We also saw some great developments in terms of ad formats with the full roll out of paid sitelinks and plus boxes along with several others.

It’s always a tough one to predict future releases, so below I’ve taken a rather safer option of going for what I’d like to see.

Reporting:

The advent of impression assisted conversions is a truly fantastic development if you happen to use Google Analytics and Google conversion tracking.  The policy of not opening this up through the API for third party campaign management tools though is still a big disappointment.  I’m not naysaying the free tools that Google provide, the quality is remarkable, but the reasons for not making these stats widely available is unclear.

The main reason I want to have this data is to measure the real benefit of impressions to your account.  Google insist that there is a big branding benefit but without being able to measure it advertisers will remain reticent to invest in non-directly converting terms.  If this data were readily available the incentive to invest in high cost generics would be significantly raised and accounts would evolve far beyond simply direct response.

Search Based Re-Marketing

Yahoo already offer re-targeting based on a user’s search history as opposed to their browsing and it makes perfect sense. Google however are very aware of privacy issues and the potential to start being seen as big brother and so are hesitant to go down this road.  As a consumer I’m not sure how I feel about it but as an advertiser I can’t help but be excited by this idea.  It would certainly improve the relevance of display advertising but could turn people away.

Ad Scheduling

Currently if you have a set of ads pertaining to a sale, a time of day or a day of the week and you want them to come down at a certain time or rotate then you need to either sit there with editor open and do it manually or to set up a duplicate campaign (Same keywords, bids etc) with different ads and day parting set up.  This is farcical.  It amazes me that the option to set up start and end dates by ad doesn’t exist.  It would make sense to include this in the next release of Adwords along with scheduling by ad so that they could be rotated throughout the day, week or month without the need for duplicating campaigns.  While I think this is an obvious and necessary development I’ve been expecting the release for four years and so I shan’t be holding my breath!

Weather Parting

Bit of a unicorn this one.  The idea is that you could set bids to automatically adjust based on the weather.  So if it’s hammering down with rain and less than 10°C you might want to ramp up “Gym membership” or “Holidays in Nice”.

Technologically this should work as Google know pretty much where you are via IP and what the weather is doing near you.  For a lot of clients you will see the weather has a massive impact so why not change bids to reflect this?

Search in Search

Google have shown this year they aren’t above copying the other engines with their introduction of page previews on the natural results.  I would be surprised if we don’t see at least a beta where Google copy Yahoo’s rich ads in search (RAIS) and allow for a search box to be used in paid ads.  This would be a great addition to ads for large retailers such as Amazon and I would expect it lure in a lot of people who would otherwise use the natural results.  This has been hinted at by Google and I’d be amazed not to see it in beta in 2011.

Resurrect Video ads (ish)

Last year Google flirted with video plus boxes, and after some beta testing they are continuing with them for media owners in the US only.  The reasoning behind this is that everyman and his dog would want a video on their ads because it’s eye catching and new but this would lead to a very messy and confusing SERP. A situation that Google wishes to avoid.  Whilst I appreciate the thinking here I’d like the approach to be somewhat different.  As a no-brainer it should only be ads in the top box which qualify, and at that only ones that reach a certain CTR threshold (much as Sitelinks currently behave).  Secondly would be the proviso that the ad must lead to a page where the video is displayed prominently.  A page like this is unlikely to be the greatest converter so the quality of the video would need to be high, and to be highly relevant rather than just the standard TV ad.  It would make sense for the hosting to be provided by YouTube.

Negative search partners

By allowing your account to appear on the search partners network you will increase your clicks substantially.  Any decent campaign management software will allow you to assess how specific partner sites perform in terms of conversion rate but there is no way to pick and choose which ones you appear on.  As there is already a negative placement option in adwords it seems like a huge oversight not to be able to apply these to search as well as display.

So, just a few ideas on the things we may see from Google this year.  I’d be amazed if they all appeared (especially the weather one) and disappointed if they didn’t throw out a surprise or two.  I think the integration of on and offline will grow, as seen by their call centre tracking and offer ads as will mobile specific formats.  To maximise the benefit of any new formats it’s key to get in on the ground floor – everyone likes something new and typically the competitive advantage erodes over time as the new ads become commonplace.  As with all PPC the key is to plan, test and refine.  We’ll keep you updated throughout the year.

60 million iPhone apps downloaded? Wow that must be representing a lot…

…of free ones. So how are those free apps monitised? Well, in a way there’s no suprise here; through advertising.

The advertising formats which are used on Apple’s smartphone are quite familiar to what we know and several ad network/platforms are already available:

• Text and rich media banners
• Microsites
• CPM, CPC and CPA advertising

That sounds interesting…but how does it work?

