As someone who works in search marketing a little, I usually completely ignore advertisements on the Internet.  However, while using my Yahoo! e-mail account yesterday, I noticed a rather interesting ad for the new CBS show Viva Laughlin (the network's apparent answer to NBC's Las Vegas…).

Beyond its normal animation that catches the eye, the ad gave me the ability to add the show times of the show's entire first season to my Yahoo! calendar with a button at the very bottom, which means that I can set up reminders of each episode. 

I don't know how long Yahoo! or other sites have offered such options to their users and advertisers, but who wouldn't want such a robust feature?

Appointment viewing — with reminders – is a network executive's dream.

I must admit that at first this adding the show schedule to my calendar gimmick struck me as slightly vexing.  However, I probably would've loved to have this option for one of my favorite TV shows — Alias. 

What are some of the most robust features of Internet ads you have seen?

Update (October 29, 2007): CBS canceled the show after two episodes and four days since its premier.  However, that doesn't mean that these Yahoo! ads aren't interesting.

Many people are buzzing about how snazzy 2008 presidential campaign sites are with their slick designs, multimedia content, and social networking tools, but how many campaigns are taking advantage of Internet text ads?

Awhile ago I took a snapshot at who are buying Google text ads for searches for both democrats and republicans presidential candidates and found that only Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Barack Obama bought ads for these searches.  Wired has taken a broader look at presidential campaign text ads in an article today. 

Sarah Lai Stirland reports that only the McCain and Mitt Romney campaigns are buying ads for issue and news searches. 

Text ads are incredibly useful since they are much cheaper than other forms of advertising, and since they're based on what people actually search for, organizations that use these ads can target their advertising dollars towards people they can better identify as a likely customer, voter, etc.

Richard Ball, founder of Baltimore based search engine marketing firm Apogee Web Consulting, blogged and was subsequently quoted by Wired that: 

For less than the cost of postage, a presidential candidate could have acquired a visitor to their election campaign website. How much would a direct-mail advertising campaign have cost to acquire 1,820 visitors to their site? How much would a radio or TV or print-ad campaign have cost to generate that much interest?

Stirland's article concludes with the fact that the vast majority of presidential campaigns have ignored Internet text ads and are likely missing out on a great campaign resource.  She also quotes Eric Frenchman, political Internet marketing strategist at Connell Donatelli in Washington, D.C, as saying that since people are interested in news and issues candidates should advertise on keywords that they take clear, strong stances on in hopes of luring people to their web sites.  Frenchman is a good guy to talk to since Connell Donatelli is managing McCain's on-line advertising.

As people wonder how political campaigns — perhaps even the candidates themselves — will further embrace social media tools like using videos and social networks to better connect with individuals in upcoming elections, maybe they'll also use text ads more to connect with a broader, yet targeted, crowd.

The Bivings Group's Fred Thompson Disclosure

For me the highlight of the Personal Democracy Forum was seeing Seth Godin speak in person. You can check out the video of his presentation below. If you haven’t heard Godin before, take the 15 minutes and watch it.

Click To Play

You can see other videos from the conference here.

I took a look at who is buying Google text ads for searches for Democratic contenders in the 2008 presidential election.  Let's now look at the Republicans.

Read below for the ads that I found.  Here's a few general trends I found: (more…)

You know those text ads on the right hand side of Google search result pages?  I wonder who is trying to cash in the 2008 US Presidential race.  Back in February Michael Bassik over at techPresident did an investigation into which 2008 Presidential candidates had purchased text-ads.  I've decided to take a brief look at any site buying ads for searches for candidate names.

Let's see who is trying to cash in on the Democrats.  Click here for the Republicans.

Read below for the ads that I found, but here's a few general trends I found: (more…)

Over the years I’ve signed up for every online political mailing list known to man as part of my job, so it was no surprise that I got an email this morning from the Brownback campaign about his candidacy for President. But I was surprised at how poorly executed the email was.

Here is a rundown of the major issues:

(1) The “from” address of the email is brownbackforPresident@cfourstrategies.com. I have no idea what cfourstrategies.com is and half of me now thinks the email is fake. When sending this sort of official correspondence, it has to come from an email address running off the official campaign URL - brownback.com in this case. Otherwise I’m going to assume it is a scam.

(2) The request for money calls in the email link to this page, which also isn’t on brownback.com. In and of itself, that is ok. Lots of campaigns host their donation pages on third party sites. But when the email doesn’t come from the official campaign URL, alarm bells go off again. The suspicion is made worse by the fact that nowhere in the entire email is there a link to the main campaign website. That is a pretty shocking omission. And the donation form itself only has a link to the Brownback site at the very bottom of the page. At worst, this is making me think this email is fake again. At best, I’m thinking this is a campaign solely focused on getting my money (no conversation here).

(3) When you actually do visit brownback.com, you are redirected to some long URl hosted off the domain t-worx.com. The resulting site looks official, but I half think it is a fake too since it is not running from the main campaign URL - brownback.com.

