digital axle

Oh Vertical Search Engine, Where Art Thou?

You know when someone writes a post entitled 'On the increasing uselessness of Google' that all is not right in Web Land. Citing another blogger who ran into all sorts of junk when searching for a new dishwasher:

Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches -- from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons -- churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder.

The result, however, is awful. Pages and pages of Google results that are just, for practical purposes, advertisements in the loose guise of articles, original or re-purposed. It hearkens back to the dark days of 1999, before Google arrived, when search had become largely useless, with results completely overwhelmed by spam and info-clutter.

Well said, dishwasher-seeker. The first page of Google is no longer the clean, clear landscape it once was. Too many companies have realized that finding consumers with AdWords alone is like fighting a dragon with a dull-tipped sword, face on. Best to sneak around from behind and attack from a better place: hence, the raging popularity of so-called content strategy in online marketing.

It's not just SEO anymore, clearly. With content farms run by Demand Media and sketchy link-buying techniques, everyone is in a race to own keywords, and they'll do it any way they can. But what are consumers doing? That's right, they're getting wise and giving up. People are no longer looking on Google for answers, writes the Washington Post. They're using (gasp!) Twitter and (another gasp!) Facebook, putting out queries and requests for recommendations from friends -- and getting exactly what they need.

So here's my proposal. To companies: Follow the consumer; find an authentic way to reach them via social media. To consumers: Know how to filter out the junk in Google results, and don't rely solely on your "friends" to solve your problems. To that next group of bright-eyed engineers or MBAs leaving school: build the framework for a series of vertical search engines, and put them in a central directory until everyone knows the destinations by heart. Searching for a new dishwasher? Then go to the Kitchen Appliance Search Site. Sometimes it's better to completely reinvent something -- using a tried and true concept -- then fix what's broken.

The Post notes that Microsoft thinks the next big thing is going to be social search -- scouring data from user accounts to show up in basic search. Okay, that might work. But I think there's still a market out there for qualified advice, for "real" articles written by scholars, field experts, and yes even marketers and salespeople.

Tim Armstrong of AOL: 3 things

1. People. Board, consultants, employees are passionate about the turnaround. "people at AOL are playing to win.

2. Predicts a massive platform battle in Silicon Valley. Content is the new glue that holds the Internet together.

3. "it's time for the Internet to get programmed"

4. Brands matter a lot so the content future won't be Mom & Pop

5. Content Platforms can be good or bad. Does not see AOL as a "content farm"

6. AOL will develop content that looks different

7. Great strategy a la Tom Brady, "throw it to the open guy"

8. Would AOL buy Yahoo? Doesn't sound like it

EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson does more than oil spills

Aspen, CO -- "in between oil spills, we do air and water pollution" joked EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson as she was interviewed by Aspen Institute Director, Walter Issacson at the Fortune Magazine Brainstorm Tech Conference.

Jackson also declared the Clean Air Act a tremendous success but warned that the nation's air remains dangerous and toxic on many places across the country.

Jim Breyer disses old media's ability to succeed at digital

Aspen, CO-- at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech Conference, Jim Breyer, one of the deans of Sand Hill Road ( Accell Partners ) believes that large established media companies have exactly "zero" chance of diverging with their digital initiatives. He specifically mentions NewsCorp, Disney, Time Warner .

Jon Miller of NewsCorp says iPads give media companies a "do-over"

Aspen, CO -- Making people pay for websites generates fewer users but far higher quality users. So says Jon Miller of NewsCorp at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech Conference.

Miller sees content consumption moving to tablets not just from printed news but also from the standard browser. For media companies tablets are a whole new channel with it's own user dynamics and business models.

Adam Lashinsky tries to get answers from Google's Nikesh Arora (GOOG)

Weird stuff. Google dominates the industry but I feel like I'm watching a juke & jive show. YouTube "on the brink of imminent profitability. Now turning into a brilliant PR seminar on how not to answer a reporter's legitimate questions. Now it's funny.

Barry Diller ( IAC ) loves his dog more than his iPad -- but it's a close call!

Aspen, CO -- Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Barry Diller made an impassioned plea to the nation's technology leaders to join the fight for net neutrality. Speaking at the Fortune Magazine Brainstorm Tech Conference at the Aspen Institute, Diller, CEO of Interactive Corporation (IAC) took on the big telco's desire to control the gateways to the Internet.

Interviewed by Fortune Managing Editor, Andy Serwer Diller went on to declare his "love" for the iPad. He added that he did not love his iPad as much as his dog.

Diller believes that over time, the pay wall concept currently deployed by The New York Times will work. Media companies should be experimenting with all platforms and pay models. Diller also took on google over it's market share.

Finally, answering a question about TV, he believes that broadcast media will begin to be available on a paid basis.

"Engagement" on it's deathbed?

Aspen, CO, BrainstormTech: Brian McAndrews and Wes Nichols declare the concept of online engagement is only an intermediate metric and does not relate to sales data.

