The Advertising Blog

RELIANCE BIG ENTERTAINMENT AGREES TO ACQUIRE 50% SHAREHOLDING IN CODEMASTERS

2010-04-05T06:50:00.000-07:00

Codemasters, the leading British developer and publisher of world-class video games, announced that Reliance Big Entertainment Ltd. (RBEL), a part of India's Reliance ADA group, has agreed to acquire a 50 per cent shareholding in the company, alongside existing investor, Balderton Capital, the leading European venture capital firm that first invested in Codemasters in 2005.

RBEL's gaming division, Zapak Digital Entertainment Ltd. will oversee the Codemasters investment.

Zapak is the largest gaming company in India, with interests in online casual games, massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) publishing, India's largest chain of gaming cafes and physical distribution of gaming software. Zapak also controls Jump Games, an award winning international mobile game development and publishing company with global distribution across Asia, Europe, North America, and South America.

Rohit Sharma, CEO of Zapak, said: "We are excited to partner with Codemasters and believe it's very strong technology, development and distribution presence will complement our global gaming portfolio. Additionally, Zapak's global strength in mobile gaming will enhance Codemasters' ability to fully leverage its attractive franchises such as its racing and cricket games."

Codemasters has major franchises in cricket games (The Ashes), racing games (Formula 1, Dirt2 and Race Driver Grid), performance games (Dance Factory) and military simulations (Operation Flashpoint 2) and annual revenues in excess of US$ 150 Million.

Rod Cousens, chief executive of Codemasters, said: "The opportunities arising from this partnership are truly exciting. This is great news for our development and publishing teams. Reliance and Zapak have immense resources and will help us realize the full potential of our game coding and online excellence across so many platforms, and especially in the world's fastest growing markets. The future of Codemasters has never looked brighter. It's a whole new game!"

Tim Bunting, Balderton Partner, said: "We are delighted to welcome Reliance as our partner in Codemasters and gratified by the confidence in Codemasters that Reliance's initiative represents."
About Codemasters:

Codemasters (www.codemaster.com), the award winning games developer and publisher, has a 21 year heritage in the UK and annual revenues in excess of US$ 150 Million. It has major franchises in cricket games (The Ashes), racing games (Formula 1, Dirt2 and Race Driver Grid), performance games (Dance Factory) and military simulations (Operation Flashpoint 2).

Codemasters is widely acclaimed for its proprietary “new generation” game engine and the coding skills of its multiple UK and Malaysian development teams as well as its effective social network marketing strategies and the Codemasters Online Game team.

Headquartered in Warwickshire, UK, the company maintains European operations in Germany, France, Spain, and Benelux and, in 2006, established its US operations in California.

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment distributes Codemasters titles throughout the US. Across the group, Codemasters employs over 450 people. In January 2006, Chris Deering, the former President of Sony Europe, Consumer Electronics Division, and Chairman and CEO Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, was appointed non-executive Chairman. Rod Cousens joined the company as CEO in 2005.

You can read the complete article at http://www.zapak.com/news/zapak-codemasters.php

Keeping a True Identity Becomes a Battle Online

2009-06-19T01:53:00.001-07:00

Since Facebook started giving out customized Web addresses like facebook.com/yourname last Friday, some 9.5 million people have rushed to grab their top choice.

On Twitter, public fights have broken out over so-called impostor accounts, like those that should probably be in the hands of Kanye West or Bank of America.

And somewhere out there on the Web, another new service or social network is on the rise, threatening to start yet another online land grab.

Celebrities, companies and even regular people can be excused for feeling a bit of déjà vu. Staking out and protecting their names and trademarks on the Internet has become a seemingly never-ending battle. With the rise of social networks, registering a simple Web address like pepsi.com or mileycyrus .com is no longer enough to plant one’s flag firmly in the virtual terra firma.

When domain names first became hot properties in the ’90s, it was mostly companies that worried about claiming the right addresses. But in this more narcissistic Internet era, people who were once happily anonymous view themselves as online minicelebrities with their own brands to promote.

Those whose names are not unique may run into problems in trying to manage those brands. Chris Hardwick, a stand-up comedian and host on the tech-focused cable network G4, had no trouble registering chrishardwick.com a few years ago and securing the appropriate Gmail address. But he missed out on claiming his name on MySpace to a Chris Hardwick in Ohio. Last weekend, Mr. Hardwick got home from a performance too late to get his address of choice on Facebook; he said a high school student in England appeared to have grabbed it.

“It’s like a Wild West town full of Chris Hardwicks with their hands on their mouses getting ready to draw on each other,” he said.

To some, the rules of this new game are frustratingly hazy. Facebook has invited trademark holders and celebrities who find their names are taken to fill out a complaint form on the site. It says it will resolve disputes on a case-by-case basis. While Facebook’s social network has room for many people with the same name, the new vanity addresses are being distributed on a first-come-first-served basis.

Twitter has begun verifying the identities of well-known users, giving them a badge on their pages that serves to confirm that they are who they say they are. But it has revealed little about how that process works. A Twitter spokeswoman, Jenna Sampson, said the program was a small-scale test at this point.

Tony LaRussa, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, recently sued Twitter, saying it did not do enough to prevent someone from tweeting under his name. Twitter has called the lawsuit “frivolous” and says the network shuts down accounts used by known impersonators.

Another problem is that no one knows whether any of this online terrain has any lasting value — only that accounts on sites like Twitter and Facebook tend to show up at the top of the list when people search the Web. So many people are plunging in — including so-called cybersquatters who hope to profit, financially or otherwise, from Web addresses and accounts.

Larry Winget, the author of four popular books on personal finance, has been quick over the years to get control of his name on the Web and on sites like MySpace. But last weekend, a professed fan beat him to facebook.com/larrywinget and then said he would turn it over in exchange for a face-to-face dinner.

“It’s this constant effort, this sprint, to stay ahead of the technology,” Mr. Winget said. “You’ve got to hire a person just to stay on top of it.”

Companies are feeling just as much anxiety over the online name game. RCN, a cable and telephone service based in Herndon, Va., submitted a request last week to Facebook to secure facebook.com/rcn. But then Facebook said companies would need to have more than 1,000 fans on their pages to be eligible for the custom address program. RCN’s recently created page had 527 fans as of Wednesday.

RCN executives say they are frustrated with Facebook’s rules and are worried that they could lose what they suspect could be valuable real estate. Possible competitors for the address include people and organizations with those initials, along with the dreaded squatters.

“This is a new world that we are having to step into in order to protect our brand, and they did not give us a huge window of time to prepare for it,” said Ashlie Ellison, a Web producer for RCN.

Social media sites give companies new ways to promote their brands, said Howard H. Weller, a trademark lawyer at Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp in New York. But he added that “these are all new avenues for abuse, and it’s more resources trademark owners need to devote to policing and enforcement.”

The Facebook Web addresses in particular could be worth nothing — Facebook has said they will not be transferable, although users could quietly hand over the passwords to their accounts.

But digital squatters are still trying, creating potential headaches for companies. For example, Dell grabbed facebook.com/dell, but Jeremy Fancher, a student at Washington University in St. Louis, registered facebook.com/dellcomputer and plans to try to sell it. A Dell spokesman declined to comment.

“I think it would be sort of funny if another computer company buys it,” Mr. Fancher said. “It all illustrates how murky the water is when signing up for these accounts.”

[the article was originally published at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/technology/internet/18name.html]

Microsoft Says New Google Tool Interferes With Outlook Software

2009-06-19T01:50:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. clashed Wednesday, as the two giants traded barbs over a new Google software offering.

Microsoft said Google's new Apps Sync software disables the search capabilities of Microsoft's popular Outlook email program.

Google acknowledged an issue with its software, which it released last week. But Google disputed the severity of the problem, and said it is working to improve its software.

Apps Sync, which is aimed at businesses, allows users to merge data between Google's email and calendar service and Outlook.

The dispute illustrates the potential for tension between the two giants as Google seeks to encroach on the software turf of Microsoft while Microsoft attacks Google's search business.

In a post on a company blog, Microsoft's Outlook product manager, Dev Balasubramanian, said Apps Sync includes a "serious bug/flaw" that disables Outlook's ability to search data like emails and contacts.

Google product manager Chris Vander Mey said in a blog post that Apps Sync disables Windows Desktop Search, a separate piece of software, because it doesn't work properly with Google's software.

A Google spokesman said users can still use the search function within Outlook to search their emails and contacts.

[the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124526980217124483.html]

Google Searches for Ways to Keep Big Ideas at Home

2009-06-19T00:52:00.000-07:00

Google Inc. is revamping how it develops and prioritizes new products, giving employees a pipeline to the company's top brass amid worries about losing its best people and promising ideas to start-ups.

The Mountain View, Calif., company famously lets its engineers spend one day a week on projects that aren't part of their jobs. But Google has lacked a formal process for senior executives to review those efforts, and some ideas have languished. Others have slipped away when employees left the company.

"We were concerned that some of the biggest ideas were getting squashed," said Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt in an interview.

Google can no longer afford to let promising ideas fall by the wayside. The Internet search giant's once-torrid growth has slowed. At the same time, it faces fresh competition from Microsoft Corp.'s new search engine, Bing, and start-ups such as Twitter Inc., which was founded by former Google employees.

In response, Google has recently started internal "innovation reviews," formal meetings where executives present product ideas bubbling up through their divisions to Mr. Schmidt, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and other top executives.

Employees at their desks inside Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., shown in March 2008.

The meetings are designed to "force management to focus" on promising ideas at an early stage, Mr. Schmidt said.

The efforts have been behind several services that Google has recently unveiled, including software that allows companies to use Microsoft's Outlook email and calendar software while storing their data with Google. Microsoft said Wednesday the Google software interferes with an Outlook search function; Google disputed the severity of the problem, but said it is working to improve its software.

Another project, an imaging product that is based on facial-recognition software developed inside Google, is expected to be released this summer.

Google has also begun to give a few engineers broad leeway to start big projects of their choosing, Mr. Schmidt said. One result of this effort: Google Wave, a collaboration tool that the company previewed last month.

The moves are a shift for Google. Previously, its early-stage projects weren't systematically vetted by top executives. Employees with a new idea would lobby their bosses for resources and time. Once approved, a project could linger or die without getting much attention from senior management.

Google needs new products to jumpstart its growth. While it remains a juggernaut with one-third of all U.S. advertising dollars spent online, its year-over-year revenue growth has slowed from 56% in 2007 to 31% in 2008 and was just 6% in the first quarter of this year.

What's more, employees continue to leave Google as it evolves into a mature company with 20,000 workers. "Most product managers evaluate [whether to stay] every six months," said Chris Vander Mey, a senior Google product manager who worked on the Microsoft Office integration.

While praising how Google has supported small projects like his own, he said he still expects to leave the company over time to explore other interests.

Google has taken cracks in the past at the retention problem. In March, it repriced millions of employee stock options whose value had been wiped out as Google's share price has fallen over the past two years. The company has also begun testing a mathematical formula to try to predict which employees are most likely to leave, based on factors like employee reviews.

David Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor who studies technology and e-commerce companies, said prioritizing is important for Google. While Google has launched hordes of new experiments, "in the absence of focus and promotion" few have turned into blockbusters, he said.

In the case of Google Wave, the company singled out Lars Rasmussen and Jens Rasmussen to test its approach to developing ideas.

The brothers, who are based in Australia, had been working on Google Maps. On the side, they were also thinking about creating a new communication system to replace email.

Messrs. Schmidt, Page and Brin were intrigued and gave the engineers a long leash. "We said go do something really interesting and take as many resources as you need," Mr. Schmidt said. They gave the Rasmussens dozens of employees, he added, substantially more people than most early-stage projects.

To allow the duo to stick to their vision for the product, the top executives kept Wave secret from the rest of the company. Wave wasn't opened up to broader employee feedback until later in the development cycle.

Lars Rasmussen said the conditions freed his team from concerns such as fighting for engineers and removed pressure to integrate with other Google products. "We knew we had to do something different," he said.

While Google has high hopes for Wave, which combines communications like email and messaging through a new service that updates in real-time, some are skeptical. Search analyst Danny Sullivan said he was "underwhelmed" by Wave and sees the service as a feature rather than a whole new way to share information. The service is scheduled to be released to the public later this year.

Other current and former Google employees see Wave as an exception. Sean Knapp, a former Google engineer, left the company in 2007 and started Ooyala Inc., a start-up that distributes and manages advertising around online video.

Mr. Knapp said Google managers offered him the chance to start the project within the company, but he declined. He worried he wouldn't feel the same pressure to succeed. "If you're really aggressive, you want that sink or swim environment," he said.

Mr. Schmidt said it is "a fact of life" that some Google employees will ultimately choose the risk and reward of a start-up. But he added the company tries to make it possible to be "part of a start-up within Google."

[the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124528387214225641.html]

Iran Protests: Twitter, the Medium of the Movement

2009-06-19T00:49:00.000-07:00

The U.S. State Department doesn't usually take an interest in the maintenance schedules of dotcom start-ups. But over the weekend, officials there reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled for Monday night. The reason? To protect the interests of Iranians using the service to protest the presidential election that took place on June 12. Twitter moved the upgrade to 2 p.m. P.T. Tuesday afternoon — or 1:30 a.m. Tehran time. (Read "The Iran Election: Twitter's Big Moment.")

When Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone founded Twitter in 2006, they were probably worried about things like making money and protecting people's privacy and drunk college kids breaking up with one another in 140 characters or less. What they weren't worried about was being suppressed by the Iranian government. But in the networked, surreally flattened world of social media, those things aren't as far apart as they used to be — and what began as a toy for online flirtation is suddenly being put to much more serious uses. After the election in Iran, cries of protest from supporters of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi arose in all possible media, but the loudest cries were heard in a medium that didn't even exist the last time Iran had an election. (See pictures of Iran's presidential election and its turbulent aftermath.)

So what exactly makes Twitter the medium of the moment? It's free, highly mobile, very personal and very quick. It's also built to spread, and fast. Twitterers like to append notes called hashtags — #theylooklikethis — to their tweets, so that they can be grouped and searched for by topic; especially interesting or urgent tweets tend to get picked up and retransmitted by other Twitterers, a practice known as retweeting, or just RT. And Twitter is promiscuous by nature: tweets go out over two networks, the Internet and SMS, the network that cell phones use for text messages, and they can be received and read on practically anything with a screen and a network connection. (Read about how Twitter is changing the way we live.)

This makes Twitter practically ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control. The same might be true of e-mail and Facebook, but those media aren't public. They don't broadcast, as Twitter does. On June 13, when protests started to escalate, and the Iranian government moved to suppress dissent both on- and off-line, the Twitterverse exploded with tweets from people who weren't having it, both in English and in Farsi. While the front pages of Iranian newspapers were full of blank space where censors had whited-out news stories, Twitter was delivering information from street level, in real time:

Woman says ppl knocking on her door 2 AM saying they were intelligence agents, took her daughter

Ashora platoons now moving from valiasr toward National Tv staion. mousavi's supporters are already there. my father is out there!

we hear 1dead in shiraz, livefire used in other cities RT

As is so often the case in the media world, Twitter's strengths are also its weaknesses. The vast body of information about current events in Iran that circulates on Twitter is chaotic, subjective and totally unverifiable. It's impossible to authenticate sources. It's also not clear who exactly is using Twitter within Iran, especially in English. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the bulk of tweets are coming from "hyphenated" Iranians not actually in the country who are getting the word out to Western observers, rather than from the protesters themselves, who favor other, less public media. This is, after all, a country where the government once debated the death penalty for dissident bloggers. (See pictures of daily life in Iran.)

Twitter isn't a magic bullet against dictators. As tempting as it is to think of the service as a purely anarchic weapon of the masses, too distributed to be stoppable, it is theoretically feasible for a government to shut it down, according to James Cowie, CTO of Renesys, a company that collects data on the status of the Internet in real time. While Iran has a rich and diverse Internet culture, data traffic into and out of Iran passes through a very small number of channels. It's technically relatively trivial for the state to take control of those choke points and block IP addresses delivering tweets through them. The SMS network is even more centralized and structured than the Internet, and hence even easier to censor.

But there are counter-countermeasures to this kind of censorship. Sympathetic observers outside Iran have set up "proxies," servers that relay Twitter content into Iran through network addresses that haven't been blocked yet. When the Iranian authorities discover such a proxy, they block it too. It's an arms race crossed with whack-a-mole. Protesters are also organizing denial-of-service attacks against government websites — coordinated efforts to shut down their servers by flooding them with traffic.

Rumors of the Iranian authorities' tampering with Twitter traffic are rampant. But very little hard data is available, and so far it's not clear that they've throttled Twitter completely. Why not is a matter of great speculation. It's quite possible that the government finds Twitter useful as a way of monitoring protesters, gathering data on them and even tracking them down. There are also signs that the Iranian government may be infiltrating the Twitter network itself, manipulating it to its own advantage. This tweet went out over the network earlier today, and was itself retweeted more than 200 times:

DO NOT RT anything U read from "NEW" tweeters, gvmt spreading misinfo

Twitter didn't start the protests in Iran, nor did it make them possible. But there's no question that it has emboldened the protesters, reinforced their conviction that they are not alone and engaged populations outside Iran in an emotional, immediate way that was never possible before. President Ahmadinejad — who happened to visit Russia on Tuesday — now finds himself in a court of world opinion where even Khrushchev never had to stand trial. Totalitarian governments rule by brute force, and because they control the consensus worldview of those they rule. Tyranny, in other words, is a monologue. But as long as Twitter is up and running, there's no such thing.

[the article was originally published at http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html]

Ruling on NightJack author Richard Horton kills blogger anonymity

2009-06-19T00:46:00.000-07:00

Thousands of bloggers who operate behind the cloak of anonymity have no right to keep their identities secret, the High Court ruled yesterday.

In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of the NightJack blog. The officer, Richard Horton, 45, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary, had sought an injunction to stop The Times from revealing his name.

In April Mr Horton was awarded the Orwell Prize for political writing, but the judges were unaware that he was using information about cases, some involving sex offences against children, that could be traced back to genuine prosecutions.

His blog, which gave a behind-the-scenes insight into frontline policing, included strong views on social and political issues.

The officer also criticised and ridiculed “a number of senior politicians” and advised members of the public under police investigation to “complain about every officer . . . show no respect to the legal system or anybody working in it”.

Some of the blog’s best-read sections, which on occasion attracted half a million readers a week, were anecdotes about cases on which Mr Horton had worked. The people and places were made anonymous and details changed, but they could still be traced back to real prosecutions.

In the first case dealing with the privacy of internet bloggers, the judge ruled that Mr Horton had no “reasonable expectation” to anonymity because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity”.

The judge also said that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a right to anonymity, the judge would have ruled against him on public interest grounds.

The police officer, the judge said, had argued that he should not be exposed because it could put him at risk of disciplinary action for breaching regulations. But Mr Justice Eady criticised that argument as “unattractive to say the least”.

He added: “I do not accept that it is part of the court’s function to protect police officers who are, or think they may be, acting in breach of police discipline regulations from coming to the attention of their superiors.”

He added: “It would seem to be quite legitimate for the public to be told who it was who was choosing to make, in some instances quite serious criticisms of police activities and, if it be the case, that frequent infringements of police discipline regulations were taking place.”

The action arose after Patrick Foster, a Times journalist, identified the NightJack blogger “by a process of deduction and detective work, mainly using information on the internet,” the judge said.

Hugh Tomlinson, QC, for Mr Horton, had argued that “thousands of regular bloggers . . . would be horrified to think that the law would do nothing to protect their anonymity if someone carried out the necessary detective work and sought to unmask them”. Mr Tomlinson said that Mr Horton wished to remain anonymous and had taken steps to preserve his anonymity.

But Mr Justice Eady said that the mere fact that the blogger wanted to remain anonymous did not mean that he had a “reasonable expectation” of doing so or that The Times was under an enforceable obligation to him to maintain that anonymity.

Antony White, QC, for The Times, argued that there was a public interest in non-compliance by a police officer with his obligations under the statutory code governing police behaviour and also with general public law duty on police officers not to reveal information obtained in the course of a police investigation other than for performing his public duties.

Lancashire Constabulary said: “He has been spoken to regarding his professional behaviour and, in line with disciplinary procedures, has been issued with a written warning.”

[the article was originally published at http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6509677.ece]

How MySpace fell off the pace

2009-06-19T00:44:00.000-07:00

MySpace is looking to do an about-face.

The once-red-hot social networking site acquired three years ago by septuagenarian mogul Rupert Murdoch, which landed him on the cover of Wired magazine and won News Corp. praise for embracing the Internet ahead of its old-media rivals, has cooled considerably.

New statistics released this week show MySpace has been surpassed by rival Facebook in the U.S. market, where it once dominated, and ad revenue for the site is projected to decline.

Signaling the depth of its problems, MySpace on Tuesday said it was laying off 420 people -- nearly one out of every three employees -- as part of an aggressive restructuring that seeks to make the company smaller and more agile. The action follows a management shake-up in April, in which MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe was replaced as chief executive by Facebook's former chief operating officer, Owen Van Natta.

"Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company," Van Natta said in a statement. "I understand that these changes are painful for many. They are also necessary for the long-term health and culture of MySpace."

Van Natta's comments underscore just how troubled Murdoch's big Internet gamble has become in the rapidly changing world of social media. Highly touted initiatives, such as MySpace Music, failed to live up to expectations, even as the site's developers constantly play catch-up to the technological innovations of others.

"MySpace ended up not being the leader that it wanted to be in the social-networking realm, on the tech front, on the ad front -- and now on the usage front," said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst with researcher eMarketer.

The perceived missteps are numerous. Some observers say it clung too long to a "portal strategy," in which it sought to amass an audience around entertainment content. By contrast, Facebook maintained its focus on features that enhance the social-networking experience, such as the "News Feed" that matches the immediacy of Twitter's staccato updates.

"The speed with which a company like Facebook is able to innovate and keep things fresh is the key to survival in this space," said Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group, a research firm specializing in social networking. "There are new things like Twitter that come along. What does Facebook do? It does Twitter . . . and it does it better."

MySpace's miscalculations have cost it ground in its competition against Facebook.

Online audience measurement firm ComScore reported MySpace attracted 70.25 million users in May -- a loss of 3.4 million people from the same period a year earlier. Meanwhile, Facebook nearly doubled the number of users over the same period and overtook MySpace in the U.S., with 70.28 million users.

Still, as Microsoft Research ethnographer Danah Boyd points out, with 70 million users, MySpace has hardly disappeared. "They are still as large as they were a year ago. And a year ago we were in awe of their size."

As the number of MySpace users declines, so does advertising revenue. EMarketer projects that U.S. revenue will fall 15% to $495 million in 2009 from $585 million last year.

Although News Corp. doesn't break out financial details for MySpace, revenue for the media giant's Fox Interactive Media division was down 11% in the most recent quarter from a year earlier, reflecting a double-digit drop in advertising. FIM also includes IGN Entertainment and the movie review site Rotten Tomatoes, although contributions from those businesses are modest compared with those from MySpace.

Murdoch tried to reassure investors about MySpace's direction during the company's earnings call last month, declaring that the management changes at MySpace "will help it regain its momentum."

That task may be harder than it looks. The history of social networks suggests that these sites have the fleeting popularity of a trendy nightclub. The site that's recognized as the birthplace of online communities, the Well, gave way to the more broadly available America Online, which was eclipsed by Friendster -- which itself became passe.

"Each of these services supplants the one before. It takes the golden ring and everyone loves that, and they forget about the last one," said Roger L. Kay, president of research firm Endpoint Technologies Associates. "MySpace made sense at a particular date, that might have been 2003. At that moment, it was the place to be. . . . Now, they have to do some major spade work on the quality of the site if they want to maintain the eyeballs."

[the article was oroginally published at http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-myspace17-2009jun17,0,6726077.story]

Check it Out : Wearing the Pants in a Social Media Setting

2009-06-19T00:30:00.000-07:00

Think you can't make any real money marketing on social networks? Think they're really only branding tools? Think again.

I recently learned about a pretty cool online retailer and manufacturer of men's clothing that's gaining real marketing ROI from targeted ads on Facebook.

The company is called Bonobos, and it sells fashionable men's pants, shorts, swimsuits and shirts that cost less than most high-end brands.

The two-year-old company began using Facebook's online sales system in March 2008 to create ads targeted to demographic groups that were likely to be interested in its product lines. The Facebook presence works "incredibly well and is very easy to use," says Dave Eisenberg, the New York City-based e-retailer/manufacturer's chief of staff and acting vice president of marketing. "We could quickly create ads and target them to different regions, age groups, college backgrounds and work environments. We basically tailor our pitch to everybody in a unique way."

Bonobos also did some super targeting: Last spring, it launched a pair of pants with a Chicago Cubs theme in royal blue and targeted it to the demo that fit Cubs fans. The result? A grand slam: Bonobos sold 100 pairs and sold out within a month.

"This was the highest sales rate compared to any other advertising campaign we'd run before," Eisenberg says.

Right Clicking
Because Facebook's ad inventory isn't particularly expensive, clicks are a lot less expensive than any other form of online advertising Eisenberg's seen.

"With Facebook, you can find cost-per-thousand impressions for less than $1 for a very targeted, highly educated clientele, and that's not easy to find around the Web," he says. The system also allows for easy tracking. When customers click on Facebook ads, for example, they're directed to Bonobos' homepage or a landing page created for the ad that has a coupon affiliated with it. Bonobos adds a tracking code to the ad as well.

This past March, the company launched several styles of pants that it believed would work well with specific schools' sports teams. A pair of light blue pants, for example, was targeted to University of North Carolina fans.

"These all performed very well," Eisenberg says, adding that Bonobos plans to create similar promotions for the fall college football season as well.

Selling Via Social Media? Go On!
What we have here is proof that social media and social networking really work, especially if you use traditional direct marketing techniques in tandem with them — and if you target your ads to the right people.

[you can read more at http://www.allaboutroimag.com/article/targeted-facebook-marketing-pays-off-upstart-mens-apparel-merchant-407580_1.html]

IAB Proposes New In-Game Ad Measurement Guidelines

2009-06-19T00:10:00.000-07:00

The Interactive Advertising Bureau issued a new draft of its in-game ad measurement guidelines yesterday. The release of the document, available on the IAB's site, begins a public comment period during which buyers and sellers will weigh in on proposed definitions and recording methods for PC, console, and Web-based game ad impressions.

In addition to providing a methodology for counting those impressions, the guidelines create a glossary of in-game advertising terms. These include "cool off period," which is similar in concept to frequency capping, and "occlusion," a visual obstruction to an ad. The document was released yesterday during the IAB Marketplace: Games event.

Little communication has come from the IAB's in-game advertising committee since it issued a Game Ad State of the Union report in the fall of 2007.

For logo-based ads, or ads containing a textual message, the document states an impression counts once a user has viewed an ad for a cumulative 10 seconds. However each fractional exposure has to be at least 0.5 seconds. The cumulative 10 second impression was first established by Massive several years ago, then became generally accepted in the industry.

"Ultimately this is something that the IAB put together to help sell in-game," said Dino Mytides, director, new media at Interpret LLC a measurement and market research firm that concentrates on the entertainment, media, and technology sectors. "It won't likely stay like this forever, but for now [the cumulative 10 seconds] is definitely where it should be."

(the article was originally published at http://www.clickz.com/3634095)

Digital spending to fuel slower media growth - PwC

2009-06-19T00:08:00.000-07:00

*Global spending growth seen accelerating in 2012-2013

*Digital growth seen taking share from non-digital forms

*US digital ad growth seen growing to 25 pct of total

By Gina Keating

LOS ANGELES, June 16 (Reuters) - Global spending on entertainment and media will reach $1.6 trillion in 2013 at a relatively sedate 2.7 percent annual average growth rate with growth in digital content offsetting declines in traditional media revenue models, PriceWaterhouseCoopers said on Tuesday.

The migration to digital entertainment will accelerate as companies seek efficiencies in advertising and distribution in a downturn and consumers want greater control and higher value, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers' Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2009-2013, released on Tuesday.

The report also showed declines in consumer and ad spending in some areas through 2011, with healthy growth returning in 2012-2013, and media companies struggling to attract revenue from fragmented and mobile audiences.

The U.S. entertainment and media market will ultimately grow at a 1.2 percent average annual rate to $495 billion in 2013, with Internet access and Internet ad sales leading the way, the five-year forecast for the media sector showed.

