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January 2005
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Wal-Mart Addresses PR Storm with Site, Search CampaignWal-Mart launched an anti-anti-Wal-Mart site at walmartfacts.com to counter the growing internet chatter about its labor practices, according to ClickZ. Faced with many class action suits and a flurry of populist local news stories, rumors and a developing urban legend... continue reading »TripAdvisor to 'the Nunnery'TripAdvisor, falling in line with industry wags who predicted it would choose the same agency used by fellow IAC siblings Lending Tree and Match.com, selected Mullen to run its $5-$10 million account, according to AdWeek. Consultant Pile & Co. helped... continue reading »Hundreds of Retailers Spending $50,000 or More a Month in Searchsearch engine marketing firm Efficient Frontier estimates that between 350 and 500 American retailers are now spending more than $50,000 per month on search campaigns, according to Internet Retailer. These campaigns typically involve from 3,000 to 5,000 search terms. Efficient... continue reading »Chatter: MSN to Launch Search Beta Feb 1Online chatter among search geeks indicates Microsoft may be ready to go live with its MSN search beta at the beginning of February. One search marketer said he was told by a high level Microsoft executive that February 1 would... continue reading »Roomba Case Study Argues for Search Term TargetingAdAge compiled a brief case study of automated vacuum brand Roomba using paid search marketing, along with an integrated marketing campaign that included broadcast media, to vastly improve its direct sales. Where its first forays into search proved unsuccessful, a... continue reading »'Broadband' Connections Average Anemic 2.1 MbpsAmerican downstream broadband connections average about 2.1 Mbps, about 20 times the speed of a typical dial-up connection, according to Jupiter figures mentioned in a PaidContent piece. Cable connections average 2.7 Mbps, and DSL connections average 1.2 Mbps. That difference... continue reading »Two Firms Added to Mobile Messaging FrayTwo more ad companies announced they'll be joining the mobile short text messaging market. Interchange launched an SMS Local wireless search beta. Lake Group Media said it partnered with SMS Media Group to great an opt-in network of mobile subscribers... continue reading »Kapor: Firefox Could Succeed Only Outside AOLSomething in the structure, culture, or perhaps even the water, of AOL prevented the Mozilla browser efforts from coming to fruition, according to a new interview with Mozilla Foundation board chief Mitch Kapor. It was only after it was wrested... continue reading »Youth Adopt Broadband, Reduce TV, but Watch Both at Same TimeeMarketer reports that a recent Bolt survey shows rapid adoption of broadband connections among its youth readers. 70 percent of 15 to 20 year-olds polled used broadband connections, up 11 percent from 2004's third quarter. Two thirds of them say... continue reading »Businesses Handle Own Search Duties, Look for Direct ROIKeywordRanking.com reports that about three quarters of businesses polled are not working with a firm to help them with search engine rankings. Half handle the chores in-house. One out of five haven't even started to implement either paid search or... continue reading »Fewer Seniors Online than ThoughtThe Kaiser Family Foundation released a study, examined by MarketWatch, revealing that 70 percent of seniors have never gone online. This certainly puts a crimp in some government and corporate plans to have seniors manage their health care options through... continue reading »Jupiter: Net Ads to Overtake Magazines in '07Jupiter announced that paid search led the online advertising rejuvenation of 2004, rising 34 percent in the year. Jupiter's Gary Stein also predicted the general online ad market would about double to $16.1 billion in five years, which represents a... continue reading »180solutions Fighting Affiliate 'Crammers' that Turn Adware to SpywareMediaPost reports adware firm 180solutions is revising its software to help combat stealth downloads and is joining an anti-spyware nonprofit. 180solutions CEO Keith Smith said the new roll-out, to take place over the first quarter, will prevent the software from... continue reading »Google Seeking Own Backbone NetworkGoogle may be interested in creating its own global fiberoptic network backbone, as suggested by a Light Reading story made prominent by a CNET mention. As "dark fiber" is more expensive to get up and running than leasing existing bandwidth... continue reading »Texas Charges Two as Spam KingpinsTexas state prosecutors filed civil charges against a University of Texas student and a California resident, alleging that they are running one of the worlds largest spam rings, according to CNET. Texas prosecutors believe Ryan Samuel Pitylak and Mark Stephen... continue reading »Product Manager Reveals Google TriviaA blogger reports on learnings gleaned from a talk at PARC given by Marisa Mayer, a Google product manager. Of the sixteen observations made about the discussion, most were items of Google trivia and history, such as Google's name being... continue reading »Google