Tag: lorem

Google Taps Your Site Content To Generate Ads

Google announced the launch of Dynamic Search Ads, which let advertisers target relevant searches with dynamic ads generated directly from their site. It’s in limited beta for now.

“For many online businesses, each day you might have hundreds of new listings, items that temporarily change availability, or items that are permanently removed from stock,” AdWords Product Management Director Baris Gultekin says, explaining the thinking behind the new offering. “And at the same time, user search behavior can be a moving target — each day,16% of searches that occur, Google has never seen before. So even well-managed AdWords campaigns containing thousands of keywords can miss relevant searches, experience delays getting ads written for new products, or get out of sync with what’s actually available on your web site. That’s not great for advertisers. It’s also not great for end users, who appreciate relevant ads linked to landing pages with in-stock items that perfectly match what they’re searching for.”

Google says it maintains a fresh index of advertisers’ inventory using Google’s organic web search technology. When a relevant search occurs, Google (in theory) dynamically generates an ad with a headline based on the query, and text based on the advertiser’s most relevant landing page.

This could be pretty cool if it works like it’s supposed to.

“The ad enters the auction and competes normally — but we’ll hold it back for any search where you also have an eligible keyword-targeted ad,” says Gultekin. “So you get additive results from broader exposure for more of your in-stock inventory, without disrupting your existing keyword campaigns.”

The new ads are available in all countries and languages, but the product is in limited beta. Interested advertisers are directed to join the interest list by contacting their Google account rep or signing up here.

October 20, 2011
Google Offers Expands Into New Markets

Google announced the further expansion of Google Offers today. The company says it has launched the product in 13 U.S. cities since the initial launch in Portland, Oregon, and has 25 more markets on the way.

Today, Google Offers comes to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Google Offers Director of Product Management Eric Rosenblum describes the first offers for these two cities:

Love beer? Live music? And delicious Bavarian fare? Look no further than the Hofbräuhaus Pittsburgh where today’s Google Offer is $10 for $30 toward signature beers and savory German-Bavarian dishes. Modeled after the legendary 400+ year-old Hofbräuhaus in Munich, Germany, the Hofbräuhaus brews all its beer in-house including the famous “1810 Prince Ludwig.” This flavorful amber lager is made from the original top-secret recipe first created 200+ years ago in honor of the wedding of Prince Ludwig to his bride Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen.

…

If you’re craving classic American dishes, check out today’s deal for the award-winning Marathon Grill. A family-owned and operated restaurant for nearly 30 years, many of their delicious offerings are made with fresh ingredients from local farms as well as their very own urban farm in the Brewerytown neighborhood! Stop in and try the 8oz Marathon Burger, Cheesesteak Spring Rolls or the Brownie Sundae Smoothie made with probiotic and active culture nonfat yogurt. At Marathon Grill, eating like a local means eating well — really well. Today’s Google Offer for Marathon is $8 for $16 toward food and drinks, plus a free soup of the day.

The next deal in Pittsburgh will be for Dave & Andy’s Homemade Ice Cream, and in Philly, it will be Campo’s, a restaurant known for its Philly sandwiches.

This week, Google added some more features to Google Wallet, including “Featured Offers” to the Offers tab. This shows Google Wallet-exclusive discounts.

October 18, 2011
iPhone 4S Siri Demo, Wolfram, Schmidt & A Scary Phone Ad

People are still waiting to get their hands on the new iPhone, but you can still see some hands-on demos. Also, check out the ad that’s apparently scaring children in the UK, and may get banned for violating ad standards. Pretty lame if you ask me.

For more daily video round-ups, go here.

MacRumors points to a pair of iPhone 4S hands on (and Siri) demos from YouTube:

The ad for this phone is apparently in danger of being banned in the UK for being too scary:

Eric Schmidt speaks at the Kenexa World Conference:

Stephen Wolfram talks about the background and vision of Mathematica:

John Carpenter’s The Thing: The Musical:

Sneak peek of Photoshop image debarring from Adobe MAX:

October 11, 2011
New AdWords Conversion Metric for Phone Calls

Google has announced a new conversion tracking metric for AdWords: reporting for calls placed from mobile pages. As mobile usage skyrockets, and smartphone use in particular, this should be an increasingly important metric to track for many businesses.

