In the afternoon, partners split up into separate tracks: Search Partners and Integrated Partners. Here are a few highlights from the afternoon sessions:
Deep mobile, common courtesy, spooky display and refining your campaigns
Yahoo's Paul Cushman checks his Twitter feed at SES
Day two of the Search Engine Strategies confab was, in a way, even more intense than the first, with sessions going deep into the details of mobile, search and display advertising. Here are some lessons learned.
Give their thumbs a rest
It’s one of Paul Cushman’s (he’s Yahoo!’s Senior Director of Mobile Sales Strategy) favorite truisms, invoked at the session “Getting Mobilized: Mobile Marketing Strategies: “Mobile is a channel, not a strategy.” Panelists Cindy Krum (Rank-Mobile), Sandeep Aggarwal (Caris & Co.) and Michael Martin (Mobile Martin) then proved his point, going way deep into the geek weeds of mobile SEO and usability.
One key takeaway for mobile eCommerce marketers is a simple one. “It’s a pain in the butt to enter your financial information on the phone with your thumbs,” said Krum. Instead, consider employing a payment solution like PayPal to make it easier on the user—and always provide a bail-out, one-touch phone number. After all, mobile users are on the phone, right? (Which, not incidentally, is another Cushmanism.)
Courtesy counts, online and off
At the session “Twitternation & Automation,” moderator Matt McGowan, Publisher and Head of U.S., Incisive Media, announced a surprise panelist. In addition to the previously announced speakers (Tracy Falke of Freestyle Interactive and Paul Madden of Crea8 New Media), 140Conference founder, renowned twitterphile and friend of Yahoo! Jeff Pulver would also be presenting.
Pulver gave his stock, “it-all-started-with-HAM-radio” and “Twitter is about love” speech while the other panelists patiently waited their turns. When it was time for Falke to give her talk on how she handles multiple Twitter accounts, Pulver pounced, interrupting repeatedly with quips and snide, though intelligent, remarks. During Madden’s admittedly “gray hat” Twitter automation talk, Pulver ejaculated, “You are EVIL.”
Granted, Madden pays legion of sweat shop copywriters in the Philippines $1.40 an hour to create fake Twitter personas and stories, but the effect was that of a teenager flaming others in an online forum circa 1999. It did, however, make for one of the liveliest sessions at SES. Pulver eventually backed off a little, saying during the Q&A period, “It’s evil, but it’s also brilliant, and I respect that.” Well, after all, the best panelists are entertainers and the best entertainers are insult comics.
Paul Cushman, Senior Director of Mobile Sales Strategy for Yahoo!, talks about the session he moderated, “Getting Mobilized: Mobile Marketing Strategies,” at the SES conference in San Francisco, August 18, 2010, as well as some of Yahoo’s initiatives in mobile.
Naughty or nice holidays; search is a-changin’; location rules; and mocking “The Social Network”
2010 holiday season: naughty or nice?
There’s no denying it: The 2009 holiday season was naughty. It registered the first sales decline since the early 1950s. But a new study predicts that the 2010 holiday season will be nicer to retailers—thanks in part to mobile. The study shows the percentage of consumers who buy on mobile phones has grown in the last year from 10% to 13%. It also reports 37.7% of U.S. consumers identified the Web as the media that they can’t live without, above television at 21.6%. Wonder what the author of the new Wired article entitled “The Web is Dead” would say about that.
Search is a-changin’ After all the anticipation and preparation, the Yahoo! and Microsoft alliance is here. Organic transition begins this week and paid search transition testing has already started. And the whole world is watching—or, at least, The Wall Street Journal,Search Engine Land and Reuters. One reason for the heightened interest? According to comScore, Yahoo! gained market share last month while Google dropped. Clearly change is in the air for the search world.
Mocking “The Social Network”? Twilarious! The trailer for the upcoming movie “The Social Network” has everything we love: nerds, Ivy League intrigue, million-dollar lawsuits, and Justin Timberlake trying to act. But the recent Twitter movie trailer spoof is even better. It’s got LOL lines (with fewer than 140 characters) like “If Twitter was as useless and boring as they say, then someone would have tweeted it.” But our favorite: “If you put a ’tw’ in front of any word, you make it infinitely cooler.” We certainly love our Twhiskey.
It’s a fact: The world is going mobile and shifting to an app-based universe—fast. And Yahoo! is shifting right along with it. Today, we’re pleased to announce a plethora of new mobile apps designed especially for Yahoo! users on Android, iPhone and iPod Touch devices, using advanced HTML5.
