Google TV Ads Go Broadway
Google announced today that it has entered a television advertising agreement with Broadway Systems. Apparently Broadway Systems announced this back on the 16th, but Google is talking about it today on the Traditional Media blog.
Broadway Systems is a provider of traffic and billing for managing TV ad inventory. Under the agreement, the two companies will integrate systems and enable Broadway Systems’ cable network clients to make their inventory available to Google TV Ads advertisers more easily.
"With the addition of Broadway, the Google TV Ads team is now working with most of the leading traffic and billing systems for cable networks, including Harris Corporation and VCI," says Bob Meese, Business Development Manager for Google TV Ads.
"We hope to make TV advertising more relevant, accountable and measurable, delivering benefits to viewers, advertisers and programmers," he says.
Broadway’s clients who are Google TV Ads inventory partners will be able to reach new advertisers with Google TV Ads as well as using their existing tools. They will also get access to inventory performance reports based on set-top box data.
"Efficiency has always been a cornerstone of Broadway Systems, and our integration with Google helps streamline the process of bringing new advertisers to our customers," said John Sorensen, president of Broadway Systems. "Google TV Ads is an exciting outlet for new advertising revenue, particularly for cable networks. Now, Broadway customers have a direct line to these online opportunities."
Inventory owners specify the inventory they want to make available through Google TV Ads, and when advertisers select inventory they want to target, submit bids and upload ads, the winning ads are delivered from Google’s platform to Broadway’s traffic system. Broadway returns verification info to Google about when and where the ads ran.
Categories: Virtual Gambling Tags:
The Collaborators of the Global Mobile Industry
Today the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) announced new members of its global board of directors and officers. If you are unfamiliar with the MMA, it is an organization that is made up of agencies, advertisers, hand-held device manufacturers, carriers and operators, retailers, software providers and service providers, and other companies focused on the marketing with mobile devices.
Recently, WebProNews interviewed the MMA’s President and CEO Mike Wehrs. Wehrs talked about growth in in mobile marketing, and the benefits of the medium.
People have their mobile devices with them 18 hours a day, as Wehrs said. "Why wouldn’t you want to be able to deliver relevant information to them?" he asked. "Because if you do it well, it doesn’t become an advertisement. It becomes information that they were looking for anyway."
The Global Board is made up of elected Executive Committee members from each region who will work together with the wider membership and MMA staff to "manage and steer the Mobile Marketing Association; continuing to advance its international leadership on the key issues that affect the industry."
The Global Board will be chaired by Federico Pisani Massamormile, and will be supported by Global Vice-Chairperson Michael Becker and Wehrs among others.
"The MMA is a premier industry association which discusses, plans and works cooperatively with its entire membership to resolve key industry issues, to share perspectives and case studies across the different geographic regions, to promote technology, processes and practices innovation, and, ultimately, to boost the growth of mobile marketing and advertising worldwide. I am greatly honored to be in a position to help shape its initiatives, drive its international growth and advance its industry leadership," says Massamormile.
"Global industry collaboration is essential for the success of mobile marketing and to ensure the best experience for the consumer. Our member and board contribution to this collaborative process is incredibly important, offering real-world expertise and experience," said Wehrs.
The Full list of Board Members is as follows:
Global
* Global Chair: Federico Pisani Massamormile, CEO HANZO
* Global Vice Chair: Michael Becker, Executive Vice President of Business Development , iLoop Mobile
* Global Treasurer: Louis Gump, VP Mobile, CNN
* Global Secretary: Geoffrey Handley, Co-Founder & New Business Director, The Hyperfactory
* MMA: Mike Wehrs, President and CEO
APAC
* Chair: Sean Rach, Managing Director, OgilvyOne Hong Kong
* Vice Chair: Barney Loehnis, Network Director, Isobar Asia Pacific
* Secretary: Dilip Mistry, Head of Mobile Services, Microsoft Asia
* Treasurer: Geoffrey Handley , Co-Founder & New Business Director, The Hyperfactory HK Ltd
* Chair Emeritus: Jimmy Poon, Managing Director, Puca Technologies
* MMA: Rohit Dadwal, Managing Director APAC
Europe
* Chair: Herve Le Jouan, Managing Director, Europe, comScore Inc
* Vice Chair: Arda Kertmelioglu, Vice President & Business Development, Mobilera BV
* Secretary: Mark Wächter, Chairman, BVDW Section Mobile (MMA Germany)
* Treasurer: Salvador Carrillo, Founder & CEO, Mobile Dreams Factory (MMA Spain)
