Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , - Yahoo finally Announced it would close their Geocities service and close out all Geocities websites. Giving current customers the option to upgrade to one of the Yahoo! small business or other paid non Geocities accounts- See their press release HERE
- MarketingVox had an interesting article on a study by Forrester Research saying that Interactive Advertising is still growing- See Their Article HERE
- Research firm ComScore was downgraded from a buy to a hold position by Needham, based on valuation and a high YTD Churn rate or the rate of which customers unsubscribe or leave. This according to briefing.com, will most likely to affect their Q2 revenue results as the ComScore model had predicted a slight improvement. See MSN article HERE
- Possibly in light of the fact that analysts like Zenith Optimedia are predicting that newspaper in 2009 may well see a loss of nearly 12% in print advertisements See HERE the New York Times is once again considering a paid subscription model in order to bring up revenue. NYT Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. seemed to suggest to shareholders at its 113th annual meeting Thursday the advertiser-supported online model is not going to change soon. See Both Marketingvox and Adweek covered the story See Adweeks coverage which I quoted from HERE
By Mark Blei compiled by various sources.
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , The number of online video viewers will grow by more than two-thirds to 941 million in 2013, from 563 million in 2008, according to ABI Research.
The 2013 estimate represents just over one-half of the 1.8 billion consumers expected to use the Internet that year.
Although online video viewing is growing among Internet users worldwide, viewing varies greatly from country to country. More than three-quarters of consumers in Australia, Germany, India, Japan, the UK and the US surveyed in Q3 2008 by IBM Global Business Services said they watched video on their PCs—outpacing viewership for the world as a whole.
Read The rest—>Online Video Goes Global
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , ….
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Watch Shelly’s commentary on NBC’s Ben Silverman and his decision to manage for margins.
JULIE ROEHM will be a judge on the new Mark Burnett reality show “Jingles.” The CBS reality show, which also features Gene Simmons, has contestants write and perform jingles for a variety of products. The show, which was originally scheduled to air this month, has been pushed back a few months due to lack of promotion.
EBAY’s (NASD: EBAY) stock is up 4.5% on news that the company’s profit is up 22%. Despite lawsuits and a botched deal with Buy.com, eBay is riding high on fees. The surcharges for auction listings and PayPal are at an all time high.
AMAZON (NASD: AMZN) will launch an online store for movies and TV shows. Amazon Video on Demand will serve 40,000 movies and TV shows on a streaming server, which users will be able to watch without downloading. Unlike APPLE’s iTunes store, the videos available at Amazon will all be streaming, rather than downloads.
NINTENDO, MICROSOFT (NASD: MSFT) and SONY (NYSE: SNE) each announced similar plans at the E3 convention. Each plans to unveil more games, more networked interactivity and more ways for gamers to use their systems for things unrelated to video games. Also, both Microsoft and Sony will be lowering the price of their systems.
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , Ad Networks and Analytics:
- All Things Digital surmises that Microsoft covets Google and Yahoo’s display advertising businesses.
Agencies and Marketing Execs:
- Carat was selected to manage consumer and trade media buying and planning for Kohler Co. in North and South America, the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
- Senior VP Wendy Clark of advertising at AT&T has decided to leave the company.
- Jeff Scott, longtime managing director, board member, finance and executive committee member of Campbell Ewald, has left the company.
Biz Buzz:
Campaigns of Note:
- ABSOLUT Vodka is using online celebrities Tim and Eric of “Time and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job” in an off-beat online video campaign.
- The Mochila has formed a relationship with Barely Political. The latter’s popular Obama Girl videos will appear in the content network.
Legal, Government and Regulation:
- Apple reportedly filed suit against “Mac-clone” Psystar, alleging the latter violated its copyright, trademark and even its shrink wrap license.
- NebuAd faces more congressional critique: a bipartisan passel of Representatives are questioning ISP Embarq about whether it adequately notified consumers of its recent test of NebuAd’s system.
Mobile:
Social Networks:
- Virtual world Minyanland joined the GoFish Network, expanding the latter network to 23 million unique visitors per month.
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , GET MORE GREAT MARKETINGVOX CONTENT INCLUDING NEWSLETTERS HERE
Estimated value: $30,000
Ad Networks and Analytics:
- Cost-per-lead firm Pontiflex launched AdUnit X, custom cost-per-lead banner ads. A screenshot is available on the Pontiflex CPL Blog.