“Mobile advertising has created an entirely new opportunity for businesses to drive phone calls to sales teams and call centers, generating a new method for our advertisers to receive qualified incoming leads,” says Google Mobile Ads Product Manager Surojit Chatterjee. “In fact, since we introduced the click-to-call feature to advertisers over a year ago, we’ve had more than half a million customers globally run campaigns with phone extensions.”

“Two of the most common ways to get mobile customers to call you are either by listing your phone number on a click-to-call ad, or adding your phone number onto your website,” adds Chatterjee. “It’s easy to measure calls from a click-to-call ad from yourCampaign reports, but it can be more challenging to track the calls made by consumers clicking on the phone number on your website.”

Hence the new metric.

Advertiser can track clicks on their phone numbers or call buttons to the AdWords campaign, ad group, ad or keyword levels.

Google has a step-by-step guide to set up a mobile site with a phone number right here.

October 7, 2011
Google Touts New Ad Formats as Answer to Print Circulars

“Maybe the best ads are just answers.” That’s Google’s motto for search ads, as described in the above video.

It is Advertising Week, and Google’s talking about their efforts in this department at the event in New York City. According to VP of Product Management Nick Fox, about a third of searches with ads show a new enhanced ad format. New formats include a mix of the visual, the local and the social.

“Not only can you find theater times for a new movie, you can watch the trailer directly in the ad,” explains Fox. “Media ads put the sight, sound and motion of video into search ads. With Product Ads, people can see an image, price and merchant name, providing a more visual shopping experience. Because this format is often so useful, people are twice as likely to click on a Product Ad as they are to click on a standard text ad in the same location, and today, hundreds of millions of products are available through Product Ads.”

“More than 20 percent of desktop searches on Google are related to location,” says Fox. “On mobile, this climbs to 40 percent. Location-aware search ads can help you find what you’re looking for more easily by putting thousands of local businesses on the map—literally. More than 270,000 of our advertisers use Location Extensions to attach a business address on at least one ad campaign, connecting more than 1.4 million locations in the U.S. via ads. And, with our mobile ad formats, not only can you call a restaurant directly from the ad, you can also find out how far away the restaurant is located and view a map with directions.”

In an interview with Bloomberg, Fox equated Google’s efforts in search ads to trying to find the online equivalent of the offline print circular. You know, those big ads you find in your Sunday newspaper (if you still get that, or at least remember it).

Google offers quick glimpses to its various search ad formats here, though Bloomberg reports that the “circular” style ads will also be available for display ads.

October 3, 2011
Facebook Announces Page Insights Tool, New Metric & Ad Unit
Facebook announced a new Page Insights tool, a new public metric for “People Talking About This” on all Pages, and a new expanded premium ad unit.

“Facebook has unveiled a new Page Insights tool so that all Pages – small businesses, global brands, celebs, public figures, etc – on Facebook will be able to measure the value of social like never before – and act on it,” a representative for the company tells WebProNews in an email. “As part of this announcement, a new metric -“People Talking About This”- will be made public and appear on every Page underneath ‘Likes’ to show the conversations happening around the brand or business Page. This will help marketers and Page owners understand how to make their content more engaging and shareable, which increases the reach of their messages on Facebook. It will also help users get a sense for what Pages are relevant, engaging and interesting to them when discovering and connection to Pages on Facebook.”

