbed 61% to $126 million and Skype-to-Skype minutes rose 30% to 14.2 billion. So, what you’ve got is a high-growth business that will likely have sales of $500-million in 2008.”
With those growth prospects and owner eBay looking to recoup some of last year’s losses, there’s growing speculation that a Skype spin-off or telecom acquisition could be in the works. From iLocus:
“In the meantime, which direction should Skype pursue and what should be the eBay criteria in deciding the future of this business unit? I think the criterion should be future growth of Skype itself…So I think the first choice should be to spin off Skype as an independent company rather than selling the asset at a substantial loss to some other company. If, however, selling Skype to another company is the only choice, I think a telco acquisition could make sense for Skype…Through Skype acquisition, not only does a telco get the most popular telephony interface on the Internet, it also inherits a large pool of developer partners that a telco could only dream of.”
We’ll keep a close eye on Skype and its tremendous growth. This could be the year that it all pays off.
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?
Google Maps Mobile Adds “You Are Here” Function
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | November 28, 2007 | Share This
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Google Maps has been busy this week. First, they added a new terrain view option that shows users topography, and today Google Maps for mobile added a beta “My Location” feature, which is basically “You are here” functionality that shows you where you are on the map. The best part is that it doesn’t require a GPS-enabled phone, because it uses cell phone towers to figure it out. From Google Maps, here’s how to use it:
Press “0″ and look for the blue dot… If you have a GPS-enabled device, this blue dot corresponds to your GPS location. At times, or if you do not have a GPS-enabled phone, you might see the blue dot surrounded by a light blue circle (as shown on the right) to indicate uncertainty about your location…
The My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near you to approximate your current location on the map - it’s not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average).
And here is a short video that explains it.