The branding view from Aspen

Friday July 22-- Fortune Brainstorm Tech, @ The Aspen Institute

At the branding panel with Wes Nichols, (Marketshare Partners), Tom Bedecarre (AKQA), Brian McAndrews, (now a VC) Barry Saltzman (Google)

Room full of investors, agency CEOs, analysts all agreeing that social media will be the engine that finally moves big media dollars online.

Radio Industry Has to start acting like Silicon Valley

My admonition to the radio industry to get off its butt @ Radio Ink Convergence Summit last night: http://ht.ly/1UbYT

Please take our poll, 15 seconds to be counted. No ethnicity questions.

As ConferenceHound.com growls its way out of its winter of discontent and hibernation, we are taking a few surveys about what motivates you to attend a conference or trade show.  This survey is exactly one question long and we'd sure appreciate it, if you could find a few seconds to give us your opinion .  We think it's three clicks and about 15 seconds to complete. 

Yoo Hoo. Anyone know where Dave Smith is at?

Can we stick a fork in Adobe Flash now?

There's no sense in not taking a few more cheap punches while the Adobe Flash platform is reeling on the mat.

Not for Steve Jobs. Not for me.

 
Back in the depths of the dot com crash, I remember the sages of my rump agency expounding, like the plastics salesman to Dustin Hoffman's Ben in The Graduate,  "One Word: Flash". A generation of expensive flash developers was born. Design shops, Ad Agencies, Fashion Brands could not stumble over each other fast enough to build Flashy, Splashy Web intros on their sites. 

Micro-sites in flash, rich media banners in flash, video in flash, Flash in Flash.  Macromedia wins. Adobe buys out the platform.  Party is on. 

Along comes buzz kill Apple which does not support Flash in it its nascent iPhone.  Worse, this Ipad, this arriviste, this nifty hug-it-in-your-lap in your Ralph Lauren earth tone beddings, Kindle-killing, gargantuan iPod Touch comes along. Suddenly, every hipster company and brand is left with a website home page that looks like a highway construction zone for a collapsed bridge. Media publishers, heavily invested in Flash video can't strut their stuff on the newest, coolest delivery system out there. Magazine publishers are all over the iPad as the savior of journalism. 

To your left, you will see a beautiful screen capture of the appearance of the home page of the evidently misnamed "Design Agency" as it appears this morning on my iPad. 

Would you like to hire them? Would you know how to contact them? Do you know what they do?

Can you hear the collective whine from Flash developers and award winner wannabes?

Guess what? Steve doesn't care about you and your piddling Flash problems: Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Flash .

Actually neither do I. Flash hegemony can't end soon enough.  Why?

• Site developers and publishers who entice their clients or bosses into Flashy, Splashy Home pages are instantaneously guarantying their clients sub-standard SEO discoverability on major search engines. Unless you really know what you are doing, the text within a Flash unit is not indexable  
  
• Have you ever tried to cut and paste a company's contact information from an Adobe Flash site into your contacts?  Fuhggedaboudit. Next company please.
• Flash developers, in my experience, are really nice, frequently talented, always expensive, hard-to-find and for the most part usually gone surfing (the waves, sunshine, not the web)..  Good people, many of them, but after paying them endlessly to fix their own bugs, it gets old.
• Which brings me to the platform itself.  I'm not a developer, but I don't need a computer science degree from Stanford or a design degree from RISD to know that this platform is extremely buggy, requiring lots of QA, lots of long conversations with clients about bugginess, and not at all easy to edit by "the rest of us".

So while there has no doubt been some tremendous commercial art completed in flash, not to speak of insane budgets (even I, speak as someoneonce succesfully enlisted to sell a client  a $95,000 flash banner requiring a helicoper shoot), the end can't come soon enough.

The iPad may or may not be the next killer platform, but every content publisher is going to think twice about continuing to develop content that will be unusable on the newest coolest device -- not to speak of its older, possibly cooler cousin, the iPhone.

HTML 5 Baby. Bring it on.

Oh, and if you just checked your site on your iPad and discovered the horror of it all, our Barbary Coast Subsidiary might be able to help you solve the problem quickly.

$6.3 Billion Understatement

From Press Release land .. and the The Wall Street Journal

"The U.S. online ad market started a turnaround in the second half of last year, says research from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Interactive Advertising Bureau:"

Well, what else would they say?

"U.S. online ad spending for the fourth quarter totaled a record $6.3 billion -- a rise of 2.6%."

OK, that's good.  The interesting thing about "online ad spending" numbers is that they massively understate the dollars that are spent in online marketing.  The IAB (the web publisher's advocacy group and don't forget it) is naturally going to tell Price-Waterhouse to define "online ad spending" as transactions between an advertiser and a web publisher. Fair enough. But, big but, the definition of what constitutes "online ad spending" could be looked at in a much different way.

What if we defined online ad spending as any transaction that creates an impression, whether it is a transaction between a publisher and an advertiser or between a consultant and an advertiser.  By this I mean that as dollars have flowed (and plenty have) into "social media" and the old standby "web development" and various kinds of "optimization", none of that gets recorded as "online ad spending."  And yet all of those dollars are doing exactly what ad dollars are supposed to be doing.

