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August 2004
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A Coke I-Agency to Start Gaming DivisionInteractive agency Studiocom said it will start a new online game division in order to keep serving existing clients Coca-Cola and Twentieth Century Fox. Atlanta-based Studiocom has been involved with Coke advergaming and other efforts for the past three ... continue reading »Brit: Media Buyers to Blame for Low Net Ad ProportionBritish media executive Damian Burns rues the fact that, while online ad billings are rising quickly, they're still extremely out of proportion to viewer's media consumption. The net comprises about 12 percent of media consumption, but only about 2.5 percent... continue reading »Microsoft Offers Peek at Search AppAs several search companies attempt to expand their presence on the computer desktop, giving away toolbars and planning even more ambitious bridgeheads onto the operating system, Microsoft is fighting from the other direction, incorporating web search results into system-level searches.... continue reading »MarketWatch Revs Almost DoubleMarketWatch.com's revenues almost doubled in Q2 relative to last year's second quarter. Revenue rocketed to more than $20 million in 2004. About two out of five dollars came from advertising, a 48 percent increase in ad revenues. MarketWatch said that... continue reading »Web Analytics Heavily Discounted Due to Tough CompetitionWeb analytics firms are facing an increasingly competitive market, with about 50 vendors and increasing expectations among customers for discounts of 20 percent or more, according to a Forrester Research study. Less than half of respondents rated the analytics project... continue reading »FTC Sues Another Boca Resident for SpammingThe Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed its third action against an alleged spammer under the Can-Spam Act, accusing Creaghan Harry of using open proxies and other ways of faking his identity to send out millions of spam messages selling fake... continue reading »Forbes Puts Ad Links in EditorialForbes started putting links to advertiser sites in the midst of editorial. IntelliTxt provides the technology behind the ad links, with Overture supplying many of the advertisers through its Content Match system. The concept of making certain words hot in... continue reading »JibJab Strikes at Threatening Copyright HolderHaving been threatened with legal action by the owner of the Woody Guthrie tune "This Land is Your Land," JibJab Media struck first, bringing action against Ludlow Music in a California court, asking for an early judgment indicating JibJab's parody... continue reading »Bloggers Fail to Ruin ConventionIt turned out, after all, that having bloggers at the Democratic National Convention wasn't that big a deal. The New York Times reviews the results of having had bloggers trawl the floor and snark on the happenings. The report doesn't... continue reading »'Subservient President' Next Punch in Viral Political BoutThe Subservient Chicken - the Burger King viral marketing humor site - has been flattered by a spoof, the Subservient President: a rather funny portrayal of President George Bush obeying the orders typed in by site visitors. It's even funnier... continue reading »Most Top Brands Fail to Answer EmailMost of the top 100 brands don't answer their consumer email, according to a study by Common Sense Advisory. The firm sent four different types of emails to each of the top 100, in both Spanish and English. Not surprisingly,... continue reading »WebTrends Updates Search ProductWebTrends updated its WebPosition Gold product, a combination of several tools to optimize their search engine optimization process. Included are the WebPosition Gold 3, a page optimization helper; WordTracker, a package for researching keywords; and On Demand, a conversions and... continue reading »Viacom Buys Out Rest of SportsLine.comViacom announced it will buy the remainder of SportsLine.com that it doesn't already own. It will pay about $46 million for the additional 62 percent. This makes efforts to integrate Viacom and CBS properties, such as NFL games, PGA events,... continue reading »Live from SES San JoseContent is nitty gritty here at Jupiter Media's Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose. A popular new session track is Business & Finance, popular with all those SEM firms hopeful that Google's IPO will pave the way for... continue reading »Lycos Bought by South Korean FirmSouth Korean Internet portal Daum Communications, as rumored, purchased Lycos for $95 million in cash and an additional $10 million in real estate leasing guarantees. The deal didn't include Terra Networks USA, nor Lycos Europe. Spanish company Terra had purchased... continue reading »iProspect Launches Bid Management ToolProspect, the firm that just filed a patent on bid management technology, launched its bid management tool along with those of tens of others bowing their new wares at the Search Engine Strategies Conference taking place in San Jose. iProspect... continue reading »Chinese