Posts Tagged ‘Yahoo’
Éste es un artículo por Michael Learmonth @ adage.com
It will be at least nine months and probably closer to a year before Microsoft takes over Yahoo’s search infrastructure, theoretically consolidating 28% of the U.S. search market and mounting the first credible challenge on Google in a decade.
But it’s not too early for marketers to wonder if they need to ask: Do we, uh, speak Bing?
One thing is certain: figuring that out is going to amount to a mini stimulus package for digital agencies and search-engine-optimization consultants in the first half of 2010.
Turning up on the first page of organic search results when someone types your product or brand into a keyword box is pretty much the cost of entry for any substantial e-commerce entity or marketer. And for the past decade or so that’s meant pretty much one thing: optimize your site for Google, maybe a tweak or two for Yahoo, and everything else, well, didn’t matter all that much.
«If you were well-optimized for Google, you were pretty much set, because it means you were well-optimized for everyone else out there,» said John Ragals, chief operating officer of digital agency 360i. «The gap wasn’t significant enough to warrant the extra investment.»
But Bing is quite a bit different from Google and Yahoo, both in the way it ranks pages and the way it presents results on the page. And if search becomes more of a two-player market, it could mean a return to the late ’90s, when it was common for marketers to create separate pages optimized for Yahoo, Google, Lycos and AltaVista, and as they do now for the iPhone or other mobile devices.
«You’d effectively have two pages, one for Google and one for Bing,» said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com. If all goes according to plan, Yahoo will make the switch to Bing’s organic search results in the third quarter of next year, and then fold in Bing’s paid search results soon after.
«We’ve been getting a lot of questions from clients about the differences,» said Craig McDonald, chief marketing officer of digital agency Covario. «This will have an impact in the first half of next year.»
Shooting for the top five
The big challenge for marketers will be to figure out how to land among the top five spots on both search engines. That is particularly true for Bing, which often shows only five organic results on its first page — after which it groups results into categories. Position six on Google may mean users have to scroll down to see the result; on Bing users have to click to the second page.
«If you are not coming up in the top five [search results] for the very generic terms, you are not getting page-one exposure, which means you are losing out on 70% to 80% of searchers,» said Collin Cornwell, VP of natural search at iCrossing.
That’s a tough challenge for marketers, given that one of the top spots is generally dominated by Wikipedia, leaving really only four slots to make an impression. Or consider the plight of a movie marketer optimizing a film’s lead actor: the top three results are dominated by IMDb, Wikipedia and the actor’s «official» site — leaving only two available.
The upside of having results categorized is there’s an opportunity for aggressive marketers to have more than one listing on a page for non-branded queries — not including whatever paid keyword listings the marketer may or may not be buying. For example, a search for «heart rate monitor» might pull up the website of manufacturer Polar USA in the first five organic search results and it might also pull up, under the video category, a Polar demo of how to use a heart rate monitor.
Bing also offers different placements for photos and video, which means opportunities for marketers that produce both.
Still tweaking algorithm
Fundamentally, Google’s algorithms give more weight to inbound links, while Bing focuses more on the content or the keywords contained on pages. That said, Microsoft is still tweaking Bing, so any strategy formed today might have to change when the integration with Yahoo takes place. And all of this will get shaken up if and when both engines make real-time search of, say, Twitter or Facebook updates part of their strategies.
How much to invest in Bing is a calculation marketers will make this fall as they plan website development and put together budgets for 2010. While each has its own goals and search strategies, if Bing/Yahoo can retain 25% share, it will be too big for most marketers to ignore. And with apologies to Ask.com and others, it will be the first time in years that marketers will be able to optimize for two players and get virtually 100% of the search market.
«You gauge the amount of effort and investment based on its potential return,» said Gregory Markel, CEO of digital-marketing firm Infuse Creative. «If you are killing it on Google and there is room to grow, or if Twitter is delivering traffic to you, you would maximize them first. But if you wake up one morning and Bing has 30% market share, then that’s a different conversation.»
Éste es un artículo por Stephanie Clifford @ The New York Times
In an effort to fend off federal regulation, major trade groups in the ad vertising industry have announced stricter guidelines on how their members use and collect online data.
In a report to be released Thursday, a consortium of the trade groups intends to address a growing concern in Washington and among consumer advocates that people are being tracked too much online, with information about their Web surfing, shopping habits and overall interests being collected for advertising purposes.
