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TV advertisers try to play down their online nemesis

Posted by Christopher Tate September 30th, 2009

On the day that it is announced that Internet advertising has overtaken the Television sector in the UK, questions have been asked about whether or not the term ‘Internet advertising’ is fair to its TV competitor.

In the first six months of this year, a record £1.75 billion was spent on online advertising, compared to £1.6 billion in TV, breaking the stranglehold that television had enjoyed for close to fifty years as the main advertising medium in the country.

So should the numerous types of online advertising income spends (affiliates, paid search, email etc) be lumped together under the umbrella of ‘Internet advertising’? Thinkbox, the UK television marketing body, is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not of this opinion. It’s view is that the maturation of the Internet, along with the diversity of advertising methods, means that it is inaccurate to treat all of these types of advertising as a single entity.

Talking to Mark Sweney, Thinkbox Marketing Director, Lindsey Clay, plays down today’s figures and points to the argument for recording spends separately:

“It is interesting but meaningless to sweep all the money spent on every aspect of online marketing into one big figure and celebrate it. Online marketing spend is made up of many things, including email, classified ads, display ads (including online TV advertising) and, overwhelmingly, search marketing. They should be judged individually.”

However, if this is the case, then surely you would have to treat different types of Television advertising such as commercial breaks, product placement, DRTV and programme sponsorship as separate mediums? One can’t help but feel that this is purely a damage limitation exercise from an industry that is facing major competition and fears that it may lose the battle.

Tags: marketing, online advertising, tv

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Mirror launches 3am Girls site.

Posted by Caroline McGuckian August 20th, 2009

As print newspapers change their attitude towards online content delivery, we take a look at one of the classier of the latest batch of web offerings.

On from the launch of the relatively impressive if not entirely unique Mirror Football website earlier this month, recently launched is the digital version of the “famous” 3am Girls- Trinity Mirror’s latest attempt at a vertical for which they possibly hope to charge in the foreseeable future in order to help stave off the UK’s largest newspaper publisher’s plummeting share price avoid laying off more journalists and closing down more newspapers.

http://www.3am.co.uk/

What can we say about the SEO of this site by looking at it for 2 minutes? The URL structure looks ok, they seem to have a hierarchical system that uses hyphen to separate words. But I can’t say the actual words they want Google to spider are too impressive. I am not sure what they will make of “Ooh”, “Gasp!” and “Phwaor!” as the links on the main navigation. All the page titles are the same as well and there is no RSS feed, but I don’t want to be too picky.

Does it have any meta data then? What are those CTRs going to be like?

Let’s Google [3am] … here they are down at number 6.

Well, I don’t know about you but to me the snippet’s not exactly an incentive to learn more. But we all know newspaper companies hate Google so maybe they’re not interested in traffic from search engines, which might start 80% of internet journeys but let’s not let facts get in the way of the truth.

Oh but hold on. Trinity are paying for PPC rankings for both [3am] and [celebrity gossip] so they are at least acknowledging that search exists in some form. Oh dear.

To be fair, it is early days for this site. With a decent amount of marketing more people will come and visit what is an established brand in the celebrity world and as a result the site will attract some high quality links that will push it up the rankings to a point, despite Trinity making it as hard as possible for Google to understand what the site is about.

But if they want to rank for [celebrity] (450,000 exact match searches on average per month) or [celebrity gossip] (368,000 exact match searches on average per month), which I am pretty sure they do as they are bidding on PPC for both, and compete with Heat, Perez Hilton, Spike and *whisper it* The Sun then they had better smarten up their act. Because currently they are, sensibly, not charging for content so all cash will come from ad revenue which is reliant on traffic and impressions and as far as Google, the biggest traffic driver of them all, is concerned they are merely a blip on the horizon.

Tags: Google, keywords, marketing, online advertising

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Why are my Google AdWords Ad Preview Tool results different to the main results?

Posted by Manley February 3rd, 2009

I have had a few queries regarding Google’s AdWords Ad Preview Tool, specifically, why are the results displayed subtly different to those of the main results.

What causes this change and why?

Because Google serve their advertisements based on the user’s IP address (amongst other considerations), it is not easy to see what your targeted users’ SERPs look like. The Google AdWords Ad Targeting Preview Tool is really useful for seeing your ad just as it appears to a potential customer in a specific geographical region without the inconvenience of a rail journey to Basingstoke. Additionally it is possible to change ads around and click away merrily on both your own and your competitors’ ads without fear of clicks being registered.

The tool is undeniably useful and is seen as essential by some for checking your ads are performing correctly without incurring any costs or skewing analytics data. It does, however have a minor quirk which can become a confusing factor which anyone handling both the SEM and SEO elements of a search campaign; the organic results do not always reflect the results in the main SERPs.

A good example is Chocolate. If we search in the preview tool we find that that the ads are changed depending on the engine selected (on the left in the top section) and the location (the right side of the same section). The organic results seem fairly good too, changing along with the PPC ads when we change the location.

A little experimentation shows that these do not, however, change with the PPC ads when the engine is changed. Normally this does not matter, but for some searches this is quite obvious, for example a search for [chocolate]:

Now, the reality is that Hersheys is a name which the British only really associate with Usonian films. This side of the pond we are much more interested in Cadbury’s confectionery offerings.

Why is this happening? Well, it appears that the results shown by the preview tool are always drawn from google.com results. Why is this different? Well, if a UK user (or at least a user whose IP appears to place them in the UK) navigates to www.google.com they are redirected to www.google.co.uk automatically.

