Online Advertising

Google+ won't let Brands have pages, and this is upsetting the e-Marketeers, poor things - an Open Letter from Danny Sullivan :

Hey Google, I'd say I know you're all new to the social game and should be forgiven that you have messed up with how to handle brands here so badly. Except, you're not new.

For one, you know that Twitter and Facebook both support brands, and that there would obviously be demand for this here. You failed to implement that support. Bad on you.

I know it's all "field trial," but that's not really an excuse, given that you knew -- had to know -- this would happen.

Worse, you gave no clue that Google Profiles were suddenly changed to bar non-humans from using them. Before Google+ came along, this wasn't a problem. I know. I remember Google Buzz, when plenty of brands, including our own +SEL on Google Buzz account, started up.

No one said a word against this. No one told us not to do it. So when Google+ happened, no one had any idea the rules had changed - and especially changed for Google Profiles which are a superset of Google+.

IE, plenty of profiles that have nothing to do with Google+ but which are for businesses were suddenly made outdated.

I know you have great plans to have super wonderful business profiles eventually. But if you're going to only let a "tiny" number of businesses operate before that, then you taint them and yourselves with favoritism.

At least when you announced applications for business profiles, there was a sense that anyone interested would have some type of a fair shot. Now that's gone.

Don't try to put the genie back in the bottle. Restore the business profiles you have closed. Drop the rule you silently added that blocks business profiles. Let businesses use profiles here just as regular people do. Works just fine on Twitter. Then upgrade those accounts when you're ready

Two things we would note - one serious, one not:

(i) Facebook also tried the same approach initially (Broadstuff blog was thrown off Facebook when they tried to persuade advertisers that all avatars were individuals) but eventually gave in to the lure of lucre, no doubt Google will do the same - once it works out how the House wins the game.

(ii) In the interim we suggest Brands followthe example set in the book Jennifer Government,and force all their employees to change their surnames to the company name and take out Google+ accounts. We eagerly await Google+ accounts from Johnny Reggae Reggae Sauce, Jenny Colgate-Palmolive, Steve Microsoft and Charles Schwab (now that's clever -naming your company after yourself - such anticipation!). In fact one could go further and change name to actual products too - Dave iPad, Toni .

Spot the serious one

...and just beware of the unfortunate combinations - you know, the Wayne King, Mike Hunt etc equivalents (examples in the comments section please, there will be points, and points mean prizes)

It would appear that Duke Nukems PR threatened to nuke people who said nasty things about the new release and was then nuked itself! Ars Tech:

...the Redner Group's official Twitter account posted something you almost never see: an open threat stating that outlets who reviewed Duke Nukem Forever poorly may not receive review copies of games in the future. Anyone who has done this job for any amount of time has suffered through a dry spell after giving a publisher a bad review, but this is the first time the threat of a blacklist has been made public.

"Too many went too far with their reviews...we are reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn't based on today's venom," the company tweeted. "Bad scores are fine. Venom filled reviews...that's completely different," another tweet read. Currently, Duke Nukem Forever has a Metacritic score of 49 on the Xbox 360, the format most commonly sent to the press. For a game with such a large marketing budget and name recognition, that's shockingly low.

The furore spread out all over the social media nets in a viral way that any PR would have been proud of, sadly in this case Duke didn't take to the Wildean view that any publicity is good publicity and thus nuked the PR Agency:

2K Games has officially weighed in on the issue. "2K Games does not endorse the comments made by Jim Redner and we can confirm that The Redner Group no longer represents our products. We have always maintained a mutually-respectful working relationship with the press and do not condone his actions in any way."

Face saving nuking move, may even have got the correct PR bang, and maybe even without paying the bucks. We eagerly now await the discovery at Redner that it was an Intern wot done it

Reinforces my view that you should never buy anything until after it hits the market, time passes, and the independent reviewers can get a good look at it.

Paris Lemon argung that Mashable went in for SEO laden Bin Laden reporting, with minimal Tech interest - as there is always someone who wants to pump out an Ad:

Imagine that, you write 35 200-word posts featuring the words “Bin Laden” in the headline and they pull in traffic on the day it’s one of the most searched terms ever. Were any of those stories really about technology? A few, maybe. But none were given the actual attention that a story of such magnitude deserves. It was a pure traffic/SEO play. This is the state of tech blogging these days. It’s shifting more towards a mixture of quick-posted nonsense and pure SEO plays.

