Google Adsense

Google Lands Omnicom As Display Ad Partner

Written on July 14, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing

Google continues to expand its efforts to get away from being a revenue one-trick pony. A recent result of these efforts is the announced partnership with Omnicom who will be using Google’s ad exchange to purchase display ads for their clients.

With Apple having some reception issues (nothing a roll of duct tape can’t fix though) and suffering the slings and arrows of a bored press that is looking to make someone a target and then deem it news, Google is doing pretty well. Motorola’s Droid X rolls out today and Verizon reports that it is gaining in market share even without the iPhone in its stable of smartphone offerings. As the Wall Street Journal reports this new Omnicom deal is more reason to celebrate.

Under the deal, Omnicom, part of New York-based Omnicom Group Inc., is expected to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy display ads for its clients through Google over the next two years, said a person familiar with the situation. In return, Google will work with Omnicom to build a global “trading desk” that allows the company to buy display ads more easily on Google’s ad exchange, an auction-like system that matches ad buyers and sellers to advertising space across large groups of websites.

Omnicom says it was already buying ads on Google’s exchange using its own technology system.

As part of the deal, Google, which reports second-quarter earnings Thursday, will provide analytics services to Omnicom to help it understand how its display ads are performing, the companies said.

There are the typical concerns that by committing to one company like this (although there is no contractual restrictions as to who either side could work with in addition to one another) then Omnicom could ‘alienate’ other companies like Yahoo or Microsoft.

Such partnerships also could create tensions among other parties with which the advertising and Internet companies do business. “If you get in deeper with Google, then someone like Microsoft [Corp.] might be less likely to work with you, or Yahoo might be less likely to work with you,” said Michael Brunick, vice president of technology at Interpublic Group of Cos.’ digital-ad unit Cadreon. “Ultimately, we want everything we buy to be in the best interest of the campaign. If you are stuck filling a commitment, that may or may not be in the client’s best interest.”

OK, here’s what I have to say to that. What is this, middle school?! Does this really happen in business at this level. The “I’m not going to talk to you because you talk to them!” is usually reserved for hormonally imbalanced teens not multi-billion dollar corporations. Geesh. Just imagine how much incremental income could be made by others who pick up the business from Omnicom that can’t be run through Google for whatever the reasons. If everyone would stop acting like children there would be good business to be earned out there.

Anyway, I know I am dreaming here because people are people and they make weird business decisions that are more emotional than logical (another term for this kind of person is a stockbroker).

The bottom line here is that Google continues to diversify. It shouldn’t be too long though, before someone cries foul and says that Google is doing too much to grow the economy and create jobs (I do hope you picked up on the sarcasm there).

Where else should Google go to diversify and become more than just a search company? We will hopefully learn more today as Google reports earnings and tells the world what else it may have up its sleeves.

Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

See more here:
Google Lands Omnicom As Display Ad Partner

Facebook Makes a Deal with App Maker Zynga

Written on May 18, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

Zynga has made some of the most popular apps on Facebook, such as FarmVille with its 75M users. With a total of 239 million monthly active users of their apps, Zynga has a significant proportion of Facebook users hooked. But they just about got unhooked: Zynga and Facebook were in a tense face-off over Facebook’s currency and the site’s cut.

Facebook is moving wholly to the Facebook Credits system, with the network taking a 30% of transactions with apps. A new agreement, announced today, has averted the war. The two companies have finally realized that they are interdependent, though I daresay Zynga needs FB a bit more than FB needs Zynga.

Both Mark Pincus, chief executive of Zynga, and Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, issued statements saying how the companies look forward to working together on behalf of users. The deal shows that both companies realize that to go to war against the other would be a case of mutually assured destruction. Both are dependent on each other, in a classic scenario of a platform owner and a major application maker.

(“Classic”?)

Zynga needs Facebook to sustain its apps. Zynga’s apps keep Facebook users coming back—though they’re just one of many things people sign onto the network for. The terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, but with Facebook on the high ground, I assume they are still taking a significant cut of the Facebook Credit transactions within the apps.

Zynga had already FarmVille.com, which links back to the Facebook app for its most popular game on the social network. However, it also had plans to launch Zynga Live, which could’ve been an independent gaming site—which suggests that the relationship between Zynga and FB was already strained. The agreement, however, has cemented their relationship for the next five years.

What do you think? Who do you think will come out on top from the deal?

See the rest here:
Facebook Makes a Deal with App Maker Zynga

Cup of Joe: The Care Bears Hold the Secret to Being a Successful Entrepreneur

Written on March 27, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Care Bears?

Have you lost your marbles?

Well I’m not sure yet, but here’s the story.

This week I was taking a break from some coding to relax a little bit with my 21 month old niece. We decided to turn on Care Bears. This specific episode is called Lucky charm. Here we see the story of a young girl with low self confidence who is taught to believe in herself and to create her own luck.

I think this is an incredibly important message not only for children but also for entrepreneurs and businesspeople alike. It’s easy for us to write-off doing something worthwhile by making excuses for ourselves or our companies. By doing so we are able to hide behind our own insecurities and never move forward, taking risk and confronting the challenges they are required to do amazing things in life and business.

