901am » Advertising

Windows 7 House Party Parody

Mike Abundo — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:19:58 +0000

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.

Is Google trying to maintain its position in the British psyche?

Andy Merrett — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:52:06 +0000

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”.

I don’t know whether Pet Plan has a deal with Google, or they just decided to promote the search engine, or in fact whether Google is targeting some products and tacking its own five second ad on the end. It’s the first and only time I’ve seen it.

Does Google really need to advertise on UK TV?

Interestingly, TV broadcasters are often quite sensitive about mentioning real brands (including online ones) in programmes, because they can be accused of product placement. There’s even a UK company that creates fake online services for the times that someone on a TV drama needs to search the Internet, use a dating site, or such like. It’s really quite amusing.

However, the other day (again, for the first time), a character on a BBC drama mentioned that they were going to “Google” something.

Not unusual in itself — we all know that “to google” has become part of the language — but I wonder if this slipped past the script and programme editors or was a deliberate placement?

I’d be less surprised if Microsoft started advertising Bing in the UK (though I’d probably fall off my chair if I ever heard “I’m just going to Bing it” in any drama other than a Friends spinoff).

Does Google need to advertise? Are other companies helping Google, even inadvertently because “to google” is such a part of the British psyche?

I don’t know the answers, but I wonder if Microsoft has noticed and is thoroughly annoyed about the whole thing.

What do you think?

UK’s online advertising spend exceeds TV

Andy Merrett — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:41:31 +0000

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.

Unsurprisingly, technology firms made nearly one-fifth of all online spend, followed by telecoms, finance, and entertainment and media.

Naturally, a marketing body representing commercial TV broadcasters was quick to point out that the comparison is not like-for-like.

Lindsey Clay, marketing diretor at Thinkbox, said that online marketing is made up of many different things (such as email, classified ads, display ads, and search marketing) and should be judged individually rather than lumping the numbers together and then compare it to TV advertising.

That’s a fair point, but even so, it’s another sign of the times that, even in an economic downturn, Internet marketing is seeing as an increasingly viable option for reaching an audience.

Via

Annoying Tech Ads

Mike Abundo — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:23:54 +0000

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.

Users Triple Time, Advertisers Double Spend on Social Networks and Blogs

Mike Abundo — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 10:37:04 +0000

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.

DoubleClick Pumps Up Your AdSense Earnings and Screws Yahoo

Mike Abundo — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:08:37 +0000

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.

DoubleClick specializes in display advertising — flashy, brand-building, CPM ads often used by big advertisers. Google bought DoubleClick in 2007 for a whopping $3.1 billion; apparently, the integration of the two companies’ infrastructures is complete and ready to roll.

Google’s bread-and-butter so far has been pay-per-click advertising. Yahoo has been sitting comfortably as the market leader in display advertising through its acquisition, Right Media. The Yahoo Publisher Network trails massively behind the Google content network; integrating display ads into YPN still wouldn’t let Yahoo catch up.

Yahoo just lost its search business to Microsoft’s vendetta against Google. With thousands of Long Tail sites now suddenly open to big-brand display advertisers through Google, Yahoo gets screwed for the second time this quarter.

Of course, if you’re an AdSense publisher, you wouldn’t care about Yahoo’s fate. You’d just sit back and enjoy the earnings bump. ;)

Yahoo Ads Prove CEO a Liar

Mike Abundo — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:58:18 +0000

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz claims Yahoo was never a search company. These ads touting Yahoo Search make her historical revisionism blatantly obvious.

Of course, you probably don’t need ads to tell you Bartz is merely trying to justify the horror that is MicroHoo.

Review: Contextual Partnership Plugin

David — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:38:46 +0000

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;

Enhance the user experience for your blog visitors by providing them with links to other high quality blogs for further information on subjects of interest (and it can do this without you actually loosing the visitor which is a great feature).

Indirectly increase your search engine rankings by building highly relevant incoming links to your blog for keyword terms you define, related to your own niche market.

Not a bad indirect benefit at all.

To better understand how the network works, first you need to know what a “contextual link” actually is. A contextual link is simply a link “within content” of a blog post and “within context” of specific keyword terms in that post. For example the term “dog training” found within a blog post becomes a link out to another blog (related to “dog training”) within the network. Contextual Links are found all over the internet – bloggers interlink their own pages contextually, there are paid advertising programs that allow you to place contextual advertising links and earn per click, and bloggers naturally link out to other websites they find useful “contextually” as well.

This is the key to the “Contextual Partnership”. When you install and setup the WordPress Plugin, you’re asked to provide the URL’s you wish to advertise on other partners blogs, and the keyword terms you want those blogs to use to link back to your own. When a match is found within the network for the keyword terms you provide (and assuming it meets with the Contextual Partnership’s strategic linking methodology), a link back to your blog is assigned, and your account has a credit removed.
The amount of credits your account holds appears to be directly related to the number of links you’re providing to other partners in the network for the keyword terms they themselves are looking to use to advertise. Apparently for every link you provide for another partner, you earn 1 credit. That 1 credit is then “cashed in” to assign a link back to your own blog from other partners whenever a match is found for your own keyword terms. So if you already have 100 posts in your blog, and each of those pages finds a match to provide a link to another partner, then technically you could receive 100 incoming links to your blog as soon as you’ve been approved to participate in the partnership. You also continually earn more points and incoming links as you continue to blog and add more posts just like you usually do.

That’s the basic overview and you’ll find more specific information on the plugin website including details of many features not mentioned here (like the ability to select specifically which blog posts you want to include – or nor include in the network)…

http://www.contextualpartnership.com

Uptake by the blogger community seems to have been extremely good and this new service looks to become very popular. In the first two weeks of launch the partnership already had over 54,000 individual places to place links throughout the network, and within the first 4 weeks over 10,000 advertising links had been allocated between network partners. This is most likely a result to how easy it is to actually setup the plugin and participate – it literally takes 5 minutes to install and setup – although approval can take anywhere from 24-72 hours depending on the moderation queue as only high quality blogs are accepted to participate to keep out the splogs and spammers.
This seems to be one of those services worth giving a shot for a few months, and by the looks of things the developers have some exciting new features in the pipeline to make things even more effective for partners in the future.

You can find out full details and download the plugin below…

http://www.contextualpartnership.com

Or alternatively you can download the plugin directly from WordPress…
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contextual-partnership-link-exchange-plugin/

Microsoft blasted over fake pharmacy ads on Bing.com

Andy Merrett — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:11:07 +0000

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.

Bing: A Sacrifice for MicroHoo

Mike Abundo — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:37:35 +0000

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.

Dammit, Ballmer. Just when I was starting to appreciate Bing for its pornsearch capabilities, here you go trying to eat Yahoo again. Here you go threatening to confuse your users once more. Here you go sacrificing real technological improvement at the altar of your vendetta against Eric Schmidt. Here you go spitting in the faces of your developers developers developers to court advertisers advertisers advertisers.

This deal didn’t make sense last year, and it doesn’t make sense today. It may make sense to Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, the businesswoman who just wants “big boatloads of money”. It may make sense to Ballmer, who’s just insane with hatred for Google. It won’t make sense to users, who won’t know whether Microsoft wants them to Bing or Yahoo. It won’t make sense to developers, who won’t know whether to develop stuff for Bing or Yahoo. It won’t make sense to advertisers, who won’t know whether they should advertise on Bing or Yahoo. It won’t make sense to marketers, who won’t know whether they should optimize their sites for Bing or Yahoo.

On top of all that confusion, Microsoft buying Yahoo’s search advertising business shows a complete lack of faith in Bing’s ability to compete. It shows a complete lack of faith in developers. It shows a complete lack of faith in software innovation. It almost makes you miss the days when Microsoft was a technology company.

Think what you will of Bill Gates; the man waxes poetic about the power of software. His buddy Ballmer clearly has no such faith in his own company’s technology.