This creates some interesting winners and losers:

The Winners: Social Media & Optimization budgets

The winners are optimization-focused and social savvy agencies (of all kinds, btw) and consultants who understand that their economic future and their clients' both get better every time they can convert a dollar earmarked for traditional "media" into fees for services such as ghost twittering, landing page optimization, content creation and on and on.

The other winners are the advertisers who recognize this. At a recent OMMA panel moderated by AKQA's @TomBed, Marty Collins of Microsoft's Windows answered my question regarding their ROI tracking on cost-per-impression for social media versus the cost-per-impression for traditional media by saying, "social media blows traditional away.  It's not even close."  (To be fair, she went on to add that her view, which I agree with is that not all impressions are created equal.) 

The Online Ad Losers: Web Publishers

The losers, oddly, and notwithstanding the $6.3 billion "measured" by the IAB, are the publishers.  Smart media consultants, ad agencies and PR agencies are recognizing that for fees that stay with them they can create impressions at a fraction of the cost of "traditional" online media.  All the better if they get to keep a much larger portion of the "media" budget as fees --rather than acting as a bank for the advertisers and skimming, at best, 15% off the top.  So the smart gatekeepers over online spending are rapidly building rationales for massive cuts to the "online ad" spending the IAB is boasting about

Will this turns into a wave?  Is it possible that "online ad spending" is the wriong metric.  Maybe it's online ad spending + fees collected by smart agencies and consultants.  And, my guess is that that (unmeasurable) number is growing at a way faster pace than 2.6%.

What do you think?

 

Let the iPad Madness Begin

A bold prediction:  The iPad will exceed all but the most optimistic analyst expectations.

Here's why:

• Everyone I know who has held and touched the thing is in love with it.
• David Pogue and Walt Mossberg gave it the coveted NY Times and the Wall Street Journal Two thumbs up.  Where are you Roger Ebert? More precisely where is your thumb?
• Traditional publishers (like magazines and newspapers) love the device and they love the business model and they are already investing heavily in their iPad channel, a channel where they believe they can finally sell subscriptions and build a pay wall that won't be breached.
• Game publishers are going insane developing apps as you read this

And the number one reason I think the iPad will be successful.....

I've stopped watching TV and seem to spend my evenings in my big ole TV watching Barca Lounger using my iPhone.

I don't think I'm alone. 

Give me a bigger screen with today's newspapers and magazines, my email, my music, my "Risk" app.  Sign me and 10 million people up.  Must have iPad. Must have iPad. Must have iPad.

Tomorrow morning, we'll be blogging photos of the Ipaddies camped out by the Apple store at the Corte Madera Mall, I guarantee they will be there.

Self Serving Tweets 'r Us

Today's @digitalaxle press release re SEO, Usability Consulting gig with Enterprise Mashup leader, Convertigo: http://ow.ly/1tIgR

Innovation Reigns: Twitter to announce plan to make money

The king of that 140 character, billion dollar valuation micro-blogging platform, Twitter has hit upon an absolutely brilliant concept. 

I don't know why nobody ever thought of this before.

Biz Stone says he will announce plans to monetize Twitter with.....are you ready?...... Advertising.    Happy Friday!

Flash to the Trash Heap of History? So says VC

Everyone has their pet frustrations with the device they can't live without.

The failure of the iPhone browser to support Flash content has been pretty frustrating if only because everyone insists on putting Flash into their sites (never mind Google can't index it, but I digress).  Along comes Rich Wong of Accel Partners, a Valley VC saying that Adobe blew it,  Flash is toast, Fuggedaboudit.

Flash won't be supported on the iPad.  Now I could this see this having a big affect on how publishers develop content. Since publishers both online and off are stumbling over each other to develop iPad-ready versions of their magazines and newspapers, it's not hard to see how Flash starts to lose its appeal for publishers. Why do things in Flash if readers can't see it on the iPad -- because, as you know we will each own five iPads in about two years, not counting the kid's pads.

One possible benefit of the death of Flash (I'll believe it when I see it) is the demise of the classic advertising agency site built entirely.in Flash so as to satisfy some art director's vanity -- sites where you can't copy content or download anything while you play cat and (ready?) mouse (har, har. Sorry had to do it) trying to find the precious hidden roll overs.

Jessi Hempel: Is LinkedIn defenestrating the head hunters?

You know those ever so cautious, ever so serious emails or phone calls. The one's where they say that they have been retained by a "very important" company to conduct a "top secret" job search and they are wondering if you might have some recommendations for them.  We all know that this is usually a headhunterspeak for "we're not really interested in your friends but we don't want to offend you by assuming you are unhappy, but would you be interested in interviewing for this job?"

Turns out the same Internets that fed these guys your name might well taketh their lunch.

Jesse Hempel writes about the impact of LinkedIn on the headhunting business in this week's cover story in Fortune at  http://ow.ly/1qS7h .