It’s interesting that as adults we tend to forget these important lessons that children are taught on a daily basis. This is generally because as adults we have responsibilities that force us to be rational and conservative with the decisions we make. But what’s important is that we don’t confuse our responsibilities with our insecurities.

Being an entrepreneur is all about risk management. Trying something new whether it be a different business model or product idea requires taking a risk and the best entrepreneurs are the ones that minimize risk by laying a foundation through a solid business model or funding strategy. But even before that, the best entrepreneurs are the ones that believe in themselves. They create their own luck and write their own rules.

So if you want to be a better entrepreneur then you have to take risk. But first you need to believe in yourself and create your own luck. Unfortunately, the Care Bears are not real. They are not going to fly down in a cloud car and teach you an important life lesson. You have to do that on your own. But, in doing so it’ll make all the risk and scary moments more worthwhile.

See the original post:
Cup of Joe: The Care Bears Hold the Secret to Being a Successful Entrepreneur

FTC Still Examining GoogleMob—Wants Feedback from Rivals

Written on March 11, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, marketing

Now here’s a great way to gather totally, completely unbiased information about a potential merger: ask the companies’ competitors. Okay, so the FTC isn’t completely crazy—of course other companies in the market would have a pretty good idea what the industry looks like and what a big merger might do. But still, we can only hope the FTC will remember to take their opinions with a grain of competitive salt.

AdMob, the popular mobile advertising company, and Google, the wanna-be-popular mobile advertising company, announced the deal in November. Google gave AdMob $750M in stock in the deal. The next month, consumer groups began lobbying against the deal. Now the FTC wants both advertisers and rivals to make sworn statements about the pending merger.

The probe isn’t public, but sources say the commission is “investigating whether Google’s proposed purchase of AdMob would reduce competition in the market for Internet advertising on mobile phones.” (Kind of a duh.) Google says it’s continuing to talk with the FTC and cooperate with requests for information.

Bloomberg consulted Thomas Ensign, an antitrust lawyer, on the matter. He said, “It’s difficult to envision a scenario where this development, if true, is positive for Google-AdMob, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the agency is going to challenge the deal.”

Just over a year ago, the US Department of Justice was hours from filing anti-trust charges against the search giant over another major advertising deal (with Yahoo). Is Google pushing their luck with this merger? Will GoogleMob hurt the mobile ad industry? Will the FTC stop the deal?

Go here to read the rest:
FTC Still Examining GoogleMob—Wants Feedback from Rivals

7 Do’s & Don’ts For Working With A Technical SEO During A Redesign

Written on January 28, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, seo

In the past few months, I’ve been the technical SEO consultant to 6 companies who have been in the process of redesigning their websites. The companies range in size from a one-person show to a world-reknowned Boston hospital, and everything in between. All of the companies were smart enough to know they needed expert SEO [...]



….

Read more:
7 Do’s & Don’ts For Working With A Technical SEO During A Redesign

Q4 Results Show Things Looking up for Yahoo

Written on January 28, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Things might be looking up for Yahoo, which just posted its best quarter since Carol Bartz took the reins a year ago. They earned $153 million (11 cents per share) in Q4—a huge improvement over the same quarter last year, where they saw a loss of $303 million (22 cents per share). And Yahoo might have even done better, if it weren’t for all the internal changes and pending Microsoft partnership.

That may be changing soon. “We are done looking inward,” Bartz told analysts. “We are looking outward at the incredible opportunities ahead.” And this year’s opportunities might even include acquiring other companies. Yahoo also projects that Q1 of this year will be even better YOY, with $1.63B in revenue (which would be lower than Q409, but ain’t that always the way? maybe they held back some of their revenue to report in Q1?).

Of course, it’s not all good news. Revenue for Q409 was down by 4%, coming out at $1.73B (then again, revenue was down 12% YTD, so that’s not so bad, right? And I hear there’s this recession thing going around.). Google’s revenue was up 17%—but a fat lot of good that did their stock. Yahoo’s stock was up 60 cents (3.8%) after their numbers came out.

There have also been some interesting flip-flops in earnings and revenues:

For all of 2009, Yahoo earned $598 million, or 42 cents per share, on revenue of $6.46 billion. That compared with income of $419 million, or 29 cents per share, on revenue of $7.21 billion in 2008.

Perhaps best of all, Yahoo added 700 employees in Q4, though they’re still 1300 below the “recent peak employment” from September 2008.

What do you think? Could things be turning around for Yahoo?

The rest is here:
Q4 Results Show Things Looking up for Yahoo

Be Careful Who Your Friends Are

Written on January 26, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

As more and more layers of the Google v China spy activity and accusations continue to get peeled back this onion really is starting to stink a bit. It appears as if the victims of “Googlegate” (you like that one?) were not just those labeled as human rights activists. In fact, it has been discovered that friends of employees of many of the companies that were attacked were targeted as well.