It’s nothing new, but it’s getting worse.

It used to be that the advertising wasn’t there to really support these plays long term. But as more money is flooding online to spend post-downturn (as the print world continues to collapse), that’s no longer the case. There will always be someone who advertises against anything that gets pageviews.

Paris's argument is that this is a form of spam that Google could (but won't) think of culling:

The only thing that will stop this is Google taking the same type of action against this gaming as they have against the larger content farms. That line, it seems to me, is quickly blurring. But I just can’t see Google doing that.

I'm not sure that this is Google's job - as JP Rangaswami most recently pointed out, the filtering needs to be at the receiver, not the sender end. And one doesn't have to read this sort of sh*....stuff.

What's that you say - this as an SEO linkbait post? Tut. if it were I'd a-written it over the weekend....

Study from BlogHer - the BlogHer 2011 Social Media Matters Study - (as reported by Sherilynne Starkie)

The study was conducted to gather insights on current social media trends among women, both in the US general online population and members of the BlogHer community. It showed that blogs are playing an increasingly influential role in people’s purchasing decisions:

- Blog opinions matter: 53% of women blog readers have purchased a product based on a blog recommendation. That number soars to 80% of the BlogHer population.
- The top reason the general population trusts blog advice is because of their satisfaction with past purchases based on blog recommendations.
- The top three types of products that the general population seeks reviews and recommendations for on blogs are consumer electronics (35%), computer hardware/software (33%) and movies (33%). Among the BlogHer community, the priorities shift to food/beverage (67%) and clothing/shoes (67%), with movies coming in third at 62%.
- Almost half (47%) of blog readers tap into blogs for finding new trends or ideas, 35% for finding out about new products, and one in four for help with making a purchasing decision.

In addition, the study found that women see social networking as a way to preserve connections with family and friends. Specific findings include:

- Blog usage and Facebook usage continue to grow at an equal and modest rate year over year with women (10%).
- Tech love is all about connecting: 58% of women spend more or about the same time with their friends online as they do offline, yet only 5% feel that social impact has had a negative effect.
- When asked why technology makes women feel hopeful about the future, the top answer (67%) was that social media makes it easier to stay in touch with family and friends.

Picks up on a trend we have seen over and over again - people trust other people the most, women trust other people more than men do, so no surprises. Ad industry still chases youth and slebs, because thats what they did 20 years ago.

I eagerly await the day the Hello! magazine is full of Bloggers

Following on from our previous article about the Huffington Post valuation and why, to believe it, you had to believe "6 impossible things before breakfast" I thought it might interest a few people if we went into what those impossible things are. In essence, from the previous article, you have to believe some totally amazing growth statistics for HuffPo to believe it is worth the money paid for it. These are unlikely as:

(i) The model says you need to grow at c 50% PA to break even on a 10% (ie low) cost of capital, and that was assuming a very generous Year 1 post merger $100m turnover and 20% margin. That growth is not impossible (cf Facebook) but it is unlikely - it means 5-fold growth in 5 years - because:

(2) As the amount of content farm pages rises (rapidly), the amount of Adspend going online also rises, but at a slower rate so Ad rates per page decline - putting pressure on eyeball acquisition, but

(3) There is a limit to the number of people, and the amount of time they will spend, reading HuffPo - we'd bet its before 5x current impressions are reached, because...

(4) Barriers to entry are low, and once HuffPo disappears into the AOL peanut butter it will lose its lustre while a million other copycats are hot on its heels - and what is the value retention strategy for a content mill of unpaid bloggers and linking to other people's work?

(5) I think Google et al will be forced to tone down the rankings for Content farms and near-content farms, simply because they do not give users what they wat - and Google is now competimng for search eyeballs - and no Search no Ads, No Money. It is in this light that I suspect a (small, but well advertised) proportion of HuffPo resource will be spent on real reporting, ie to try to prevent Google from treating it as a content farm.

(6) I also suspect that, as content spam becomes more prevalent, so will software blockers, as they did with email spam

In other words, I think we are nearing the high water mark of the Content Farm AdSpam business model, and in a few months it will be drastically curtailed as search engines start to select for the original authors and content spam blockers start to just cut out certain sites - which is why Demand Media, HuffPo et al's backers have to rake in the cash now. It is exit or bust (or at least a shorter and more brutish existence) so I expect to see a plethora of content farms and near-content farms trying to sell themselves now.

