We’re finally getting SearchParty on Technorati.

<a href=”http://technorati.com/claim/286w4viwqj” rel=”me”>Technorati Profile</a>

This is just the validation step.

I think that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg handled the recent about face on Beacon pretty well.  They explained the situation, explained their thinking, apologized for their mistakes and gave a solution that should appease some people.

What I find interesting is that the hallmarks of blogs, Facebook and Web 2.0 is the back and forth between the community, producers and commenters.  However, Facebook’s blog is not really a blog, its a one-way news outlet.  How do they not have comments?  That baffles me!

I was thinking about things that I dislike about Yahoo!’s new platform, its definitely a huge improvement, but from the business end, YSM seems to approach advertising much differently than Google. To mix metaphors, if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, its easy to understand why Google is eating Yahoo’s lunch.

1. Higher minimum CPC. How can Yahoo! possibly justify a min. bid of $.10 when Google allows a min. bid of $.01. In my experience, its clearly posturing as the lowest CPC we have ever seen is $.02, but the fact that Yahoo! has an artificial restriction is maddening.
2. Human Editors. Notice to Yahoo!, you could hire the entire editorial team of the WSJ, New York Times and Boston Globe, and you wouldn’t have enough editorial brainpower to handle search. Search is a numbers game. Stop putting humans in the way. If your numbers say that people are responding to an ad, let it run. Don’t give that power to a human editor.
3. Not being Agency Friendly. We manage close to 100 campaigns per month for our entertainment clients. In order to create an account under our Agency management account, we have to email Yahoo, which creates shell accounts, named “Shell Account 1″, “Shell Account 2″. When we use those accounts, we have to email them and ask them to change the name to whatever we want. This is the most basic of a 100 ways that Yahoo! makes it tough to run many, large SEM campaigns with them.
4. Contextual Network. Its small and not well-optimized. In my opinion, too much emphasis on highest-bid and not enough emphasis on what ads are generating clicks on against that content. Since its a CPC network, poor optimization leads to less revenue, which leads to less publishers.
5. API. The API and the web site do not have the same functions. One example, through the management interface, I can run a report that shows me what URLs the clicks went to. There is no API function for that report.
6. Constantly Behind the Game. It still takes forever for humans to approve ads, despite their promise of faster ad approvals. And, even worse, we are constantly having words/ads declined for campaigns that ended months ago! Yahoo, take those people reviewing old ads, and put them on the new ones.
7. Difficult Human Editors. We’ve actually had the term “High School Musical” declined for a campaign for the High School Musical soundtrack. This 1 term took 3 revisions, and three calls with Yahoo’s human editors. Some of their editors are great, reasonable and smart - there are some that are just difficult.
8. Prepay billing even with a credit card. The concept of a declining balance is lame for a company as large as Yahoo. You have an authorization with Visa, Mastercard, Amex to charge the card. Why do you need to insist on holding money, and to make matters worse, insisting that we put in a minimum of 3 days worth of money into the system?
9. API again. Our Chief Architect says ‘You have to generate the Java classes to talk to the API. Google does this for you.”. Whatever that means.
10. My biggest pet peeve is: No display ads. Google lets you run text ads, video ads and banner ads on a CPC-basis with no minimum spend. Yahoo, the clear 2nd place company, doesn’t allow banner or video ads. If you want to use those, according to one of their reps, its a min. of $50,000! Google made its billions $.10 and $.15 at a time. Yahoo is trying to make up that ground $50,000 at a time. Sometimes, you have to follow the leader and in this case, I would beg Yahoo to realize that creative is only a hook to get a click. Do everything in your power to get a click! If that means better creative, allow it.

Thoughts?

Google’s gonna spend millions on green tech.  I don’t think that any other company could get away with spending that type of money outside of their core competencies….but its good to be Google!

http://earth2tech.com/2007/11/27/google-to-produce-clean-energy-cheaper-than-coal/ 

The only thin that I worry about is what happens if this turns into an absolute cash sink - do they bail on it?  Do people care that they bailed on it?  Or will it just be swept under the rug because the rest of what they do is so successful?