Usually, app ads are clickable banner, which either link to an iPhone-optimised microsite.

Example

Of course, as with traditional formats, analytics solutions are available for more insights (Impression, CTR, revenue etc…).

How lucrative can iPhone apps ads be?

According to a report from the mobile advertising company AdWhirl, iPhone apps can make between $400 and $5,000 a day on ads. However those figures only concern the top 100 (out of 100, 000 remember?) and the success story of developer Steve Demeter is rather rare. Therefore most of free iPhone apps don’t make money.

The future?

Apps advertising is still fairly recent and some trials have shown to be quite fruitless.

However yesterday’s acquisition only confirms the fantastic monetisation opportunity of this new format.

And as Gartner sees Google’s Android being 2^nd (ahead the iPhone) in terms of Smartphone OS market share in 2012, this move was indeed indubitably logical.

So, as reported by the BBC, the UK is going to lift the ban on product placement within British television programming. The story went something like this:

Adman1 “I’ve got an idea. As UK television revenues are plunging and consumers are now ignoring and fast forwarding through TV advert breaks let’s trick them by placing products into programming. In this way they will be unable to tune out and we will be able to force-feed our advertising messages into their spongy couch-potato brains.”

Adman2 “Brilliant, it’s foolproof, and American TV is some of the best in the world, I especially love the way they blend serious news and advertising messages seamlessly. I reckon that it’s worth a few quid too – bring-on lunch at the IVY.”

Adman1 “Ha, the Internet doesn’t know what is going to hit it, we’re back!”

Admen (together) “Cigars!”

10 Embarrassing Product Placements from AlleyInsider on Vimeo.

OK, so I’ve drastically simplified the issues but I do think that the move signifies how bankrupt some of our media practices have become. The £100m or so estimated extra revenue that the lifting of the ban will generate will help prop-up the out-dated, and unloved, ad model for a little longer. Whilst the change will bring us into line with our US and European counterparts does it help bring advertising in-line with people who actually spend time watching programmes? Did anyone ask us?

BUT, we tune out because we want to. We fast forward through the bad adverts because we want to. We like to choose the time, place and medium for absorbing advertising content.

Google has gained a monopolistic market share because 90% of the UK search market (us again) find it useful because it fulfills a need. Trying to slip ad-messages into my favourite soap will not work unless it’s useful.

In March Ben Bradshaw’s predecessor, Andy Burnham (Culture Secretary), rejected the idea of lifting the ban saying, ‘I have listened carefully to the arguments on both sides around product placement, and concluded that it should not be permitted in programmes made for this country. There is a lack of evidence of economic benefits, along with very serious concerns about blurring the boundaries between advertising and editorial.‘ [Guardian]

So why the u-turn? Does the change help diffuse some of the criticism aimed at the Beeb for its’ easy ride compared to commercial public service broadcasters during the downturn? Where have the serious concerns gone?

For me it’s the white flag to the digital media age. Rather than adapt the model to be better based on what we want the admen have done what they know best. Although this time, it’s not what we or anyone outside of the madmen bubble want.

Other background at the FT click here.

We watch the online strategies of the news media especially closely at iCrossing, for a number of reasons:

• They are in the front line when it comes to dealing with reality of moving from channel to network media models (it’s do or die time for newspaper brands)
• The best operators in this area (like Guardian, Telegraph, CNN and the BBC) are innovating with social media formats
• Our approach to creative / content is in a large part editorially-influenced, as we have a number of professional journalists at the heart of our content & social media team

So when we see the Telegraph’s online success story (it currently leads the UK pack for traffic) being discussed in the context of its search and social-influenced strategy of good curation it’s exciting.  Curation’s a highly useful concept and one we’ve been thinking about for a while.

Telegraph.co.uk digital editor Edward Roussel, speaking to the Guardian’s PDA Blog earlier this year said:

The mistake we all made early on was thinking it was all about speed and volume, and really that’s wrong. Speed does matter, but as good as that is it’s the quality of your curation of content that makes you a good news organisation.

“Twelve or 18 months ago it was all about getting stories out but now it’s about how we tag, organise and curate those stories, how you combine them with info-graphics or SEO. That’s the key to the future of news on the web, and how you build the long tail.”

As we laid out in the Brands in Networks e-book, the challenges that brands face in moving aren’t limited to dealing with the speed of networks, but the longevity of content too (among other things).