Growth of digital segments will sharply outpace the rest of the industry during the downturn and recovery, with digital revenues taking share from non-digital, the report showed.

Revenue declines throughout the forecast period were forecast for TV advertising, consumer and educational book and magazine publishing, recorded music, and newspaper publishing.

Overall U.S. advertising spending was expected to decline by a 1.7 percent annual average to $174 billion in 2013 from $189 billion in 2008, while global advertising in 2011 will be 13.3 percent lower than in 2008, the report said.

"The current decline in revenues is not because of declining demand," Bill Cobourn of PricewaterhouseCoopers' media and entertainment practice said. "In fact, demand for

(entertainment and media) appears to be increasing."

Mobile and digital platforms globally will expand at an average annual rate of 12.2 percent to reach $387 billion by 2013 while non-digital forms grow at a 1.2 percent annual average, the report said.

U.S. digital spending will rise to 25 percent of total industry revenues in 2013, from 17 percent in 2008, the report showed. Advertisers also will shift toward new media, boosting Internet advertising to 19 percent of U.S. advertising by 2013, from 13 percent in 2008, the report showed.

(you to read more at http://www.reuters.com/article/technology-media-telco-SP/idUSN1524587120090616)

Google's Grab for the Display Ad Market

2009-06-19T00:06:00.000-07:00

For all its success selling text ads alongside search results, Google (GOOG) can't seem to make a go of it anywhere else in the ad world. In January, it shut down a two-year-old operation that sold print ads in newspapers. A few weeks later it abandoned an effort to buy and sell radio spots. And a TV ad project has been slow-going. To make matters worse, the economy has hit Google's mainstay search ads: First-quarter revenue growth of 6%, though better than many companies in the recession, is far below its high double-digit gains of years past.

In its hunt for new growth, the search giant is redoubling efforts to grab a bigger piece of the largest online ad market it doesn't control: display ads, the pictorial banners and videos that account for more than a third of the $40 billion online ad market. "Google has won the search battle, so its whole future is display," says Jay Sears, executive vice-president for strategic products and business development with online ad firm ContextWeb.

Google faces a tough challenge. Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN have a huge lead in display ads, largely because they can put ads on their own pages of content, like Yahoo Finance and MSN Money. Google hopes to place more display ads on its YouTube site as well as on thousands of partner sites, from small blogs to The New York Times.
MATCHING ADS TO BUYERS

But it aims to do more than simply help BMW, say, plaster brand ads on car videos or car sites. The fastest-growing kind of display ads, called performance ads, work more like search. They allow advertisers to use data analysis and user-tracking technologies to match ads more closely to likely buyers and measure mouse clicks and other actions so advertisers pay only when ads deliver. Google spies an opportunity to apply its mathematical wizardry to make those ads even more effective. The idea is to make display ads useful knowledge instead of visual clutter. "It's like search—matching people with information they want," says Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder and president of technology. "It just happens to be promotional."

This summer, Google will begin demonstrating what may be its most potent weapon in this emerging battle: an overhauled version of the advertising exchange that it picked up in the $3.2 billion acquisition of DoubleClick last year. Ad exchanges are sort of like stock exchanges for online ads. Web sites put ad space up for auction, and ad agencies, armed with demographic and behavioral data about the people who visit those sites, bid to place ads for their clients' campaigns. Yahoo, Microsoft, and others also run exchanges.

Until now, Google's and DoubleClick's ad-placement systems used different software, so ad agencies had to cobble together programs to place, monitor, and measure ads. In the revamped exchange, they'll be able to use the two systems seamlessly, making ad buys simpler. At the same time, Google is pushing Web publishers, which have been wary of putting prime ad space on the exchange for fear of turning it into a low-value commodity, to pony up more space. In return, Google is expected to give Web publishers more control over pricing and who can bid on the space.

Google will also help advertisers and agencies buy ads more easily and quickly: When ad space with price and audience demographics matches those advertisers set for a particular ad, the spot runs instantly. "The exchange will allow Google to make a go of it in display," says Michael Hayes, executive vice-president and managing director of digital for ad agency Initiative. "It really turns the business model on its head."

The exchange is part of Google's overriding goal to make display ads, which can be expensive to create and complex to manage, so easy that even the smallest businesses can use them. "Google's vision is to grow the pie for everybody," says Neal Mohan, Google's director of display products. For instance, Google introduced a free Display Ad Builder last fall that lets anyone use simple building blocks to create an ad.

(you could read more at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_25/b4136052151611.htm)

Facebook to Begin Mediating Intractable Web Name Disputes

2009-06-19T00:04:00.000-07:00

As has been widely noted in the blogosphere this week, Friday night Facebook will begin allowing users to register their own plain-language Facebook domain names, like facebook.com/bits.

Until now, Facebook’s profile pages were delineated by an awkward string of letters and numbers (”http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=500019730&”), which isn’t handily printed on business cards and doesn’t play well in search engines like Google.

Anticipating a frenetic land rush for the best names, Facebook says it will assign the new addresses on a first-come, first-serve basis, starting Friday at midnight, Eastern time. It is allowing trademark holders to fill out forms protecting their marks and says it will internally mediate all disputes.

Which may not stop things from getting ugly.

Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has been in the thick of quarrels over Web site names for more than a decade and has watched companies and lawyers generate waves of lawsuits over coveted URLs. Things became so ugly that in 1999, it began requiring Web site registrants to agree to participate in binding arbitration if any third party asserted a claim over the Web address in question.

Discussing the challenges ahead for Facebook, Tim Cole, Icann’s chief registrar liaison, said that even careful mediation processes will not prevent skirmishes from breaking out, and wondered if Facebook knew what it was getting itself into.

“This sounds like the early days when Network Solutions started doing domain registrations, and they didn’t anticipate the nature of the trademark issues that started arising and weren’t prepared for the flurry of lawsuits they started receiving,” Mr. Cole said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if the same thing happened here.”

The creativity of Facebook users, said Mr. Cole (a member of Facebook himself), should not be underestimated. “When someone registers something like ‘Facebook.com/MicrosoftSucks,’ what happens then?” He added that Facebook itself could come under legal fire by an aggrieved party who is not interested in waiting for a perceived trademark infringement to be resolved.

“Unless they have a really distinctive way to prevent abuses from arising, I have to believe disputes will arise fairly quickly as soon as people start registering names,” he said.

(the article was oringinally published at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/facebook-to-begin-mediating-intractable-web-name-disputes/)

Political Cues in China Web Filter

2009-06-18T23:58:00.000-07:00

BEIJING - Web-filtering software that the Chinese government will require on all new personal computers includes data files containing political keywords and Web addresses, suggesting it could block more than just pornography, say people who have studied the program.

A notice sent to PC makers last month said they must include the software with all new PCs shipped in China as of July 1. Chinese officials and the main developer of the software have said the purpose of the software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, is to enable parents to prevent their children from viewing online pornography. But foreign industry officials and free-speech advocates have criticized the plan as an effort by Beijing to expand its censorship powers.

Isaac Mao, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, said Green Dam data files have a broad range of political content, "much more than Falun Gong," the banned spiritual group.

Mr. Mao, who has seen the program's coding, said the words in the lists aren't necessarily blocked by the software. He said the blocking will appear inconsistent to users because the program includes mechanisms that activate and deactivate various functions. The software also appears to communicate with a centralized server, he said.

Shi Zhao, a prominent Beijing blogger, said he found data files with Chinese phrases such as "6-4 massacre" -- a reference to the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4, 1989 -- and "the celebration of Tibetan people."

Keyword documents in the software related to political content "are very big -- much, much bigger than those related to pornographic content," Mr. Shi said.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which issued the Green Dam requirement, didn't respond to requests to comment.

Wang Jingcheng, deputy general manager of Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Co., the developer responsible for Green Dam's keyword technology, declined to comment on reports the software blocks political content. He said earlier that it would block content "according to the law."

Bryan Zhang, founder of Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co., the primary developer of Green Dam, said the software serves no purpose other than filtering pornography. He said Jinhui compiled and maintains the list of blocked Web sites. "I know what is on my own blacklist," he said. Mr. Zhang declined to share the contents of the list of blocked sites, arguing that doing so would "promote" the Web sites.

Industry officials have also expressed concerns that the software could expose computers to viruses, or worse. Researchers at the University of Michigan, in a preliminary investigation, found programming errors creating "serious vulnerabilities that allow any Web site the user visits to take control of the PC," said J. Alex Halderman, a professor involved in the tests.

The government continued its defense of the software requirement on Thursday. State-run broadcaster China Central Television publicized a newspaper report that said a "vast number of parents and experts welcome the preinstalled green Internet surfing software."

But commentaries in prominent publications have expressed other views. On the Web site of the Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily, a Peking University journalism professor, Xie Xinzhou, said blocking and filtering content shows the government is "treating all Internet users as children."

(the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124474567529507107.html)

Affluent Set Gets Selective

2009-06-04T01:15:00.000-07:00

Affluent Internet users are more active than ever on PCs and mobile devices -- but their spending zeal has been somewhat tempered by the recession, according to an analysis of recent data by eMarketer.

The number of "affluents" continues to grow, even in a severe recession. In March, 50.1 million people in households with incomes of $100,000 or more were online, up 3.4 percent from March 2008, per comScore.

In 2009, affluent households are evaluating future purchases carefully and have reined in spending. Investment strategies have switched to preservation of assets rather than acquiring new ones. Global sales of luxury goods are predicted to slide 10 percent in 2009 to $201 billion, according to Bain & Co. However, the habits and patterns acquired since the start of the recession are not expected to quickly revert to normal.

Luxury brand marketers must stay top-of-mind with wealthy Internet users by offering superior customer service, personalized products and exclusive offers and invitations.

Other marketers hoping to entice affluent consumers that are "trading down" must raise the bar in their online efforts, not by advertising so much as taking care to explain how their products or services fit in with the affluent lifestyle.

(the article was originally published at http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3i4fb04ccd3a536c41bb519e44d941f41b)

Google Unveils a Conversation Service

2009-06-04T01:04:00.000-07:00

Google Inc. previewed a new communications service that combines features of email, instant-messaging and document-sharing to facilitate multiperson conversations online.

The Google Wave service caps a years-long project to come up with a way to break down the barriers between different types of online communication services, said Lars Rasmussen, the Google engineer who led the development of the service along with his brother, Jens Rasmussen.

The service, which won't be open to the public for several months, will allow users to start a conversation, called a "wave," and to invite their contacts to join it. Any member of the wave can put photos, notes or other content into the group, which updates in near-real time.

People see an "in-box" with the most recent waves they have joined and whether others have added any new notes or content to them. They can click to scroll through the wave and see what content has been added to it.

Dozens of Internet companies, including Facebook Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are racing to come up with new methods for sharing and organizing online information.

Google, which announced the new service at its developer conference in San Francisco on Thursday, envisions Wave as not only a way to share messages with friends and colleagues, but also to share and access a variety of information online. For instance, a user could create a wave that is an article he or she wrote and then invite people to read and comment on it.

Mr. Rasmussen said it is too early to tell how consumers will use Wave, but he expects that the various applications and services Google hopes developers will build on top of it will be a big draw. Videogame developers could build a game that began as a wave, for example, and Google will allow other Web sites to embed waves into their Web sites.

He added that Google hasn't thought much about how the service could generate revenue. "One of the great luxuries of Google is that we get to not think about that yet," he said.

(the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124353647910863557.html)

Microsoft’s Search for a Name Ends With a Bing

2009-06-04T00:56:00.000-07:00

“Why don’t you Bing it?”

A year from now, if you hear someone say that — and actually understand what it means — Bill Gates will be a happy billionaire.

That is because it will be a sign that Microsoft is finally making progress in its quest to challenge Google in the Internet search business.

Bing, the name Microsoft gave to the new search service it unveiled Thursday, is its answer to Google — a noun that once meant little but has become part of the language as a verb that is a synonym for executing a Web search. After months of, uh, searching, Microsoft settled on Bing to replace the all-too-forgettable Live Search, which itself replaced MSN Search.

Microsoft invested billions of dollars in those services and failed to slow Google’s rise, so a new name certainly can’t hurt.

Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on “The Sopranos” but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the “aha” moment when a search leads to an answer.

The name is meant to conjure “the sound of found” as Bing helps people with complex tasks like shopping for a camera, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group.

And if Bing turns into a verb like, say, Xerox, TiVo or, well, Google, that would be nice too. Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said Thursday that he liked Bing’s potential to “verb up.” Plus, he said, “it works globally, and doesn’t have negative, unusual connotations.”

Some branding experts said choosing the name Bing was a good start, but also the easiest part of the challenge facing the company, since most people turn to Google without even thinking about it.

Michael Cronan, whose consulting firm helped come up with brands like TiVo and Amazon’s Kindle, said Bing’s sound, brevity and “ing” ending were all positives.

“It has a promise that you are going to find what you are looking for, and that’s great,” Mr. Cronan said. “But its success is entirely wrapped up in the quality of the experience that Microsoft can deliver.”

Peter Sealey, a former chief marketing officer at the Coca-Cola Company, said Microsoft should have picked a name that more directly connotes search.

“Bing has no equity; it signals nothing,” Mr. Sealey said. “It is going to be an enormous expense to create an image for this thing called Bing.”

Google’s name is a play on the word googol, which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The company has said the name speaks to its ambitious mission to organize all the world’s information.

Asked about Microsoft’s choice of name at a press conference on Wednesday, Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, said he did not know enough about the new service to comment on it. Then he deadpanned: “We’ve been pretty happy with the name Google.”

Meanwhile, some tech people were already noting that Bing is also an unfortunate acronym: “But It’s Not Google.”

(the article was originally published at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/technology/internet/29bing.html?ref=technology)

McAfee Lists Most Dangerous Search Terms

2009-06-04T00:44:00.000-07:00

A report from McAfee that lists what it considers "The Web's Most Dangerous Search Terms" includes a lot of terms that may surprise you.

The news comes shortly after a report from Panda Security revealed that malware writers have become adept at search engine optimization and are even building their own search engines. The McAfee report covers only legitimate search engines.

Users searching for downloadable content -- especially screen savers, music lyrics, and free digital music -- are at risk of downloading malware instead, the study concluded. The survey covered over 2,600 popular keywords from a wide variety of sources for the U.S. and from Google Zeitgeist for international search.

For each keyword, the company examined the safety of search results on the first five pages of the following five search engines: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, Ask, and AOL for a total of 25 pages of results.

The McAfee study also touts two of its free services, SiteAdvisor (software that rates the riskiness of search engine links) and the Cybercrime Response Unit (which helps victims contact financial institutions and law enforcement).

The company counted the number of items marked dangerous (red or yellow) by SiteAdvisor and divided that by the total number of results to produce two numbers: the most risky page in all the results, and the average risk across the 25 pages. Across all results, the average risk was 1.7 percent and the maximum risk averaged out to 10 percent.

SiteAdvisor tracks the following risks: downloads, browser exploits, e-mail registration forms and ease of unsubscribing, phishing (define), excessive popups, and links to other risky sites. Sites that fail one or more of these tests get a red rating, and sites that "merit caution before using" get a yellow rating. Green ratings go to sites with no risk or only "very minor" risks.

It would have been interesting to compare the relative safety of these five search engines, but that was not the purpose of the study, said Shane Keats, McAfee research analyst, in an e-mail to InternetNews.com.

"This is a study that focuses on keywords, not search engines. We wanted consumers to have a simple take-away from this study: The Web is a great resource but consumers need to understand that it has risks, and those risks are magnified if you search in popular categories," he wrote.

He added that customers can avoid the risks as they would avoid risks while driving. "As with driving on highways, risks can be mitigated if you use safe rules of the road," he said.
Beware of downloads

The riskiest terms were those that involved downloading content. Around the world, "lyrics" was one of the most dangerous search terms, appearing in the top 10 in the U.S., Canada, The Netherlands, and New Zealand.

In the U.S., the most dangerous search terms were "free music downloads" (20.7 percent average risk), "game cheats" (16.7 percent), "word unscambler" (16.1 percent), followed by "lyrics" (14.8 percent).

For further keyword analysis, McAfee contracted with Hitwise, an Internet data company, to collate risk levels from individual keywords into categories. The riskiest category by far was "screensavers," with an average risk of 34.4 percent, followed by "free games" (6.8 percent), "work from home" (3.1 percent), "Rihanna" (2.4 percent), "Wekbinz" (1.9 percent), "powerball" (1.5 percent) and "iPhone" and the "Jonas brothers," both at 1.2 percent.

Globally, the keywords with the worst average risk profiles were "free" sites (7.3 percent) and lyrics sites (5.1 percent).

The report said that it made sense that malware writers were targeting keywords associated with downloading. "One key tool cybercriminals use to snare victims is to get them to download a computer file or program that comes with a malicious payload," the report said.

Malware writers exploit current events. "Hackers are most successful when they can attract a large number of victims. One way to target big crowds online is to track current events -- everything from celebrity meltdowns and natural disasters to holidays and popular music," the report said.

"The best protection is to install a computer security suite and keep it up to date and to use a safe search tool like McAfee SiteAdvisor software," the report concluded.

(the article was originally published at http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3822611/McAfee+Lists+Webs+Most+Dangerous+Search+Terms.htm)

Optimizing For Natural And Paid Search, After The Click

2009-06-03T23:57:00.000-07:00

At the Search Insider Summit in Captiva, Fla., Gord Hotchkiss hosted a panel and clinic on eye-tracking analysis of Web sites suggested by attendees, specifically addressing the topic of post-click optimization. This session preceded several related breakout discussions, including the "Branding and Post-Click Strategies" roundtable session that I moderated.

Overall, this is a critical topic at a time where more and more marketers are looking for ways to show a higher return on investment for spending in SEO, PPC and other online channels. So in this column I'll cover some of the highlights in the breakout session.

For the panel, a small lab was set up to monitor eye-tracking on three sites, to see if users could complete a specific task. While it is worth noting that the testers (conference attendees) were not your average users because of their knowledge of interactive marketing, the exercise illustrated the importance of testing for conversion and search performance. If there was one single takeaway, it was this: enable this type of testing early in the discovery and design process of Web site and landing page development, testing multiple creative comps, architecture, and messaging on groups that represent targeted users, in addition to testing the pages with a paid search campaign.

The discussion begins.

There were several immediate points made by the assembled group of agencies, media professionals, client-side interactive marketers and enterprise optimization consultants. With a user originating from paid search, the consensus was that the most effective types of pages were specifically targeted landing pages (though the pages reviewed by the panel were from various Web sites). Ultimately the marketer has more control to experiment with conversion performance of multiple pages and messaging.

The conversation then turned toward various challenges of using a site's own pages as paid search landers, as well as the search user experience from an organic result. While using a site's pages is often not ideal (in absence of specific landing pages used only for paid search), the reality is that many brand and DR marketers use their site pages as landing pages for very large spends, even though many of these sites were developed without the search user experience and conversion process in mind. Again, the difference here is in using a Web site page designed generally for multiple purposes, while paid search landing pages are designed specifically for direct conversions coming from paid search.

The paid landing page approach can also become a bit more challenging to scale to catalog sites, or other large-scale publishers. On top of this issue, even the slightest landing page tweaks on enterprise sites can be problematic in a post-deployment situation. Marketers are ultimately stuck with a conversion process that doesn't perform as well as it could, and the result is the lower conversion performance of both the landing page and ad spend.

Most people at the table agreed that getting in front of search and usability issues in the early design and strategy phases of page development will help improve experience and conversions, and increase the return on paid and natural search efforts. Here are a few other takeaways from the discussion:

Set up a testing lab, or hire someone to do it for you. Use focus groups, grab your colleagues or friends, or hire an agency or research group to test before moving forward with a particular concept. Even if only a small sample can be pulled in for a test, you could still gain new findings to influence design and better inform the conversion approach.

Get media stakeholders involved early in the development process. If your Web development team or agency is designing a site that will ultimately be used as a landing page for paid media spends, it is imperative to get them involved to anticipate campaign goals and strategies. The effectiveness of search campaigns often hinge on the effectiveness of the pages themselves. Investing even a small portion of media dollars in testing and development of multiple comps can increase effectiveness of those spends.

Test multiple creative comps, architecture, and messaging with your target group, for both direct navigation experience, and also effectiveness in paid search. Consider varied approaches to testing in terms of messaging and layout. It is important to do this upfront, so you will have a solid starting point for any tweaks down the road. Overall, testing multiple concepts provides a better view of what is really going to work.

Use prior performance knowledge to inform redesign or landing pages. While the post-click session was largely focused on user site activity, our group noted that actual performance data is also crucial to informing future efforts. Take your performance history from paid or natural search, and ask "What worked?" Did particular terms convert better than others? Did the landing pages for higher converting terms have better language or call-to-action than lower performing pages? Did particular layouts perform better than others? Were there gaps in relevance for your existing landing pages, when compared to your targeted keyword list?

Build in the ability to test and change. One of the other challenges of page-tuning is that the process for changing an existing site is often not fluid enough to meet the needs of ongoing optimization. When you enable the modification of page areas like a heading or opening paragraph, you help provide the post-launch flexibility needed to optimize search campaigns down the road.

Again, these were just a few group discussion points on a major marketing topic that deserves a great deal of consideration. (If you were present at the discussion or panel and would like to add your feedback, please comment on the blog version of this column). As both the panel and roundtable discussion made very clear: Rethinking the conversion process early on can only help maximize and optimize the value of natural and paid search campaigns.

(the article was originally published at http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=106821)

How Facebook Will Upend Advertising

2009-06-03T23:23:00.000-07:00

The guessing games over Facebook's worth are back on again. They were reignited by the news on May 26 that Facebook has accepted a $200 million investment that values the company at $10 billion.

Much of the discussion centers on the ability, or lack thereof, of Facebook and other social networks to sell advertising and deliver advertising results. People get on Facebook to socialize, not hunt for products—or so the argument runs.

But that argument misses the point. The question isn't how advertising will work on Facebook but rather how Facebook and social networks like News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace are changing advertising. I'm loath to affix the 2.0 moniker to yet another phrase, but if ever an industry needed to be 2.0-ized, it's advertising.

Almost a century ago, retailer John Wannamaker is reported to have said: "Half of all advertising works, I just don't know which half." Today the percentage may be far lower. On the Internet, click-through rates have fallen precipitously as clutter has replaced clarity. These days an ad has performed exceptionally well if at least 1 in 10 people who see it click on it. Much of the time click-through rates that once approached 3% are more like 0.3%.
The Holy Grail of ads: word of mouth

The good news is that we're on the verge of a major rethinking of advertising's fundamental premises. One of the biggest challenges facing advertisers is ad credibility. Consumers typically rate advertising as their least credible information channel. However, businesses have continued to invest in advertising because they could compensate for the lack of credibility through broad distribution and high-impact messaging.

Today that trade-off is being turned on its head. Word of mouth—peer opinion—has consistently been rated the most credible source of information. But traditionally there's been a limit as to how widely you could distribute a friend's point of view. Readers of a certain age will remember the Fabergé Organics commercial from the 1970s depicting a shampoo user who "told two friends," who in turn "told two friends, and so on, and so on." Three decades ago, telling a lot of friends wasn't nearly as easy as it is now.

Credibility now has a channel for mass distribution. It's called the Web and it particularly thrives in social networks. Such distribution will have profound implications for how we "advertise."

Obviously, we can use social networks to reach friends. But social tools woven into various sites can deliver the opinions and reviews of a group—"people like me"—whose views may be just as credible as those of my friends.

Say I'm a chief information officer. I may find the opinions of fellow CIOs I've never met every bit as credible as the ones I know—perhaps even more so, in that I'm less willing to denigrate the opinions of people I don't know. After all, I know the biases and shortcomings of the people in my friendship circle.
deploying social maps

These tools are showing up in a variety of online destinations. Facebook's Connect and other similar technologies let people bring their social map with them as they traverse the Internet. Businesses have to be thinking about how they might incorporate the social map into the way they deal with customers and prospects. This is going to be huge—and the opportunities are immediate.

I'm a big fan of Loomia's SeenThis application. While it was designed for Facebook, I actually "use" it elsewhere. You're probably familiar with the boxes on such newspapers sites as The Wall Street Journal that show what stories other readers have read. This "most read" designation rarely interests me. However, the Loomia tool gives me an additional box that shows me what stories my Facebook friends and groups have read. Generally I end up clicking through on most or all of those articles. The "recommendation" from my peer group is much more interesting and relevant to me than those of the general WSJ readership or editorial board.

In sum, social networks and related tools are transforming the way companies communicate with consumers and potential consumers in profoundly interesting ways. In this light, questions of Facebook's valuation are at best mildly amusing to me. If, as I suspect, Facebook is at the vanguard of transforming how companies reach consumers, $10 billion will some day seem laughably small.

Now it's up to the advertising industry to get its collective head out of the sand and exploit this transformation to its advantage.

(the article was originally published at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2009/tc20090527_635562.htm)

Former Yahoo exec launches online ad rival

2009-06-03T23:20:00.000-07:00

Silicon Valley venture capital firm DAG Ventures has joined the backers of online advertising startup OpenX, leading a series C funding round of $10 million that takes total investment in the company to $31 million.

OpenX is an independent competitor to advertising services offered by Google (GOOG.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O), Yahoo (YHOO.O) and Time Warner's (TWX.N) AOL. It is run by industry veteran and former head of Yahoo's search business, Tim Cadogan,

The company said on Tuesday it would use some of the new funding to accelerate development of an online ad marketplace it launched last month that is designed to make it easier for smaller Web publishers and advertisers to find each other.

Advertisers are faced with an explosion in the number of Websites run by small publishers, some of whom have valuable niche audiences, while the publishers often find it hard to get the best value from ad platforms run by the likes of Google.

Cadogan said OpenX, whose more than 300 billion ad impressions per month put it in the same league as Google's DoubleClick in terms of volume, would now be able to explore other forms of online advertising, such as video and mobile.

"We increasingly see a range of opportunities - new markets, related markets, new product lines that we could get into," he told Reuters by telephone from OpenX's headquarters in California. The company also has offices in London and Poland.

Publishers are increasingly turning to Internet advertising as they chase dwindling audiences for their print products, who are racing online. Some, like Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (NWSA.O), are considering charging consumers for online content.

Cadogan said he believed those publishers who could survive the next year or two would have many more possibilities to make money out of their online offers than they currently do.

"I think we're on the cusp of a renaissance in online advertising outside of search," he said.

"The next year is definitely tough, but I do think within the next one to two years you're going to see a new level of quality, value, and consumer value of ads."

Existing investors in OpenX -- Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital, First Round Capital and company Chairman Jonathan Miller -- also participated in the latest funding round.

Miller has recently been appointed News Corp's new digital media chief.

(the article was originally published at http://www.reuters.com/article/smallBusinessNews/idUSTRE54P2PR20090526)

Facebook Lands $200 Million in Funding

2009-06-03T23:17:00.000-07:00

Ending months of fevered speculation over whether it would raise more money, social network Facebook said on May 26 that it will take a $200 million investment from Russia's Digital Sky Technologies.

In return, DST is getting preferred stock worth 1.96% of Facebook, valuing the social network at $10 billion. This is the first time Facebook has raised major equity funding since late 2007, when Microsoft (MSFT) invested $240 million in exchange for a 1.6% stake that valued the site at $15 billion.

In a move that will help Facebook employees unlock some of the value of their shares before the company goes public or is sold, DST will purchase at least $100 million of Facebook common stock from current or former Facebook employees. DST co-founder Yuri Milner tells BusinessWeek that the agreement to buy common stock was not a precondition of the equity investment. "These are two separate transactions," Milner says in an interview. DST and Facebook say they will release details of the plan this summer.
Zuckerberg: No shift in strategy

Facebook considers the investment a "good buffer" and will use it for expansion, rather than to fund existing operations, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says in an interview. "It might come in handy if we want to expand," Zuckerberg says. "We felt the valuation was good. Having additional money will allow us to explore new things, such as building data centers or acquiring companies." Sales are rising, and the company has no concrete plans to spend the cash, he adds. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said as recently as April that the company did not need additional financing.

Over the past year, while most companies have grown cautious and cut back on expansion, the social networking Web site has pressed ahead with aggressive growth plans. However, Zuckerberg says, the investment does not portend a strategic change. "This doesn't signal any shift in strategy," he says.

