Archive for Business
And the future of video advertising is… overlays?
August 28th, 2007 • Advertising, Video
Big buzz today. YouTube has finally decided on its advertising format of choice, and it appears to be transparent overlays.
This is major news. YouTube now accounts for 10% of all internet traffic, and is costing Google the earth. And until today, there was little way to guage how the search company would see a return on its $1.65 billion investment.
The challenge has been made all the greater by apparent public resistance to pre-rolls (ads that run before the video begins), with complaints in research groups that they ruined the experience.
But after much soul-searching, Google has finally gone for a semi-transparent overlay. Read more »
Wired: how to run a corporate blog
August 22nd, 2007 • Business, Internet, Media
I should have read this months ago. Wired has a guide on how to run a corporate blog without being launched into space by your MD. Wriiten by Edelmann PR VP Steve Rubel (who’s own blog, Micro Persuasion, is a personal fave), the guide offers a few gems.
Rubel has obviously walked the hard miles, judging by the tips given. He warns that your words need to be written with your entire peer group in mind (including senior management and advertisers, not just your MD), and that your business has to come first:
It’s important to know what your blog is about and where it can impact your business. Figure out your mission and know where you can and can’t go. In my case, I learned that it’s very difficult for me to blog substantively about our clients, their competitors or individual media outlets. I largely stick to big trends, insights and how-to’s and pepper them with small examples
Where now for video ads?
August 11th, 2007 • Advertising, Video
No-one’s quite sure what to do with advertisements in video, according to today’s Wall St Journal.
The issue is intrusion: as previous research has shown, people focus hard when watching online videos (more so than they do when watching TV), so anything that kicks the flow into touch is disliked.
As the WSJ explains, one new format that’s proving popular is the ticker, an advertising message running across the bottom of the player. Elsewhere, the likes of Heavy are betting the house on skins, wrapping the video in one big message.
Me? I’ve never seen the problem in the first place. I grew up as an online video consumer watching the likes of DiggNation and Rocketboom: the issue to my eyes was always tone andc context, never the existence of the ad in the first place. I know of GoDaddy.com, purely because it sponsored the hell out of the start of DiggNation for heaven knows how long. If that’s advertising working, then it works.
paidContent.org: No Holy Grail For Online Video Ad Model, But Various Formats Find Their Converts
New Yahoo! SmartAds: saviour, or intrusion?
August 10th, 2007 • Advertising, Internet
The right offer at the right time. The ninja sales guys around me would always insist that this was the key - know what your client wants, and fulfil their needs.
So using that criteria, it would seem that Yahoo! is doing a damn fine job. According to today’s WSJ, the new SmartAds appearing in Yahoo! Travel have been a wow with advertisers, and the company now plans to roll them out into other channels.
How does it work? You start digging around in Yahoo! Travel for a break in Toronto in October. Like all good researchers, you don’t buy the first deal on offer. So a few days later you go back - and hey presto, there are leverly placed ads that offer good deals on holidays in Toronto in October.
In theory, it’s a win for everyone - you get the right service at the right time, and the advertiser gets the right buyer at the right time. But, as the WSJ story points out:
There also is a danger consumer online-privacy concerns could derail them, since Yahoo makes heavy use of data about its visitors to target ads, including information users supply during registration, location data from their computers and insights into their interests gleaned from their online “behavior,” such as where they have gone within Yahoo and their keyword-search history.
Yahoo Banks on SmartAds To Lift Display Business - WSJ.com
Maybe I’m soft, but such ‘intrusions’ have never bothered me. I’m quite used to supplying information online that will enable people to cut their cloth they offer to my needs. Would I rather have a banner ad for a new car while I’m hunting for that well-earned holiday, or a list of flight and hotel prices to the place that are actually useful. No brainer.
Social networking to go mobile?
August 10th, 2007 • Advertising, Mobile
A new report from Juniper Research suggests that the world of user-generated content is about to break free of the PC. In fact, it predicts an explosion - from 14 million users this year to a simply huge 600 million by 2012 (shurely shome mishtake? - Ed).
The report also suggests that developing countries will be at the forefront of the growth; as late arrivers at the technology party, many have gone straight-to-mobile.
