I knew the brilliance of the I’m a PC and Laptop Hunters ads couldn’t last. Reverting back to their usual retarded marketing style, Microsoft is now telling people to throw house parties in celebration of the Windows 7 launch — complete with horrible actors in a ridiculously awkward promo video.
Fortunately, by bleeping out the right words, you can turn the promo video from awkward to hilarious. The party suddenly sounds a lot more interesting.
Perhaps you’ll forgive this thought dump as I make a few personal observations about Google and its place in Britain.
Maybe you have your own thoughts about how Google is trying (officially or otherwise) to maintain its position as premier search engine.
Recently I’ve noticed a trend on TV ads where, instead of providing a direct web address, they invite the viewer to “search online for…”. However, they don’t specify which search engine you should use — merely that you should go online.
Obviously, this approach means that they’re fairly confident that the proposed search term will bring up their website. I wonder if they’re also assuming that most people will use Google?
Last week I saw for the first time a direct ad for Google. At the end of an advert for a pet insurance company, a Google page appeared on screen with the voiceover “Search on Google for Pet Plan”. More →
The UK has become the first major market where spending on online advertising has exceeded that of TV, according to figures released by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The recession caused an overall reduction in advertising spend, but many companies have invested more in online advertising compared with traditional media.
New Media Age’s editor, Justin Pearse, said that although this was expected to happen eventually, the milestone had been achieved at least a year sooner than expected due to the current economic climate. More →
Why does the tech industry produce some of the worst ads in the history of advertising? Do geeks spend so much time with their computers that they have no idea how to convey ideas to agency guys? Do agency guys misunderstand geeks so badly that their creations come out crap?
Whatever the reason, Brian X. Chen compiles a list of eight outrageously annoying tech videos. This is why normals will never understand geeks: our ads suck.
Spending too much time on Facebook? You’re not alone. A new study from Neilsen shows that Americans have tripled the time they spend on social networks and blogs. Even has-been MySpace is getting a lift from the rising tide. On average, you spent seventeen percent of your online time on social networks and blogs in August 2009, up from six percent the year before.
When it comes to online media, advertisers are often slow to go where the audience goes — but in this case, they’re definitely catching up. Advertisers increased their spending on social networks and blogs by a whopping 119%, up to $108 million in August 2009 from $49 million the year before.
Now you won’t feel so guilty about goofing off on Facebook. Even Madison Avenue’s starting to hang out there.
If your AdSense earnings go up in the next few months, if you start seeing ads for big brands on your little sites, here’s why: Google has opened the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and connected it to the Google content network. More →
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz claims Yahoo was never a search company. These ads touting Yahoo Search make her historical revisionism blatantly obvious. More →
The Contextual Partnership Plugin For WordPress Provides Free Advertising To Help Promote Your Blog & Get You Noticed…
If you’re looking for an effective solution to help get your blog noticed then the Contextual Partnership Plugin for WordPress bloggers could be well worth consideration. Perhaps the most attractive aspect is that there is no cost involved.
According to the developers the plugin is designed to;
We’ve all seen plenty of ads for dodgy tablets and male enhancement drugs in our email inboxes, and it’s no surprise to note that there’s a huge number of them floating around the “sponsored results” sections of major search engines.
Take Bing.com, Microsoft’s shiny new search engine, which has been called out by an online pharmacy verification service for displaying a huge number of ads from illegal online companies.
A report from LegitScript.com suggests that nearly nine in every ten “sponsored results” displayed on Bing were for fake or illegal companies, with the authors claiming to be able to order prescription-only muscle relaxant from one of the advertisers without any checks being done.
KnujkOn, which tracks Internet criminality, collaborated on the report. President Garth Bruen said, “These types of sites are usually the product of organized crime and vast illicit drug networks, many of them based in Russia and Eastern Europe, that deceive, defraud and poison Internet users.”
Not surprisingly the call to Microsoft is to fix the problem, though that may be easier said than done.
If the Bing parody ad was a blow to the Bing team’s self-esteem, wait ’til they hear about this: Microsoft is about to buy Yahoo’s search advertising business for several billion dollars, plus guaranteed revenue. More →
