New Activision Publishing CEO is Kevin Butler's dad originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 14 Jul 2010 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
AdAge reported on last week’s Google press event, where vice president of product management Neal Mohan explained how the company plans to extend its advertising empire beyond search keywords.
Google will be trying ways to serve more display ads — that’s industry jargon for Internet ads not targeted to search results — throughout its popular properties.
But Google spokesperson Rob Shilkin explained to VentureBeat that “display ad” doesn’t necessarily mean gaudy, dancing images.
“The Google Display Network already exists,” Shilkin said. In an email, he wrote, “Google Display Network = YouTube + Google sites + AdSense/Ad Exchange partner sites.”
AdAge reporter Edmund Lee concluded that “a substantial part of Google’s display success hinges on its ability to milk YouTube, Gmail and Google Finance.” Already, Google Finance sometimes runs rectangular animated display ads alongside stock information. But Shilkin was clear that this doesn’t mean Gmail is about to start hosting similar image, animation or video ads. “A display ad can also be text,” he said.
One of Gmail’s seductive traits has been that ads in the system are displayed to the side of the screen and are text only. Compared to Hotmail and other services that stuff ads, sometimes consisting of big images, into the middle of email messages, Gmail’s ads are barely intrusive. Shilkin said the company has no plans to change the successful format.
Mohan said last week that today’s display market is about $20 billion per year. “We think it can be … $40 billion, $60 billion, or $80 billion,” he said. There are some big hurdles to be leapt first. For starters, complicated processes for buying display ad space can stall the launch of a campaign for a month or more. Compared to Google’s nearly instant do-it-yourself targeting system for search keywords, there’s obviously room for a major overhaul of how display space is bought and scheduled.
Tags: advertising
Companies: Google, Neal Mohan
Continue reading Have you met Marcus 'PSP' Rivers?
Have you met Marcus 'PSP' Rivers? originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 04 Jul 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
The latest monthly report from mobile ad network Millennial Media says advertisers spent 85% more on interactive “rich media” mobile ads in May than in April. The report doesn’t offer much detail as to why the sudden extra kick in spending, nor does it reveal the dollar amount being spent. It’s likely that rich media spending is not very high, hence the ability for it to nearly double in one month.
A Millennial spokesperson said, “Rich media creative encourages deep consumer engagement and drives successful campaigns for brands. Advertisers are seeing the value that rich media brings to their campaigns and are putting more dollars into it as a result.” Which means that the people who are served interactive ads rather than static banners are clicking on them more.
Still, it’s not yet clear that interactive mobile ads are a hit rather than a curiosity. The goal of many mobile ads is to make a brand feel familiar to smartphone owners, rather than to try to get them to make a purchase on the spot. What the mobile ad industry needs is some quantitative testing of the brand awareness boost generated by specific campaigns. Do interactive ads make a huge difference? It would be great to see some numbers to back that up.
Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “The year of the superphone and who will profit.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Register now. Tickets are going quickly. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, click here.
Tags: advertising
Companies: millennial media
APB in-game voice chat will be ad-supported originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Playboy mags make Dead Rising 2 more inappropriately sexy originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Fifteen year-old Christian Owens, founder of online advertising network Branchr, was recently named Enterprising Young Brit 2010. The Daily Mail gives the annual award to teen tycoons with startups in the United Kingdom.
Owens founded the startup, which counts MySpace as an advertiser — to give you a sense of the prestige — in January 2009. The company provides small and medium sized businesses with an alternative to Google through its pay-per-click advertising platform.
The international company also boasts teen execs in the United States, including 17-year-old Mark Bao of Boston. According to Bao, a self-described “technology entrepreneur and non-profit founder and advocate,” the company serves ads on 17,500 online properties. While Branchr is profitable, Bao said the team is thinking about venture funding “over the pond in London.”
The entire company may soon move stateside. Candidates for the new Branchr headquarters include New York City and San Francisco, a move that would bring the young team closer to the competition.
Tags: advertising
Companies: Branchr, Google, MySpace
People: Christian Owens
A slower website loses customers. Period. That’s why Google employee Steve Souders, author of the definitive O’Reilly manuals High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites, did a performance test of nine popular widgets for websites, to see how much they slowed down the host’s page loads.
He ran all nine — Digg, Facebook, Google Analytics, Google AdSense, BuySellAds, ValueClick, Quantcast, Collective Media and Glam Media — through Google’s Page Speed and Yahoo’s YSlow benchmark tools. He posted the full table of results on his personal website.
Souder found that Digg’s widget was the biggest boat anchor of the bunch, adding two-thirds of a second to page load times. Facebook Sharer, the second worst, added about one-sixth of a second. These times seem trivial, but many sites embed multiple widgets in their pages. The total adds up to far more than the 400 millisecond delay that Google found would lose them several hundred million dollars a year in ad revenue.
Not all of the advertising widgets were testable, because, Souder wrote, “it’s not possible to gather timing stats for snippets with live ads.”
Beyond the sheer number-of-millseconds delay, Souder created an Impact on Page rating that included “content size, number of HTTP requests, and performance issues,” all of which are easily observed by non-technical users.
Ad networks had the biggest impact in his tests, with all but BuySellAds rating a “medium” or “big” impact score. Souders wrote earlier this year that “the performance problem of ads” was a hot topic among site engineers trying to extract the best performance and, by extension, the most business from their sites.
Tags: advertising
People: Steve Souders
Google’s acquisition of mobile ad network AdMob, a deal big enough that the Federal Trade Commission investigated it as a possible monopoly, was cleared and closed last week. Now, AdMob has released a software development kit that lets publishers include Admob-served ads on all iPhone OS devices — iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.
Google and Apple, once cozy partners, have grown increasingly competitive in the past year. Yet Apple’s clout is such that Google is going out of its way to ensure its products work on Apple’s products, even if that means creating Apple-only software and content.
The trick to AdMob’s new iPhone OS kit is that while it produces Apple-only output, it accepts the same inputs as ad tools for other platforms. There are two forms of ads available: Text ads of up to 35 characters, and image ads in industry-standard sizes such as 300 x 250 pixels, or a superwide 728 x 90 pixels on the iPad.
AdMob has produced both screenshots and a video demo to show what’s possible on the iPad.
Tags: advertising, ipad, iPhone
Companies: AdMob, Apple, Google
Ads with images outperform those without. Put your brand name at the top. Change your ad’s image or title every couple of days so it appears fresh. And always, always tell your audience exactly what you want them to do, even if it’s as basic as “Click here to get started.”
These are among the dozens of tips and examples in a new section of Facebook aimed at helping advertisers on the almost-500-million-member social network get the most bang for their buck. Guide to Facebook Ads, officially launched today, contains dozens of pages that cover the basics of advertising on Facebook and on the Internet in general, since many Facebook advertisers are Internet first-timers lured by the site’s reach and buzz.
Advertisers were “looking for more proscriptive help,” a Facebook spokesperson emailed me this morning. The guide has separate multi-page sections on ad creative, reach and targeting, billing, budgeting, and more. There are three success stories including Japanese airline ANA, which used creative grouping of keywords to target Facebook users who might be fantasizing about a trip to Japan.
A multipage section of best practices goes beyond the basics to say what works and what doesn’t. Facebook suggests you run multiple ads in parallel and check daily to see what works and what doesn’t. Try adjusting the targeting to be both less and more restrictive, because either direction might be the key to a better response rate.
And while this seems obvious, Facebook’s guide reminds advertisers it almost never hurts to make the ad simpler and the product or brand easier to recognize.
Tags: advertising
Companies: Facebook
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