Zuckerberg also reiterated that Facebook has no plans to sell shares to the public soon. "For a lot of start-ups, you get the feeling that the IPO is really the end goal," he says. "That's really not the case for us. We view that as one milestone along the way. We don't see it happening in the immediate horizon. It's not something we're rushing toward. We'll do it when it's the right thing for the company."
DST: dozens of Web investments

On a conference call following the announcement, Zuckerberg also reiterated the company's forecast for sales to rise 70% this year. Some analysts remain skeptical that the company can achieve such growth during a recession. For instance, eMarketer speculates that Facebook's main source of revenue—global advertising—will increase 20%, to $300 million, from $250 million. "Where is that [70%] going to come from?" says Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst. "I can't see it coming solely from advertising. Either he has some new revenue stream up his sleeve or he is crazy."

On the call, Zuckerberg said Facebook was drawn by DST's expertise in developing business models that help social networks make money. Based in London and Moscow, DST is a four-year-old investment group. According to its Web site, DST has raised and invested more than $1 billion in over 30 companies, including Russian Web portal Mail.ru, Russian social network Vkontakte.ru, and Forticom Group, which owns and operates other social networks in Russia and Eastern Europe.

While other private investors have offered to buy Facebook shares for valuations in the range of $4 billion to $6 billion, DST co-founder Yuri Milner expressed confidence in the company's ability to make money on its Facebook stake. Although Facebook and other U.S.-based social networks have had a hard time making money from their growing number of users, Milner said the social networks he has invested in are making much more money per user than Facebook is now. Milner said Facebook would be able to generate more money from advertising and forms of e-commerce, such as micropayments for virtual gifts given to a person's friends. "We see monetization patterns that will be very applicable to Facebook going forward," he said. "For us it was almost a no-brainer."
A Soviet at Wharton in 1990

Milner says he does not need to use only traditional metrics, such as price-to-earnings multiples, in valuing his Internet investments. "That's not how we look at it," said Milner. "We see things that others don't see."

Milner, who received part of his education in America, founded DST in 2005 along with fellow Russian businessman Gregory Finger. A 1990 article in the Daily Pennsylvanian, the newspaper of the University of Pennsylvania, said Milner was "the first Soviet citizen ever to study at Wharton," Penn's prestigious business school.

In the story, Milner said his goal was to return with his degree to the Soviet Union to take advantage of the developing free markets and serve as a bridge between his native country and the West. "My idea is to be in the most useful place in the proper time," Milner said.

Almost two decades later, Milner is hoping he has found that place in Facebook.

(the article was originally published at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2009/tc20090526_070168.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_top+story)

Microsoft Aims Big Guns at Google, Asks Consumers to Rethink Search

2009-06-03T23:09:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has used attack ads to go after Apple, and now it has Google in its sights.

The software giant is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. That's a big campaign -- big compared with consumer-product launches ($50 million is considered a sizable budget for a national rollout) and very big when you consider that Google spent about $25 million on all its advertising last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, with about $11.6 million of that focused on recruiting. Microsoft, by comparison, spent $361 million. Certainly Google has never faced an ad assault of anything like this magnitude.

JWT has been tapped for the push, which will include online, TV, print and radio. Another sign of the campaign's size: At a time when most agencies are laying people off, JWT added creatives on the Microsoft business last week.

People with knowledge of the planned push said the ads won't go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. Instead, they'll focus on planting the idea that today's search engines don't work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search (aka Google) really solves their problems. That, Microsoft is hoping, will give consumers a reason to consider switching search engines, which, of course, is one of Bing's biggest challenges.

"If you grab the average user off the street and ask them, 'Does search suck?' I think they'd say no. They don't know what else can be done," said Shashi Seth, a former Google executive who is now chief revenue officer at Cooliris. "They think search does a pretty good job, and if you could prove otherwise with a product that's differentiated, people will sit up and take notice."

Case for refinement
Indeed, data show that about 65% of people are satisfied or very satisfied with online search. But Microsoft sees an opening on its own proprietary search data: 42% of searches require refinement, and 25% of clicks are the back button.

That's why Mr. Seth likens the Bing marketing challenge to that of the Apple iPhone before it was introduced. Most people, pre-iPhone, didn't know they were missing a multi-touch screen, or an application that would enable them to detect what song was playing wherever they were. But Apple, through its ads, showed how markedly different the experience was and created a new de facto standard for phones.

Many will argue that no amount of advertising Microsoft throws at the product will make a difference -- the quality of search results is the only thing that matters. And that may have once been true; after all, Google built its brand on the back of a great user experience, results that were markedly better and zero ad support.

But that's not necessarily true anymore, as the quality of search engines has approached parity. Sure, there are no switching costs, and it's easy to simply type in a new web address should a better engine come along, but the psychological pull of the leading brand in the space overrides those factors for many consumers.

Consider that Google has conducted internal tests, according to people familiar with them, in which the company put its logo and treatment on another engine's search results. Users still prefer the results with the Google logo, even if they're not Google results. Or consider that a revamped Ask.com made its debut in 2007 to a glowing review from The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, who said it "holds its own with Google, and even beats the champ on some searches." Two years later? Ask's share of search is down 28%.

'Better mousetrap'
"I don't think they can win this game with a better mousetrap," said Allen Adamson, managing director of Landor Associates, New York. "They have to compete with Google on a brand front -- there's no other way to skin this but go head on against the Google brand."

Obviously Microsoft has not shied away from "going head on" in its Windows campaign. Its chief attack on Apple -- that it's too expensive and not worth the high price -- is showing some signs of working. Apple's value perception among 18- to 34-year-olds has dropped significantly since the campaign launched in late March, which might be a testament to the right message at the right time.

Still, advertising isn't a panacea, as even the most self-absorbed ad man knows, especially when it's not the right advertising. Ask.com famously spent $57 million in 2007 to market its engine, and another $22 million last year, according to TNS. The 2007 campaign was an oddball execution from Crispin Porter & Bogusky that touted "the algorithm" -- a concept unlikely to grab anyone not already entrenched in the world of digital marketing. What Microsoft needs to do is go after people who don't know and probably don't care what an algorithm is.

And all the advertising in the world only works if the product backs it up. People who've seen the Microsoft product suggest it's useful and has some nifty filtering tools, even though it's not a markedly different-looking interface, at least for text search (some of the multimedia search results, however, do look quite different from how Google currently displays them).

"It doesn't take a lot to switch people from one type to another and usually it's a unique feature that gets people excited," said David Karnstedt, CEO of Efficient Frontier and former head of sales for Yahoo. He reflected on his days at AltaVista, which Google supplanted. "Google got people excited because it got people and places right early on. That got people to really start to switch, and once developed the habit of using Google, it was hard to get them to switch back."

(you can read more at http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=136847)

Real Time: The Web's New Prime Time

2009-06-03T23:07:00.000-07:00

The Internet was always fast. Google made a point during its rise to prominence to detail -- to the millisecond -- just how quickly it delivered a search result. And, as we all know, the Web has gotten even faster.

Real-time communications channels like Twitter are pushing the Internet into "real time," where communication and information flow nonstop. This presents advertisers with a dizzying array of opportunities -- and a daunting number of challenges.

Marketers "are built like battleships for long, sustained warfare, [but] this is guerrilla warfare," said Lisa Bradner, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

One of the most intense challenges is the new speed with which messages need to be crafted. Think of display advertising, which is in the doldrums thanks to a nearly limitless supply of space outstripping ad demand. With a large chunk of the market transitioning to a marketplace-driven dynamic where advertisers, networks and agencies bid on ad placements based on people, not pages, a message -- and its permutations -- increasingly needs to be made on the fly. And this, in turn, means extra work up front.

HP, for instance, using tools from Yahoo and Tumri, recently ran a campaign with more than 20,000 ad permutations. To do this, said Catherine Paschkewitz, director of demand generation, HP Direct, "you need to take the time to think of your testing framework and the different things you want to test. It's having an up-front process as you're launching and refreshing campaigns."

Another way to make display ads more real time is to use live video. Visa, for instance, ran live video in banner ads earlier this year that showed scenes from cities worldwide. Last month, Intel embedded live chat in its banners. Earlier this month, GE CEO Jeff Immelt delivered a Webcast address on healthcare issues live in a banner ad on top sites. And Volvo and Intuit have piped Twitter into ad units.

Another challenge for brands is that consumers now expect instant gratification when it comes to customer service, which is why marketers like Apple, Bank of America and Overstock.com now provide live customer service on their sites. Kevin Kohn, evp of marketing at LivePerson, which worked with BoA and Overstock, said this is nearly a requirement in a real-time world.

(You can read more at http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i15f4e2b3b4a487b3b5cd5347ebd07cbf)

Every blog becomes a cinema

2009-05-19T23:52:00.000-07:00

Former AOL executive Ted Leonsis was frustrated: He'd produced a critically acclaimed documentary called Nanking, a film that looked at some Westerners who had protected Chinese civilians during a brutal, six-week attack by the Japanese army in 1937. But he was pretty sure the film, which premiered in 2007 at the Sundance Film Festival, would reach a relatively small audience.

Only a few hundred movie theaters in the U.S. will even show documentaries, and even those cinemas don't always give non-fiction films prime spots on their schedules. Distribution is a source of aggravation for many documentarians.

Unlike most filmmakers, though, Leonsis, who stepped down from day-to-day management at AOL at the end of 2006, had the wherewithal to do something about the situation. Last year he launched SnagFilms, a company that aims to distribute documentary films via the Internet. But rather than just stream its library of 650 titles through the SnagFilms site, the company is enabling portals, news sites and individual fans to share the movies through their own Web sites, blogs, Facebook home pages and other sites.

"Everyone talks about user-generated content," says Leonsis, who also is majority owner of NHL's Washington Capitals. "Let's talk about a new category called user-distributed content,"

Leonsis' Nanking, which will be available online for the first time Memorial Day weekend, is the centerpiece of an 10-film slate Snag is presenting during the holiday; each of the movies commemorates the heroism of soldiers and civilians during periods of war and conflict.

For films released in theaters Snag provides an opportunity for the documentaries to find new audiences. A blogger who is writing about alcohol abuse on college campuses, for example, might seek to embed in her blog a Snag video player that shows the movie Haze, a look at a drinking-related hazing incidents.

Filmmakers who make their movies available to Snag benefit in a few ways: For each film it includes a "Buy DVD" button that takes a viewer immediately to the documentarian's DVD distributor. Leonsis contends that many Snag users will only watch a portion of the film via the Internet, and that true fans will end up purchasing the film to watch on their home televisions.

Snag also sells advertising in the documentaries, and splits the ad revenue with the filmmakers. "We are writing checks to filmmakers every quarter," Leonsis says. "They're not always big, sometimes as small as $20 but sometimes more than $1,000."

Finally Snag offers users a chance to make an online donation to a cause of the documentary maker's choosing.

But for most directors who work with Snag, the main benefit is the opportunity to reach more people. "Filmmakers have never had this kind of opportunity before," says Steven C. Barber, whose film, Return To Tarawa, is part of Snag's Memorial Day slate. "I can get my film to every single country this way."

Barber's film has already run on Discovery's Military Channel, and many of the films in Snag's library have traveled a fairly conventional path for documentaries (film festival, theatrical or television premiere, DVD) before landing at Snag. But Snag CEO Rick Allen says the company is looking for more documentaries to launch on Snag, a concept that would upend the traditional theatrical distribution model.

(Entrepreneur Mark Cuban has also sought to disrupt theatrical release windows, showing films on his HDNet Movies channel two days before the film appears in theaters.)

Allen says it is too early to know if Snag's Internet-distribution efforts will cause major movie studios to think differently about their current models, but he does believe the film industry will go through lots of experimentation in the coming years.

"I think everybody believes that digital distribution is the wave of the future and they're all trying to figure our how it affects content delivery and content creation," Allen says. "I think people in large media organizations have seen the success of something like Hulu and its broadened people's ideas about how to get content out there and consumed."

[the article was originally published at http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/18/technology/mehta_docs.fortune/?postversion=2009051810]

Microsoft Rolls Out Its Contextual Ad Network

2009-05-19T23:47:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has taken its Content Ads contextual network out of beta.

The official launch of Content Ads, which media buyers can use to place keyword-targeted ads on up to 1,000 sites including WSJ.com, FOX Sports, and RunnersWorld.com, is part of an upgrade to the company's adCenter pay-per-click ad buying system. The upgrade also includes enhanced targeting, bidding and keyword research options.

Microsoft's answer to Google's AdSense network, Content Ads enables advertisers to deliver content-relevant ads across the Microsoft content network audience. With its general release, the offering has added a site exclusion option that allows advertisers to withhold their ads from up to 500 sites in the network at the campaign or ad group level. Additionally, marketers can now analyze the performance of individual sites in the Content Ads network.

"With this increased visibility into Content Ad placement and performance of their Content Ads, advertisers will be able to help control the distribution of their Content Ads and improve ROI," said Brian Boland, director of search and media with Microsoft's Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group. Boland claimed financial services advertisers have found particular success with Content Ads to date.

[the article was originally published at http://www.clickz.com/3633791]

Pepsi Crafts 'Throwback' Spots for Hulu Play

2009-05-19T23:41:00.000-07:00

In a sign of Hulu's growing clout for building brands, Pepsi has crafted retro-themed spots to run with Hulu's selection of shows from the 1970s and '80s.

The 15-second ads promote "Pepsi Throwback," a beverage launched in April to tap into the nostalgia market. It features packaging reminiscent of '70s designs -- and uses real sugar like the soft-drink recipe did 40 years ago.

Pepsi is running the commercials, beginning today, with vintage fare on Hulu like Hill Street Blues, Battlestar Galactica and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In all, Pepsi plans to run 11 spots with more than 200 programs through June 15.

The beverage giant hopes the ads will connect with a youth audience that is discovering programs from the '70s and '80s thanks to Hulu. While many of the service's most popular shows are current TV hits, some older entries -- like Doogie Howser, M.D., Alf and Married...With Children -- have found a second life on the site.

"We know Millennials are craving this content," said Ana Maria Irazabal, Pepsi's U.S. brand marketing director. "What happened in the past is not old, it's considered new because they haven't seen it before."

In one spot called "Pet Rock," a Pepsi Throwback can chats with the U.S. Bicentennial-era collector's item about how the two "go way back." The clip closes with a shot of the Pepsi Throwback can on a shag carpet and the message "Made with real sugar" in psychedelic font. Other iterations feature the can bantering with other touchstones from the era, such as a fondue pot, an eight-track player and a Polaroid camera.

The program sprung from a collaboration between several Pepsi agencies, including brand shop TBWA\Chiat\Day, media agency OMD and digital strategy firm Undercurrent.

Pepsi also worked with IAC-owned youth entertainment site CollegeHumor.com to create three of the commercials. CollegeHumor's spots feature two guys spoofing the '80s. In one, they are shown playing videogames when a phone call arrives from someone who uses vintage catchphrases like "Eat my shorts."

The challenge was creating compelling ads on a shoestring budget, said Irazabel. "If we don't have cost efficiencies we wouldn't be able to produce 12 spots," she said. "They need to be nimble."

Hulu, which publicly launched 14 months ago, has quickly registered impressive growth. Estimates of its audience vary widely. According to ComScore, it attracted 42 million visitors in March. Nielsen, parent of Adweek, estimates its audience that month at 8.9 million. Both services believe Hulu's audience and views are up sharply.

Its advertising efforts have not kept pace, despite keen interest from brands in attaching themselves to high-quality, professional content. Hulu visitors frequently see public service ads, and nearly all the site's commercials consist of repurposed TV spots. Hulu CEO Jason Kilar has complained that not enough advertisers are crafting spots geared to the environment.

"Our goal is to target highly relevant environments and experiences for users and for advertisers' brands which ultimately allows us to increase the effectiveness of our advertising platform," Hulu svp of advertising J.P. Colaco said in a statement. "The Pepsi example is one that allows us to uniquely bring together more than 200 relevant archived shows with retro-themed advertising to create a more immersive and engaging experience."

[the article was originally published at http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3i505437152ed713675ae9ae9f8bf96bf6]

Scribd borrows a page from iTunes

2009-05-19T23:38:00.000-07:00

Scribd is proposing to do for books what iTunes did for music -- let readers buy only what they want to read.

Eight years ago, Apple Inc. turned the music industry upside down when it launched iTunes, an online music store that let listeners cherry-pick one or two songs instead of having to buy the whole album. Starting today, Scribd is giving readers the option of buying content, including paying a few dollars for a chapter or two from a travel guide or a how-to book.

That's just one example of the flexibility that digital book purveyors are experimenting with as printed content migrates to the digital format. Another is the pricing model. Paperbacks have largely been priced at about $10 to $15, while hardcovers are $25 to $30. With digital books, that price could be any amount. Scribd just takes 20% of whatever price publishers and authors set for their works. The rest goes to the writer or publisher. Some authors, for example, are releasing their books on Scribd for $2.

One of them is Kemble Scott, a 46-year-old San Francisco writer whose first book, "SoMa," was published as a trade paperback in 2007. For his second book, "The Sower," Scott eschewed print and decided to debut his novel on Scribd as a $2 digital book.

Scott chose the digital route for its immediacy. His thriller includes a number of contemporary references such as swine flu and Susan Boyle, a Scottish singer who rose to media stardom on the wings of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. "Publishing a book the traditional way can take a year to 18 months from the time you find a publisher to the time it ends up on store shelves," Scott said. "Now I can publish a book instantly that makes the most contemporary pop culture references of the day."

As for the $2 price, Scott said he and several other authors on Scribd thought the amount would be low enough that readers partial to print would take a gander with books on a screen. (Readers can also purchase books in a format that can be printed.)

"We realized that if we want people to try something new, we had to price it appropriately," Scott said. "We felt $2 puts it in the realm of an impulse buy. Paperbacks were invented during the Great Depression as a low-cost option. Now we're in the Great Recession, so we decided to give people a price break."

Still, at $2, Scott will make more money per copy than he did with his first book, priced at $15. His contract for "SoMa" gave him 7.5% of the cover price for each copy sold, or roughly $1.12. His contract with Scribd for "The Sower" gives him 80% of $2, which is $1.60 per copy. The question is whether Scribd will be able to push the kind of volume on its website that a traditional publisher can through bookstores.

Scribd's chief executive and co-founder, Trip Adler, believes it can. The 2-year-old website already has 60 million unique readers a month, Adler said. Until today, the site has been primarily supported by ads. Writers have uploaded millions of documents for anyone to read, including family recipes, original music scores, academic research papers and doctoral dissertations and even original novels.

Until today, access to those works had been free. But Scribd, like other digital book players such as Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Sony Corp. and O'Reilly Media Inc. (which put their entire catalog on Scribd), is seeing how digital distribution can transform the publishing industry's business model.

Scott sees opportunity in digital publishing. "With print, my income was limited by the number of runs the publisher made," he said. "Online, it's limitless."

[the article was originally published at http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-scribd18-2009may18,0,6817936.story]

Nielsen: Hulu's Traffic Soars While FIM's Plummets

2009-05-19T23:36:00.000-07:00

Hulu’s video traffic has grown at a staggering clip over the past year—driven in part by an older (35-plus) Web audience. Meanwhile, over the same period of time, former Web video powerhouse Fox Interactive Media has seen its streaming traffic plummet. And all the while YouTube has maintained its dominance of the category—accounting for 58 percent of all video streamed on the Web in the U.S.

Those are just a few of the findings in the latest VideoCensus report issued by Nielsen Online. For example, in April, Hulu streamed over 373 million videos, a whopping increase of 490 percent versus the same month last year. According to Nielsen’s analysis, a big chunk of that growth can be attributed to adults 35 to 49, who make up 30 percent of the site’s audience. In the past six months Nielsen found that demo’s time spent per viewer increased by 154 percent to 416 minutes per month on Hulu. That minutes-per-month figure is 10 percent larger than any other age group found on the site—indicating that the 35-plus crowd is drawn to Hulu’s collection of longer-form content—much of which is sourced from TV.

However, to keep things in perspective, even as Hulu soars, YouTube is hardly shrinking in its wake. The Google-owned video site saw its total volume of streams climb by 36 percent in April to nearly 5.5 billion videos compared to the same period last year. That’s almost 15 times as many videos as Hulu streamed last month. The 35 to 49 crowd also spent three times as much time on YouTube as they did on Hulu (nearly 3 billion minutes versus less than 1 billion).

Meanwhile, Fox Interactive Media (FIM), which includes social networking giant MySpace, is quickly losing its stature among the top Web video players. FIM properties generated 201 million streams in April, representing a slide of 39 percent year over year (and just 54 percent of Hulu’s video volume). That places FIM behind Yahoo, which delivered 203 million streams, a decline of 8 percent versus last year for the portal.

Gaining ground on FIM is MTV Network’s Nickelodeon Kids and Family Network, which theoretically targets a much more niche audience. According to Nielsen, Nickelodeon Kids and Family Network streamed 176 million videos in April, an increase of 16 percent versus the same month in 2008.

[the article was originally published at http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/content_display/news/local-broadcast/e3id8b91cde574aee6561378e0eb5ff80bb]

Is Paid Subscriptions, the Next Great Trend In Online Advertising?

2009-05-19T23:15:00.000-07:00

As respected online publications such as Salon.com, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal removed all or most of their paid subscription models over the course of the decade, conventional wisdom formed that holding print content intended for a mainstream audience behind a pay wall was a noble but failed experiment.

But are paid subscriptions on the Internet poised to make a comeback, albeit in a different form?

There are several standard ways to make money in the highly competitive online publishing space. The dominant one for years has been free content supported by advertising, but the massive amount of supply (even of the high-quality stuff) coupled with a worldwide recession have pushed down rates that advertisers are willing to pay for ad space, squeezing profit margins for most online publishers.

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler points out a not-so-little secret about online display ads: most people couldn’t care less about them:

The web is increasingly filling up with ads. Many sites, including this one, have a bunch of them all around with the hopes that you’ll find one relevant to you, and click on it. Of course, most of you don’t. And if you do, it may be by accident.

While there are a number of other ways to make money at the online content game, such as using content to sell products and services, there are a few factors at play that could pave the way for online paid subscriptions to make major headway over the next few years.

An Anti-ad Network?
Siegler discussed online advertising while covering Contenture, an “anti-ad network” that allows publishers to group themselves together with the idea that Contenture members can pay a subscription fee to gain access to a group of member sites that have the ads removed.

Think about what the future of online browsing might look like when you take this idea to scale. For example, what if you could one day pay Contenture (or Facebook Connect, perhaps) $5 a month — a fee I’m grabbing out of the ether — with the blessed result of being able to visit thousands of high-quality web sites, absolutely ad-free? That could theoretically provide both an important revenue stream for publishers while improving the user experience at the same time.

Subscriptions For Mobile Content
Amazon, with its handheld content reader Kindle, is steadily moving forward — using a similar strategy as Apple in terms of monetizing the sale and distribution of MP3s to iPod devices — with the creation of a massive and sustainable business in getting people to pay for digital content.

While the Kindle is best known for selling books available from the Amazon.com catalog, there’s a growing number of magazine, newspaper and blog subscriptions that can be paid for using an existing Amazon account. Importantly, the Kindle is “training” a mainstream marketplace to pay for digital content, including a subscription component.

While an announcement on Wednesday (again covered by Siegler on TechCrunch) that Amazon is opening all blogs to become part of the Kindle Publishing for Blogs Beta program was not front-page news, it could be another notable step toward building the importance of online subscriptions for online publishers.

Consider, too, that the Kindle’s forthcoming DX release, with its 9.7-inch screen, has the opportunity to further challenge both the computer monitor and print for the attention of readers across the planet. Therefore “training” people to pay for content in the form of subscriptions on the Kindle may have vast repercussions for the future of digital content.

[the article was originally published at http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2009/05/14/14gigaom-paid-subscriptions-the-next-great-trend-in-online-10572.html]

Google eases trademark restrictions

2009-05-19T23:03:00.000-07:00

Google Inc is lifting restrictions on the use of trademarked terms in its U.S. online advertising system, a move that could increase friction between the Internet giant and brand owners.

The new policy will allow businesses to place trademarked terms directly in the copy of text advertisements that run in the U.S. starting next month, the company announced in a blog post on Thursday.

The move, which Google said will improve the quality of its advertisements, comes as advertisers have begun bidding less money for the individual search terms that their ads appear alongside and as Google's revenue growth slows in the dismal economic climate.

Until now, Google has forbidden companies from placing trademarked terms in their advertising copy unless they owned the trademark or had explicit permission from the trademark owners.

That policy was the equivalent of a supermarket promotion in a Sunday newspaper that only listed generic products like "discount cola" instead of the actual products for sale, Google said in its blog post on Thursday.

The new policy will allow resellers and informational Web sites to use trademarked terms in their copy in certain situations without seeking permission from the trademark owners.

The move represents the second recent loosening of Google's policies on trademark use. Earlier this month, Google said it would allow companies in 190 countries outside the US to bid on trademarked keywords that act as the triggers for their own advertisements.

Google is also facing new legal challenges from trademark owners.

On Monday, Firepond, a Texas software company, filed a trademark infringement suit against Google seeking class action status for all Texas trademark owners.

Brand owners have historically had serious concerns about Google's policy with regards to trademarks, said Eric Goldman, Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law.

Google's latest policy change is "kind of like pouring gasoline on the fire," he said.

The change may help consumers better understand sponsored search results, by allowing the advertiser to reference trademarks in their marketing pitches, Goldman said. But he predicted that the change could spark more legal challenges.

Google Senior Trademark Counsel Terri Chen acknowledged some people might be unhappy with the change, but she said she believed the ads would be well-received overall.

Chen said the policy was well-established legal principle in the US. Google is changing the policy now, she said, because it was more comfortable it had a process in place to monitor situations that don't comply with the new policy.

[the article was originally published at http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE54B6R020090515]

Facebook's virtual currency

2009-05-14T23:46:00.000-07:00

Facebook will soon begin testing a system that would let members use its virtual currency to make purchases within applications in the social network, providing a potential new revenue stream for the company.

Until now, people have only been able to use Facebook "credits" ($1 buys 100 credits) to purchase items in the site's virtual gift store. But extending that virtual currency to the site's thousands of third-party applications could possibly bring in millions of dollars in additional revenue for the company.

The blogs Inside Facebook and VentureBeat estimate that developers this year will generate between $300 million and $500 million in revenue from transactions within Facebook applications that currently offer payment options via credit card, PayPal and other providers such as OfferPal and SuperRewards.

Through its own gift shop, which sells things like virtual birthday cakes and flowers, Inside Facebook estimates that Facebook will make $45 million to $55 million in 2009. That would amount to about 10% of a projected $500 million in total revenue for the company this year.

Going a step further by creating a "universal" virtual currency system for applications "could be a powerful revenue driver for the company, which to date has largely abstained from directly monetizing the sea of applications running on the Facebook Platform," wrote Inside Facebook's Justin Smith, in a post Tuesday about Facebook's plans to trial its virtual currency in apps.

Indeed, the company has come under criticism for not doing more to make money from its developer platform, while helping companies like Zynga, Rock You and Slide to flourish by distributing apps on Facebook.

A Facebook spokesperson Wednesday confirmed the test, but indicated that it was too premature to provide details. "We're starting a very small alpha test in a few weeks with a handful of developers that explores ways for users to use their Facebook credits with third-party applications on Facebook.com," he said.

Facebook initially announced plans to begin beta testing a payment system for application developers in December 2007, but the company appeared to put that effort on hold while it focused on growing its user base and other priorities.

But that has not stopped competitors from pushing ahead with their own e-commerce initiatives. Social network Hi5 in March launched a virtual currency system for developers, and MySpace is reportedly looking to develop its own payment system for third-party applications.

With Facebook and other social networks still struggling to monetize their vast amounts of inventory through advertising -- especially amid the economic downturn -- any supplemental e-commerce revenue they can produce is welcome.

But why should developers who already offer various payment options want to add another from Facebook? The company says it would give members more places to use Facebook credits and developers another avenue to monetize apps. Smith adds that Facebook's own currency would have the benefit of being more deeply integrated into the social network's ecosystem than a third-party service.

While no details have been disclosed, Smith speculates that developers who agreed to accept Facebook credits would be reimbursed by Facebook for currency spent in their apps, less a small percentage the company would take as a commission.

[the article was orginally published at http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=106016]

Bigger Ad Units - A new way to get noticed

2009-05-14T23:43:00.000-07:00

When the going gets tough, the ads get bigger.