Congress held hearings on the subject in June, asking executives from Facebook, Google and Yahoo to testify, and the Federal Trade Commission issued a report in February that urged updated principles for self-regulation. All along, most advertisers, agencies and publishers have been arguing that they can keep an eye on their own practices, and don’t need government intervention.
The jump in interest from Washington hastened the report’s release, said Stuart P. Ingis, a partner at the Venable law firm and a lawyer for the trade groups.
“We believe that self-regulation, historically, it’s proven to be far more dynamic and flexible in this area,” Mr. Ingis said. “Legislation is a pretty blunt instrument and we hope, legislation or not, these are the right standards.”
The report, “Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising,” reflects several of the commission’s suggestions from February. The principles are meant to go into effect in 2010, affecting the more than 5,000 companies that belong to the sponsoring organizations, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Disney and Verizon.
In one big change, the report instructs members to provide notice, either in an ad or on a Web site (rather than hidden in the privacy policy), that behavioral information is being collected.
“For years, consumer groups, and most recently the F.T.C. and people on the Hill, had been calling for transparency at the time of collection” of data, Mr. Ingis said. “So for the first time — we think it’s a monumental shift — there will be transparency provided across the ecosystem.”
Mr. Ingis said the exact form of the notice had not been decided on — it could be a link that says “Why did I get this?” or “interest-based advertising,” meaning information on advertising based on Web visits and behaviors, he said. “All that is to be determined following the rollout of the principles,” he said. “The requirement is that it be clear, meaningfully prominent and uniform.”
The report also suggests an enforcement process, so that competitors or consumers can bring complaints if a company violates the principles. “Programs will also, at a minimum, publicly report instances of noncompliance and refer entities that do not correct violations to the appropriate government agencies,” the report says.
It also says consumers must approve the collection of “sensitive data” — mostly on finances or health.
Some privacy advocates have been pushing for more stringent rules, saying, for instance, that consumers must explicitly approve all data collection.
Mr. Ingis said that was not feasible.
“If you had that as a default, you would wind up undercutting significantly the economic underpinnings for all the stuff the public loves,” he said. “The way, operationally, that would work is every time a consumer’s doing their Web surfing, you’d be requiring them to click through all these options. Consumers would hate that.”
Another issue privacy watchdogs have raised is that consumers have no access to the data being collected about them — it is all done behind the scenes.
Giving consumers access to the data is “an interesting concept,” Mr. Ingis said, noting that what the companies collect shows up as “a bunch of ones and zeros.”
“The data is in computer wording, programming speak, and to the consumer would mean nothing,” he said.
(A handful of online companies, including Google, have translated the data, however, and have said they will give consumers access.)
“Of course they can give the profile information, the profile information can be translated,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy advocacy group, when asked about Mr. Ingis’s statement. “People need to have access to their entire profile, and this is a thinly veiled excuse so that the companies can retain the data without giving consumers control over their information.”
The announcement of the report includes an advertising campaign to publicize the new standards. Members of the consortium include the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers (which represents companies that advertise, like McDonald’s or General Electric) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Their members have pledged 500 million impressions, or views by readers, over the next year and a half to promote the changes.
“I am gratified that a group of influential associations — representing a significant component of the Internet community — has responded to so many of the privacy concerns raised by my colleagues and myself,” Pamela Jones Harbour, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, said in a statement. The report has “the potential to dramatically advance the cause of consumer privacy,” she said.
Charles H. Kennedy, a lawyer at Morrison & Foerster who focuses on communications and advertising and did not work on the report, gives it a mixed review.
“These principles are especially strong in the area of notice or transparency,” Mr. Kennedy said. “It’s a little less clear, I think, on consent and how it’s going to be obtained and what it’s going to consist of.”
He said that although the Federal Trade Commission seemed to be increasing its enforcement in the online-marketing world — last month, it settled with Sears over charges that its marketing software did not disclose all the information it collected — he expected self-regulation would win out.
“What we will see at minimum is the F.T.C. will continue to bring individual enforcement actions, like the one they brought against Sears, that will be intended to signal to industry the kind of practices the agency wants to see,” he said. “It’s sort of an informal way of making rules without making rules.”
He added, “I think self-regulation ultimately is going to be the solution, and this is a big step in the right direction.”
Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise.
Posted on: 1 junio 2009
Éste es un artículo por Stephanie Clifford @ nytimes.com
ON a recent Thursday, Darren Herman, the president of Varick Media Management, was sequestered in his SoHo office. He wasn’t scrutinizing a television ad or images from a photo shoot. He was combing through graphs and Excel spreadsheets.
