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David BerkowitzFiled under: Uncategorized | Tags: Autos, Ford, Ford Motor Company, Mark Fields
- Image via Wikipedia
Our latest contribution to Ad Age’s DigitalNext blog includes an exclusive interview with Ford Motor Company President of the Americas Mark Fields. Here’s an excerpt:
Mr. Berkowitz: You’re making a car sound a lot like a social network.
Mr. Fields: Very much so, when you look at where the trends are going, and people wanting to be connected, and wanting to know where other people are, and what they’re doing, it’s going to become more and more a piece of that – it’s what people are going to expect out of their vehicles.
You can read the full interview at Ad Age and watch the video on YouTube.
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Filed under: David Berkowitz, Search Engines, Search Insider | Tags: Google, Inspector Gadget, Short message service, Web search engine
- Penny, via Wikipedia
After the Consumer Electronics Show this month, where I met with the executives from Ford and heard about their ambitious voice search plans, I kept wondering how the ability to conduct voice searches from their cars will change how people search, communicate, access information, and drive. It then made me wonder about all of the venues and devices people can search from. At CES, Dick Tracy, James Bond, and Inspector Gadget would have had a field day testing out the latest gizmos (if they could avoid Gadget’s nemesis Dr. Claw tricking them into joining a booby-trapped tweet-up).
These new devices aren’t meant to be solely for Inspectors; they’re supposed to be for all of us. Here’s a vision for how searches will differ when conducted in different settings from different devices. In all of these situations, we’ll take the example of a young, female, Dallas-based professional named Penny who’s searching for the best cupcakes.
INDOORS
Home PC
Query: “best cupcakes dallas tx.” Penny has a craving for something sweet after dinner, so she spends a few minutes trying to find recommendations. She uses Yahoo where, thanks to SearchMonkey, reviews from Yelp and Citysearch appear on the search engine results page.
Work PC
Query: “cupcakes plano tx.” It’s her receptionist’s birthday and Penny wants to find something near the office.
ON THE GO
Query: “does anyone have any favorite cupcake places in dallas? I hope sam’s not following me or it’ll ruin the surprise 
” She texts this to 40404 and uses TweetReplies.com to get responses emailed to her.
Filed under: Ad Age, Bylines, Video | Tags: advertising, Bryan Wiener, Television
This viewpoint from Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i, was originally published in Advertising Age.
The recession is happening at a pivotal moment in the evolution of the media industry. The growth of consumer time spent online continues to outpace the migration of brands’ advertising dollars to the web. Because advertising dollars are critical to support the production of high-quality content, the impact of the recession on the evolution of internet brand advertising threatens to cause a downward and self-perpetuating spiral that will continue to hurt marketers, media producers and even consumers if not reversed within the next couple of years.
- Image by TaraLivesOn via Flickr
So how did we get here? Over the last decade, online advertising’s growth has been driven primarily by marketers seeking measurable direct-response goals, rather than awareness and consideration. During this same time period, DVRs and the internet have cannibalized the reach and effectiveness of traditional advertising. Routinely, video segments garner more views online than on TV. For instance, “Saturday Night Live’s” famous sketches of Tina Fey portraying Sarah Palin got 33% of their total viewers on the original live TV broadcasts, while 67% watched online or on a DVR. Yet because of the disparity in advertising allocation, it’s quite likely that NBC made significantly more off the TV broadcast than via online distribution.
- Image by TheMarque via Flickr
Have any New Year’s resolutions? How about 20? You can see them all in our latest contribution to Ad Age.
It was actually hard to keep the list down to a blog-friendly level and 20 of the top ones are included. You’ll see the comments found a number of people connecting with the personal resolutions, but there are also thoughts on Google, Facebook, and Barack Obama.
A few snippets:
For the industry: …Don’t call something a viral or word-of-mouth marketing success when its uptake is directly the result of a multimillion-dollar media blitz.
For Google: Add Trends-style charts to Google Blog Search already. Really, you’re on the verge of making other blog search services irrelevant. Just finish the job.
For Facebook: Add a real search engine. This is ridiculous already. And that goes to just about all you social networks. Maybe the reason comScore’s saying you and MySpace are such large search engines is that it takes 20 searches to find anything or anyone on your site.
Care for 17 more? Read them all at Ad Age.
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Filed under: David Berkowitz, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engines, Search Insider
Between the economy affecting stock prices and the potential mergers and acquisitions discussed among several of the major search engines, there is a lot of uncertainty as we head into 2009. Yet we can anticipate several shifts in search based on what we’ve seen over the past decade and other signs in the media ecosystem. Here are some major changes to anticipate:Holistic — In Every Sense
The word “holistic” should play out in a number of ways:
First, any significant media campaign or offline event drives search volume, so marketers must capture that demand by integrating search with other media planning.
Next, paid search and SEO should be planned in tandem for the best results. Several studies show that by integrating search engine marketing with search engine optimization, results are greater than the sum of its parts.
Lastly, expect the major search engines and others to push forward with new ways to infuse paid search listings with display and video media. This will make search also about engagement and not just clicks and conversions. To some degree, these new search engine offerings will be motivated by more concentrated efforts to attract large brand marketers . Additionally, given how effective search engine marketing is, the engines and portals will want to have a steady stream of upsell options. In the coming year, consumers may experience the most dramatic shift in the format of search engine results pages since the basic template was established roughly a decade ago.