Amid all the hand-wringing about the decline of the news business and the need for subscription revenue, big publishers are doing something concrete: They are trying to sell more ads for more money.

You see advertisements expanding to cover pages of major sites all over the Web these days. Now the Online Publishers Association has created a series of new standards for really big, intrusive, bash-you-on-the-head sorts of advertisements, which you are going to start seeing on its member sites in coming months.

The association was started by Martin A. Nisenholtz, the senior vice president for digital operations at The New York Times Company, to represent the needs of companies that offer premium content online and in turn, hope to earn premium ad rates. These days the group includes companies like CBS, Forbes, and Condé Nast.

One format is a version of the sort of expandable banner ad you’ve already seen. It starts big and then rolls up to fit at the top of the page. The other two formats will be more jarring. There is an ad, meant to go on the side of a page, that is 468 pixels wide — far bigger than other side-of-the-page formats. Publishers are going to have to squeeze the width of their editorial content on pages with this ad format.

Another format rises and falls like an elevator on the right-hand side of the page, so the ad is always in view. This means that publishers need to clear out the various other features and ads placed on the side of pages to give this ad some space to roam.

Among the first sites rolling out these formats is MSNBC, which has included them in a new design it is introducing for the pages on which its articles appear (as opposed to its home page and topical section pages).

The site has been trying to integrate more of its content — photos, videos, interactive elements — onto the same page as its articles. Until now, you often had to jump to a separate page to see a slide show or watch a video. This page from a series on Elkhart, Ind., shows off all these features and a gizmo that allows navigation between elements as you scroll the page.

It’s a bold, in-your-face design, said Kyoo Kim, MSNBC’s vice president for sales — and perfect for bold, in-your-face ads.

“When you are getting robust photos or videos within the story itself, then you can afford to have large ad units because you are not totally hijacking the user experience,” Mr. Kim said. “It’s a value exchange.”

MSNBC will use the large formats at the top and sides of its pages. It isn’t going to use the elevator ad. It had a similar unit that chased people around its site early on, and it doesn’t want to remind users of how much they disliked that format.

The company will not sell the big ads to just anyone. Rather, it will use the formats for its best customers, which sponsor entire sections or buy “roadblocks” that fill every page of the site, or a big part of it, for a period of time. MSNBC has cultivated these sorts of deals and gets 60 percent of its revenue from sponsorships.

Indeed, while the company hopes it can extract higher prices for bigger ads, the main focus initially is simply to use them to encourage companies to keep buying the sponsorships they already have. A sponsorship can cost $50,000 to $500,000 per month, he said.

In these deals, one advertiser will have all the ads on one of these new article pages: perhaps a big banner at the top, a very large rectangle along the side, and other units further down. In addition to the standard units, MSNBC has created a series of “adgets” — short for advertising widgets — that are based on technology originally developed for its news content. For example, a company might use its mapping widgets to show off various locations, Mr. Kim said.

Other members of the Online Publishers Association, including The Times, are expected to roll out support for these big ads in the coming months.

[the article was originally published at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/make-room-for-the-wide-load-ads]

Responding but Not Clicking

2009-05-14T23:02:00.000-07:00

Clicking on an online display ad isn't the only way of responding to it, emphasizes a new iProspect report on a survey of Internet users.

While 31 percent of respondents to the survey (conducted online in January by Forrester Consulting) said they'd responded to such ads in the past six months by clicking on them, nearly as many -- 27 percent -- said their initial response was to do a search for the product, brand or company. (iProspect is itself in the search-engine-marketing business.)

Another 21 percent of respondents said they "typed the company Web address into browser and navigated to site." Nine percent reported that they "investigated the product, brand or company through social media or message boards." Thirty-seven percent said they hadn't responded to such ads in the past six months.

As you'd expect, people were more likely to buy a product if they were familiar with the company and its wares before seeing a particular online display ad. Among those who said they'd responded to such an ad, 33 percent of those who were already familiar with the company or offering said they ended up buying the product, vs. 14 percent of those who were learning of the company or offering for the first time.

Another question in the survey asked respondents to describe any searches (using a search engine) "you may have eventually performed as a result of the ads you saw." A plurality, 38 percent, said they "performed related search and visited site from search results." Another 11 percent conducted a search "but did not click on any results."

Gladdening the hearts of the advertisers, 14 percent "performed related search, visited site, and purchased product."

[the article was originally published at http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3i14c62023ee3459abfb95e3e71d67059c]

Google's Rival Keyword Sales

2009-05-14T22:59:00.000-07:00

Google is going global with an advertising strategy that has kicked up controversy in the U.S. and Europe. As part of its efforts to generate revenue from online ads, Google lets marketers in a handful of countries pay to surface their ads when a would-be customer searches for a rival's brand name.

Starting June 4, marketers in about 200 countries will be allowed to purchase rival trademarks as keywords to trigger display of "sponsored search" ads on Google. Honda, for instance, could bid to have one of its ads displayed when a consumer searches the term "Toyota." In recent years some companies have sued Google or the competing company, saying the practice is a form of trademark infringement.

The decision to implement the strategy more widely suggests that Google is confident it is operating on sound legal footing. "Following a global legal review, we have made the changes in countries whose legal and business practices are consistent with making the change," Google spokesman Ben Novick explained in an e-mail. Notably excepted from the long list of countries are member of the European Union, though a forthcoming court ruling could change that.

European Court of Justice will rule

Efforts to force Google to curtail the practice have met with mixed results. In April a U.S. appeals court said a patent-infringement claim by computer repair company Rescuecom could go forward—though to win, Rescuecom will have to prove that consumers will be confused if rivals are drawn to rival Web sites.

Europe's highest court, the European Court of Justice, has also been asked to rule on the issue after member country courts reached differing results. Google is appealing the loss of an infringement case in France to LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton but has won similar cases in Germany. In the EU, "the legal and business practices there are not consistent with making the change," Novick wrote in the e-mail.

Google's policy, implemented in the U.S. and Canada in 2004, bars advertisers from using others' trademarks in the text of the ad itself but does permit it in the unseen keywords used to display the ad in cases where the keyword is used in a search. After adopting the same policy in the United Kingdom and Ireland last year, Google has now decided to extend it virtually worldwide.

[the article was originally published at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2009/tc20090511_791916.htm]

Study : Display Ads, Paid Search Work in tandem

2009-05-14T22:49:00.000-07:00

Display ads influence search behavior, according to a study from iProspect released today. The findings rely on data to support industry rhetoric that display ads and search work together to provide a bigger impact on campaigns.

The "Search Engine Marketing and Online Display Advertising Integration Study" suggests that while 31% of people click on display ads, nearly as many -- 27% -- go to search engines to provide a search. More than 20% type the company Web address into their browser and directly navigate to the Web site, and 9% respond by investigating the product, brand, or company through social media.

"If I don't have a display campaign to support my paid search campaign, I'm basically giving the traffic away to my competitors," said Robert Murray, CEO at iProspect, Boston. "Display isn't dead, but just as many people will perform a search, and you had better have an integrated paid search campaign."

Murray called paid search "the ultimate demand capture mechanism," but it can't create awareness for the products and the services. He said smart marketers don't need to generate demand. Although a bit of a "gorilla tactic," those running smart search campaigns integrated with someone else's display campaign let marketers capitalize on another's spend.

Tapping into a competitor's display campaign, marketers can run paid search ads based on keywords and messaging. Marketers should keep in mind all conversions and clicks the display ad will drive to competitors' sites if they invest in display and not integrate a paid search campaign.

The survey found that of the 52% of Internet users who respond to an online display ad, 48% are familiar with the display ad offering or company but do not purchase the product. It is interesting to note that 38% learn of the offering or company for the first time from exposure to an online display ad but do not purchase the product, while 33% are familiar with the offering or company and eventually make a purchase of the product or from that company. Only 14% learn of the offering or the company for the first time and eventually purchase the product.

Overall, the study shows that Internet users are more likely to engage and/or eventually make a purchase from brands with which they are already familiar.

Consumers also seek to validate a brand through search engine rankings. Perception suggests that if search engines rank a product or a brand high in query results, it must be a reputable brand.

Murray said marketers should also integrate display and paid search with offline media, such as radio and TV. A iProspect study conducted last year suggests that 67% of the people exposed to an offline marketing message said they performed a search. "You need to make sure the message is consistent throughout all media including the look and feel of ad units and keywords," he said.

[the article was oroginally published at http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=105740]

Official Google Blog: We have a Knol for Dummies.com winner!

2009-05-13T01:05:00.000-07:00

Google - We have a Knol for Dummies.com winner!

Nokia Asks Advertisers to Brand Its Mobile Phones

2009-05-12T01:18:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) -- If you brand it, they will buy. That's the hope of Finnish handset maker Nokia, which is hoping mobile devices wrapped in a corporate logos will appeal to U.S. consumers.

For an undisclosed fee, the world's biggest cellphone maker is offering advertisers the right to brand the mobile handset. Advertisers choose a Nokia phone that complements their demographic target, splash the handsets and the accessories with their visual identities, embed some mobile content into it and wrap it all up in packaging plastered with their logo.

The program, set to launch in the U.S. in the second half of 2009, comes from Nokia Interactive, the cellphone maker's ad-selling arm. Nokia's ability to preload content on the advertisers' behalf is the linchpin of its custom-device strategy -- the prize for the consumer is, presumably, access to that original content. Brands may also subsidize the cost of a handset.

The idea is for brands to put "content in the hands of the most potent brand advocates -- people who like the brand ... so much that they want to be seen with it," said David Kohl, Nokia interactive head of sales-Americas.

The 18-month-old program has seen some early success in its initial testing ground in Brazil, but a U.S. launch would certainly require some tweaking. When it arrives, the program will test how far consumers here are willing to go to interact with brands -- and experts say value and relevance are the operative keys.

Select audiences
"If you ask advertisers, 'Would you like to brand a phone?' I think it'd be difficult to find one who says no. The question is: Is this something that's got enough value for consumers to change from the phone they already have?" said Maria Mandel, Ogilvy's executive director-digital innovation. She said this program would appeal to brands that want to reach a select, targeted audience, build buzz or create a loyalty tool.

In Brazil, the branded phones are priced between $70 and $200 and sold through retailers that market them with in-store promotions and co-op advertising programs involving Nokia.

One of the program's best-selling phones belongs to Unilever's Seda personal-care brand, which used a limited-edition pink Nokia phone to refresh its brand and launch a teen shampoo line. The $100 device, which came bundled with games, trial-size shampoos and exclusive music by a popular Brazilian band, sold out within two months; it eventually sold 200,000 units between April and December, according to Nokia.

Unilever media director Maria-Luisa Lopez said Seda tapped into branded handsets to get closer to its customers, and plans to brand more Nokia phones in the future. "The project ... was one of the ways to increase relevance to our consumers -- being with them, speaking their language, with the colors, sounds and shapes they love the most," Ms. Lopez said. Nokia says the branded-handset program is profitable and that it has sold millions of the branded devices.

But Brazil's mobile economics favor the program's success in ways that the U.S. may not. There, consumers pay dearly for mobile internet access and content (songs cost $3 a pop), but stateside content is cheap or free and rarely the top reason to purchase a handset.

Distribution could also be a challenge. Brazilians, who overwhelmingly prepay for their mobile talk time, can buy handsets without carrier oversight, but in the U.S., people typically buy phones through carriers, who subsidize the handsets in exchange for signing a service contract. In fact, experts say Disney and ESPN's attempts to sell branded handsets earlier this decade went nowhere because they lacked wide distribution. Nokia said it is in talks with T-Mobile and AT&T regarding distribution of the branded sets.

Trade-offs
Ultimately, the program's success will likely come down to what consumers get in exchange for carrying a brand-plastered handset. In the U.S., the branded phones will cost the same or cheaper than the unbranded one of the same model.

"I'm not sure if consumers would want their mobile experience to be a commercial-advertising experience," said Mike Slusar, a former AT&T executive who now consults on brand management and licensing. "Their preference is to brand their own phones."

As Forrester research analyst Charles Golvin pointed out, consumers are savvy: "If they're being co-opted as a brand spokesman, they expect some compensation in the way of increased subsidies."

While Nokia's program has the attention of retail, entertainment and package-goods advertisers, not everyone is into it. For example, said Mr. Kohl, automakers are still scratching their heads: "It's not clicking with them to the same degree as it is with a Coke."

For now, entertainment companies are among Nokia's low-hanging fruit because they view mobile as a key promotional channel for their movies and music. Mr. Kohl said Nokia is working on possible joint partnerships, including one that marries a cable network with a fashion retailer.

[the article was oroginally published at http://adage.com/article?article_id=136543]

New Search Tool Aims at Answering Tough Queries

2009-05-12T01:16:00.000-07:00

Every new online search service must face the inevitable question: “Is it better than Google?”

Result of a query for "space needle eiffel tower" entered into the WolframAlpha search service.

WolframAlpha, a powerful new service that can answer a broad range of queries, has become one of the most anticipated Web products of the year. But its creator, Stephen Wolfram, wants to make something clear: Despite the online chatter comparing it to Google, his service is not intended to dethrone the king of search engines.

“I am not keen on the hype,” said Mr. Wolfram, a well-known scientist and entrepreneur and the founder of Wolfram Research, a company in Champaign, Ill., that has been quietly developing WolframAlpha.

Mr. Wolfram’s service does not search through Web pages, and it will not help with movie times or camera shopping. Instead it computes the answers to queries using enormous collections of data the company has amassed. It can quickly spit out facts like the average body mass index of a 40-year-old male, whether the Eiffel Tower is taller than Seattle’s Space Needle, and whether it is high tide in Miami right now.

WolframAlpha, which is expected to be available to the public at wolframalpha.com in the next week, is not a finished product. It is an early working version of a project that has been years in the making and will continue to evolve over years, if not decades. As such, there is much it cannot answer now.

But even as he dismisses the Google comparisons, Mr. Wolfram, a former child prodigy who published his first research paper on particle physics at age 15 and is best known for creating the math-formula software Mathematica, is happy to add fuel to the simmering expectations surrounding his service.

“I think WolframAlpha has the potential to be quite important,” he said.

The goal of creating a computer system that can answer questions has been a tantalizing but elusive pursuit for many computer scientists for more than four decades. Some veterans of the field say Mr. Wolfram may have come as close as anyone yet.

“In many ways, creating a system like this has been a holy grail of lots of folks for some time,” said Nathan Myhrvold, a former chief technology officer of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, an investment company that owns a portfolio of patents.

“It has wound up being considered something that is virtually impossible,” Mr. Myhrvold said. WolframAlpha has shown “that it wasn’t impossible but really difficult,” he added. “It involved applying lots of different tricks.”

Doug Lenat, an artificial intelligence expert whose company Cycorp has spent the last 15 years developing a system that brings human-like reasoning to some computer systems, said WolframAlpha can handle “an astronomical number of questions,” and could eventually turn into a favorite destination on the Web.

“It may become a massive player alongside Google,” Mr. Lenat said.

Traditional search engines like Google and Yahoo, by and large, excel at finding information that already exists online. If there are Web pages that include the words used in a query, the engines will find them and rank them in order of relevance.

WolframAlpha is different. For starters, it does not gather data from the Web. Instead, its “knowledge base” is made up of reams and reams of data — ranging from the kinds of facts you would find in a World Almanac, to highly specialized data from physics and other sciences — that some 100 employees at Wolfram Research have gathered, verified and organized over several years.

When a user types in a query, WolframAlpha tries to determine the relevant area of knowledge and find the answers, often by performing calculations on its data. If you type “LDL 120,” it will return a graph showing the distribution of cholesterol levels among the United States population, and display the percentage of people above and below that figure. If you type “LDL 120 male 33,” it will adjust the results to focus on that gender and age group.

In response to “how far is the Moon from Earth,” WolframAlpha will calculate the exact distance based on an algorithm that computes the ever-changing distance between the two bodies. The engine that computes answers is largely built on Mathematica.

In its current state, there are many queries that WolframAlpha cannot answer, either because it does not understand the question or because it does not have the requisite data. For instance, it is stumped by queries like “obesity rate,” “housing prices New York” or “unemployment San Francisco” (but it will answer “unemployment San Francisco County”).

“It is going to be very good in some areas and incomplete in others,” said Nova Spivack, the chief executive of Radar Networks, which is using artificial intelligence and other techniques to help people find Web content that is interesting and relevant to them.

WolframAlpha does not actually try to work out the real meaning of a query, as some artificial intelligence systems do, so there are some questions it will never be able to answer. But experts say its approach appears to be effective in many areas.

“He’s done a great job of marrying the acquisition of data with the mathematical algorithms,” said David A. Ferrucci, an artificial intelligence researcher at I.B.M., who is leading a team developing a computer program that will compete with humans on “Jeopardy.”

If successful, WolframAlpha has the potential to become a large business opportunity. For now, Mr. Wolfram said he plans to offer advertising and other forms of sponsorship on the site, and perhaps offer premium versions of the service for researchers. And somewhat coyly, he said he has discussed potential partnerships with the “obvious people,” including search engine companies.

“We are actively pursuing interesting relationships,” he said.

Representatives for Google and Yahoo declined to discuss WolframAlpha.

Mr. Spivack and others said WolframAlpha may become a complement to traditional search engines, which themselves have begun to offer simple versions of the kinds of calculations and data manipulation at which WolframAlpha excels.

“There is a huge space of possible questions that Google doesn’t answer,” Mr. Spivack said. “I think WolframAlpha will go well beyond the academic world to cover business and industry, economics, health.”

[the article was originally published at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/technology/internet/11search.html?_r=1&ref=technology]

Hulu's tug of war with TV

2009-05-12T01:11:00.000-07:00

Online video site Hulu trumpeted its ascension to the media big time a few months back with a dash of sardonic humor. In its debut TV commercial, in which Alec Baldwin mocks the audience's addiction to the very shows he creates as a fictional network executive, the site calls itself "an evil plot to destroy the world."

The joke is uneasily close to the truth for some in the television business.

Once dismissed as "Clown Co." by Silicon Valley critics who scoffed at the notion that old media giants could ever harness the Internet, the website with a name that sounds like a Hawaiian dance has quickly upset the status quo. Hulu's traction with users has entrenched entertainment companies worried that the video site's runaway success could undercut the financial underpinnings of the industry.

Those companies are fighting back, and the result could mean no more free passes for many signature cable programs that appear on Hulu.

NBC Universal and News Corp. publicly launched Hulu a little more than a year ago as a gamble on television's digital future. The website allows viewers to watch thousands of episodes of TV shows for free, from current hits like "Family Guy" and "The Office" to old favorites like "WKRP in Cincinnati" and "I Dream of Jeannie." Hulu's simple design, expansive catalog and no cover charge have elevated it to one of the most popular websites for watching video.

With 42 million viewers in March -- an audience nearly twice the size of TV's most popular show, Fox's "American Idol" -- Hulu whizzed past Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, and is now nipping at the heels of Google's YouTube.

"Hulu has certainly exceeded all of our expectations," said Jean-Briac Perrette, NBC Universal's president of digital distribution. "We've come a long way from Clown Co."

Late last month, Walt Disney Co. overcame its initial skepticism and signed on as an equity owner of Hulu, which has nearly 150 content partners. That gives the video site even more star power with the addition of ABC's "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," and cable hits such as ABC Family's "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" and Disney Channel's "Wizards of Waverly Place."

"Our feeling is that -- and some of this is instinct, by the way -- media consumption online is growing and will continue to grow," Disney Chief Executive Robert A. Iger said in a call last week with analysts who grilled him about Hulu. "It is really important for us to establish ourselves there."

But in making a bid for the next generation of Internet- attuned viewers, Hulu's owners have strained their lucrative relationships with cable and satellite operators. Companies like Time Warner Cable Inc. and DirecTV Group Inc. pay cable networks billions of dollars each year to carry programming. Believing that they should have exclusivity because their payments support the enormous cost of producing TV shows, such companies have been pushing back against the Hulu freebies.

Investors also are wary that the media companies' embrace of the Internet-content-should-be-free philosophy threatens one of Hollywood's biggest profit centers: cable programming.

"If you give away your premium content for free, you are basically hastening your own demise, signing your own death warrant," said Laura Martin, a media analyst with Soleil-Media Metrics. "There is a choice that companies have to make."

Hulu illustrates the quandary that media executives face as they weigh the potential of the Internet against their dependable, old-line businesses. If the television industry does not find a way to preserve its two pillars of revenue -- advertising and subscription fees -- the consequences could be dire. Analysts point to the rapid deterioration of newspapers, which traded paying print subscribers for the expectation of big bucks from online advertising that have not materialized.

The conflict has forced Hulu to make concessions that have hurt users who have come to expect a rich menu on the video site. In recent months, entire seasons of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" were abruptly taken off the site, along with episodes of other cable TV shows such as "In Plain Sight" and "Psych."

Hulu even blocked access to a technology that lets its users watch content on their TVs. The move provoked outrage among fans of the software, called Boxee, drawing 385 angry comments on the company's website.

"Big Media had better come out of their hole and embrace the power of Internet streaming or they'll be in big trouble down the road," wrote one poster who identified himself as Lew Ciokiewicz.

Hulu's pullback in the case of "Always Sunny," one of the site's early favorites, underscores the tug of war within established media companies over the wisdom of placing TV shows on the Internet for free.

The quirky sitcom about a group of slackers has become a signature of the FX cable channel. (FX is a division of Fox, whose parent company, News Corp., is one of Hulu's founding partners.)

Even as FX acknowledged Hulu brought it new viewers, the cable network nonetheless demanded that the video site drop three seasons from its free online offerings over fears it would undercut the show's ratings and hamper lucrative DVD sales.

"We are not going to take steps that ignore the needs of our partners," explained Hulu Chief Executive Jason Kilar.

[read more at http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-hulu11-2009may11,0,5771665.story]

Microsoft Buys another Start-Up

2009-05-12T01:05:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Corp. agreed to acquire a videogame start-up co-founded and partly owned by Don Mattrick, the executive who runs Microsoft's videogame business.

The Redmond, Wash., company said the purchase of BigPark Inc., a Vancouver-based company that is staffed by veterans from Electronic Arts Inc., will give Microsoft control of a new game that BigPark is developing exclusively for the company's Xbox 360 game console. Financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

The deal is complicated by the role of Mr. Mattrick, who leads Microsoft's videogame efforts as senior vice president of the company's interactive-entertainment business. He is also chairman and co-founder of BigPark and remains a minority shareholder in the company.

David Dennis, a Microsoft spokesman, said Mr. Mattrick wasn't involved in the discussions to acquire BigPark and that the impetus to do the deal came from other Microsoft executives, including Phil Spencer, general manager of Microsoft game studios, and Robbie Bach, the president of Microsoft's entertainment-and-devices division.

"The team was blown away by the creativity and talent of folks at the studio," Mr. Dennis said. "We think the game they're working on is going to be a hit."

Mr. Mattrick co-founded BigPark several years ago after leaving Electronic Arts. Microsoft said Mr. Mattrick disclosed his investment in BigPark to the company before they hired him to run Microsoft's videogame business two years ago. His position as chairman of BigPark was approved by the company pursuant to Microsoft's standard of business conduct, Microsoft said in a statement.

[the article was orginally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124172618297397483.html]

Google's Latest Domination

2009-05-12T01:01:00.000-07:00

You may think Google (GOOG) dominates the search market, with 63.7 percent of all searches conducted in the United States compared with Yahoo's (YHOO) 20 percent. But you haven't been looking at mobile Internet devices, which everyone agrees will be the most dynamic and explosive piece of the online world for years to come. According to a new report from the Internet marketing firm Net Applications, Google accounts for 97.5 percent of all mobile phone searches. 97.5 percent. Now that's what we call dominance.

And the company's fortunes keep rising elsewhere as well. BusinessWeek spreads around a rumor that Dell (DELL) is exploring the option of using the Android operating system for a new line of cheap laptops. This makes Dell the second major computer manufacturer to flirt with abandoning Windows for Android; Hewlett-Packard announced it was looking into Android a few months back. Google has an outright monopoly on mobile search, and it's threatening to eat into Microsoft's (MSFT) core business. What does it do for an encore?

Ah, yes: Twitter. For months, gossipmongers like us have been spreading word that Google might snatch up the microblogging company for a few hundred million. After all, Twitter's main potential value lies in searching all those tweets in real time and the advertising that could accompany the search results. What business model does that sound like to you?

And Google's not alone in reportedly salivating over all that searchable data. Apple has reportedly offered $700 million to make Twitter a part of the Steve Jobs family. In fact, Twitter Vice President of Operations Santosh Jayaram (who just happens to be Google's former head of search quality) just announced a new breakthrough in searching tweets. Now, Twitter's search engine will also crawl over each tweet, find any links people embedded in them, scan the linked page, and index the content to produce even more accurate results. In addition, Twitter's search engine will also rank results according to whatever Internet or cultural trend is hot at the moment, as well as the popularity of each twitterer. Now everyone searching on Twitter gets to know what Ashton Kutcher thinks, whether they want to or not.

Sounds perfect for Google, right? They've got the search know-how, and Twitter's got the next big thing. Nonetheless, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone maintains that he won't sell the company—to Google or anyone else. In case anyone didn't get the message, he even went on The View to tell Barbara Walters. Got that, Eric Schmidt? Twitter's not for sale. Until it is, of course.

[the article was originally published at http://www.thebigmoney.com/blogs/feeling-lucky/2009/05/07/googles-latest-domination]

Microsoft to buy game maker BigPark Inc

2009-05-08T00:23:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it will buy computer game designer BigPark Inc for an undisclosed amount, as it pushes its strategy of producing exclusive games for its Xbox entertainment system.

Microsoft has already been working with Vancouver, Canada-based BigPark over the past year on a game for the Xbox, but has so far announced no details. More information is expected at the video game industry's annual E3 Expo in June.

BigPark, founded in 2007 by former executives of Electronic Arts Inc and Distinctive Software Inc, will become part of Microsoft Game Studios.

One of BigPark's co-founders, Don Mattrick, became senior vice president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business in July 2007.

[the article was originally published at http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5460AW20090507]

Biz Stone says Twitter's not for sale

2009-05-08T00:10:00.000-07:00

Twitter Inc. co-founder Biz Stone said today the company is not for sale despite reports that Apple Inc. is in late-stage negotiations to buy the microblogging site.

Stone and co-founder Evan Williams were making an appearance on the morning talk show The View when host Barbara Walters asked about the recent flood of rumors that the likes of Apple, Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. all are vying to buy Twitter. Stone said, "No. We are not for sale."

Echoing his previous statements about sale rumors, Stone added that right now, Twitter is focused on developing new features on its Web site and on remaining independent.

Stone's comments come just a day after rumors flared on the blogosphere that Apple was laying down a $700 million offer for Twitter. This latest round of speculation comes on the heels of last fall's failed bid by Facebook Inc. to scoop up Twitter, which was followed by rumors that had both Google and Microsoft both casting an eye on the microblogging site.

Blog site Gawker.com reported on Tuesday that an unnamed source, who reportedly has been recruited for a senior-level position at Apple, said the company is in "serious negotiations" with Twitter. The story noted that Apple is trying to hash out a deal quickly so an announcement could be made on June 8, during Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch also reported that a "normally reliable source" said that Apple is in late-stage negotiations to buy Twitter. However, that story also noted that other sources said they have no knowledge of any talks between the two.

Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc., said yesterday that if the rumors about Apple's interest are true, it could make for an interesting combination.

"Apple has the right 'attitude' to run something like Twitter, plus the ability to monetize it with advertising," Olds said. "I can see where Twitter might fit quite nicely into the Apple empire. It would give Apple a strong entry into the social networking market and also a very solid advertising vehicle."

[the article was originally published at http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9132602]

Top execs reveal why newspapers don't block Google

2009-05-08T00:05:00.000-07:00

vTo hear the poobahs of traditional media tell it, Google is to print media what global warming is to the polar caps. At many once-stalwart print publications, profits are melting away.

For several months, leaders at some of the nation's most influential newspapers and periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and the online arm of Forbes magazine have begun blaming Google and similar Web services for at least some of their deepening financial troubles. Google sells ads tied to the news blurbs it "scrapes" from news sites. It links back to the Web sites from which it acquired the content but doesn't share ad revenue with them. This isn't fair, many media execs say.