* Chair Emeritus: Russell Buckley, Vice President of Global Alliances, AdMob (also Global Chair Emeritus)
* MMA: Paul Berney, Managing Director EUR
LATAM
* Chair: Omarson Costa, Senior Business Development Manager – Latin America, Microsoft
* Vice Chair: Enrique Yuste, President, Wunderman Latin America
* Treasurer: Fernanda Magalhaes, Brazil Manager, Mobext
* Secretary: Roberto Vázquez Ferrero, Director Telecom Practice, Latin America, The Nielsen Company
* Chair Emeritus: Federico Pisani Massamormile, CEO, HANZO
* MMA: Terence Reis, Managing Director LATAM
North America
* Chair: Maria Mandel, Executive Director of Digital Innovation, Ogilvy Interactive
* Vice Chair: Michael Becker, VP, Mobile Strategies, iLoop Mobile
* Treasurer: Louis Gump, VP Mobile, CNN
* Secretary: Paul Palmieri, President & CEO, Millennial Media
* Chair Emeritus: Tom Daly, Group Manager, Strategy & Planning, The Coca-Cola Company
* MMA: Mike Wehrs, President & CEO (also MMA rep to Global Board)
Categories: Virtual Gambling Tags:
Reports Say Microsoft Could Be Selling Razorfish
When Microsoft acquired aQuantive in 2007, it wanted to bolster its ad network. Unfortunately, it also ended-up with a conflict of interest, as aQuantive came with Avenue A | Razorfish–an ad agency.
Since then, you could argue that about the only good thing to come out of that particular acquisition was the re-branding from the awkward "Avenue A | Razorfish" to the more practical Razorfish. Really, what did Microsoft want with an ad agency anyway?
Well, the FT has yet another rumor–in a long line of rumors–that Microsoft plans to sell off Razorfish.
Microsoft has appointed Morgan Stanley to find a potential buyer for Razorfish, its digital agency…In August, two years after the aQuantive deal, more favourable tax implications will provide an opportunity for Microsoft to sell an asset some view as a conflict of interest with Microsoft Advertising, which sells technology to rival agencies.
So far French marketing firm Publicis appears to be the front runner–with barely a mention that WPP may once again be interested.
So what’s Razorfish worth? Back in 2008, AdAge slapped a $800 million valuation on the agency, but we’re in a totally different economic climate right now, so FT’s $600m-$700m might be more realistic. But, really, that’s just a very small drop in an insanely large Microsoft bucket. Why bother either selling?
Well, that brings us back to the conflict of interest issue again. Microsoft has a renewed focus on its own online advertising sales, and so the time might be right to get rid of any distractions.
Categories: Virtual Gambling Tags:
StumbleUpon Can Get You Big Traffic and Lots of Links
Facebook and Twitter have both been proven to be valuable sources of traffic to many sites, but another potential source that you might be overlooking is StumbleUpon. It is true that in the past, StumbleUpon has been presented as a traffic tool, but the results weren’t always what webmasters and marketers had hoped for.
StumbleUpon has been changing though. Last year, the company’s founders bought it back from eBay and have been busy ever since. They’ve been listening to users and playing catch up to the rest of the social media world and are now doing more for sites’ traffic than ever before. Have you seen much traffic from StumbleUpon in the past? How about more recently? Tell WebProNews readers.
At the recent SMX Advanced show in Seattle, WebProNews had a discussion on this very topic with Internet Marketing consultant Brent Csutoras. You can watch the entire conversation in the following clip.
In the past, Brent says you would get maybe three to five thousand visitors from StumbleUpon. "It was interesting, but it was just a little bit of traffic. It wasn’t enough to really drive a lot of time spent within the site," says Csutoras. Users were only getting random content, and it wasn’t all that great for links and targeted traffic, although it was always easy to see the potential of the technology.
Now since StumbleUpon has become more web-based this year with features like a web-based toolbar, a navigational section with popular & related content, StumlbeUpon buttons for webmasters to add to their sites, etc., the company has been driving people to participate and interact with other users more.
According to Csutoras, StumlbeUpon went from 5 million users last year to 8 million this year, and they are now drawing a more social userbase that is prone to sharing content.
So What Does This Mean for Your Traffic?
Well, Csutoras says StumbleUpon is now capable of sending anywhere from thirty to two hundred thousand unique visitors over a period of a week. He knows this because he’s seen it (the example is mentioned in the interview).
Fortunately for webmasters and marketers, it doesn’t end there either. When StumbleUpon users are stumbling through content and they come across your content and like it, they are apt to share it through another network like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. That’s the beauty of the social web (and also a good reason to include as many sharing options on your content as possible).