Search Engine LaunchedChina's pre-announced new search engine by Sohu.com (Chinese for "search fox") launched, complete with a complete Chinese language portal at the address www.sogou.com ("search dog"). The homegrown effort hopes to compete with foreign firms Google, which partnered with domestic firm... continue reading »SEM'ers: Don't Mix Search and Contextual PlacementsDespite the best hopes of Yahoo and Google, it's quickly becoming a unanimous opinion in the search engine marketing industry that search inventory and contextual placements shouldn't be lumped together, as both Google and Yahoo do with their paid placements... continue reading »Advertisers Outspent by Consumers on MediaWith the increase of subscription content in newer media, such as pay cable, new print vehicles and the Internet, consumers in 2003 started paying more for media than advertisers did. The center of gravity of the media business model moved... continue reading »Yahoo, Ask Jeeves to Bow New Local Search Sitesahoo launched its Yahoo Local beta that combines maps, yellow pages information and even reviews of local businesses. The new site seems to sign an abandonment of its relationship with CitySearch for similar services. At the same time, Ask Jeeves... continue reading »Ask Jeeves VP Search InterviewedClickZ's Zachary Rogers interviewed Ask Jeeve's Scott Garell, vice president of search. Sticking closely to the Ask Jeeves message, Garell notes that the firm has one of only three core search engines and is extremely hungry to grow its current... continue reading »Subservient President Creator Speaks"Cut taxes" response Steve Anderson, a research faculty member at the USC School of Cinema-Television and a teacher at the Annenberg Center, and - most recently - the creator of the Subservient President site, spoke to MarketingVOX this morning to answer... continue reading »Online Retail Sales Figures DisappointComing off a week when online commerce figures barely registered a rise from the year before, the week ending July 18th registered a gain of ten percent from the prior year, according to comScore. But in some ways this was... continue reading »SEMPO Promises to Do BetterThe Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) held their annual meeting last night, and less fur flew than had been anticipated by those who had heard rumors of angry members harboring complaints of poor internal communication. That issue ate up... continue reading »Net Ad Conversions Up, Hitting Four PercentOnline retailers are big fans of web analytics, optimization and keeping an eye on those conversion rates. That might be why the industry has seen relatively consistent gains in conversion rates over the past three years. Hitting four percent or... continue reading »Dell, Gateway Embarrassed by Unoriginal Photo ChoicesIn what seems proof of a creative deficit in the computer marketing realm, arch computer retail rivals Dell and Gateway managed to buy what seems to be the same stock photography for their back-to-school site imagery. The same model appeared... continue reading »E-Commerce Site Opened Databases Drive Huge BusinessInformationWeek spells out the benefits to ecommerce sites for opening up their databases and platforms to third party developers. This data point alone is worth pondering: "[a]bout 40 percent of the items listed for sale on eBay's U.S. site come... continue reading »Quigo Opens Vertical Contextual NetworksQuigo's new AdSonar Exchange works like a vertical version of Google's AdSense, divvying up publishers into vertical markets and only then selling contextual keyword placements. The additional targeting garners costs per click up to five times what broad search engines... continue reading »Study: Web Biggest Remote Shopping MediumA Dieringer Research Group study of 3,000 Americans found that the web has become the most popular remote shopping method, with almost 100 million people making a purchase after using the web to research choices. That was head and shoulders... continue reading »Sullivan: SEO to Be More ImportantSearch engine guru Danny Sullivan told the Search Engine Strategies conference that, even as paid listings have become dominant in the industry, unpaid search engine optimization is increasingly complex and important. MSN will introduce its own web crawler within the... continue reading »Cinema Ads Biggest Growth MediumThe Internet is moving over, along with other media, to make room for the growth of cinema advertising. In the past five years, it has grown at a compound rate of 38.4 percent, according to Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), and... continue reading »Mainstream Sites Hit with Gambling Ad Class ActionThirteen big online publishers were hit with a class action lawsuit yesterday, charging them with receiving ill-gotten gains from gambling advertisers - a no-no in California. The suit seems a kitchen sink affair, with seemingly irrelevant publishers, like Jupiter Media... continue reading »General Mills' Karl Schmidt InterviewediMedia interviewed Karl Schmidt, the director of consumer price promotion, corporate coupon