In all the very public bashing of Google, however, few if any of the critics has answered why they don't just cut Google out of the equation by preventing the search engine from indexing their Web pages. The task could be accomplished by inserting a single line of code into their URLs. If Forbes.com added a line such as forbes.com/robots.txt, content from the site would be rendered invisible to Google.

Representatives from the Journal and AP declined to comment for this story, but their Web sites speak volumes for them. None of the companies has severed ties with Google and risked losing access to the search engine's millions of users. Traditional print publications, which have seen ad revenue plummet, mass layoffs, and in some cases the shut down of operations, are now hopelessly dependent on Google to lure readers, says media executives. Jim Brady, the Washington Post's former digital chief, says the question of whether Google is good or bad for print journalism is almost irrelevant at this point. Print publications are helpless to do anything about it.

"Get out a sheet of paper and write down all the things Google does for you," said Brady, former executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, as he offered advice to his former peers in old media. "Google allows your content to be exposed to people who would never see it otherwise. If you're able to code your pages well, then you can get an awful lot of leads from Google. It's up to your site to turn those leads into loyal customers...Google is not going away."

Pointing fingers
That's not exactly how Jim Spanfeller sees it. The CEO of Forbes.com asked the question in an opinion piece he wrote for the blog PaidContent.com, "is Google being disproportionally compensated for what is fundamentally other people's work?" He said the answer appears to be yes. He claimed Google "makes roughly $60 million a year directing folks" to Forbes.com.

So why doesn't Spanfeller prevent the search engine from indexing the magazine's content?

"I don't know that this isn't a bad idea," Spanfeller said in a phone interview with CNET News. "But I think that would be hard to do without everyone's competitors shutting (Google) out as well."

This sounds like an acknowledgment that Forbes needs Google to compete and that the search engine may provide publications like his a valuable service. That's at least what Marissa Mayer, a Google exec, told Congress on Wednesday during a hearing on the future of journalism. Google sends 1 billion page views every month to print publications, Mayer testified during the hearing.

Spanfeller argues, however, that Google does do harm. For example, the blurbs the search engine obtains from news sites often includes enough information to satisfy the major questions about a story. For many people, reading a headline and synopsis about three more people dying of swine flu in Mexico is all some readers want to know. There's little motivation to click on links to the site that actually produced the news. To some in media, this violates copyright law.

Spanfeller says there's also frustration when a news organization pays professional journalists to do original reporting and then see links to stories written by amateurs--or worse, blogs that are little more than flimsy rewrites of their content--with higher visibility on Google than their own.

Spanfeller wants Google to do a better job of showcasing professionally created content, and "cease stepping on or over the line of fair use." This means he wants Google to start providing less information in its news blurbs and crack down on sites that use stories without authorization.

"We show users just enough to make them want to read more," wrote Alexander Macgillivray, Google's associate general counsel, wrote last month. "Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rights holder...to remove their content from our index."

The cure?
So what do print execs want from Google? First, the search engine could cure a lot of ills by sharing ad revenue with print companies. After all, it's their content Google is selling ads against. Forget it, not going to happen predicts Brady.

"There was a fair amount of pushing from people at the (Washington Post) news group who said: 'We should make Google pay us for our content,' Brady said. "I told them 'They're never going to do it. They wouldn't give us a dime.' (They responded) 'Well then, we should block it.' I said 'Fine, we can go ahead and do that and that's suicidal.'

"Google built a better mousetrap than the newspapers were able to build," Brady continued. "That's part of the reason they're making the money they're making. At some point I don't know what you can do about that other than to try and work it to your advantage."

There are some media execs looking for new ways to get their content in front of readers without help from Google. Amazon on Wednesday showcased a new large-screen e-reader called the Kindle DX. The device is partly geared toward readers of newspapers, and magazines. Newspaper publishers Hearst Corp., and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. have said they will create their own e-readers designed to deliver their own content.

This kind of effort is fine with Brady. He says this kind of thinking is far more preferable than obsessing about the past.

"We have to ask, 'what's next?'" said Brady who plans to soon open his own consulting business. "That's where everybody needs to get to. Because Google isn't going away and they aren't writing us checks. Let's move on. We're all getting way too hung up on the past, with all the things we should have done 10 years ago, could have done...well, we didn't. Game over. We should be asking 'What are the new rules of this game and how do we best take advantage of them.'"

[the article was originally published at http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10235359-93.html]

Search Goes On - New Google ad chief points to untapped potential

2009-05-05T05:25:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK Companies often go back to basics in lean times. That's a message Google's new ad leader, Dennis Woodside, plans to convey to marketers.

Woodside, 40, said that despite the fast growth of search advertising over the past seven years, much more can be done to tap into its potential, particularly as the pressure to prove ad effectiveness grows.

"There are still huge opportunities in search," he said in an interview at Google's office here. "There are clients still not understanding the scale of the opportunity."

Google is pushing an expanded definition of search, hoping to make money from YouTube by inserting advertiser videos into the search results page. By some measures, YouTube is second only to Google in search volume. So far, advertiser uptake has been modest, Woodside said. It will continue to try new formats on the site to find what works. "Over time, some of these things will break through," he said.

Although Google made ambitious forays into selling print, radio and TV advertising, it abandoned efforts with newspapers and radio, marking an embarrassing retreat. Woodside said Google remained committed to TV advertising, seeing it as an adjunct to its video efforts and an opportunity for Internet-like targeting and measurement.

"We're trying to create a feedback loop as you have with the Web," he said. Newspaper and radio programs failed because Google couldn't implement such systems.

Woodside, who was vp of the United Kingdom, Ireland and Benelux for Google, was named vp of Americas operations after Tim Armstrong left in March to helm AOL.

[the article was originally published at http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3i06056b3e43453484d1438c745e92c513]

How to use the downturn to your advantage

2009-05-05T05:04:00.000-07:00

As the world teeters on the brink of financial collapse, the smartest thing you can do is increase your spending in paid search. Now.

That sounds counterintuitive, but it's all a matter of learning to see your paid search as an investment. I'll explain why.

Boom times are for revenue, bust times are for market share
On the most basic level, recessions are perfect times for marketing overall -- particularly because they're an ideal time for capturing market share. While your competition is slashing its marketing budget, you can take the opportunity to snap up the customers that your competition ignores. The strategy will be particularly rewarding once the economy bounces back, and your brand equity is suddenly head-and-shoulders above the competition's.

This point holds particular weight in the world of search as it becomes an increasingly critical shopping arena amid the worsening economy. Analyst David Hallerman from eMarketer explains it bluntly: "Customers are going to search engines because they are looking for better deals."

And if customers are flocking to search engines during a downturn, then capturing market share in a downturn means paying particularly strong attention to the search channel. If search is where the customers are, then you need to be in search to capture the customer market.

Investment in data
If you want to know how best to target your ads to your best customers, you need plenty of data to work with. And if there's ever a time when you need to create efficient campaigns by targeting your ads better, it's when times are tough.

This point resonates powerfully in search, perhaps the most data-driven marketing medium around. It's your marketing data that tells you things like what kind of keywords your ideal customers use, what types of search ads they are most likely to click, and what your customers look for in an ideal landing page.

But the amount of data you have correlates directly to the size of your search investment. If you create a large search campaign, you'll have a lot of data to work with, and you'll have the opportunity to create an extremely strong search ROI by working with that data. If you run a tiny search campaign, you'll lose the opportunity to find the data you need, and you'll end up risking the ability to target efficiently.

Of course, it's not enough to have the data from a large campaign. You need to know how to make use of that data. But without the data as a starting point, you really never know what levers to push to make your search marketing campaigns more intelligent -- something you need to know in a downturn, when efficiency matters most. At the same time, having more data now will help you know how to take advantage of improvements in the economy, whenever they come.

Since these are things you really can't do without, you really can't do without a strong investment in paid search.

Data as an investment, part two: Quality score
There's also a second, search-specific part of the data story that's valuable to explore here: the search engine's ad quality ranking systems (like Google's Quality Score).

The idea behind quality ranking is simple. Search engines only make money when searchers click on search ads. Therefore, poorly-performing search ads represent an opportunity cost for the engines, which would rather hand over an ad unit to an ad that gains more clicks. To compensate, search engines charge advertisers more per click on ads that seem unlikely to perform well.

How do the engines know if an ad will perform well? One of the most powerful indicators is the advertiser's track record. Search engines assume an advertiser with a strong history of clicks will gain a similar number of clicks going forward. And so the more search clicks you've garnered in the past, the less you'll pay per click now.

The converse is also true: The fewer clicks you've garnered in the past, the harder it is to know that your ad will be a success, and the more you'll have to pay the search engine per click. That's equally true if your ads have underperformed in the past, as it is if you simply haven't run enough ads to build up a track record. Either way, the engines can't tell if your ad will perform well, and they'll simply charge you more for each click. (This, of course, is a woefully simplified explanation of quality ranking, but it gets to the gist of things.)

Quality ranking holds tremendous ramifications for would-be search advertisers who are planning to sit out the recession. By not running search ads, those advertisers are doing nothing to develop click histories. As a result, they'll need to pay exorbitant click costs on the search ads they run, once the economy bounces back. In other words, they'll be slammed with exorbitant search fees, at precisely the time when their customers are looking to buy again.

And so while some advertisers hope to save money by pulling out of search for the duration of the recession, it may prove cheaper to stay in search, in the long run.

Recessions are temporary; investments are forever
Is holding steady in search an easy decision in a recession? Of course not. But in business, the people who come out on top are the ones who keep their heads when everyone else panics. This is why you need to think beyond short-term fears, and instead look to long-term investments. Search is just one such investment you need to consider.

After all, recessions are temporary. But the benefits of a good search campaign might just be forever.

[the article was originally published at http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/22914.asp]

ABC to Add Its Shows to Videos on Hulu

2009-05-05T04:54:00.000-07:00

Three of the four big broadcast networks now own stakes in Hulu, the popular video Web site.

ABC Enterprises, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, announced Thursday that it would join NBC Universal, which is owned by General Electric and Vivendi, and the News Corporation, owner of Fox, as a partner in the joint venture.

Hulu, which in the last 18 months has become the third most popular video site on the Web, behind YouTube and Fox Interactive Media, displays free, high-quality versions of television shows and movies, supported by advertising. It said it would add ABC shows like “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live” to its online library by late summer, pending regulatory approval.

Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, said that while most of the network’s shows will continue to be available on ABC.com, that site attracts mostly core fans. By distributing them on Hulu, Disney hopes to reach Hulu’s much-larger audience of 42 million visitors a month.

According to people briefed on the terms of the deal, ABC will give Hulu an exclusive license to distribute its shows on Hulu.com and across the Web on Hulu’s partner sites, like MySpace and AOL .com. ABC will also give Hulu around $25 million in marketing credit, which Hulu can use to advertise itself during ABC’s broadcast shows.

In exchange, Disney will take a 28 percent stake in Hulu.com, a little less than the stakes of the joint venture’s founders, NBC Universal and the News Corporation. As part of the deal, NBC and the News Corporation also renewed their commitments to provide their shows exclusively to Hulu for an additional two years.

The deal is a blow to YouTube, owned by Google and by far the largest video site on the Web. It also courted Disney but struck a deal to display only short clips from shows on ABC and ESPN. People familiar with the negotiations said talks between Disney and YouTube broke down over how a deal would be structured, with Disney insisting on owning a stake in any joint venture.

Jeff Zucker, president of NBC Universal and a member of the Hulu board, said the experience on Hulu.com was superior to that on YouTube, for viewers and advertisers.

“Advertisers have made it clear that they want a safe environment unpolluted by videos of cats on skateboards,” Mr. Zucker said. “Couple that with the fact that Hulu has generated a user experience that is second to none. That has made Hulu the pre-eminent video site.”

ABC’s deal with Hulu also isolates CBS, which will be the only major broadcast network without a seat at the Hulu table. In a statement, CBS said it wanted to maintain control over the distribution of its shows online.

CBS has been offered a chance to join the joint venture several times, say people who have followed the continuing discussions, but has always declined. CBS distributes its shows on 300 video sites, including Joost, MSN and AOL. It also withholds some shows from the Web for several days after they are broadcast to ensure that the Web does not cannibalize the more profitable TV-watching audience.

That is a widespread concern among all the television networks and cable and satellite companies, and it is the reason Disney will not make cable shows like “Hannah Montana” available on Hulu. But Peter A. Chernin, president of News Corporation, said the answer was not to withhold material from sites like Hulu.

“The alternative of never making anything available on the Web is just silliness,” he said. “Then the pirates will just make it available for you. ”

Mr. Chernin said cable companies and Hulu were devising ways to identify the subscribers of cable and satellite services when they visit the site, so they can provide access to cable shows.

[the article was originally published at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/business/media/01hulu.html?_r=1&ref=media]

Pentagon targets recruits on Facebook, Twitter

2009-05-05T04:52:00.000-07:00

You don't often hear a three-star general using the word "friend" as a verb.

But for Lt. Gen. Benjamin Freakley and other Army brass, a new era has brought a new language — and new tools like online social networks Twitter and Facebook — for seeking out young recruits and spreading the military's message.

Freakley, who heads the Army command that oversees recruiting, says social networking sites offer another way to reach tomorrow's soldiers.

"They live in the virtual world," Freakley said. He cited Facebook as a key component in targeting 18-to 24-year-olds. "You could friend your recruiter, and then he could talk to your friends."

The Army isn't the only branch of the military with Facebook friends or that has a following on Twitter. The Air Force has also established a Facebook page, Twitter feeds and a blog, while the Marine Corps is using various networking sites mainly for recruiting purposes. The Navy is "experimenting" with several forms of online media, and some of its commands are using Twitter, a spokesman said. Even the Coast Guard commandant regularly updates his Facebook status while traveling.

The Army has also added to its Web site video games, a virtual recruiter and clips that answer commonly asked questions about life in uniform.

Showing off the videos during an interview at his office at Fort Monroe, Freakley said some of the questions were surprising: Can I have a dog in the Army? Can I buy a truck in the Army? Can I be married in the Army?

The Army, Freakley said, wants to answer those questions.

Earlier this year, the Army established an online and social media division within its public affairs office. The division's director, Lt. Col. Kevin Arata, said the search is on every day to find new avenues online to reach not only soldiers, but their families and the general public.

"We know that's where they are, and we need to go to them," Arata said.

[the article was originally published at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30513702]

Google Tries Viral Campaign to Goose Interest in Chrome

2009-05-05T04:48:00.000-07:00

Why would Google take on Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla in the web-browser war and not try to win it? That question has been asked since Google ambled into the Safari-Explorer-Firefox derby last fall with its own entry called Chrome, but took a remarkably low-key approach to marketing it.
Well, Google is about to turn up the heat, a little. The search giant is releasing 11 short films on YouTube today that extol Chrome's various virtues, in hopes it can turn them into the kind of viral hits YouTube is famous for. (It doesn't hurt that Google owns YouTube.)

The videos take pains not to mention or to directly attack the competition; rather, their goal is to get people to start thinking about what they want out of an appliance most thinks works just fine.

'Featured videos'
Initially, the videos will get promotion as "featured videos" on YouTube's home page, but Google may combine that with a media buy across the content network that would see the videos placed as display ads across the web. Tagline: a new way to get online.

"There's a teeny group of people who obsess and care browsers, but most people don't really think about it," said Google Creative Director Robert Wong. "But imagine if a browser was a car and people didn't know what they were driving or that they had a choice?"

The videos are Google's latest effort to market Chrome, which has been limited largely to keyword and display ads on Google's ad network, a download button on YouTube and for a few days after its launch a link on Google's search page. But after a flurry of early-adopters, market share for Chrome has settled at 1.23% compared to Explorer's 66.8%, Firefox's 22% and Safari's 8.2% according to Net Applications.

Adoption has been abysmal largely because Google hasn't promoted the software or signed any expensive deals to have PCs shipped with Chrome pre-installed (which reports say it has considered). Google also hasn't yet released a Mac version, eliminating a small but potentially enthusiastic group of early adopters.

Marketing on the cheap
Google is still trying to market Chrome on the cheap: Budgets for the videos were $10,000, according to a person who bid on the project. In using YouTube to market Chrome, Google is using the video service in much the same way mass marketers tend to, as an opportunity for free, earned publicity rather than a medium on which to purchase advertising.

The videos were produced by a diverse array of designers, illustrators and mostly small creative shops such as Motion Theory, Go Robot and Hunter Gatherer. Christoph Niemann, a frequent illustrator for The New Yorker and the New York Times, created an animated short called "You and Your Browser," which depicts the difference between a "Bad Browser!" and the various attributes (speed, power, sophistication) of a "Good Browser."

The campaign is similar to Chrome Experiments, a site launched in March where Google commissioned web designers to create web pages and applications that take advantage of the speed of the browser.

Google got into the browser business as a defensive move: All of its products and services from search to e-mail to YouTube are experienced through a browser, software that Google does not control. By launching an open-source browser, Google can push development in the space, even if it never wins in market share. A video of Google engineers explaining the strategy has been viewed nearly 1 million times on YouTube.

[the article was originally published at http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=136340]

Social Gaming Scores in the Recession

2009-05-05T04:15:00.000-07:00

Gaming goes gangbusters in a downturn. In 2001, the Nasdaq was plunging and such tech mainstays as telecom, e-commerce, and enterprise computing were in a tailspin. But gaming giants Electronic Arts (ERTS) and Activision (ATVI) soared. Titles including The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and the Madden sports series became national big-budget obsessions.

In the current recession, amid declines in computing and online advertising, gaming again is on a tear. Only this time around, it takes more than producing a pricey console or a slick blockbuster in a shrink-wrapped box to win big at gaming. In a way, it takes a lot less.

Some of the most impressive growth of late is in technologically stripped-down games that offer players social, communal experiences. The most talked about are Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and several interactive titles associated with Nintendo's (7974.T) Wii. And the trend isn't confined to the living room. Less talked about is a surge in social games, played with friends on smartphone platforms such as Apple's (AAPL) iPhone and on mass-market sites such as Facebook and News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace.
Many Games Are Free

Social gaming is less about killer graphics and quicksilver hand-eye coordination and more about connecting with friends. The best games aren't impressive in terms of technology, though they're quite adept at harnessing media that let players interact. For games on social networking sites, that means letting far-flung friends and families share an activity, rather than just photos and wall posts. On the iPhone, games utilize sophisticated multitouch technology that lets the screen respond to more than a single touch at a time. The number of people playing social games is expected to surge to 250 million in 2009, from 50 million in 2008, by some industry estimates. During recessions, people tend to look for low-cost entertainment, often staying at home. Many social games are free; often even power users pay less than $50 a month.

Despite the low costs associated with social games, many actually make money. That's where entrepreneur Mark Pincus comes in. Pincus missed the last countercyclical gaming surge. Unlike most Silicon Valley geeks, Pincus isn't into video games; and in the early part of the decade he was too busy starting a company called Tribe, an ultimately failed effort to merge local newspapers with the burgeoning social networking trend then made popular by Friendster.

Pincus doesn't intend to make the same mistake twice. So he started Zynga, a site that specializes in social gaming. He's raised almost $40 million from some of the most well-regarded names in venture investing, including über-angels Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel. Other investors include Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

[you can read more at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2009/tc20090429_963394.htm]

AOL chief wants portal to focus more on user experience

2009-04-30T00:34:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) -- Since leaving his post as sales chief of Google to run AOL, Tim Armstrong has kicked off a review of the long-ailing internet icon's vast array of brands, with an eye toward creating a simpler experience for both consumers and the ad community.

In an interview with Ad Age Editor Jonah Bloom here at the 4A's annual Leadership Conference, Mr. Armstrong made no guarantees about the long-term survival of AOL's current offerings, such as its MediaGlow publishing division or its Platform-A advertising platform or its numerous consumer-facing content brands. While he didn't detail any specific plans, he did say its portfolio has gotten cluttered.

"The understanding of the value of brands at AOL has gotten a little gray over time," he said in front of a crowd of ad agency CEOs, adding that the intense scrutiny of the company has had a negative effect. "The questioning from the outside" has actually bruised the company internally, he said. "There are cases where we have tens of millions of people touching a brand every day," but people inside AOL have forgotten the need to improve the products behind those brands.

Mum on spinoff
Mr. Armstrong shocked the ad business recently when he left the relatively comfy confines of Google for AOL, a trouble spot for Time Warner since its dial-up-internet-access business eroded with the advent of broadband.
More 4A's Leadership Conference Coverage:
No More Remembering What All Those A's Stand For
4A's Rebrands, Makes Other Changes in Bid to Stay Relevant in Changing Industry

Lately Madison Avenue, the media business and Wall Street have been waiting for a decision from Time Warner on whether it will spin off AOL and thus unravel one of the most calamitous mergers in business history. That decision could be revealed as soon as an earnings call tomorrow, according to a recent Bloomberg story.

Mr. Armstrong said he did not know whether the story was accurate.

Taking a page out of Google culture, he said he has put multiple executives on the task of simply studying all of AOL's brand assets and working on the Time Warner unit's mission statement. He's also met with 2,000 or so AOL employees, many in town hall meetings he's conducted.

Focus on user experience
Mr. Armstrong hinted at disapproval of the company's recent decision to allow Intuit to alter the AOL logo on the AOL home page by installing the TurboTax check mark in the "O" in AOL. "AOL needs to focus on the user experience," he said, and understand the "trade-off between that revenue and the user experience." He added, "I don't know how that decision was made, but I'd like to find out. ... There are lines to be drawn around brand monetization."

He said the future of AOL is as a "great, great, great internet products company, and products include content." He added, "People are not paying enough to put their ads on AOL content."

As Mr. Armstrong tries to sort out the future of the company, he is in part looking to the past. He said he's consulted with co-founder Steve Case as well as Ted Leonsis, AOL's vice chairman emeritus. Mr. Leonsis, who owns the Washington Capitals hockey team, even gave Mr. Armstrong a lucky green tie he wears to the team's games.

Mr. Armstrong also gave some details of the final moments of his last day at Google, owner of 5% of AOL, when, having already surrendered his security badge, he found his only way out of the building was through the loading dock.

[the article was originally published at http://adage.com/agencynews/article?article_id=136327]

Despite tough advertising market, Facebook is expanding

2009-04-30T00:29:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook Inc. has plenty of money to overcome the economic slump and is adding new forms of interactive advertising that will boost sales 70 percent this year, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, said.

"We could not be doing better financially," Sandberg said in an interview last week. "We absolutely do not need to take money. We might take money - but it doesn't mean we need to."

Facebook is expanding amid the worst market for Internet advertising since the dot-com bust, and at a time when companies are still trying to figure out how to advertise on social-networking sites. While Facebook was "nervous" following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. last year, its confidence for ad sales "grows every week," Sandberg said.

"We're on a path, a clear path, to be cash-flow positive next year," said Sandberg, who joined Facebook from Google Inc. last year. She had previously served as chief of staff for the Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton.

The challenge for Facebook, the most popular social-networking site, is that people aren't used to seeing ads on its pages, said Allen Weiner, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"It's a very, very tough and discriminating audience," Weiner said. "I also don't think they've totally sold the vast array of potential advertisers and marketers on the value of Facebook."

Founded in 2004, Facebook has raised more than $400 million in equity funding, including a $240 million investment from Microsoft Corp. Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and venture capital firms Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, and Meritech Capital Partners are among Facebook's other investors.

Although Facebook doesn't need more money, the company uses lease-financing for equipment purchases, Sandberg said.

Sandberg, 39, said the company has improved its advertising offerings in the past year so they more closely resemble how the site works. In February, Honda Motor Co. allowed users to exchange heart-shaped virtual gifts - complete with a Honda logo - around Valentine's Day. Four days after the campaign started, 1.5 million people had either given or received virtual gifts that promoted the Honda Fit.

"It raised awareness about the Honda Fit by bringing new fans to the Honda Fit fan page" on Facebook, said Chris Martin, a spokesman for the Tokyo-based automaker.

Facebook is also using information on users' profile pages to target ads, Tim Kendall, the company's director of monetization, said at a conference in San Francisco last week. Facebook helped an Asian airline promote airfares by identifying people who expressed an interest in Japan in their profile pages, he said.

Sandberg said Facebook is experimenting with targeting ads based on information on users' virtual walls - without revealing any personal data.

Clients are spending more on Facebook than they did before the financial crisis, which contrasts with industrywide declines reported by Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft, said Jordan Bitterman, a media buyer at Digitas, an online ad agency in New York.

Some companies have held off buying ads on Facebook because they worry about their brands being displayed next to pictures of scantily clad women or other questionable content, said Gaston Legorburu, chief creative officer at Boston-based Sapient Corp., which provides online advertising services to clients such as Coca-Cola Co.

"I still see a lot of hesitation from big brands to take that risk," Legorburu said. "They are still very shy around buying media next to user-generated content."

Sandberg said the increase in visitors to Facebook, as well as the site's growing popularity with older visitors, give advertisers more potential customers.

Facebook reached 200 million users this month, double the number from August last year. Much of the growth is coming from people ages 35 to 49. They accounted for about 34 percent of Facebook's US users in March, up from 27 percent a year earlier, according to researcher Nielsen Online. The percentage of users ages 18 to 24 was 7.6 percent, down from 17 percent a year earlier.

Facebook had 69.2 million US users in March, compared with 55.9 million for MySpace, its closest competitor.

One indication that 2009 is an important year: Mark Zuckerberg, the company's 24-year-old founder, has committed to wearing a tie every day to the office.

"This was a year where we were really, I think, going to have to execute," Sandberg said.

[the article was originally published at http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/04/29/despite_tough_advertising_market_facebook_is_expanding]

MySpace Hires Two Officers To Fill Ranks

2009-04-30T00:27:00.000-07:00

News Corp. on Monday named a chief operating officer and chief product officer to fill out the executive ranks at MySpace, after naming former Facebook Inc. executive Owen Van Natta as CEO of its social-networking site last week.

Michael Jones, a former executive at Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, was named MySpace's chief operating officer. Most recently, he was founder and CEO of Tsavo Media, an online content publisher. MySpace's operating-chief position has been open since Amit Kapur left last month.

Former MTV Networks executive Jason Hirschhorn was named chief product officer, a new position at the company. Mr. Hirschhorn worked as chief digital officer at Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks. Most recently, he was president of Sling Media Inc.'s Entertainment Group.

News Corp. also owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

The company has chosen two executives with experience in product development and the technology industry, both areas in which MySpace has faced criticism.

[the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124085705936260201.html?mg=com-wsj]

NEWS -Digital Download

2009-04-28T03:16:00.000-07:00

If Microsoft wants out of the online ad business, it has a strange way of showing it. As rumors swirl that talks between Microsoft and Yahoo over a potential search ad deal could also result in Microsoft handing over its display ad business, the software giant last week threw an upfront-esque shindig in New York.

The company formally introduced Robin Domeniconi, the Time Inc. vet who was hired to lead digital sales in January, and then unveiled half a dozen original series concepts while touting its strength in video.

Such enthusiastic salesmanship and long-term positioning seemed to fly in the face of the rumored abandonment of display sales—leaving buyers puzzled. “That would surprise me if they were willing to drop MSN,” said Michelle Lawrence, group media director, Horizon Media. “That’s such a massive site.” Indeed, MSN still reaches 100 million users each month, per comScore. Lawrence also found it ironic that Microsoft—in pursuit of Google in search—“might eliminate something that they’ve got an advantage in.”

Others suspect that Microsoft’s Google envy may be leading to ill-conceived sacrifices. “It doesn’t make sense to split up display and search for either party at a time when marketers want integration,” said Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i.

Wiener fears Microsoft may fundamentally see Web advertising as an engineering endeavor. “Microsoft has to decide if they want to be in the ad sales business altogether,” he said. Dropping display would be “indicative of a fundamental misunderstanding of where the advertising business is going.”

Based on last week’s presentation, Microsoft’s programming and ad sales executives believe the business is going toward video, particularly entertainment. “That is an area that I’m absolutely leaning into in the next year,” said Scott Moore, executive producer & general manager, MSN. “The entertainment category has no dominant leader online. It’s an area we believe is ripe.”

In the works are comedy projects featuring The Office’s Rainn Wilson and The Kids in the Hall’s Dave Foley. Microsoft also is planning to launch Cinemash, a show in which comedic stars act out favorite dramatic roles; and Last Night on TV, a daily review of prime-time TV hosted by the comic duo Frangela.

