"Google Ad Planner "Lauched

In a move that allows Google to act ads virtual media planners for every size of Advertisers, Media brokers and Advertising Agencies, Google has beta launched their " Google Ad Planner"

Google ad planner serves as a media buying data center or a media buying tool that analyzes the websites,where your target audience visits, their demographics and and host of other research insights, which then allows advertisers to slice and dice the data and target their products and services to the appropriate and relevant category.

What Google Ad Planner,does is, that it connects advertisers and publishers. Google Ad Planner, simply lets you define your demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you've added to your media plan.

While Google Trends for Websites, announced last week, is designed for all users, Google Ad Planner is designed with media planners in mind. Using Google Ad Planner, you can quickly create media plans and export to a .csv file, which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications. Or, you can export to DoubleClick's MediaVisor, which helps you manage all your other media planning, buying and campaign management activities. ( Google Adwords Blog )

The Google Ad Planner account interface consists of:

* An audience definition tool, where you define your audience by language, age, and other criteria.

* A list of sites matching your criteria. The site list includes traffic, reach, and other key data for each site to help you make informed decisions about where you might advertise. To make your research more efficient, Google Ad Planner automatically refreshes the site list when you enter, remove, or edit audience definition criteria.

Google Ad Planner can help you identify appropriate sites to target through Google AdWords. First, filter your Google Ad Planner results to display sites in the Google content network and export the appropriate list of sites to a .csv file.

Google Ad Planner combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users and powered by computer algorithms.

Google Ad Planner demographic information is provided by third-party market research data, opt-in consumer user panel data, and algorithms that improve the demographic estimates. Demographic data is available for the United States only.

The two main players in the business currently who comes up with these kind of data to track wen site metrics are comScore and Nielsen Online --who gather data on Internet use largely by tracking what of people do online or by conducting surveys, and their results can be inconsistent and incomplete since they use web users who have agreed to let them track their online visitations ,and then take these data and extrapolate from them to make statements about the broader population of Internet users. In some cases, Nielsen benchmarks its findings against a Web site's computer-server logs. however many industry observers say that this is not representative of the real metrics. Google's new offering will be based mostly on data from Web servers, allowing for a deeper and broader view of Internet use.

Google's new tool, which will also rely on some data gleaned from panels of human users and other sources, is similar to one developed by New York-based start-up Quantcast, which has been gaining popularity among media buyers. But because of its size, Google has the potential to shake up the Web-measurement business.

The like fallout of this would be that Google will be a one stop shopping solution platform provider where Marketers would cary out end to end online marketingThe services are a logical next step for Google as it moves into other parts of the advertising business, including television and newspapers, where the company has begun selling ad space. Marketers are hungry for research that helps them compare the results of offline and online ads so that they can allocate their marketing budgets more intelligently.

Coming Soon:Social Banners Advertising from Socialmedia.com

It a move that is likely to take social media advertising to a new level, Socialmedia.com , which deliver marketing and advertising services to over 5,000 applications spread throughout Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, and MySpace and numerous other websites, and is one of the leading social media advertising network will be launching "Social Banners" which will be powered by FriendRank.

The Social Banners ranking product will be an algorithm that will analyze and aggregate social media interactions from social network applications to determine which users exert the most influence over their friends or profiles and then targets those users with ads which they hope will be in turn broadcast or send to their friends.

In other words, the friend rank scans your friend list and tries to analyze who your best friends are and what activities they are into and then try to serve ads depending on the relevance. The idea is that showing you ads that can be customized depending on your friends, will attract your attention and thus make the ads perform better.

In the above example , the friendrank has somehow figured out that David is someone whom you tend to follow more diligently or is among your top friends,someone who is more influential as compared to Tony or Amanda.

In terms of financial incentive for the integration of Social Banners in its advertising network, One source from the company has this to say“We don’t get paid to put you in ads. We’re getting paid to present you with the opportunity to interact with a product socially.”

CNET uses the following example of a movie advertisement to explain how it works. Instead of simply showing you the movie ad, this product invites you to interact with the movie by inviting you to contact your friend about it.

