Marketing Pilgrim

They thought it wouldn’t happen, but the folks at Yahoo! (and many others) got a happy surprise when they totaled up the balance sheets for Q4 2010. Turns out they saw a 16% increase in display ad revenue, popping them up from $465 to $567 million dollars.

Unfortunately, the spike did nothing to help the 600 people that got pink slips in December. It’s also too little, too late for the additional 1% which are expected to be let go in the coming months.

The trouble lies in the fact that even though display rose, search ad revenues dropped 18%. Overall, the company was down 4% in total revenue over last year and that’s enough to hurt.

Yahoo! is blaming the drop on outside forces. Says ClickZ,

It can be hard keeping up with the virtual Jonses. First your old roommate gets a new tractor for his farm, then your mom gets a missile launcher and your best friend just got a baby whale. Don’t stress it. Facebook’s new Buy with Friends program is going to help you keep up by offering you a chance to purchase everything your friends bought and you might even get a discount.

Deb Liu of Facebook Commerce Product Marketing announced the roll out of the new program at the Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 Conference.

Buy with Friends is an attempt to make social commerce more social and it could be both a boon and a bust, depending on which side of the dollar you’re on.

You know how we approach research here at Marketing Pilgrim. We look at the title of the report or survey, then we look at the source, then we see the (more often than not) obvious connection to why this ‘research’ was done. The answer is usually PR versus actually showing or proving anything.

These reports often leaves one scratching their head but on occasion there is something that comes across our desk that refreshing because it is, gulp, realistic.

Objectivity in research is defined for me by the use of words that don’t always make every subject sound like an online Utopia where everything is always positive and things are always on the rise. That’s not the real world. Research that states for a particular vertical that everything is ‘unicorns and rainbows’ is marginalized because nothing in this world is all upside. However, you would never guess that from most of the research in the marketplace these days.

Well, they’ve been a long time coming, but Twitter ads are finally ready to go mainstream…almost!

MediaPost reports that the self-service version of Twitter’s promoted tweets are being rolled out to advertisers–albeit a select few. So far, Clix Marketing’s David Szetela is the only one talking about it and he’s landed Guy Kawasaki as a Twitter ads client.

As part of the roll out, we’re starting to learn a few more details of how they work…

…Twitter’s self-serve platform requires the advertiser to enter a name, and date and time to run the campaign. It also asks for “interests” and “search keywords,” as well as a maximum bid and daily budget…the backend technology crawls tweets and user bios looking for the frequency of repeated words. The platform determines where to insert tweets in the user’s timeline, but it’s not clear if the algorithm takes into account Twitter followers. Nor is it understood how Twitter will rank the Promoted Tweets in Twitter streams.

LinkedIn has finally taken the beta tag off of their self-serve ad platform. The beta tag has been in place since 2008. So rather than looking like Google in keeping a beta tag on an offering until it rusted the time has come for LinkedIn Ads to be ‘official’. Of course, the talk of a first quarter IPO can help a company to ‘clean up shop’ a bit as well but who’s counting.

As reported by MediaPost

LinkedIn Wednesday formally launched its pay-per-click, self-serve ad system after being in beta since 2008. Rebranded as LinkedIn Ads, the text-advertising service formerly known as DirectAds mainly expands audience targeting options to include job title, LinkedIn groups and companies. Previously, the platform offered several targeting choices such as age, gender, geography, job function and seniority.

If I say “Pudding!” to my closest friends, they’ll crack up laughing because they know exactly what I mean. It’s an in-joke, a kind of secret language that defines us as a group. Widen that circle to my fandom friends and we truly have a language all our own. A language we use so commonly that we often forget that outsiders can’t figure out what we’re talking about. Then again, maybe that’s part of why we developed the language in the first place, so we can talk in front of the whole world but only those clued-in will know the truth.