Moore said each show will be developed in conjunction with advertisers, while keeping MSN’s existing user base in mind. “I’m not a fan of doing original, standalone stuff that you have to promote an inordinate amount,” he said. “I’m more interested in doing stuff that is organic to the experience we’re already programming.

We know we have an audience [for entertainment]. Why not give them more in video, which advertisers want and we can sell at a higher CPM?”

Unless, of course, if Yahoo ends up doing the selling.

[the article was originallu published at http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/content_display/news/digital-downloads/broadband/e3ida99bf36787f149a541a1a5694447cb3]

Facebook Opens Site To Developers Of Services

2009-04-28T03:14:00.000-07:00

Facebook Inc. is expected to announce significant plans to open up core parts of its sites -- namely the information that appears in the stream of updates on users' homepages and profiles -- to third-party developers so that they can build new services on top of it, people familiar with the matter say.

The announcement, expected Monday, means developers can build services that access the photos, videos, notes and comments users upload to Facebook, with users' permission. That's a big change for the social-networking site, which has exercised tight control over the look and feel of its service and how developers can interact with it.

Facebook isn't charging for the feature, instead hoping that developing new ways to access the information it houses will build user loyalty and get people to engage more often with the site, say people familiar with the matter.
[facebook] Getty Images

Developers could build a Web site that aggregates just the articles certain friends upload to the site or build a service that associates the photos a user had uploaded to Facebook with their account on another Web site, like an email service. To take advantage of the new services, users would have to allow the companies to receive access to their Facebook data, according to people familiar with the matter, and users' privacy settings on Facebook will extend to any new services built.

In addition, the Palo Alto, Calif., company is expected to announce that developers can pull the Facebook data using an open technology standard that other Web sites can also use, a decision likely to broaden the service's appeal.

The plans are expected to be discussed at a developer event in Palo Alto on Monday.

The site, which was the first major social network to allow software developers to build services on top its platform, has seen some momentum around a service it built that allows people to connect with their Facebook friends on other Web sites.

Still, Facebook, which has around 200 million users world-wide, has been heavily criticized for not doing more and for requiring developers to write some services using a customized Facebook programming language. Other companies like micro-blogging service Twitter have generated buzz by opening up more of their core features to developers.

[the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124078628311057281.html]

Rise Of The Advertising Robots

2009-04-28T03:02:00.000-07:00

Tim Cadogan pities the plight of the digital advertiser.

Big brands would love to advertise on small, niche-focused Web sites--think Mountain Dew on blogs about windsurfing, or Gerber baby food on sites about vegetarian parenting--but don't have the manpower to screen every site for quality content, let alone negotiate thousands of deals with different buyers.
Yet publishers have it even worse, says Cadogan, Yahoo!'s ( YHOO - news - people ) former head of global advertising. Editors who run small Web sites are so consumed producing content that titillates readers that they turn over their ad inventory to one of hundreds of resellers in exchange for pennies per view.

Through his Pasadena, Calif., start-up OpenX, Cadogan is working on an application to alleviate the anxiety of both beleaguered ad buyers and frustrated Web publishers. OpenX recently unveiled Market, an application that allows advertisers to automatically bid on access to narrow niches of readers across an array of small Web sites.

OpenX is one of many outfits seeking to automate the selling of hyper-targeted digital ads on the Web. A slew of firms--ranging from tiny start-ups to Web giants like Google ( GOOG - news - people )--have rolled out applications purporting to analyze online ad opportunities and help publishers and advertisers figure out how to allocate their respective ad inventories and budgets.

Many of these new applications promise to deploy demographic, geographic and personal interest data to identify attractive readers for advertisers wherever they land on the Web. Such micro-targeting may seem like a potential invasion of privacy, but user data analysis is an established practice. Most data collectors skirt privacy complaints by allowing Web users to block their tracking software.

The boom in new advertising optimization tools could reshape the $7.6 billion market for Internet display advertising. Leery of attaching the brand to sketchy Web content, big advertisers have historically preferred to deal with large Web publishers, such as the digital arms of newspapers and consumer magazines.

But ad tech executives and media planners say the new ad sales tools promise a cheap and efficient way for brands to screen and buy ads on smaller Web sites and blogs.

"These systems help advertisers cut through the clutter online, which will clearly help the 'long tail' publishers,'' says Kelly Twohig, a senior vice president at media planning agency Starcom ( SCME.PK - news - people ) in Chicago, whose clients include Allstate ( ALL - news - people ) and Capital One.

The potential for a reallocation of ad budgets from big publishers to smaller rivals comes at a stressful time for media giants. The New York Times Co. ( NYT - news - people ) announced this week that Web ad sales fell 6% and overall ad revenues dropped 28% year-over-year during the first quarter of 2009.

Earlier this month, Gannett ( GCI - news - people ), publisher of 85 daily newspapers including USA Today, reported that quarterly revenue decline 18% compared to last year.

Publishers participate in the OpenX Market by entering their advertising inventory--the spaces on their Web pages where ads can appear--into an online database and set a floor price for each slot. If an advertiser bids above that minimum, their ad appears on the Web site.

Along with buying on specific Web sites, Cadogan says that ad buyers will be able to use third-party data on Web users' personal interest, browsing history and demographics to find desirable segments of readers across all publishers participating in the market. Web sites currently use OpenX's software to deliver an estimated 300 billion impressions each month.

In addition to the challenge of convincing marketers to spend their ad budgets in a drastically different way, outfits like OpenX have to figure out how to emerge as leaders in an already competitive field.

"We've seen half a billion dollars of venture capital poured into building optimization and planning companies,'' says Matthew Hulett, chief executive of ad network and analytics firm Mpire.

This week, Hulett's firm unveiled an application to help advertisers track on which Web sites networks place ads, where on the actual screen the ad appears and if Web surfers pause their cursor over the ad. The tool is intended to help marketers better figure out how much of their ad spending is essentially worthless.

Google and Yahoo! both operate advertising exchanges that allow publishers to analyze how much revenue different ad sales techniques attract and help advertisers secure the best ad placement for the cheapest prices.

Rubicon Project, a two-year-old Los Angeles start-up that processes 40 billion impressions each month, helps Web sites compare ad prices delivered by different third-party ad brokers. This week, the company unveiled OnDemand, a service that lets advertisers automatically buy ads delivered to specific geographic, demographic and personal interest groups across a network of publishers.

PubMatic, a Silicon Valley start-up known in the ad world for publishing market reports on trends in ad prices, offers a similar optimization product aimed at big media companies' digital arms.

It's too early to say whether advertisers embrace the automated ad buying tools en masse. As people spend more of their lives online, marketers are desperate to reach them cheaply and efficiently. But, as Starcom media planner Twohig says, a human salesperson and trusted media product go a long way in attracting ad dollars.

[the article was orginally published at http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/24/advertising-internet-business-media-ad-data.html]

Local Tech Savvy Duo Steps Onto Federal Stage

2009-04-28T03:01:00.000-07:00

Aneesh Chopra and Vivek Kundra met nearly a decade ago as entrepreneurs in Northern Virginia's Indian American business community. They worked together in Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's administration and then as technology and innovation advisers on President Obama's transition team.

Now the two longtime friends will work in tandem to help meet Obama's ambitious goals of using technology to improve public access to government data, create new jobs, expand broadband services, reform the way health records are stored and build a modern electric grid.

Chopra, Virginia's secretary of technology, last week was named the nation's first chief technology officer, although he still awaits confirmation by the Senate. The long-awaited announcement comes six weeks after the administration named Kundra, former chief technology officer for the District, to the post of federal chief information officer.

The chief technology officer will focus on overall technology policy and innovation strategies across departments while the chief information officer will oversee day-to-day information technology spending and operations within agencies.

They will work within the White House with direct access to the president. Chopra will be in the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Kundra in the Office of Management and Budget.

Some in Washington's technology policy circles had questioned whether the jobs were too large and unwieldy for tech czars who have never worked on the federal stage and will now have to navigate deep-rooted federal agency structures and processes.

There also had been much debate about whether the CTO job should be filled by a tech industry veteran rather than someone with more policy experience.
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"They face huge challenges of inertia and ramping up new staff . . . but they know how to bring the potential of technology to government," said Blair Levin, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus who was also an adviser on the transition team. "Silicon Valley has a vested interest in not so much having their own person in the job, but in someone who can hear what they have to say and translate that into government."

Their appointments to the newly created federal positions have been generally well-received. Supporters say both have track records for taking innovative approaches to using technology in government. For example, Chopra, 37, created a social network for clinicians in remote health clinics, and also spearheaded a state-sponsored venture capital fund to let Virginia agencies try out unconventional tools to improve their services.

Kundra, 34, got attention for inviting software developers to use the District's government data to create Internet and cellphone applications intended to give citizens easier access to city information. His efforts to let the public watch the city's contract-letting process helped spur the development of Recovery.gov, designed to track stimulus funding.

"We are both going to be driving innovation, whether it's health IT and broadband or how federal agencies use technology," Kundra said in an interview. "We're also embracing the open government principles to make sure we are democratizing data and to make sure agencies deliver results. At the same time, we need to leverage the ingenuity of the American people and the private sector to help us."

Chopra could not be reached for comment.

[you can read more at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/26/AR2009042602262.html]

Microsoft Sales Fall Way to Short

2009-04-27T00:49:00.000-07:00

Microsoft (MSFT) posted its first year-over-year sales decline in its 23 years as a public company Thursday, highlighting the tech sector's challenges as the recession drags on.

The Redmond, Wash., software giant missed Wall Street's third-quarter sales forecast by a wide margin, but met expectations on earnings, excluding one-time charges.

For the quarter that ended March 31, Microsoft earned 39 cents a share, excluding charges totaling 6 cents a share related to layoffs and money-losing investments. That was 17% below the same period last year, its second straight dip in year-over-year earnings per share.

Sales fell 6% to $13.65 billion, well below the $14.09 billion estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. It marked a historic low for the company. Since going public in 1986, Microsoft had never reported a year-to-year drop in quarterly sales.

"While market conditions remained weak during the quarter, I was pleased with the organization's ability to offset revenue pressures with the swift implementation of cost-savings initiatives," Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said in a statement.

Though Microsoft did not provide specific financial guidance, Liddell said company officials "expect the weakness to continue through at least the next quarter."

Microsoft shares rose 4% in after-hours trading following the earnings release. During regular session trading, shares rose 0.75% to 18.92.

Investors were likely encouraged that the company preserved EPS through cost-cutting, says Jeff Gaggin, enterprise software analyst at Avian Securities.

Investors also may be enthused about the upcoming release of Windows 7, the company's next-generation PC operating system, Gaggin says. Microsoft said it remains on track to release Windows 7 in fiscal year 2010, which ends in June next year.

"Microsoft had a fairly weak first (calendar) quarter, but I don't think anyone was expecting anything differently," said Toan Tran, an analyst with Morningstar. "What investors are going to focus on now is the upcoming release of Windows 7 and how that might get the Windows business back on track."

The current version of Windows, called Vista, is a "damaged brand," Tran said. Critics have called the software slow, bloated and subject to annoying security alerts. Many PC users have avoided upgrading to Vista and continue to use its predecessor, Windows XP.

Microsoft felt the effects last quarter of the personal computer sales slowdown and corporate tech- spending cutbacks.

Analysts are forecasting year-over-year declines in sales and earnings per share for the next two quarters as well.

[the article was originally published at http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=474927]

Yahoo Set to Shutter GeoCities

2009-04-27T00:31:00.000-07:00

Yahoo Inc. said it plans to shut down GeoCities -- the personal profile service it bought for more than $4 billion in 1999 -- the latest casualty in Chief Executive Carol Bartz's campaign to shutter duplicative and underperforming products.

The company posted a notice on the GeoCities site saying it is no longer giving out new accounts for the service, which hosts user-created Web pages. The company said it would close the site later this year and will notify customers about how to save data they have uploaded to it, encouraging customers to upgrade to Yahoo's subscription Web hosting service.

The news comes as Yahoo said it will lay off 675 workers in the coming weeks through cuts targeted at certain products.

Ms. Bartz, who joined Yahoo in January, has already begun to reduce Yahoo's sprawling portfolio to focus on flagship services. The company recently announced it was closing two start-ups it acquired and tried to integrate in recent years: Jumpcut, an online video-editing service, and FareChase, a travel Web site.

GeoCities allows users to create personal pages with photos and other information, and to associate them with particular communities or neighborhoods. But its technology, designed for slower Internet connections, is crude by today's standards. Later social-networking sites, such as Friendster, MySpace and Facebook, have attracted much larger audiences.

[the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124052150483049791.html]

Amazon quarterly sales jump 18%

2009-04-27T00:29:00.000-07:00

Amazon, the online retailer, underlined its ability to thrive amid the global consumer slump on Thursday, announcing an 18 per cent increase in first-quarter revenues to $4.89bn, and a 24 per cent increase in earnings to $177m.

Excluding the impact of the stronger dollar on the overseas businesses, which account for almost half of its sales, Amazon’s net sales would have grown 25 per cent against the same period last year.

The strong quarter, which delivered earnings per share of 41 cents, beat Wall Street’s expectations and was at the high end of the company’s own forecasts, and continued the strong growth seen in the preceding holiday quarter.

Amazon’s shares, which have almost doubled since early December last year, gained more than 2 per cent in after-hours trading to $82.68.

The company’s robust performance is being sustained by its ability to offer prices on goods that compete with conventional discount retailers, combined with free shipping, and the comparatively prosperous demographics of online customers.

Amazon is also continuing to expand its sales range, recently launching a stand-alone shoe and accessory site in Japan, called javari.com, which is built on the architecture of its US Endless.com site.

It has launched digital music downloads on its German site and launched an online video game trade-in service.

The retailer soundly outperformed leading bricks and mortar rivals, while its growth in North America – up 21 per cent – was roughly twice most estimates of overall US online retail growth. International sales rose 15 per cent to $2.3bn, but increased 29 per cent on a constant currency basis.

The quarter also saw a dramatic 38 per cent increase in Amazon’s sales of non-media products such as electronics, clothing and food, which now account for 42 per cent of worldwide net sales, compared with 36 per cent last year.

Jeff Bezos, chief executive, highlighted the performance of the Kindle electronic bookreader, whose second version the company introduced this spring, saying sales “have exceeded our most optimistic expectations”, but gave no further details.

Tom Szkutak, chief financial officer, said that Amazon’s cloud computing web services business was gaining corporate clients and hedge funds. The company is also starting to market its web services to state and federal government clients.

For the second quarter, the company said it expected net sales to grow by 6-17 per cent to $4.3bn-$4.75bn. It forecast a decline in operating income of $110m-$190m compared with last year.

[the article was originally published at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8463ea90-3046-11de-88e3-00144feabdc0.html]

Current Puts RFP Call on Twitter

2009-04-27T00:24:00.000-07:00

Every day brings new uses for Twitter. Now, the short-messaging service has found its way into the agency-selection process.

The Current Network today became the first brand to solicit agencies via Twitter to receive RFPs for its account review. "This is a TwitteRFP for The Current Network. Searching for a full service ad agency partner," wrote Jordan Kretchmer, vp of brand at Current.

In a longer posting linked from the initial tweet, he explained the type of agency Current is seeking:

"Our ideal agency will help us formulate a brand/ad strategy that communicates who Current is through compelling, inspiring, and even controversial advertising. The ideal relationship for us is based on collaboration, dialogue, and a reciprocal excitement for the potential that Current has to attract a mass audience."

In an attempt to open the opaque RFP process, agencies are instructed to post their responses publicly.

Kretchmer said he hatched the idea earlier this week as a way to fill out the roster of shops Current will evaluate. He already has chosen five agencies to receive RFPs separately from Twitter.

"The whole idea is searching for an agency...that lives and breathes social media rather than claiming they do," he said.

So far, Kretchmer has gotten dozens of responses. Most are from small shops and include little more than an expression of interest. One to One Interactive, a Boston agency, went the farthest, putting together a video linked to in a reply to the "TwitteRFP."

Many of the responses have come from small creative firms that Kretchmer -- who worked at Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners before joining Current -- did not know.

"This is not a stunt at all," Kretchmer said. "I'm short-listing people with interesting responses."

At the very least, it's made the often-tiresome RFP process more intriguing, Kretchmer said. At Butler, Shine and earlier at Mullen, he often chafed at the formulaic nature of the mating dance between agencies and potential clients. "While this may not get us any different work at the end, the approach is much more fun," he said.

Shops have until Monday to respond to Kretchmer's call by replying to him using @jkretch. Kretchmer declined to state the size of the account. Current plans to have an agency chosen by June. Current has no agency relationship at present.

[the article was originally published at http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3ic65aba1d643fc23caaf0f251ba580cbc]

MySpace founders step aside

2009-04-24T06:12:00.000-07:00

The founders of MySpace are leaving the helm of the pioneering Web site that made social-networking a mainstream phenomenon, as owner News Corp. seeks to reinvigorate the once-hot property it scooped up four years ago.

The pushing aside of Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, whose contracts weren't due to expire until October, represents a pivotal test for the viability of social-networking sites. While social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have exploded in popularity in recent years, they have struggled to generate the kind of revenue and earnings prospects that can sustain them as businesses over the long haul.

News Corp. now aims to show that a large conglomerate, with a portfolio that includes many old-media properties including newspapers, can succeed at that task.

People familiar with the situation said News Corp. was completing a deal to name former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Owen Van Natta as chief executive to succeed Mr. DeWolfe. He would report to Jon Miller, the former AOL chief executive who was recruited to join News Corp. this month in a newly created position of chief digital officer. Charged with all News Corp.'s stand-alone digital properties, he was particularly given the mission of shoring up MySpace.

Spokeswomen for News Corp. and MySpace both declined to comment beyond a news release. Messrs. DeWolfe, Anderson and Van Natta couldn't be reached for comment.

News Corp. sees MySpace as critical in its transformation from a conglomerate of traditional television, movie and newspaper businesses to a new-media titan. But while MySpace grew quickly following News Corp.'s purchase, last year its revenue fell short of executives' targets. News Corp. also owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

MySpace is still the dominant social-networking site in the U.S. But its U.S. audience has fallen this year. In March, MySpace attracted 70.1 million unique visitors, down 3.6% from a year ago, according to comScore Media Metrix. Meanwhile, Facebook is nipping at its heels. Facebook surpassed MySpace's world-wide audience a year ago, and is growing fast in the U.S., with 61.2 million unique visitors in March, up 72% from a year earlier.

More broadly, MySpace, like other social-networking sites, still must overcome doubts about the medium's viability. Advertisers, for one, remain leery. "Advertising doesn't fit so neatly into a conversation that people are having among themselves," says Tom Bedecarre, chief executive of independent digital-ad firm AKQA. "The interruptive model of advertising hasn't been successful."

MySpace was founded in 2003 by Messrs. DeWolfe and Anderson. Their email marketing division of a Los Angeles company called eUniverse, which later renamed itself Intermix, was floundering, so they imitated a popular site at the time, Friendster.

They made two key improvements on Friendster: They allowed users to customize their profile pages, and they allowed users to create any identity they liked. Friendster, like Facebook today, encouraged members to use their real names.

But just as MySpace was taking off, fueled in large part by its popularity with musicians, it was sold to News Corp. MySpace's parent company, Intermix, negotiated the $650 million deal directly with News Corp., leaving the MySpace founders out of the loop until the last minute.

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch immediately sought to mollify the founders with lucrative two-year pay packages of $30 million each, but Messrs. DeWolfe and Anderson still chafed at the fact that MySpace ad sales were taken over by executives at Fox Interactive Media, according to people familiar with the situation.

The rank and file of MySpace were also angry that their stock options were canceled after the acquisition and that they were forced to move from Santa Monica, Calif., to Beverly Hills, the people said.

Relations fell apart further. Mr. DeWolfe ignored suggestions from Fox Interactive Media President Ross Levinsohn about ways to improve the site. Mr. DeWolfe sought to amend a $900 million advertising deal News Corp. cut with Google Inc. -- delaying its implementation, the people said. That deal is due to expire next year.

Mr. Levinsohn also clashed with Mr. Anderson, who is president of the site. Mr. Anderson controlled the product development and was criticized for not moving fast. In April 2006, MySpace bought the online karaoke service kSolo. MySpace launched the karaoke feature on its site in April 2008 -- two years later.

The tension between the MySpace founders and News Corp. eventually led to Mr. Levinsohn's dismissal in November 2006. He was succeeded by his distant cousin, Peter Levinsohn, who eventually gave Mr. DeWolfe control of the advertising sales at MySpace that he had sought.

All this time, Facebook was steadily gaining on MySpace. Founded by Silicon Valley computer programmers as a social network for Harvard students in 2004, Facebook expanded to other college campuses and opened to everybody in 2006.

Facebook focused on building innovative features and encouraging third-party software developers to write applications to run on Facebook.

Meanwhile, MySpace, with its marketing and music background, fought back with entertainment, such as a celebrity news site and an expensive music joint venture.

Three top MySpace executives, including Amit Kapur, former chief operating officer, left the company in March to work on a start-up. MySpace has yet to name successors for those positions.

Mr. Miller began discussing the job with potential candidates including Mr. Van Natta, but hadn't finalized anything when the news of the talks leaked, according to people familiar with the situation. Mr. Van Natta helped expand Facebook but stepped into a less prominent role as chief revenue officer as the site grew, ultimately leaving the company in February 2008. At MySpace, he could serve as a bridge between Silicon Valley and MySpace, which has struggled to match Facebook's technology prowess.

Hearing of the talks, Mr. DeWolfe called Mr. Miller to discuss his future, these people said.

In the statement News Corp. released Wednesday announcing the move, it said Mr. Anderson would take on a new role in the organization. It said Mr. DeWolfe will continue to serve on the board of MySpace China and will be a strategic adviser to the company.

[credit : http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124043324710044929.html]

Microsoft answer to Google AdSense

2009-04-24T06:08:00.000-07:00

Microsoft on Wednesday opened its PubCenter advertising service up for public beta testing, providing more of an alternative to Google's AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network technology that places ads on publishers' sites.

All the services scrutinize the content on a Web site and place advertisements the service deems to be relevant to that content. As with ads on search sites, the advertiser pays only when a reader clicks on one of the ads, and revenue is shared with the publisher and the company operating the ad service.

Kevin McCabe, senior product manager of PubCenter, announced the move at the AdSpace conference Wednesday. People can sign up for the beta service at the PubCenter site, though it's only open to people in the United States at present.

Click-through rates on such services typically are far lower than for ads on search engines. But the technology still is significant, particularly during the recession, in part because advertisers can bid for keywords and limit their investments only to areas where they see a return.

[credit : http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10224959-93.html]

TiVo Promotes Ads It Hopes You’ll interact with, Not skip

2009-04-24T06:01:00.000-07:00

The company that attacked television advertising is trying to resuscitate it.

TiVo, which allows viewers to digitally record programs and fast-forward through ads, is trying to sell ad spaces on its screens.

It is in a footrace with other companies, including Cablevision, Cox Communications and DirecTV, to offer interactive alternatives to the zapped-through television spots. The ads are called interactive because they ask the viewer to do something — enter in a new channel number, press a button on the remote — to get more information.

“In the last 18 months, the momentum has just lifted,” said Jacqueline Corbelli, the chief executive of BrightLine iTV, which designs interactive ads. “It’s started to become a staple of very large advertisers.”

In December, TiVo began offering ads that appear as a small piece of text when viewers pause a show. Advertisers can choose the specific show or genre they want their pause ad to appear on — Mercedes-Benz USA used it to promote a new car during football games earlier this year. TiVo also offers ads that appear when viewers fast-forward through shows. Advertisers that run regular 30- or 60-second spots can buy these, and when the viewer presses fast-forward, a static box appears. One for Tourism Australia shows a photograph of a girl on a beach with the text, exclaiming, “Don’t tell me I just skipped the Australia ad!” TiVo viewers are instructed to press the Thumbs Up button to see the ad and get more information.

Once a viewer interacts with its ads, TiVo can show them a video about the product, let them request more information or a coupon, or even let them configure a car with different colors and options. TiVo also sells ad space on TiVo Central, its home screen.

“By catching them at a time when they’re pausing the program, when they’ve finished with a program,” said Tara Maitra, vice president and general manager of content and advertising at TiVo, “the viewer’s main reason for being there isn’t being interrupted.”

TiVo is not the only company devising a solution to commercial-skipping. Cable and satellite companies, and technology providers like Microsoft’s Navic Networks, are also working on interactive ads.

The cable offerings vary by market. In Tucson, Phoenix, San Diego and Las Vegas, Cox Communications sells interactive spots, with graphics on top of commercials that direct viewers to vote or ask for more information using their remotes. In the New York metro area, Cablevision sells special video-on-demand channels to companies like Disney, which runs videos about its amusement parks and stars and a “talk to agent” button that is associated with the viewer’s phone number, provided by Cablevision; selecting it results in an immediate phone call from a Disney representative.

Time Warner offers some interactivity, too. Last September, the media company MPG ran a test for the insurance company American International Group with about 180,000 Time Warner subscribers in Hawaii. MPG, a unit of Havas, used Navic technology to send different ads to households with different demographics, and a banner sat on top of the ad as it ran, telling viewers to click a button on their remote for more information. Only 566 of the households interacted with the ad, said Mitch Oscar, executive vice president of televisual applications at MPG. But, he said, that number was promising.

“We’re doing branding spots anyway,” he said. “If advertisers are going to run commercials one way or the other, and we can add this element to it.”

For now, the cable company’s interactive offerings are largely limited to the two minutes of advertising an hour that each local operator sells. But Canoe Ventures, the consortium of the nation’s six largest cable companies, has announced it will make interactive request-for-information ads available by the end of 2009, and those will be available nationally.

The satellite providers, DirecTV and Dish Network, also offer interactive ads that can run nationwide — a recent Nike ad on Dish Network allowed viewers to zoom in to see a shoe, among other features.

Unilever, the consumer products company, which owns brands like Bertolli and Dove, has been aggressive in the interactive television space for the last couple of years, so much so that it held an “upfront” in the winter to book and negotiate for interactive television slots.

“What we love about it is, if you think about it, the remote control and DVRs have really been a marketer’s worst nightmare,” said Anne Jensen, brand-building director at Unilever. “What we’re doing with ITV is we’re actually making the remote control our friend.”

Last week, Unilever introduced an interactive campaign for Axe on DirecTV that had new interactive features. The campaign promoted Axe’s body washes for men, which come in four varieties, like “Shock,” to wake you up, and the exfoliating “Snake Peel,” so “if you’ve had a very questionable hookup you can scrub away the shame,” Ms. Jensen said.

The idea with this campaign was that “guys don’t really talk to each other about personal hygiene,” Ms. Jensen said. The interactive piece, designed by BrightLine, comes when the commercial’s host points to a space on the screen, and a button pops up that viewers can select for more information. Then, there are clips where Axe diagnoses what variety is appropriate for the viewer, and suggests pranks the viewers can play on friends.

Axe receives reports on how many people responded to the ads, what sections of the extra video they watched, and how much time they spent with the Axe material. “What’s nice is that this medium can be quite flexible in terms of how we optimize our campaigns and improve it as we go along,” Ms. Jensen said.

For all of the data and features that interactive ads offer, the fragmentation of the industry tended to scare off advertisers, said Craig Woerz, managing partner of Media Storm, an agency based in Norwalk, Conn., that has run interactive ads for clients like Magnolia Pictures and the Food Network.

“Advertisers and agencies love to take the easy way out, which is, I’m not going to look at this interactive stuff until I’ve got 90 million households, 60 million households,” Mr. Woerz said. “There’s a heck of a base out there. But you’re not going to do it with one phone call.”

[credit : http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/media/23adco.html?_r=1]

New Stuff from Google Labs

2009-04-23T03:47:00.000-07:00

Today, Google’s introducing some early-stage new products and services coming out of Google Labs at a press gathering hosted by R.J. Pittman, director of product management in search properties. I’ll be liveblogging the hourlong press conference being held at Google’s San Francisco (and there’s more here on the Google Labs blog):

Here’s Pittman: “We’re still not exactly sure where the economy is headed. But innovation is alive and well at Google.” The challenge is keeping the innovation framework going when the company is growing so huge.

Pittman mentions several recent innovations that are intended to “catalyze the Web,” such as Streetview and turn-by-turn directions, Audio Indexing, Picasa facial recognition, and Google Translate.

