Articles of the Day
Digicorp Inserts Ads Into Media Files, And Follows Them Everywhere - Putting a new twist into the hot category of in-stream advertising, Digicorp, Inc. has launched a service that can insert display ads into audio or video files, and follow those ads as they travel around the Internet–even through peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing.
April Searches Up 11% From 2006: comScore - Google was the search engine of choice for the 7.3 billion search queries conducted in April, as measured by comScore., which gave it a 49.7% share of search for the month.
Marketers Try Online Video Platform to Maximize TV ROI - Coca-Cola and Maybelline are among the advertisers that are partnering with online marketing firm BrandPort to test a video platform that gives consumers an incentive to watch online the ads they may skip viewing programs using a DVR.
Lone Good News In Dismal Newspaper Ad Picture: 1Q Web Ad Spend Up 22% - Online ad spending is the only bright spot for newspaper publishers as year-over-year first-quarter spending hit $750 million, the NAA reports. Print ad spending, meanwhile, was down 6.4%.
The Big Spenders - The rankings of top online marketers saw some major moves in 2006, but the big picture remained the same: Internet advertising continued to grow rapidly as ad budgets shifted toward digital media. Internet display advertising overall increased 17.3 percent last year, easily outpacing any other media category, according to data compiled by TNS Media Intelligence.
Online Video Ads: Can’t We All Just Get Along? - MORE THAN SEVEN MONTHS HAVE passed since the GoogTube deal gave online video advertising a jolt of credibility — and still adoption lags. The space is in dire need of standards, which requires more willingness to cooperate and experiment among publishers, advertisers and vendors.
Google & Yahoo! Dominate With 86% of U.S. Searches - According to a recent Hitwise report, 47 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.86 percent of U.S. searches, while Google (65%) and Yahoo! (21%) captured 86% in April.
Why Facebook’s Open-Door Policy Is Good for Marketers - The new face of Facebook is good news for advertisers — especially those trying to make their marketing materials useful to social-network users by giving them ad-supported widgets or other branded apps. Greg Verdino, senior VP-director of emerging media at Digitas, believes “As interrupting consumers … with something that looks and feels like an ad becomes less effective, brands will needs to connect themselves to utilities,” he said.
VIDEO REPORT: Deprived of TV and Out on the Net - A week ago, Ad Age editor at large Matthew Creamer pulled the plug on his home TV and turned to the internet in an attempt to accomplish all his normal TV watching via digital sources. The experiment, which provided new insights into the rapidly changing media landscape, also underscored the future importance and value of video-search utilities. In this six-minute video interview, Mr. Creamer discusses his seven days of boob-tube deprivation and OtherTube substitution efforts and his conclusion that, ultimately, the most successful video-search utility is likely to become a bigger media player than Google or even the network TV business as it exists today.
Host of Players Look to Bring Contextual Ads to Online Video - Looking for the AdSense of video? So are a lot of others, including Google, which last week announced it would expand AdSense to include ads in online video content. Google, for its part, is relying on manual targeting to place ads within that multimedia content, but it joins an ever-expanding marketplace of technology companies hoping to bring contextual targeting to audio and video content, using nifty techniques such as speech-to-text and image recognition to detect what’s happening inside a piece of multimedia content.
Spam and Virus Partnership Still Strong - Although spammers and criminals have many tools at their disposal, e-mail remains the method of choice for attacks, according to MessageLabs. Spam rates reached 76.1% in April, up 0.9% over March’s 75.2%, but lower than the peak of 94.5% observed in July of 2004. That means that three out of every four e-mails is spam.
Business Week To Launch VC Video Competition - The well-respected business magazine is mulling the idea of a “business YouTube” that would allow would-be moguls to pitch ideas to the paper’s readers, who would vote on a winner to receive $500,000 in venture-capital funding. Speaking at a conference in Miami, John Byrne, the acting editor-in-chief for Businessweek.com, said the company was looking to purchase a new technology platform to help create the interactive competition.
Could Ad Exchanges Reform The Display Market? - Why are Google, Yahoo and Microsoft putting money and resources behind online ad exchanges? Yahoo recently purchased Right Media, while Google, pending approval, will acquire DoubleClick, which announced it would offer its own ad exchange shortly before the Google deal.But it’s still very early days; exchanges need to build their networks–usage is the key–and consolidate. Then, Q Interactive CEO Matt Wise hopes, “One technology platform can cover an enormous swath of the Internet.”
Facebook’s New Face Has Wide-Ranging Effect - Facebook just took giant steps toward expanding into a global technology company. The social network’s decision to extend its technology platform to software developers should “create a raft of new opportunities for companies of all sizes,” Kirkpatrick says, because it now allows anyone to build applications for social computing. In conjunction with the announcement, Facebook announced that 65 partner companies were unveiling more than 85 applications its members could install immediately.
What The Social Media OS Strategy Means To Advertisers - Facebook has fired the starting gun signaling the race to social media’s next evolution, gaining a significant edge in the race. The open call is for droves of driven, innovative and funded entrepreneurs to develop feature sets and functionality to improve the quality of Facebook life, rather than focusing their collective efforts on building Facebook competitors.
