Yahoo Ad Campaign Zings Google

Media Post

Yahoo posted a sneak peek of several creative pieces that will become part of the next phase of the company's "It's You!" marketing campaign. This second phase begins May 18, and will run through the year. The ads will appear online, on billboards, airplanes, television and radio. While the campaign aims to highlight Yahoo's products and services and what they mean to consumers, a video on Yahoo's site sets the tone.

That tone takes a blatant jab at Google. The video begins with the narrator explaining "There's a theory about homepages. They should get you where you want to go. You don't stop or linger. There's nothing to look at but a box and a button."

The video implies that Google's cold blank homepage isn't inviting, and as soon as you arrive it hustles you out the door. The narrator says when you look at this homepage nothing looks back at you. Yahoo's homepage, on the other hand, becomes the center of your online life by getting to know you. It contains the news and sports you want to read about, as well as items you're searching for on eBay and connections to friends on Facebook and Twitter. It's a network, homepage, search engine, as well as everything you're into.

Still, analysts and industry insiders remain skeptical that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz can turn Yahoo around. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, vice president of marketing at Webtrends, and former Yahoo employee, says companies that go on the offensive from a marketing rather than a product perspective signal that they're in trouble. It would be interesting to know if the creative minds at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the agency responsible for the ad, see it that way.

Yahoo's challenge isn't about growing the brand, but rather the content and innovations they introduce into their network, says Kaykas-Wolff, who spent three and a half years at Yahoo. "The reality is, they're being beat in two different areas that are massively important," he says. "Those two areas are algorithmic search and semantic search."

Kaykas-Wolff believes Yahoo conceded algorithmic search to Google, and semantic search to Facebook. He called it a "curious time" for Yahoo because the company's challenge isn't just to stop the decline of the business -- but find ways to grow it. It you start going on the attack from a marketing perspective you start grasping at straws, he says.

Google's search share rose about 2% to 71.40% of all U.S. searches in April 2010, while the No. 2 search engine, Yahoo, declined about 1% to 14.96%, according to Experian Hitwise. Bing and Ask received 9.43% and 2.18%, respectively. The remaining 78 search engines measured accounted for 2.03% of U.S. searches.

Advertisers would likely agree with Piper Jaffray Analyst Gene Munster, who believes Yahoo's strength remains in display ads, rather than search. "While the focus of investors around Yahoo's last earnings report mainly centered around the impact of Microsoft beginning to make payments to Yahoo in accordance with the search transition, we believe the most important part of Yahoo's business is the display segment," he wrote in a research note published Wednesday. "Display grew 20% year on year in Q1, ahead of our 12% estimate."

It's unclear whether the Sunnyvale, Calif., company can pull off a turnaround, though most folks hope for the best. It's also not clear if Yahoo's campaign will have or has had any impact.

A Bidding Frenzy for Search Engine Keywords During Super Bowl

LA Times

Advertisers will vie for the top 'sponsored links,' bidding on terms they think lots of fans will be seeking as they watch the game.

When New Orleans takes on Indianapolis at the Super Bowl on Sunday, Brandon Nohara will be sprawled in front of his big-screen TV like millions of others across the nation, drinking beer as friends pack into his apartment.

But Nohara, a marketing analyst for the Bay Area online retailer CafePress, will also be on the job.

He'll be simultaneously watching the game, listening to his guests and monitoring his laptop, on the hunt for the trendiest phrases of the day, in an effort to win a very different contest: the battle of the search engine keywords.

Nationwide, his competitors will be doing the same -- either manually, like Nohara, or with computer programs. They'll be bidding on terms they think large numbers of fans will be entering into search engines such as Google or Bing during the game and its aftermath.

Perhaps "pizza delivery" or "Miami weather" or the name of a bench-warming player who comes out of nowhere to be a hero. Nohara, for example, plans to bid on "New Orleans T-shirt."

The search engines host the auctions. At any given moment, the highest bidder on the word, name or phrase wins the top search engine placement spot among sponsored links when search results for that term are displayed.

Victory can be fleeting. As soon as someone places a higher bid, he or she gets that top spot.

No matter who wins, the search engines will probably be economic victors.

Search engine advertising is a bright spot in a marketing landscape that has suffered in the recession.

The U.S. advertising market overall was down nearly 14% in 2009, and online advertising was flat, according to data compiled by investment bank Barclays Capital. But search-related spending was up 8%.

Events such as the Super Bowl are gaining importance in that search-advertising marketplace because advertisers can take advantage of weeks of anticipation as consumers prepare for parties or seek stats on their favorite teams.

Super Bowl-related searches are up 40% over this time last year, according to Google advertising-sales executive April Anderson.

And at a time when CBS, the network airing the game, took months to sell its limited inventory of spots in what is one of the most important advertising events of the year, Google and other search engines said their sales are moving at a surprising clip.

"It's hard to shell out money for 30 seconds for an audience that might be TiVo-ing the thing or walking away from it somehow," said Nina Lentini, editor of the trade publication Marketing Daily. "TV is not the end-all and be-all anymore."

Ad prices are set by the advertisers in the bidding process. They pay the search engine only if people actually click on their messages.

The price for each click varies widely, typically from as low as 5 cents to $25 or more, depending on how high the bidding goes.

The pay-as-you-go nature of the business makes it particularly appealing to companies during slow economic times. And unlike television ads, which don't always translate directly into sales, search marketing campaigns show their results in real time.

"We can look at the campaign after it's been running for three hours, and if it's not meeting our goals we can tweak it," said Sumant Sridharan, head of online acquisitions for CafePress. "We have a team of analysts who are constantly monitoring performance."

This year's Super Bowl is expected to be an especially rich opportunity for Google search engine optimization. "We expect as more advertisers take their campaigns online this year -- whether it's to save money from advertising on game day or to extend the reach and exposure to an ad during the game -- we'll see an even higher return for search ads," said Robin Domeniconi, Microsoft's vice president for U.S. advertising sales.

Denny's Corp., which is airing three TV commercials during the Super Bowl, has also bought up keywords "Grand Slam," "Dennys" and others. Indeed, a Google search on "free breakfast" brings up a top sponsored link promoting the restaurant's post-Super Bowl offer.

The company added online advertising to its Super Bowl ad campaign last year, and it worked so well that it expanded the Google SEO effort for 2010, said John Dillon, vice president of marketing for the restaurant chain.

Denny's is also significantly increasing its presence on social media, including Facebook, Dillon said.

Companies are stepping up efforts to measure the effectiveness of their ads -- analysis that often breaks in favor of the search market, said Wes Nichols, chief executive of the consulting firm Marketshare Partners. He said his company has been hired to track the effectiveness of Super Bowl advertising -- online and on television -- for several of the event's big sponsors. The result, he said, could be a smaller television buy or larger online presence for next year's game.

"Marketers are spending an inordinate amount of money on the Super Bowl and they're constantly questioning whether it makes sense," Nichols said. "That's one of the things that we will be measuring for them."

Tips For Choosing a Video Platform
Story from Streaming Media

Let’s assume that you’re a small to mid-size non-media company seeking to use video to acquire or retain customers, train your employees, and, perhaps, communicate with investors, and you’re considering inexpensive alternatives for distributing the video. You have three basic approaches.

First, you can encode the video files yourself, create the necessary player and all the links, and upload the files to your own website, similarly to the medical videos posted by Video MD. As long as viewing numbers stay fairly modest, this approach should work from a technology standpoint, though it may not be the optimal approach for accomplishing the goals that you have for your videos.

The second alternative is to host your videos on a free, user-generated content (UGC) website such as Vimeo or YouTube or even on a social networking site such as Facebook. These UGC sites relieve you of the encoding and player-creation chores and assume the task of hosting and distributing the video for you. You can still embed the video on your own website, but by offering your video on a UGC site, you also expand the number of potential viewers, which can help from a marketing perspective. However, there are some negatives to consider, as well as some benefits that are only possible via the third alternative.

That alternative is to use a fee-based service to host and distribute your videos for you. Multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) online video platform vendors offer hosting, encoding, customizable players, and detailed statistics to help you maximize the effectiveness of your video. They help distribute your video to other sites to acquire more viewers and provide interactivity that lets viewers click the video to advance to the next step in the sales cycle, as well as other features. Even a few short months ago, these types of features would have cost hundreds of dollars per month. Today, however, depending upon the amount of video you distribute, you can sign on for less than $20 a month, with one service offering unlimited video views for less than $50 a month.

This article will review the costs and the benefits of all three alternatives. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, any business seeking to truly leverage the value of its video should at least be familiar with the benefits of the second and third alternatives. Many businesses will find that an amalgam of these two is the best option of all.

We've also created a list of the nearly 50 UGC and SaaS online video platforms on the market today. Click here to download the Online Video Platforms PDF. (If you are an online video platform that wishes to be included on this list, please contact Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen.)

Hosting Your Own
Let’s start with hosting your own distribution site. Here, the primary benefits are cost and control. You control the quality of the videos and who sees them. And since you’re posting the videos to your own website, adding more videos won’t cost you a thing. Or will it?

Let’s examine that “free” concept. Most small companies don’t have video production capabilities in-house, but if you’re using a third-party videographer, it’s relatively simple to encode your video into a streaming format—just another export option from the software video editor. However, you probably don’t have the expertise to choose a codec (H.264, VP6, or VC-1), select a player (Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media, or Silverlight), or specify general encoding parameters such as resolution, data rate, or frame rate, not to mention advanced parameters such as variable bitrate encoding, B-frame interface, and CABAC versus CAVLC.

Depending upon your choice of technologies, you may have to create a player (Flash or Silverlight), which will likely require programming resources, and you’ll have to create the HTML links to embed the video into your webpage. None of this stuff is rocket science, but it will either take time, money, or both to acquire this knowledge and expertise. And all of these tasks will be fully assumed by any of the companies available in the second and third categories. So unless you’re a streaming guru or you play one on TV, hosting your own videos isn’t free.

In addition, consider what you’re giving up by hosting your own videos. At a very high level, UGC sites deliver two benefits: content delivery and community. UGC sites are in charge of making sure that your video gets delivered to your target viewers at sufficient bitrates that ensure high-quality viewing, and they are almost certainly better equipped to handle that than your web-hosting provider or your own self-hosted site. Beyond that, UGC sites, if chosen correctly, can deliver community or, if you prefer, viewers, which is critical if your videos are designed to market your products and services.

The Advantages of UGC Sites
UGC sites deliver additional viewers in several ways. First, sites such as YouTube have morphed into ad hoc Yellow Pages for viewers searching for any number of things. If you’re unconvinced, I have an excellent example. If you had a potential medical malpractice claim in New York, where would you go to find a lawyer? A phone book? The bar association? That’s where I would look. But if you search for “medical malpractice New York” on YouTube, you’ll find a video from an attorney that was uploaded in July 2008. The video had been viewed 61,693 times when I wrote this article—obviously, it will have been viewed many more times by the time you read this (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Think that YouTube is a waste of time? With 61,693 views in a matter of 7 months, attorney Robert Sullivan might disagree.

Read Entire Article at Streaming Media

Advertising Provides Key To Microsoft-Yahoo Deal

So Microsoft is back, this time in talks over an unspecified "transaction" with Yahoo.

A couple of weeks ago, I said Yahoo may have blundered its way into a better outcome for its shareholders, and this latest twist strengthens my conviction. With a possible deal with Google still being considered and Microsoft back at the table, much-derided Yahoo is suddenly looking like Cinderella at the ball. Yahoo's management may yet emerge as heroes.

Microsoft maintains that it isn't discussing another takeover bid, though it reserves the right to do so. What might they be talking about?

Speculation has focused on combining Yahoo's and Microsoft's search businesses, which are a distant No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, to Google's. April figures from Nielsen Online, a research firm that tracks Internet usage, put Google's share of the U.S. search market at 62% versus 27% for a combined Yahoo-Microsoft. Surely the trend of ever-shrinking market share hasn't been lost on executives at Yahoo and Microsoft. So combining their search operations makes about as much sense as the Sears-Kmart merger.

The only advantage would be cost savings. Yahoo spends about $1.2 billion a year on "product development," much of that presumably on the search arms race with Google. It's hard to say how much Microsoft spends, but let's assume a comparable figure. Combining the two operations would presumably cut close to $1 billion in costs. I assume Microsoft would buy Yahoo's search operations, with some sort of revenue-sharing arrangement.

But why stop at search? A combined Yahoo-Microsoft still has the edge over Google in display advertising. Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platform and services division, said in a widely circulated memo to employees this past weekend that his aim was to "disrupt" the market in search and "win" in display advertising. He noted that Microsoft's ad revenues had increased 40% compared with declines at Yahoo and Google. This intense competition doesn't yet reflect Google's deployment of recently acquired DoubleClick but suggests an intense campaign ahead.

Display is where Yahoo's sheer numbers are most compelling. What Yahoo has going for it is content and a vast number of unique visitors. Scale is what matters, just as it does for Super Bowl advertising. Scale is Yahoo's most valuable asset.

In the most recent quarter, about 87% of Yahoo's revenue came from advertising. If Microsoft essentially buys all of Yahoo's ad business, both search and display, then it gets nearly all the benefits of a merger. Yahoo would become a pure content company, basically outsourcing its ad business to Microsoft.