“The (innovation) garden is actually overgrown.” Lots of local opportunities getting built off Google’s overall platform. The key is getting users’ participation earlier in the food chain of product development, to get products in the hands of consumers as soon as possible. “We think it’s really important to engage the users as soon as possible.”

OK, now on to the products. First up is Radhika Malpani, director of engineering, on Similar Images. You can take a favorite query, say on Porsches, and specify the color. Now taking that further. You can do a search on Paris, say, and you get images of the city, the star, etc. Then you can choose which image for which you want more that are similar. Google looks at color, texture, and shape to determine similarity, with a little metadata (accompanying information) to help.

She shows a demo: Search on beaches, and you get a wide variety of images, most of which probably aren’t what you had in mind. So you can click on a Similar Images link under each image to get more of the same. You can keep clicking on images to get closer and closer. Hundreds of millions of images are in the database.

Pittman says they’re putting this out even before they have similar images for each image search to get quick feedback.

Pittman again on another new product coming into GoogleLabs: News Timeline. This is legendary former Apple software engineer Andy Hertzfeld’s project. Hertzfeld: It’s Google’s mission to organize the world’s information, and certain information is best organized by time. That’s the purpose of this project.

The demo: It’s literally a timeline with stories listed under each date and you can scroll back and forward in time. You can also scroll up and down to get more stories. The stories include video and other rich media that plays when you click on them. And of course you can make a search and then those stories relevant to those queries show up. “It’s a visual map of what’s going on in the world.”

You can search by source, such as a range or magazines or specific magazines, newspapers, Wikipedia events, movies, blogs, sports scores, prizes, and so on—looks like about 15 or 20 sources or categories. Hertzfeld says Google might eventually eliminate that “corpus” selection so you don’t have to specify the specific sources. You can do the timeline daily, weekly, yearly, or even by the decade.

Lots of other interesting things to display on the timeline besides news. He shows how you can choose to look at Time magazine, with Time covers for each month decades back. Or Popular Science. And if you click on the covers (except for Time, which doesn’t make full content available for free), you go into the Google Books interface to see the full issue content that has been scanned in.

It’s essentially a new user interface for the same information already available through Google News (and in some cases Google Books or publications Google has scanned, under license from the content owners).

No plans to make money from it yet. “Literally we haven’t thought about it all.” Pittman adds: “We’re doing this to push the envelope on the user experience.”

OK, last announcement from Pittman: It’s a new Google Labs itself—that is, the site for the company’s products in development. You’ll be able to follow what’s new in Labs more easily. You’ll also be able to comment on and rate projects and engineer profiles. There are new “Meet the engineers” profiles.

And that’s it. Even with all the projects Google has cut or reduced in recent months, it’s clear there’s still a lot going on—at least that’s the impression Google wants to leave here.

After the event, Pittman added a bit more color that to my ears added up to this: Google wants to get products out faster, and to do that, it needs to get more people outside the company involved in providing feedback on early versions of products. Thus the redesign of the Google Labs site and today’s announcements on products that are being let out into the wild a bit earlier than they previously might have.

[the article was originally published at http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/04/live_new_stuff.html]

Yahoo Posts 78% Profit dip, job cuts again

2009-04-23T03:41:00.000-07:00

Yahoo Inc. posted a 78% quarterly profit decline as the recession hit its slumping advertising business and the Internet company said it would eliminate about 675 more jobs, or 5% of its work force.

The Sunnyvale, Calif., company was hurt across the board as companies scaled back their marketing budgets and flocked to cheaper alternatives. In particular, search-ad revenue, which had been a bright spot for Yahoo, declined 3% after several quarters of double-digit growth.

The results did little to alleviate the pressure on Chief Executive Carol Bartz to make big changes at Yahoo. While she has cut costs, Ms. Bartz is still working through strategic options, including possible sales of business units and a search-ad pact with Microsoft Corp. Yahoo executives declined Tuesday to discuss any talks with Microsoft.

Yahoo's display-ad business, which historically has been fed by spending from major brands such as car companies and telecommunications providers, dropped more quickly during the quarter. Revenue from display ads on sites Yahoo owns, such as Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Mail fell 13%, compared with a 2% decline in the fourth quarter.

Ms. Bartz, who joined Yahoo two weeks into the quarter, said the company was being pressured by the economy but that "brand advertising will grow in an economic recovery," allowing Yahoo to "take meaningful share." She said that some companies, such as non-U.S. auto makers, have increased their spending with Yahoo.

Overall, Yahoo's revenue fell 13% in the first quarter to $1.58 billion, from $1.81 billion a year earlier. Net income declined to $118 million, or eight cents a share, from $537 million, or 37 cents a share, in the 2008 first quarter, when Yahoo recorded a $401 million noncash gain.

Yahoo and Microsoft are still discussing an agreement that would enable the two companies to combine search-ad assets, with Microsoft taking over the business of selling search ads on Yahoo pages, people familiar with the matter said. But no deal appears imminent, said a person familiar with the situation, adding that it appears both sides "are still talking conceptually."

Yahoo Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen in an interview said he was pleased with the company's quarterly results given the "headwind in the economy."

He added that Yahoo would continue to pay close attention to costs, beyond the fresh layoffs. The company laid off roughly 1,500 employees in December and about 1,000 people in the first quarter of 2008.

Ms. Bartz said the latest cuts would be targeted at certain businesses rather than across the board. She added that the cuts were designed to give Yahoo "flexibility to accelerate hiring in other areas" and said she is continuing to focus resources on larger products that are performing well, such as Yahoo Mail.

Shares of Yahoo, which reported earnings after the market's close, rose 3.8% in after-hours trading to $14.92, after rising 5.3% to $14.38 in 4 p.m. Nasdaq composite trading.

[the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124034487471340099.html]

The Rise of the C-Tweet

2009-04-23T02:53:00.000-07:00

Social media has obviously given voice to employees in ways that never existed before. Early corporate bloggers were often brand enthusiasts themselves and tended to "get" the brand a gut level; soon enough, voice and tone guidelines became more actively put in play to govern blog writing. But Twitter is different. The nature of the medium encourages users to transmit an interchangeable mix of musings about life, work, daily observations and whatever else. Employees on Twitter are either designated brand ambassadors or simply have personal accounts -- and these lines of distinction help offer guidance. But that line grays with the advent of the "C-Tweet." C-level execs are part-lead ambassador, part-celebrity. Twitter accounts can build a cult of personality and extend a dynamic that has long existed for top CEOs into a broader set of C-level executives.

Among C-level execs, Twitter holds an allure as a seemingly simple vehicle to communicate thought leadership while staying connected to the market. Yet a daily supply of profundities in 140-character increments is a lot harder to pull off than it sounds. One natural obstacle blogs offered was the demand to actually have to write. Twitter is much less intimidating -- and the immediacy and ostensible intimacy of the platform may suggest that it is perfectly alright for executives to say things ranging from "Wow that was a delicious hamburger! Jalapenos, yum" to "Holding firm in my negotiations with Yahoo right now." And herein lies the greatest challenge of the C-Tweet: Where does the voice of the brand end and the voice of the individual begin?

Notable tweeting CMOs include Jeffrey Hayzlett of Kodak (@jeffreyhayzlett) and Barry Judge of Best Buy (@BestBuyCMO) -- each of whom ties his account closely to his brand. And each interprets the boundaries between the personal voice and the voice of the brand a bit differently. Of course, each brand has different social-media agendas that these executives are trying to push forward -- with variables ranging from the brands themselves and the strategic objectives to the audiences they serve (and aim to serve) and the styles of these individuals. Is there a blueprint for doing this right?

Tony Hsieh (@zappos), Zappos CEO, has come to be considered the gold standard for CEO tweeting, thanks to a comfortable style that leverages both the brand he helped create and his own personal voice. And he has gained a reputation for responsiveness and accessibility via Twitter that has come to epitomize the entire Zappos aesthetic. Padmasree Warrior (@padmasree), Cisco CTO, has also built a successful account on Twitter, finding that balance between business and personal that offers some good, relevant insight into the Cisco brand while putting a very human voice on a heretofore more removed role. While Hsieh's efforts are overtly endorsed by the Zappos brand, Warrior's does not carry the official endorsement of the Cisco brand.

As we see more such accounts in the rise of the C-Tweet, three things to think about:

1.The objective
An executive's objectives for a Twitter account are likely a mix of the brand's interest and self-interest. A simple rule of thumb here: If it is conspicuously endorsed by the brand (via the account name or use of the logo, for example), then the objectives should directly align with the vision and mission of the brand. If the brand is merely a description of the executive's occupation, there is more room for flexibility. And, with an endorsed account in particular, have a discussion with internal counsel to set up some basic legal guardrails before you jump in.

2. The commitment
Twitter is a hungry beast. If you're truly in it, you've got to tweet. Conventional wisdom seems to have it at somewhere between five to 10 tweets per day as the minimum for an active account with a healthy following. Generating 30 to 50 compelling, pithy statements (or links or retweets) each week may sound simple, but it can easily turn into a chore. Carve out time in the day to address this need -- to feed the beast without turning this into a distraction.

3. The exit strategy
Admittedly, this is a tough one -- considering the lifespan of Twitter itself and the questions that may exist around its own future. At the end of the day, an executive's account will be more of a reflection on him or her than it is on the brand. Executive impermanence is a fact of life -- and while creating deeper connections between a brand and its key executives can have tremendous value for partners, customers, analysts, employees and investors, an executive's inevitable departure along with several hundred thousand Twitter followers is likely to sting a bit. A strong Twitter following is becoming a brand asset -- and succession planning for the future of this asset is an important consideration. It may be worthwhile to try to mirror an executive's Twitter following within a more overtly corporate account. Or perhaps encourage junior executives to build their own followings, assuming this does not conflict with the points above.

Twitter is yet another example of where brands have to accept a loss of control. In this case, it is not about putting the brand in the hands of the market but in the hands of the people for whom the brand is their livelihood. A certain amount of letting go is a necessity. We will undoubtedly see a few missteps in C-tweets, and we'll learn and move on. Ultimately, the medium may change but basics of branding still apply -- both for the brands themselves and for their executive stewards: Be true, be relevant, be transparent, respect your brand and your customers, don't make a promise you can't keep.

[the article was originally published at http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=136159]

Public Turns To Twitter for News

2009-04-22T04:31:00.000-07:00

Twitter, for the uninitiated, is a social media Web site that began with the idea that people could stay connected by "tweeting" each other short answers to one simple question: "What are you doing?"

And while it may have been a bit frivolous at first, Twitter is increasingly being used by companies as a marketing tool, and for many, it's become a source for news.

How we get news and who reports it is changing dramatically. Breaking stories sometimes appear on Wikipedia and Twitter before they are reported by mainstream news organizations.

Hanson Hosein, for example, gets much of his breaking news from tweets — the Twitter messages of 140 characters or less that dance across his computer screen.

"I know if something really crazy happens in the world or something really interesting happens in my world — which is technology and communication — someone is going to pick it up pretty quickly and let us all know about it," he says.

Hosein, a digital media expert at the University of Washington, follows about 250 people on Twitter and receives everything they post on Twitter's Web site.

The Silicon Valley startup doesn't have any reporters or photographers; rather, anyone and everyone who sees or hears just about anything can post it online. Sometimes it's nonsense; sometimes it's breathtaking.

Hosein says that while many New York City reporters were in their offices on the afternoon of Jan. 15, 2009, many Manhattan residents and ferryboat passengers witnessed a US Airways plane land in the Hudson River.

"There were people there with their cell phones who could report on this," Hosein says. "Not necessarily professional journalists, but they're there, and that makes all the difference."

Hosein says that within minutes of the plane going down, an eyewitness snapped a photo.

"So that's the million-dollar shot — that's the money shot," Hosein says. "He's on the ferry, and he shot that. There's a plane in the Hudson, and I'm on a ferry going to pick up people. Crazy."

That and other Twitter messages were forwarded around the globe within minutes. They were picked up by traditional journalists who used that information as a starting point for their own reporting.

Similarly, traditional reporters sometimes take cues and get breaking news from Wikipedia, the free, online encyclopedia. Just about anyone can write and edit it, which explains, for example, how John Updike's death could be noted on the author's wiki page even before NPR could confirm that he had died.

Trusting News From Social Media

The big question: Can you trust the news you get from social media? Maybe not, says Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute, a training center for journalists.

"You know, just because a person says it, and says it online or says it on a Twitter page, does not make it true — not even close," Tompkins says.

Professional reporters, says Tompkins, have an obligation to verify information before they publish or broadcast it. But the widespread use of cell phones, computers and digital cameras has turned that tradition on its head. For non-journalists, he says, it's often "report first, verify later — if at all."

"The enemy of truth is speed, and in our business in journalism, we are always fighting that friction, aren't we? The Web, very often, has very little concern for truth and verification — let's get it out there, and then we'll sort it out," he says.

The challenge is to figure out what's true and what's not to be believed.

[The article was originally published at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103221268]

Bloggers for Hire - A profession in America

2009-04-22T04:26:00.000-07:00

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks have grown dramatically over the years, blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about, and the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That's almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click -- whether on their site or someone else's. And that's nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: "It's my work he'd say, I do it for pay."

This could make us the most noisily opinionated nation on earth. The Information Age has spawned many new professions, but blogging could well be the one with the most profound effect on our culture. If journalists were the Fourth Estate, bloggers are becoming the Fifth Estate.

What started as a discussion forum for progressive politics and new technologies has now been applied to motherhood, health care, the arts, fashion, dentistry -- and just about every other imaginable area of life. What started as a hobby and an outlet for volunteers is becoming big business for newly emerging sites, for companies that now depend upon their reviews and for the people who work in this new industry.

All this fits with the trend toward Opinion TV. Less and less of our information flow is devoted to gathering facts, and more and more is going toward popularizing opinion. Twenty-four-hour news channels have been replaced by 24-hour opinion channels. The chatter is the story.

Demographically, bloggers are extremely well educated: three out of every four are college graduates. Most are white males reporting above-average incomes. One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall. It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as "spokesbloggers" -- paid by advertisers to blog about products. As a job with zero commuting, blogging could be one of the most environmentally friendly jobs around -- but it can also be quite profitable. For sites at the top, the returns can be substantial. At some point the value of the Huffington Post will no doubt pass the value of the Washington Post.

The barriers to entry couldn't be lower. Most bloggers for hire pay $80 to get started, do it for about 35 months, and make a few hundred dollars. But a subgroup of these bloggers are the true professionals who work at corporations, serve as highly paid blogging consultants or write for sites with substantial traffic.

Pros who work for companies are typically paid $45,000 to $90,000 a year for their blogging. One percent make over $200,000. And they report long hours -- 50 to 60 hours a week.

As bloggers have increased in numbers, the number of journalists has significantly declined. In Washington alone, there are now 79% fewer DC-based employees of major newspapers than there were just few years ago. At the same time, Washington is easily the most blogged-about city in America, if not the world.

Almost no blogging is by subscription; rather, it owes it economic model to on-line advertising. Bloggers make money if their consumers click the ads on their sites. Some sites even pay writers by the click, which is of course a system that promotes sensationalism, or doing whatever it takes to get noticed.

The United Kingdom has just had a major scandal in which an official at 10 Downing Street had planned to leak to a friendly blogger all sorts of lurid stories about the Conservatives, complete with descriptions of secret sex tapes. But all of it was to be made up, and the friendly blogger who was going to post it all thought it was an "absolutely brilliant" idea. Someone blew the whistle, but had the plot gone through, this blogstorm could have played a major role in the upcoming election.

As a political pollster, I always observed that the poll that often got the most coverage was the one that was different from the others, regardless of whether it was right, or whether the pollster had any track record. This is true with opinions, too: those on the extreme right or left, or those that are the most titillating, seem to drive the most traffic through their sites. The center doesn't seem to have either the edge or the passion to grab the same kind of traffic.

The implications of bloggers for hire are substantial. While many bloggers probably support unionization in general, they have no union of their own. Most have no benefits, yet they work long hours in front of computer screens which could cause a variety of health ailments. And the owners of the big sites most often pay their bloggers as freelancers, avoiding all of those taxes and benefits that newspapers have to pay for their writers.

For now, bloggers say they are overwhelmingly happy in their work, reporting high job satisfaction. But what happens if they, too, lose work; are they covered by unemployment insurance if tastes change and their sites go under? Are they considered journalists under shield laws? Are they subject to libel suits? Are there any limits to the opinions they churn out, or any standards to rein them in? Is there someone to complain to about false blogs or hidden conflicts? At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, Panasonic outfitted bloggers with free Panasonic equipment; did that affect their opinions about the companies they wrote about? There are more questions than answers about America's Newest Profession.

It is hard to think of another job category that has grown so quickly and become such a force in society without having any tests, degrees, or regulation of virtually any kind. Courses on blogging are now cropping up, and we can't be far away from the Columbia School of Bloggerism. There is a lot of interest now in Twittering and Facebooking -- but those venues don't offer the career opportunities of blogging. Not since eBay opened its doors have so many been able to sit at their computer screens and make some money, or even make a whole living.

And with millions of human-hours now going into writing and recording opinion, we have to wonder whether being the blogging capital of the world will help America compete in the global economy. Maybe all this self-criticism will propel us forward by putting us on the right track and helping us choose the right products. Maybe it will create a resurgence in the art of writing and writing courses. Or serve as a safety net for out of work professionals in the crisis. But for how long can nearly 500,000 people who are gradually replacing whole swaths of journalists survive with no worker protections, no enforced ethics codes, limited standards, and, for most , no formal training? Even the "Wild West" eventually became just the "West."

[The article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124026415808636575.html]

Kodak Zooms In on Women

2009-04-20T22:43:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK Kodak is using an arsenal of national media properties anchored by assets under the recently formed Women@NBCU banner to drive a value message for its fledgling printer and ink business.

The new campaign, which directly challenges some of the leading competitors in the field, uses a combination of branded integrations on properties including Bravo, Oxygen and iVillage, and, to a lesser degree, Nickelodeon. Print, online and TV spots drive viewers to a Web site, printandprosper.com, where users can compare ink prices with those from brands including HP, Epson, Canon, Lexmark and Brother. Those companies either declined comment or didn't return calls seeking comment on the Kodak campaign.

Leslie Dance, vp, brand marketing and communication at Kodak, said the company is targeting "ultra-high burners." Internally, said Dance, Kodak marketers profiled the consumers they're after as female, "40, feisty and facing frugality." These women, she added, are usually a family's "memory keeper."

Market research, Dance said, also showed that "by far the largest consumer dissatisfaction with home printers is the cost of ink."

Deutsch, the Interpublic shop that won the estimated $40-50 million media account (printer and ink) last November, approached NBCU about anchoring the TV portion of the campaign around the Women@NBCU properties.

Peter Gardiner, chief media officer at Deutsch, said the combination of platforms and properties within the Women@NBCU collection of assets and the network's ability to offer creative integrations appealed to the marketer.

The Kodak deal, said Maryam Banikarim, svp, sales marketing at NBCU, was "one of the first" major packages assembled under the Women@NBCU banner since the unit was formed last summer. Other deals will be unveiled soon, she said.

[read more : http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/agency/e3if46ca983d59bcb8f9fe55c5778f64bac]

Digg Ends Exclusive Advertisement deal with Microsoft

2009-04-20T22:41:00.000-07:00

Digg is ending its two-year-old exclusive ad selling relationship with Microsoft, one year earlier than the deal was set to expire.

The two will continue working together on remnant and so-called "network reserve" inventory. Microsoft's network reserve ads represent high visibility placements sold to advertisers on a blind basis.

But beginning in July, Digg will be solely responsible for all custom ad deals and a significant portion of its own Interactive Advertising Bureau standard ad inventory.

The partnership initially was supposed to last until summer 2010, but the two always had an understanding that Digg would at some point step up to rep the bulk of its own ads, according to Mike Maser, Digg chief revenue and strategy officer. He said the company's internal sales efforts will focus on custom, non-IAB inventory combined with standardized banner ads.

"We've had a great relationship with Microsoft over the last year and a half," said Maser.

Digg hired its first ad sales executive, former Yahoo sales exec Thomas Shin, in January, and is now recruiting a national sales force. The company said it would soon make regional sales appointments for the West Coast, Midwest, and East Coast. By the end of the year it hopes to hire a total of five to seven reps in San Francisco, the Los Angeles area, Chicago and New York.

Even though it will work with Digg on remnant inventory, Microsoft remains dedicated to high-engagement ad deals, according to Robin Domeniconi, VP U.S., Microsoft Advertising.

"We want to do custom," said Domeniconi, who was appointed in December to oversee a dizzying array of ad products at Microsoft. Those products -- represented by over 1,100 sellers -- include MSN, Microsoft Media Network, Live Search, partner deals like those with Facebook and Digg, and game products like Massive and Xbox Live, among others.

Under her leadership, Microsoft is moving away from pitching those products individually. Rather, reps are proposing custom ad packages that combine non-standard advertising, premium display placements, and remnant ads across all its channels.

For instance, Discovery Channel recently graced Microsoft with its entire online ad budget for the fifth-season debut of "Deadliest Catch." High-engagement placements spanned mobile, Web, gaming and other channels.

"I don't believe [IAB standard ads] are the only thing the Internet is good for," she said. "These types of packages let us get out of an ROI conversation."

[read more : http://www.clickz.com/3633453]

Major brands learn they'd better respond quickly to Digital

2009-04-20T22:22:00.000-07:00

Amazon.com Inc. shut like a book.

Domino's Pizza Inc. was late but eventually delivered.

When the three major brands engaged with their Web-savvy fans and critics in separate incidents last week, their responses demonstrated how corporations are still learning how to control their messages -- and reputations -- in a fast-twitch online world.

The mixed track record so far shows that fluency in the evolving language of digital public relations comes easier to some companies than others.

First, CNN: As Ashton Kutcher edged out the cable TV network last week to become the first to attract 1 million followers to his Twitter account, an odd quirk of the much-hyped race was overshadowed: CNN hadn't actually owned its account until a few days earlier.

For more than two years, the CNNBrk account (for breaking news) had been created, maintained and run by a 25-year-old British Web developer who just wanted a way to beam short news alerts to his cellphone.

But when CNN found out that James Cox had appropriated its name and content, it took a direction that might seem a bit surprising for a major media company. Instead of suing Cox or trying to shut down the account, CNN quietly hired him to run it -- and then acquired it last week when Cox was visiting the company's Atlanta headquarters.

"We've been managing the feed through him," said KC Estenson, the head of CNN's online operation, noting the huge increase in the number of Twitter followers since the November election. "As Twitter took off and became more prominent, we decided it was time to take our engagement and make it a marriage."

Other companies may find that unexpected uses of their brand have a less than fairy-tale quality.

Last week, Domino's was handed a PR nightmare when a video showed up online showing two employees laughing as they prepared food in a deliberately unsanitary way.

The video quickly garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

Domino's initial instinct was to try to dispose of the situation quietly by responding only to concerned consumers who had already seen the video, rather than risk broadening its exposure by making a public statement.

But chatter about the problem spilled over into Twitter, whose expansive micro-messaging network is becoming an online circulatory system for news, pumping information between media organs, consumers and businesses themselves.

The Ann Arbor, Mich., company posted a YouTube response of its own and even established a Twitter account to answer direct questions from customers.

"What we've learned is if something happens in this medium, it's going to automatically jump to the next," Domino's spokesman Tim McIntyre said. "So we might as well talk to everybody at the same time."

When Amazon was faced with its own consumer outcry last week, it decided to forgo the social media route.

Without warning, many gay- and lesbian-themed books began disappearing from the site's search results and sales rankings. The Twittersphere instantly saw red, accusing the Seattle company of discrimination and censorship and demanding a response.

But Amazon stayed mostly mum. It waited most of a day only to cite an unspecified "glitch," and when that vagueness only fomented the outrage, it released a second clipped statement blaming a "cataloging error."

But Twitter abhors a vacuum, and commenters rapidly filled Amazon's silence with boycott threats, petitions and caustic accusations -- an outcome that suggests that the growth of social media may be driving up the cost of inaction.

[read more : http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-twitter20-2009apr20,0,2701874.story]

R/GA Creative Director Runs Twitter, RFID Experiment

2009-04-20T22:19:00.000-07:00

Interactive digital agency R/GA's Richard Ting has been experimenting with a cutting-edge technology on Twitter. The platform, dubbed touchatag, allows his 20-month-old daughter to trigger tweets by swiping tags affixed to books and toys near a reader that resembles a bar code scanner.

The platform relies on a form of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology known as near field communications (NFC), as well as QR bar codes that when read by a camera cell phone can launch a browser and connect with a Web page.

Users set up the Twitter application through the Web-based dashboard. Tweets are preset; a fixed message is tied to a physical object. The platform comes with software, one reader and 10 Mifare Ultralight tags from NXP Semiconductors, a Philips Semiconductors spinoff. Each time a reader identifies the tag it sends the signal to the Web platform and triggers the Tweet. The starter kit is available through Alcatel-Lucent or Amazon.com.

Alcatel-Lucent has an investment group and incubator for emerging technologies inside Bell Laboratories that supports fledgling companies. The venture group supports about six ventures. Touchatag is one of two the company has made public.

Ting, VP and executive creative director of mobile and emerging platforms at R/GA, bought the kit with the thought that the tags could make physical objects smart by connecting information about them to the Internet. "The RFID tag allows the object to become smart," Ting said. "This would let you tie in customer service, ratings and recommendations. It also lets me listen in to the talk across the overall community."

Once tags are connected, information transmits from readers to PC software clients and onto the Internet. There are many applications that marketers can use. For example, consumers in a shoe store buying sneakers with an embedded RFID chip could transmit a message to download branded content to their cell phone or tweet a message on Twitter. It could provide marketers with a forum to gather ratings and recommendations and share information.

For Ting, the touchatag turned into a communication experiment to examine cross-generation communication -- how senior citizens might communicate with younger generations. While the older generations would rely on land-line telephones and physical letters, kids would use Twitter and Facebook.

[read more : http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=104106]

Microsoft: The Internet Needs More Trust for growth

2009-04-20T22:15:00.000-07:00

The Internet needs to be more trustworthy if it wants to grow, according to Microsoft's senior security executive, Scott Charney.

In a video posted to Microsoft's Web site ahead of Charney's keynote at next week's RSA security conference, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Trustworthy Computing described how anonymity on the Internet is increasingly being exploited by cyber criminals. "We need to push back on anonymity and lack of traceability," he said.

"Because the Internet can be anonymous and untraceable, criminals flock to the Internet," Charney explained. "Today too many people do not know what software is running on their machine and often they have malware. They often don't know who they're communicating with, whether an e-mail they've received is spoofed or from some unknown sender even when it appears to come from someone they know. When they visit Web sites, they don't know if that Web site is to be trusted or not."

"For all of these reasons we need End-to-End Trust," Charney said.

End-to-End Trust is a security marketing initiative introduced by Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie at last year's RSA conference. Keynoting next Tuesday, Charney is expected to give an update on the initiative, which the company has thusfar billed as an effort to engage industry, consumers and policy makers in a serious discussion of online security problems. His video was posted this week on a revamped version of Microsoft's End-to-End Trust Web site.

As the world's dominant supplier of software, Microsoft is constantly in the crosshairs of attackers. Even as the company has taken steps to lock down its flagship Windows operating system, hackers have exploited countless flaws in the programs that run on top of it, such as Office and Internet Explorer.

Microsoft would like to give its users a better idea of whether a Web site or e-mail attachment is trustworthy. But how you identify people on the Internet without raising serious privacy concerns? It's a problem that Microsoft hopes to solve first by engaging in discussion.

"We've been talking about this since last year, spending a lot of time with the policy makers," said Doug Leland, general manager of Microsoft's Identity and Security Business Group, in an interview. "This is an agenda we're trying to advance with the reset of the industry and with policy makers and lawmakers and law enforcement as a proposal of a solution to tackle a very significant problem."

Last September, for example, Microsoft made a submission to the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, a group looking at ways to improve online safety for children. Microsoft's paper (pdf) advocated the replacement of Web user names and passwords with Information Card systems, such as Microsoft's own CardSpace technology, and calling on a collaboration between government, industry and child development experts to solve the problem.

Microsoft has been working with a number of countries, including Singapore, Belgium, the U.K. and France to develop government-issued digital credentials, Leland said.