Rumored to Devolop Comment Spam KillerSteve Rubel's Micro Persuasion gives the scoop on rumors that Google is developing a new sort of tag that will allow blogs to fence off comments, thus reducing the economic incentive for comment spamming. The site links to reported examples... continue reading »New Sites Need Patience with Google ListingsSearchEngineGuide's Scottie Claiborne lays out some advice, mixed with a little speculation, as to why new sites tend to do poorly in Google results. The trend may be evidence of the combination of two relatively new factors in Google's ranking... continue reading »Advertising.com to Employ UnsubCentral's Can-Spam Compliance TechnologyUnsubCentral, an email suppression list manager that helps firms comply with Can-Spam legislation and abide by subscriber preferences, announced AOL-owned Advertising.com will incorporate its services into its own products. UnsubCentral securely manages lists between advertisers and third party mailers, a... continue reading »Domain Names Vulnerable to HijackingA New York Times piece covers the domain name hijacking of a prominent New York ISP, showing how easy it remains to steal a brand's internet address. Domain napping became even easier in November, when ICANN, the governing body for... continue reading »i-Frontier Brand Retired in Favor of Avenue A/RazorfishPhiladelphia lost its biggest claim on the internet media industry this week when Brad Aronson's i-Frontier officially merged with its parent Avenue A/Razorfish, retiring the city's biggest online agency brand name. Mutual parent company aQuantive acquired i-Frontier two years ago.... continue reading »Huge RSS Study ReleasedEuropean e-marketer Rok Hrastnik spent the last year or two researching an exhaustive review of syndication technology on the web, finally releasing to Marketingstudies.net a 550-page definitive ebook on RSS and the marketing uses of syndication. The advance copy sent... continue reading »Diller: IAC Is No PortalIAC's Barry Diller joins a long line of internet executives making assurances that they do not intend to emulate the most unpopular business strategy of the moment: portals. Diller told Reuters that his conglomerate of sometimes disparate internet brands, such... continue reading »Responsys Staffs up Marketing Department at Competitors' ExpenseClickZ reports that email services firm Responsys staffed up its marketing department with a series of hires from its competition. The firm appointed Scott Olrich, formerly with Topica, as CMO, replacing and expanding the position opened up by marketing VP... continue reading »Rich Media May Get its Day in Sun in 2005eMarketer predicts that 2005 will be the "year of rich media." It also says that - unlike years 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004, which were all named the year of rich media by various parties, but turned out... continue reading »Media Buyers Expect Spending Increases in 2005, Except for TVMediaPost reports that a poll of a media buying sub-group of its audience shows almost unalloyed optimism about upcoming media spending, particularly in the online media. A full 94 percent report that they expect media spending to increase or stay... continue reading »WhenU Moves to Grow its Own Sales ForceIn its ongoing attempt to transform itself to a less controversial online ad company, adware firm WhenU brought in its outside sales force teams under its own roof so that it can better control the media sales process and WhenU's... continue reading »New Agency Opens Creative to India OutsourcingIn what should be a nightmare for many coffee-swilling, depressive, creative-blocked, sardonic creatives that lurk in the plusher offices of ad agencies, this week a group of former big agency executives will launch a new boutique that will outsource work... continue reading »Buyer Warns about Aggregated Media NetworksProminent online media buyer Tom Hespos called for a more transparent process to be developed in handling "blind" buys, where companies buy large tracts of media placed among unknown sites by aggregating networks. The practice, which tends to win significantly... continue reading »Ten E-Tailers Stand Out for ServiceThe E-Tailing group published a review of 100 major e-commerce sites, finding 10 of them meeting all of their desired criteria, according to Internet Retailer. Having toll-free phone support, search, quick email responses, fast shipping and six or fewer clicks... continue reading »Blogger Hopes for Endorsement, Other DealsProminent PR blogger Steve Rubel writes that marketers should approach relevant bloggers and offer endorsement deals, writing contracts and other sorts of relationships to take advantage of their inherent relevance and credibility. "Many bloggers feel a higher holy calling to... continue reading »U.K. Holiday Sales Grow 20 PercentA British online trade group reported that 2003 holiday sales were up 20 percent, according to Internet Retailer. Brits spent more than £3 billion, according to the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), outshining the paltry 2.5 percent growth rate... continue reading »Orbitz Has Wandering Agency EyeAdWeek reports online travel e-commerce site Orbitz is going behind the back