Some bullets about the new Page Insights from the email:
- See how posts they put on their Page reach people on Facebook – beyond their fans.
- See Total Likes, number of Friends of Fans of a Page, the new public and internal Pages metric, ‘People talking about this’, and Weekly Total Reach of a Page
- “People Talking about this” counts ‘stories” – structured content that people choose to share through Facebook that is eligible to appear in a user’s news feed: liking your Page, posting to your Page’s Wall, liking, commenting or sharing one of your Page posts (or other content on your page – like photos, videos, albums), answering a Question you posted, RSVP-ing to one of your events, mentioning your Page, phototagging your Page, liking or sharing a check-in deal, or checking in at your Place.
- Optimize content for posts -whether they’re photos, videos, questions, etc. – see what’s working best at reaching the most people, and how to increase the viral nature of these posts.
“To encourage third party development and analytics innovation, Facebook is also announcing a Page Insights API for the analytics developer community, so that they can create customized Page Insights solutions for existing and potential clients,” the rep tells us. “Webtrends (Gatorade, Simon Malls), Wildfire (Electronic Arts and Virgin Atlantic) and Context Optional (Sony Playstation and Levis) are already creating customized insights tools for clients based on the new Page Insights through the Facebook Insights API.”

As far as the new ad unit, it allows brands to promote page posts to anyone on Facebook.

“When the person viewing this brand’s ad has friends connected to this brand’s Page, Facebook will expand the unit to include a line above that shares which friends like the Page,” the rep explains. “Adding how friends engage give the ad social context, which research has shown increases ad recall.”  ”Together, brands will be able to measure their success and enhance their strategies with the combination of Page Insights and thIS new Premium ad unit,” she adds.

According to Facebook, friends of fans represent a 34x larger set of consumers than the fans themselves, on average for the top 100 brands. For the top 1,000, it’s 81x. They are also more likely to visit a store or site and purchase a product or service, Facebook says.
October 3, 2011
Ads, Search, Analytics & Star Wars Music

The video round-up is strictly business today. Well, almost. There is some pretty sweet Floppy drive music and some business-based comedy from an Onion guy. But plenty of marketing material too.

View other daily video round-ups here.

Baratunde Thurston of The Onion talks IAB MIXX Awards:

Floppy music DUO plays the Imperial March from Star Wars:

WebProNews interviewed Steven Wyer of ReputationAdvocate.com about rebuilding your online reputation:

YouTube presentation looks at YouTube API and the news:

Google shares some lessons from Animal Planet and Volvo on how display builds brands:

Google has a new surfing-based “Search Story”:

Google announced Google Analytics Premium:

Adobe put up Digital Enterprise platform in 10 Minutes:

September 29, 2011
Groupon Rewards Loyalty Program Announced

Groupon announced a new loyalty program today called Groupon Rewards, which lets consumers get special deals when they go to local businesses multiple times.

They earn rewards from merchants who utilize the service, when they pay with their credit or debit cards that are on file with Groupon. Once the customer spends a certain amount (set by the merchant) they can purchase a special deal from that merchant.

“What’s exciting about Rewards is how easy it is for both merchants and consumers,” Groupon says. “As a shopper, you don’t have to worry about a loyalty card or remembering to check in – we do all the work behind the scenes. And as a merchant, Rewards works with your exisiting POS system to help you track redemption and ROI while incentivizing future purchases. Pretty cool stuff.”

Groupon says Groupon Rewards completes its “trifecta of merchant product,” which includes Groupon deals, Groupon Now and Rewards.

Still, the company is said to be testing online retail deals in the UK, which would be another layer, and open up a lot more opportunities for businesses, as well as more revenue for Groupoon.

Groupon’s IPO is expected to launch in October or November.

September 28, 2011
The Facebook Timeline, as Pitched by Don Draper

If you learn one thing from this video, it’s that Don Draper is a much better pitchman than the notoriously awkward Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe if Zuck put on a slick 60s suit and started chain smoking Lucky Strikes during Facebook events…

Adapted from the hit AMC show Mad Men, this viral vid shows Don Draper making an emotional pitch – for Facebook’s new timeline feature. The Timeline has been receiving a lot of buzz since Zuckerberg announced it at this year’s f8 developers conference.

Timeline will allow users to put their entire lives on the site. Zuckerberg says that you can “tell the whole story of your life on a single page.” You’ll be able to see pictures, events, statuses, and much more basically from your birth up to present time. Facebook thinks that it will revolutionize social sharing. This extremely well-done video shows exactly how Facebook should pitch their new feature (from user EricLeist) –

In the original Mad Men episode, that scene it taken from a pitch that Don Draper makes for the Carousel, a new slide projector from Kodak. The main draw, he argues, is nostalgia.

