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My 2 featured articles for the week ending Jan. 19, 2007:

Archived blogs for the week of Jan. 15, 2007

1291 - Jan. 16, 2007 - 5.29 PM EST

Advertising on smaller sites

In today's competitive online marketplace, planning multimedia advertising campaigns is far more complex than it used to be just a few short years ago. However, media planners would still much prefer to keep things as simple as they can.

Overall, when it comes to the Internet advertising portion of their budgets, they buy PPC advertising on Google, Yahoo and a few other marketing Web sites and that's about it for the most part.

On average, Merrill Lynch expects that both search marketing and branded advertising will grow on the Internet for 2008, up 27 percent and 21 percent, respectively.

However, continuing to place the majority of online ad dollars on large Web sites could be a very costly mistake says Merrill Lynch. Large, particularly on the Web, may not be better.

Posted on Businessblog™

1290 - Jan. 16, 2007 - 3.23 PM EST

AOL plans to acquire TradeDoubler

AOL hopes to increase its online advertising business in Europe with its planned acquisition of TradeDoubler, a Swedish provider of online marketing services, for $1.05 billion.

TradeDoubler's online marketing services offering includes hosted analytic tools that help customers simplify the creation, management, analysis and optimization of online marketing and sales activities.

AOL's planned acquisition will complement its existing European online advertising effort, which is presently based on services from Advertising.com, a company AOL bought a little over two years ago.

Advertising.com operates a display advertising network in the U.S. and eight European countries. As a complement, it also offers search engine management and lead generation services.

Posted on Businessblog™

1289 - Jan. 16, 2007 - 10.14 AM EST

MSN loosing out to Google, again

When Bill Gates was asked for a plan in beating Google in Web search technology, he gave Microsoft engineers just 100 days to develop a new search portal.

"Go with everything you've got" Gates told Stephen Lawler, Microsoft's project leader of the just-formed Virtual Earth team. The development team met Gates' first deadline, as well as other equally important milestones in the two years that ensued.

However, Microsoft's efforts has yet to pay off in a big way. It seems that the harder the programmers from Redmond race after Google, the more the Mountain View company appears to rapidly move forward.

During 2006, Microsoft introduced many new online offerings. In addition to the widely praised Virtual Earth, an exact 3-D representation of major U.S. cities, there were three new search services, a new portal, online video, classified ads, mobile email and social networking.

Perhaps most importantly, there was Microsoft's new adCenter software released in May that was supposed to help MSN make more money from its online offerings. As a result of all these efforts, the number of visitors to Microsoft's sites has not increased, while the amount of time they have spent there has dropped significantly. To make matters worse, advertising sales have fallen.

At the same time all of this was happening, Google's overall traffic and advertising revenues have continued to increase, almost exponentially. Overall, Microsoft executives say they are taking the long view. "We feel like we have the right services in place and the right team in place to be successful, but it is super early in this entire space," said Adam Sohn, director of global sales and marketing for online services.

Official optimism aside, the early results have been grim to say the least. According to comScore Media Metrix, the total unique audience that visited Microsoft's U.S. websites in December of last year was roughly 117 million, unchanged from 2005.

Overall, Google is rapidly catching up, with its number of unique visitors up 21 percent to 113 million. MSN's page views, an approximation of how long visitors spend at its sites, was down 12 percent in December 2006 to 18 billion, according to the research firm. Google's page views were up 90 percent to 13 billion.

Microsoft has steadily lost ground in search, despite developing its own search engine a little over 2 years ago. As of November 2006, Microsoft's share of Internet searches has fallen to 8 percent. In January 2005, when MSN search was released in beta, Microsoft share's of searches stood at 14 percent, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Microsoft's Internet slide is reflected in its online sales. During the quarter ended Sept. 30 2006, sales for the online business unit were $539 million, down 5 percent in a year. In comparison, Google reported revenue of $2.69 billion, an increase of a little over 70 percent.

Posted on Businessblog™

1288 - Jan. 15, 2007 - 3.05 PM EST

A new deal for comScore Networks

Tacoda has completed a deal with comScore Networks to integrate comScore data with its existing Audience Networks™ database of behavioral targeting and advertising.

The result will be actionable data that will reveal unique information about Internet audiences and will allow online marketers to design stronger media advertising plans and place more relevant marketing messages.

"comScore is really delighted to partner with Tacoda by providing our rich anonymous consumer data, including online visitation, e-commerce, and demographic details, in an effort to better enhance the targeting segments available through Tacoda's Audience Networks™ service," says Anthony Psacharopoulos, Senior V.P. of comScore Networks.

He added "this partnership will enable Tacoda to provide information that will transform the way brand advertisers think about online media."

"This is the first real deal that integrates two of the largest repositories of knowledge about online consumer behavior. Our goal is to condense the combined information and offer it to online advertisers in a fashion that will help improve their creative approach and media planning," says Tacoda CEO, Curt Viebranz.

"Using comScore's data, we are already gaining new insights into how advertisers should think about their vertical and online markets. This will undoubtedly advance the advertising experience by years."

Posted on Businessblog™

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