When you combine all these problems together, you end up with an email/web program that seems more like a Paypal scam than official campaign correspondence.

The Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled, “Is It News…or Is It an Ad? ” yesterday about the appearance of in-text ads on major news sites.  In-text ads appear as an underlined key word or phrase within an actual article.  If a user mouses-over it, an advertisement related to that phrase appears as a layer above the content, obscuring part of the text temporarily.

The article spends some time discussing the ethical concerns about tying advertising so closely to content and how this blurs the separation between editorial / news and advertising. Perhaps a more important point, one that was also included in the article, is that the contextual targeting of such advertisements can be way off the mark.

I personally think that the ethical dilemma is nearly moot regarding such ads.  The problem of contextual correctness is a potentially larger barrier to their success and a greater threat to personal sensitivities.  If an ad for, say, Viagra, appeared in an article about the Korean nuclear crisis in a sentence that reads, “DPRK’s impotent missile program has yet to produce an ICBM capable of reaching the mainland US” I think that neither Pfizer nor the readers of the article would appreciate it.

In my opinion, solving the context problem, which will occur eventually as natural language processing improves, will make in-text ads one of the most effective formats for advertisers and add value for consumers by placing the right product and information in front of them at the right time, and in the right place.

A $500 million to $1 billion problem, depending on whom you ask.

In a front page article in The Washington Post, 'Click Fraud' Threatens Foundation of Web Ad, staff writer Sara Kehaulani Goo discusses the mechanics of click fraud, the new forms of click fraud — the fast growing "pay to read" and "pay to click" rings of individuals and companies around the world — and the new lawsuit against Google.

 Some figures from the article worth filing away:

• Google and Yahoo own 70% of all web searches in the  U.S.
• About 40 percent of all Internet ads are clickable text ads (the advertiser only pays when the ad is clicked on)
• Thirty-nine percent, or $1.04 billion, of Google's 3rd quarter revenues derived from affliate networks, website that allow Google text ads
• Click fraud hurts mortgage, insurance, real estate, legal and travel businesses the most

Yankee Group estimates that fraud is involved in 10% of clicks on text ads, or a $500 million problem.  Others estimate the problem is even worse, perhaps as bad as $1 billion — affecting 12 to 30 percent of all text ad clicks.  Google claims the problem is less that 10 percent.

Yankee Group argues that without more agressive measures to validate ad clicks, "fraud could undermine the the entire business model of Internet search engines by causing advertisers to lose confidence."

So it looks like there is yet another Wal-Mart/Edelman blog controversy.  The gist of the story is that a blog  launched in late September that was supposedly written by a couple traveling across America in an RV and spending nights parked in Wal-Mart lots.  It turned out the blog was paid for by a Wal-Mart funded group and one of the blog's authors is a Washington Post photographer.  None of this information was disclosed on the blog.  You can read commentary on the issue here, here, here and here. 

I think we are going to see lots more misteps like this in the coming months and years.  Lots of companies and organizations are starting to cautiously participate in the blogosphere without really understanding it.  Many are participating using an old school PR/advertising mindset.  Meaning they are trying to manipulate people instead of trying to talk to them.

Note the blog is no longer active and older posts have been removed.

Update: Richard Edelman and Steve Rubel from Wal-Mart's PR firm, Edelman Public Relations, have dived on their swords for the lack of transparency in the Wal-Mart campaign and issued mea culpas.   It was the right move.

But I think it is important to point out that this program was a bad idea even if Wal-Mart was completely transparent about the payment of the bloggers.  The whole RV tour idea just strikes me as old fashioned and, well, boring.  I don't think the point here is to bring the same tired old ideas to a new medium. 

With the rise of blogging has come blogger relations: the efforts of PR and marketing types to get bloggers, some influential with large audiences, some obscure with niche ones, and everyone else in between, to write about their companies and clients' products.

In many ways there's nothing new to this development.  PR types have always worked, basically their bread and butter, to get print, radio and TV reporters to write about and promote their clients' products.  Reporters from the national newspapers to the city dailies get hit with press releases, product samples, and phone calls.  Getting a favorable story by Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal can launch a new tech product.  A bad review can do the opposite.

And the better PR pros get to know key reporters very well, and know how reporters work and are able to make the reporter's job easier.  But no money changes hands.  There may be lunches, speaking engagements and other honoraria, but no payments.

But now it seems that PR types and marketers are paying bloggers to write favoarble stories about client products.  There's a story(not yet online) in the November issues of Smart Money called "Bloggers" by Anne Kadet highlighting this new (perhaps not, alas) and sordid trend.  There's even a company called PayPerPost.com that as its name implies pays blogger for posts.  Seems about as reputable as paying individuals and companies to fradulently click on search engine ads.  (Yes, this is a real problem.)

Here's my favorite quote from the story: Noramn Miglietta from Turner Sports interactive says that

"paying bloggers to mention an event is no different that buying an ad." 'If it's informative and not misleading, I don't see that as a conflict.'"

