The year of display; when good brands get bad press; location bonanza; tweeting up a storm and more
Will this be the year for display?
A new report from the Rubicon Project says it just might be. CPMs among the optimization firm’s top 20 index have surged 47% from the start of this year to date, according to a report from BrandWeek.
The power of “negative” buzz
What happens when your time-honored brand suddenly gets associated with something… unsavory? What do you do? Earlier this week, Edgar Valdez, also known as “La Barbie,” the suspected kingpin of a notorious Mexican drug cartel, was arrested by authorities while wearing a famous-name polo shirt. Time to rebrand, or just ignore it?
Location: the next digital bonanza?
“Now that Facebook has entered the location-based services market, ‘places’—and the information generated by users about those places—is the next digital bonanza.” So writes Sheila Shayon on Brandchannel.com. But where to go next? Invoking Flickr founder Caterina Fake’s new startup Hunch.com, which uses Twitter and Facebook polling data to better target users’ desires, Shayon offers six tips on how to get your locale-based offerings to the right customers.
A verification bill of rights
As networks and demand-side platforms have grown ever larger, writes Goodway Group COO, Jay Friedman on Adotas, advertisers’ control over where their ads appear has flown out of control. “And when something is out of human control, someone is going to cheat,” he notes, citing malware, nudity and profanity ads as chief culprits. He proposes an eight “amendment” bill of rights for advertisers to help ensure the appropriate ad shows up at the appropriate place. Number one: “You have every right to know that your ads only appeared within the provided site list during and after the campaign, and to see the URLs of any sites on which your ads appeared outside of that pre-approved site list.” Not exactly “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” but a compelling idea.
Appolicious is a website that lets users find and review apps. (Yeah, it’s one of those clever ideas you and I both wish we’d thought up first, but didn’t.) Well, the big brains over there recently added a new section to their site devoted entirely to apps built using the Yahoo! Application Platform, or YAP.
Retail Pulse, the monthly report that taps into Yahoo! data to track changes in U.S. online shopping trends, confirms that back-to-school shopping started earlier than in 2009:
“Back to School” searches on Yahoo! entered the top term list as early as the first week of July.
Search for “backpacks” on retailer sites surged after July 5.
Users who visited Office Supplies sites also increased over four consecutive weeks.
Women’s passion for fashion
The report also highlighted that search in the Apparel category has increased over four consecutive weeks, recovering from a four-month slide. Specifically, Yahoo! Shopping click volume in the Clothing category saw an up-trend. The number of women aged 18-49 who visited sites in the Department Store category has also increased since July 5.
Follow these informative digital marketing events in person or online
Below is an extensive list of upcoming search, social media and marketing events around the globe taking place in September 2010, with descriptions provided by the sponsors. We’ve included the Twitter pages and hashtags where available, so that you can follow chatter from the event organizers even if you can’t attend in person.
Know of any we missed? Please feel free to share them with our readers in the comments section.
iMedia Brand Summit, US Date: September 12-15 Where: Coronado, CA Twitter: @imedia Cost: (request invite) Event Description: The iMedia Summit provides a rich environment to chart your company’s digital future among peer-level executives, industry thought leaders and select publishers and service providers.
Search Engine Strategies (SES) Hong Kong Date: September 13-14 Where: Hong Kong Twitter: @sesconf Cost: $895-$995 Event Description: This conference will be packed with sessions covering PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link-building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization and usability, plus networking events, parties and more.
Ad Club Leadership Breakfast Date: September 14 Where: New York, NY Cost: $65-$275
Join Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo!; and Peter Sachse, Chief Marketing Officer of Macy’s, as they discuss the importance of understanding today’s consumer and the best ways to connect with them. Sponsored by Yahoo!.
Online ad spend rises (again); telling stories in social, Quaker’s new campaign; kill the buzzwords and more
Online ad spend to outpace ad spend on other gadgets and media
Online ad spend will grow 14% next year to nearly 60 billion smackers, while the overall market is expected to increase just 5%. And the fastest growing slice of the digital pie will be local (60%), with targeted display offering the second-fastest-growing slice (50%). This according to a forecast released by Borrell Associates and reported in AdWeek. Do you know a company that does display and local really well? We do.