Fortunately, in AOL they found a buyer with a "Strategic Need".....always a goody at times like these

Kenneth Cole, outfitters to the (non-news reading?) aspirational, tried to tag their brand to the Egyptian revolution today with a tasteful twt:

“Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at (link).

To say that it flopped is putting it mildly - cue mass uproar on Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, the media et al, and an (eventual) apology. Now, George Santayana, an Spanish American philosopher of c 1900, noted that:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

We take you back to the Habitat/Twitter debacle in 2009, when Habitat tried to spam its way onto the Iranian revolution twitterstream. That didn't work very well either - cue apologies, humiliation and blaming the whole thing on an (imaginary?) Intern.

No doubt Kenneth Cole would have loved to blame all this on an Intern, but clearly didn't read up on Habitat's tricks before apologising (photo above, courtesy MikeST. I don't know if its a real stick-on or a photoshop (suspect the latter), but it's pretty fast work).

Update - a Kenneth cole mocking site, @KennethColePR has been set up - gems such as:

"Austrian Men: Got a daughter you've impregnated locked in the basement? Cheer her up with a new sexy KC two-piece. "

and

“Our new slingback pumps would make Anne Frank come out of hiding"

Oscar Wilde (A contemporary of Santayana) pointed out that all publicity is good publicity, we shall see....


(Hat tip @deejackson and @joannejaccobs for heads up)

Facebook has resurrected a scheme eerily similar to parts of Beacon, the new "Sponsored Stories". In essence, if you write "Hey I am in Starbucks", then Starbucks has the option to pay to spam all your friends with an Ad made of your Post + a Starbucks Ad (see above) in addition to the original post. More than that, it can send even data based on where you go offsite, based on "likes" you have made and/or with sites that have Facebook tie ups. So you may never know what is being recommended to whom - until too late. You also don't get the option to turn it off. This is going to be fun to watch......

Sound familiar? Yes, its a part pf good old Beacon, so roundly criticised just a few short years ago. But this time no one is turning a hair, as Peter Kafka notes:

Recall what Zuckerberg was saying less than four years ago, when he was going to “build a new kind of ad system” based on “social actions” and “information that is shared between friends.” At the time, that sounded wildly ambitious, and maybe a bit creepy....

.....

This is what Zuckerberg was talking about in 2007, right? He just needed time to get there. So did his users.

Remember that when Facebook rolled out Beacon, the site was a big deal, but not the biggest: A mere 50 million users, not 600 million. Many of those people were still trying to get a handle on how the site worked, and what they ought to do with it.

Why is that, you may ask - Kafka believes most users have made a pact with the devil already:

Now, I think, just about everyone who uses Facebook knows, more or less, what they’ve signed on for: A place that wants you to share as much of yourself, with as many people, as you can.

But that's the users. What happened to all those stalwart industry observers and bloggers who rounded on Beacon so fierceely? For that I think you need to look at the bigger point above, ie criticising Facebook when its a (mere) 50 million user startup is one thing, doing it when its a 600 million user behemoth that has a huge PR budget, massive clout in Silicon Valley (the Town where most Tech bloggers ever want to work) and an IPO in 12 months or so is another - you have to be pretty independent to take a Quixotic tilt at the windmill now.

But we are, so we will - the "interesting" ethics that made Beacon a bad idea are still here in "Sponsored Stories", so caveat emptor, as they say. And, as eConsultancy points out, the law hasn't changed:

There's just one problem with all of this -- Sponsored Stories seemingly runs afoul of the same laws that critics argued made Social Ads so problematic:

Common-law privacy torts...forbid someone from appropriating the name or likeness of another, and several states -- including New York and California -- have such laws. New York, for example, forbids the use of a person's "name, portrait, picture or voice" from being used for advertising purposes without the prior written approval from the person.

As George Washington Unversity law professor Daniel Solove noted back in 2007, "It seems as though Facebook might be assuming that if a person talks about a product, then he or she consents to being used in an advertisement for it. But such an assumption might be wrong..." Here, Facebook is doing exactly that; it assumes that a like or checkin, for instance, constitutes consent to feature a user's name and likeness in an ad.

