Marketing Pilgrim

After their recent skirmish with the Chinese government over Internet porn, Google China is back online. And they’re already optimistic: apparently they’re poised to announce a Q2 revenue increase in China of 25% over the previous quarter. (And in this economy, that’s not just great; that’s phenomenal!)

Brand Republic reports that Google China will also see operating revenue increases of 45% to 50% over the second quarter of last year. For owning only 30% of the Chinese search market, that seems pretty impressive. And the revenue boost from April, May and June of this year probably wasn’t because of a jump in market share—they’ve only added eight percentage points to their marketshare over the last two years.

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The results of a new poll from Harris Interactive indicate that Internet advertising isn’t as effective as search engine marketers would like to think. When asked what medium’s ads were most helpful in making purchase decisions, the 2500+ American respondents indicated that first television, then newspapers, then search engine ads. Internet banner ads fared even worse:

• 37% said television ads were most helpful in purchase decisions
• 18% said newspaper ads
• 14% said search engine ads
• 3% said radio ads
• 1% said Internet banner ads

Perhaps most revealing, however, is the math. Those numbers don’t add up to 100% because another 28% (rounding effects) said that none of those ad media were helpful in purchase decisions.

The Harris poll also asked about what kinds of ads people ignore. Again, the banner ads didn’t do so well:

• 46% tended to ignore Internet banner ads

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Last week, we saw that Facebook was taking status updates public for selected test users (a la Twitter). Those selected users were ones that had already set their profiles to a high level of sharing—everyone could see their profiles already.

Now Facebook will make it so that all users will have a very granular control over exactly what gets shared with whom.

These settings can be applied on a message-by-message basis, but there will also be changes to the full privacy settings for every member. As paidContent points out this will eliminate the need to view at least six pages of privacy settings.

And now Facebook announces that they’ll be rolling out this change to the full site very shortly:

To make it easy for users to set their profiles’ level of “openness,” Facebook will be using a transition tool. Here’s the first step:

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FeedBurner, an RSS management utility that was purchased by Google a few years ago, has long offered an RSS-to-email service. One of its major drawbacks, however, was that as an RSS publisher you could only set one subject line. So every email from your feed (generated and sent daily) had the same subject line.

The lowly likes of us regular bloggers complaining in the support forums didn’t have much of an effect. The only solution offered until now was logging in every day and manually changing the subject line to match your post—not fun.

But after Darren Rowse’s open letter to FeedBurner two weeks ago on ProBlogger, things are finally changing. Today, the Google AdSense for Feeds blogs announces that “Happiness is more subject in your subject line.” And it’s true!

Now the interface under Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email Branding offers this “hot tip”:

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You know how they say “Timing is everything”? Well, apparently so does Google. Less than a week after the head of Dow Jones whines about Google sucking newspapers’ lifeblood like a vampire (no, seriously, he said that), Google helpfully instructs news publishers on how to share their videos with the search giant.

Thankfully, unlike many newspapers, most news video publishers seem to be a little more “with it.” Google is asking them to become YouTube Partners. In exchange for their original, professional content, Google says its partners gain (emphasis added):

• Featured Premium Placement. YouTube news partners receive featured placement on the YouTube news page, youtube.com/news, where we feature news videos from partners related to the top news stories on Google News. In addition, if you allow your videos to be embedded, they’ll be eligible to appear on Google News, which means additional exposure to all Google News users.

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If you found an ad format that could be up to 900 x 400, feature rich media and guarantee audience engagement for at least 30 seconds—with testing showing average engagement of over a minute—you’d think it was too good to be true, right?

But that’s the newest ad format and promises from Meebo. In addition to on-site chat and free-standing IM (integrated with popular clients), the instant messaging company powers MySpace IM and Facebook Chat and some forty other good-sized networking sites. Their new ad format already has up to 85 interested websites signed up.

Reuters reports that new ad format shows up first as an icon on the chat toolbar on a partner’s page. Interested users can click on the tab to open the full ad as an overlay (although in the image below, it says “rollover,” not “click”).

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paidContent has two pieces of good news for Hulu in the past week—they’re commanding not only similar ad prices to broadcast television, but also 10% of the online video ad market.

