|
|
|
Home »
Archives »
August 2004
« Previous Entries · · Next Entries »
IAB U.S. and IAB U.K. Disagree on Measurement PrioritiesGreg Stuart, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) U.S. chief, questioned the efforts being put into the U.K.'s IAB plan to try to measure and quantify the online audience into a common currency. He said that the impression is the most... continue reading »FTC: Fraud Common, Internet not High on ListFor once, the Internet isn't the best medium for a high-growth business: fraud scams. A newly released Federal Trade Commission study found that about one in nine Americans was the victim of one sort of fraud or another over the... continue reading »PayPal Ready to Challenge Visa, MastercardPayPal, after having re-written some of its back-end systems so as to be able to talk to major merchant systems, is set to make a foray into the payments market of major retailers, challenging companies like Visa and Mastercard. The... continue reading »Google Gives Rebate to Those Who Try AdWordsGoogle sent a message to advertisers that have avoided the contextual side of its offerings, giving them a 20 to 25 percent rebate on AdWords, hoping to attract back many search marketers who early on learned that the contextual clicks... continue reading »Mitsubishi Dumps Integrated Effort for Web-OnlyMitsubishi's "See What Happens" integrated campaign success - driving 31 million web visits and tripling dealer leads will be reprised this year, but without the expensive Superbowl spot. The web-only campaign, titled "Feel What Happens" launches this weekend to promote... continue reading »Yahoo Buys FareChaseYahoo bought FareChase, an online travel aggregator site, for an undisclosed sum. Most of the 25 FareChase employees will move over to the Yahoo headquarters and eventually incorporate the smaller firm's fare finding technology into Yahoo Travel. Currently, Yahoo has... continue reading »For Commerce Sites, Sticky is BackStickiness is back in fashion. But this sticky is different from the much lauded sticky that proved popular in the late 90's, when media firms hoped to generate more hits and visitors in order to better beat their figurative chests... continue reading »GM Outsources Dealer Sites, Local Online AdsInternet sales leads might be up 250 percent for GM dealers, but now they're going to cost a bit more now. General Motors is outsourcing dealer website development to The Cobalt Group, which already handled 3,000 dealer sites. The new... continue reading »24/7 Real Media at Break-Even24/7 Real Media saw revenues increase 61 percent last quarter, but failed to earn a profit outside of a one-time legal settlement. Without the $2.9 million from a legal award from Chinadotcom, 24/7 would have posted a loss of about... continue reading »Yahoo's 'Anti-Spy' Now Nixes Claria's AdwareYahoo, whose search division Overture has a very large and profitable relationship with adware creator Claria, updated its anti spyware software "Anti-Spy" so that it fingers the Claria software and other adware as objects requiring user scrutiny. Both Claria and... continue reading »Jupiter Forecasts Slowed Growth, Stalled Local Search MarketThe headlines on BBC and CNET got it wrong. Online advertising isn't set to slow, but its growth rate inevitably will. At least that's what the new JupiterResearch study coming out today says, predicting that last year's 65 percent growth... continue reading »U.K. Study: Five of Six Users Have ClickedA British online advertising vendor's study showed that five out of six U.K. web users had clicked on an online ad. In fact, the ability to click through ads and deal immediately with the companies was cited as the single... continue reading »Republicans Still Trying to Replicate Dems' Blog Fundraising SuccessIt seems to bug Republican bloggers that the Democrats have been using their blogs to such effect in fundraising. Some are trying to even the score with RedState.org, a group sort of like a Republican MoveOn.org that tries to throw... continue reading »Google's Secret Ad Policy Partly Revealed, Still Pretty MysteriousGoogle's ad policy - the secret rules by which it accepts or rejects paid search ads - have been mysterious, and after the San Francisco Chronicle obtained some documents detailing some of the rules, they seem even more mysterious. Advertisers... continue reading »Bill Matthews Resurfaces at TacodaWell-known Internet sales figure Bill Matthews joined Tacoda as head of a new San Francisco office. Matthews is best known for the various roles he held at Internet auditing firm I/Pro over the years. He originally cut his teeth in... continue reading »Online Sales Merely Pacing Offline SalescomScore reports e-commerce growth of 12 percent for the week ending July 25 relative to the same period last year. This is an improvement from the largely flat spending seen in the two previous weeks. All sales, both online and... continue reading »Eyeblaster Flushes Marketing DepartmentNate Elliott notes that Eyeblaster Director of Marketing Masha Geller is following