Give your social media posts a little panache
Think you can’t develop a story in 140 or fewer characters? Think again. Writing on ClickZ, Heidi Cohen offers five tips on how companies can imbue their social media posts with a story line, and another five on the attributes of developing a ripping yarn on same.
Earth Quaker
We all know the value of a good breakfast. When we were kids, it was “toast, juice, milk and…” whatever breakfast cereal was being pushed. But “does your breakfast make you amazing?” Quaker Oats say theirs does, or is about to. The venerable cereal company is about to embark on its “amazing” campaign, and Quaker CMO Kristen Lynch gives the details in AdWeek. An amazing breakfast should help humans go.
We’re a bit persnickety about the English language here at the Yahoo! B2B Marketing department. Anyone who has ever enjoyed the PBS series “The Story of English,” or relied on their Strunk and White for advice pretty much feels the same. But English, as every savvy English speaker knows, is an ever-evolving tongue that takes in thousands of new words and expressions each year from other languages, the sciences, technology and plain old common usage. It’s a steamroller of free expression that you just can’t stop.
The rules may change, but it’s important to note that there are rules, whether you’re writing a script for a play, a screenplay for a film, a novel, a marketing Web page or even a tweet.
The reviews are in and, boy, are they positive. Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, said: “Yahoo!’s editors have given the rules of the writing road a smart and timely reboot. It’s Strunk and White for the online world.” While Seth Godin, famed blogger, futurist and Squidoo founder, opined: “Do you have an online style? You need one. People judge your writing, and if you’d rather not be a n00b, here’s a great place to start.”
A sneak peek into the new Yahoo! Content Syndication Exchange
Speaking at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco, Wendi Sturgis, Vice President, North America, Business Development and Partnerships Group at Yahoo!, talks about what’s being called (for now) the Yahoo! Content Syndication Exchange—a new platform that will allow publishers to draw down Yahoo! search and other content, content from our vast array of partners, from Associated Content, from Facebook, Twitter, and more.
Tough choices between PPC and SEO, and how to become a search marketing pro
Lee Odden, Mike Grehan and pals at the Black Hat, White Hat cocktail party
Day three of the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco was, admittedly, a bit of a graveyard. We reckon that, after the Yahoo! | Bing cocktail hour on Tuesday and the Black Hat, White Hat Un-conference soirée on Wednesday, people needed a bit of a rest. But the future goes to the hearty and the hearty showed up. So here are a couple of final tips to live by in the digital marketing world.
Do you have to choose?
The session “PPC vs. SEO” was set up as a debate to determine which is the more effective method of getting traffic. Melanie Mitchell, the SVP of Search Strategy at Digitas, argued that paid search allows you to “own the presentation,” as Toyota effectively did during its period of bad PR in ’09 and ’10, using PPC ads to push down the page news items about recalls. She also showed how Delta Airlines’ tickets sold and incremental revenue rose and fell as the company increased and decreased its PPC spend on brand keywords. In the end, Mitchell said, “PPC and organic don’t cannibalize each other, and using both together results in significant lift for both, as it enables you to reach the entire search audience.”
Quantity over quality: As a devotee of SEO, Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SEOmoz.org, stated that while PPC has a 20% higher conversion rate than SEO, SEO gets 7.3X the clicks that PPC does. Paid search providers also enforce a bunch of restrictions on ad copy, where as what you put in your meta data is your own choice. Still, he admitted, PPC is easier to use and easier to test, but that fact increases the number of competitors you have. In other words, a lot of firms get scared off by the work required for effective SEO.