[The] social banner would ask which of your close Facebook friends, among a short list, you’d like to invite to see the movie. Or a social banner might inform you that a friend Jim just ranked Iron Man with three stars, and it might ask to “click here to buy tickets at Fandango.”

See image below, which shows the example of an ad, with friends on the top right.

Be it be your name or your photograph, SocialMedia is looking to give banner advertisements somewhat of a more personal, trustworthy appeal through custom automated design and thus enhance ad engagement. As SocialMedia’s Dave Gentzel explains it, “…our goal is not to put people inside of ads as a gimmick, as gimmicks die and provide little value to anyone. Instead, we want to facilitate real conversation and interaction around certain products and brands

Social Banner work the following way"If you tend to click often on an ad featuring a particular friend, that friend’s ranking rises within SocialMedia’s algorithm. Also, someone you don’t interact with at all won’t be part of your FriendRank."

SocialMedia finds out information about your friendships by watching who you play games with on Facebook or MySpace, or who you otherwise communicate with using other applications on those networks. SocialMedia is in a good position to get this data because it serves ads on hundreds of applications, which in turn can access certain profile data of the people viewing the pages.


source:venturebeat.com
Mashable.com

Nokai Grabs Remaining Stake in Symbian

In a cash deal totaling about $410 million, Nokia snapped up the remaining 52% stake in Mobile Software giant Symbian. This deal also underlined Nokia 's ambition in ruling the mobile world.

Nokia and a handful of other electronics manufacturers (including AT&T, Motorola, Samsung and Sony) are also forming the Symbian Foundation, an alliance that any company can join. The foundation aims to rev up the development of Web applications for mobile consumers. It will also create one platform with a single interface that members can use under a royalty free license.

“Our vision is to become the most widely used software platform on the planet,” Nigel Clifford, CEO of Symbian, said in a written statement.

The LiMo open mobile software alliance,which has many OEM's including the big players in Mobile space will also welcome more new comers for a small fee.

Once it owns Symbian Ltd, Nokia will contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the Foundation, while Sony Ericsson and Motorola said they intend to contribute technology from UIQ, and DoCoMo will contribute its MOAP(S) assets. Using these contributions, the Symbian Foundation will build a unified platform with a common user interface framework to which Foundation members will gain access via a royalty-free licence.

Members will contribute to the ongoing development of the Symbian open platform - which Symbian said will be made available over the next two years under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

The shift to a free open source platform also removes barriers to greater adoption of the Symbian OS, according to Ian Fogg, research director at JupiterResearch - which could bring the company nearer its original stated goal of becoming a universal mobile platform.

source:http://networks.silicon.com/

New Google Adwords Image Sizes Coming soon

Google adwords will soon have two new image sizes.

The first of these new images for Adwords will be a large 2560 x 1920 image is designed for advertisers who want to appear “larger than life,”and for those advertisers who wants to stand apart from the rest, according to AdWords Developer Arnold Ferguson. “Advertisers have been bugging us since November for a large-format image ad that can showcase photo quality 5-megapixel images. It’s a little bit larger than your standard banner ad, but I think if it makes advertisers happy, it will make our publishers happy as well.”

As part of the test, Google has been serving 2560 x 1920 ads on sites like ultrahighresolution.color online digital camera retailers wishing to advertise unreduced megapixel-sized images to allow users to have a first hand knowledge on the real life images produced by some digicams.

The second format, a 1 x 1 pixel ad can be purchased in blocks of ten by keyword. “We’ve actually been working very closely with pixel ad inventor Alex Tew on this one,” said Ferguson. “After seeing all the aimless pixel ad sites out there, we knew we needed an original approach. Unlike all the copycat pixel ad sites, integration with our keyword bidding system will us serve pixel ads contextually on nearly any site in the AdSense publisher network.”

Google also plans to publish a pixel advertising site of their own in mid-April, and has registered the milliongooglepixel.com domain to display AdWords pixel ads. Google AdWords expects the new sizes to be available to all AdWords users in the next few weeks.

source:adotas.com

Semantic Ad Health Network from Healthline.com

Healthline has launched its own semantic ad network where it will power leading heath websites with its contextual ads.However rather than only targeting websites with matching keyword like adsense ,healthline uses semantic search technology to target websites with ads .

Healthline can serve ads that match the health concepts on the page. So an article that mentions the medical term “costochondritis” (an inflammation of the rib) might serve up an ad for ibuprofen (the most common treatment).Keywords containing dry cough may serve ad of a cough syrup.

Thisis a boon for health websites that has traditionally used banner ads and text ads with very little relevance.

Healthline's taxonomy-driven Medically Guided Search platform provides consumers and business partners with a powerful portfolio of online health search, content, and navigation services. This "semantic taxonomy" - the only one of its kind currently in existence - is built from multiple medical databases and uniquely connects interrelated concepts to provide a semantic organization and contextual presentation of health-related information.

Healthline was founded in 1999 as YourDoctor.com and was re-launched as Healthline Networks in 2005. In late 2005, the company launched its first consumer-facing service, the Healthline.com website. Since then, Healthline.com has become a top 10 health information destination site with over 5 million monthly unique visitors generating over 20 million page views per month, providing pharmaceutical, healthcare and lifestyle advertisers with a valuable audience in an exceptionally targeted environment.

To date, network customers include companies such as Aetna, AOL, Ask.com, Cerner Multum, Human Kinetics, Merck, Merriam-Webster, NBC Universal's iVillage, PacifiCare, U.S. News & World Report, Eons, Info.com, and Televox.

attracting 3.4 million visitors to its site worldwide in April, according to comScore.

Youtube Now Available "Live on Television"

Youtube has finally made an entrance to our living rooms. Youtube finally annouched a list of TV set Manufacturers that will provide Youtube Online Videos on your TV sets.

YouTube Syndication team is excited to now offer a number of options to actually consume YouTube on your television sets. We're also proud to have helped many leaders in the consumer electronics space create YouTube experiences on TV.

Getting YouTube right on TV is extremely challenging from both a design and technology perspective. Each of our partners' engineering and design teams had similar questions:

• What would users, accustomed to a simple remote control interface for their TVs, expect given their typically much richer interaction options when surfing youtube.com?

• How could the YouTube enhance user experience be personalized for TV?

• How could the extra computing power and memory often required to make this work on their devices be added effectively?

• What were the most important YouTube features to retain, and how would they translate to a 10-feet user experience? Source:Youtube Blog

Here are some of the OEM's that will be integrating Youtube Online Video 's in their TV sets

• AppleTV: In June 2007 this became the first product to offer a way to watch YouTube on your TV.

• Sony Bravia Internet Video Link: Last week, Sony announced the general availability of YouTube content on their Bravia TVs via the Internet Video Link.

• HP MediaSmart: HP announced availability of YouTube as part of the HP MediaSmart platform.

• Panasonic: At CES 2008, Panasonic announced VieraCast, which allows you to access YouTube directly from your TV. The device will be available later this month.

• Samsung: Samsung launched their IPTV device which supports YouTube (currently only available in South Korea) in early May. TiVo: Announced that YouTube would be available on their devices.Verismo: A startup in the IPTV space, has announced availability of a YouTube-enabled device.

The increasing dominance of Online Videos are bound to threaten of live Television. With more and more people preferring the web to view and download videos and increasingly share those videos with friends, the dominance of Television based videos in terms of market share will be increasingly challenged.

In fact a few industry research comes with with some startling data and facts on Online Videos. In an recent article in Readwriteweb, Josh Catalone cites that the Traditional Video Consumption in the form of TV sets has come down in the recent times.

"Ipsos MediaCT found that even though TV is still the dominant method of video consumption among those who have streamed a video online, that dominance is slipping. TV was down to 70% of video watching time from 75% last year, while "personal computer" jumped from 11% in 2007 to 19% this year. That was even more pronounced among teens. In the 12-17 age group, PC watching was 24%, while TV was down to 55% of screen time.

Though the shift toward the PC for video watching is more pronounced among the younger set, Ipsos said the trend was "relatively consistent across all age groups and genders." Even though the study only looked at the viewing habits of those who have streamed or downloaded video content, previous Ipsos MediaCT studies have found that is a rapidly growing segment of the population."

It would be interesting to watch how Brand Marketers view this change in consumption habits, in terms of greater dollar spends on Marketing Budgets. While it is too early for most brand marketers to already shift their advertising dollars, one thing is sure.. this research is sure to make most Media Planners sit up and tale notice to this viral medium.

