Marketing Pilgrim

We spend considerable time here chronicling just how badly the newspaper industry is adapting to making money on the web. With so many sites abandoning free, ad-supported content, it seems like they just don’t know what they’re doing.

And maybe they’re not the only ones. In the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of many ad-supported free music sites: SpiralFrog, imeem, MySpace Music, Pandora, to name only a few. And the entire sector is struggling, as CNET reports today: SpiralFrog shut down earlier this year (which is almost funny, since it was a joint venture between the NYT and the Financial Times), imeem is reeling from a financial crisis, Pandora is charging its heaviest users, and MySpace Music underperformed in Q1.

In case you needed more evidence in this “Google isn’t perfect” file, the most popular search engine in the world has made a mistake. (Gasp!) Or, if you come down on the “Google is now trying to be evil” side of the debate, they’re trying to provoke international conflict by changing borders.

Google Earth underwent a routine update this week. As part of that update, it renamed areas of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh—in Chinese. This is particularly bad because China disputes that border, and have actually claimed portions of Arunachal Pradesh as South Tibet. (However, Arunachal Pradesh is administered internally as an Indian state.)

If you’re a visual learner, here’s another explanation:

A Google spokesman responded in a statement:

If you’re an avid dayparter, you might already know that breakfast is one of the best times of day to target your advertising.

According to the NYT, more and more people are checking emails, tweeting, texting and updating their Facebook status, before they grab breakfast. Some, are even more addicted!

This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.

Hah!

As you know, Twitter, Facebook and many other social networking sites fell victim to a DDoS attack last week. Well, Google was also included in the attack, but managed to stay afloat.

Now SER has word that many users–at least of the marketer variety–are complaining that Google unfairly labeled them as hackers and were shown the following error message:

I suspect this was part of Google’s efforts to thwart a DDoS attack, but perhaps they dialed the anti-spam dial just a little bit too far to the right.

In a Razorfish sale, yet to be officially confirmed, both Microsoft and French ad firm Publicis look set to walk away winners.

Microsoft looks set to recoup $530 million of the $6 billion it paid to acquire aQuantive and, along with it, Razorfish.

Publicis beefs-up its online advertising offering, picks up Microsoft, McDonalds, Google, and Yahoo as clients, and celebrates its 1-year anniversary of acquiring Performics with another big acquisition.

This should be Publicis’ last big-fish acquisition for a while, according to CEO Maurice Levy, "Don’t expect any acquisitions of this magnitude in the short or medium term." Now Publicis has to figure out how to integrate Razorfish, without losing any of the marquee client accounts, and hope that it can turn around a decline in revenue during the first half of 2009.

Since we had a rather strong response to our coverage of the United States Marine Corps’ policy to not allow Marines to access social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter on the Marines’ network it seemed appropriate to see how this is handled ‘across the pond’.

Now before going into this and making comparisons between the two reports I think it only fair to share a comment from one of our readers to the report regarding the USMC policy. Commenter Jason said

This ban has slowly been implemented across all Department of Defense systems. This is not just a Marine ban. This is strictly for government systems and in no way affects the systems used for morale. They are not saying the Marines cannot access Facebook or MySpace or Twitter on their time. They are saying that Marines cannot access these Social Networking sites while at work.