Is that the selling point of Facebook’s new Timeline? Nostalgia? It sure seems like it. People are already giddy for the ability to track everything they’ve done (most importantly, with photos). Your whole life – all your relationships (good and bad), the birth of your child, the trips with friends, your new house, your first real job – emotional, right?

For Facebook, they get a ton of new information about people and ad opportunities out of the Timeline. But for users, it could be one of the best things to hit social media in a long time. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Watch the original Mad Men clip off which the mash-up is based here.

September 28, 2011
Facebook Reportedly Giving Small Business $10M in Free Ads

As businesses anxiously await the launch of business profiles on Google+, Facebook is reminding small businesses of the power of its social media dominance (it’s up to 800 million users now).

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook has teamed up with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Federation of Independent Business to launch a program that includes giving away $10 million in advertising credits to small businesses. The publication reports:

The new program will officially kick off next month with a cross-country road show in coordination with state and local chambers of commerce and regional NFIB offices. At locations still to be determined, Facebook officials and members of the two business groups will meet with local businesses to discuss best practices for marketing to customers through Facebook.

Then in January, Facebook will begin giving away $50 per business in free advertising credits to as many as 200,000 small businesses. Such companies will be able to redeem the discount on a first-come, first-served basis when purchasing ads on the social-networking site, which can be targeted to specific users as a business sees fit.

Sheryl Sandberg recently did this video interview with USA Today talking about how Facebook creates jobs and how great Facebook is for small businesses.

“When you look at small businesses, there are probably fourteen to fifteen million active small businesses in the country, and we think over nine million of those are using Facebook to connect directly to consumers,” she said.

“One thing that makes Facebook easier for small businesses to use, is we’re not asking them to use a new product,” she added. “Most people who are attached to the web actually have a Facebook profile, and if you look at a page, which is what they tend to use to market their small business, it works pretty much the same way. So if you’re on Facebook and you’re posting something to your friends….they might post, ‘hey, we’re having a sale today.’”

Google, on the other hand, is asking people to use a new product. Recent estimates indicate that Google+ is up to around 43.4 million users so far. Last week, they announced a bunch of new features and opened it up to the public (as opposed to invite-only).

Google+ has a long, long way to go to achieve Facebook-like user numbers, but the fact that it’s tied (and will be tied even more) to other Google products businesses are already using is a key factor.

September 26, 2011
Bing Deals Gets Deals Hub, Punchcard Loyalty Program

Earlier this year, Bing launched Bing Deals, a deals aggregation feature to surface deals from across the web in Bing. Today, Microsoft announced some new features to go along with that.

First off is the Deals hub. “Previously deals were surfaced within Local results so you didn’t have one place to go find deals in your area or a way to sort,” a representative tells WebProNews. “With the Bing Deals hub, there is a one stop shop for the more than 200,000 deals from across the web, local daily deals, and exclusive deals only found in Bing.”

“And those exclusive deals only found in Bing are also new,” he adds. “Deals on mobile via m.bing.com (RIM, iPhone, Android) have had a hub-like page since the launch in March, but with this update the new additions are the exclusive and local deals. Although not identical, Deals on mobile is optimized to surface local deals based on the person’s location – simply clicking on the ‘Locate Me’ button, people can find the best deals in their current location.”

Also new is a Punchcard loyalty program for advertisers. Raj Kapoor of Microsoft’s mobile advertising team talks about this on the Microsoft Advertising blog:

Today we are announcing the launch of Bing Deals Beta with loyalty program in 12 cities across the US in order to bring a new relationship-focused element to deals. Deals will no longer be a one-time engagement, but rather, the Microsoft Punchcard Program will integrate a loyalty program tied to the deal that gets better with more engagement. Businesses will have the opportunity of staying connected with their customers and offer programs that reward their customers for repeat business. Businesses will also have the opportunity to offer “accelerated deals” whereby the deal can become more valuable once the number of customers purchasing the deal crosses a defined threshold.

Furthermore, Bing Deals will enable giving back to the community by enabling local merchants to offer deals in partnership with local schools with a percentage of the proceeds going towards schools’ fund-raising efforts – continuing a long history of local businesses supporting local community initiatives.

