The Growing Backlash Against PR Spam, And The Rationale For MicroPR

From /Message: - Gina Trapani, of Lifehacker, has created a prspammers wiki where she and others can publicly out PR firms that are spamming bloggers at their personal email addresses, or using other unsavory spammish practices. She announced the blacklist in a twitter message, here, inviting others to add to it.

Various practitioners (Todd Defren, Brian Solis, and so on) have written what I think are heartfelt apologies for the missteps that their firms and the industry as a whole has made. These are being collated at PR Openmic.

Personally, I feel that it is the whole system that is wrong, and piecemeal solutions like blacklists and filtering, and one:one agreements about how I, some specific blogger, should be approached by some specific firm won't work in the long run -- these are all stop gaps and band-aids.

The root cause here is the delusion on the part of the clients that this sort of PR carpet bombing works, that mass media messages embedded in a press release or press release-ish email work, and that we, the bloggers, actually react positively to this junk.

We, the bloggers and journalists, need to stand up and shout, 'Stop! This doesn't work! Shut up! Stop shouting! Stop screaming your bilge! Stop screaming and listen!' We need to shout them down, because they aren't taking our subtle little hints, like deleting the email and not responding. They aren't paying attention. There is no feedback loop, just a messianic faith in the power of PR blitz. | Read full article

"Free" is Killing Us--Blame The VCs

This posting is right on the money. So - digital entrepreneurs, how can you make money online if ads only work for larger sites? Go free and hope to be acquired?

From The Silicon Alley Insider - I believe it should be possible to start a small business and to have a small number of profitable customers, and to earn a living. From there, it should be possible to work hard, and to grow your business into something substantial. Until recently, this was the American way, and it applied to technology as much as to any other business. But no more.

In today’s “free” world, in most online business categories, it is inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to grow it. This is because in the digital world, advertising, the only real revenue stream, cannot support a small digital business. If businesses were based on the idea that people paid for services then small companies could succeed at a small scale and grow. But it is very hard to charge when your competition is free.

The economic problem with advertising businesses is that advertising businesses do not work without really significant scale. In the past, a good product or service could address a niche and succeed without being a home run. Today, a home run is required because if you do not reach a massive scale, advertisers are uninterested. And even if advertisers could be attracted, CPMs are so low that the revenue would be inconsequential. Small Internet businesses don’t work. | Read full article

Net Radio Gain: CBS Radio, Last.fm Collaborate

From Media Post - INTERNET RADIO IS SEEING THE flurry of content and sales deals continue in first-quarter 2008. The latest partnership brings together CBS Radio and Last.fm to share content. The deal will allow the Internet company to stream audio from CBS radio station broadcasts live, while giving listeners from the CBS Radio Internet Network access to Last.fm's library of free online music.

For Last.fm, the deal represents a substantial increase in the number of broadcast partners and breadth of content it can offer--adding CBS Radio's 140 stations to its existing partnerships with Universal, EMI, Warner Music Group and Sony BMG, as well as about 150,000 independent artists and studios. The station list includes top CBS properties like New York's WCBS-FM, Los Angeles' KROQ, Chicago's WXRT and Atlanta's WVEE. Last.fm users will be able to access the content through CBS' new online audio player. | Read full article

YouTube Debuts Viewer Analytics Tool

The service is designed to help video makers understand more about where their viewers are and how those viewers found their videos.

From Information Week - Online video makers can now watch those watching their videos.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s YouTube on Thursday released YouTube Insight, a free video analytics tool designed to help video makers understand more about where their viewers are and how those viewers found their videos.

"For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time," a YouTube blog post explains. "You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks."

The metrics YouTube is making available are likely to be appreciated by marketers and professional video makers, who can use the information to see where videos are popular and to correlate changing viewership with related promotions and events. | Read full article

Making millions when the boss isn't looking

From The Globe And Mail - It's one of the fastest-growing, most lucrative departments at CBS Corp. right now. But the company's president, Les Moonves, has a far more blunt way to describe how the network has turned March Madness basketball into an Internet gold mine.

“People sit at their computers and waste away their afternoons watching basketball games while their bosses are looking the other way,” Mr. Moonves told analysts recently in New York.

When asked about the advertising dollars CBS expects this year from online broadcasts of the annual U.S. college tournament starting today, Mr. Moonves simply added: “We are having our best year, by far. Ever.” | Read full article

In CBS Test, Mobile Ads Find Users

From The New York Times - Pssst, hey you! There’s a cheap latte waiting at the coffee shop on the corner!

CBS plans to announce on Wednesday that it is trying one of the first serious experiments with cellphone advertising that is customized for a person’s location. Its CBS Mobile unit is teaming up with the social networking service Loopt, which allows its subscribers to track participating friends and family on their mobile phones.

The ads will appear on two Web sites that are tailored for mobile devices, CBS Mobile News and CBS Mobile Sports. | Read full article

Social Sites Don't Deliver Big Ad Gains

As Microsoft Corp. makes a $44.6 billion bet on Internet advertising with its unsolicited offer for Yahoo Inc., there are signs that some of the biggest new places where consumers are flocking on the Web -- social networking and video-sharing sites -- are yielding advertising revenue slower than some Internet companies had hoped.

The latest warning that the hottest Web properties are proving difficult to make money from came from Internet giant Google Inc. While announcing disappointing fourth-quarter earnings Thursday, Google executives said the company was having a harder time than it expected generating ad revenue on social-networking sites and ... | Read full article

Headwinds for online advertising

From The Globe And Mail - The explosive growth of online advertising may slow somewhat because consumers are beginning to find some of its techniques intrusive, consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu believes.

While many consumers find advertising annoying, Deloitte said there are signs they are taking a particular dislike to ads in the online world. It cited a survey last year of consumers in the United States that found the majority noticed print ads more than those online, but also found them less invasive.

People are also objecting to advertisers following their every move online, according to Deloitte. Perhaps the best demonstration of that came last month when Facebook pulled its Beacon ad program that tracked the purchases its members made online and then alerted their social networks.

A slowdown in online ads would be discouraging news for companies looking to expand beyond traditional advertising, as well as for the media companies and websites that rely on online ads for growth.

Nevertheless, Deloitte expects this segment of advertising will expand further in 2008. “Even if the growth of online advertising does slow in 2008, slower growth should be put in perspective. Online advertising is expected to generate tens of billions of dollars worth of revenues in 2008 from a relatively small, addressable market.” | Read full article

What Do Casual Games And Pharmaceuticals Have In Common?

From Video Insider - I recently flipped through an issue of Time magazine and noticed that pharmaceutical companies not only push their latest sleep aids, cholesterol suppressors and erectile dysfunction meds, but they also compete for market share amongst themselves.

The issue I looked at had ads for Actonel, AdVair, Ambien, Cymbalta, Cypher Stent, Medco, Rozerem and Zetia. My first thought was, There is an awful lot of money used to advertise these well-known drug brands. At the same time, I thought about the value proposition of online video advertising:

* touches millions of consumers each month.
* has sophisticated consumer targeting and tracking with each ad served.

Out of curiosity I looked at Time's online rate card, and with simple math I calculated the combined monthly ad-spend of all the pharmaceutical companies to be in the neighborhood of $3 million — just one issue. I looked deeper into what Time offers advertisers and found that the magazine guarantees 19.5 million impressions per month, charges a hefty $48 CPM for black-and-white full-page ads and a whopping $74 CPM for full-page color ads. I also noticed that each pharmaceutical ad was two full pages:

* Page one — the actual full-color ad.
* Page two — the full-page disclosure that generally appears on the back of the page of the color ad

This suggests each drug company buys two pages per month for an average cost per thousand of $61. WOW. | Read full article

Online Display Ad Market To Hit $8.6 Billion, Yahoo Will Dominate

From Online Media Daily - GET READY TO PAY MORE for both premium and remnant display ad inventory. JP Morgan is forecasting the U.S. graphical ad market to hit nearly $8.6 billion this year--a 20% increase from 2007, with much of that cash flow being driven by costlier CPMs. What's going to fuel the price spike? According to analyst Imran Khan, the 4% growth in CPMs will stem from a cocktail of factors, including less abundant (and possibly devalued) offline inventory, improvements in behavioral and geographical targeting, and the increased use of ad exchanges.

Khan said that local broadcast and cable inventory will be "tight" in 2008, as presidential campaign ads will absorb many of the available spots, and the increasingly scattered TV market will contribute to more ad dollars shifting online. And we expect newspapers to continue to bleed circulation and ad revenues to the Web.

Meanwhile, Web publishers will get better at monetizing their inventory via improved targeting, migration to ad exchanges and sites like social networks increasing the number of ads per page. In 2007, some 83% of graphical inventory was sold for less than $1/CPM, according to Khan--so if a publisher improves its yield even by a few cents, it can have a tremendous impact on revenues. | Read full article

In Restless Pursuit of Craigslist’s Success

From The New York Times - MICROSOFT tried. Google tried. Now it’s eBay’s turn to see if it can dethrone the Web’s most spectacularly successful underdog, Craigslist.

The Kijiji unit of eBay, a free classified ads service covering 13 countries online, was introduced in the United States in late June, and has already achieved modest success in some important markets, including New York. Its vice president and general manager, Jacob Aqraou, said it would market itself far more aggressively in 2008, and was further refining its service in hopes of putting a dent in Craigslist’s huge market-share lead. | Read full article

Web Research Drives More Real-World Purchases

From The New York Times - E-commerce purchases are expected to grow a healthy but unspectacular 17 to 20 percent this holiday season over last year’s. But the Web’s influence over what people buy could be growing even faster.

ShopLocal, a Chicago-based firm that helps retailers use their sites to drive in-store sales, says that purchases researched online but made offline, in physical stores, are booming.

The company helps retailers like Home Depot, Best Buy and Target bring their advertising catalogs and circulars to their Web sites. For the last two years, ShopLocal has been measuring Internet-influenced purchases through a combination of surveys and measuring traffic to Web pages with coupons and other discounts that can only be used offline. | Read full article

MySpace hones targeting of online advertising

From The Globe And Mail - News Corp. has taken the next big step in the move toward commercializing social networks Monday by expanding MySpace's advertising platform, allowing advertisers to deliver precision-targeted banner ads based on user-created data.

Advertisers can now pinpoint exactly who they want to reach, based on data collected from users' personal profiles, the groups they join and the messages they post for their friends. For a studio looking to promote its latest vampire film, the technology represents the difference between advertising to movie fans en masse and reaching the 205 members of the Doomed Moviethon Horror Review group and others like it more directly. | Read full article

Networks Start to Offer TV on the Web

From The New York Times - Music and TV were lazily paddling their canoes down Prosperity Creek when Music suddenly heard a deafening roar ahead. “Help! What’s happening?” cried Music — but it was too late. The canoe tumbled over the Internet Falls, knocking Music upside-down into the churning vortex.

TV, following at a short distance, was determined to avoid Music’s fate. “I shall go with the current and not fight it,” vowed TV. And with only seconds to spare, TV threw every shred of brainpower and muscle into avoiding its doom.

End of Chapter 1.

Now, nobody knows how that story will turn out. But everybody knows that fewer people are watching network TV with every passing year. This year, the networks have mounted their first counterattack. In addition to short mini-videos for the short-attention-span generation, they’re putting full-length free on-demand episodes online. ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CW are all in the game, with surprisingly pleasant results. | Read full article

People Do Watch Commercials

From The New York Times - Nielsen’s hotly anticipated commercial ratings landed with a thud on Tuesday, and network executives and media buyers quickly analyzed the premiere week numbers that most of this season’s advertisements were bought and sold based on.

And the spreadsheets contained… hold your breath… no big surprises, according to Alan Wurtzel, the president for research at NBC Universal.

“It was literally a confirmation of what we expected to see,” Mr. Wurtzel said. | Read full article

P.&G., the Pioneer of Mixing Soap and Drama, Adds a Web Installment

From The New York Times - Can young Ashley find success and happiness in the big city? Will the dashing Eric win her heart? Can she make consumers buy more Tide detergent?

Stay tuned. Or logged on.

The company that brought soap operas to radio, then television, Procter & Gamble, is trying the same strategy online with “Crescent Heights,” a new show intended to reach young viewers where they watch the most — their PCs and cellphones. | Read full article

Here Are the Answers to Your Craigslist Questions

From The New York Times - Last week, you submitted lots and lots of questions for Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, the founder and CEO, respectively, of Craigslist. They couldn’t answer every question but I think you’ll agree they’ve given us a lot of good answers, time, and ideas. I was particularly intrigued by Jim’s statement that investigative journalism has actually been damaged by newspapers’ past financial prosperity. While I don’t quite buy his argument, I see the logic behind it. Another topic for another day. Thanks to Craig, Jim, and all of you for participating. | Read full article

IAB Issues Final Word On Rich Media Impressions

From Online Media Daily - THE INTERACTIVE ADVERTISING BUREAU ON Wednesday released final guidelines on the measurement of rich online media to better gauge the level at which ad impressions are counted in rich online application environments supported by AJAX and JSON technologies.

"It's critical that there's consistency in how impressions are counted on pages using AJAX," said Sheryl Draizen, senior vice president and general manager of the IAB. | Read full article

Google Program Enlists Mini-Sites as Selling Tool for Advertisers

From The New York Times - Google is seizing on the popularity of widgets — small online tools that function like mini-Web sites — for its latest push into advertising.

The online giant will announce today a Gadget Ads program that will provide tools for advertisers to run widget ads in Google’s AdSense network.

Marketers can use space within these display ads on Google’s network to show videos, offer chats with celebrities, play host to games or other activities. If consumers like the widget ad, they can save it onto their desktops or on their profile pages online on sites like Facebook and MySpace.

The new widget ads represent a more aggressive push by Google to attract big brand advertisers who like flashy ad units rather than the simple text ads commonly run in Google’s ad network. | Read full article

Want to 'converse' with advertisers? Me neither

From The New York Times - I admit it; I'm cynical when it comes to advertising and marketing. I believe that the sole purpose of advertising is to convince me to part with my well-earned and limited supply of money and persuade me that I want things that I don't really need.

So, it was with some skepticism that I covered the Conversational Marketing Summit hosted by Federated Media at San Francisco's Presidio on Wednesday. The notion is that instead of bombarding consumers with generic messages whose success rate are hard to measure, companies can use the Internet to deliver targeted messages that consumers will want to hear, can learn from customers through interactive features and can entertain them with funny videos. Federated Media connects the many blogs--including BoingBoing, Digg and Techdirt--in its network to advertisers who are seeking that audience. | Read full article