Posts Tagged ‘yahoo’
Strange Craziness Looming at SCG Headquarters
Thursday, March 12th, 2009First, the stars align in such a way that allows for two consecutive months to contain Friday the 13th.
Next, two airplanes align to create this–
–outside of the SCG Global World Headquarters.
As we have learned in the past, seemingly unrelated occurrences such as these should not be taken lightly. Ominous events are obviously forthcoming.
Don’t worry, though: if anything crazy or dangerous goes down, we’ll make sure and log into our Twitter account and then set up a live video stream instead of notifying the proper authorities in a timely fashion.
The Free Web Application Syndrome
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008This post was originally entitled “Can Twitter Ever Make Money?” But as we wrote it, we realized the issue is bigger than simply wondering how, when and if companies like Twitter will monetize.
The early days of innovation are truly fantastic for early adopters and consumers who are ahead of the market. VC’s and Private Equity firms pour billions of dollars into cool ideas. Those who are “in the know” early are/were able to get M&M’s brought to them on a Friday night (Kozmo.com), groceries delivered free wherever they lived (Webvan), 100 pounds of pet food without a shipping charge (Pets.com), free music to their PC (Napster), free phone calls across the world (Skype) and more.
The problem is, like your economics teacher told you, there is no free lunch. Someone is paying the bill. And eventually, that person paying the bill, the person paying the salaries of all the people doing things for you, well, he wants to get reimbursed for his efforts.
So look today at what we are getting for free. We can stay in touch with every one of our business contacts no matter how many times they switch jobs, thanks to LinkedIn. And we know the personal lives of all of our friends, thanks to Facebook. And if we want, we can get global updates in real time, 140 characters at a time, thanks to Twitter. All of this for free.
Now the business models that the investors saw said something like this. “We are going to be hugely popular. Everyone will love us. We’ll run some ads. And if we get 1% of the people to click on an ad, we’ll make a gajillion dollars.” It’s the model that has worked since Mr. Marconi showed off his first radio nearly 100 years ago.
But 1% of the people aren’t clicking on Facebook ads, or upgrading to premium LinkedIn accounts. And Twitter hasn’t even come up with any ways to make money. Throw in the fact that the economy is struggling, and that even rich people don’t like losing money. Someone has to start generating profits some day.
Well, that’s the story FastCompany is addressing in this article. Their synopsis – everything cool you get today for free will basically become a lead generation tool for Google, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Apple, etc…. For the Social Media Marketer, that means that these are the days to leverage the creativity and free form activity this medium allows. We all remember how Flickr got destroyed when Yahoo turned it into a way to generate YahooMail accounts. Take these great opportunities available to you today, and grab them before they are simply ways to get you to buy other products. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt if we all would just click on a few ads 
Is Twitter Right for Your Business?
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008Twitter has turned into one of those companies that marketers can’t figure out what to do with.
For one thing, as a person receiving “tweets,” it’s hard to figure out what actual value you are receiving. But when a million people do anything, you have to take notice.
Daniel Riveong has a good article profiling some reasons to add Twitter to Social Media campaigns. First off, he gets our attention by mentioning a few big brands that see value, including H&R Block, 10 Downing Street, Zappos , BBC News, Yahoo’s Marketing Team, Amazon.com and the New York LaGuardia airport.
We’ll had some of our own personal case studies as we experiment over the next few months. But check out Daniel’s article for a primer.
Who Clicks on Banner and Display Ads? And Do They Matter for Direct-Response Marketing? How About Brand?
Monday, February 18th, 2008Well, a variety of research and pseudo-scholarly articles have been published of late on this topic.
One of the most interesting blog posts we recently discovered, though, actually covers a variety of related topics: yahoo vs google audience profiling, whether or not ad clicking=ecomm buying, etc. There is even a cool graph, reproduced here:
Don’t forget to check out the comment thread — some great add-on commentary, in particular a link to a study of eye-and-mouse movement over webpages that seems to suggest that banner ads are becoming like the unheard/unnoticed “white noise” of the internet.
Brand Names in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Ads Increase CTR, Recall
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008… so says Microsoft, after a joint research study with Sony conducted using Live Search and the related AdCenter SEM advertising network. Not terribly surprising, after all a search ad is an impression just like any other customer impression, so it stands to reason that including the relevant brand term (presumably not only in the Display URL, but somewhere in the three available lines of ad copy) would increase likelihood of action and subsequent brand recall.
A useful reminder, though, given how many SEM ads don’t utilize a brand or product name anywhere in the 3 lines of copy. There is often a view in SEM ad creative development that says, “we don’t have much copy room – maybe 100 characters total – so we need to speak to the need-state rather than wasting copy on a product or brand name.” However, when you remember that average search ad CTR’s are in the very low single-digit-percentage to fraction-of-a-percentage-point range, it’s not hard to see how you’re wasting 99 impressions out of 100 if you’re not at least delivering a “leave-behind” branded impression in the SERP viewer’s grey matter.
Conversion is king, but branded impressions improve recall… so don’t miss out on the latter being overly focused on the former when you write your three lines of copy. [Full disclosure: we probably need to go do an audit of our Live Search, AdWords, and Yahoo Spring Creek Group agency search ads now, as well...]
Good luck harvesting clicks…. and securing brand recall among all the “99 percenters” whose eyes you’ve momentarily got if not their index fingers.
Publicis / Digitas Demonstrating Its Biz Dev Chops
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008Today’s announcement (however vague it was) that Publicis and Google have been “cooperating” for a year is mainly interesting because it shows that Publicis can convince Google to let them issue a press release about non-specific initiatives. Every major advertising agency in the world is “cooperating” with Google… in the sense that they are, with permission, utilizing all manner of search marketing tools, web analytics tools, and probably beta testing unified search and display advertising media buying. I don’t doubt that Publicis has got some kind of specific, deeper strategic information sharing and technology development initiatives underway with the Mountain View Juggernaut. I’m just surprised that Schmidt allowed them to “create news” about their friendliness without any specifics. If nothing else, it shows how proud Publicis is of their sleek reputation as the innovative, digital-forward ad agency among the big guys.
Pretty meta though: A PR and Advertising firm issuing a press release about an unspecified friendly initiative with an advertising network… and reminding readers that another PR and Advertising firm is also friendly with the advertising network, but just not as friendly.
But then, any press release with the word “Google” in the headline is a good press release, we suppose Messrs. Levy et Schmidt?