As most of our clients know, I don’t like site-targeted ads.  I think that online advertising is less of a creative process, and more of a technical process in which millions of data points are analyzed and an optimum mix of of creative/pricing/placement is developed. That being said, I understand that sometimes you have to buy advertising on certain sites. So, we are happy with Google’s recent announcement that CPC site targeting (i.e. placement targeting) is officially live.

This features allows us to offer clients a chance to target a specific site, but retain the hallmarks of SEM campaign - no minimum spend, control of creative, control of flight dates, etc.

However, I wonder how top publishers will react to Placement Targeting and if they understand the implications for their business model. Google built AdSense on two principles: First, their technology will deliver highly targeted ads which will increase CTR and thus the advertiser’s satisfaction & publisher’s revenue. Second, the network was double blind in that publishers don’t choose advertisers and advertiser’s don’t choose sites.

Now, placement targeting rolls out of beta and voila, Google is THE rep for every site that uses AdSense. Forget your salesperson’s relationship with an advertiser or the years of working together. When that advertiser realizes that they can buy advertising on your site and pay per click, instead of per impression - they are GONE! And, anyone who thinks that Google isn’t wickedly clever, hasn’t followed the story. Here is how you own the online ad space.

1. Roll out *cheap* targeted text ads that convert very well and deliver top-notch results. (AdWords)
2. Take those same cheap targeted text ads and 100,000’s of advertisers and expand beyond your domain. Now, everyone can share in your windfall, except that they don’t know their % share. (AdSense)
3. Expand the advertising creatives available to advertisers from text ads to banner ads to video ads (AdSense Image Ads and Click-to-Play Video Ads)
4. Get rid of the double-blind nature of your ad exchange and give access to 100,000’s of sites, as your technology serving as the easiest and most cost-effective way to buy advertising - severely undercutting the CPMs on the publishers’ rate card.

This is very much a game changer and it will be interesting to see which sites opt-out of site targeting or worse, opt-out of AdSense. There is no doubt that this makes Google’s platform much more compelling for advertisers, and less compelling for publishers. As an advertiser focused agency, we’re ecstatic, but we realize that the power of the Google platform is that we can reach great sites like CNN. It would be a shame if this development drove quality sites out of the network.

Facebook recently updated their “Flyers” advertising platform. Previously, it had been limited to targeting by location or school, and ad buys were handled on a CPM basis. I remember the joy of waxing nostalgic after seeing flyers for Syracuse keg parties 2 years after I’d graduated. Early on, these flyers were mostly used in the same way that a flyer posted on a residence hall bulletin board is used: to promote parties, concerts, and used junk for sale.

As Facebook continues to evolve beyond a college-centric social network, so has their Flyer service. While you are still able to use the old CPM-based system, the new Flyers Pro system allows you to bid on a much more advertiser-friendly CPC basis. Additionally, you are able to go beyond demographic targeting and target users based on the interests listed in their profiles. We’re currently testing Flyers Pro with a few of our clients, and are excited to see how it all works out.

With SEM, we often make the assumption that when someone is searching for something, they have a genuine interest in that thing, or from a marketing standpoint, an interest in making a purchase related to that thing. While this is a fairly strong assumtion to make, it’s not always accurate. A lot of searching is done strictly for the purpose of gathering information. With a social network like Facebook, users are opting to display things that they are genuinely interested in, or even better, things they want everyone to know that they’re genuinely intersted in. Allow me to elaborate, and you’ll get a taste of how my mind works:

A girl hears a song on The Hills, and absolutely loves it, so she types some of the lyrics into Google. Now she knows who sings it, but she doesn’t want everyone thinking she just found out about it tonight, right? So she logs in to Facebook, and puts the singer’s name in the Favorite Music section of her profile (don’t worry, she’s savvy enough to know to how to hide this story from her News Feed). Now as far as her friends are concerned, this girl has been a fan since day one. In your wildest dreams, could you imagine a better person to show an ad for that singer’s new CD to? With Facebook’s new Flyers Pro service, we are able to do just that.

The ability to target users based on these self-selected interests has the potential to be valuable asset to our clients. If you’re interested in working with us using Facebook Flyers Pro, or if you have any additional insight on the new platform, feel free to contact us.