If you weren’t already getting enough links from StumbleUpon, this opens the door for many more links as your content is spread from network to network – from reader to reader. This is basically (at least partially) where social media fits into the SEO equation.
Get Users to Stumble Through Your Content
StumbleUpon also has a partnership program, which Csutoras says is likely to expand (and apparently requires you to have 3,000 indexed pages within StumbleUpon). What this program does is allow you to place StumbleUpon’s technology on your site, so that readers can go through more of your content without actually being directed back to StumbleUpon at all. That means more time spent on your site.
Interesting Social Advertising Opportunities
StumlbeUpon also has a program where you can directly advertise through stumbles. Earlier this year, I interviewed the company’s VP of Business Development, John Bryan about this. Advertising through stumbles, means people get to vote ads up and down just like any other content. Not a bad way to gauge how effective an ad is.
Wrapping Up
So the moral of the story is, StumbleUpon has the potential to send some good traffic your way. It’s probably not going to happen all by itself though. You’re going to have to push it a little bit, and I don’t mean by spamming StumbleUpon. Create good content that people want to share. It’s the same principal that applies to every other facet of social media (and search engine) marketing. People will share what they like. Give them something to like. Also make stumbling a clear option on your content. Give them that button.
How have you encouraged users to stumble your content? Tell us what has or hasn’t worked for you.
Categories: Virtual Gambling Tags:
Important Bing Developer Leaves For eBay
It seems that Microsoft’s taking three steps forward and one step back, with its hiring of other companies’ employees. It just lost Hugh Williams to eBay.
He left Microsoft to become vice president of development for search for the auction site and, judging by Williams’ LinkedIn profile, eBay gains the guy that helped created Bing:
I was a Partner at Microsoft, and a development manager in the Bing team. I’m proud to say that many of the features of the first Bing release were created by my team.
I managed the development of all user-facing web search relevance features, including the left-rail explore pane (with its "table of contents"), navigational query treatments, query-biased summaries, "deeplinks", related searches, and whole page results relevance. Additionally, I managed the Powerset team in San Francisco.
He also played a key role in Microsoft’s development of Internet Explorer 8.
So, two questions. What damage does this do to Bing, if any? And, what the heck does eBay have up its sleeve?
Categories: Virtual Gambling Tags:
Online TV Brings In Ad Revenue
The online TV services of the four major U.S. networks, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, along with Hulu, accounted for a combined 53 percent of the ad-supported online TV market that generated $448 million in revenues in 2008, according to a new report by Screen Digest.
The remaining share of revenues was made up of the online video services of major sports leagues, video services from traditional online portals, and direct services from other major channel groups and content owners.
The combined dominance of the leading broadcaster supported platforms will drive the total ad-supported model for the distribution of online entertainment programming, news, sports and events in the U.S. to more than $1.45 billion in revenues by 2013.
"With better targeting and increased ad inventory, online TV services could be generating per-viewer revenues comparable to an average TV broadcast viewing in as little as three years," said Arash Amel, Research Director, Digital Media, Screen Digest and author of the report.
However, based on the current online ad strategies implemented, it will account for 2.2 percent of all US TV advertising revenue by 2013, but definitely won’t be generating enough to offset the $2bn we expect total US TV advertising to have declined by during in that period.
The major U.S. broadcasters are evolving into a multi-platform TV distribution networks in an attempt to mirror their traditional channels business online. The multi-platform approach has been and will remain important to the future relevance of broadcasters to younger demographics and retaining prime position in the online TV space.
The key will be to create an online platform model that allows for control of the content while distributing it widely, and meets the audience’s changing demands for TV anytime.
"A successful online entertainment distribution business model is about establishing and maintaining interest in trusted brands and syndicated services that go hand-in-hand with the content, often free at the point of audience consumption, said Amel.
Categories: Virtual Gambling Tags:
8 Tips for Combating Social Profile Spam
The way of the web has become very social, as you are more than likely aware. Fortunately, this makes for more widespread conversations about any and all issues that are deemed worthy of discussion by anyone on the Internet.
Unfortunately, it also opens up many pathways for abuse including spam, which can quickly turn a positive user experience into an ugly one.
As the web continues to become a more social animal, more and more webmasters find ways to make their own sites more social. Essentially, this makes for a web full of little social networks. A webmaster that is going this route may run into some of those spam issues right in the profile pages of his/her so-called users.
Jason Morrison of Google’s Search Quality Team has posted an interesting article on the company’s Webmaster Central Blog. Within this article are 8 tips for dealing with this social profile spam.