- Online ad prices have reportedly fallen for the third consecutive month.
Agencies and Marketing Execs:
- Agencies have cut back on across-the-board ad spend since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to the ever-insightful Telegraph.
- NeverBlue made Mark How its VP of Sales and Business Development. How previously worked with DivX and ACD Systems.
- North American Scientific appointed Robin Gibbs to VP of Marketing.
Biz Buzz:
Legal, Government and Regulation:
- Antitrust officials from the US Department of Justice are issuing subpoenas for information about the sponsored search deal between Google and Yahoo.
- Amgen shall pay $200 million to settle an antitrust lawsuit with Johnson and Johnson. The latter accused Amgen of anticompetitive marketing efforts for cancer medication.
Online Content:
- “Obama HOPE,” a media print by artist Shepard Fairey, is up for bid at CharityBuzz, an online auction house. The estimated value is $30,000; the current bid is $60,000. The auction, which ends July 24, supports Art for Life, which supports disadvantage urban youth.
- LL Bean has added Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews to its website, llbean.com. The company reportedly garnered 13,000 in five days, following its first email promo effort.
- Search engine optimization firm ChaosMap was chosen by Spill.com, an animated movie review site owned by MIVA, to improve traffic, branding and social media expansion efforts.
Publishing:
- Print media groups in Asia, Europe and the US — which lost money to internet publications — have begun to outsource copyediting work to companies like Mindworks in India.
Search:
- To protect its sponsorship deal with Yahoo from further scrutiny, Google testified Monday that the relationship would not expand its already-sizeable lead in search traffic. “We think we’ll make money, of course,” the executive added with haste.
Social Networks:
User Experience:
- Sojern Inc. partnered with five airlines to place local advertising on printable online boarding passes. Participants include Delta Airlines and Continental. “We expect to make a nice profit while delighting customers,” said spokesman Mark Bergsrud for Continental in Houston.
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , The embattled portal has landed a unique multi-year global ad deal with Havas Digital -LINK to Original Source Article
June 4, 2008
-By Mike Shields
Yahoo on Wednesday (June 4) made a series of announcements detailing the company’s expanding footprint in the online advertising space on multiple fronts, just as the company faces intensifying pressure from high profile investor Carl Icahn, who’s been calling for the ouster of CEO Jerry Yang. (see www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/corporatenews/2008-06-03-yahoo-icahn_N.htm).
Among the various announcements, the embattled portal said it has landed a unique multi-year global ad deal with Havas Digital that will see the agency group become an active player in the Right Media Exchange, which promises to become an outlet for publishers and agencies to buy and sell remnant ad inventory. As part of the deal, Havas has also committed to become a guinea pig participant in Yahoo’s AMP! platform, a set of buying, selling and trafficking tools, which promise to reduce some of the pain inherent to online advertising’s processes.
In addition, Yahoo announced an eye-opening partnership with Wal-Mart to sell video and display advertising for Walmart.com. That deal is noteworthy given that the majority of top ecommerce sites (such as Amazon.com or Dell.com) carry little to no advertising—though Yahoo did ink a similar groundbreaking deal with eBay several years ago.
Yahoo is also launching a new ad platform designed for retail brands that promises to recreate Sunday newspaper circulars on the Web. Via the new Yahoo Circular program, users can receive personalized shopping circulars online any day of the week.
Of course, Yahoo has pushed to strengthen its ties to the newspaper business over the last few years just as local online advertising is set to enjoy a major growth spurt. The company’s successful Newspaper Consortium, which enables it to share content and advertising sales resources with local newspapers across the U.S., has added 94 new members, bringing the total to 779 newspapers.
Lastly, Yahoo said it is joining the CBS Audience Network, the much-hyped syndication network via which CBS distributes full length episodes of a multitude of its current and past prime time hits, such as CSI and Survivor, to sites ranging from AOL to Bebo. Yahoo, which already works with Hulu’s similar multisite distribution network, was the most conspicuous holdout from CBS’s push toward spreading its content all over the Web.