planning and development at General Mills. He points out that coupons are now potentially becoming viable in large-scale ways online, where previously they worked only on very small... continue reading »MarketingVOX Bows New Professional Network ForumMarketingVOX is pleased to invite readers to join its new forum on the Soflow Network, a Friendster-like site that allows professionals to network, shoot the interactive breeze and find the right people to help make work happen. As it turns... continue reading »BK in New Viral Effort: Angus DietThe makers of Subservient Chicken now bring us the Angus Diet, a spoof diet site created for Burger King to both exploit and counter the buzz behind the current Atkins Diet craze. Crispin Porter & Bogusky again are behind the... continue reading »aQuantive Beats ExpectationsaQuantive, owner of the AtlasDMT products and various i-agencies, blew away expectations on its second quarter earnings yesterday evening, posting 11 cents a share of profits, versus 3 cents a year ago and versus expectations of only 6 cents. Its... continue reading »Men Dominate Online News DemosMen continue to dominate the demographics of Internet news sites, which isn't really causing much alarm in an industry that more often has difficulty reaching men. Newspapers are taking the attitude that they can enjoy the slightly higher-CPM demo now... continue reading »Anti-Spyware Campaign Expands, Targets CookiesIt was once that just adware companies worried about getting painted with an overly-broad "spyware" brush, but now mainstream sites that use cookies for tracking are also finding themselves more and more lumped into the same bucket. A study by... continue reading »WPP Buys DigitWPP bought a 22-person digital shop in the U.K. after it won business from that country's health department, Vodafone and Motorola. Digit will join Good Technology, Incline and XM London in WPP's digital grab bag GT Network. Revolution reports.... continue reading »ValueClick Buys PricerunnerValueClick announced during an earnings release yesterday that it had bought European shopping portal Pricerunner. ValueClick will pay $29 million in cash and stock (which might be a bit less now, as the after-market trading pummeled ValueClick for a very... continue reading »Limited Supply Drives Search Marketers to Alternative EnginesSearch engine marketers report that increased demand has made for steeply increased prices on major search engine systems Google and Overture. Some are turning to the estimated 525 alternative paid search providers. Still others are exploring the proliferating contextual networks... continue reading »JibJab Handicapped to Win Rights SuitCanvassing a bunch of intellectual property lawyers, Wired reports that the JibJab Media case against would-be copyright enforcer Ludlow Music seems pretty cut-and-dried. It seems everyone agrees that the JibJab political parody that used a Woody Guthrie song - the... continue reading »Mobile Spam Banned with Expansive DefinitionThe Federal Communications Commission voted to ban unsolicited commercial messages sent to mobile phones. Most interestingly, the spam definition used in this rule making includes all non-opt-in commercial messages, without making the various exceptions that currently apply in the email... continue reading »Sender ID Forwarded as Official StandardMicrosoft's anti-spam identity validation technology, Sender ID, is set to be put forward as an official web standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The technology is a simple list of domains and the corresponding IP addresses from which... continue reading »AOL Buys Challenge-Response Patent HolderAOL will purchase the Mailblocks challenge-response anti-spam system company and roll it out over time to its massive subscriber list. Mailblocks was started by WebTV co-founder Phil Goldman two years ago. He died this past December at the age of... continue reading »FindWhat in Deal with Canada FirmFindWhat is partnering with Canada's Yellow Pages Group (YPG) to create a pay-per-click network using FindWhat's technology and YPG's on-the-ground sales force. Already, YPG's various sites reach about 3.7 million Canadians. The deal is consistent with FindWhat's strategy of working... continue reading »Amazon Adds Two StoresAmazon is at it again, adding new vertical stores to its portfolio of retail shops. Added to the roster are musical instruments and cameras. Amazon has been constantly adding product categories, some of which vary greatly enough that the firm... continue reading »Microsoft Releases Search StudyHarris Interactive and Microsoft studied search engine users, finding that almost all Internet users employ search engines, but only half do so every day. Users average two searches per day. The study's reported most popular searches don't come as much... continue reading »Vonage Account in ReviewVonage contacted shops to initiate an account review for both media and creative. About 20 agencies were contacted, and Vonage will find out if they could be heard on the other end of the phone (rather than just the frequent... continue reading » |