These new apps will let Yahoo’s 600 million users connect with the people they like the best and the stuff they want the most in totally new ways, from just about anywhere, when using Android, iPhone or iPod Touch gear. For more detail on the benefits of these releases, click over to the Yahoo! Mobile blog.
Local, video and social media continue to dominate the buzz
Well, the rain finally came in the last hours of ad:tech’s annual San Francisco conference, but it didn’t dampen the spirits of attendees who stuck around until the conclusion of Wednesday’s sessions.
The Ad Blog attended several of these sessions throughout the day, beginning with the “Marketing Masters: Branded Online Publications” in the temporary theater set up on the exhibit floor. We first heard from Babette Pepaj, Founder of the social networking site BakeSpace.com, who described how the small idea of creating a meeting place for people to share recipes has grown into something much larger and dynamic. BakeSpace members regularly plan weekend get-togethers, and the site works with media providers like ABC to promote recipes for dishes served by the ladies in “Desperate Housewives,” such as “Susan’s Caribbean Chimichangas.”
Follow Twitter’s “Chirp” conference; new Yahoo! Video for the iPad; the case for mobile marketing; search is looking good, and more
Tweeting Twitter
F.O.Y.’s (“friends of Yahoo!”) Danny Sullivan and Barry Schwartz are at Twitter’s “Chirp” conference in San Francisco today and tomorrow (tax day!). Follow Danny @dannysullivan and Barry @rustybrick, or catch all the action at @chirp. (You can also search #chirp on Twitter for even more.) And here’s a handy live stream of the events. There’s sure to be lots of news from the confab and the company, which now boasts 105,779,710 registered users, according to recent tweets, and now will include tweeted ads.
View Yahoo! Video on the iPad
The innovation just keeps rolling out over at Yahoo! Mobile. Those savvy guys and gals just released HTML5 playback for the iPad, which enables non-Flash video, so you won’t get that annoying blue question mark when all you want to do is watch a video. Click over to the Yahoo! Mobile blog for the deets.
Imagine a consumer who truly appreciates your advertising. This consumer is more likely to spend money online, has a higher income, and a large, active social network where he can advocate for your products. He spends more than 14 hours a week on the same sites, making him an easy target to reach.
Now imagine there are 15.1 million of these consumers in the U.S. This isn’t just a marketer’s dream—this is the Über sports fan.
To better understand this phenomenon, Yahoo! surveyed 1,010 sports fans who visit online sports sites several times or more per weekmore than once a week. As expected, we found Über sports fans are much more engaged online than the average sports fan, but—importantly—they also have higher expectations for ads.
According to CNET, iPad sales could top seven million this year alone. And Yahoo’s on the case: Today we announced Yahoo! Entertainment for the iPad.
From today’s Yodel Anecdotal blog: “Using editorialized, real-time content, Yahoo! Entertainment surfaces and recommends TV shows, entertainment news, TV listings, book reviews, and a wide variety of popular videos from across the Web.”
That’s corporatese for saying that this thing is going to be huge, a lot of fun for users, and a potentially enormous opportunity for advertisers as we scale up our already vast entertainment audience, which currently draws some 200 million visitors a month worldwide.
A Mobile Marketer interview with Yahoo! Mobile’s David Katz
“Yahoo’s mobile initiatives encompass the mobile Web, paid and ad-supported applications, as well as mobile search” writes Mobile Marketer’s Dan Butcher. “The company is especially bullish about the prospects for mobile advertising for this year and beyond.”
Darn right we are. Butcher goes on to interview David Katz, Vice President of North America at Yahoo! Mobile.
“For a long time we’ve been saying next year is the year of mobile advertising, but this year we’re saying last year was it, 2009 was the breakout year,” said Katz in the interview. “What’s next is getting much more creative about mobile-specific advertising experiences.”
It’s a fact: The world is 
Well, the rain finally came in the last hours of ad:tech’s annual San Francisco conference, but it didn’t dampen the spirits of attendees who stuck around until the conclusion of Wednesday’s sessions.
Tweeting Twitter
Imagine a consumer who truly appreciates your advertising. This consumer is more likely to spend money online, has a higher income, and a large, active social network where he can advocate for your products. He spends more than 14 hours a week on the same sites, making him an easy target to reach.
“Yahoo’s mobile initiatives encompass the mobile Web, paid and ad-supported applications, as well as mobile search” writes Mobile Marketer’s Dan Butcher. “The company is especially bullish about the prospects for mobile advertising for this year and beyond.”