To those who wonder "when will Facebook have jumped the Shark" the answer is clearly not till they have plastered an Ad on every available surface, and told all your friends to boot. Still, we eagerly await the Starbucks Ad at the bottom of the "At Starbucks and by Chr*st their coffee is sh*t" post*

* Sentiment being a hard thing to map by algorithm, especially Irony....

The lead up to the Christmas and New Year holidays required researching a number of consumer goods to buy, which of course meant using Google to search for them and ratings reviews thereof. But this year it really hit home just how badly Google's systems have been spammed, as typically anything on Page 1 of the search results was some form of SEO spam - most typically a site that doesn't actually sell you anything, just points to other sites (often doing the same thing) while slipping you some Ads (no doubt sold as "relevant"). The other main scamsite type is one that copies part of the relevant Wikipedia entry and throws lots of Ads at you. It wasn't just me who found this - Paul Kedrosky found the same:

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.

And I can't believe Google doesn't know this - nor does Paul:

Google has to know this. The problem is too big and too obvious to miss. But it's hard to know what you can do algorithmically to solve the problem. Content creators are simply using Google against itself, feeding its hungry crawlers the sort of thing that Google loves to consume, to the detriment of search results and utility. For my part it has had a number of side-effects. One, I avoid searching for things that are likely to score high in Google keyword searches. Appliances are an example, but there are many more, most of which I use mechanisms other than broad search. Second, it has made me more willing to pay for things. In this case I ended up paying for a Consumer Reports review of dishwashers -- the opportunity cost of continuing to try to sort through the info-crap in Google results was simply too high.

Reading the comment's on Paul's blog post was interesting - you can parse the responses into 3 broad groups:

- Yes, we agree with you, and here are some tips on how to deal with it
- Yes, but its not poor Google's fault, its those evil spammers (ie Google has no way of changing their systems and is at the mercy of SEO)
- No, there is no problem, this is the best of all possible solutions (complete bollocks IMHO, it was definitely better a few years ago)

(Ignoring the ones trying to pimp their own products or agendas of course, and the end posts comparing the economics of online vs library copies of Consumer Reports.....)

Ignoring these comments, I have found my behaviour is exactly the same as Paul's , i.e. increasingly reaching for paid-for, edited research (Which? in the UK) as Google and some of the "comparison" sights (clearly flooded with Spam, Sock Puppets and Sleazeoids) become less and less credible. (Another aside - I had a gift voucher from Amazon, and searching for a book I wanted I found Page 1 was totally full of results for the book on Kindle, which was very irritating - they need to allow one to select e-book and/or book).

The interesting question to me is what happens if this gets worse, as Google risks attacks on 2 fronts:

(i) Other search engines decide to eschew Ads for accuracy and cut down the spamming, to gain market share. There is an article on Techcrunch today about Blekko, which appears to promise this.

(ii) The market for paid-for search and research grows - how much would you pay per month for a neutral search engine? Which? costs about £7 a month, would you pay that for a neutral engine?

Frankly, I don't believe that it is not possible to reduce this sort of spam, I think Google's problem is more that it is trying to navigate a line between income (systemically the more spam there is, the more Ad money it makes) and usefulness (how much spam can you run before the user walks away) and has veered too far to the spamside.

Update - this piece was ReTwt'd by Tim O'Reilly, and had the equivalent of a slashdotting so down went our server - fortunately those nice people over at Hacker News pointed to the proxies pronto. I liked two of the themes in the comments there:

(i) a lot of these sites must be known, ditto their pattern, so just a few weeks judicious "mechanical turk" work should have a large 80/20 impact

(ii) Google is like a monoculture, and thus parasites have a major impact once they have adapted to it - especially if Google has "lost the war". If search was more heterogenous, spamsites would find it more costly to scam every site. That is a very interesting argument against the level of Google market dominance

Update 2 - Anil Dash and Coding Horror have picked up on the same issue today.

Update 3 - Bruse Sterling has picked up on the story - his comment:

"we may be approaching a period where the machines will feed you an infinite amount of cunningly-engineered gibberish"

Google is accused today of favouring its own advertisers - WSJ:

Google, which is developing more content or specialized-search sites in hopes of boosting ad revenue, says that prominently displaying links to them is more useful to Web searchers than just displaying links to sites that rank highly in its search system. But the moves mean Google increasingly is at odds with websites that rely on the search engine for visitors.