Mr. Herman had run 27 ads on the Web for his client Vespa, the scooter company. Some were rectangular, some square. And the text varied: One tagline said, “Smart looks. Smarter purchase,” and displayed a $0 down, 0 percent interest offer. Another read, “Pure fun. And function,” and promoted a free T-shirt.
Vespa’s goal was to find out whether a financial offer would attract customers, and Mr. Herman’s data concluded that it did. The $0 down offer attracted 71 percent more responses from one group of Web surfers than the average of all the Vespa ads, while the T-shirt offer drew 29 percent fewer. And Mr. Herman didn’t just compare the messages in the ads — he also looked at the sites where they ran, when they ran and what groups of people responded.
From the “Mad Men” era until now, advertising has been about a catchy tagline, an arresting image, the Big Idea. But Mr. Herman and his competitors are bringing some Wall Street-like analysis to Madison Avenue, exploiting the huge amounts of data produced by the Internet to adjust strategy almost instantly.
“It’s putting numbers to an industry that never had numbers before,” says Mr. Herman, 27, who started and sold three media and technology companies before founding Varick last summer. “It’s nice to be able to tell your brand manager or the chief marketing officer which audience is interacting with the unit, what time of day, what day of the week, and what the response is on certain types of offers. Before, nobody could really tell you that.”
This approach turns marketing “upside down,” says Ron Proleika, the vice president of marketing communications at Windstream Communications, an Internet service provider and a client of Mr. Herman’s. “It forces marketers to stay on their toes and think of thousands of small great ideas instead of one great big one.»
Major advertising holding companies like WPP, the Publicis Groupe, Havas, MDC Partners and the Interpublic Group are starting data practices, hoping to latch onto what is expected to be the fastest-growing category of online advertising in the next five years.
Where the data guys were once an afterthought in a marketing presentation, now they are at the core of the online strategy. What’s more, they can help advertisers save money in traditional media by testing different phrases or images online to see what works before producing an expensive television commercial or magazine ad. Who attracts more clicks in a grape juice ad, for example — the blond girl or the brown-haired boy?
The shift to data-based campaigns is forcing marketers to learn new skills and drawing a new breed of worker to Madison Avenue. While most data executives now in the field came from media backgrounds, they are recruiting Wall Street math geniuses because the job requires hourly adjustments in strategy based on numbers.
Mr. Herman is trying to hire people from Citigroup and Bank of America, and he hopes that the layoffs in the financial industry will help him do it on the cheap.
“It mirrors the financial markets in many ways,” he says, so “that’s where we go.»
Still, getting advertising agency employees to rely on data is difficult, agencies say. And as people trained on Wall Street migrate to Madison Avenue, executives anticipate battles between creative types and wonks.
Traditional ad agencies still don’t have budgets that allow for a lot of digital experimentation, Mr. Herman says. He notes that most traditional agencies “make the bulk of their money in print, radio and television.”
So even as this area becomes increasingly technology-driven, old ways of doing business and clients reluctant to embrace radically new approaches mean that the advertising culture won’t change overnight.
“At the end of the day,” Mr. Herman says, “the entire process isn’t digital because our clients aren’t.”
Until the Internet, advertising required heavy research at the front and back ends. Millions of dollars went into television and print ads, so the advertisers had to get the idea right before they produced one. Determining the effectiveness of those ads was hard. It required follow-up surveys and interviews. And once advertisers began a campaign, they were locked into it — they usually booked TV spots four months before the season began, for instance, and even if a show tanked, they couldn’t always abort their plans.
“In the olden days, the consequences of planning were great, so we’d spend nine months before air date” doing research, says Barry Lowenthal, the president of the Media Kitchen, a media planning and buying company that, like Varick, is a unit of MDC Partners. “Then, nine months after we’d been running the ad, we’d finally figure out whether it was working or not.”
Online, though, advertisers get instant measurements and can make instant changes to a media plan.
Varick and its handful of competitors cement their strategies around a system called exchanges, a mechanism that helps online publishers like NBC.com or Yahoo.com sell ad space. While publishers have some ad space no company would bid on in advance — few advertisers would book a random Yahoo mail page, for instance — publishers still want to show an ad when someone loads that page. So the publishers let an ad exchange like Right Media, from Yahoo, or DoubleClick Advertising Exchange, from Google, sell that space instantly, through an electronic auction, and get a cut of sales.