Clearly, as its months-long entanglement with Microsoft continues, reignited by Icahn’s recent statements, Yahoo is hoping to change the subject by touting its leadership and clout in the online advertising business. That was the emphasis of a keynote address delivered on Wednesday by president Sue Decker at the Advertising 2.0 conference in New York. “Yahoo is helping to accelerate the transformation of how display advertising is both bought and sold,” she said. “First, we are developing the technology, products and platforms that are designed to help advertisers find the right audiences and publishers find the right advertisers.”
“Second, we are partnering with publishers to secure and monetize inventory that advertisers and agencies find desirable,” she added. “And third, we are partnering with advertisers and agencies to channel demand to the right consumer.”
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , 
Olay done gone digital
Agencies and Ad Networks:
- Ad network AdReady secured $10 million in funding from a variety of venture capital firms, money it will use for marketing and new hires.
- Viewpoint, which purchased Springbox in October, has changed its name to Enliven Marketing Technologies Corporation. The “new” firm will focus on disseminating Premium Rich Media, in-game advertising, and widget marketing. The name change will take effect in January ‘08.
Campaigns of Note:
- Olay is launching Olayforyou.com, the online centerpiece for the launch of five new personal care products. The products and site will be promoted in a multimedia campaign.
- Chrysler created a new Facebook application that lets people send branded holiday cards promoting its new Dodge Grand Caravan.
- Microsoft’s Ultimate Steal campaign lets college students create avatars that interact with each other. This is an effort to push a low-cost version of Office for students.
Major Brands:
- Kimberly-Clark says it will begin developing campaigns that are more media-neutral, with multiple executions in mind and not just built around 30-second spots.
- The NFL and Ticketmaster have partnered to offer a ticket resale service to compete with existing players like Stubhub. The site will launch sometime in 2008.
Europe:
- Expedia is looking to more offer more services and products to European travelers as the US market for booking online travel arrangements matures.
- A service called TVCatchup, which allows people to record shows online and watch them later, is coming under legal scrutiny from the BBC and other broadcasters. One major grievance: The service is ad-supported.
- Odnoklassniki.ru (The Russian Classmates.com) has hit seven million registered, and 2.5 million daily active, users. Quintura calls it the largest social network in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Facebook:
- Researchers are examining Facebook interactions for glimpses into behavioral trends in the new media world.
- Some say Facebook has turned from a college hangout spot to an online force to be reckoned with, with the momentum to go up against the big boys in the online ad game.
Google:
- Google says its TV Ads program reaches 13 million households, much more than previously reported.
- European regulators say they’ll hold Google/DoubleClick hearings next month, marking the billionth story to this effect since Google’s decision to purchase it.
- Google wants to start indexing videos more completely. Toward this end, it created Video Sitemaps. Publishers may place it on their sites and index away.
- Brandweek interviews Google’s Kevin Kells on the company’s efforts to lure more consumer packaged goods advertisers into its programs.
- As 2007 folds shut, some have begun the annual sport of speculating on what Google will buy next year.
Miscellany:
- Mobile Messenger, the company behind myriad odd-sounding banner ads online, has become the top online advertiser in the US, just months after entering the market.
- Only six more years and blogs can drive, as the word “weblog” celebrated its 10th birthday yesterday.
- Ever wonder what equestrians wear on their wrists? Try Rolex, which has become the “Official Timepiece of the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games.”
- A firm called Peanut Labs claims virtual currency may one day outdo web research. Bill Cook of the ARF calls the idea “very interesting and germane” on the surface.
- In countries like the Philippines, which depend on mobile for mass communications (including political messages), the revolution will be text messaged.
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , MarketingVox Reports That Social Network traffic has surpassed web-based Email in the UK
.
Getting connected
for retail success
October traffic to the top 25 social networks, including Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, accounted for 5.17 percent of all UK internet visits, compared with 4.98 percent for the “Computers and Internet – Email Services” category, such as Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Gmail, according to Hitwise, writes MarketingCharts (via ResearchRecap).
This marks the first time UK internet visits to social networks outnumbered visits to web-based email services, Hitwise UK Research Director Robin Goad wrote.
“A growing proportion of the UK online population is choosing to communicate with friends via social networks rather than email,” he added.
Moreover, social networks now send as much traffic to retail websites as do web email sites, according to Hitwise data:
Younger internet users — those age 18 to 34 — tend to visit social-network sites more than they do web email sites, whereas the reverse is true for those 35+, Goad writes.