From a Bloomberg report, paidContent shows that, for some shows, CPMs on Hulu are actually greater than they are for broadcast TV. And when I say broadcast TV, we’re talking primetime, new episode, time-slot-leading network television. (None of that cable syndicated rerun stuff!) Bloomberg’s example:

Marketers typically pay $20 to $40 per thousand viewers for a prime-time ad. On Hulu, which began offering shows to the public in March 2008, an ad on the animated series “The Simpsons” costs $60 per thousand viewers, Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. wrote in a June 18 report.

How can the Internet, with demonstrably fewer viewers (another example, the NCAA basketball championship game, drew 17.6M TV viewers and 7.52 Internet viewers), command such high CPMs?

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Although the latest planned feature for YouTube looks like an ad, for once YouTube’s rolling out something somewhat noteworthy that’s not part of its continue search for revenues. The feature? Overlays, like InVideo ads, that feature off-site links.

As TechCrunch reports, “you probably thought it was already out there.” But to-date, YouTube hasn’t allowed any links embedded in its videos other than a.) ads or b.) links to other YouTube videos. If you needed to link to your website, blog, Twitter profile, etc., you had to do it in the right-hand sidebar, where it would be largely ignored.

YouTube ran a similar promotion in March for charity:water. This video from the organization features the overlay:

The move is unique in that this is the first non-advertising off-site links YouTube has allowed. However, the program will only be open to YouTube’s advertisers participating in the CPC Promoted Videos program. TechCrunch says the program is launching today.

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“Competition is just a click away,” Google Senior Competition Counsel Dana Wagner reminds us. “We are in an industry that is subject to disruption and we can’t take anything for granted.”

I hear him loud and clear. I spend hours a day fretting about the future of Google. (Um, NOT.) But Wagner is doing something few companies have to worry about these days: campaigning to remind us how vulnerable they are.

Then again, as the New York Times points out, convincing people (or the government) you’re no big deal is kind of a big deal when you’re one deal away from anti-trust proceedings, and

[handle] roughly two-thirds of all Internet searches, . . . [own] the largest online video site, YouTube, which is more than 10 times more popular than its nearest competitor, [a]nd last year . . . sold nearly $22 billion in advertising, more than any media company in the world.

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As a marketer, which of these would you find more useful?

Tweet: @sumbuddy dont buy the BrandCo table it sux–hasnt stood up at all

or

On site review: (2 stars) For what we paid for this table, my husband and I expected something more durable. The wood dents way too easily for a kids’ table. We expected a lot more from BrandCo.

While both product reviews are negative, the on-site review giving a client’s product two stars might make us cringe a bit more than a single Tweet (even if the Tweet was as specific as the other review). But the on-site review might also be the better marketing tool, at least according to Ad Age today.

Ad Age contends that product reviews are more useful to companies and marketers than the oft-touted media sweethearts of social media: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (the triumvirate of YouTwitFace), and the like.

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Man, hardly a week goes by without the European Union getting after some Internet behemoth for bad business practices or invading individuals’ privacy, or both. Usually it’s Google on the receiving end, but this time it’s social networks that are getting scrutiny from the supranational regulator.

As Facebook begins testing greater and greater publicity, with user controls, the EU begins demanding more and more of social networks’ privacy policies—or, that’s what we think their vague regulations are trying to do, anyway.

There are several specific policies that social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, which both have large European audiences, will have to comply with: automatically setting users’ privacy to the highest level (giving users the option to opt out of that extreme level of privacy), allow users to limit the data shared with third-parties (including advertisers and applications), and limit the use of “sensitive information,” including race, religion and political views, in behavioral targeting.

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This week, Facebook announced some coming changes to your status updates. Soon, just like with Twitter, you’ll have the option to make them public—but not just to everyone on the world’s most popular social network, but everyone around the world. (You know, with Internet access.)

Because this feature is being implemented on the Facebook Publisher, you can add more to your newsstream than just text updates and links. The buttons below the text area allow you to add photos, videos and announcements or other integrations from your apps that have integrated with the publisher.

Facebook also gave an in-depth explanation of each level of access:

• Everyone: Anyone, on or off, of Facebook can see it.
• Friends and Networks: People you have confirmed as friends and people in any school or work networks that you’ve joined can see it.

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