Such random, seemingly unwanted space could be virtually worthless. But because ad agencies can now use multiple sources to gather very specific demographic data about visitors, such space gains value and can be brokered on an exchange.
Among the sources agencies rely on for data-mining is information gathered from other sites. Imagine that every time someone entered a store while shopping, she received a stamp on her hand. By the time she got to Macy’s, the clerk could see she had visited Williams-Sonoma and Home Depot and could direct her to housewares. A similar principle is followed online.
When someone visits a site like Expedia or Autobytel.com, that site captures valuable information: Someone is a first-class traveler, for instance, or shopping for a hybrid car. Those sites have deals with data companies, like BlueKai and eXelate, to place a so-called cookie — a small text file — on that visitor’s hard drive, indicating those preferences. An advertiser like Varick bids on those cookies, instructing an exchange that it will pay a certain amount for an ad when a certain cookie is for sale.
Other companies, like Media6Degrees and 33Across, analyze the world of social media, using cookies and interaction data to find “lookalike” groups among friends on Facebook, Flickr or other social sites. Their theory is that friends share values and are likely to respond to similar marketing messages.
Finally, companies can add cookies for anyone who visits pages on their sites — if someone gets to the checkout page, then abandons his shopping cart, the company will probably pay lots of money to advertise to him again.
This combination — real-time data and ad exchanges — has monetized what was once considered throwaway space online. ThinkEquity, a research firm, estimated that advertising based around Web publishers’ extra space brought in $4.1 billion in 2008, up 32 percent from 2007, and it expects it to be the highest-growth segment of the online advertising market between now and 2013, outpacing even search. (It is still a small part, however, of what ZenithOptimedia, a media agency, estimates to be the overall $487 billion advertising market.)
All this tracking has raised privacy concerns. Some privacy advocates have asked Congress and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the issue, seeking clear policies about sensitive data, more information on the way companies are tracking consumers and options for consumers to avoid online tracking.
So far, the commission has recommended that the industry police itself. But Jon Leibowitz, one of the commissioners, warned in February that the industry needed to do a better job or face new laws and regulations.
Without much regulation, says Michael Brunick, vice president and media technology director for Cadreon, a competitor of Varick’s, “the data game right now is a little bit of the Wild West.”
WITH so much information to trade on, several advertising firms are creating their own data-based practices.
“We have, over the last year or so, gotten more and more interested in the ways that you can use data to make advertising more effective online,” says Matt Greitzer, the vice president of search marketing and auction-based media at Razorfish, which is building its exchange group.
In addition to what an ad should say, and where and when it should run, advertisers have to figure out how much each ad, or “impression,” is worth. The data helps them do that. “You’re making, in some cases, real-time decisions about how much to pay for a specific impression,” Mr. Greitzer says.
In a simple example, if an advertiser knew that his ads attracted more clicks on profiles.yahoo.com than on movies.yahoo.com, he would pay more when space was auctioned for the first site.
Edward Montes, the managing director for North America at Havas Digital, who oversees its exchange group, says that his data analysts are “basically looking for anything that affects performance — any time they find variance in the matter of how the media performs, that’s what they go in and exploit, and that’s what the exchanges are perfectly set up to do.”
As data executives continue to build on their research, this arena could resemble Wall Street even more: yield managers could hedge their purchases, buy futures to lock in prices and use other trading strategies. And this type of sophisticated testing and trading will require changes in clients’ attitudes.
Mediabrands, a unit of the Interpublic Group, has been quietly running a data practice called Cadreon for nine months that it soon plans to roll out more publicly. In addition to buying standard Web site ad space, Cadreon also buys mobile advertising, online video slots and, soon, spots on digital billboards and other new media.
Traditionally, marketers allocate certain amounts of money for each medium. Quentin George, the interim chief executive of Cadreon and the chief digital officer of Mediabrands, says Cadreon instead would base its strategy on the audience, not the medium.
For a campaign it’s now running for a technology client, Cadreon bought data on visitors to Web sites of the client’s competitors. It divided them into groups that its client already used to segment existing customers offline — like new parents, gamers or designers.
By examining clicks and other data, Cadreon determined the demographic profile of groups that were most interested in the ads. In this particular campaign, new parents responded at high rates so Cadreon emphasized pitching ads online to that group.
As more ads are bought and sold through exchanges, it could transform the ad marketplace. “It is foreseeable that you can go into the system, select an audience and not know whether you are ultimately buying” a cellphone ad or a video ad on a Web site like Hulu, Mr. George says. “That’s a very, very big change.”