The Financial Times Reports

Personal friends of employees at Google, Adobe and other companies were targeted by hackers in a string of recently disclosed cyberattacks, raising privacy concerns and pointing to a highly sophisticated operation, security experts said.

The most significant discovery is that the attackers had selected employees at the companies with access to proprietary data, then learnt who their friends were. The hackers compromised the social network accounts of those friends, hoping to enhance the probability that their final targets would click on the links they sent.

This can certainly be a little disconcerting for those who are friends of these employees of the various companies who say things like “I can’t tell you that or I’d have to kill you.” It’s been said it’s good to have friends in high places but in this world that can be trouble.

McAffe has been keeping tabs on this situation for many reasons. George Kurtz, chief technology officer had this to say.

McAfee discovered that a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had been used in the attacks. Mr Kurtz said the attackers also used one of the most popular instant messaging programmes to induce victims to click on a link that installed spy software.

Well, that’s what you get when you use IE instead of your own company’s browser, huh? I suspect there were some Googlers getting an earful about that aspect of this story.

So how does this impact those in the Internet marketing industry? Probably too early to tell but one has to suspect that as more and more security holes are discovered and capitalized on there will be more and more need to lock down systems. As systems become more closed it will be harder to reach people with marketing techniques and messages. The reality is that while the Internet marketing industry doesn’t try to make a big deal about it security concerns are a tremendous threat to commerce on the Internet. This quote sums it up.

Sam Curry, vice-president of security firm RSA, said: “This is a loud message for the commercial world, which is: wake up, this isn’t all happiness and goodness and new business.

“Doing business on the internet is as risky as sending ships through the Panama Canal.”

Having never been on a ship or sent anything on a ship that has gone through the Panama Canal I can’t speak to just how bad that is but the point is that doing business on the Internet may look different in the future more because of security and less because of innovation.

Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

View original post here:
Be Careful Who Your Friends Are

Planning a Customer Loyalty Program? Forget Social Media!

Written on January 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

It’s not often that you’ll hear the advice to NOT bother with social media, but a new CMO Council report suggests that when it comes to customer loyalty programs, social media just doesn’t make sense.

While 60% of the 600 marketers polled, planned to make better use of the web and social networking tools, consumers say that’s not how to reach them. In fact, just 4% of consumers say they used social media–dropping to 3% when focusing only on blogs–to learn about customer loyalty programs.

Now, you could argue that the number is at 4% simply because companies are doing a lousy job of promoting their customer loyalty programs via social media, but the CMO Council suggests otherwise:

This finding is not surprising when you consider that consumers engaged in loyalty programs demand high-touch direct engagements, versus mass messages, regardless of channel.

This appears to be backed-up by the revelation that only 20% of business have yet to form any kind of loyalty program. So it appears companies have the right fishing pole, they’re just at the wrong lake.

So, who should you emulate? When surveyed, these are the companies that were top-of-mind when consumers think of the best loyalty program:

The keys to their success? Well, let’s flip it and look at what consumers didn’t like about the average loyalty program:

Too much spam and junk email topped the list of negatives associated with loyalty and rewards program membership (44 percent), followed by too many conditions and restrictions (38 percent), and rewards that lacked real value (37 percent). Other prevalent beefs included members having a hard time redeeming points or rewards, program membership lacking value, as well as communications and service not being personalized or targeted specifically for members.

The average US household is enrolled in 14 loyalty programs, but only active in 6 of them. The odds are in your favor, if you know where to engage consumers–and give them the benefits they want!

Here is the original post:
Planning a Customer Loyalty Program? Forget Social Media!

Email Users Grew by 100 Million in 2009, 81% of Them Were Spammers?

Written on January 25, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

Web site uptime monitoring service Pingdom has put together a nice list of internet stats for 2009. Most of them are from studies and surveys already floating around the web, but Pingdom adds in some of its own metrics.

I had a lot of fun applying my own fuzzy math to a number of the startling statistics.

For example, the number of email users grew 100 million in 2009, to 1.4 billion worldwide. During the same period, email spam increased by 24%, with 81% of all emails being spam.

Now, I know that you can’t assume that 81% of new email users were spammers–one spammer could account for 1% of spam, all on their lonesome–but that just takes away all of the fun!

Another interesting observation. While Flickr is thought of as being the top image hosting site–with 4 billion images hosted–Facebook users upload more pics in a two-month span, than hosted by Flickr–about 2.5 billion per month.

And, just in case you thought the web-world rotated around North America, here’s a reason why you may want to provide language translation on your site:

Excerpt from:
Email Users Grew by 100 Million in 2009, 81% of Them Were Spammers?

Google Money ‘Scammer’ Says They Will Settle Legal Dispute With Google

Written on December 22, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: Object

Pacific WebWorks says it is settling Google suit from the Associate Press reports that the ‘Google Money Kit’ type of alleged scammer will settle the dispute with Google. A week ago, we reported Google filed suit against this organization, in order to help prevent these types of scams.
Pacific WebWorks, one of the companies in [...]



….

More here:
Google Money ‘Scammer’ Says They Will Settle Legal Dispute With Google