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Mobile Marketers: Are You a Vampire or a Servant?

posted on June 17, 2013

Marketing research is a lot like mobile marketing. You have to get the potential user’s attention, use clever content to keep him engaged and then hope he likes what you presented enough to act on it. Or you could use bribery – as this study will show, that works, too.

The pitch that caught my eye today was the Millward Brown / SessionM study called “Exploring the Role of Value in Mobile Advertising.” I decided to cover the story because of this graphic:

time sucker

Any company that uses a vampire bat to make their point is full of win. In this case, they asked mobile users to express how they feel about mobile advertising. Many people feel that its nothing but a time suck. On the other hand, they’re okay with ads as long as the content makes them happier, enriches their life or introduces them to a product that will do either of the aforementioned.

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Google Adds Photo Extensions to AdWord Campaigns

posted on June 7, 2013

In more display ad news, Google invites you to join them for a round of “Show and Tell” with a new feature they call Image Extensions.

Like hair extensions, image extensions are all about making you more attractive to others. Here’s how it looks on the page:

extended images

Look at that. Makes me want to hop a plane right now and go to Sydney. Really. That wasn’t sarcasm. I mean it.

Says Google,

Image extensions enable you to more accurately convey the body style of a car, the cut of a pair of jeans, or a particular shade of eyeshadow, making your ads richer and more informative so they stand out in a crowded marketplace.

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Did You Know that Facebook Had 27 Types of Ad Units? Not Anymore

posted on June 7, 2013

Facebook just announced that they’re going to simplify their ad process by cutting down the number of options from 27 to less than half of that in addition to making the ads more uniform.

I got stuck on the number 27. I don’t do a lot of Facebook advertising so I was surprised to see there were that many options. As a consumer, there are two kinds of Facebook ads, the irrelevant ones in the sidebar and the irrelevant ones in my news feed. What’s worse is that the sidebar ads always look like something from a beginner – tiny, lousy photos, uninspired text, and no formatting whatsoever.

Behold the new Facebook ads!

Screenshot 4

 

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Mobile Advertising Dollars Triple for YouTube and Climb on iPad Mags

posted on June 6, 2013

mobile adsMobile advertising can be tricky. You’re dealing with smaller screens, shorter attention spans and limited bandwidth in some cases. None of that has stopped YouTube from tripling their mobile ad sales in the last six months. Bloomberg estimates $350 million in revenue. That means mobile is bringing in between 20% and 25% of YouTube’s yearly revenue. Not bad for a such a new and “hard to monetize” product.

The success of the program is coming from two elements. First, YouTube app usage has gone through the roof.

More than half of smartphone users in the U.S accessed YouTube’s application in March, according to Nielsen Holdings NV (NLSN). At least 70 million people in the U.S. were on the app in March, up 42 percent from a year earlier, the researcher said.

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Yahoo! Redesigns Their Search Results to Look Like Everyone Else

posted on June 5, 2013

I know I’ve been hard on Yahoo! these past few weeks but seriously, this is getting silly. Yahoo! has become that embarrassing mom who dresses and acts like she’s her teenager’s best friend. Let’s get real. Putting your stuff on Tumblr doesn’t automatically make you part of the Tumblr crowd.

yahoo tumblr

 

When I hit this page, I thought it was a fake account. This is your “official” announcement page? I was expecting to find a joke at the end of the post. What I did find was another one of those flashing gifs. These things make me nauseous. Stop it. Flashing back and forth between “before” and “after” doesn’t allow people to compare them side by side. This is no way to announce a new feature. Especially one that is important to business owners and marketers.

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Amazon Ad Revenue Continues to Grow Rapidly

posted on June 5, 2013

Amazon is the world’s shopping place. You can buy most anything and feel like you are not getting scammed in any way so the online world (consumers that is) sees Amazon as one of the good guys. Maybe even THE good guy.

As a result it looks like marketers are seeing the benefit of advertising on Amazon. That is evidenced by their continued ad revenue growth. eMarketer predicts that the growth will continue as it rapidly approaches the $1 billion per year mark (eMarketer predicts that the US market alone (which last year was the source of about 74% of the company’s ad revenue) will get to about $1.1 billion in 2015).

Amazon Net Ad Revenue 2011-2013

So what is the source of all this ad revenue?

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Yahoo to Email Subscribers: Upgrade or Get Out

posted on June 4, 2013

yahoo mailYahoo is in the news once again (is that a good thing or a bad thing) thanks to a mouthy mandate for all Yahoo Mail users: upgrade to the new version with personalized advertising or get out.

To be fair, everything Yahoo posts sounds more urgent and stringent because of all those exclamation points, but it’s hard to misinterpret this paragraph:

Other Options

If you don’t want to use the new Yahoo! Mail, you may consider these other options:

Download your Yahoo! Mail using IMAP: (instructions omitted)
Close your account: Learn how to close your account.

What? No “we’re sorry to see you go” or plea to give them another chance? Maybe they’re just not all that worried because of this: