Marketing Pilgrim

The news part of this story is that the European Commission (EC) has launched an anti-trust investigation against Google. I suspect that this is heard with little surprise considering the amount of chatter recently about Google’s dominance in the marketplace. I would think it is safe to say that Google has been preparing for this day for quite some time and suspecting that the first official volley in this war would be from “across the pond” considering the EC’s apparent obsession with controlling everything with regard to the marketplace. Now, Google is being brought to task for imposing penalties on sites and allegedly being a barrier to trade.

The Telegraph tells us a little more

Eyeblaster released a study yesterday showing that “display ads stimulate search by increasing the speed at which people searching enter the purchase funnel,” reports MediaPost. The study examined over 1300 search and display campaigns over a 15 month period.

They found that early one in five people who convert after using search had seen at least one display ad before searching. Eyeblaster concluded that display advertising increases the reach of campaigns, pushing more consumers to search. Those consumers then move through the purchasing funnel faster.

And this wasn’t just in a single industry: Eyeblaster looked at more than 200 advertisers in over 20 verticals. 72% of conversions resulted from display advertising, while 23% of the conversions were a direct result of the search channel and 5% were the result of display ads that were followed by a search.

Once up on a time, it seemed that Google and Apple were natural partners, as inseparable as . . . well, two boards of directors with the same guy on them. And then last August, Google CEO Eric Schmidt left the Apple board, citing “core business conflicts.” Those conflicts have become more apparent over the intervening six months as Google has unveiled a smartphone/superphone set to compete against the iPhone.

And Apple may be set to fight back. Last month, they were apparently thinking about making Bing the default search engine on the iPhone, and now people are speculating that Apple is contemplating Bing for the iPad. You know what they say about the enemy of my enemy, but . . . isn’t this going a bit far?

Before I get into this post, let me state that I believe the ruling in Italy is absurd.

What am I talking about?

Well a case, which has been in the hands of an Italian court for over 3 years, has just come to a conclusion–and 3 Google executives have just been sentenced to 6 months of jail time for invasion of privacy.

According to Reuters…

…a Milan court has convicted three Google Inc executives for the 2006 transmission of a video showing the bullying of a youth with Down’s syndrome, the judge in the case told Reuters on Wednesday…The case stems from an incident in 2006 when students at an Italian school filmed and then uploaded a clip to Google Video showing them bullying a schoolmate with Down’s syndrome.

Better late than never is what they say right? Everyone else and their brother have made their deal with Twitter so Yahoo doing so only makes sense. What is interesting is that while this kind of announcement should be a big deal it comes off as sounding a little “after the fact” which, unfortunately, seems to be how Yahoo is perceived more and more these days.

To be fair, Yahoo has more properties to tie Twitter into so the deal is likely to be more complex than the “real time search” deals that have been struck with Google and Microsoft. Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog sings the deal’s praises

Well folks it looks like the days of advertising free tweeting may finally be coming to an end. The rumors are flying around regarding the ad platform that Twitter has in the works and is testing. Everyone is “atwitter” with this change and for good reason. Of course, until there is more than what has already been released by Twitter itself any ideas / thoughts about what Twitter ads might look like are for the imagination.

MediaPost reports on how this whole thing really started to bubble to the surface.

Twitter plans to launch an advertising platform in about a month, according to Seth Goldstein. The chief executive officer and co-founder of socialmedia.com led a panel Monday focused on the next wave of interactive advertising at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2010 in Carlsbad, Calif., that shed light on Twitter’s strategy.