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Join Us At The West OC Legislative Committee Mixer
Come out and join us at a five city mixer in Seal Beach on Thursday. We’ll be there talking about online marketing, SEM, SEO, PPC, Email marketing, and some new cool tools that we’ve developed to help out our friends on the Direct Marketing side of life.
The festivities begin at 6:00 PM at Old Ranch Country Club, 3901 Lampson Ave., Seal Beach, CA.
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Microsoft Bing’s Continued Growth ‘Rattles’ Google
MarketingVOX is reporting that MSFT’s Bing search engine is beginning to “rattle” GOOG’s share of the market. No surprise there, updates to IE8 and the MSN toolbar have been “tweaked” to use Bing as the default search engine.
There is nothing really better about Bing, if you’ve used it, you’ll know that it’s a bit on the frustrating side, IMHO. Although, I can’t complain about being #1 when searching for “digital marketing ideas” (we’re #6 on Google). When searching more geo-centric, however, by searching “digital marketing orange county,” we’re #8 on Bing and #4 on Google. There is no PERFECT algorithm. The important thing, for marketers, is to look at where you’re ranking and then make sure you’re doing all that you can, on the SEO front, to rank where you want to rank.
Bing’s Continued Growth ‘Rattles’ Google – MarketingVOX.
New York Times Loss Widens as Ads Shrink
The WSJ ran a story (subscription required) on the 22nd about this issue. This problem is hitting all print publications:
Ad dollars are leaving print… and fast!
Their Q1 losses for 2009 were worse than expected, around a 27% loss in advertising revenue. This outpaced their efforts to cut costs (not surprising, good journalism is expensive).
Seth Godin, on his blog, is predicting that by 2012 there will be, “no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US.”
WOW! and entire vertical market will be gone, or almost gone in less than three years!
These are both interesting reads and worth the effort to see what’s coming for online advertising.
We have seen with with our clients, and in our past, efforts to cut “traditional” media spending and emphasize online strategies. We’re helping our client get better results through email and PPC marketing; things that are measurable and quickly executable.
Google Toys with Behavioral Advertising, Keeps Users Apprised – MarketingVOX
Google is at it again, stepping up to meet the pressure and remain at the head of the pack of online advertising networks. With their privacy policy change today they will be able to deliver targeted display advertising through their display ad network which is targeted to consumer (read user) behavior.
Read the article here on marketingvox.com, or here for the full WSJ paid article.
This is great news for consumer who will finally get relevant advertising in their display ads, it’s great for marketers who can begin to target consumers with something relevant on the display side, and, it’s great news for agencies who can again do innovative things with display advertising. This should significantly alter the way display ads are used, looked at, and understood.
The Future of PPC, SEO, SEM and Online Media in A Down Economy
An interesting, and positive article appeared in The Economist on November 28th about online advertising and how we will be impacted by the faltering economy.
To summarize, although advertising budgets will likely be cut in the coming months/years, there is a good chance that Internet Marketing will be able to defend its usefulness and survive the turmoil. SEO and other marketing and branding tactics used on the Internet currently allow for actual data to be tracked, and metrics to be provided to a company so that there is justification for where and how the advertising money is spent. According to the article, “All this makes spending on advertising much less speculative, so that it starts to be treated instead as a cost of sales.”
This is good news for the Interactive Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, and Google Adword agencies out there. If these forecasters are right, then even in a recession this sector of the economy can still show growth. As the article points out, we may need to look for different avenues to reach the consumer, such as a focus on social networking sites, but with creativity it should be possible to weather the storm.
It’s True, PPC Ads Do Increase Brand Awareness
In a Yahoo!/MediaVest study, reported in Ad Age, sponsored text ads (Pay-Per-Click) increased BRAND AWARENESS by 160% for consumer packaged goods type products. These search marketing ads had a HUGE impact on brand awareness, etc… EVEN on consumers who DID NOT click!
But, wait, if it works here, why doesn’t it work elsewhere? It does, I would argue, work the same across the board for ALL retail products. Consumers basically ignore most non-targeted display advertising… the traditional method for brand building online, but, search is relevent and targeted, therefore consumers are MUCH MORE aware of the page content than they are on a typicall web page.
One Online Site to Rule Them All?
AdAge is reporting that MySpace is rolling out a new "tool," for it’s users. This tool will allow MySpace users to "control," their other social networking "applications," like Twitter, eBay, and others. They’re calling the service, Data Availability. This, "single site," or, as AdAge calls it, "control center," approach is going to make the social network expand even faster as more users are exposed to things that might’ve been more, "techy," in the past. This will allow marketers to use these technologies, too, and expand their brand’s online presence. This is something that will also allow users to opt-in to more communication with the brand, on their terms. As the internet continues to evolve (insert funny Web 2.0 reference here) marketers will need to become smarter about how they talk to consumers. Long gone are the days when a 500,000 piece direct mail job was identical. Personalization and targeting technologies are about to get an ENORMOUS boost in focus, both for marketers, and for agencies.
UPDATE:
Reuters is also reporting this with a different "take," than AdAge.
It would seem that this is another show of support by MySpace towards the Google OpenSocial initiative.
It’s The Economy, Stupid…
What’s happening with the economy? Every day there is another news story about someone loosing their house because the economy is … dare I say it … in a RECESSION. Well how is this downturn going to affect the advertising industry? Companies still need to advertise, right? Of course, it’s more important in a "down" economy for companies to fight harder for their share of the dwindling consumer dollar.
So, what is a company to do with it’s marketing budget?
SHIFT IT TO ONLINE
Why, you ask? Because it is measurable, trackable, and it is not hard to generate the metrics to determine if a campaign is successful.
eMarketer has an interesting article, today, on a study conducted in February by Penton Research for PROMO Magazine that talks directly to this point. It is reporting that 43% of marketers surveyed are planning to increase their online marketing budgets in 2008.
The WWW Historical Perspective
The BBC has an interesting story out today on the history of the WWW. The article features commentary from the following, "Top 10."
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee – Here is his blog, and his predictions for the future of the WWW.
- Professor Nigel Shadbolt
- Professor Wendy Hall – Her homepage.
- Kai-Fu Lee
- Dr. David Belanger
- Mitchell Baker – Her blog.
- Mark Bernstein
- Robert Cailliau – His website.
- Robert Scoble – His blog.
- Tim O’Reilly – His homepage.
Not a list to laugh at, at all. So, where was I among all of this? Well, thirteen years ago, while Netscape was undergoing its IPO and starting the first "boom," of what we now call, "New Media," I was working in IT at a large advertising agency in Los Angeles. We decided it would be a good time to demonstrate, to our clients, at the time names like, Vons, Flamingo Hilton, Honda Motorcycles, that we should be doing something with this "WWW" thing. Well, we built some small products in JavaScript (well, back then we called it LiveScript); we went to the first Netscape Developers Conference in NYC; we impressed our clients with flashy branding stuff. Then I moved on to a classified service, headquartered in Orange County, CA… We began putting classified ads online, we migrated their flat-file system to a dynamic, server-side database system, then, we moved in on to a Microsoft based database application…
The point of the story, though, is that what was misunderstood fifteen years ago is still misunderstood by a great many people. Click through to find out what and why…