I saw this ad for Virgin Atlantic on Manuel Montilla’s blog the other day and i haven’t stopped laughing since (ok slight exaggeration) – see what you think
Category: advertising
Good friend Marshall Kirkpatrick broke the news yesterday that Google were going to start offering video ads to people publishing ads using Google’s Adsense program. I use Adsense to publish the few ads that are on this site.
The official announcement on the Adsense blog contains a non-functioning video (not a good start) and the following caveats:
Video units will be live in AdSense accounts later today (10/9). Currently this feature is open only to publishers located in the United States with English-language websites.
How well this works will depend very much on the targeting, I suspect. Video ads for cool new gadgets would do far better on this site than video ads for, say, Shiseido’s latest age re-perfect, vitamin enhanced, moisturiser.
I’ll have to consider, if I roll this out, where to place it in the page’s design.
I see Microsoft are following Google into the Advertising business with their announced purchase of aQuantive for $6bn.
Advertising definitely seems to be where the money is at right now – as Michael Arrington put it earlier on TechCrunch:
Google bought Doubleclick for $3.1 billion in April. Later that same month, Yahoo acquired competitor RightMedia for $680 million. Just yesterday, WPP Group acquired yet another company in this space, 24/7 Real Media, for $649 million.
Just as an indicator of how seriously Microsoft is taking advertising as a revenue stream, this is Microsoft’s largest acquisition to-date. Look to Microsoft to start generating more and more income from advertising and less and less from the traditional software licencing model.
I suspect that we will see an online version of Office, developed in Silverlight, free to use and ad supported in the next 12 months.
I decided to try adding ads to my RSS feed a few months back to see how the process worked and if it is a viable revenue generator. The ads were inserted into my RSS feed by the FeedBurner Ad Network.
I have dropped the ads from the feed in the last few days as they were generating a small bit of negative feedback from readers and there was virtually no income from them (around $2 for the month of January).
Has anyone else using RSS advertising decided to roll back on it?
We have, by and large, stopped believing in advertising. Why is that?
It is because we are sick of being lied to by advertisers. Shampoos which ‘nourish’ our hair? Now with added ‘citrus technology’? Hair is composed of dead cells. You can’t nourish dead cells.
We are being bombarded by lie-vertising and we have learned to tune it out.
I was in Seville over the Christmas break and one day, while walking down the Carretera Carmona, I saw the following ad on the side of a building site advertising the apartments being built, for sale:
Notice the “Calidades de Primera” screaming out in ALL CAPS! Loosely that translates as Premium Quality. Yeah, right. You see that on a sign and immediately you become suspicious.
What made it all the more obvious was that not 10m away was another sign on an adjacent building site. This time though, I would be prepared to believe that these apartments are of a reasonable quality. Why? Because they don’t feel the need to say so!
One of the big advantages of Social Media is that they are extremely transparent. You simply cannot get away with lying in a blog or podcast. You will be found out and your reputation will suffer.
Advertisers are looking enviously at the trust afforded bloggers wondering “How can I get some of that credibility?”