In his video, Charney called for a "model where people get in-person proof and then can pass digital identities on the Internet. So, for example, if you got a drivers license or a passport and it also had a digital certificate on it, you could later pass your identity to a site along with your credit card number for example and they would know you are who you claim to be."

But Microsoft doesn't think these digital IDs should be mandatory.

In December, Charney sent a letter to the Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Roy Cooper of North Carolina arguing that any move toward mandatory digital IDs "would not only compromise privacy but would have a chilling effect on other important social values such as freedom of expression."

Instead of centralized digital IDs, Microsoft is pushing a concept known as federated identity, where different organizations develop ways to share and trust identity information about their users. With CardSpace, Microsoft has been careful to give users the ability to decide what information they want to share.

"The way in which Microsoft has been thinking about it has been very constructive," said John Palfrey, a co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center, which published the Internet Safety Task Force report. "They would leave all or virtually all of the decision making in the hand of the users."

Charney's RSA keynote, entitled "End to End Trust: A Collaborative Effort" is set to be delivered Tuesday morning. RSA runs at San Francisco's Moscone Center from Monday to Friday next week.

[read more : http://www.pcworld.com/article/163311/microsoft_the_internet_needs_more_trust_to_grow.html?tk=rss_news]

Pirate Bay founders Get Jail in Copyright Case

2009-04-20T22:06:00.000-07:00

The Pirate Bay’s four Swedish founders were sentenced to jail for helping consumers illegally download online music and films, handing the entertainment industry a victory in the battle to protect copyrighted material.

Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi and Carl Lundstroem were given jail sentences of one year each by a Stockholm district court today. The court ordered the defendants to pay compensation and damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million), below the more than 100 million kronor claimed by prosecutors. The defendants said they plan to appeal.

The ruling is the industry’s biggest triumph since successful lawsuits against music-swapping sites Napster Inc., Kazaa and Grokster Ltd. The International Federation of Phonographic Industry estimates 95 percent of all downloaded music is pirated, as consumers can get access to files free of charge within minutes, often before commercial release dates.

“It is a serious offense, marked by serious sentences, and I think it will surprise many in the file-sharing community as many of them don’t deem it to be a crime at all,” Mark Young, an associate at Covington & Burling LLP in London, said by telephone. “It is likely to cause a ripple among the file- sharing community, but it is a penalty that is possibly appropriate for the charges that were being considered.”

Property Laws

Pirate Bay is the largest file-sharing site using BitTorrent software, which allows users to download and share files in 34 languages for free, according to IFPI. Pirate Bay has said the site is a network where users put up content to share with other users and that there is no copyrighted material on the site. Pirate Bay had 22 million simultaneous users in February.

“This may be the verdict of a Swedish court, but it is a great outcome for British music,” Geoff Taylor, chief executive officer of the British Phonographic Industry, said in a statement. “Criminal sites like Pirate Bay seriously undermine investment in music and in legal online services and do nothing to reward artists or creators.”

Content owners have successfully sued to stop file-sharing services such as Napster and Grokster from allowing consumers to download copyrighted material without permission. Napster began in 1999 as a free music-swapping Web site. Roxio Inc. purchased the company out of bankruptcy to start a paid download service and adopted its name in 2004.

Sharman Networks Ltd., the owner of the Kazaa file-sharing network, agreed to pay more than $100 million to settle music- industry lawsuits over the illegal downloading of songs in July 2006. In November 2005, Grokster shut down its file-sharing service and agreed to pay $50 million to settle a music-industry case in Los Angeles.

Still Running

The Swedish ruling won’t shut the Pirate Bay Web site, whose most popular downloads include television series “Lost” and Academy Award-winning movies such as “Slumdog Millionaire.” Other products include Apple Inc. software, computer games and millions of songs from bands such as AC/DC and EMI Music’s Coldplay.

Entertainment companies including Vivendi SA and EMI spent years fighting Pirate Bay and similar sites. The ruling threatens the existence of The Pirate Bay, which was founded in 2004. The site has developed a following that includes its own political party that aims to change intellectual-property laws.

“The court has found that by using Pirate Bay’s services there has been file-sharing of music, films and computer games to the extent the prosecutor has stated in his case,” the district court said. “This file-sharing constitutes an unlawful transfer to the public of copyrighted performances.”

‘So Bizarre’

Music companies in the case, including EMI and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, are seeking compensation of 2.2 million euros ($2.9 million) for a sample of music tracks selected as a basis for the case, IFPI said. The film industry, which under Swedish law must limit its case to the piracy of four films and one television series, is seeking 10.9 million euros in damages.

The people who have shared files on Pirate Bay have broken copyright laws, the court said. By providing a Web site enabling users to share files, The Pirate Bay founders have facilitated crimes committed by site users and are therefore guilty of contributing to a crime, it said. The men were also aware that copyrighted material was shared, the court said.

“It’s so bizarre that we got convicted at all, we have to laugh about it,” Pirate Bay member Sunde said. “They could have fined us 1 billion dollars. It doesn’t matter because we can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay.”

[credit : http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a.zK8PzD3jaA&refer=home]

Top Social Media - Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook

2009-04-17T00:49:00.000-07:00

An overwhelming majority (88%) of marketers say they are using some form of social media to market their business, though 72% of those using it say they have only been at it a few months or less, according to a social media study by Michael Stelzner, sponsored by the upcoming Social Media Success Summit 2009.

The study found that Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook - in that order - are the top four social media tools used by marketers, writes Marketing Charts.

The research also included an analysis of nearly 700 open-ended responses, which revealed the top-three questions marketers are asking about social media:

What are the best tactics to use?
How to do I measure the effectiveness of social media?
Where do I start?

When asked if they used social media for marketing purposes, 88% said they are employing some form of it. Business owners are more likely to use social media marketing (90+%) than employees working for a company that is not their own (81%), and respondents ages 30-39 are most likely to use social media marketing (92.8%), the study found. 72% say they have either just started or have been using social media for a few months.

The survey found that there is a direct relationship between how long marketers have been using social media and their weekly time commitment. For people just beginning, the median weekly time commitment is two hours per week. For those who have been at it for months, the median jumps to 10 hours per week. For those who report social media marketing use for years, the median is 20+ hours each week.

Respondents report that the #1 benefit of social media marketing is gaining attention for the business, and 81% say their social media efforts have generated exposure for their businesses.

Improving traffic and growing marketing lists is the second major benefit, followed by building new partnerships. At least two in three participants found that increased traffic occurred with as little as 6 hours a week invested, while those who have been doing this for years reported better results. Owners of small businesses (2 - 100 employees) are more likely than others to report benefits.

[read more : http://www.mediabuyerplanner.com/2009/04/15/top-social-media-for-marketers-twitter-blogs-linkedin-facebook]

Bandwidth does not grow on trees ?

2009-04-17T00:42:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows that print newspapers are our generation's horse-and-buggy; in the most wired cities, they've been pummeled by competition from the Web. But it might surprise you to learn that one of the largest and most-celebrated new-media ventures is burning through cash at a rate that makes newspapers look like wise investments. It's called YouTube: According a recent report by analysts at the financial-services company Credit Suisse, Google will lose $470 million on the video-sharing site this year alone. To put it another way, the Boston Globe, which is on track to lose $85 million in 2009, is five times more profitable—or, rather, less unprofitable—than YouTube. All so you can watch this helium-voiced oddball whenever you want.

YouTube's troubles are surprisingly similar to those faced by newspapers. Just like your local daily, the company is struggling to sell enough in advertising to cover the enormous costs of storing and distributing its content. Newspapers have to pay to publish and deliver dead trees; YouTube has to pay for a gargantuan Internet connection to send videos to your computer and the millions of others who are demanding the most recent Dramatic Chipmunk mash-up. Google doesn't break out YouTube's profits and losses on its earnings statements, and of course it's possible that Credit Suisse's estimates are off. But if the analysts are at all close, YouTube, which Google bought in 2006, is in big trouble. As Benjamin Wayne, the CEO of the rival video-streaming company Fliqz, pointed out in a recent article for Silicon Alley Insider, not even Google can long sustain a company that's losing close to half a billion dollars a year.

But YouTube's problems point to a larger difficulty for many Web startups: "User-generated content" is proving to be a financial albatross. Two years ago, Time magazine named "you" its Person of the Year for doing your small part in fueling the Web 2.0 revolution. The magazine argued that by collecting and distributing the creations of millions of individuals, the Web is upending the way we learn about what's going on in the world around us. There's no doubt this is true; you experienced the presidential inauguration through millions of pictures captured by ordinary people, and a lot of what you learn these days comes from articles put together by the anonymous hordes who power Wikipedia. Yet even though they've changed the way we live, sites that collect and share content produced by all of us haven't done the one thing many tech evangelists said they'd do—make a ton of money. Or, in many cases, any money.
Click Here!

There's a simple reason for this: Advertisers don't like paying very much to support homemade photos and videos. As a result, the economics of user-generated sites are even more crushing than those of the newspaper business. At least newspapers see a proportional relationship between circulation and revenues—when the paper publishes great stories, it attracts more readers, and, in time, more advertisers. At YouTube, the relationship can be backward: The videos that get the most clicks—and are thus most expensive for YouTube to carry—trend toward the sort of lewd or random flavor that doesn't sit well with advertisers. Look at some of the site's hits over the last few days: a clip of a guest fainting on Glenn Beck's show filched from Fox News; a video of a Brazilian soccer coach punching a referee, also recorded from TV; a cell phone capture showing Britney Spears misidentify the city she's performing in; and a shot of a "boob grab" among spectators at the Masters golf tournament. Would you pay to stick your product's logo under any of them?

Probably not—YouTube sells ads on fewer than 10 percent of its videos. Credit Suisse estimates that 375 million people around the world will play about 75 billion YouTube videos this year. To serve up all these streams, the company has to pay for a broadband connection capable of hurtling data at the equivalent of 30 million megabits-per-second—about 6 million times as fast as your home Internet connection. All this bandwidth costs Google $360 million a year, the analysts estimate. Then there's the cost of the videos themselves: Even though many of the site's most popular content is uploaded for free from users, Credit Suisse says YouTube spends about $250 million a year to acquire licenses to broadcast professionally produced videos. Add in all other expenses, and the cost of running YouTube for one year exceeds $700 million. But the company makes only a fraction of that back in advertising—about $240 million in revenues for 2009, according to the report.

[read more : http://www.slate.com/id/2216162]

Domino's nightmare holds lessons for marketers

2009-04-17T00:28:00.000-07:00

It's a PR nightmare scenario: A national fast-food chain has to respond to a video, spreading rapidly online, that shows one of its employees picking his nose and placing the result in the food he's making.

That's exactly what Domino's (DPZ), the nation's largest pizza delivery chain, has spent the past several days doing.

Two employees — fired and facing charges — posted a video on YouTube on Monday that shows one of them doing gross things to a Domino's sub sandwich he is making. Among them: sticking cheese pieces up his nose and passing gas on the salami.

The video had been viewed more than 550,000 times by Wednesday.

For Domino's, the PR response hasn't been easy. The video reflects some of the worst fears consumers have about food purchased from restaurants. The video and discussion of it has moved on to Facebook, Twitter and dozens of other social-networking sites.

But Domino's is getting fairly high marks from social-networking and crisis-management gurus about its response.

And marketers are getting an instant lesson in the dangers of an online world where just about anyone with a video camera and a grudge can bring a company to its knees with lightning speed.

"Nothing is local anymore," Domino's spokesman Tim McIntyre says. "That's the challenge of the Web world. Any two idiots with a video camera and a dumb idea can damage the reputation of a 50-year-old brand."

An arrest warrant was issued Wednesday for Michael Anthony Setzer, 32, of Conover, N.C., and Kristy Lynn Hammonds, 31, of Taylorsville, N.C., for food tampering, a felony in North Carolina, police say. McIntyre says Domino's is mulling a lawsuit.

Here are key things experts say marketers can do to quickly catch and respond effectively to similar social-networking attacks:

• Monitor social media. Big companies must actively watch Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social sites to track conversations that involve them. That will help uncover potential crises-in-the-making, says Brian Solis, a new-media specialist and blogger at PR2.0.

• Respond quickly. Domino's responded within hours. "They responded as soon as they heard about it, not after the media asked, 'What are you going to do?' " says Lynne Doll, president of The Rogers Group, a crisis-management specialist.

• Respond at the flashpoint. Domino's first responded on consumer affairs blog The Consumerist, whose activist readers helped track down the store and employees who made the video. Then it responded on the Twitter site where talk was mounting. "Domino's did the right thing by reinstituting the trust where it was lost," Solis says.

• Educate workers. It's important that all employees have some media and social-media training, says Ross Mayfield, co-founder of Socialtext, which advises companies on new media.

• Foster a positive culture. Workers who are content and customers who like your product are far less likely to tear down a company online, PR guru Katie Delahaye Paine says. "This would be a lot less likely to happen at places like Whole Foods."

• Set clear guidelines. Companies must have clear policies about what is allowed during working hours — and what isn't, Doll says. "It won't prevent everyone from breaking the rules, but at least they'll know what the rules are."

As a result of the incident, Domino's is looking at banning video cameras in stores, McIntyre says.

[ Read more : http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2009-04-15-kitchen-pr-dominos-pizza_N.htm]

Video :

Search Ad Spending Slides Amid Consumer Caution

2009-04-16T04:59:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK Search advertising is showing signs that it will record a decline in the first quarter, according to an industry tech provider.

Search management provider SearchIgnite, whose clientele includes large multi-channel retailers, found that ad spending among its clients was down 4 percent in the first three months of the year when compared to the same period a year earlier. The negative picture is brightened somewhat by the positive trend SearchIgnite spotted in March, when spending rose 11 percent year over year. February spending was flat and January's was off 14 percent.

While the end of the quarter was positive, there's no guarantee that will continue in the fluid search marketplace, where advertisers can adjust budgets on the fly.

"There's a lot of volatility," said Roger Barnette, president of SearchIgnite. "Marketers have a very short-term view now. "They're making decisions month by month and in some cases week by week."

On a quarterly basis, search ad spending was down 10 percent. That's typical for the first three months following the holiday season, when ad spending is heaviest. However, the decrease this year was much wider than in years past. Last year, Q1 2009 search ad spending was down just 4 percent from the previous quarter.

While SearchIgnite charted a volatile marketplace for spending trends, it found consistency where the money went: mostly to Google. The Internet giant continued to attract 74 percent of spending while Yahoo remained at 20 percent and MSN was at less than 10 percent.

Another positive sign for Google: its many non-search engine properties are starting to pay off. SearchIgnite saw a lift in the amount of conversions marketers saw from other Google properties, such as YouTube and Google Maps.

In a sign of the economic climate, SearchIgnite charted uncertain consumer behavior. The purchase cycle lengthened, it found, with consumers less likely to buy after the first click. In fact, SearchIgnite found the time between the first click and conversion on the site was 32 percent longer in the first quarter of 2009 compared to the year-ago quarter. In a further sign of caution, the firm tracked consumers clicking on multiple ads from the same advertiser increased 28 percent.

"The consideration process is longer and more involved," Barnette said. "It probably means there's more comparison shopping online as well."

Time to Buy TV, Radio, and Internet Ads?

2009-04-16T04:55:00.000-07:00

These days, you don't have to be an insomniac to come across television commercials for products like the "Snuggie" or "ShamWow." With advertising dollars scarce and large corporations cutting back on their marketing efforts, smaller businesses are reaping the benefits of significantly lower rates for ad buys they may have once thought were out of reach.

Prime-time TV slots are going for a 25% less than they sold for just last year, says Steve Cox, spokesperson for the Better Business Bureau. "The playing field for TV advertising is becoming more level, and small business owners can now take advantage of steep discounts for prime slots, as well as cut rates from PR firms and productions companies," he says.

J. T. Hroncich, managing director and principal of Capitol Media Solutions, a full-service advertising agency in Washington, says advertising rates are more negotiable than ever. "Before, some of these media companies didn't do business with firms with smaller budgets, but it's very easy to negotiate now with Web sites, television, and radio," he says.
More Eyeballs

In addition to more flexible rates, small businesses can get more bang for their ad bucks today because viewership is up, Hroncich says. "People aren't going out as much; they're staying home watching TV or looking at the Internet. So these venues are getting more impressions but they're charging less money" for their ads, he says.

But it's not always easy to persuade smaller firms to try new ad buys. "Companies like to stick with what they know best, but we're trying to get them to branch out and try electronic or interactive ads. If they even take 10% to 20% of their ad budgets and use that to see what results they can get with broadcast or Internet, they're liking these options they weren't able to get 6, 9, or 12 months ago when prices would have been double," Hroncich says.

Cox advises small companies to identify customer demographics when deciding where to advertise, rather than being biased by their own viewing habits. Advertising slots that have the most cost-effective reach may be on niche cable TV programming that reaches a particular geographic area or target audience, he says.

And while large corporations have budgets that allow them to run ads simply reinforcing their brands, small business ads should get viewers off the couch. "Small businesses need to have their phones ring or orders coming in at their Web sites" in order to determine that an advertisement is successful, Hroncich says.
They're Prepared to Haggle

Smaller firms do not have to spend a fortune on production costs for broadcast advertising, he says. And many media companies today are willing to take spots on a test basis, rather than lock advertisers in to six-month or one-year commitments as they have in the past. "These companies are looking to survive, so they're willing to do short-term campaigns without minimums, at discounted rates," Hroncich says.

A small company can contract with a freelance graphic artist or video production company to design its ads or hire an advertising firm to do both the design and placement of the ad campaigns. In some cases, Cox says, the media outlet will work with advertisers to produce the spots.

Entrepreneurs should be prepared to haggle over pricing, he says, being aware that it's better to run more spots at a less desirable time than to blow their ad budgets on one prime-time slot.

Hroncich says that businesses can get a week's worth of oft-repeated radio spots for $1,500 in many markets: "You'll either see results immediately or you won't, so you can see how it goes. Your rates may go up later, but by then you'll know if it's worth it."

Similarly, he suggests that his smaller clients try month-long banner ads on targeted Web sites or week-long ads on cable television. "Cable is cheap as opposed to broadcast TV and the cable viewers will be local. It may cost $1,000 to $2,500 to produce a cable advertisement, and you could air it for $25 or $50 a spot, depending on what time of day and what shows you're looking at," Hroncich says.

[credit : http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/apr2009/sb20090414_800224.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_top+stories]

Yahoo Is Said to Plan More Layoffs

2009-04-16T04:49:00.000-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo is planning a new round of layoffs, the first since Carol Bartz became chief executive in January, according to several people with knowledge of the situation.
Skip to next paragraph

The layoffs could affect several hundred employees and may be announced as early as Tuesday when Yahoo reports first-quarter financial results, said these people, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity because the plan is confidential.

A Yahoo spokesman, Brad Williams, declined to comment, citing a company policy not to discuss rumors and speculation.

The cuts would be the third round of layoffs at Yahoo in little more than a year. The Internet company, which has been struggling for more than two years, laid off about 1,000 workers early in 2008. It cut 1,400 or so in the fourth quarter of last year, in continuing efforts to prune its sprawling online business and bring down expenses. It ended the year with 13,600 employees.

In recent years, Yahoo has seen its growth slow and has lost ground to Google in online search. Despite its huge online audience of roughly 500 million people worldwide, it also missed the opportunity to acquire fast growing social Web sites, like YouTube or Facebook, which have become a magnet, especially with younger users.

And its display advertising business, which was concentrated on high-priced ads, has been undercut by the proliferation of sites that offer marketers a way to reach audiences at lower prices. The company has suffered from a continuing exodus of executives and a series of revampings that have damaged employee morale.

Late last year, Yahoo was hit with the deepening recession, which took a further bite out of the company’s online advertising business.

“If you look at the changing economic environment and the changing leadership, it is not surprising that you would see further cuts at the company,” said Scott Kessler, a stock analyst with Standard & Poor’s.

Under Ms. Bartz, Yahoo has also been trying to sell some business units that it doesn’t consider core to its mission, including Hotjobs, the online recruiting service, according to several people familiar with the plans.

Ms. Bartz has been reviewing Yahoo’s businesses. In recent weeks, she renewed discussions with Microsoft, which attempted to buy Yahoo early last year, and later tried to acquire the company’s search business. The new round of talks center around a possible advertising partnership, not an outright acquisition or a sale of Yahoo’s search business, according to people familiar with the discussions.

[credit : http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/technology/companies/15yahoo.html?_r=1&ref=technology]

StumbleUpon Goes Independent Again

2009-04-15T03:19:00.000-07:00

Less than two years after eBay purchased StumbleUpon for $75 million, the recommendation engine is a standalone company once again.

In a blog post, co-founder "gmc" reported that the company is "now a startup again". Gmc, co-founder Geoff Smith, and "several great investors" have taken the comp-any independent again. Terms were not disclosed.

"This change will help StumbleUpon move quickly and stay true to its focus - helping people discover interesting web content," Gmc wrote. "Our goal is to make StumbleUpon the web's largest recommendation engine and we think this is the best way to get us there.

"Thanks to everyone for helping make this happen," Gmc added. "While there will be some internal changes at SU, it will not impact the Stumbling experience and will help us create the best possible product. We are really excited about this change, and hope you are as well."

Originally, eBay said that it had acquired StumbleUpon for the synergies between the two companies. eBay was drawn to StumbleUpon because of the "engaging and unique experience" provided by its toolbar and because of the "similarities in our approaches to the concept of community," Michael Buhr, senior director at eBay, said in 2007. But eBay never quite assimilated StumbleUpon into its overall business model.

eBay has also been heavily scrutinized for its $4.1 billion acquisition of Skype in 2005 which has also been criticized as a deal that never achieved the synergies that executives originally promised.

StumbleUpon, meanwhile, was originally said to also be a takeover target by Yahoo and AOL, among others.

[credit : http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2345229,00.asp]

An ARIA for Google Moderator

2009-04-15T03:18:00.000-07:00

Official Google Blog: An ARIA for Google Moderator

Nielsen: Online Video Audience Bounces Back In March

2009-04-15T03:15:00.001-07:00

After a fall-off in February, online video viewership last month bounced back in March, according to Nielsen Online's latest VideoCensus report. Total video streams increased almost 9% to 9.7 billion in March, while time per viewer rose 12.6% to 191 minutes. Unique viewers inched up 2% to 130 million.

YouTube accounted for nearly 5.5 billion streams, followed by Hulu, with 348.5 million and Yahoo, with 231.8 million. Fox Interactive Media surged ahead of Nickelodeon Kids and Family Network into fourth place, with 207.5 million streams -- up from 194.3 million in February.

Hulu -- now a solid if distant No. 2 to YouTube in online video -- continued its steady rise, increasing streams about 10% in March and adding about 600,000 unique viewers for a total of 9.5 million.

The March figures are a contrast to February, when total streams fell 15%, unique viewers declined 6%, and time per viewer dipped more than 5% to 169 minutes.

A seasonal surge in the online video audience tied to the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament likely helped boost overall viewership figures in March. CBS said unique visitors to its March Madness on Demand video service increased 60% over last year to 7.5 million, and total video and audio was up 75% to 8.6 million hours.

CBSSports.com alone generated 38.2 million streams last month and 3.3 unique video viewers -- up more than 1,200% and nearly 300%, respectively, from February. CBS also distributed its free March Madness offering across 200 sites including YouTube, Facebook and Yahoo.

Total video streams in March were up almost 40% from a year ago.

[credit : http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=104007]

Universal Music, YouTube forge partnership

2009-04-13T00:26:00.000-07:00

U2 lead singer Bono, well known for his ONE campaign against poverty, has turned his focus to a charity case closer to home: the ailing music industry.

The rocker is credited with bringing together Universal Music Group, the world's biggest music company, and YouTube, Google Inc.'s online video site, for talks that on Thursday resulted in a partnership to launch a music video service featuring professionally produced content from the label's big-name acts.

YouTube will create a dedicated channel on its site, to be called Vevo, where users can watch music videos from Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Weezer and other Universal artists. Later this year, Universal and YouTube will debut a separate online music video site, Vevo.com, where viewers can watch music videos from Universal's library. YouTube will provide the underlying technology, Universal will furnish the content, and the partners will split the advertising revenue.

"We have been searching for a way to work with the rights holders, which really does drive more -- let's be blunt -- more revenue," said Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt.

Music videos have posed a vexing dilemma for YouTube. These short-form videos are among the most watched clips on the site, with a hot new track from an artist like Soulja Boy attracting millions of views. But the advertising revenue has not been enough to make YouTube's partnerships with the labels profitable, even though it monetizes hundreds of millions of views a day. Indeed, Warner Music Group said it pulled its music videos off YouTube in December in a licensing dispute over the value of its content.

Universal Music Chairman and CEO Doug Morris proposed an approach modeled on the success of the Hulu video site, a joint venture of News Corp. and NBC Universal that, after a little more than a year, is attracting 34 million monthly viewers with the lure of Hollywood movies and episodes of popular TV shows.

Morris outlined a similar concept for music videos, in which YouTube and Universal would bring together all the professionally produced content into the online equivalent of MTV. The venture would redistribute the music videos online in a bid to grab an audience large enough to attract advertisers. Morris said he was speaking with other major labels about participating in Vevo.

Bono played the role of digital ambassador, prodding his label, Universal, and YouTube to explore a partnership.

Morris recounted how, over dinner in Paris, Bono suggested he meet with Google's chief executive. Schmidt, meanwhile, said he received an e-mail from Bono urging him to meet Morris. That spurred a trip to New York, where Schmidt said he was struck by the Universal executive's ideas for new advertising and sponsorship models.

"I came back here in California [thinking]: Why don't we think about a new approach?" Schmidt said. "That then kicked off Doug's vision."

Record labels are eager to explore new revenue sources to help offset free-falling CD sales. Album sales this year are down 45% from 2000, according to Nielsen SoundScan. A recent Forrester Research report projects that disc sales will continue to decline at an annual rate of about 9% over the next five years as retailers reduce the shelf space allotted to CDs and music fans shift their purchases online.

"The options for record labels, in terms of business models, have really dwindled," said Paul Verna, an entertainment industry analyst with researcher EMarketer. "When you look at the steep decline of physical [sales], look at the digital formats that seemed to show promise to make up for the losses in physical. Most of these are really falling short of expectations."

Universal Music has long espoused the commercial potential of music videos, which as recently as three or four years ago were deemed largely promotional in nature and written off as a loss. In 2008,Morrissaid, the music company generated tens of millions in revenue from its music videos.

"This is the next step in taking the video, which is more important than just an audio stream, to the next level of monetizing it," Morris said.

Analyst Verna isn't sure music videos will bring the financial windfall Morris and YouTube hope.

"Clearly, there's some monetization potential," Verna said. "I'm not sure how much it is, or how significant a focus it is for the labels. Clearly, they're trying to make it work."

[read more : http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-fi-ct-youtube10-2009apr10,0,7026280.story]

Video Surges On Newspaper Sites

2009-04-13T00:24:00.000-07:00

Newspapers across the country may be scaling back to survive, but online video appears to be one area where they are expanding aggressively. An analysis of 187 U.S. newspaper Web sites by Web video provider Brightcove shows a surge in their video-related activity last year.

The number of videos uploaded by each newspaper to the Brightcove platform, for example, grew from an average of 186 per month to 638 in 2008. The overall total of uploads increased 1,500%.

On the consumer side, video streams are growing 35% per quarter, nearly tripling to 42.7 million during the fourth quarter of 2008 compared to the year-earlier period. Total video player "loads," or page views containing video, increased 700% -- suggesting that newspaper sites are putting video on more pages.

While Brightcove does not provide ad revenue figures, the company says nearly all of its newspaper partners are monetizing video content with advertising. The main ad format is the 30-second pre-roll video with 300 x 250 companion banner.

A growing number of newspapers are also relying on third-party ad networks to help sell and optimize their video inventory, according to Brightcove. The Boston-based company attributes the rapid growth to lower production costs, higher-quality video and the gradual consumer shift from print and broadcast media to online outlets.

"While the data and trends point to many positive signs, the question remains whether newspaper publishers will be able to ramp their digital initiatives and evolve their operations in time to save their businesses and ensure a growth position when they come out on the other side of the current recession," wrote Brightcove Communications Director Josh Hawkins in a post on the company blog Tuesday.

The company says it works with more than 30 major newspaper groups in the U.S., Europe and Asia including Cox Newspapers, Freedom Communications, Hearst Communications and Media News Group.

[read more : http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=103665]