Newspaper Ad - Click Here to Compare?

#FAIL Click here to compare on a newpaper ad! How on earth did this happen?!?!

NSFW. A hunter shoots a bear!

Great interactive campaign. This viral video by Tipp-Ex® has over 10.5 million views on YouTube in less than a 45 days!

Advertising Agency: Buzzman, France

Will People 'Keep' Banner Ads?

AdKeeper preps service that lets users 'clip' banner ads for viewing and sharing at their convenience

By Brian Morrissey. Found @ AdWeek

Scott Kurnit, a veteran of Internet 1.0, believes the first iteration of the Web got some things wrong.

"The tech guys who came up with the Web frankly never thought about ads," said Kurnit, founder of About.com, which is now part of The New York Times Company. "Marketers and regular people like ads."

Kurnit hopes to undo some of that with his new effort, AdKeeper, an ad-technology company that looks to make Internet advertising as easy to "clip" as magazine ads. AdKeeper has signed over 20 marketers, including Best Buy, Gap and McDonald's, to affix a tiny "keep" logo to their banners. Clicking on these allows users to return to the ads later on the AdKeeper Web site.

The simple idea begs an obvious question: Is there any way regular Internet users -- who on average click banners one time out 1,000 -- have any interest in saving banner ads to check out later?

"The keep rates are going to be off the chart compared to click rates," predicted Kurnit (pictured left).

The AdKeeper effort is one of several attempts to jump-start brand advertising in the online space, which is currently dominated by direct-response efforts. AOL is in the midst of a wholesale revamp of its Web pages to include far larger, more interactive ad space. Another startup, Solve Media, aims to further "cognitive advertising" by having people retype brand taglines in order to access content.

"[Marketers] thought the Internet was supposed to give them great ROI," said MaryAnn Bekkadahl, chief revenue officer of AdKeeper. "They realized click-through rates are so terrible that before they get value they had to shift to take away the need for the click-through rate."

AdKeeper plans to deploy its technology on ads at the start of 2011. In its current format, users click on a small "k" logo in the lower right corner of a banner ad. They can view their "keeper" then or later, as well as rank, sort and share the banners.

The company's research found users have a need for such a service. For example, an office worker viewing a Monster banner during the day can't visit the offer immediately but might wish to do so later. Movie trailers are another obvious fit, Kurnit said. The hope is that this initiative will help raise the bar on creative from being dancing monkeys that distract people to actual information folks will want to keep for later.

"We as an industry have messed this up," said Kurnit, who recalls garish ads dotting About. "We've got some undoing to do as an industry."

Google Instant has changed the way we search [From econsultancy.com]

by Will Critchlow. FOUND @ econsultancy.com


Sam Crocker, one of our lead SEOs in London has been researching what proportion of searchers are seeing Google Instant. This has a potentially significant impact on the various research being published on how Instant affects average query length. Here's what he has found:

There has been a great deal written about Google Instant since its release and some very interesting studies about the impact of Instant on search behaviour. These studies have analysed the number of keyphrases of a certain length, the average length of searches, and even gone so far as to point out that the overall impact of Google Instant has been smaller than the impact of the average update to the Google algorithm in terms of search traffic and the length of keywords.

Whilst we can glean some information from this data I want to be very careful to point out that we should not be too hasty. The most important point to make about the referenced studies is: none of these studies claim to have segmented out the data from just Instant traffic. If this is the case, any implications of Instant's impact on search behaviour does not accurately measure the impact of Instant, but rather the observed change on overall traffic driven by search since Instant has been released - and this differentiation is absolutely essential.

When Google updates its algorithm it impacts everyone but usually will not change user behaviour or experience in any drastic way. However, changing the "Google" experience as significantly as Google has done with Instant- has the potential to change the way we search, rather than SEO performance and this is extremely important to bear in mind.

There is a difference between search behaviour and performance of a website in the search engines. Search behaviour refers specifically to the way people search, whereas performance in the search engines refers more generally to how the search engines rank particular sites for a given word.

Looking simply at "before" and "after" Instant results in analytics does not accurately account for the potential impact of a change in the user experience of this magnitude.

We have taken a stab (given the data available to us) at segmenting the data and analyzing the true impact of Instant on searchers behaviour, rather than the broader impact on search volume and changes in analytics data pre/post the introduction of Google Instant. And, as you may have gathered from above, our results look very different than some of the other studies out there.

Read the rest of this great article/study @ econsultancy.com

Japan, US and Europe Mobile Use Comparison [From Marketing Pilgrim]

It’s always fun to see just how different areas of the world are using different elements of the Internet. We have known for quite some time that Japan is the world leader in mobile usage although you don’t hear as much about it these days as the US and Europe closes the gap.