marketing head Paul Kadin in leaving the firm. An Eyeblaster source still employed with the firm - which pretty much rules out the marketing department - tells MarketingVOX... continue reading »MarketWatch Ejects '.com' from NameAdWeek reports that MarketWatch - like a newlywed getting an old boyfriend's tattoo removed - will nix the .com from the end of its name. In the 1990s, when a .com at the end of a name could attract investor... continue reading »Search Blog Complains of Anti-Search Press BiasFirst there was the search advertising hype, then there came quite recently the backlash commentary, and now we see the search folks wincing at the lashes. SearchEngineLowdown complains that a recent MarketingSherpa review of the SES show in San Jose... continue reading »'The Spot' Makes Online ComebackThe Spot is back. The failed 1995-1997 online soap opera featuring a bunch of young people living in a beach house is back online as of this February. The original show predated the reality TV trend popular today. The Spot... continue reading »DoubleClick: Post-Impression Responses Outnumber ClicksDoubleClick's ongoing study of ad serving trends showed that click rates declined about nine percent in the second quarter, while rich media usage grew 34 percent over the previous year. Other notable tidbits include the increased popularity of the leaderboard... continue reading »Yahoo Exacts Huge Google Settlement for Self-Serve Ad PatentYahoo and Google called off the lawyers yesterday, announcing a settlement in the patent suit that threatened the efficacy of Google's most important revenue stream: automated search ad revenues. Combining two legal cases between the firms, the settlement grants Yahoo... continue reading »Young Men Back Watching TVWhen Nielsen pulled the figurative fire alarm last year, telling TV companies they were losing young male viewers, network executives said the methodology was flawed, threatened to sue and generally denied that perhaps young men could be watching less television... continue reading »Among DoubleClick Publishers, Ad Server Sputtering Not Polite ConversationWhile DoubleClick survived a hack attack that temporarily downed parts of its ad network, the publishers who used DoubleClick's ad servers have been reluctant to discuss the loss of inventory or the repercussions it implies, according to a MediaPost's Kate... continue reading »Xerox's Global Ad Director InterviewediMedia interviewed Barbara Basney, Xerox's director of global advertising, finding her keen on search - particularly the organic variety. She recently assigned a person to head that area up, along with paid search and online advertising. She also feels that... continue reading »Online Travel Growth SlowingInterActiveCorp and Priceline are joining Orbitz in predicting lower growth in the online travel field. To date the three major travel players have been moving as quickly as possible to land grab travel territory in an underserved market. Now that... continue reading »Happy Tenth Birthday to E-commerceTen years ago today, according to the New York Times, the first online retail transaction took place on the Internet - the purchase of a Sting CD. Nashua, NH-based NetMarket constructed a secure transaction environment by cobbling together a popular... continue reading »Google Gets Lawyer Visit from Firm Claiming Gmail NameIndependent International Investment Research (IIIR), a British firm, indicated in an investors' meeting yesterday that it had thrown lawyers at Google in its dispute for the name Gmail. The company said its lawyers have indicated to Google their desire to... continue reading »Overture Tests Market Reaction to New FeesSearchEngineLowdown pointed to rumors it is trying to track down to ground suggesting Overture may be intending to increase fees. The idea seems to stem from discussion boards that lit up after Overture sent out a customer survey asking how... continue reading »Valueclick Sets Sites on EuropeValueClick says its purchase of Pricerunner isn't a one-time opportunistic acquisition, but rather the start of a major push into Europe. Pricerunner is expected to contribute about $20 million of Valueclick's $150 million in revenue for 2004. It's European structure... continue reading »Search-borne Customers Make Fewer ReturnsObserving a seldom-watched metric, Shoes.com discovered that people coming from search engine queries tend to be much less likely to return purchased goods. A Shoes.com executive attributes this to searchers knowing more precisely what they want. The worst customers, in... continue reading »Net Marketing Execs Upbeat on Company ProspectsAn informal poll conducted against MarketingVOX's own network of online marketing executives shows that the industry is indeed picking up, but at a relatively measured pace to that seen in the Internet bubble years. About ten percent of MarketingVOX's business... continue reading »Online Adspend to Hit Record, Steal from TV & NewspaperseMarketer pegs 2004's online ad market to grow by $1 billion over that of 2003, hitting $9.1 