If you want to test this for yourself then it is possible to follow the link on the Google homepage which reads ‘Go to Google.com’ or to manually browse to http://www.google.com/ncr (I have purposefully not included a link, since this step needs top be manually reversed in the same manner if you wish to go back to normal results).

Why do Google do this? It almost certainly is because it reduces overheads calling data and connecting to data centres. the tool is not really aimed at SEO so, although I have used it for research and for some SEM work, it was not an irregularity which I had ever noticed before. Embarrassingly, I need to take note of the warning provided, but it is very easy to become blind to adverts and banners – thanks to spam, the more obvious something is the more studiously we have learned to ignore it.

I like this kind of problem and have had an enjoyable morning looking hunting around, so if anyone has any similar queries please ask!

Tags: adwords, Google, online advertising

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Will Google buy Valve?

Posted by Ian Macfarlane September 17th, 2008

Rumours are going round that Google might buy Valve, and through it acquire the leading games distribution platform, Steam. What would this mean for the industry?

Everyone’s favourite source of tech-industry speculation, The Inquirer, claims to have inside information that Google is about to buy Valve. Although not always on the money, The Inquirer have broken some of the most sensational news in the tech industry (such as AMD buying ATI), so it firmly falls under a definite maybe.

The suggestion has taken many by surprise, but in hindsight, we’re kicking ourselves for not having thought about it before now. A tie up makes more sense than you might realise.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful (and fill it with targeted advertising of course!) This definitely includes games – only last year Google appeared at the Casual Connect game convention in Seattle and spoke of their plans for “AdSense for Games”. Microsoft are already working in this area, having bought in-game advertising company Massive Inc. in 2006. Microsoft also, of course, created and own the Xbox platform.

Valve became famous for developing gaming blockbuster Half-Life, but it’s their games distribution platform called Steam – by far the most successful in the industry and with over 15 million accounts – that would be key to interest from Google. Valve has said only last month that they would be happy to be bought.

Here are some potential areas where the two could work together;

Firstly, and most obviously, is AdSense for Games. Google would instantly have a commanding position in PC games distribution, putting them in an ideal situation to get talking to games developers about using Google for their in-game advertising.

This in-game advertising could be anything from ads on in-game billboards to product placement (e.g. Coca Cola cans in in-game vending machines or Nike branding on in-game characters), and many, many other forms people haven’t even thought of yet (for inspiration, see what Ikea did with the Sims). This is still a nascent industry, one with massive potential for growth (Google’s Bernie Stolar said last year Google is involved in in-game advertising … This is an area that Google believes will have tremendous growth over the next number of years.

In-game advertising is also something that wouldn’t have been possible only a short time ago, when always-on connections were less widespread (if your in-game ads never change, then the ads your game ships with are only a one-off source of revenue).

In-game advertising has greater potential than simply making games publishers a bit more money for their games – like advertising on websites, and in print and other forms of media before it, it will also open up entirely new business models, where the advertising pays for the content.

Many games could in the future be distributed for free and be supported financially by some form of advertising. This is unlikely to work for all types of games – the longer the users plays the game for, the more ads can be shown and the more money can be made. Therefore this is likely to work best for multi-player games, although there are some forms of single-player games which can keep attention for a longer period of time (such as the Sims). Expect an explosion in low-budget advertising-supported games too.

So, aside from in-game advertising on PC games, what else is there? Well, there’s the possibility of advertising within the Steam client itself, although we wouldn’t expect too much revenue from this compared to other channels. There’s also potential for tying in searches for games on in Google web or product search with direct download links.

The other big potential tie-up is with mobile gaming – some of the biggest complaints about games for mobile phones have been the small screen size and lack of compatibility across many phone models. Google Android could solve both of those, with minimum requirements (including a minimum screen size) which could be used as a basis for game developers to target. Google could act both as a distributor of mobile games, and could also apply the same in-game advertising principles that it will apply to PC gaming.

Gaming is an exploding market. Recent studies found that 97% of young Americans (including females) play video games, but studies are reporting growth in pretty much all demographics. It’s not just 16-29 year-old males who play games any more! This is a massive market… and also a rich source of data for producing targeted adverts. You paused to look at that flashy ad on a billboard while blasting your way through City 17? Look out for it on the next website you visit which uses AdSense. Picked out a nice coffee machine for your house in the Sims? Guess what’ll greet you in the ads next time you search for coffee-related queries on Google.

Piracy is one of the many challenges the games industry faces, particularly for the PC games industry, and digital distribution is proving to be one of the more successful ways in getting around this (another being subscription-based online games like World of Warcraft). Supporting games development with advertising makes a lot of these problems go away, or at least reduces their impact.

One thing in question is what Google might do with the games development side of Valve – that might sit too far outside of their business model. If Google do buy Valve, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to see Steam itself kept and the Valve games development department sold off (and I don’t doubt that there would be many interested buyers).

Make no mistake, this rumour – and it is still just a rumour – would be a huge gamble for Google to take. It would be an audacious (and completely unexpected) move, but it makes a lot of sense on numerous levels.

Some food for thought – last year Google also said We are not going to be a publisher or a developer or a portal for games. Well, don’t forget,
there is no gPhone and Eric Schmidt’s statement We are not building a browser.

Tags: acquisitions, Google, online advertising

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