Those companies say their links are being pushed lower on the results page to make room for the Google sites. Critics include executives at travel site TripAdvisor.com, health site WebMD.com and local-business reviews sites Yelp.com and Citysearch.com, among others.

"There is no denying that today Google is competing [with many websites] for the same Web traffic and the same advertising dollars," said Jay Herratti, chief executive of CityGrid Media, a unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp. that owns Citysearch and sister sites Urbanspoon.com and InsiderPages.com.

Google of course says this is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds:

When someone searches for a place on Google, we still provide the usual web results linking to great sites; we simply organize those results around places to make it much faster to find what you’re looking for. For example, earlier this year we introduced Place Search to help people make more informed decisions about where to go. Place pages organize results around a particular place to help users find great sources of photos, reviews and essential facts. This makes it much easier to see and compare places and find great sites with local information.

We’ve heard from users and businesses that Place pages are a great way to find local information and reach customers. We’ve also heard from webmasters that Place pages help them reach a broader audience when users click through to learn more.

Well, they would - but as Google gets bigger, however, and it stretches up and down the value chain, there will increasingly be these conflicts of interest. And just like there were over-enthusiastic staffers sniffing people's wifi while taking pictures of their houses, its not hard to imagine other groups tweaking algorithms here and there too - especially as we now know that the algorithms are not necessarily "pure maths". The temptation in the short term must be huge at an operating executive level, because in the long term the gulty party is well outtathere. The risk to Google is a few profitable tweaks now risks a massive crash of confidence in a few years, probably co-inciding with a rise of other major Ad engines.

The European Union is already looking at Google, concerns there include this issue as well as various privacy-reducing practices over the last few years. It's also been a while since the "Do No Evil" motto could be applied to Google, so we suspect this issue won't go away and will get worse.

Oh dear - the normally very sensible eConsultancy blog got itself a bit bamboozled by breathless social media PR today when it broke the story about McDonalds' "Foursquare Day" which offered users checking into McDonald's a chance to win $5 and $10 giftcards. The results were apparently astounding:

On Foursquare Day, McDonald's saw a 33% increase in check-ins from the day prior. And for the week of the special, check-ins increased 40%. Says [McDonalds Head of Social] Wion:

"I was able to go to some of our marketing people — some of whom had never heard of Foursquare — and say, 'Guess what. With this one little effort, we were able to get a 33% increase in foot traffic to the stores.'"

Only problem is, as RWW pointed out a bit later:

Let's look at the numbers, though, and it's easy to see why Foursquare could never account for a 33% increase in foot traffic to McDonald's. In the U.S., McDonald's serves about 26 million customers per day. On FourSquare Day (4/16/2010), Foursquare had less than 1 million users. Clearly, the math doesn't add up here.

33% increase on 26m, not 1m - now that's what I call Supersizing

Still, this was picked up by all the usual Flat Earth News blogs who Want To Believe, and if you believe the Wildean nostrum of publicity they got a huge bang out of their apparent $1,000 spend (assuming that is true....I would suspect that is the direct spend on prizes, not the spend of all the labour etc to run the actual event).

Actually, doing the numbers - asume 26m burger-buyers a day out of a US population of 310m (say 260m once young kids have been removed and to make the calculation easy) and that Foursquare users are representative, then 1m Foursquare users should generate 100,000 burger buys a day and thus there was a 33% - c 33,333 - increase in checkins. Say a round 30,000 to account for 10% false checkins, and say the average buy was a $4 burger at say 25% margin, and you have c $30,000 generated. Assuming the average McD PR staffer costs $100,000 a year fully loaded, we can calculate this buys about 4 man (or woman) months of work so I reckon they about broke even, probably a small(ish) loss of a $10k or so. Still, not bad for all the publicity - assuming, as I sad above, that it is Wildean. That wil be interesting to track.

I must admit my initial reaction to the eConsultancy post debunking was "there but for the grace of god" as there is so much bullsh*t being flung about Location Based Services right now you really have to be constantly on alert (which implies a huge fall from the top of the Hype Cycle is coming if you ask me), but I do think the subsequent attempt by eConsultancy to bluster it out in the comments by justifying it on the PR bang for buck is an error for them.