Trackur Launches New Online Monitoring Tools

Most online business needs to track how markets are conversing about their business. Whether you have a brick and mortar offline presence or you have an online shopping site,whether you are SMB or running a corporate blog, its highly essential to monitor and track how people view you and whether you are successfull in online Buzz Building about your brands.

Most online Reputation Monitoring tools gives you a sense of how an industry vertical views your business,but there is no monitoring tool that can give you a wider range of cross section markets converse about your business.

Every single day, someone, somewhere is discussing something important to your business; your brand, your executives, your competitors, your industry. Are they hyping-up your company, building buzz for your products? Or, are they criticizing your service, complaining to others about your new product launch and dealing your new start up a death blow?

A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious.But these days your brand can be annihilated in minutes by disgruntled online consumers and users.

Any beal of Marketing Pilgrim gives a few ways of how you can track what end users and competitors are saying about you

Online reputation monitoring tools

* If possible, monitor hourly as early action is crucial.

* Create custom RSS feeds based on keyword searches: Feedster.com, Technorati.com, IceRocket.com, Google.com/blogsearch, Blogpulse.com, MSN Spaces, Yahoo! News, Google News, MSN News and PubSub.

*Monitor This allows you to monitor a single keyword across 22 different search engine feeds at the same time.

* Filter all feeds into one RSS Reader for easy and time-efficient monitoring options include: Newsgator.com, Bloglines.com, Google Reader or Pluck.com.

* Sign up for Google and Yahoo email alerts using your desired keywords (http://alerts.yahoo.com/ and www.google.com/alerts).

* Determine message boards/forums to track: BoardReader.com, ForumFind.com, Big-Boards.com, BoardTracker.com, iVillage, Yahoo Message Boards, MSN Money

* Determine groups to track: Yahoo Groups, AOL Groups, MSN Groups, Google Groups.

* Track changes on web pages via tools such as Copernic Tracker, Website Watcher and WatchThatPage.com. Monitor every page of your competitor’s web site and specific keywords on pages, etc.
o Also, a good tool for tracking posts to user groups, message boards, forums and blog comments.

Helpful Short Cuts for Online Reputation Management:

* Create your own search engine at Rollyo.com. This is a great way to track sites that do not offer RSS feeds for keywords such as Consumerist.com, PlanetFeedback.com, ComplaintCenter.com, Complaints.com, Better Business Bureau and RipOffReport.com.

* Use Keotag.com to search for tagged blog posts across multiple blog search engines.

* Get a feel for stories that are creating “buzz” in the blogosphere via sites like Memeorandum.com and Blogniscient.com.

* Acquire an overview of blogger opinions (both negative and positive) via Opinmind.com, a blog search engine that allows you to type any subject into its search box.

* Learn about a specific blog’s traffic, credibility and popularity via PubSub.com, Alexa.com and IceRocket.com.

* Bloginfluence.net and Socialmeter.com show you the popularity and audience-reach for any entered blog URL. Use it to get a snapshot of the credibility of any blogger discussing your company.

* Research backgrounds of bloggers, owners of forums and web site editors via domain name search tools such as DomainTools.com and BetterWhois.com.

* Get creative with the classified search engine, Oodle.com. Search for job listings in your industry, then subscribe to the RSS feed. You’ll get an early alert of all the job listings your competitors’ post. Now you’ll know which areas of their business are expanding or get clues about potential new products, based upon who they are hiring.

* Not sure what keywords to track? Start entering your main “buzz” word at Google Suggest and see what’s most commonly searched. Or try Google Trends for the latest search query trends.

* Want to know what the blogosphere is saying about the page you’re viewing? Use the Technorati Favelet bookmark to quickly view inbound links and posts according to Technorati. If you use Firefox, install the Blogger Web Comments extension to see what users of Google’s Blogger have to say about the page.

* Need to know what news stories influenced your company’s stock price? The new Google Finance site let’s you analyze what stories appeared at any given stock price movement. Simply move the “slider”, located above the stock chart, and watch the stories on the right correlate with the date and time.