The tips are:
1. Make sure you have standard security features in place
2. Use a blacklist to prevent repetitive spamming attempts
3. Watch out for cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities
4. Consider nofollowing the links on untrusted user profile pages
5. Consider noindexing profile pages
6. Add a "report spam" feature to user profiles and friend invitations
7. Monitor your site for spammy pages
8. Watch for spikes in traffic from suspicious queries
Morrison elaborates on each of these, but I think you get the gist of it. "Google is constantly under attack by spammers trying to create fake accounts and generate spam profiles on our sites, and despite all of our efforts some have managed to slip through," he says, citing the tips as ways to make spammers’ lives more difficult.
It would appear that spam (in any form) just isn’t going to go away. All you can do is use the tools and strategies that are at your disposal to minimize it and try to maintain a positive user experience. That’s what Google does.
Categories: Virtual Gambling Tags:
Microsoft Readying Two "Mega" Data Centers
With regards to data centers, it looks like Microsoft’s moving full speed ahead. The company has announced that it will open not one, but two "mega" data centers in July, and some of the technical specs are rather astounding.
The Dublin facility that’ll go live on July 1st is supposed to be 303,000 square feet in size. Arne Josefsberg, Microsoft’s General Manager of Infrastructure Services, also reported on a corporate blog that 5.4 megawatts of critical power will be on tap from the start, with a total of 22.2 megawatts of critical power available.
Impressed? Well, Microsoft’s Chicago facility should be even more remarkable. Josefsberg stated that it "covers over 700,000 square feet – approximately the size of 16 football fields – with critical power of 60 megawatts."
Plus, "Two-thirds of the Chicago data center is optimized for housing containerized servers. Containers conserve energy and will help us realize new advancements in power efficiency with a PUE yearly average calculated at 1.22."
The Chicago data center is due to open on July 20th.
All of this activity implies that Microsoft’s expecting – or already seeing – significantly more demand for its online offerings. Given the timing, this may represent a big win for Bing.
Categories: Virtual Gambling Tags:
Ads Convert Better on Bing Than on Live Search?
Online marketing firm the Search Agency says that based on analysis of its own accounts, Microsoft search ads appear to be performing better since Bing launched. The firm looked at the final three weeks of Live Search’s existence, and the first three of Bing’s.
Click through rates, conversions, and conversion rates all increased. One would be tempted to chalk this up to the initial burst of Bing enthusiasm that came along with its launch. In other words, just because Bing is seeing a lot of action now, doesn’t mean it will be a year from now. The Search Agency is quick to point out however, that impressions have actually been fewer.
"Although Bing’s search volume has increased on the heels of their aggressive advertising campaign, Microsoft has been more selective on which ads they serve on each search results page, often times electing not to serve any ads at all," says Frank Lee on the firm’s blog. "As a result, we saw a 22% drop in total impressions. But Bing has significantly increased the relevancy of those impressions, yielding double digit growth in CTR and conversion rate."
The rates found from the Search Agency’s analysis:
- Click Through Rate (CTR) up 15%
- Conversions up 6%
- Conversion rate up 18%
- Cost per Acquisition (CPA) down 3%
Lee does acknowledge that the "curiosity factor" could have played a big role in in the numbers above – "explorers clicking on all sorts of listings to see how the new engine performs."
Still, conversions are conversions. Thinking back to my first experiments with using the Bing search engine, I did not find myself clicking through on ads, and if I had, I likely wouldn’t have made any purchases. If people were just messing around to see how Bing works, I have to wonder how many conversions this would have inspired. Perhaps there really is something significant in these numbers.
Categories: Virtual Gambling Tags:
Europe To Get Standardized Mobile Phone Chargers
Major producers of mobile phones have reached an agreement with the European Commission to standardize phone chargers in an effort to reduce unnecessary waste and provide convenience for users.
The first generation of the new interchargeable mobile phones is set to reach the EU market in 2010.
Günter Verheugen
"I am very pleased that industry has found an agreement, which will make life much simpler for consumers. They will be able to charge mobile phones anywhere from the new common charger," said Gunter Verheugen, Vice-President the European Commission.
"This also means considerably less electronic waste, because people will no longer have to throw away chargers when buying new phones. I am also very pleased that this solution was found on the basis of self-regulation. As a result, the Commission does not consider it necessary to introduce legislation."
The chargers will be compatible with new data enabled mobile phones that will use a Micro-USB connector as the interface.
The Commission estimates almost every household has a collection of chargers that have become outdated over time. Old chargers currently generate several thousand tons of wastes a year.
Companies that have signed on to make mobile phone chargers standardized include Apple, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, RIM, Samsung, Sony, and Texas Instruments.
Categories: Virtual Gambling Tags: