After radio and magazines, Google moves into the newspaper space, signing a deal “with over 50 papers for print ad auctions”.
Google is slowly locking all the advertising space of this planet, and will soon be the partner of choice for all the Procter&Gamble and Coca-Cola money. (via Geneva Lunch)
Merci de noter la nouvelle adresse:
Ballpark SÃ RL
13 rue Charles Giron
CH-1203 Genève
Ballpark has a new address, please update your records:
Ballpark SÃ RL
13 rue Charles Giron
CH-1203 Genève
Microsoft’s adCenter Labs has information about and demos of “behavioral targeting system”, i.e. systems that allow you to predict what users are based on what they have done.
I found the demographics prediction demo particularly interesting. It allows to “predict a customer’s age, gender, and other demographic information according to […] search queries and webpage views”. Try it here, all you need it to type a URL or keyword. I tried with URLs:
Cocomment.com seems to be searched mostly by male below 18 (23.46% of users below 18 years old, vs 9.8% in the general population) while this blog is “18 to 24 oriented”.
MySpace.com gives some interesting results shown below:
I wouldn’t take this data for truth but it is interesting (and a bit scary of course) to see what advertisers are trying to do with all the data they are gathering on us.
Steve Rubel points to a study revealing that advertisers lost $800MM to click fraud in ‘05. That’s a lot of money.
As I said earlier, this problem could be the one really threatening the whole web economical balance. When asked about this, Eric Schmidt – the CEO of Google – discussed click fraud and explained he thinks it is a self-correcting problem:
“Eventually the price that the advertiser is willing to pay […] will decline because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks. In other words, the value of the ad declines. So, over some amount of time, the system is, in fact, self-correcting. […] there is a perfect economic solution, which is to let it happen.”
Is it really that simple? Self-correction demands transparent information, something 1) nobody will really have (or with six months delay) 2) Google and the others has no interests to give away.
Is Google covering the shortcomings of the economical model their survival depends on?
Either I am suddenly one of the most read bloggers on this planet, or the people at Feedburner have a small problem with their numbers. Unfortunately, as 150 readers were reported a few hours ago, I am afraid the latter is much, much, much more likely.
Weird.
Google released an adsense API that allows websites to share revenues with their users. And Pete Cashmore wonders if it’s a good or a bad thing.
If set up incorrectly, revenue sharing can lead to an adverse selection problem – you attract spammers and scammers who are motivated solely by the money. The other issue is that without high value content, the rev share is abysmally low – Squidoo’s top earners get $30 per month, for instance. And let’s not forget that Google’s minimum payout is $100 […]. I think this is a great move on Google’s part, but it’s still up to site owners to get the motivation part right.
We have been considering revenue sharing on coComment for a while, but I can’t think of a completely satisfactory solution. Sharing is relevant as users are generating content that we then reuse to create value. But in the meantime we pay the bills to develop and maintain a free service (and there are side effects as Pete explained).
So what’s the right balance between the value of the tool and the value of the content?
David Weinberger interviews Richard Edelman, head of the world’s largest PR agency.
This discussion exposes the fundamental shift happening in marketing, with consumers getting more educated and developing a thick skin to mass marketing, i.e. taking the power back. We’re entering the consumactor era, permission based marketing will be the way to go for the next decades, and that forces a total change in attitude you can already feel in Edelman’s answers. Like when asked “what’s different about Edelman?”, he answers that they “try to be a good example” and “don’t always succeed”.
Wow! Marketers are human beings again, they are forced to be good guys, don’t always succeed, can’t have you to buy whatever they want, and even acknowledge they have to give up control on a message to make it credible. What a shift from just a few years ago, when one lousy Pringles ad could be used to sell greasy potato slices to the whole planet.
Q: Does the offer to provide product without strings scare companies?A: Yes. Tech companies are scared the least. Heavy industry is worried the most. The mentality of corporations is the control of the message. We’re saying that if you want to be credible, you can’t control the message. E.g., GM Tahoe ads.
Q: If your product doesn’t suck, why do companies worry? It’s like 7th graders on the playground.
A: Marketers want to know they’re getting a certain audience at a certain frequency. The ad agencies have impressed on them for 30 years that you go from impressions to action. We — all of this in the room — deconstructing that model. You can’t have a topdown conversation where you buy a certain number of impressions. We’re saying it’s a horizontal conversation, peer to peer.
What will PR look like in five years by the way?
PR involved earlier on in the product life cycle: We’ll be a means by which a company can reach out to bloggers to affect prod development. Deconstructed press release. A more robust role in the corporate suite. I don’t see PR as being disintermediated. David Weinberger thinks PR gets in the way; no one wants to talk to the PR person. I think we should want the flak. We are indeed agents in that we represent our clients. I don’t see that PR has to be a negative connotation, which it currently has. We have to be about truth, listening, learning, and telling the corporation stuff it doesn’t want to hear. Five years from now, I hope PR people have the balls to say what they know. We need to give clients good advice. (We have thirty people blogging at Edelman. You learn by falling on your face.)
Victor Cerutti – lecteur de ce blog que j’ai eu le plaisir de rencontrer à Innovate Europe – m’a fait réaliser qu’il n’était pas très clair que ce blog existait également en version anglaise.
Comme j’ai tendance à poster en fonction de la langue du lien que je commente, et que je lis plus de choses anglophones, la version anglaise est en l’occurrence bien plus fournie et régulièrement mise à jour.
A visiter ici (RSS)!
A survey conducted by MarketingSherpa shows how advertisers rank the emerging advertising mediums. RSS and blogs are already solicited, while mobile and podcasts aren’t in the immediate plans.
(via Steve Rubel)