Worldwide, end-user generated revenues from social networking, dating and personal content delivery services will increase from $572 million in 2007 to over $5.7 billion in 2012, with social networking making up 50 percent of the total by the end of 2012.
AOL having second thoughts on Digg-a-Like Netscape?
August 8th, 2007 • Business, Internet, Social
When Jason Calacanis relaunched Netscape as one big social voting mechanism, he hadn’t counted on the backlash from old school Netscape users (and much to everyone’s hilarity, Digg users spent a while pounding the new Netcape with everything they had). If the little package on Netscape’s home page today is anything to go by, AOL may be re-thinking the whole strategy. Netscapers now have the option to go back to a good, old-fashioned portal. 
Clearly, the folk at TechCrunch have seen the banner’s arrival as the beginning of the end for DiggyNet. However, their piece prompted a sharp reply from Tom Drapeau at Netscape:
Umm…. who are all of these sources? I run the Netscape.com social news site now, and I wrote the text that you quoted in your article.
The cobrand launch this week was simply an effort to give a place to go for those who desire a Netscape portal experience instead of a social news experience.
The Netscape.com social news team is alive and well, despite your “rumors”, and have extensive plans for 2007 and 2008 which are already in progress. We may exist in a different AOL division than the AOL.com team, but that doesn’t make this a turf war.
I am speaking to the editorial team right now, and as they knew this portal was launching weeks in advance… they aren’t “completely freaked out”.
Where are you getting these sources/rumors?
No reply from the TC guys to Tom’s question as of yet.
Pop-ups: coming to your mobile any day now
August 8th, 2007 • Advertising, Business, Mobile
Yep, the scourge of the desktop browser has spotted one final frontier - your handset. Soon, you’ll be able to enjoy compelling marketing propositions as you wait for the 07.36 at Clapham Junction.
Actually, it’s a little more complex than that. It transpires that a few companies in the US have been trialling a service whereby customers download a small app, and are then fed ads with ‘genuine’ killer offers. The app learns: after a while, it should only feed the sort of ads that you click on, and not the ones you don’t.
Mobile Posse is one of the companies trialling the service. Its CEO, Jon Jackson, reckons that its system is far more attractive to advertisers than mobile banners…
That’s because banner advertisements are limited to the approximately 30 million people in the U.S. who use mobile Web browsers. On average, those people rack up four to five page views per month. Compare that, he says, to the approximately 200 million people who can receive idle screen ads from Mobile Posse, and an advertiser may see a more interesting prospect.
Pop-up ads: Coming to a mobile phone near you? - Yahoo! News
Live.com: about to make the big time?
August 7th, 2007 • Business, Search
It looks like Google is getting a true rival at last.
According to latest figures, MSN/Live search queries are up over 16% (June 06 to June 07), and up again to 17.8% in just one month (June-July 07).
I’ve got a little theory on why this may be the case. In recent months, I’ve taken to switching between Google, Ask UK and Live (heaven knows why - I suspect simply boredom with using Google every day).
I soon rejected Ask, the major issue being speed (and the fact that my eyes couldn’t sort the sponsored from real links at the top of the page). But Live, Live I stayed with. And again, the issue was speed. Every so often, it would return results before I had hit return… or at least it felt that way. And the results good enough fr me to forget: I never worried about using it.
That said, Live.com still has a long, long way to go. The latest figures show it eating just 10.1% of the overall market, with Google at 65% and (wait for it) still growing.
New York Times ‘to go completely free’
August 7th, 2007 • Business, Media
It looks as though once of the last bastions of paid-for content is about to go free. Sources close to the New York Times have confirmed that the news website is to cease charging for access to its OpEd columnists and other content. According to a New York Post story…
After much internal debate, Times executives - including publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. - made the decision to end the subscription-only TimesSelect service but have yet to make an official announcement, according to a source briefed on the matter.TIMESSELECT CONTENT FREED
The number of subscribers paying $50 a year fell from 224,000 in April to 221,000 in June. I confess I paid the man when TimesSelect first launched. I then dipped into the columns a few times, and the account has remained unused ever since. No offence to the NY Times team of writers - it’s only that the choice of free-to-air analysis is so wide.
The unconfirmed NYT move follows discussion of the Wall St Journal ditching its paid-for model.
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