On top of all of that, there are some updates to the Bing Business Portal, which will let businesses better manage their presence, the company says. These include tools to offer detailed info about your business and other marketing tools.

September 23, 2011
Twitter Launches Promoted Political Ads

Prepare yourself for an onslaught, as political ads have just made their debut on Twitter.

As the Republican presidential primary battle heats up, candidates and interest groups will now be able to make sure that their message is seen by everyone on Twitter. The first candidate to make use of a political promoted tweet is Mitt Romney.

The ads are not yet appearing in users’ main timelines, but are working in the same way that all other promoted stuff works on Twitter. That means you’ll start to see promoted tweets when you search for specific topics and people, promoted users in the top right corner of the UI and promoted trending topics.

Move over #Transformers3 and #NFLMobile, welcome #BachmannForPrez.

Here’s the first promoted tweet, which serves the function of a 140 character political ad –

(image)

Note that when you hover over the “promoted tweet” part, it says “Paid for by Romney for President, Inc.”

TechCrunch has obtained a statement from Twitter regarding how these promoted political tweets will work:

Starting today, Twitter has begun to accept political advertising. Effective immediately, candidates and their political committees will be able to purchase Twitter’s full suite of Promoted Products, including Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts and Promoted Trends.

We’re piloting the program with a small group of presidential candidates and national party committees. These partners will be running ads in the coming week. We will expand the pilot to include other candidates and committees as we build up our political sales team.

In support of this strategy, Peter Greenberger is joining Twitter as a sales director, heading up our political sales efforts. Peter is an innovator and veteran in the market for online political advertising. He joins Twitter after 4 years with Google, where he built and managed the company’s first political sales team and managed the company’s work with electoral campaigns, committees, and issue advocacy groups. Peter’s contacts and expertise will be extremely valuable assets for Twitter as we grow this part of our business. He will be based in Washington, D.C., where he will build and oversee a dedicated political sales team.

We’re launching two small UI tweaks to make it easy for people to distinguish political advertising from other advertising on Twitter. First, we’re launching a new purple “Promoted” icon that will be used to identify political advertising on Twitter. Second, we’re adding the ability for campaigns who advertise on Twitter to include a full, FEC-compliant disclaimer when users hover over their Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends or Promoted Accounts.

Today’s news is a natural extension of the role Twitter is already playing in the political world. Twitter has become a more mainstream presence in politics, both domestically and around the world.

“We’ve had five years to watch and observe how people are using the platform organically and we know politicians are active on the platform, and we know that consumers enjoy the messages from those politicians,” Twitter’s president of global revenue, Adam Bain told Politico. “We’re excited about the election cycle, and we think that ads both in the timeline and in search are a huge opportunity.”

It looks like your TV and radio won’t be the only places that you’ll be subjected to campaigning in the coming months. What do you think about promoted political ads on Twitter? Let us know in the comments.

September 21, 2011
Both Bloggers and Advertisers Win with New Crowd Sourcing Platform

It’s clear that bloggers have helped many companies improve their rankings in search and also their position across social media sites. However, the challenging part for both bloggers and companies is connecting.

Understanding this challenge, Pavan Katepalli came up with the idea to create a platform that would make these relationships much easier to build. His idea is called Bloggers Compete and is a platform where advertisers can encourage a crowd of bloggers to compete over a specific topic for a prize.

Through the service, advertisers create a contest for bloggers to write about a topic. Interested bloggers can then publish a post on their own blog and distribute it across social media sites. The advertiser then chooses a winner(s), and that blogger(s) gets the prize.

The benefit for the blogger is, obviously, the prize. The advertiser, on the other hand, not only gets the social exposure and increased search ranking, but it also gets targeted traffic from all these places.

“That targeted traffic – it’s kind of permanent cause it stays on Facebook, it stays on Twitter, [and] it stays on Google for a very long time,” said Katepalli.

Before a blogger is able to participate, it does have to meet certain qualifications. For instance, Bloggers Compete looks at their Google PageRank, their readership, their level of engagement, and a few other aspects to make sure that they are eligible.