There's a deal that starts to make sense. This surely wouldn't be lost on Google, which has concluded a successful search advertising test run with Yahoo, and which would benefit from a display deal as well. In my previous column I called for Yahoo to turn over all its search advertising to Google, but that seems too limited now that Microsoft has upped the ante. Google should also be looking to acquire Yahoo's entire ad business in a cash-and-revenue-sharing deal.

The big question is price, but given the huge potential advantages to both Google and Microsoft, it should be a big number. As a Yahoo shareholder (I also own Google), I say let the bidding war begin.
By: James B. Stewart
Wall Street Journal; May 21, 2008

Click Fraud Impacting Small Businesses

So Many Hits, So Few Sales

A Wall Street Journal Cover Story

Click fraud is fast becoming a problem for small businesses advertising online.

Just when pay-per-click advertising made it easier for small businesses to get more bang for their advertising buck, along comes a potential budget drainer: click fraud.

Pay-per-click advertising -- where an advertiser pays only when users click on an ad that links them to the business's Web site -- has fast become an affordable way for small businesses to reach a big audience on search engines and third-party Web sites.

The problem is that not all clicks are made with the intent to potentially buy something -- or with any good intent at all. Sometimes, a competitor will click on a company's ad numerous times to blow the company's advertising budget out the window, or to move the competitive ad off the page, either way, the sponsoring business will have to pay for each of those clicks.

Other times, a Web-page owner, who gets a commission from search engines to host a pay-per-click ad, will repeatedly click on the listing to boost his or her commission.

And many companies don't even know they are the victims of click fraud.

A lot of small businesses "are probably thinking, 'Wow, I am getting all these clicks for people to visit my Web site.' They have no idea they are not buyers," says Gene Fairbrother, lead small-business consultant for the National Association for the Self-Employed, a trade group based in Dallas. One of our members was sponsoring the single keyword phrase: event management software and used thier entire $1,600 PPC budget in only 10 days. Another of our members was sponsoring 3m respirators and used up $3,000 in only one month.

But experts say businesses can mitigate the cost of click fraud by regularly monitoring their pay-per-click accounts for unusual click activity. And there are a host of start-ups popping up that will do the monitoring for them -- some even at no charge.

These so-called click-detection firms rely on clues like numerical addresses (IP addresses) that computers provide when they connect to weed out fraudsters. Small businesses can then take the information to the search companies to request a refund or credit for any fraudulent clicks.

Click Fraud Costs Add Up: The cost of fraudulent clicks can quickly add up. Pay-per-click advertising typically costs anywhere from 10 cents a click to as much as $10, with the average click running about $1 to $2. So if a small business is the victim of hundreds of fraudulent clicks, the financial damage can be steep. And it's not just the small business that could feel the sting.

Click fraud also affects the search engines, whose business models rely heavily on pay-per-click advertising.

Earlier this year, for instance, Google Inc. agreed to pay as much as $90 million in legal fees and advertising credits to settle a click-fraud lawsuit brought by Lane's Gifts, a Texarkana, Ark., retailer, on behalf of a class of advertisers that claimed they were improperly billed for clicks that didn't lead to genuine customers.

Yahoo Inc. also agreed earlier this year to pay roughly $5 million in legal fees and review advertiser click-fraud complaints since 2004 to settle a class-action lawsuit brought last year by private-investigation firm Checkmate Strategic Group Inc. of Delray Beach, Fla. Checkmate had alleged breach of contract and unfair business practices, claiming that Yahoo didn't adequately protect advertisers from click fraud.

On the Watch Both Google and Yahoo say they have systems in place that filter out invalid clicks -- often, by detecting rapid, successive clicking from the same user or IP address -- and that the majority of advertisers don't ever have to deal with click fraud.

Google says thuggery, when it comes to online advertising, has been exaggerated. The company estimates that less than 10% of clicks over its entire system are fraudulent. The problem is manageable, and the search engine has an incentive "to work with our advertisers and make them as happy as possible," says Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google's manager for trust and safety.

John Slade, Yahoo's director of global product management, says that "if our filters say that a click looks problematic, we give it away for free."

Yahoo and Google say they provide businesses with free software that shows if a user who clicked on an advertisement ultimately ended up buying a product or service. If small businesses notice any problems, the search engines say, they should notify them.

"If we find cases that are click fraud, we'll refund it," says Yahoo's Mr. Slade.
"If it's hard to tell, we'll offer" a credit for the cost of the click.

Some in the small-business community complain that the search engines were slow to acknowledge that click fraud was even a problem. The lawsuit settlements have eased many concerns since they brought the problem to light.

But some advertisers still believe that the search engines will never be able to do enough and that click fraud will always be a problem. So what steps can small businesses themselves take to combat click fraud? Marketing experts, small-business advocates and the search engines themselves agree that the most important thing a business can do is to closely monitor its advertising campaigns, especially server log files that show click results.

If, on a given day, click-through traffic is 10 times heavier than usual, then ask a few common-sense questions: Did an article about my business come out? Was there something in the news? "If there is no answer, that might be a good indication that fraud is occurring," says Andrea Peiro, president of the Small Business Technology Institute, a San Jose, Calif., nonprofit that trains small-business owners on technology skills.

Seek Outside Help Many small-business owners, however, don't have the time or inclination to sift through website logs. And that's where click-detection firms come in. Among them: Click Forensics LLC, of San Antonio; Click Defense Inc., Fort Collins, Colo.; ClickDetective Ltd., of the United Kingdom; WhosClickingWho, San Jose, Calif.; and ClickFacts, of San Francisco.

Click Forensics provides a click-fraud monitoring service free of charge to businesses whose online advertising campaigns generate fewer than 100,000 clicks a month. The company, which makes the bulk of its revenue providing the service for a fee to large advertisers, says it uses special technology to detect every click to an advertiser's Web site and tracks the visit through to the exit page.

In return for providing the service, Click Forensics uses click-fraud data to publish a monthly Click Fraud Index, which measures the frequency of click fraud in online advertising campaigns. Another firm, ClickFacts, has developed proprietary auditing software to help advertisers detect click fraud. It charges small businesses about 1% of the cost of a click for its service. For instance, "if you're buying clicks that are $1 a click and you spend $100 for 100 clicks, we will charge you one dollar," says Mikhail Ledvich, ClickFacts' chief strategy officer.

Jim Hill, owner of SportHill, a Eugene, Ore., retailer of athletic gear, was only marginally aware of click fraud until several months ago -- when his advertising budget for a new campaign based on one word search was depleted in a day as a result of incessant clicks. Although he lost only a couple of hundred dollars, Mr. Hill says his faith in the advertising model was shaken. "It's definitely been a drag on my enthusiasm for advertising on the Internet," he says.

In business for 20 years, Mr. Hill says he has relied on the Internet over the past five or six years to expand his clientele. So after the click-fraud incident, Mr. Hill decided to start monitoring his advertising campaigns using ClickFacts' service. "It's happening every month, and we're tracking it," he says. Mr. Hill says between 7% and 15% of his clicks on any given day are fraudulent -- a small but significant amount, and one that easily could have gone unnoticed.

In a few months' time, he plans to add up the losses and ask the search engines that run his ads, including Yahoo and Google, for a refund. Other Options Some experts say the best way to fight click fraud is to avoid advertising where it tends to happen most. That, they say, means listing ads only on search engines, and not on third-party ad networks like Google's popular AdSense, which allows external sites to host ads and share profits.

They say a third-party site can be driven by greed to use a software program or pay cheap labor in developing nations to repeatedly click on ads in order to get more commissions from clicks. "Generally, where we see a high volume of click fraud is not [in] Google directly but those other affiliates," says Jim Collins, chief executive of Affinity Internet, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., firm that advises small businesses on ad campaigns.

Google says that there's no greater chance of fraud if your ad runs on a third-party site, and that if anything, a small-business owner might lose out on valuable exposure. "Making decisions about where to invest your advertising dollars out of fear is not the best way to set up your campaign," says Mr. Ghosemajumder.

Other experts, meantime, point to potential new advertising pricing models that may make it harder to commit click fraud in the first place. Search engines are studying one method, called cost-per-action advertising, where an advertiser pays only when a click-through leads to a product purchase or sales lead. "It's safer for the advertiser, but then it's more risky for the search engines" because they would likely lose easy revenue from simple clicks, says Alexander Tuzhilin, professor of information systems at New York University's Stern School of Business. If such a system were adopted, he says, the loss of revenue from pay-per-click could prompt search engines to charge more for cost-per-action ads.

Yahoo says search engines are looking at ways to give advertisers more choice, but it's not anything the company can talk about in any detail right now. Google's Mr. Ghosemajumder says, "We're always looking for new ways to provide effective and useful features to advertisers, publishers, and users. As part of these efforts we are currently testing a cost-per-action pricing model to give advertisers more flexibility and provide publishers another way to earn revenue through AdSense."