BY FRANK REED. FOUND @ Marketing Pilgrim

comScore released findings for these three areas that seem to run with what one might predict about mobile usage for each region. While admittedly a little tough to read I have highlighted the leaders in each category relating to how mobile is used (hat tip to ReadWriteWeb for the info).

The US was the leader in social networking and blog access as well as checking bank accounts. Interestingly enough, the Japanese didn’t check their financial accounts as much as the US but they have a hunger for financial news.

Europeans lead the trio in playing games, taking video, texting and listening to music. With all of that time off you have to keep yourself entertained, right?

I wonder how these results will change in five years time. Will the US’s age of mobile be fully realized and will usage reach the levels of the Japanese? I doubt it because of the economic gaps that exist in the US that will prevent the masses from getting into the mobile space with smart phones. Hopefully, I am wrong but as the gap between the haves and the have-nots continues to widen mobile players will have to take what the market gives them as far as reach.

Google Working On Auto Driving Cars [From searchengineland.com]

Photo from: San Fransisco Chronicle

Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Their next step into that realm is making auto driving cars. The Google Blog announced Google has “developed technology for cars that can drive themselves.” Yes, auto-driving cars, like from the movies and high tech TV shows.

by Barry Schwartz. Found at www.searchengineland.com

Google’s reasoning behind this move is to make the roads safer and reduce accidents. Google said they have been testing this for a while and have already driven 140,000 miles with trained safety drivers who can override the system at any time. Google explained the cars figure out how to drive using video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead – which is all pulled from Google’s data centers. I won’t get into the possible privacy issues of Google navigating all the cars in the world.

How soon until you or I can get this installed on our cars? Google said, “While this project is very much in the experimental stage, it provides a glimpse of what transportation might look like in the future thanks to advanced computer science. And that future is very exciting.”

The New York Times has pictures and a video, which I will embed below. There is also a diagram of how the cars are modified.

Carol Bartz: Facebook Is Creepy, Apple’s iAd Won’t Work, And More Gems [From Techcrunch]

Image from Techcrunch


By Robin Wauters, FOUND @ Techcrunch

The love/hate relationship between Yahoo‘s CEO and the rest of the world continues. Carol Bartz was recently interviewed by USA Today, and couldn’t help being her eloquent self again.



Here’s a round-up:

On Facebook, and Yahoo missing the ‘social’ boat (emphasis ours)
Social does not just equal Facebook. Social is how people interact anywhere.
…
What I don’t like is when somebody says, “The only way you find social is (the way Facebook operates).” Did we miss the boat on exactly how they do it? Of course we did. Everybody did.

Q: Who’s your biggest single competitor?

A: Facebook — not today, but they could be. If they keep going, they will have the vault of information on everybody in the world, and that’s valuable.

Q: Valuable, to the point of being scary?

A: Yes, creepy. I don’t care to find an old boyfriend. One time, just to see if they got fat and bald, but then leave me alone. But I’m old.

On Apple and iAd (emphasis ours)
Q: You’ve said that Apple exercises too much control over the ads on its devices, and you said that can’t last. Why?

A: If you want to run an ad on the iPad, it has to be approved by Apple. I don’t think it is for us to say this ad isn’t pretty enough and to go through this whole back-end process of approval. I don’t think in the long run that’s going to work.

Advertisers will have other options.

On intrusive advertising (emphasis ours)
Q: These sound very intrusive to me. Sometimes I want to look at the screen and see what I want to see. I don’t want the dog.

A: You can click on any of these and say, “Don’t show me this.”

Q: You are making me do extra work.

A: Oh, excuse me, please. You are getting a lot of value. This is not like a free lunch here. We just opened a data center in Buffalo, and in its first phase it has 50,000 servers. That is not cheap. So the very fact that you get all this great information is part of the deal.

On what Yahoo is (emphasis ours)
(aha!)

Q: Yahoo has great assets, but some people say they don’t know what the company does or where it is going.

A: That exists in New York City and about 30 miles outside Silicon Valley. The rest of the world seems to know.

Yahoo is the largest media company in the world. We are twice as large as the nearest competitor. We do it through innovative technology and bringing people information they need to manage their lives. We serve up — and these numbers I hope will astound you — 10 billion ads a day.

On mobile and the chances of a Yahoo phone/OS
Q: If you get a Google Android phone, all the Google applications just work. You are drawn into their world. Does Yahoo need a device of its own?