Katepalli told us that he would like the platform to evolve into a community for bloggers. He wants to incentivize bloggers by offering perks to the ones that participate frequently.

He also pointed out that he sees this type of advertising working hand in hand with traditional advertising methods. He said that people are involved in a lot of different areas and that it is important for companies to be present in all these places as well.

September 21, 2011
Google Mobile Ads Getting +1 Button

Google’s mobile display ads are getting +1 buttons, according to a post to the Google Mobile Ads blog, which came through the RSS feeds, but is not live on the actual blog.

The button will appear on the left side of ads, and recommendations will appear for several seconds, then fade out:

In the post, Neha P writes:

We believe that incorporating social recommendations into display advertising will make ads more relevant for users and impactful for advertisers. Today the Google+ project is expanding to the Google Display Network.

The +1 button will start to roll out on AdSense for Mobile Content publishers for both text and image ads.

In a separate post, which actually has been published, Sonja Lee, Product Marketing Manager for Google Mobile Ads reminds advertisers of the “Going Mobile: From Why to How?” webinar, taking place on Wednesday.

More details on that even here.

September 19, 2011
More Google News

Earlier, we looked at a bunch of Google news that webmasters should be aware of, but in typical fashion, Google just keeps pumping the announcements out.

For one, Google has launched a new feature in the AdSense interface, which lets you view your top 10 performing custom and URL channels right form the homepage (pictured above).

“We understand that many of you log in frequently throughout the day to check in on your stats, and this latest change will allow you to get a quick snapshot directly from the new interface,” says Dan Banfield on Google’s AdSense engineering team. “When you log in to the new AdSense interface, you’ll see your top channels by estimated earnings along with the percentage change for the selected time period. So if you’ve chosen to view the last 7 days, you’ll see your top performing channels for that time range along with the percentage change they experienced compared to the prior 7 day period.”

Google also introduced some new tools to help DoubleClick publishers maximize their revenue with video and mobile in Doubleclick for Publishers and Direct Deals in the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Google says the number of video ads on the Google Display Network has increased 350% in the las year, and the company’s mobile network AdMob has increased over 200%.

“Before now, it’s been difficult for publishers to manage all their video and mobile ad space from a single ad server—the platform publishers use to schedule, measure and run the ads they’ve sold on their sites,” says Neal Mohan, Google’s VP of Display Advertising. “To solve this challenge, we’re rolling out new tools in our latest version of DoubleClick for Publishers that enable publishers to better manage video and mobile inventory. Publishers will be able to manage all of the ads they’re running—across all of their webpages, videos and mobile devices—from a single dashboard, and see which formats and channels are performing best for them.”

The Direct Deals on the Ad Exchange let publishers set aside all of the ad space on a page and offer it to a select group of buyers at a specific price. If the buyers pass on the offer, it will automatically place the inventory into the auction.

More on both of these here.

As previously reported, Google is making some of its products more accessible with keyboard shortcuts and screen reader compatibility. That includes Google Sites. Google also added +1 buttons to Google Sites. “Starting today, you can add the +1 button to any individual page by choosing +1 Button from the Insert menu, or you can add it to your site’s sidebar and have it appear on every page instantly by editing your Site Layout under Manage Site,” explains software engineer Michael Verrilli.

Google has also beefed up its Major League Baseball search results.

In case you missed it, Google also has an interesting post up today about time and technology.

September 15, 2011
Steve Nash, The Winklevoss Twins & Matt Cutts

I’m going to test a video roundup-style article looking at some of the more interesting videos we come across in tech, marketing and business on any given day. If the response is good, we’ll continue to do this.

There is so much content out there, it’s impossible not to miss some things, so hopefully this can help prevent you from missing some good videos. If you like the compilation, or any of the videos within, why not share it with others? And certainly, feel free to comment on any subject mentioned in any of them.

Update: Don’t miss the videos from day two and day three.

We ran an article about this yesterday, but it’s still getting a lot of attention today. The Winklevoss twins have appeared in a Wonderful Pistachios ad.