Posted by Mark Blei in : Uncategorized , Fragmentation alters Internet-LINK
Anick Jesdanun
Associated Press
Oct. 6, 2007 12:00 AM
NEW YORK – The recent rush by major Internet portals to buy advertising companies and extend their sales networks is a sign that the business of being a one-stop shop for information and entertainment isn’t what it used to be.
Gone are emphasizing ways to attract and keep visitors by creating destinations with anything people need for work or leisure.
Instead, those companies more aggressively are trying to follow Web surfers elsewhere – and bring lucrative advertising to them.
As people increasingly turn to blogs, social-networking sites and other sources of user-generated media, Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL have spent more than $10 billion collectively this year to acquire companies and technologies that help extend their online advertising networks.
Instead of relying solely on being portals for consumers, the major companies are creating one-stop shops for advertisers, who in greater numbers want to buy ads centrally and place them where the eyeballs are. The networks take care of feeding the ads to smaller sites.
“We’re not interested in building yesterday’s portal,” said Ron Grant, AOL’s president and chief operating officer. “Consumers are finding what they are looking for is coming from more and more fragmented places. We need a way for advertisers to take advantage of that fragmentation.”
That shift is important for the major Internet businesses to grab a substantial share of the marketing dollars expected to flow at the expense of television and print.
Freedom for the surfer
The development means greater freedom and a further erosion of artificial walls designed to keep visitors from leaving sites.
According to comScore Media Metrix, the U.S. audience for the major Internet brands grew in the past year, but total time spent at Yahoo and AOL dropped about 10 percent, while Microsoft’s MSN-Windows Live services saw an 8 percent decline.
In other words, these sites are attracting more people but are keeping them for shorter durations as users find what they need elsewhere.
Google was the exception, with a 57 percent jump in total time spent, but even the company recognizes that “no individual property will have all those products and services” a user might want, said Tim Armstrong, Google’s head of North American ad sales.
In a few cases, the large companies have bought wildly popular sites. Google spent about $1.76 billion last November to absorb the leading video-sharing site, YouTube. It also owns the blogging service Blogger, while Yahoo has the photo-sharing site Flickr.
“Everyone still wants to be your home page. They are always going to battle for that,” said Nick Nyhan, chief executive of market research firm Dynamic Logic. “But they have to think beyond that. Consumers aren’t going to just take your stuff.”
Google, Yahoo and AOL still make most of their ad money from sites they own and operate. (Microsoft did not break down figures in its regulatory filings.) Google and Yahoo even reported relative growth there in the second quarter.
Ad networks set the stage and help the large Internet companies ensure they will have enough inventory to sell in the years ahead.
Ford Motor Co. can, for instance, come to Google and buy ads that run not only there but at the New York Times’ Web site and thousands of others within Google’s AdSense network. Ford wouldn’t have to deal with all those sites individually; third-party sites wouldn’t have to expand their sales teams.
Google gets a cut of ad revenues without spending a dime developing those specialty sites. This concept isn’t new, but the scale is changing.
Sharing the wealth
Yahoo, meanwhile, paid $650 million for the 80 percent of Right Media Inc. it did not previously own and agreed to buy BlueLithium Inc. for $300 million. Microsoft bought aQuantive Inc. for $6 billion.
“It’s not that networks are going to supplant these mass-market sites, but they will have less influence as networks have more,” said David Hallerman, a senior analyst at the research group eMarketer, which projects U.S. online advertising spending at $44 billion in 2011, more than double the $17 billion last year.
Many factors are involved in this shift, including online hangouts like Facebook and News Corp.’s MySpace commanding more of a user’s time. Web sites big and small are making features available, through tools called widgets, for direct viewing of sites.
Of course, the major brands still would prefer visitors going to them directly, as they wouldn’t have to share ad revenues with another site.
But as audiences disperse, advertisers have become reluctant to concentrate their spending at a traditional portal.
“Advertisers are going to need to start to use the Internet the way people always use the Internet, spreading out in hot pursuit of the things they need and want,” said Jarvis Coffin, chief executive of Burst Media Corp., an independent ad network.
“It’s much easier to fish where the fish are.”
***If you are a member of LinkedIn , please feel free to join the Dynamic Logic Online Media Measurment group . Your invitation can be accessed by clicking here .