Other tidbits from Jesse's piece:

• "The average <LinkedIn> member is a college-educated 43-year-old making $107,000"
• Accenture will hire 40% of its new employees this yeat via online searches

And, you've gotta' love this one. There is an actual, real-life professional online presence consultant out there making real cash money dollars giving would be LinkedIn users advice on selecting profile photos like this gem:

• "Don't use dogs, horses, cats, or cows in the background,"

Who knew?  Better check your profiles for cows everyone.  Mine has bricks.

Yelp Check In Feature: FourSquare Killer?

It takes a while to plow through all the new features on each of the updates of the now 135 iPhone Apps that I've downloaded.

While I am busy risking my life attempting to become the Mayor of the Golden Gate Bridge on Foursquare,  Yelp may have driven right around all four squares.

If you have not been in San Francisco or Austin lately, I suppose it is possible that you are not already "playing" Foursquare on your mobile phone.  This is the app where, for seemingly no good reason, you and I are pushing white rimmed notifications at each other all day long telling everyone that we've a) bothered to show up at work b) have traveled somewhere semi-exotic (like Sunnyvale) or c) we are at the latest, hippest, happening bar with hottest, hippest girls or boys (take your pick) within thousands of miles.  For this effort we win "badges" when we don't crash our cars.  The only problem is that nobody, not even your best friends really cares all that much.  Yes, they do care a little (but have you ever asked yourself why?).  Yes, my "friendroll" has grown exponentially in the last seven days.  Yes, it's fun in a vicarious sort of way to watch the kids in the office traipse their way through the Herpes Triangle on Friday night, but other than that, who are we all really kidding?

 Along comes the latest Yelp iPhone update which not only allows you to tell your "friends" where you are --but it comes with the stunning innovation of giving you very useful information about where to go.  So, instead of gunning for "badges" I can find a list of nearby bars with user ratings included while I tell you the location information that you don't really care about anyway.

So, you have to wonder, where does FourSquare fit in?  Will the "game" trump the utility inherent in the Yelp location based services?  If the past is any guide, there will be room for both --but this does put the onus on Foursquare to get useful fast.

Not Your Grammy's Media Buyer

When I started my career at age 20 in the pre-fax, pre Internet, almost pre-fedex days on the eighth floor of Grey Advertising's 777 Third Avenue office building, not only was my calculator chained to my desk, (really. It was) but seemingly, the Grey spot media buyers had been chained to theirs for several decades.  They were let loose to plop (they all plopped or plotzed) into the waiting limosines of the slick-suited salesmen (the buyers were all women the sellers were *all* men) from the spot media rep houses like Katz, etc.   Off they went to the Yankees game or 21. They bought impressions and negotiated rates by parceling out percentages of their budgets. Send me my tickets. Over and Out.

My sources tell me things haven't changed all that much. Within the last year, I heard of a San Francisco- online buyer on the phone with spot buyers at a major buying agency (not Grey or Mediacom btw) in New York who was told point blank, something to the effect of, "if you don't stop talking about accountability and measurement in front of the client, we'll take your entire budget away". They weren't kidding and they still had that power. 

Dave Morgan's column in MediaPost today, about "Minimum Motivational Frequency "reminds me that these days may finally be coming to an end.  It is becoming increasingly possible to measure the sales impact of specific television spots (see Morgan) as well as the impact of an entire medium on actual behavior. Check out Wes Nichols' company Marketshare Partners if you don't believe me. It's no longer fantasy, it's happening.  At the AAAA's meeting last week in San Francisco, I talked to an agency CEO who had yanked the media business away from one of the big media buying agencies with a proposal that  actually cost more in fees than the "we negotiate the best rates and offer the lowest commissions" media houses by proving better effectiveness.  Even more impressive, he had won the argument with the purchasing department.

Buyers of all media are going to look more and more like digital buyers and less like spot buyers.  It's going to get harder.  Data, rather than limo length witll drive decisions. Yes, it's taking forever, but it is still going to happen. They find their own limos and they get off on spread sheets and pivot tables.  Ain't nobody going to chain them to their desks either.

About time.

But did she have to call it the "thrust" fund?

This is a very interesting concept on how to get funding for your business.  You get funded. In exchange, the investor gets a cut of your life earnings.  I don't know what happens if the investment fails.

Let's all stipulate as to Kjerstin Erickson's general brilliance for coming up with the concept and getting into Stanford GSB and her general goodness for starting up a non-profit to revitalize African refugee communities and  all that.

But... did she really have to name this idea the "THRUST" fund and then offer up this pose for her "head"shot, possibly setting back the concept of taking women in business seriously by, oh, let's say three decades.

I'm just saying.

"Rob My House" er, I mean FourSquare cuts a deal with Pepsi

Mobile Social Networking site and Thief Notification Service, Foursquare, has cut a small (dollar-wise) but big (brand recognition-wise) deal with a Rye, New York manufacturer of carbonated soda.

I've been using Foursquare for about two months and  I am so very proud to be the mayor of my own company. How badly would it suck if I wasn't?

Why do I use Foursquare?  Well it's my job. I'm supposed to be an early adopter. So, now we have a bunch of internet consultants, agency people and marketing types, 300,000 of them evidently, all following each other around.  Like all new things on the web which will someday be huge, it is still a mystery to me as to whether this will take off (which means that it, no doubt, will). 