Become a search marketing pro
Appropriately, the last session we attended at SES covered advanced paid search tactics, giving the audience a slew of useful takeaways. David Rodnitzky, Founder and CEO of PPC Associates, offered seven tips for getting your campaigns to the next level: 1) Use the right engines (have search and content keywords in different campaigns and optimize each separately); 2) Use the right keywords (the “long tail” is highly overrated—do “keyword sculpting” by creating targeted landing pages, copy, geo-targeting and dayparting); 3) Use the right bids (you can’t “set it and forget it”); 4) Use the right ad copy (engines’ maps, shopping and other features to gain more real estate); 5) Use the right landing pages (test headlines, buttons, conversion funnel, video, benefit statements—this can provide more lift than anything else); 6) Use the right tracking (purchase latency can be as high as 60%); and 7) Use the right targeting (it can turn bad keywords into good ones).
After the opening day of the Search Engine Strategies 2010 conference in San Francisco, Yahoo! and Bing got together to host a little—well, big—cocktail reception in the exhibition hall. We can assure you that there were shenanigans. Among these was the Yahoo! Photo booth, where conference goers were encouraged to don silly costumes for candid snaptshots. See the Flickr slide show below.
Innovation the name of the game at the 2010 Yahoo! Partner Summit, Part I
Did you know that, in addition to 621 million users each month, Yahoo! has more than 1,700 active partners in nearly every corner of the globe? These partners include content, search, advertising, toolbar, mobile, local, broadband and more, in a relationship that embraces openness and benefits advertisers and consumers.
You’ve heard the old adage, “competition ensures quality.” Well, at Yahoo! we believe that cooperation can also help ensure quality, while open dialogue can help spur innovation. That’s why August 16, we invited 140 of our partners from 17 countries to come together at our Sunnyvale campus for the 2010 Yahoo! Partner Summit to share knowledge, get a sneak peak of the innovations coming down the pike, do a little networking and have some fun.
Here’s just a smattering of what was shared during the first half of the Summit:
SVP Raymond Stern and VPs Wendi Sturgis and Finnegan Faldi kicked off the proceedings. Raymond noted that this was our first truly global Yahoo! Partner Summit, while Wendi said that this year’s summit, much larger than any previous, showed how Yahoo! is “evolving its focus on partners.” Citing our 400-plus search partners in the U.S. alone and 860 worldwide, plus our more than 500 integrated partners in North America alone and many more around the globe, the group demonstrated how partners are critical to Yahoo’s raison d’etre. Faldi talked about building trust and transparency between Yahoo! and its partners, deepening those ties and and expanding collaborative initiatives.
CEO Carol Bartz took the stage first and was later joined by EVP Hilary Schneider for a Q&A. She talked about Yahoo!’s commitment to innovation. “We spend most of our time,” Carol said, “trying to figure out the future paradigm of the Internet.” Carol touted the Today Module on the Yahoo! frontpage, noting that the module serves up 32,000 different permutations at any given moment, 1 million per day, doubling the frontpage clickthrough rate.
Other fun Bartz facts:
According to eye tracking studies, men tend to be blind to banner ads but like ads in the lower left; women and teens tend to like banners.
Provoking laughs, Carol noted that male teens are lying when they say in focus groups that they only care about games and ignore celebrity gossip of the kind Yahoo! serves on omg! “We know they do,” she said. “We have the data.”
Illustrating Yahoo!’s commitment to a global platform that meets local needs (buzzword of the day: “glocal”), Carol noted that 95% of purchases occur within 5 miles of the home, making so-called “tail content” vital now and in the long term.
Yahoo! Mail processes 100 billion emails a month while stopping 500 billion spam emails, all while serving 10 billion ads per day.
Carol noted that Yahoo! is committed to superior targeting in which advertisers will be able to buy audiences rather than mere demographics.
The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is on track and going well. Organic search in the United States and English results in Canada began transitioning this week. (For more on this click over the Yahoo! Advertising blog.)
Notable Quote: Ever provocative (just the way we like her), Carol noted that she’d gone through “one-and-a half years of scrutiny” in the media during her tenure as Yahoo!’s CEO, saying, “I don’t get up in the morning wondering what off color things I’m going to say.” (True to that, Carol’s Curse Count for the session was a mere 3 swear words.)