Next Media Animation, the Taiwanese animation firm, which parodies many tech news topics, has a new video out about Ron Paul:

This follows one they recently release about Rick Perry:

Cisco has a marketing campaign bashing Juniper Networks for “not keeping its promises to customers” as the company puts it. There is a whole site dedicated to this campaign, which includes the following video:

Vitamin Water is running an ad campaign where it is calling upon consumers to upload videos showing how they embody “Nash-ness” – as in Steve Nash-ness:

Robert Scoble shared a video where he sat down with TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Shaker, which he says will be “an important company in the social world”. What do you think?

This trailer for the film Connected has been making the rounds. It’s about how technology is changing us and “what it means to be connected in the 21st century”:

We broke this down a bit in another article, but Google’s Matt Cutts put out this video talking about why webmasters may see a decline in their PageRank, and what they can do about it in some cases:

Speaking of Google, their Johnny Cash Project campaign is also getting a lot of attention:

September 14, 2011
Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL Partner On Ads

Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL are teaming up to compete with Google in advertising, according to a report that the three Internet giants hosted a dinner last night to discuss their plans.

Update: A Yahoo spokesperson tells WebProNews, “Choice in the digital marketplace is critical. As the media world continues to fragment, the value that premium publishers deserve also fragments. We believe strongly in the premium content ecosystem and the importance of matching publishers, agencies and advertisers with premium formats. At Yahoo, we’re fortunate to have deep, longstanding relationships with brands, publishers and agencies, and are working on dynamic and innovative ways to put value where value is due. We also have longstanding relationships with AOL and Microsoft and will continue to partner and compete in the years to come.”

A Microsoft spokesperson gave us a similar statement: ““We believe that choice, openness and competition help drive innovation in the market. As such, we are always looking for ways to partner with others in the digital advertising ecosystem to offer innovative solutions that benefit advertisers and publishers. However we have nothing specific to share at this time.”

Peter Kafka at All Things D reports:

The idea, according to people who attended the meeting: Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have agreed to sell each other’s “Class 2 display” inventory — graphic ads the companies can’t sell on their own and would normally hand over to ad networks.

The theory is that if, say, AOL has a big order for a certain kind of ad impressions, it will fill it with its own inventory as well as what’s available from Microsoft and Yahoo.

According to the report, revenue would be shared among the three companies, and it will begin this year.

We’ve reached out to each company, and will update as more info becomes available.

The move of course comes after a search and advertising partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo, which went into effect over a year ago. The latest search market reports have their shares increasing with Google’s declining (albeit, just slightly).

It will be very interesting to see how this new deal affects the advertising market.

September 14, 2011
Winklevoss Twins’ Wonderful Pistachio Ad References Facebook, Idea Theft

For the past couple of months, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have been trying to get various judges to believe that they deserve more than $65 million for their part in the creation of Facebook. You know the story – they claim Zuckerberg stole their idea, he says no way, and there was a movie about it. A good movie, mind you.

Earlier this year, the Winklevii decided that their $65 million settlement with Zuckerberg and Facebook wasn’t good enough, so they attempted to go back on it in order to seek more. In April, an appeals court judge ruled that the Winklevii must accept the $65 million settlement. They filed another appeal to have their case heard by more judges – and it failed as well. Then they announced that they were taking the matter to the Supreme Court, but later thought better of it.

Now that it looks like our long national nightmare is over, what are the Winklevii to do?

Apparently, that answer is “make commercials.”

The now infamous zombie litigators are starring in an ad for Wonderful Pistachios, you know, the guys that love lime green clothing and minor celebrities. They have previously called upon the talents of people like Snooki and Rod Blagojevich.

This ad has the twins referencing the whole Facebook thing with a crack about idea theft. The voice-over then says “The Winklevoss Twins do it cautiously,” referencing how they crack their pistachios, or whatever. Check it out below –

Since the video debuted on YouTube last Friday, it’s gotten some negative feedback. Haters gon hate, right?

Tyler Winkevoss is proud of it, at least –

@tylerwinklevoss
Tyler WinklevossCheck out Wonderful Pistachios commercial @winklevoss and I recently did http://t.co/Xvq0oIr #GetCrackin‘ 9 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

I, for one, have always applauded the Winklevoss’ use of Twitter.