I can see the benefits of knowing who is where and who is around you and when.  But, I have to admit that, however respected an industry denizen he might be, I do not need to have my iPhone tell me where Cory Trefilletti is every moment of the day.  All I know is that Cory gets to work earlier than I do (or at least he remembers to check in earlier) although I will say is not making it to the gym any more than I do.  Come on Cory, you can do better than that.

The other problem, coming soon to a hysterical Nancy Grace show near you, is that Foursquare seems like an invitation to tabloid hell. When Cory checks in at the gym, were I an axe murderer or second story man, that would be my cue to head over to his house (I know where that is because he checks in there) and treat myself to a nice evening of axe murdering or cleaning out his stereo equipment. Not that I personally have the time or inclination but, I'm just saying.

Anyway, Like Twitter, Like Facebook, Like everything else, this will take off if and when everybody buys in -- I'm just not completely sure they will. Unlike Facebook which invites TMI that won't affect your health and home, Foursquare provides TMI which could be physically dangerous in the wrong hands.

Google, Apple Haters Unite!

It's so easy to love good companies, especially when they're applauded for their innovation and skill at solving all of the problems you didn't even know you had.

But as any political figure knows, for every lover there's a hater. Even Apple and Google, two companies with millions of screaming fans, have gotten some serious anger directed their way. Here's a sampling, as a reminder that you can't please all of the people, all of the time -- or even ever.

-- 10 Things We Hate About Apple - via PCWorld, circa 2007

-- I Hate Apple website: http://www.ihateapple.com. Lame, though.

-- 20 things Apple Haters already hate about the Apple Tablet. Oh, and there's more.

-- Engadget, catering to the Apple-haters, has even created a custom version of their site where you can "read all the hot news happening in the tech world without the upsetting presence of Apple-related stories."

-- Another rant, this one about the iPod touch.

-- You know what I hate? Misuse of great domains. http://www.ihategoogle.org/

-- 25 Things I Hate About Google (SearchEngineWatch) Again, outdated. Somebody please chime in this year!

-- A good compilation of Google hatred.

To end on a positive note, let's remind ourselves that there are still plenty of lov-ahs out there: http://www.idrankthekoolaid.com/. Now that is a good use of a domain name.

Pardon my French, but your social media campaign sucks

Kraft Food has launched a "social media" campaign in the UK to promote their coffee brand, Mellow Bird's. It is part of a larger repositioning of the brand to reach a younger audience, according to Brand Republic.

Sounds like a good idea, right? But don't start patting Kraft on the back just yet, says John Bell in Social Media Today. The campaign is mediocre at best, in both strategy and execution. They want to "target students and give the campaign an anti-corporate feeling" -- which he notes is a terrible language to use in a PR announcement -- and the game itself on Facebook (where they only had 146 fans) is seeing how many times the user can hit the space bar within 10 seconds. And we wonder why kids brains are turning to mush.

Conclusion? It's nice that large consumer brands are seeing the value of social media and dedicating  budgets towards it, but c'mon Kraft. Don't do things half-assed. A good social media campaign is not cheap. It needs to be thought out correctly, by the right people, and executed correctly, by the right people, or it's going to blow up and turn off CMOs forever. "Well, Bob, that didn't work, now did it. Back to search!"

Says Bell: "Social media is not a channel. It is a fundamental shift in consumer behavior. It is time for even 'first-timers' to adopt a true social media strategy."

Superbowl Ads Confirm Loss of Faith in Mankind

Superbowl Ad Roll-up!

The Snickers ad was a clear winner this year, because who doesn't want to see Betty White taken down into a mud puddle? The moment was almost as good as when Bob Barker gets sucker-punched by Adam Sandler, "The price is wrong, bitch!"

But with the exception of Denny's screaming chickens, Doritos and Budweiser took ALL of the remaining spots in the Nielsen IAG Top 10 Best-Liked 2010 Super Bowl Ads chart. Same thing for the most-recalled ads, with Go Daddy's terrible-as-always spot grabbing the No. 9 position.

The sad part is, with the exception of Snickers, not a single one of these commercials had any spark of creative excellence. The comments on the Ad Age article back this up:

Just proves that pie-in-face, burlesque and a banana peels will always get a laugh, maybe even get you liked [...] for advertisers, being liked for a brand value that creates a lasting, emotional bond is far more important. Not sure any of the spots did that. - Phillip from eswpartners.com

The amount of out-and-out violence in this year's SB spots was disturbing. - Chuck

I'm so, SO tired of "men are idiots" advertising that has grown so popular. If aliens landed and watched the Super Bowl ads to get a sense of who we are, they'd conclude that we're pantless, drunken, insensitive, partying louts. Such advertising seems to appeal to our baser selves. Can't we as an industry do better, gang? - Mike Lauber, Tusco Display

So, best commercial? AUDI's Green Police, by far. Creative, snappy, effective. I('d) buy it.

