Marketing Pilgrim

As a follow-up to yesterday’s gloomy prediction for traditional advertising spend, I have some salt to pour on the wounds:

"…cannibalization of traditional media will bring about a decline in overall advertising budgets, death to obsolete agencies, [and] a publisher awakening…"

So says Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk in a new five year interactive marketing forecast.

In fact, a whopping 60% of marketers plan to take money away from traditional marketing and spend it on interactive ads instead.

And, if you’re a search marketer, Forrester has great news for you! As much as 59% of that interactive spend will go towards SEO and PPC, with both niches likely to double in size over the next 5 years!

Google certainly doesn’t rest on its laurels, that’s for sure. They are, first and foremost a search engine, but the success of their search business has fathered so many products that aren’t search related at all it’s amazing at times. Of course, now that everything is losing its beta status Google needs to get something else in the pipeline that will raise an eyebrow or two.

What about an operation system for netbooks? What about a first step toward a desktop OS? Google is all about the browser and the world available to everyone through it. If there is a way to stir up a little conversation around plans of world domination this is a great one. You have your pick of the litter regarding sources of information on this one. The Official Google blog’s intro to this announcement is as follows

Amazon apparently has some big plans for their Kindle e-reader and it involves advertising. That’s right, advertising. After all, what would a good book be without advertising, right?

cnet news reports about some patents that Amazon has filed in the not so distant past that point to a way or them to deliver an e-book with the traditional book. By putting together ad supported e-books and bundling them at little or no additional cost to the reader Amazon moves a step closer to changing the way people read in the future.

Yahoo and search seem to be synonymous with news of whether it is going to be bought or sold. Well, today in an attempt to rise above the bing vs. Google talk that has dominated the news as of late, Yahoo has launched its Search Pad service. The WSJ’s Digits blog reports on the service that can help searchers organize their searches and keep track of where they were and why they were there.

Yahoo has been testing the feature — which allows users to save and take notes on search results they want to revisit — since February, when it first described it in this blog post. Yahoo describes it as a great way to keep track of Web pages related to planning a vacation or renovating a home.

Yes, it’s true. Just five short years after its launch, and just months after they caught the most recent round of flak for the extended “testing” period, Gmail is finally losing the Beta label today, as are all of Google Apps, including Calendar, Docs, and Talk.

Oddly enough, the list of unbetaed apps coincides exactly with the list of betaed apps TechCrunch was complaining about in May. But as the NY Times reports, there’s more to it than just TC’s criticism:

Practically speaking, the change will mean precious little to Gmail’s millions of users. But it could help Google’s efforts to get the paid version of its package of applications, which includes Gmail, Calendar, Docs and other products, adopted inside big companies. Corporate technology managers tend to shy away from beta products, and Google wants to remove any barriers to adoption that it can.

Real estate sites like Zillow and Trulia have been hard at work for the last few years, offering social features to house hunters and homeowners. And now real estate sites are getting more competition from a rather prominent Internet company: Google.

Yep, Google’s making a land grab with Google Maps, as SEL cleverly puts it. You can find real estate listings by entering the term “real estate” or bringing up the search options (the link to the right of the search button on Google Maps) and selecting Real Estate from the pull down menu. Type in a location and you get a map with results, the options to narrow your search in the left panel, and the first ten listings below that. (Also note the text ad at the bottom of the map.)