Curation for brands means two things:

1. Curate the content: So much offline and online content is created in a given campaign, but it is very ephemeral often. It exists in bought spaces and (yuk) microsites, before being discarded. A blog or similar platform can pull all of these elements together, curate them in a single place, making them more useful and accessible during the campaign and giving them a life beyond the campaign also.

1. Curate the network: Brands should also effectively be aggregators of the best and most interesting things in the networks about themselves. What people are saying, related blog posts, videos and stories should be linked to, talked about. It’s a case of being the most useful place to go for information about yourself.

The Toyota iQ case study is a nice example of how this can work. The editorial part of this was the iQ blog, which touched on and curated parts of the wider UK launch campaign (Toyota’s RCA sponsorship for instance) while the Delicious account, YouTube and Flickr profiles / groups linked out to and pulled in the best of the content we sawback to the site.

This live curation is effectively just an efficient by-product of good listening by a brand. And that listening can of course inform live creative, new ideas that might help achieve a blockbuster moment in a campaign.

Obviously the same curation approach does not fit all brands and situations, but we think this is a pretty good model to start from.

: : Via Evolving Newsroom.

As I was doing so – and having just discussed with Radio 5 Live the Microsoft-sponsored Exectweets.com, which collates tweets from CEOs in one place – I notice that, in my own Twitter homepage, Exectweets is being promoted to me, complete with link, in my profile box.

Exectweets is just one of the ways that Twitter has identified (or that has been indentified for it) as a potential revenue source. It considers that advertisers might want to build and sponsor areas that collate particular types of Twitterer in one place, in this case business CEOs. Microsoft has sponsored Exectweets and it’s been built by a firm called Federated Media. What’s not clear, even from Twitter’s own comments, is whether Twitter has taken a cut of the revenues.

Twitter as an agency?

The fact it is promoting the area to users might suggest it is, but it might equally suggest it just wants people to have a look because a. it thinks it’s interesting and b. it can begin to gauge the popularity of such services. One can imagine Twitter wondering whether to devote proper development resource of its own to building such areas for advertisers. But I can’t see that happening. First, it would either have to close down its API to prevent other agencies from building services just as good or better or have to go head-to-head with those agencies.

Plus, it’s resource-heavy. Facebook has tried this route with branded pages but it just doesn’t have the automated genius of AdWords that Twitter is looking for – and needs.

Twitter as AdWords

No, what’s most interesting and the reason I think investors are going to get all of their money back and a whole lot more is the idea of e-commerce accounts. Twitter CEO Evan Williams told Techcrunch last Summer that charging e-commerce businesses per follower, per update or per sale [or per click?] was a possibility. In them there hills lie gold.

So, imagine Amazon. Book fans follow Amazon to learn about new books for sale and special offers – with links. Every time I click on one, Amazon pays Twitter a fee. The company would set up an account for each of its departments (clothes, houseware, games etc.) and sub-classifications (horror books, trainers, Xbox 360 games). Automated update systems – plugged into product inventories – will be built. Entire ‘update strategies’ will be conceived (when? how often? what copy?). And, of course, marketing strategy will begin to ask ‘how do we attract followers?’ rather than ‘how do we get to the top of search rankings?’.

I can see it already and – if I was Google – I would be worried I’d already missed the opportunity to bag Twitter for a song.

An e-commerce strategy for Twitter

So, let’s take that vision and extrapolate it into a ‘Twitter strategy’ for advertisers. Any advertiser would have to consider a user’s Twitter journey. The usual ‘conversation’ must take place – the process by which users build perceptions of a brand or product. Integrated into this is the ‘navigation’ that facilitates the research (and acquisition) of a product they’re looking to buy, as well as the purchase. Where I have positive brand associations and/or a business is very strong in a particular online retail sector (Amazon for books, for example) – I might choose to follow that business, particularly the specific feed that deals with the products I am interested in.

Even in this part of the journey, we are talking about a lot of work that needs to be done. We must:

a.      Build a brand perception that encourages people to follow us

b.      Build accounts around specific product types that encourage people to follow us

From this we are into the business of identifying an ‘update strategy’. This will ask:

a.      When and how often should I update? (this will differ entirely for different product categories)

b.      What copy works best?

c.      Should ‘traditional [social]’ tweets be mixed in with product updates?

Then, we might think payment models. I’m assuming Twitter will go for PPC since it offers the right balance between risk and reward for both ‘media owner’ (Twitter) and advertiser. Twitter after all won’t want to be relying on what happens after a user clicks and advertisers want performance-based models.

So:

a.       What PPC levels will emerge? Surely higher since users are truly opted in?

b.      How will these be set? A bidding system is not relevant since you’re not competing directly with other advertisers (it’s your personal feed).