Macking out on Mobile

Ran across "Five Mobile Trends for 2010" in AdAge, and two caught my eye:

• Advertising's outdoor real estate is fast becoming another connected channel capable of delivering high-fidelity digital experiences as unique, varied and measurable as more well-established mediums.  An example: Toyota's iPhone app that let users draw on the Thompson-Reuters screen in Times Square.

• Consumers have new power to express their opinions through social technologies from anywhere, anytime. Smart marketers will do all they can to encourage and act on this real-time feedback.  Example: AT&T's iPhone app, Mark the Spot, which crowdsources areas of weak reception.

The "connective tissue" between these -- and all the others on the list, actually -- is interaction. That is, drawing consumers back in to the advertising itself, a medium that they've been trying desperately to tune out for years. Yes, you do occasionally see some appreciation for the form, like during the Super Bowl or annual retrospectives. But for the most part, people see ads as either too irrelevant (white noise) or too relevant, with frightening levels of intrusiveness.

So is it in fact time for the big reversal, enabled by mobile? Consumers taking back control, either by choosing which ads to receive (think mobile coupons) or actually contributing to the message by using their phones to instantly share thoughts about products, services, brands?

If that's the case, it'll be an interesting couple of years. The one warning I would issue is to make sure brands, publishers, and technology developers are not ignoring an important demographic: the slow adapters. Sure, it's great to enable all of this for the tech-savvy youth, for the gung-ho fans, for the Foursquare mayors. But if you don't make these new mediums accessible to the middle ground -- those that will never be heavy users, will never be "obsessed," who don't read Mashable daily -- you're going to miss out on the opportunity for widespread adoption. Easy come, easy go.

Forecast: Traditional Ad Growth Flat, Online Quite Curvy

Interpublic's Magna unit has revised its December doomsayer forecast that US ad revenues would decline by 1.3% in 2010 to saying that they'll just be kinda flat. down just 0.1% from last year. View report (pdf).

Online ad revenues, on the other hand, will curve upward: direct online ad spend is projected to jump 12.2%. Local online spending will grow 3.7%, Magna said.

Excluding the effects of the Olympics and local elections, advertising revenue will be $161 billion in 2010, and the entire ad economy will rise 1.4%. And apparently, the worst is over: Q1 will be the last period of decline, the unit said.

Don't bust out the champagne quite yet, but you can start thinking positively now.

Is Real-Time Search the "Holy Grail" of 2010?

Last year we saw a enormous amount of deals struck between search giants and real-time data providers, aka social networks and microblogging sites.

• In October, Microsoft signed search deals with Facebook and Twitter to integrate real-time status updates and tweets into Bing's search results.
• Google followed suit in early December with the announcement that public updates from social media sites Twitter, Facebook and MySpace will start showing up in Google's general search results, a particularly nifty feature for smartphones.
• Even more proof in the pudding, this time from M&A (via TheDeal.com): Real-time search engine developer OneRiot Inc. closed its $7 million Series C, bringing the total venture capital raised to $27 million.

But real-time search is "not there yet," as proven by the magnitude 4.1 earthquake that took place in our ever-shifting city this week. At 10am on Thursday, a small earthquake shook the Bay Area, and within 6 minutes Google search was reflecting the event in the form of Twitter updates, according to Stephen Shankland at CNET. (Google claims it was just 2 minutes, and Shankland attributes the lag to the fact that he was in Detroit at the time. And clearly, people in Detroit don't give a hoot about California.)

But while we can quibble over minutes, the takeaway here is that real-time search is certainly where it's at for the coming year, but it's going to be up to marketers to figure out how that can work for their brand. To be honest, it's a little scary that a real-time tweet about your company from some Joe in Minnesota can trump your hard-earned spot for your company website, blog, newsletter, video, or special deal -- though it does introduce some exciting possibilities, like having access to top sellers and current sentiment data, and eventually, pairing real-time news with real-time ads.

What's in (Your) Store for 2010

It's that time of year again - the time for lists. No, not the kind you check twice. And not even the ones that look back over the past year, picking out all of the best highlights. As much as I enjoyed watching the top global TV spots of 2009, particularly the ones from Finland and India that Americans just will never really "get," it's not the time to look backwards. Let's look forward, to 2010, and the What's-To-Come.

Yes, Turns out, it's SEO (surprise!) , social media marketing (surprise!) and keyword research -- wait, really? Yes, keyword research. Apparently, even more people will be getting their kicks on Google Trends, and working with AdWords tools & insights all day in 2010. (That is, according to SEO.com, who released this particular compilation.)

So although other trends were mentioned, like video, conversion web design, paid search, and email marketing, the list is very much dominated by efforts that boost both web traffic AND credibility. Online PR, link building, social media marketing (done right, of course), and blogging were among the predicted continuing trends for next year.

Twitter + LinkedIn, Just Like PB & Choco?

Twitter and Linked In announced yesterday that they are integrating their platforms so that LinkedIn users can "amplify" their status updates to the Twittersphere, and Twitter users could feed their updates (hashtagged #in) into the professional networking site. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone apparently referred to the match as a "perfect combination," like "peanut butter and chocolate." Image courtesy of PC World.