billion and setting the all-time high. eMarketer predicts ad spending to grow to $11 billion annually by the end of 2005. Currently 40... continue reading »PointRoll Intros Mac SupportPointRoll announced it now supports Macs as well as PC's, claiming to become the first major concern to support rich media ad unit creation for the five to ten percent of computer users who use Apple computers. Ad agency creatives,... continue reading »FTC Wins 'Marketing Innovation of the Year'The ClickZ marketing awards were announced today, with mostly the usual suspects occupying the top spots for categories like best ad server and best rich media technology. But the Federal Trade Commission probably didn't predict last year when it started... continue reading »Study: Spam Hurting E-commerce UseConsumer Reports published figures suggesting the combination of spam, viruses and security concerns is taking a toll on the adoption of e-commerce. More than a quarter of 2000 polled email users said spam forced them to change how they use... continue reading »Claria Nixes IPO PlansBehavioral marketing and adware firm Claria told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it was canceling its previously planned $150 million initial public offering. It cited "current market conditions." Claria made almost $35 million in profit last year on more... continue reading »PlanetOut Delays IPOPlanetOut, one of the frothier of the IPO candidates planned for the summer, decided to delay its initial offering, blaming "adverse market conditions." Claria also announced it would delay its offering plans. CNET reports.... continue reading »FTC Asks What Is 'Commercial' EmailThe Federal Trade Commission, ordered by Congress to come up with some rules to determine which emails fall under greater Can-Spam Act scrutiny, is seeking public comment to figure out just what is a "commercial email." In the end, newsletters... continue reading »Yahoo's Spam ID Tech Tested OutSendmail tested out Yahoo's new email authentication system called DomainKeys - which requires a computational checking of an encrypted ID verifier - and found that the system wasn't as sluggish as some had feared. Since the Yahoo system requires email... continue reading »TDWaterhouse's Marketing VP InterviewedColin Mulligan, TDWaterhouse's vice president of marketing is coming up to speed quickly, having joined a marketing department that spends one in ten dollars online. He'd like to get more into user group and community sites in hopes of ginning... continue reading »Email Firms to Add Services to Sender IDIronPort Systems and Cloudmark hope to exploit Microsoft's pushing of Sender ID anti-spam technology to enable them to provide add-on services that will compare the now-identified sender domains against lists of domains that have earned ill repute. This will theoretically... continue reading »Time Warner in Yet Another ReshuffleTobi Elkin writes that she's received yet another Time Warner release on yet another marketing group reshuffling, calling into question whether the media giant will ever sit down and develop a group good at selling online ads and serving advertisers.... continue reading »PayPal Gains New Distributor, Guns for Merchant ServicesContinuing its strategy of expanding the reach of PayPal beyond its own eBay backyard, eBay.com partnered with Retail Decisions to sell and distribute PayPal merchant services, much like CyberSource Corporation did last year. Companies using Retail Decisions' services include WalMart.com... continue reading »Ex AOL Head Accused of Misrepresenting Ad SalesAOL founder Steve Case stands accused of knowingly misrepresenting AOL ad revenues prior to the merger with Time Warner. He is to appear in court to answer questions. Former CFO Joseph Ripp and former CEO Gerald Levin also face similar... continue reading »Britain Buys Search Terms to Boost Gov SiteThe U.K. is apparently purchasing paid search terms on services like Google's AdWords in order to attract more visitors. Launched in March, the Kingdom's main government website has fallen short of stated traffic goals. On the media buy list: Google,... continue reading »Micropayments to TripleMicropayment purchases through companies like eBay's PayPal, Qpass and PaymentOne will more than triple by 2010, according to TowerGroup. Borne on the wave of music and other content purchases, micropayments are set to rise to $6.7 billion from last year's... continue reading »Study: Email Marketing Best among Direct MediaOf all direct-oriented media tested for return on investment, email marketing proved the winner, returning an average of $15.50 in sales for every dollar spent on marketing, according to a Winterberry Group report. Telemarketing drove $8.94 in sales per dollar... continue reading »Pew: 100+ Million Searchers; Vast Majority HappyA Pew study of Internet users in May showed that 84 percent of online Americans have used search engines - more than 100 million people. More than half of those use search engines each day, and two thirds report using... continue reading » |