INSIGHT blogArchive: April 2009

Archive for April, 2009

Highlights from AdTech San Francisco

30
April
2009

The message is just as important as the delivery medium.

Stefanie Berliant
Media Coordinator

Last week I had the pleasure of attending AdTech in San Francisco. There was much to see and do; two floors of exhibitors and 3 rooms of seminars.

Highlight speakers included Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia; Jason Kilar, CEO of HULU; Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo; and Shelly Palmer, Managing Director at Advanced Media Ventures.

Much of the conversation at the conference centered around the role of display advertising, and how "creativity" still plays a strong part in online advertising. Creativity was defined at AdTech as ideas, not just words and pictures; and story telling which connects people emotionally and intellectually.  The best way for a company to promote its brand or product online is to research who their audience is, then test out several tactics using analtyicts tools to measure which tactic the audience responds to the most, and finally use creativity and innovation to continue the conversation with the audience.

Display ads help drive emotion in consumers which then generates buzz and engagement. Of course this means companies must create meaningful content in order to establish relationships and give users a quality experience.  "Creativity" is force behind the convergence of search and display advertising as display ads help drive search not only online but offline as well.

There is a fundamental difference between advertising and marketing. Consumers are ultimately in control; they choose when and how they want to see ads. Companies need to find a balance between giving the consumers what they need and promoting a brand/product . This balance where content/utility = advertising is called marketing.

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Plans for New Online Privacy Bill in Effect

24
April
2009

House members meet to discuss the draft of a new online bill that addresses privacy implications on ad targeting technology.

Christine Pepin
Media Coordinator

Yesterday afternoon, members from the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet met to confront privacy concerns of behavioral ad targeting technologies.  Joining them were several Internet freedom advocacy groups who question the integrity of an ad network’s ability to track a user’s every move online.  Members present affirmed their willingness to propose legislation relating to not only behavioral targeting but perhaps to all online targeting. 

In 2002, a bill written by Republican Cliff Stearns of Florida was introduced that would have required firms to notify customers about their data collection and usage.  The bill was never passed, however members of the House indicate that it “will be the starting point and the foundation of our privacy bill this year.”  Marketers, search engines and ad networks would be hugely affected should a bill like this one ever passed.  Therefore, members of the House and privacy advocators are thoroughly analyzing the effects of tightened restrictions on these businesses.

A joint hearing on this subject is expected for this summer where further analysis by Congress will occur.

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Some of Nations Top College Football Coaches “Tweet”

23
April
2009

College football coaches all over the country have turned to twitter as a way to communicate with recruits and also fans.

Ryan Moss
Media Coordinator

Throughout the years the NCAA has placed numerous restrictions on college coaches that limit their contact with recruits. One thing that has no restrictions, at least for right now is the use of Twitter and numerous coaches are now taking advantage of this social networking application. Using Twitter, coaches can continuously update recruits and also fans/supporters about what is going on with their program.

Pete Carroll, the head football coach at the University of Southern California (USC), was one of the first coaches to get on Twitter and is also one of the most active. Coach Carroll has posted about topics ranging from USC’s spring football practice to his ongoing campaign to get comedian and close friend Will Ferrell on Twitter. Coach Carroll even created a video to help convince Ferrell to join the Twitter community, which can be seen below.

The list of some other college football coaches on Twitter includes Bob Stoops from Oklahoma, Les Miles from LSU and Ron Zook from Illinois.

But not everyone is embracing the Twitter craze. University of Florida head coach Urban Meyer, who has won two of the last three BCS national championships, is not a fan of Twitter. In fact Coach Meyer was quoted by the Orlando Sentinel as saying "Can’t stand that stuff. Just don’t like it." This is surprising as Meyer has typically been a trend setter with new technology. Still, there is an Urban Meyer account on Twitter, but no posts have been made nor has it been confirmed that it is Coach Meyer.

Twitter provides these coaches with a great opportunity to gain exposure for their program and keep their followers up to date with the most recent happenings. The only questions are if and when will the NCAA institute restrictions on Twitter like it has done with other "break-through" communication mediums like text messages, emails and use of Facebook.

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New Similar Images and Timeline Application Integrated in Google Search

22
April
2009

Two new experimental tools are launched to help users more efficiently browse through data

Christine Pepin
Media Coordinator

Similar Images is an application that allows users to sort through the results of an image search by clicking on links to other similar images.  The searches populated will also try to match the angle of the image, a person’s position or expression, or depth of the picture. 

Another new system, Timeline, categorizes information chronologically by day, week, month or year in a zoomable format.  Users will be able to sort through the same type of results that would be shown in a typical Google News search.  According to Google, the results are pulled from various sources including recent and historial news, scanned articles, blogs, Twitter status messages and other media. 

Check out these new features through Google’s latest version of Google Labs.

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Is YouTube Losing Money?

21
April
2009

Despite being one of the most popular websites, some experts predict that Youtube is actually losing money.

Ryan Moss
Media Coordinator

What do Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Windows Live, Microsoft and YouTube all have in common? According to Nielsen Online, these are the five most popular web brands in the U.S. during February based on the number of unique visitors. Each month thousands of people visit these websites, helping to make money for the companies. But, at least one of those companies, YouTube, isn’t nearly as profitable as everyone thinks. In fact, some experts predict that YouTube may actually be losing money, despite its popularity.

Several market research companies have estimated YouTube’s revenues for both 2008 and 2009. Estimates for 2008 range anywhere from $75 million to $189 million. While for 2009, the range is from $120 million to $500 million. There is a wide range between those predicted revenue numbers, but regardless of what numbers you use, predictions about YouTube’s expenses are far greater.

