Marketing Pilgrim

If you have been paying any attention to my posts as of late you will have a general idea where this one is heading. You see, I have had some issues around research and reports that are generated by people and companies who stand to benefit if results look a certain way (read: they are positive). The quantity of these reports is surprisingly proportionate to the amount of good news about the subject, no matter how that good news is created or gathered. In other words, no one reports bad news about his or her own industry because that would be terribly fair and balanced and we wouldn’t want that now would we?

So how surprised are you when SearchIgnite, a company that manages PPC spend for companies, reports on paid search growing?

According to an article from MediaPost, Google is set to start rolling out tools for display advertisers to help them automate and optimize their display ad campaigns. It’s like an AdWords approach to the display world which will likely cause a lot of excitement along with the requisite confusion as people find out when the system works and when it doesn’t.

MediaPost says

Google’s long-term plan to automate the advertising supply chain will lead the Mountain View, Calif. tech company on Tuesday to release two tools aimed at removing costs from serving up display ads across the Google Display Network.

The tools — Display Campaign Optimizer and Contextual Targeting Tool–are geared toward helping advertisers reach performance goals on the Google Display Network, simplify the entire system to buy and sell display ads, and open the entire ecosystem through innovation.

I’m a magazine ripper. I admit it and I know it’s not something everyone understands, but it’s how I roll. As I read my favorite magazines, I rip out recipes, coupons, the occasional photo of a good looking guy (hey, all work and no play. . . ) and I rip out ads.

With the holidays coming, I’ve been ripping more ads than ever so I was very intrigued when I saw the recent ClickZ article on AdKeeper. AdKeeper is an online service that allows you to virtually rip out the ads you see online. Scott Kurnit, founder and former CEO of About.com, is the man behind the plan. He commissioned a study and found that 95% of people tear ads out of magazines, so it appears I’m not alone in this. His logic is anytime you can bring an offline behavior online, you’ve got a winner.

Could Twitter become the “must-buy” ad platform of the future? It’s not going to happen next week, but The New York Times says that Twitter is gearing up in hopes of becoming more than a fast blip on the radar. Many feel that the act of promoting Dick Costolo from COO to CEO is a sign of things to come. The article also notes that Twitter has a group of employees working on advertising instead of just one. But interest in becoming a sought after ad platform isn’t enough to make it so.

NYT quotes Ian Schafter of Deep Focus as saying;

“Agencies are uneducated, brands are uneducated and to a certain extent, Twitter is uneducated. There are no best practices. There are just hunches about what will work.”

Google’s mission is to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

So, I’m not quite sure where in that statement, “create autonomous robotic cars that drive themselves” quite fits.

Still, that’s not stopped Google from building cars that, yes, drive themselves.

Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead. This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain.

So far, the cars have logged more than 140,000 miles, including such trips as…

When you read reports about Internet usage, smartphone adoption and technology use in general you are often led to believe that this is a young person’s game. As a recent study covered in an article from AdAge points out, how you define an older Internet user is probably the most important part of understanding just how much they are online and accessible.

Marilynn Mobley has a desktop at work, a laptop at home, a netbook for travel, an Android smartphone and just last week she bought an iPad. She time shifts all her TV viewing using DVRs and enjoys watching Blu-ray movies at home. She’s also 63 years old.

Ms. Mobley is a strategic counselor for Edelman in its Boomer Insights Generation Group.