Tag: advertising

advertising, Microsoft

Ad supported Office in the works?

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.

advertising, RSS

Dropping Feedburner feed ads

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?

advertising, social media

We have lost faith in advertising (if we ever had any)

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:
Apartments 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!

More Apartments for sale

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?”

Technology

Why don't advertising agencies advertise?

Via Seth Godin comes this beauty – why don’t advertising agencies advertise?

It is a fabulous piece – sprinkled with little gems like this:

David Ogilvy once admitted, “99% of advertising doesn’t sell much of anything.” He was right. Fact is, most ads today are ineffective

and this:

If agencies hype the importance of branding campaigns for public companies to enhance their image among investors, why is it that Interpublic, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP don’t support their brand images on Wall Street?

According to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the four holding companies spent a total of $3.7 million to promote themselves in the U.S. in 2005, down 15% from the $4.4 million they spent in 2004.

Considering that agencies recommend their clients spend 10% of their revenues on marketing, the big four are spending .01% of their combined $29.3 billion in global revenue. Mull that for a second or two.

Kinda makes you wonder if the advertising agencies know something about the value of advertising, doesn’t it?

It reminds me of the old saw – why is there only one Competition Authority?