Putting aside the clear confusion Mr. Stone has over what makes a perfect combination — he is clearly not familiar with the stunning combination of pretzels and ice cream, or Speculoos and bananas — let's stop for a moment to really talk about integration. It seems every social web service these days is working on some big-deal partnership with another social web service. Why? Theoretically, integration is for users, so that they don't have to visit more than one site, or post to multiple platforms, in order to spread their message with the largest number of people.

But despite what you may read in the companies' quirky blog posts, integration is not just for users, just like Kix is not just for kids. Integration is first and foremost for the company's benefit; joining forces makes them bigger, stronger, and broadens their reach, which ultimately means more revenue from business or premium memberships, and often from ad revenues. No one really knows the true benefits of this new deal, however, since the financial details (just like those of Microsoft and Google last month) are undisclosed, reports the NY Times.

Call me crazy, but this is starting to make me think of Wal-Mart, the ultimate one-stop shop. Because isn't that what web services are trying to do? Combine forces to offer consumers everything they want in one place, and make themselves more money while doing it? And we all know what that has done to us. Bye bye neighborhood butcher, hello pre-packaged salami — with a side of crayons.

But that may be a little too far ahead to think about on a Tuesday. In the short term, heed this warning from PC World: Twitter and LinkedIn are two different animals. If you integrate the two accounts, be sure to make smart choices about what you share across the services — what's perfectly acceptable on one network may not work on the other.

Google Pays $750 Mil for Mobile Ad (Wet) Dream

You've probably already heard the news... after all, it IS No. 4 on Google Trends today, just under "katt williams arrested for burglary" and right above "brady smith."

Google is betting big on mobile advertising, having just acquired mobile ad firm AdMob for a cool $750 mil. It's one of their largest acquisitions to date, and fueled largely by the fact that mobile advertising is one of the fastest growing mediums, growing 30% annually, Google explains.

As I overheard in a panel at ad:tech NYC last week, "Mobile phones used to be phones that occasionally took crappy pictures, and now they're basically small computers that sometimes make phone calls."

With the new proliferation of these small, sophisticated devices, the reach of equally sophisticated ad units (both text-based and graphical) is going to increase. With more online searching, gaming, and messaging, ad inventory is skyrocketing.

AdMob apparently has served 1.5 billion mobile ads this year, up 540% from Sept 2007.

Overheard in a nearby office, chock full of startups, from a vociferous ad buyer: "Who the hell is AdMob? Why would Google want to buy them?" Deal with your jealousy, hon.

What's Next in Search... Part II

More from "The State of Search" panel at ad:tech NYC...

1. Google spent a ton of time on the function of presenting multiple types of content (i.e., Video, Images, News, Blogs) from one search query... and now it's pulling that principle over to paid search. See the blog for recent announcements about rich media options.
   
2. How did the recession and plunge in ad spend affect the search space? Certain sectors that were hit hard, like financial services and the auto industry, were big SEM spenders, so when they dropped out of the race (having no money left to spend!) it left the door open for new players. A recession is the best time for marketers — or rather, the smart ones — to step in and capture market share, panelists said.
   
3. More about PPC...learn a lesson from startups, they said. They have virtually no budget for marketing, yet they all have PPC campaigns. There's a reason for this! However, everyone, including the guy from Conde Nast Digital, agreed that it was best to stick with Google and to stay away from Facebook Ads because the keyword and targeting options are so limited.

What's Next in Search (Part I)

With search advertising predicted to hit $21 billion by 2012, everyone is jumping at the bit to find out exactly how the industry is going to take form: new products, innovations, strategy, etc.

At "The State of Search" panel here at ad:tech NYC, panelists from Google, Conde Nast Digital, Newsforce, and SEMPO shared their thoughts on SEM.

Highlights!

Sara Holoubek from SEMPO, a nonprofit that serves the SEM industry shot us some stats from their research report.

• Senior marketing executives consider SEM a high business priority - over half of respondents said that they were "very involved" in SEM programs.
• The shift in marketing dollars to SEM is coming from (surprise surprise) print and direct mail.
• Recognizing the integrated nature of search, or intent, 79% of advertisers are coordinating SEM iwth other marketing tactics - only 7% are not doing so at all.
• 3 out of 5 marketers are willing to pay a premium for local targeting.
• Video and mobile are poised to take off, but respondents were split on their real interest in pushing a lot of dollars into these mediums.

Video and mobile were certainly hot topics. Jim Lecinski from Google explained that smartphones are increasing the volume of mobile search queries -- up to 50 times more. Holoubek noted that it goes even beyond search, because smartphones are allowing marketers to not just "retrofit ads to fit a mobile screen" and instead use customer data (e.g., location) to offer useful information -- partnered, of course, with a brand message.