Éste es un artículo por Georgina Prodhan @ reuters.com
Silicon Valley venture capital firm DAG Ventures has joined the backers of online advertising startup OpenX, leading a series C funding round of $10 million that takes total investment in the company to $31 million.
OpenX is an independent competitor to advertising services offered by Google (GOOG.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O), Yahoo (YHOO.O) and Time Warner’s (TWX.N) AOL. It is run by industry veteran and former head of Yahoo’s search business, Tim Cadogan.
The company said on Tuesday it would use some of the new funding to accelerate development of an online ad marketplace it launched last month that is designed to make it easier for smaller Web publishers and advertisers to find each other.
Advertisers are faced with an explosion in the number of Websites run by small publishers, some of whom have valuable niche audiences, while the publishers often find it hard to get the best value from ad platforms run by the likes of Google.
Cadogan said OpenX, whose more than 300 billion ad impressions per month put it in the same league as Google’s DoubleClick in terms of volume, would now be able to explore other forms of online advertising, such as video and mobile.
«We increasingly see a range of opportunities – new markets, related markets, new product lines that we could get into,» he told Reuters by telephone from OpenX’s headquarters in California. The company also has offices in London and Poland.
Publishers are increasingly turning to Internet advertising as they chase dwindling audiences for their print products, who are racing online. Some, like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (NWSA.O), are considering charging consumers for online content.
Cadogan said he believed those publishers who could survive the next year or two would have many more possibilities to make money out of their online offers than they currently do.
«I think we’re on the cusp of a renaissance in online advertising outside of search,» he said.
«The next year is definitely tough, but I do think within the next one to two years you’re going to see a new level of quality, value, and consumer value of ads.»
Existing investors in OpenX — Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital, First Round Capital and company Chairman Jonathan Miller — also participated in the latest funding round.
Miller has recently been appointed News Corp’s new digital media chief.
Éste es un artículo @ baquia.com
Microsoft dará a conocer esta semana Bing (antes conocido como Kumo), su nueva tecnología de búsqueda con la que pretende hacer frente a Google y Yahoo! en este sector, y aumentar sus ingresos en el mercado de anuncios relacionados.
Microsoft está a punto de mostrar al mundo su última apuesta para hacer frente a Google y (en menor medida) Yahoo! en el terreno de los buscadores. Será esta semana durante el congreso All Things Digital, que se celebrará en California, cuando se presente Bing, que sustituye el nombre en clave con que se conocía el proyecto hasta ahora, Kumo.
Steve Ballmer, CEO de Microsoft, será uno de los conferenciantes, y probablemente el encargado de presentar en sociedad a Bing.lo más probable es que esta semana se haga una demostración del funcionamiento del producto, que no estará plenamente operativo para el público hasta comienzos de junio.
Hace tiempo que se sabe que Microsoft está desarrollando una nueva tecnología de búsqueda, con la que pretende hacer frente al poderío de Google en este sector, que acapara el 64% de las consultas en buscadores en EEUU (un porcentaje aún mayor en Europa) y Yahoo! (20%), frente apenas el 8% de la red de servicios de MSN.
Lógicamente, detrás de ese interés está el reparto del mercado de publicidad en anuncios relacionados, ampliamente dominado por Google con su programa Adwords.
El lanzamiento de Kumo irá acompañado de una masiva campaña publicitaria en Internet, TV, radio y prensa, en la que Microsoft invertirá entre 80 y 100 millones de dólares, una cantidad enorme si se compara con los 50 millones que se suelen destinar a una campaña de alcance nacional, o a los 25 millones que Google se gastó en todo 2008 en publicidad.
Tal y como explica Adage, la campaña no mencionará expresamente a sus rivales en le sector de las búsquedas, sino que hará hincapié en la idea de que los buscadores no funcionan con la precisión que los usuarios desean, y no terminan de resolver sus problemas. Microsoft pondrá el énfasis en esta idea para intentar convencer a los internautas de que se pasen a su herramienta de búsqueda.
Por lo que se refiere a las prestaciones que se esperan de Bing, una de las novedades que introducirá será la de agrupar los resultados en categorías, para así facilitar la presentación de resultados y acortar el número de clics hasta dar con la información relevante.
Por ejemplo, si buscamos un modelo concreto de coche, Bing mostrará los resultados se mostrarán separados en concesionarios donde se vende el vehículo, componentes, ofertas de segunda mano, foros de discusión o vídeos.
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