Over the past 4 months, I have written many articles on what the advertising face of social networks should look like. While I would like to think they were reading my columns (unlikely), I am happy to see my vision of user / community targeting is where it seems Facebook is heading. I was actually surprised at how many of the people I spoke with at Adtech not understanding the potentially gigantic platform this can be.
The purpose of marketing has always been clear—to facilitate customer acquisition—but one of the most important things that a marketer can do is help his or her company learn more about its customers. Who are they? What do they read? What do they search for? What do they shop for? And what’s the maximum we’re willing to pay to acquire their business? There was a time when very little of this was really knowable.
Does anybody out there use Yahoo Messenger’s chat rooms? If your answer is “not anymore” you’d be in the majority. If your answer is “yes,” then you’re probably a viral marketing robot.
I can always tell how healthy a magazine is just by looking at it. If it looks like it’s been eating well and lifting weights, I figure it’s doing fine. But when I see those anorexic magazines that fold over like soggy pizza when I pick them up, I know they’re in trouble. Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot more anorexic magazines, and a lot fewer hearty ones. In the meantime, if my computer were a magazine, it’d be fat and robust.
Forget the CNN/YouTube debates (which was only watched by 2.6 million viewers anyway). The real milestone of new media changing the face of politics has already happened. We are deep in an historic shift in the way elections are run, driven entirely by advancements in sharing information. But to understand where we are, we have to take a look at how we got here.
Nielsen/Netratings has just started ranking Web brands. It does this by measuring “engagement” by total minutes spent with the brand and unique audience. Brands that had a large unique audience spending a long time engaged had the highest score. AOL came in first, followed by Yahoo!, then MSN/Windows Live, with Google coming in fifth.
Okay people, enough is enough. I can’t go through a day anymore without reading some article or other about how Google has been seduced by the power of the dark side. It’s debunking time.
To read most of the articles on Google’s expanded test of CPA-based content ads, you would think it was the greatest invention since the wheel. It could be great for certain advertisers, but only if they do it right. As it turns out, that’s not so easy.
If they want to reach the right person with the right message at the right time, 2008 presidential candidates should consider site behavioral retargeting. Think of it as continuous online rehandshaking.
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