of its agency of record, Young & Rubicam to ask BBDO to pitch ideas on a new project. When asked about it, Orbitz release a statement that says... continue reading »Eyeblaster Replaces Marketing Execs, Names McFarland GMEyeblaster, the rich media company that conducted a marketing departmentectomy last year, hired or promoted three people to help flesh out its sales and marketing organization, according to ClickZ. Doug McFarland, a new board member since November, was named general... continue reading »Email Omnipresent, Big Influence in Holiday ShoppingA Return Path survey found that almost everyone felt they received much more email during the holiday season, with about half of people saying they were annoyed by it. About two thirds of unwanted emails were simply deleted, according to... continue reading »Telecoms Lead Net Ad Growth in Late '04New Nielsen/NetRatings figures show that telecom advertisers and financial firms were the biggest drivers in last month's large online advertising growth. Telecom share grew six percent among all advertisers, with SBC Communications leading the charge with about a third of... continue reading »Google to Intro 'No Follow' Tag in Swipe Against Comment SpamCNET reports that the rumors are true that Google is about to announce a new tag publishers can use to thwart comment spam. The "no follow" tag will allow publishers to demarcate which links on their sites are not their... continue reading »New JibJab Parody via YahooJibJab took advantage of both its new relationship with Yahoo and the publicity around yesterday's sparkling Yahoo financial announcements to launch its latest Flash animation "Second Term!". Its animations have moved from relatively obscure viral efforts to planned and published... continue reading »Yahoo Results Encourage Net Ad IndustryWhile the many industry watchers in the financial realm likely overstate the applicability that trends in Yahoo's financial results necessarily apply to other internet firms, Yahoo's results turned out to be too good to ignore. The portal company reported sales... continue reading »Friendster Deigns to Dip into Online Ad MarketDoubleClick announced this morning that it signed up Friendster as a "high volume" ad client. the 13-million-member Friendster, one of the first online "social network" communities, has been turning about for a revenue model for a few years, and appears... continue reading »eXact Advertising Buys Rawhide SearcheXact Advertising announced it acquired Rawhide Search Solutions, adding several lines of search marketing to its direct response media network. [MarketingVOX earlier this morning incorrectly reported this firm as being eXactTarget, a different company altogether.] eXact Advertising took $15 million... continue reading »Court TV Traffic Breaks Billion MarkCourt TV told MarketingVOX its traffic reached 1.2 billion pageviews in 2004. That represents a 24 percent increase over the previous year. Both courttv.com and thesmokinggun.com received about half a billion pageviews each. Court TV uses Omniture to measure its... continue reading »Gamevertising Firm Gets 3rd VC RoundGamevertising outfit Massive told ClickZ it raised $10 million to support its product development and office expansion efforts. The firm will open a London office in the middle of this year. At the end of the year, it plans to... continue reading »Affluent Use Net MoreDM News reports that a new Packaged Facts study found a very large correlation between people's wealth and their likelihood to use the Internet. 42 percent of affluent individuals polled last spring said they used the net as their primary... continue reading »Lobbyist Firm Gathers Trade Groups to Discuss 'Bono Bill'Four major industry trade groups are gathering together to discuss the recently re-introduced HR 29 "Bono Bill" that would limit not only spyware, but also all sorts of web tracking commonly used to determine advertising reach, efficiency, results and to... continue reading »AOL to Release Desktop SearchAOL will release a new set of search features today in a limited release, according to BetaNews [via PaidContent.org]. Most notably, the BetaNews report broke the news that AOL will be releasing a desktop search application powered by existing player... continue reading »Comment Spam Killing Tag Adopted by MSN, YahooGarrett French reports in SearchEngineLowdown that both Microsoft and Yahoo told Google they would join it in recognizing a "no follow" tag that would allow sites to mark off comments as material search engines should ignore - thus denying any... continue reading »aQuantive Billings Huge, Increasingly Display Ads, Vertical Sites, Ad NetworksaQuantive-owned agencies, now folded into the brand Avenue A/Razorfish, claimed $312 million in online ad billings for 2004, according to a MediaPost report. A company official said the firm would see about 25 percent growth in the coming year, topping... continue reading »Magazines Adjust to Online Ad MarketClickZ reports on efforts in the magazine industry to "gussy up" their publication websites with an eye for attracting online ad dollars. The moves come just as research firms are predicting that online ads will exceed the revenues coming from... continue reading » |