Then:

a.       How will updates and payment be automated?

b.      What aggregator services might emerge? (Here come the affiliates!)

c.       How many e-commerce feeds will users be able to cope with?

Twitter as media owner giant

Advertisers (and their affiliates and their agencies and their tech suppliers) will need to address all these questions and more. In the meantime, as long as Twitter continues to innovate (as Google has) to remain the dominant messaging platform, it can reap the rewards of being the host to this new marketplace. In this it has a big advantage – it’s harder to switch social network than search engine. But its scale will be compromised in comparison with Google since the need to be followed will limit how many users advertisers can reach and therefore how many ‘impressions’ they deliver.

I find all this very exciting. If Twitter makes it work – the question ‘what will replace Google?’ will have been answered, except – as with most media – we’ll discover that the replacement to Google will actually prove to be complementary. However, Twitter is where conversation and navigation truly coincide and I for one think it’ll be enormous.

Image credit:mikearther

Google may be the dominating search engine globally, but in a few counties they are still struggling to increase their market share.  In Japan, Google are trying to catch up with Yahoo, who according to Neilson/NetRatings and ComScore have around 50% vs Google’s 30%.  In a seemingly desperate attempt to catch up with Yahoo, Google Japan decided to try a bit of pay per post, getting bloggers to review and link their latest Google Hot Keywords widget.

Pay per post is a form of word of mouth marketing whereby a blogger can get paid for writing a blog post about a certain company or product. When the concept of pay per post first emerged in 2006 it faced criticism based around the ethics of this as an advertising technique. Soon after launch the Federal Trade Commission stated that “word-of-mouth marketing” must be clearly disclosed – this is now a requirement of pay per post activity but it’s up to the blogger to decide how to do this.

To find examples of the pay per posts, do this search on Google Blog Search. You can identify the pay per post activity by this string, “※CyberBuzzのキャンペーンに参加しています♪ ” which translates as “I’m a part of the CyberBuzz campaign”. There are over 30 posts by bloggers writing about the widget each of them linking to the Google widget http://www.blogdeco.jp/google_word/.

Pay per posts have been increasingly used as a way to pass Page Rank through contextual optimised links.  This violates Google’s webmaster guidelines – namely this bit here, and in 2007, Google started to reset the visible toolbar PageRank of many blogs participating in pay per post activity as a way of discouraging it.

This makes it all the more surprising, and not to mention hypercritical, that Google itself have been caught participating in pay per post.

Now they’ve been caught, Google Japan have issued an apology. Asiajin translated the post:

Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.

The apology wasn’t enough to save them, and today, Matt Cutts twittered that Google Japan had received a penalty, reducing its PageRank from 9 to 5, and that he expects it to remain that way for a while.  Interestingly, there still appears to be no official word on the official Google Blog, or Matt Cutts’ Blog – either things are hectic at the ‘Plex, or they’re trying to play the news down.

A Page Rank reduction in itself seems odd – Page Rank penalties are normally applied to link sellers, not buyers.  Combine this with the fact that potentially the only way this reduction will affect Google.co.jp is by reducing their Google traffic – come on Google, who searches Google for Google!!! – and potentially all you’ve got is a rather apologetic publicity stunt, rather than any discernible action against Google Japan.

It’s interesting if you look into the penalty a little deeper.  SEOMoz have this penalty flow diagram that indicates how a website will behave when suffering from a penalty.  If you do a search for a piece of text from the homepage, “ウェブ全体から検索“, you might expect the Google.co.jp homepage to rank pretty highly.  I couldn’t see it ranking at all, which according to SEOMoz, might suggest that Google have had most of their links wiped of their value.  However, an allinanchor search for the same term returns Google.co.jp as the top result.  The behaviour of this penalty seems to be in contrast to some other high profile penalties that have been handed out by Google.

There are a couple of flaws with this evaluation of the penalty – recently Google have been applying penalties against the terms used in paid-for anchor text, while still allowing the websites being penalised to rank for brand related terms.  This allows Google to throttle websites flouting the rules, but still allows Google to maintain relevancy for any users searching on brand terms.  Think back to how ludicrous it was when anyone googling for the German BMW website couldn’t find BMW.de following a penalty!  With this in mind, Google should probably apply a penalty against Google.co.jp by preventing them from ranking for “Google“, but this would mean they’d be invalidating their own search results – it’s a tricky situation!

It would also be interesting to see the affect this has on Google Japan’s traffic.  It would be fantastic to monitor this via Google Trends – unfortunately they block their own portfolio of online properties, making it impossible to do so.

