Marketing Pilgrim

Google Chief Exec Eric Schmidt and his fellow media moguls talked to the Wall Street Journal last week about their plans to get creative with online advertising. After fifteen years as a part of the Internet landscape, the banner ad simply isn’t as effective as it used to be and though online ad spending is up again, it’s not where it should be given the amount of time the average person spends online.

Last week, Schmidt and colleagues, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner, Walt Disney’s Bob Iger and Groupon’s Andrew Mason, headed out to Sun Valley for this year’s Allen & Co. mogul retreat.  In between the bike rides and the barbeques, the heavy hitters discussed “interactive video ads” and targeted advertising attached to content. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Despite Apple passing a death sentence to rival mobile advertising firms, the company has yet to enforce the iPhone advertising ruling handed down in June.

According to CNET, that’s something that Omar Hamoui, founder and CEO of Google’s AdMob division, is very grateful for…

“They haven’t been enforcing (the new regulations) yet. We’re very appreciative of that,” he said at the MobileBeat 2010 conference here.

The language inserted by Apple into its iPhone Developer Agreement is a ticking time bomb for competing firms such as the Google owned AdMob. Essentially, Apple can prevent any ad network from collecting certain types of analytical data from iPhones. Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Except that if AdMob and others can’t track simple click-throughs, then they can’t share that data with their advertisers. No data, no advertisers.

The next time your company needs to raise funds for more people or servers, forget venture capital. That’s so, 2009.

Instead, simply ask your users to chip-in with a donation of their choice. That’s exactly what Reddit did yesterday, much to our chagrin. But, you know what? It worked!

More than 6,000 of Reddit’s eight million active users made a donation. While that represents just 0.00075% of active users, that’s apparently enough to be deemed a “huge success” by Reddit’s tiny team of developers.

We’re getting a much-needed cash infusion.

We’ve shown that, despite popular belief, people on the Internet are willing to be supportive if you treat them with honesty and respect.

It’s given everyone involved with reddit a good kick in the pants right when we needed it.

There are few areas of any ‘traditional’ communications outlets anymore that are just that outlet alone these days. In fact, finding a standalone product that doesn’t integrate with your Facebook account, for instance, is becoming more rare.

Now you can add Microsoft’s Outlook to that list as Facebook integration is complete and being rolled out according to Mashable

Microsoft is announcing today that it has integrated Facebook and Windows Live Messenger into Outlook, bringing the streams of millions of Facebook users into inboxes across the world.

Last year, Microsoft launched Outlook Social Connector, a plugin that syncs social networking feeds with your Outlook contacts, giving you immediate data on what they are doing and thinking. It started last year with LinkedIn integration, but soon the company announced MySpace and Facebook were coming.

Boy it’s a good thing Yahoo picked up content chop shop Associated Content to make that ‘great’ content to keep visitors around its sites. Apparently there is less time being spent on Yahoo sites than ever. Here is a chart compiled by Citi analyst Mark Mahaney and shared with us from Business Insider SAI.

One question I have is what sites are included in the Google calculation because YouTube could go a long way toward goosing their number of total minutes spent on a Google site.

The chart also shows just how influential Facebook has become in a relatively short period of time. No surprise there but the next question is will it keep growing and surpass Google?

I had to do a double take this morning when I read about the plight of reddit, one of the original social news websites. Apparently things aren’t so good over at the Internet property. It’sso bad that they have started to ask for donations to keep the site afloat. I bet you that their owner, Conde Nast, must be so proud.

eConsultancy reports

Making money online isn’t always easy, especially when you run an ad-supported business. And that’s not just true for the small fries; it can be even more true for popular, heavily-trafficked sites.

That’s the case for reddit, the popular user-generated news site. It was purchased by Conde Nast Digital in 2006, but a blog post last Friday indicates that all is not well at reddit.