That time of the month …
Archive for the 'advertising' Category
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I get an email from CertiPost, a daughter company of the Belgacom/Belgian Post, that bears the title “You had an unwanted visitor last night“. When one clicks on the link, one has to give the name of one’s partner, best friend and favourite sport. The result is a somewhat customized movie about a wife who cheats on her husband, or actually, your wife cheating on you.
This obviously is a trial to make a viral video. They’ve made some mistakes though:
- You can only personalize the movie for yourself, you cannot forward a copy personalized for a friend. That would have really made it viral.
- I fail to see why “Your wife is cheating on you” would make the subject want to buy a product/service, expect if it concerns lethal weapons or a private detective.
- The contrast between a movie that is trying to be cheeky and a company that is anything but cheeky – an institution that tries to sell you security services – makes it untrustworthy
Never say “we have a Flash website”; there is no such thing. You might say: we have a website and it features, amongst a lot of relevant information in HTML pages, a Flash movie and/or application. You might say: we did buy a domain and we decided that a real website would be too accessible for our customers, so it only has a Flash blob on the ‘homepage’.
Flash is to websites what airconditioning is to a car: you might call it luxury, you might call it indispensable, but you cannot call it a car. It’s just airco.
For some reason, people that have experience with creating Flash applications also think they can make websites. “Just throw some Javascript on the homepage and it plays beautifully”, right? Wrong! If you have never heard of proper markup, SEO, the limitations of Javascript and Flash, you should leave making websites to professionals. If you insist that your branding cannot be properly expressed with just HTML/CSS/Ajax, you can add a Flash object to your site. But on its own, it’s a sorry excuse for a website.
Case: Le Fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles
Le Fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles is a new brand of singlets (’wifebeaters‘ in English, or ‘marcellekes’ in Bruxellois). The idea is good, the branding is beautiful, the advertising is top-notch (not surprisingly, since the founder is also one of the founders of the ad agency LG&F).
Continue reading ‘There are no Flash websites’
Eventhough it claims to help you detect and remove spyware, the Yahoo! Toolbar – now included/suggested in lots of freeware downloads (Flash,)- practically behaves as a piece of adware itself.
I subscribed to a Yahoo Group (for Flickr users in Brussels) and the first time I wanted to access the group’s homepage, I got an ActiveX popup for the Yahoo toolbar. I know I don’t need the toolbar to see the homepage, but I guess a lot of people will think they do, and click ‘Yes’ automatically. I installed it too to see how aggressive the toolbar would be afterwards.
The toolbar shuts down all your IE windows after installation, and a new window appears with the new toolbar. It features spyware protection (with Norton security), multiple tabs, Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Mail/Messenger integration. It tries to set your homepage and preferred search engine to Yahoo! but I did not allow that. The toolbar takes up quite a bit of screen real estate, with the tabs and all.
Let’s say you’re like me, and you’re not that impressed with the toolbar (I use Google’s toolbar and am quite happy with it). You would start with disabling the Yahoo! toolbar (View -> Toolbars). Much to your surprise, the next IE window you open, the toolbar would reappear. Even when you open a link in a new window: there’s the toolbar. Now that’s pretty annoying.
The best way to go is to remove it completely:
Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Yahoo! Toolbar for IE
I’m not saying that Yahoo! is evil, but the way their toolbar is promoted and the way it keeps popping up even when you don’t want it to, reminds me a lot of ’shopping toolbars’ and other malware. Certainly if they want to promote it as a tool to combat spyware and adware, they might do some effort to behave correctly too.
Last year, Google took in about $2.7 billion through ads on other people’s sites, accounting for 44% of its ad revenues. Most of that money probably came through big sites, but a decent portion must have come from the little guys. When you add up all the under-$100 AdSense balances earned by the Scott Karps of the world, the total must be a pretty impressive number. That’s free working capital for Google, or it can invest the stash and make even more money. It’s a devilishly good idea.
roughtype.com via kingsley2.com and google.blognewschannel.com
Nicholas Carr then goes on clarifying that if you have more than $10 on your account, and you officially terminate your Adsense account, Google will send you the money anyway. In any case, there are thousands of Adsense accounts with sleeping money that cannot be touched until they break the $100 barrier.
BUSINESSMODEL?
Let’s see, thousands of small $ amounts that are blocked, that still represents tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars. Let’s see if we can come up with a business model to recover some of that money without breaking the Adsense Terms of Service.
Goal: fill the bucket, i.e. reach the $100 mark and then leave.
Continue reading ‘Adsense: The long tail of spare change’
I had been wondering just how much information Google Adsense uses to select the right contextual ads. Specifically, do they use the referring page also. I just got part of the answer:
Continue reading ‘Adsense also looks at search terms’
Google is looking for a “Product Manager – Interactive TV”:
In this role, you will provide leadership on product vision and execution of projects that enable using Google’s search and advertising technologies to enhance users’ Television viewing experience.
(…)
These (trends) include but are not limited to the intersection of internet and Television technologies, video-on-demand, personal video recorders and emergence of next generation set-top-boxes with IP connectivity. You will then identify areas where use of Google’s search and advertising technology can enhance this user experience and define appropriate products to deliver these user benefits
from Google jobs
Fewer people will be channel surfing, and more people will want to sit down and literally search for something to watch.
radioactiveyak via CNN Money
Google has filed and published the following patent applications:
(1) Method and system to provide wireless access at a reduced rate:
Methods and system for providing wireless access at a reduced rate. In one embodiment, access to a WAP is provided to an end-user at a rate subsidized by a first entity. The first entity includes advertisements in an end-user view.
which sounds like a Google (secure) proxy that modifies passing-though HTML(2) Method and system to provide advertisements based on wireless access points:
Methods and system to provide advertisements in a view of an end user accessing a wireless access point. The advertisements are related to the WAP based on a predetermined criterion.
aka contextual advertising for Wifi(3) Method and system for dynamically modifying the appearance of browser screens on a client device:
In one embodiment, a connection of a client device to a wireless access point is identified. Further, the appearance of a screen presented on the client device is modified to reflect the brand associated with a provider of the wireless access point.
aka the ‘captive portal’
Continue reading ‘Google files patents for contextual wifi advertising’
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