Search Fragmentation
While the search engine landscape continues to be dominated by one player, new complexities keep emerging as search migrates far beyond the traditional engines.
Filed under: David Berkowitz, Google, Search Engine Marketing, Search Insider | Tags: Google, iPhone, iPod Touch, search, Smartphones
- Image by Josh Bancroft via Flickr
iPhone users love to search almost as much as they love their iFart apps. Earlier this year, Google noted the i Phone drives 50 times the search queries of other mobile handsets. One wonders, then, what took Google so long in offering iPhone targeting through AdWords.
Now targeting is live, with a great overview on the Google Mobile Blog. Can’t figure out why you’d try it? There are 10 ideas below.
A few notes before we begin:
1) Google refers to targeting “full HTML Internet browsers.” That’s more accurate than referring to this as iPhone targeting, but it’s a mouthful. This new targeting will apply to an increasing number of handsets and already includes the G1 powered by Google Android.
2) Consumers on the iPod Touch will also see these ads. Again, I’m oversimplifying below most of the time when referring to the “iPhone.”
3) The entries below aren’t mutually exclusive. There’s a good amount of overlap.
Now, let’s go to the 10 reasons, maybe even the top 10 reasons, to run ads on full HTML Internet browsers.
Filed under: David Berkowitz, Search Engine Marketing | Tags: Burger King, Google, Search engine optimization
- Image by renaissancechambara via Flickr
Imagine you go around the world spending months shooting footage for a campaign. Then you spend millions on a media buy that includes blanketing primetime TV and Sunday football games. You create a microsite with high quality video that’s the centerpiece of the entire campaign. And then, for a huge percentage of people who are trying to find the video, you’re invisible – your brand is NOWHERE to be found.
That’s what happened with Burger King’s Whopper Virgins campaign. We’ve covered this in detail on Ad Age’s DigitalNext blog. Here’s an excerpt:
There are three areas of neglect here:
- The domain: WhopperVirgin.com is a parked domain filled with ads for Burger King store listings, Virgin Mobile gifts, Virgin Atlantic flights, Virgin Islands vacations and Virgin Mary checks.
- Search engine optimization: The microsite doesn’t appear on the first three pages of Google results for “whopper virgin” searches.
- Paid search: While reviewing Google’s listings over several days, there hasn’t been a search ad running on “whopper virgin” queries.
Meanwhile, as the ad campaign continues, searches for “whopper virgin” are starting to overtake “whopper virgins” queries:
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Filed under: David Berkowitz, Social Media | Tags: Citysearch, Facebook, Facebook Connect, Google, Google Friend Connect, MySpace
- Image by MrTopf via Flickr
One of the biggest changes with digital media that’s emerging is the prevalence of third-party registration options now available for publishers. Today, there’s a post from 360i on Ad Age’s blog about this. While you should go there to read the whole thing, here’s the gist:
Google, Facebook and MySpace have all developed platforms where publishers can let visitors log in with an existing account from another service, rather than requiring visitors to register for that specific site. Publishers lose a bit of control; they won’t have access to emails and the full details they can collect when requiring visitors to register directly with them. What they gain instead is the potential for much richer and deeper engagement from a large population of visitors that might not have registered at all. They also gain opportunities to attract new visitors.
How should publishers choose among the current connect platforms — Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpaceID? The services are evolving quickly but [there] are three rules of thumb to consider.
Read the full post at Ad Age to check out those rules of thumb; you’ll also read more about this in upcoming 360i POVs.
For a great example of how these services work, try Facebook Connect on the new Citysearch beta site. Assuming you have a Facebook account (if not, may we ask why?), on the upper right you can click “sign in using Facebook” and click around from there. Try writing a review, for instance, and you’ll see an option to share this back on Facebook. You’ll also see if any of your friends are registered with Citysearch through Facebook, and then you’ll see their reviews.
There’s a lot more potential for how to integrate such services, and there are dozens of live examples now, so in 2009 it will be fun to push the envelope in finding new ways to use such platforms to increase engagement and drive traffic.
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Filed under: David Berkowitz, Google, Search Insider | Tags: Google, search engine
- Image via CrunchBase
At MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit last week in Park City, Utah, some attendees were frustrated over the economy, and most people were frustrated by the lack of snow. Yet the biggest source of frustration seemed to be Google.
It came up during a panel early on Friday specifically about Google. It also came up in the “What’s Next” panel that I moderated. And when I facilitated a roundtable on e-commerce following my panel, the participants were most talkative when they started kvetching about Google.
It wasn’t the kvetching I sometimes hear during search marketing events. There wasn’t the talk about challenges with Google’s Quality Score or pages suddenly dropping out of its index. The complaints were mostly from marketers responding like consumers. Below I’ll share a number of these complaints, largely from the roundtable. You can share your thoughts or add new gripes in the comments.
I’m not doing this to beat up on Google; the stock market’s done that enough lately, forcing Google to consider whether it swaps out its Naked juices for Tropicana. During my panel, SearchIgnite President Roger Barnette noted that Google’s stock woes may make it even more aggressive in developing products that appeal to both consumers and marketers, so Google could emerge as an even fiercer competitor. Meanwhile, last I checked, Google’s market share has only been increasing. Still, these frustrations shed light on some of the challenges search engines face as they try to innovate while delivering on their core value.