What do you think of the ad? Let us know in the comments.

September 13, 2011
Contagion Gets Awesomely Gross Advertising Campaign

The new disaster flick Contagion sports an all-star cast including Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gweneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet. It sports an Academy Award-winning director in Steven Soderbergh.

It also sports this truly spectacular viral ad campaign (I’m so sorry for that, everybody).

In the weeks before the worldwide premiere, Warner Bros. Canada Google+Feedfetcher”>hired the ad company Lowe Roche to make two unique billboards to promote the film.

The two billboards that were created actually served as giant petri dishes. They were laced with different bacteria and fungi and hung in a storefront window in Toronto.

As you can probably guess, as the bacteria and fungi grew, they spelled out “Contagion” on the billboards.

I must say, this is one of the coolest marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen. Check out the video for some awesomely disgusting fun –

The first 50 people to view the bacteria-board received free passes o the film, which opens today. Right now, it’s 81% certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, so it look like this might be a pretty big end-of-summer blockbuster for Warner Bros.

September 9, 2011
Google Reviews Paused Ads

Google announced today that it will begin reviewing paused ads the same way it reviews active ads.

“We’re proactively reviewing paused ads to eliminate unnecessary delays in getting your ads approved and ultimately enhance your ability to plan and manage campaigns,” explains Lauren Barbato of Google’s Inside AdWords crew.

“New and existing unreviewed paused ads will be sent through the standard ad approval process,” she adds. “This means that paused ads will be subject to our AdWords advertising policies, and ads that violate one or more of our policies will be disapproved. If your paused ads were originally disapproved, it’s easy to resubmit them to be reviewed again.”

To do so, just edit and save the ad, and it will automatically resubmit to Google. Any change in approval status will be shown in the Status column. It will either say Eligible, Under Review or Disapproved.

“Just be aware that changing the actual ad (such as editing text or uploading a new image) is the same as deleting the original ad and creating a new one, so after editing the ad, any statistics will be reset to zero,” Google reminds advertisers in the help center. “The same is true when you copy an ad to another ad group.”

Google will notify the advertiser if there are any issues, and will instruct how to go about getting an ad approved. The approval process is explained here.

September 6, 2011
Yahoo-Gannett Partnership: New Opportunities for Local Advertisers

Local advertising is about to change in several markets as a result of the extended partnership between Yahoo and Gannett. The companies have been partners for a little over a year but recently decided to extend their partnership to include all 81 Gannett print publications in the U.S. except for USA Today and all 19 of the company’s broadcast stations.

The local advertising market is growing as the value of digital increases for local businesses. Lem Lloyd, the VP of North America Channel Sales at Yahoo, told us that because local advertisers are trying to make their ad dollars work smarter for them, they are shifting their spend from traditional advertising to digital.

“Their audiences are already online spending most of their time online, and they’re trying to match their ad spend with the amount of time that folks are spending now on the Web,” he said.

Through the expanded partnership, local advertisers will have more digital opportunities. They will be able to take advantage of Yahoo’s targeting capabilities as well as the company’s large inventory.

“If you’re a local business in one of Gannett’s markets… when you talk with your sales rep at the station, now they’ll be able to offer you access to all the 100s of 1,000,000s of users that are on Yahoo,” said Lloyd.

As local advertisers, how can you see this partnership benefiting your business? Let us know.

For Yahoo, the extended partnership will bring in advertisers that would not have previously been possible. This means that Yahoo’s reach will expand even further while also bringing in more revenue for the company.

“It’s a fabulous opportunity for us to get more demand from these 1,000s and 1,000,000s of local businesses across the United States,” Lloyd pointed out.

He went on to say that the companies hoped their expanded agreement would have the same success that their previous one has had. Yahoo is also excited to see what opportunities their new advertisers will bring.

“We hope to see lots of new types of advertisers on Yahoo that we weren’t seeing before,” said Lloyd.

The companies are expecting this expansion to be fully integrated into all of Gannett’s broadcast markets by February 2012.

September 6, 2011