A: It isn’t Google that gets to do that: It is what the carrier wants to do. By the way, there are many instances around the world where what comes up are Yahoo applications, not Google applications, even on an Android phone. The only one that actually controls that precisely is Apple.

On Carol Bartz (emphasis ours)
Q: Would you have hired someone like you to be CEO?

A: Let me answer a question you didn’t ask. Am I the perfect person for the job at Yahoo? No. Am I good for the job? Yes.

Perhaps a search for another chief executive might be in order? Unless shareholders and the Yahoo board agree good is good enough, of course. Cough.

Tobacco companies accused of promoting cigarette brands online [ From guardian.co.uk]

A cigarette packet is transformed into a robot on YouTube. Anti-smoking groups argue that such images are promoting tobacco.

Pro-tobacco content on Facebook and YouTube is glamorising smoking among the young, warn health groups by Jamie Doward and Denis Campbell.

Found @ www.guardian.co.uk

Leading health organisations have expressed alarm at how the internet is being used to promote smoking.

Tobacco companies deny using the online world to market their brands, but there is mounting concern that social networking sites are glamorising smoking, especially among young people.

British American Tobacco (BAT) has been forced to conduct a damage limitation exercise after it emerged that several of its employees had established fan sites on Facebook for the company's Lucky Strike and Dunhill brands, apparently without the company's knowledge.

Ash, the anti-smoking group, has also established that BAT hired an online marketing firm, iKineo, to promote the Lucky Strike brand in South Africa.

iKineo boasted on its website that it had "extended the Lucky Strike campaign into the digital space, using it to mobilise a powerful underground movement to advocate the brand".

Other tobacco companies have also looked to the internet. Thousands of smokers – who had to confirm they were over 18 simply by clicking on an online box – have accessed a website allowing them to design packets for new blends of Camel cigarettes, manufactured by the American firm RJ Reynolds (RJR). The resulting exercise saw the launch of a range of new packets that extended the Camel brand and saw it climb up internet search engine rankings.

The market research exercise did not breach rules prohibiting tobacco advertising, but Robin Hewings, Cancer Research UK's tobacco control manager, said: "The industry has a history of searching for loopholes which allow its lethal products to target young people."

It is not always clear who has established the pro-smoking sites. In 1997 RJR withdrew its Joe Camel cartoon figure from its advertising campaigns after the American Medical Association published a report claiming that young children could recognise him more easily than Mickey Mouse. Now a Facebook search for "Joe Camel" brings up more than 25 sites dedicated to the character.

YouTube also carries old cigarette adverts that would fall foul of the comprehensive ban on tobacco advertising, recognised by 168 countries if they were aired on television. An analysis of 163 YouTube tobacco brand-related videos, carried out by researchers at the University of Otago in New Zealand, found that 71% featured "pro-tobacco content". Many of the clips are highly sophisticated in their use of tobacco packets. One "freeze frame" video shows a Marlboro packet being turned into a Transformer robot similar to those featured in the blockbuster film.

Internal industry papers released as a result of legal action reveal that tobacco firms have been experimenting with the internet as a marketing weapon for years. US tobacco company Lorillard ran an online competition at the start of the millennium allowing young people to vote on their favourite music videos. The competition was ostensibly designed to promote the company's slogan "Tobacco is Whacko if You are a Teen" – a message that has been attacked by anti-tobacco campaigners for implying that smoking was acceptable among adults.

Fresh concerns about the tobacco firms' use of cyberspace were raised last week when it emerged that the annual Global Tobacco Networking Forum had held a workshop on social media for thousands of delegates in the cigarette industry. Those attending also heard a talk on "Social Media in Regulated Markets" from Jason Falls, a leading expert on internet branding.

In an emailed response to the Observer, Falls said he was unable to discuss his talk, citing the conference's rules barring speakers from discussing the subject with the media. But Falls emailed a copy of a presentation that he gives to other clients in which he discusses how "it is entirely possible to leverage social media marketing and the social web as a company in a regulated industry".

The presentation notes: "Regulations and guidelines are not impediments. They are necessary and opportunities to innovate in the social media space."

Professor Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said: "I would like the people who are responsible for these new forms of social media to be more responsible in the content they allow, especially content which glamorises and promotes smoking to young people."

A BAT spokeswoman insisted it was not company policy to use social networking sites to promote its brands after the allegations first surfaced in an academic paper at the University of Sydney in Australia. "Our employees, agencies and service providers should never use social media to promote our tobacco brands," BAT said.

5 Social Media SEO & Analytics Tools Worth Checking Out [from Online Marketing Blog]

Great read by Lee Odden on online marketing blog. Check out those useful social media and SEO analytics tools.