Overall Consumer Generated Media (CGM) Tips

* Investigate facts internally before taking action - could this be a competitor spreading rumor?
* Always take the high ground
* Be honest!
* Explain what you have done to rectify any issue
* Offer to resolve any complaints personally - have a senior-level staff member make the offer - try to continue discussion offline
* Rally friends, clients, peers and utilize your allies

Andy Beal has just launched Trackur.com which monitors your Online Reputation by giving you a detailed history of where you are most visible and what markets think of you by searching wel known verticals and wide range of niche websites and showing where you are most vulnerable and your strengths in social media space.

Trackur is an online reputation monitoring tool designed to assist you in tracking what is said about you on the internet. Trackur scans hundreds of millions of web pages--including news, blogs, video, images, and forums--and lets you know if it discovers anything that matches the keywords that interest you.

Using sophisticated monitoring and filtering techology, Trackur is your reputation guardian. It does the heavy-lifting for you--scanning the web for any mention of your name, brands, and products--so you don't have to.

Barrack Obama Online Marketing Spends

Barack Obama's campaign spent nearly $3 million on online advertising related purchases between January and April. The biggest recipient of the Democratic Presidential hopeful's online ad dollars was Google.

Google contributed to over 70 percent of money spent on online media by Barrack Obama which includes buys for the Illinois Senator's campaign this year through April, according to information compiled from Federal Election Commission filings. More than $2.08 million was paid to Google alone.

After spending about $640,000 in January on online advertising, the campaign pumped its online ad budget up to $1.18 million in February. Expenditures tapered to about $905,000 the following month. Filings show spending of only around $234,000 in April. However, previous monthly reports suggest more April online ad payments will be reported in the future; Google didn't even appear in April spending data supplied by the campaign.

Barrack Obama also spend money for his online marketing campaign on other web media too,as a small portion did flow towards direct buys on Web sites including Politico ($36,000), CNN.com ($24,000), and Gothamist ($2,800). Those most likely involved CPM-based display ads.

Yahoo and MSn too was a part of Obama's marketing efforts online.About $180,000 was spent on Yahoo search ads; meanwhile payment notes indicate approximately $172,000 went towards display ads seen on Yahoo's site.

Social networking sites too were a part of Barrack Obama's online Marketing spends as Facebook appears to be the winner, scoring about $47,000 in online ad dollars from the Obama camp.MySpace collected about $11,500 from Obama for America through April, while Community Connect, publisher of ethnic and lifestyle-oriented social networks, took in about $5,000.

source: Clickz.com

Blogspot and Info Domain face Penalty By Google

In an unprecedented Move by Google there were reports that Google had banned Blogspot and info domains from its index

WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums suggested that Google dropped .info and blogspot results due to spam.

First reports came in at around 9:50am (EST) on May 23rd at both forums. Massive panic actually started where dozens of forum posts with members shocked at how Google can completely remove so many blogs all of a sudden

But most felt this was a pretty large Google bug and they were right.

About five hours later, Webmasters began to see the old results come back to life and bloggers saw their blogspot domains once again back in the index and rankings

Facebook Goes in For a Radical Design Change

It seems Facebook is going inomplete redesign after having resisted any attempt to change its interface and design for close to two years.

Many Industry observers haveoften talked about the cluttered look and feel of facebook warning that the site needs to do more revamping to help spruce up its image.The new design is also expected to give users more control over which details about themselves they want to highlight.

The social networking site announced a redesign this week aimed at cleaning up users' profile pages and improving organization now that the site has more than 20,000 applications. The new applications will be organized in one of four tabbed categories for easier navigation and access.

The other tabs will carry personal information, photos, and feed. Users can put their applications under other tabs if they want.

The 'Applications' link at the top of the page contains a dropdown menu with a 'Bookmarks' section. There, Facebook users can add their favorite applications. The menu also contains a 'Recent Applications' section.

All of the tabs will be located at the top of user profile pages and the new layout is expected to cut down on the need to scroll down to view the pages.

A new "Publisher Box" will allow users to add content directly to their profiles, saving them the trouble of navigating to different pages.

Facebook will unveil its new look in June, but the site already provided a sneak peek this week.

source:informationweek.com