Does anyone know if Google has agency discounts for US agencies? I know that they give a token promotional credit, but for an agency that manages a couple million dollars in advertising, that $100 promo coupon isn’t that exciting. The reason I ask is that they stopped doing it in Europe, and I wanted to double-check that they didn’t offer it in the US.

Yahoo! could start making some headway with an agency discount, I think that it would be a quick way to spur favor with agencies that don’t support them. Microsoft too. Currently, we don’t support Live because its hard to justify managing a 3rd-account to increase reach only marginally. You know what a game-changer would be? If Live launched a tool that grabbed your Google account, and recreated it perfectly in their system.

In any case, the article that spurred this is from a site called “SEM Report Card”, the story is here.

I have a major problem with Google playing high & mighty and scoring landing pages/sites and factoring that QualityScore into an advertiser’s minimum bid. Google has standardized the lion’s share of their advertising on a CPC-basis. The basic premise of a CPC pricing model is that an advertiser buys the visitor from Google, and are free to do with that visitor what they want.

I applaud Google for not allowing ads that link to pages with pop-ups, phishing sites, etc. They have certainly made the web a safer place to surf by imposing their limits. I was talking to a client about Google’s implied editorial endorsement. Your ad benefits from being in a box that says “Ads by Google”. Its a very easy way for Google to transfer some tiny bit of brand equity to your site. It says “Google has deemed your Ad good enough to run on our network”. Admit it, if Google opened a coffee shop or auto dealer in your town, it would immediately be the coolest lounge (for geeks) or the most fair car dealer. Everything Google touches turns to Gold.

However, with their post today on the AdWords blog, they are starting to show that its not about protecting their users (their “true north”), its about protecting their users for the right price. For me, this one line said it all “The following types of websites are likely to merit low landing page quality scores and may be difficult to advertise affordably”. You can still run your scams, you can’t just do it affordably. Or, read differently, we realize that your site is probably a scam, but we’ll still sell you a user if you pay us more.

If Google asked, and they have not, I would propose the following:

1. If you want to protect user experience, have a standard and stand by it. If its not good enough for Google, don’t run the ad, regardless of price. The user doesn’t know/care if Google charged $.10/click or $10.00/click.
2. If you are going to score websites, you should give them clear-cut guidelines on what you are looking for. If changes are made, allow them to see how that change affects their QualityScore either negatively or positively.
3. The min. bid could be high for a number of reasons, most are due to campaign set-up, structure, negative matching, ad text, etc. If those are the issue, fine. If its the landing page, alert us!
4. Come out with clear-cut details on how rich-media pages are scored. Is Flash positive for user-interaction? Is it a negative?

Would love to hear from other agencies out there - do you think that Google is being overreaching and under-informing?

There has been a lot of discussion lately about behavioral targeting and how it fits in to the targeting pantheon. Its an interesting discussion, because targeting is not the end goal, its using targeting to find people at the right time.

At Gupta Media, we use the term “Psychographic” targeting (new term under fierce discussion) for targeting users at the exact moment that they are thinking about a product. We see this online is during “search” activity, mostly on search engines, but it can manifest itself in different areas (i.e. reading white papers via a white paper syndication network like TechTarget). After psychographic targeting, we currently believe the next best targeting is “contextual” because if the content is relevant, their is an implication that the reader is interested in your product. A good example of this would be a person reading about running shoes, and Nike targeting them through contextual advertisements. They aren’t actively searching for Nike running shoes, but they are showing interest in running shoes. After contextual, we get into genre targeting (Nike running ads against gym ads, running trails, etc). Finally, the lowest form of targeting we use is demographic targeting (I call demographic targeting a “blunt” instrument). This is the most traditional form of advertising - Nike running ads that target men and women that are 18 -35 (or some other specific demographic segment).

So, the question becomes - where does “behavioral targeting” fit into this paradigm? Is it betweeen psychographic targeting and contextual targeting? If you watch users across sites, can you imply what they are thinking about ? Is it between genre & contextual, because contextual advertising has some definitely insight into a user’s current state of mind? Would love to know your thoughts.