All in all it’s a very interesting situation, and it will be extremely interesting to see how this plays out – it could potentially have far reaching implications for anyone operating within the SEM arena.

The panel’s combined years of experience in advertising in general, and digital in particular, as well as their mix of roles and standpoints, were useful indeed but not more than their ability to tell us what is already happening. Patterns of spend have already changed, budgets for 2009 are being set, and the clues to the real impact of a recession that – for digital – is not necessarily a bad thing were in their pockets. So, what the hell is going on?

First, the panel: representing clients and the large media owners was Guy Phillipson, IAB chief exec and former head of advertising at Vodafone (where he ran a £70m budget). For publishers (and client advertisers) was Time Out Group head of marketing Catherine Demajo. In the digital [creative] agency corner, was Wayne Brown, client service director at glue. From networks (and online ad exchanges) we had Damon Reeve, Unanimis CEO and co-founder of OpenX. Last, and representing technology and tracking, was DoubleClick head of product specialists David McMurtie.

What’s most useful about the headline insights that follow is that – thanks to Guy’s knowledge of the media owner figures already emerging as the IAB conducts the now industry standard PWC online ad spend research for the second half of 2008, as well as the rest of the panel’s (particularly David and Damon’s) real-time knowledge of where ad money is going – they are predictions based on realities.

And those insights are none too surprising. Digital – as the accountable ‘channel’ – will have been up in the second half of 2008 on the year before (my guess – and it really is a guess – is by between 15 and 20%) and even up by a [perhaps significantly] smaller amount compared with the first half. Its most accountable sub-channels – search – will claim even greater share, though growth will be slower. And the accountable versions of other channels – CPA display, for example – would fare better than their less accountable brethren – like CPM banners. Experimental budgets like mobile are likely to be cut or axed completely. Brilliantly, Wayne Brown, who oversees the Toyota account at glue, was also able to confirm that no one is buying cars.

So, what lies beneath?

The upshot was that advertisers are starting to fall into two camps:

1.       The back-to-basics types that will hammer the numbers (and their DR suppliers) harder to reach tougher targets in tougher times. Their bosses have said to them: “You’re in online, get me out of this mess. You won’t get any more budget, but you will get more of what you had last year than everybody else.”

2.       The innovators. Usually in marketing-led businesses, there are those that see the recession – and the potential desperation of innovative suppliers – as the time to buy and try new ideas to get what money they have working harder for them.

This was, essentially, the view of our panel though they’re all of course fully aware that splitting people in such bilateral fashion is always a dodgy business. People aren’t really glass half-empty or half-full kind of guys. The clever ones, for example, are ‘my glass is at 50% capacity’ sorts – and so are most advertisers.

I suspect that what our experts expect – as do I – is for good advertisers to be both the first and the second and the bad ones to be just the first. That means every single one of them will be hammering down their DR work so hard that the industry might resemble Wile E. Coyote after a particularly amusing anvil incident come the recovery.

However, along with that effort – indeed as a fundamental part of it – the good ones will be looking to get even cleverer in what they do, which means innovation. It means innovation, yes, in insight and analytics, and bid strategies and the like, but also in creativity, in formats, in brand work (and measurement), and in technology. If you do something new that helps drive efficiency of spend, you’re in a good place.

Further to that, the common theme to emerge from last night’s discussion was that, to drive efficiency, advertisers will be seeking to truly understand their customers’ paths to conversion – the user journey – more than ever before. Digital – as Wayne Brown commented – understands user journeys far better than any other ‘channel’ (because it can be the platform for an entire one). The agencies, publishers, and technologies that can help clients both develop that understanding and act accordingly will survive – and possibly even thrive. 

First off, social network academic Danah Boyd of Stanford kicked off a fascinating discussion earlier this week when she posted a typically provocative and insightful piece entitled: “Who clicks on ads? And what might this mean?”.

Her hypothesis is disturbing.

I suspect that heavy ad clickers in social network sites and other social media are more likely to trend lower in both economic and social capital than the average user. Unfortunately, I don’t have the data to test these hypotheses at all. (Does anyone? Are there any studies on class dynamics and ad clicking?)

A week on and the comments debate on her blog has not yielded any strong evidence to counter her idea. I find this surprising: is there really no study of the demographics of people who click on ads?

Anyway, once you’ve chewed that over, I would direct you to IBM’s recent study, based on surveys of 2,400 consumers and 80 advertising experts, breezily headlined “The end of advertising as we know it”.

The study predicts “greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than occurred in the previous 50″. In itself that’s not news: the only certainty for the industry in the near term is profound change.

Happy reading – and thinking…