Live From ad:tech NYC

Floating bits of wisdom from today's Media & Entertainment panels:

On creating customized content for online channels: "Is it expensive? Yes. Not huge, but way more in proportion to the revenues. It's get better though, as soon as it scales." - John Stinchcomb, Publisher at Conde Nast Digital

"How do you decide where to distribute...widgets, TV, websites, iPhone apps. That's easy: Just fill in the data where the consumer is." - Matthew de Ganon, Senior VP, weather.com, The Weather Channel (NBC Universal)

"How do you compete with free?" - Patrick Moorhead, Director of Emerging Media, Razorfish

"Don't just dive into mobile. Figure out your business goals first, then map your emerging media products and measure your investment based on that. Don't try to do everything." - Paul Jelinek, Senior VP, A&E

Bloggers Beware: FTC Can Fine You $11k For Undisclosed Product Reviews

In the blogging world, it has been considered good taste to dislose relationships you have with a brand or advertiser when you mention them in a post, whether you are reviewing their product, campaign, or just giving an old fashioned shout-out.

Now it's the law.

The FTC, in its updated Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, has made it clear that any blogger who makes an endorsement for a product must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. If they don't? They could be slapped with fines of up to $11,000. Per post.

This is not just for bloggers who use services like Izea. The rule defines "material connection" as "cash or in-kind payment," so really any situation where something of value changes hands between advertiser and blogger would be considered payment.

It's a fine line, though. Are samples, giveaways —or even exclusive news, or fame— considered something of value? If so, General Mills and their blogging mommies, as well as Ford and their Fiesta bloggers better be careful to own up exactly what is changing hands, Mashable notes.

Most well-run social media programs do use appropriate disclosure, Mashable concludes, but deception still exists, and "unscrupulous" marketers are still a dime a dozen. (Sorry, guys. No offense.) Enter the threat of money lost from heavy fines, however, and the game changes.

I'll take that ad to go, please.

Advertising is going mobile, right along with everything else that takes place on a screen. As more and more people carry smart phones (don't you?), advertisers have to adapt.

We have written before about "app-vertising." Now we are studying this new report from Research And Markets, to begin to imagine our future. This a future in which every marketing plan includes mobile. Seriously.

At a recent Mobile Ad Summit panel, a trio of advertising CEOs agreed that smart phones are the game-changer. The platform has suddenly become desirable, and brands are just beginning to explore the possibilities.

The global spend on mobile could reach nearly $29 billion just this year, and up to $50 billion five years from now.

You in? Grab your phone, let's hit the road.

Brits May Go Where Americans Dare Not — DRM TV

They did it to music - now what about TV? ReadWriteWeb reports that the BBC wants to prevent piracy, ad removal, and illegal copying by encoding all listing metadata and using a compression algorithm to limit playing abilities. In other words - DRM for TV content.

Danny O'Brien gets into the details of the "crazy" plan over on the Electronic Frontier Foundation blog, but the gist is this: the rightsholders want copy-protection technology built into every TV receiver device, and make manufacturers sign an agreement that would ultimately limit their ability to innovate, for fear of violating the "metadata compression parameter" license.

Rewind 5 years and change continents: here in the US of A the same measure was suggested by the FCC and the Motion Picture Association of America, trying to force HD encryption on digital television, before we transitioned from analog. The court wasn't convinced, and the idea was thrown out.

Even if they had succeeded, the rise of open source TV services like Boxee means that people could watch protected programs at home, just not via their HC receiver. A Boxee spokesperson remarks, "The way for content owners to make money is to cater to their audience, not to stifle innovation by creating a DRM racket like what's proposed here." Square off, guys.

TV? Why bother when you can connect on Facebook.

Just about a month ago, we wondered here if the end of traditional media had finally arrived. Today, we see that Gap is putting another nail in the coffin. This autumn's "Born to Fit" campaign has just about everything in it -- everything, that is, except the mix of traditional media we are used to seeing. Instead of the big television campaign, we see an engaging Facebook page, as well as an iPhone app called StyleMixer, an online fashion show, and hundreds of in-store concerts.

Mobile? Check.
Social? Check.
In-store? Check.
TV? Not so much.

Is this the model for the future?

Google is...

Observant blogger Louis Mason points out a biting little detail that Google has included in their Auto Complete feature: trash talk. Apparently, when you type in "Facebook is" or "Twitter is," the dropdown options are, well, funny/insulting, with choices like, "Facebook is for old people" or "Twitter is retarded." And so on and so on - for Microsoft, MySpace, etc. Okay, okay, we get it. You don't like the other playa's.

Of course, when you put in "Google is" you get phrases like, "Google is your friend" and "Google is always right." More aptly, "Google is taking over the world." I'd like to meet the cunning engineer that came up with that one.

 But there's one little problem - I think they forgot about YouTube. Type in "YouTube is" and the dropdown choices are "YouTube is so slow," "YouTube is broken," and "YouTube is upside down." (What?) Either Google forgot about that money acquisition a few years back, or it stopped at MySpace. Of course, there's that other option - that Auto Complete accurately reflects what people are typing in.

Try your name - it's fun. Apparently, I (Ana) am beautiful, positive, love, and perfection. I am also someone's life, and "in their DNA." How lovely.

And the common "I"? Well, I can't even write this, so I'll just have to share it via screenshot. That way you'll know, too, that I'm not making it up. But believe me, you can't make this stuff up. It's just too good.

Which is your fave?