Shift Market

Yet another awesome remix of the famous scene, the best one yet.

While search advertising generates a much greater sales lift among the consumers it reaches, the far broader reach of display advertising can more than compensate for display ads’ lower sales impact

Consider Both Sales Lift and Reach When Using Online Advertising to Grow Offline Sales (comScore Voices)

Someecards

So, if you’re the New York Times or Wall Street Journal you:

1. Hire John Markoff and Walt Mossberg (on staff)

2. Distribute their technology reportage

3. Sell advertising against that reportage

4. Pay Markoff and Mossberg

5. Create an archive on NYTIMES.com and WSJ.com of their work.

Let’s run Google’s Knol through this same process:

1. Hire writers (on contingency) — check

2. Distribute these pages in Google’s search results — check

3. Sell advertising against it in the form of AdSense — check

4. Pay the writers via AdSense split — check

5. Create an archive on Knol for future monetization — check

Is Google A Content Company? Of Course It Is. So What Should Publishers Do?

 

Couldn’t have said it any better.

sketch

Just spent way too much time in this. Draw something, swap with someone, repeat. It has been fun since SomethingAwful discovered the app. 

This just hits too close to home. Awesome deck.

For those reading the post through facebook or tumblr — there is a slideshare presentation embedded. Thanks Florian for the link.

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Everyone has their media annoyances. Here are some of mine.

Misrepresentation of audience composition as pageview composition. The fact that a site may be predominantly reaching women, for example, does not mean that the actual pageviews (and hence impressions) generated by women are in the same proportion. A site may very well reach 80% women, which may only generate 10% of impressions on the site. In other words, a minority demographic may account for the majority of impressions. If you buy the site you end up with 10% of women and not 80% as per reach.

Last click syndrome. Most advertisers still attribute all actions to the last impression or click. If a person has been exposed twice to a creative, spent 10 minutes on a site but then a week later ended up searching on Google and buying, that last click usually accounts for the conversion. Non-click conversions, offline spend, and all other channels need to be part of standard reporting. Otherwise you end up using Google’s report which tells you to spend more with Google.

Social media marketing. Not sure I grasp the idea of marketing being the act of emailing your blogger friends so that they post about something your client is paying you to promote. The whole area of “social marketing” still feels like an awkward infomercial where brands try to get people to talk to them about how much they love the products (or at least mention the products), while other people are supposed to care. We need better tools, better understanding of audiences and better ways of fair, transparent advertising that would actually allow big brands to support micro-publishers and their readers. Let’s develop those instead of talking about blogging and how important blogs are and how it’s changing the world, shall we? It’s 2008, let’s move on.

Newsflash: cartoons don’t have to be drawn by hand on the back of a business card. In fact, it’s much better if it isn’t.

Awesome content, but they should make these things embeddable. It’s like a forum macro anyway, why not add a js tag in there?

someecards.com

THE BEST-INFORMED PERSON I EVER KNEW was a friend of my grandfather’s back in the Bronx, where I grew up. Every morning of every day of his life, this elderly man — his name, as I recall, was Boris — would dress impeccably in a suit and waistcoat and shuffle to the public library, where more than a dozen of the day’s local and out-of-town newspapers were threaded through bamboo poles and hung from racks. One by one, Boris would read them all, front to back; at dusk, he would walk home alone. This daily pilgrimage was conducted with ecclesiastic solemnity, a quiet, dignified homage to the majesty of knowledge. Even as a little boy, in that intuitive if primitive way that children comprehend important things, I understood the fundamental truth that Boris was, in some clear but compelling way, a douche bag.

Washington Post: Cruel and Usual Punishment

Launched yesterday, the visualization API is closely tied to iGoogle and Google Docs.

A fun game to play whenever Google launches something: “How Will This Help To Make Advertising More Relevant?” For example, the Google Maps API provides geographic location. Ad Manager provides results of ads ran by other parties.

I doubt that the visualization API is there just to make Google Docs or iGoogle a bit better. So what does the Visualization API add to advertising effectiveness? Could the new structured data brought in from third parties improve ad relevance? The API will support custom data sources in the future, so perhaps this is a way to gain access to data that can be reused in ads themselves?

Examples of visualizations are in the gallery.