Twitter receives more funding

Twitter received another round of funding which evaluates the service around $100 million. Jezz Bezos from Amazon was one of the leading funders. With a simple call to action of “what are you doing” Twitter has become quite popular as many different uses have been figured out. There is still no clear revenue model behind the platform, but several other online platforms figured it out later as well.

Most of the funding will hopefully go to making service regularly available as it struggles to match consumer demand and often crashes.

So for all the Twitter haters, looks like it has made its mark and is going to be around for awhile or at least until it’s bought.

Google AdPlanner revealed

Google revealed AdPlanner which they hope will sway more agency folk to the dark side and using their planning tools, which in return, brings Google even more data. It will be interesting to see if this is the in-road to offline media that Google has so desperately searched for. If they can bring the offline planning side along the online planning and provide analytics on the back-end, it would be hard pressed to say anything else would be better for close to 80% of companies. Obviously there will be some out there that will use other planning adn reporting tools, but if Google’s AdPlanner can directly tie into Analytics, that would be a sweet package.

Now agencies must be careful, as Google is looking more and more like the the agency killer as it makes the basics easier and easier for clients to do themselves. This will be an interesting move in the future of agency/client relationships and where “value” resides.

“Call me now” buttons back?

A long long time ago, many sites had a call me now feature that allowed users to request the company to call them. That was lost in the shuffle as sites focused on converting on the site and removing the need for a call center. However, as times are getting tough, some people still like the good old telephone. Especially when it is a high ticket item, they like the comfort of someones voice on the other end to answer any questions.

As long as you are not using an affiliate model where they will drop you like bad habits as soon as they see a phone number prominently placed with a large call to action, a “call me now button” might be a good test. The call must be as close to real time as possible as people have come to expect it, but it might close a sale that would not have happened, or worse, gone to your competitor because they answered the question online.

It’s not the holy grail for increasing conversion, but something worth testing again as others focus on fancy technology and flash. Let them play with exciting things that might help adn might not, and focus in on what consumers want, information the way THEY want it.

Google updates Google Trends

but still not transparent. Google has made some recent updates to their Trends platform, but has not reached full transparency. It’s going to be a baby-step process for them, because as of now, they have no real need to do it. People have to play by Google’s rules.

Microsoft on the other hand, allows much more transparency with their AdIntelligence tool. Google Trends works on a scale, so it is impossible to tell whether there are 500 searches or 5 million??

Google to launch “skip intro”

How many times have you looked for an address, hours of operation, or contact info and had to sit through a 90 second flash intro that treats you like a first timer? Guessing quite a few..

Google has launched a new option in the search results that allows users to click through avoiding the flash intro and be placed directly to the home page where they can navigate to the information that they were seeking.

A screen grab of the option can be seen here.

eBay media side bites the bullet

eBay’s media auction platform has been officially killed. The site simply read, “We have ended our pilot program in this market.” It’s no surprise as it received very little support from the cable industry and none from the broadcast side. With few media suppliers, media buyers could not rely on the model to buy media and had to look at picking up remnant or premium inventory somewhere else.

Oh well, an interesting idea to try and make eBay similar to ad networks that can sell remnant inventory for publishers.

Youtube to allow publishers to sell ads

All the news in the online world is revolving around the new iPhone announcement, but Youtube has some interesting news as well. The giant in the video space has had a hard time monetizing their site and content, and now are looking to publishers to help solve the problem. They are letting professional publishers who have a Youtube channel sell ads on their channel and share the revenue with Youtube.

This is a good step for advertisers, as they can buy advertising on certain channels, but is not the golden ticket to monetizing video that Google thought they could figure out when they purchased Youtube.

Anyways, back to the iPhone craze.

What is strategy? Mushy middle of objectives and tactics

Too many times lately I have heard the word “strategy and strategic” used and is seems like when it is used nothing is in common. I read a great post about what is strategy from the mediapost search insider and I think that is what made me cognisant of the use of the word.

Strategy gets caught in the mushy middle of objectives and tactics. Some people align the word with objectives or goals and some align the word with tactics and some conversations can mean two completely different things if you lean one way and others another.

Found a good simple explanation-

• objective=goal
• strategy=how to reach
• tactic=one specific method of implemented strategy

So a real word example is- the objective is to increase sales, the strategy is to use a multi-channel marketing campaign increasing awareness for new consumers, while the tactic is generating a buy one, get one program.

However, too many times the tactic listed above would be considered the strategy. And maybe it is a strategy, but it does not look at the whole picture of what the objective is, and often times, that is where the disconnect happens and strategic thinking breaks down. People focus on a tree and not the forrest.

 

Banner creative: Be careful

Dunkin’ Donuts decided to pull a recent display ad as there were several complaints about Rachel Ray’s black and white scarf. Complaints stated that it was a religious symbol supporting terrorism and Muslim extremism. Dunkin’ Donuts pulled the ad stating “the possibility of misperception detracted from its original intention to promote our iced coffee.”

One must be careful when we design creative units as this is a great example. A simple scarf in an ad, turns into a large debate over racism and terrorism. It’s no longer symbols and colors, as simple clothing accessories can cause quite a stir in the media world.

Google to host Ajax libraries

Google announced today that they will allow sites to download five common Ajax libraries (Dojo, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Mootools, and jQuery). Privacy is obviously an issue here as Google could track visitors across non-Google sites. This will help with speed if several sites adopt the usage of the library, but only time will tell if webmasters adopt.

The real question if Google is using this as a means to get more visitor data that they can use to make more money on ad revenue. My vote is yes! They are offering the service for “convenience” but it’s really a way to collect data on more sites outside the Google network.