Marketing Pilgrim

What do you do when you want to invest in alternative advertising models for television but haven’t exactly seen a lot of success in that channel?

The answer?

Don’t buy a risky start-up, when you can invest in it and share some of that risk with other venture capital firms. If it succeeds–and you happen to be Google–you can sweep-in and acquire the company. If it fails, you don’t have to put up with the press giving you a hard time about yet another failure.

And, that’s exactly the approach Google has taken with Invidi–a start-up that’s hoping to find a better TV ad model:

Apparently not.

While embedding a tweet about Twitter’s new embeddable tweet feature tool hack won’t bring on the Fail Whale, it wil make it a whole lot easier for bloggers to embed a 140-characters of juiciness into their blog posts.

During a third quarter earnings call for News Corp. yesterday, the content paywall’s number one proponent, Rupert Murdoch, gave some fuzzy “details” about the new way he suspects people will be buying their information. Murdoch has had the loudest rallying cry when it comes to fighting the “Internet is free” mantra. Along the way he has taken on Google as well, saying that they are the ones who truly profit from all the content creators’ hard work (especially News Corp.’s).

The LA Times reports

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said the company planned to hold a press conference “in three to four weeks” to announce details of a new subscription model for news and other digital content.

From time to time we like to take a break here at Marketing Pilgrim and talk about the actual practice or actually “doing” social media and search in the real world. Sure it’s fun to talk about ideas, news and theory all day but in the end if there is no action attached to it then, well, you just talked about a lot of stuff. How this plays out in the real world gets too little attention and we like to talk to those that are in the weeds every day for perspective.

Google Ventures has recently invested in Southlake, TX-based mobile payment provider Corduro. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.

According to Corduro’s website they offer “a range of payment services, for Internet, mobile, and traditional retail transactions, including support for recurring payments.” TechCrunch reports that “The service offers everything from electronic checks and bill pay to recurring payment support.”

Google Ventures announced the investment yesterday—just one day before mobile payment app Square launched on the iPad. Square’s iPhone app is scheduled for release later this week. Square uses an attached credit card reader to essentially turn any iPad or iPhone into a cash register.

Investing in a competing platform to Square makes a lot of sense for Google as they battle Apple for mobile supremacy.

Since it first began monetizing, Facebook has offered to models: CPM (you know, cost per mille or cost per thousand impressions) and CPC (cost per click). Depending on the goal for your ad campaign, one might be a better fit for you than the other. Of course, if you’re hoping for clicks in your campaign (pfft), CPM is about to become a much less attractive option on the most popular social network in the world.

Last week, Facebook notified its advertisers of the change:

Upcoming system change:
As you know, we continuously work to make our ads system more accurate in order to further improve the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. Among other ongoing improvements, we are refining our ads delivery system to better reflect the goals of our advertisers. This change will take place over the next few weeks and, assuming current bids remain unchanged, will mean that: