Today I decided to take a look at the MSN.ca portal as I was looking for reviews of Glee, the new show I watched last night about a Glee club made up of misfits, trying to be cool in modern day America. Yes the show was entertaining, but that’s not the point of this post. When I got to the page reviewing the show on …
Microsoft may not be making any upfront payment to Yahoo, but it will be paying heavily on the back-end to make the transition to powering Yahoo’s search engine. During Wednesday’s call, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said there would be “several hundreds—a couple of hundreds of millions probably” of transition costs over the next two years. A slide made public—and later taken down—at the company’s …
According to the “Media Advertising Forecast” from MAGNA, nearly all media sectors will experience advertising spending declines in 2009.
Hardest hit will be traditional media such as newspapers, radio, magazines and TV, each falling by 14% or more.
Even the once-indomitable online ad space is faltering, with MAGNA expecting a 2.2% total spending decrease. …
Are people who search on Bing more commercial than Google searchers? According to a study by search-advertising network Chitika, visitors who arrive at sites from organic search results on Bing are 55 percent more likely to click on an ad than if they arrived from Google.
Chitika looked at the clickthrough rates from 32 million ad impressions across its network of more than 50,000 …
Ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky, known for their award winning creative and strategic work are earning some major PR today with the announcement that they have launched an eBay auction for the services of their 40 interns. These interns, who have been working on client engagements ranging from “Guitar Hero” to Burger King will now be available to other brands and organizations through the auction.
According to a new study by iProspect, over half of internet users (52%) actively respond to display advertising on ad-supported websites. Among them, almost as many initially respond to an ad by conducting a search as those who click on the ad. Results from iProspect’s “Search Engine Marketing and Online Display Advertising Integration Study” suggest a closer relationship between search and online display than many marketers think, noting that internet users initially respond to online display advertising as follows:
People around the world do trust the media, but to varying degrees. According to TNS, the good news, for Internet content producers, is that people now trust the information they get from online news—roughly to the same degree as news from television and information from friends. On a global basis, the most trusted information source was friends, with 42% of those surveyed saying that they trusted word-of-mouth recommendations. About an equal number trusted TV news (41%), online news (40%) and newspapers (39%).
Working for a major Canadian digital publisher, I have seen the ups and downs in the past months as advertisers and agencies scramble to decide what to do with their ever precious marketing dollars. The nice thing, is that in most cases, I have seen the ups as digital spend, which still usually represents less than 10% of total marketing budgets has remained intact or often grown substantially. The reality is that marketers worldwide are shifting more of their budgets into cheaper, more-measurable categories and that usually means online.
Back in December I wrote a post about maintaining the status quo in a down economy. In that post I reference the auto industry and how some companies, like Hyundai had an incredible opportunity to increase share of voice and ultimately sales as a result of their competitors reducing ad spending. Without doing so much as maintain status quo, there was tremendous opportunity to take market share away from the competition. Apparently The New Yorker thinks the status quo is not even enough and goes as far as saying that ratcheting up spending during a downturn may be the best way for a company to make it through the recession. While that might sound counterintuitive, it’s the theme of several pieces of research that James Surowiecki highlights in this week’s column in The New Yorker.
General Motors Corp. might not wait 60 days to declare bankruptcy. The automaker’s new CEO, Fritz Henderson said GM could head to bankruptcy court for a quick reorganization before June 1 if it can’t make deep cuts fast enough to meet the Obama administration’s mandate for a revised revitalization plan in 60 days.
Under GM’s earlier restructuring plans, filed late last year, the company would keep four of its eight vehicle brands: Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick and GMC, although Pontiac would remain as a niche nameplate with a much smaller lineup. Mr. Henderson said GM is executing that plan and he said it was inappropriate to discuss whether some of those four core brands might not survive should GM enter bankruptcy court.
So Microsoft bought into Facebook a while back, but has not really been able to realize significant value yet other than access to representing their sales to the agency market. Now, it seems some of Microsoft’s marketing budget is going to help Twitter get itself into the advertising game.
Twitter rolled out a new program titled ExecTweets. The program presents on a page, Tweets collected from various executives.
So I have been attending the IN09 (The Interactive Exchange) conference put on by Interactive Ontario for the past two days. Last year the conference was named ICE08, however for some reason (which I cannot disclose, LOL) they changed the name. I like it better now in any event. So, here are some highlights from day 1 of my adventures through the conference:
Working for a media company, or for that matter working in the digital space in general, you are always making sure that any endeavour you take on has to have a revenue model behind it that makes sens. Over the last few months there’s been much speculation regarding the present and future of online advertising. Particularly, that of display ads and their true value to both brand building and conversion. Some people believe that total spend will be up this year, while many feel it will go down. The real question in my opinion, is how to make it last longer and perform better against both brand and acquisition strategies.
Articles of Interest