Marketing Pilgrim

Apple finally officially made the leap into advertising on apps on its iPhone and iPad last week with the announcement of iAd. Of course, we’ve all been expecting that since they acquired Quattro Wireless—but it looked like no one was as excited as soon-to-be-full-on-rival Google.

As rumored, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt is already telling the US government what iAds mean for the mobile ad market. And the bottom line for him? iAds mean the FTC should approve Google’s acquisition of AdMob.

Well, of course.

Google’s acquisition was announced in November. The next month, consumer groups lobbied the FTC, saying the deal would stifle competition in the mobile app ad market. Last month, the FTC turned to rival app advertising companies for feedback on the pending deal.

While it’s not a surprise that social media is growing it can often be a bit stunning to hear some ‘actual’ numbers to back up the assertions and assumptions that the industry itself can be prone to making. The latest data that tells us about who is involved in social media comes from Arbitron and Edison Research via MediaPost.

What it shows is that the young crowd has greater saturation in who has profiles but the older age groups are seeing large percentage increases in social networking profiles. This should make marketers happy because the older the person the more money (supposedly) there is to buy stuff. Overall, though, about half of the people in the US aged 12 and older have at least one social network. Here’s a picture for you.

Google and the newspaper industry truly have a love / hate relationship. Google loves the hard news generated by traditional media outlets but hates that the newspaper industry paints them as freeloaders. The newspapers love the traffic that Google sends to them but hates that they are doing it for free. This tug of war has been going on for some time but the inevitable “winner” in any tug of war is the side with the strength and the stamina to pull the team over the line. Right now Google has plenty of strength and stamina while the newspaper industry is in a tailspin.

So when Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the ASNE (American Society of News Editors) meeting last night there was some interest in just how he would handle this situation. His overall tone was to let the newspaper people know that things would get better. Politico reports

I suspect Google’s decision to buy Plink, was not motivated by the start-ups amazing ability to analyze mobile pictures of artwork and recognize them.

I’m confident that Google’s not going to launch Google Art Critic anytime soon.

However, it’s entirely possible that Google has acquired Plink simply to gain access to the two PhD students–Mark Cummins and James Philbin–behind the visual recognition app.

In fact, according to a blog post by the founders, they’re ready to abandon their PlinkArt app and roll-up their sleeves for Google:

PlinkArt will continue to be available for download and work as it currently does today. However, we won’t be updating the app and will instead focus our development efforts on Google Goggles, so you’ll see new functionality appearing there in the future.

I’m excited to share with you the latest Google TV ad–featuring both Marketing Pilgrim and Trackur!

How cool is that?

OK, so you won’t be seeing this ad run during the Super Bowl any time soon, and yes, you too can create your own Google TV ad, but it’s still pretty cool.

It struck me the other day that I worry about other people’s marketing efforts way more than my own! In fact, I don’t worry about my marketing efforts at all. Because I don’t do marketing for myself. That’s right I don’t do any marketing for my business. A few of my SEO colleagues like to tease me about how badly my site is optimized. I have never bought a paid ad for my business. I do not offer any type of affiliate promotions. But despite my own marketing inaction I am always busy with work. Seriously, I usually have 2 or 3 clients waiting in line for me to get to their projects, and most of them are willing to pay top dollar.