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Yahoo CFO Interested in Search Deal–Until Fired in Yahoo’s Shake Up

posted on February 26, 2009

As as promised on Monday, Yahoo posts a major reorganization this week. But is it any coincidence that less than a day after telling investors that Yahoo might do a search deal, CFO Blake Jorgenson is getting the axe?

I’m sure it is. Probably. Maybe. Here’s what Bloomberg caught him saying yesterday:

Any agreement would have to maximize the unit’s value, Jorgensen said today at an investor conference. He added that it would be extremely difficult to separate Yahoo’s search business from the rest of the company, though not impossible. Under a partnership, Yahoo should continue to have full access to the search-engine data, which the company uses to make its display advertising more effective, he said.

“We want to do it for the right reasons and the right economics,” Jorgensen said.

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Online Advertising Up or Down? You Make the Call

posted on February 26, 2009

If you just read the last post I did you would see a report that touted the continued IDC logogrowth of online marketing despite the economy as reported by CMO’s of 518 companies. That’s so yesterday though. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, Market Research Group IDC reports a different point of view. Or is it? ARRGGGHHHHH!

I am a little confused by the following sentences that appear to have come from the same source about the same subject matter. The first:

Internet advertising could fall by 5% in the first quarter of 2009, the first contraction in online ad spending since the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, market research group IDC said Wednesday

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CMO Survey Confirms Online Still Growing

posted on February 26, 2009

For quite some time now Internet marketers have experienced unbridled growth in the need and use of thecmo-survey medium. That growth recently has been threatened by the down economy and there has been impact across the board. For the most part the Internet marketing industry has had the good fortune of just seeing slowing growth. Many in the industry bristle at the thought of low double digit growth but in this environment getting greedy can be an unwise choice.

The CMO Survey, a poll of 581 U.S. marketing executives conducted in February 2009. The survey was conducted by professor Christine Moorman of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in conjunction with the American Marketing Association and its findings are quite interesting.

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ABCNews Tries to Be Cool but Stumbles a Bit

posted on February 25, 2009

Last night President Barack Obama gave a pseudo state of the union address to the concerned citizens of abcnewsthe US and the world. We all know that things are not so great economically so let’s not beat that horse anymore. The president though, has been taking a little heat for being so negative that he may be making things worse so last night he set out to reverse that course a bit.

Of course, you would be hard pressed to find a more newsworthy event considering the times (although I must admit that it was my wife’s birthday and I didn’t have a clue that this was happening…. Did I miss anything?) and the networks decided to put their best foot forward so their viewers / consumers could get the most out of this. ABCNews in fact promoted the heck out of their Twitter stream that they would run during the speech calling it a Twitter – anza (huh?) and really trying to get the Internet masses to join them online to monitor this happening.

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Mobile Ad Spend on the Way . . . Up?

posted on February 25, 2009

While there are a multitude of reports having marketers bracing themselves for this recession, there are still a number of optimists who say that the best is yet to come. The Kelsey Group is one such optimist, reporting that mobile ad spend is on the way up, and mobile search will lead the way.

Their prediction? Over five years, mobile ad spend will increase 81.2% annually (compound growth rate), going from $160M last year to $3.1B (yes, billion) in 2013. Over the same period, mobile local search will grow from 1/8 of the total mobile spend to nearly half—from $20M to $1.3B, consistently constituting a little over half of the mobile search spend.

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Ryanair Hits Reputation Turbulence; Apparently Doesn’t Care

posted on February 25, 2009

ryanairI really don’t know what’s worse. A Ryanair employee getting busted for leaving an abusive comment on a blog, or the official–and equally abusive–statement from the airline Ryanair.

I’ll let you read the full details, but long story short, a blogger finds a bug in Ryanair’s booking system and blogs about it. He then receives an anonymous comment–which he later tracks down as a Ryanair employee:

jason!
you’re an idiot and a liar!! fact is!
you’ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it! you dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!

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Will Celeb Twittering Reveal Them as Twits?

posted on February 25, 2009

On the tail of the Oscars this weekend comes a story from the NY Times. I have read it several timeskutcher because I can’t get over the possibilities. The possibilities of what you ask? There is a new trend apparently starting to surface where celebrities are using Twitter to connect with fans and the mind races with what that could produce. Let’s look at this and then put the collective brilliance of you Pilgrims to work.

According to the article

In addition to being a staple for rapid-fire communication among technophiles and a networking tool for tech-savvy companies, Twitter is swiftly being adopted by celebrities who see it as a way to give the public a controlled peephole into their otherwise highly private lives.