Analysts from Credit Suisse considered YouTube’s bandwidth costs, content licensing agreements, hardware needs and other expenses, and predicted their total expenses to be around $700 million in 2009. With YouTube likely losing a significant amount of money, how can this be corrected?

"The issue for YouTube going forward is to increase the percentage of videos that can be monetized (likely through more deals with content companies)," the analysts said. "[YouTube needs] to drive more advertiser demand through standardization of ad formats and improve ad effectiveness."

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Updates to Compete.com

15
April
2009

Compete.com updates some services and revokes others.

Stefanie Berliant
Media Coordinator

As an Online Marketer, I appreciate having a variety of free online analytics tools, including Quantcast, Compete, Alexa, and Google Insights and Trends.  I use these tools on a daily basis to gather research for potential clients, monitor trends for current clients and keep myself and my team up-to-date in the ever changing world of the internet.  So when I heard from a colleague that Compete had made some upgrades to its site, I immediately went to the site to see what changed.

The homepage of Compete clearly announces the modifications to “the new compete.com.” These updates include:

“Enhanced UI- An upgraded and simplified user interface makes utilizing and interacting with Compete PRO data easier.

User Generated Tagging- Tagging allows you to categorize sites as well as understand how other users/consumers define a site, brand, or product.

Improved Graphing- New and improved graphing tools allow you to compare multiple datasets on a single graph.

Daily Digest Emails- Data on sites of interest to you delivered to you inbox daily.”

My excitement for these improvements was put to an abrupt halt as I noticed several metrics were no longer available for free. Average stay and pages per visit are only now available if you pay a fee to get the PRO service.  This was very disappointing to discover as I find that these two metrics are the most useful when comparing sites.  This is especially significant in the case of regionalized companies to national companies.  While local companies do compete with national chains, ultimately the national chains have more traffic and visitors to their sites.  With data such as average stay and pages per visit, we are able to compare apples-to-apples when looking at what audiences do once they get to a site. How long a user is browsing your site can tell a company how sticky or interactive their site is.

While it’s great that these tools are free, Quantcast, and Google Insights Google Trends does not provide this depth of information as well. Alexa does include these detailed metrics in its repertoire, however its interface is not as user-friendly as Compete. Compete.com’s meta description explains that they help users “by providing free services.”  With these “upgrades,” the majority of the services Compete provides need to be accessed with a credit card. Perhaps they forgot to update the description when they upgraded their site.

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Twitter Introduces Monitter.com

13
April
2009

Consumer demand drives Twitter to release a simple dialog-monitoring tool to watch tweets anywhere…anytime.

George Assimakopoulos
Principal Manager

If you’re curious about people who may be tweeting about you, your products or your services on Twitter – now you can monitor this dialog in real-time.  Check out Twitter’s new keyword watch-tool:  Monitter.com. This simple tool lets you monitor the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying ("tweeting").  All you need to do is type in a few keywords into the provided search boxes and within seconds you’ll start seeing relevant tweets streaming live.

You may wonder why this is a valuable tool.  One specific benefit to Monitter is that it allows users to narrow their search within a 10 mile radius of the users location.  Now imagine if you are a home improvement contractor searching for people who may be tweeting on do-it-yourself topics.  I actually know of an independent contractor who recently used Monitter and entered the keyword phrase:  "painting rooms".  Within the Washington DC area he immediately found four tweets of people who had indicated  that they were at home "painting rooms this weekend".  The contractor replied to those tweets right for Monitter and offered his advice.  He eventually got one of those painting projects as a job.  Pretty cool, huh?

Monitter.com can have some other very cool application benefits:  politicians can use it to target possible voters tweeting about some top-of-mind issue; associations can use it to target new audiences who may be interested in their cause-driven organization’s focus; even cooks could use this to invite audiences to their restaurants as people tweet about their food cravings.  Try it for yourself – go to http://www.monitter.com/ and enter in "eating sushi".  I never realized how many people tweet about what they are eating for dinner.

This is just another example for how Twitter is truly growing their toolsets to build a business model for their social network.

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DONER USA and EyeTraffic Media partner to support the national search engine marketing efforts for Mazda USA

1
April
2009

During these challenging economic times within the automobile industry, OEMs are seeking more efficient ways to manage and maintain marketing efforts.  EyeTraffic Media has been supporting SEO and PPC efforts for MazdaUSA since 2006.  To streamline all media buying, and to collaborate better on all online marketing efforts for MazdaUSA, agency of record DONER and [...]

During these challenging economic times within the automobile industry, OEMs are seeking more efficient ways to manage and maintain marketing efforts.  EyeTraffic Media has been supporting SEO and PPC efforts for MazdaUSA since 2006.  To streamline all media buying, and to collaborate better on all online marketing efforts for MazdaUSA, agency of record DONER and the strategic partnership team of EyeTraffic Media and Search Mojo will work as a single source to plan, execute, manage and measure all paid search engine marketing programs during the next fiscal year. With this collective intelligence in place, Mazda eliminates agency service overlap and will effectively save money by avoiding redundant management fees.

This collaboration is another example for how EyeTraffic Media continues to work alongside top-tier agencies to support marketing efforts. ‘Our primary focus is always on the delivery of a marketing message’, says EyeTraffic’s principal manager George Assimakopoulos. ‘We are not brand designers nor creative developers.  So, we are able to complement any agency approach by managing what we do best – tactical execution of online marketing.’

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