Yeah, right. Ask him for a mention or buy an advertisement.  Otherwise the blogger is a paid shill and is being dishonest if he doesn't disclose the 'sponsorship'.  If this goes unchecked bloggers run the risk of being viewed as the social media's equivalent of junk mail and spam.   Caveat Lector. 

Anyone conducting keyword ad campaigns on sites like Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Engine Marketing should check out these two recent articles on click fraud:

• Click Fraud is Growing on the Web - New York Times
• Click Fraud: The Dark Side of Online Advertising - Business Week

Via Rough Type and Micro Persuasion.

According to a recent article in Online Media Daily, DoubleClick has introduced a new ad serving platform that integrates ads directly into Flash-based websites.  The new system enables the ad to interact directly with the content, coordinating the rich media elements of the ads with the rest of the content so that they are not competing with one another for attention.

The platform, which is called DART Motif for Flash-in-Flash, has been in beta since January, running with four DoubleClick clients, including iVillage and Napster.  The system represents a slightly new direction as previous products focused on pages created within an HTML environment.

Here are some quick takes on a few items I’ve come across in the news the last few days:

(1) The average online news story receives half of its page views within the first 36 hours of being posted, according to a new study by the University of Notre Dame. I think this short lifespan is a result of many stories being disposable by nature - they simply aren’t relevant after the first day or two. I think it also has a bit to do with the nature of newspaper websites, which rarely organize archived content in a logical way (using tagging as an example) and have atrocious search engines that make it impossible to easily find old content.

(2) There is a shortage of quality venues on which to advertise online, according to a report McKinsey & Company. Rough Type has a good summary of the report. The results of this study jibes completely with what I’ve found working on advertising plans. Lots of growing sites attracting a lot of page views (like MySpace as an example) simply aren’t a good advertising fit for many clients. And much of the space that is available on high quality sites is junk. Do people really think that a 120*90 banner ad buried at the bottom of the homepage of a site like the New York Times is worth the effort and money?

(3) Political consulting rock stars Joe Lockhat, Carter Eskew, Mathew Dowd and Mark McKinnon are developing a new, bi-partisan social networking site called Hotsoup.com. The idea here is to improve the political discourse online by providing a venue where rationale folks can have reasoned, less charged discussions about the issues of the day. Sounds great in theory, but it’s not going to work. Why? First, I have no idea how they plan on keeping the partisan flame throwers out of the mix. Seems impossible. These folks are committed. Second, if they do keep the partisans out, isn’t the site going to be dreadfully boring to most people? Seems to me that Americans have pretty much spoken on this issue and, for better of worse, they like their political sites partisan and highly charged. Kung Fu Quip has a good breakdown on the problems with this concept.

Those polling maniacs over at Rasmussen Reports released a study today that claims that 69% of Americans still have a positive opinion of Wal-Mart, while 29% do not like the superstore. The report revealed the following:

• Americans who are in the lower or middle income brackets are more likely to have a positive opinion of Wal-Mart than those in the upper income bracket.

• Of the 25% of Americans who claim they rarely or never shop at Wal-mart, 35% percent think positively of Wal-Mart.

• Those surveyed say that if given a chance to shop at either Wal-Mart, Target or K-Mart, 48% would prefer to shop at Wal-Mart, 30% would go to Target and only 9% would go to K-Mart.

I’m curious to see if there’s a difference in category. For instance, if someone was asked if they would prefer to buy clothes from Wal-Mart, Target or K-Mart, would they still choose Wal-Mart? Or, if they were given the chance to have a shopping spree at either Wal-Mart, Target or K-Mart, would they still pick Wal-Mart?

So now that we’ve all agreed that The World is Flat and also that we’re a nation of people drowning in debt, Boston Consulting Group senior consultant Michael Silverstein has a new theory for us: Middle class consumers are on an eternal treasure hunt, looking for an emotional connection to our purchases, from mac and cheese to the kinds of pens we write with. So how does all of this effect the way marketers, advertisers and PR people communicate to consumers? Silverstein says this, “If your offering isn’t exciting enough to inspire trading up, but not enough of a bargain to satisfy the treasure hunters, you’ll have no emotional connection with your target audience.” (Keep in mind, this book focuses strictly on the consumer goods category.)

Having seen various “strategy” forms (these are forms that make a PR person answer, in short form, what their goal or vision is regarding messaging and product positioning. For instance, a public relations team member might write something like, “We want consumers to think of Sprinter’s Flavored Beverage as a way to live a healthier lifestyle.” Unfortunately, that’s generally the bulk of it sometimes. They build their powerpoint slides around that pithy wish list.), there is a noticeable lack of actual, thought out market research or connection to the consumer in these hollow, easily replicated messages. Somehow, many PR firms without research arms, think that market research isn’t necessary, outside of skimming through a few articles here and there. (more…)