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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What would be the best way for a research firm to get some notice in a market that has two or three dominant players that most turn to? Well, get the first numbers into the market place around how well Bing has performed for Microsoft. Reuters reports that StatCounter, a Dublin based research firm has done just that.

The company is based in Dublin and has published results that are based on 4 billion pageloads per month monitored through a network of websites. Drumroll please?

Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter.

Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No. 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 percent from 10.99 percent.

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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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Did you understand the title of this post? Well, if you had installed the new Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, you would have been able to automatically translate it to: “Google’s Toolbar Now Includes Automatic Language Translation.”

The official announcement suggest some pretty handy features:

If you go to another page in the same language, you will continue to see translations rather than have to translate one page at a time. And if the page has dynamic content, like Google Reader, you will get translations in real-time. Finally, if you frequently translate pages in the same language, Toolbar will let you translate that language automatically without any extra clicks in the future.

Right now, translation is available for over 40 languages and a Firefox version is coming soon.

The big questions is: Будет ли кто на самом деле это использовать?

For a while now there has been a lot of talk of the new and improved Yahoo. Since Carol Bartz took over as CEO there has been a more hopeful buzz around the company than back in the days of Jerry Yang.

One nagging question that keeps coming up is “What is Yahoo these days?”. Kara Swisher over at the WSJ’s All Things Digital has been keeping a watchful eye on this process. She has had some interesting conversations with Bartz and now tells of the latest addition to the team that will be leading the Yahoo of the future, Penny Baldwin.

Baldwin became an official Yahoo exec, as SVP of global integrated marketing and brand management.

Baldwin, said Yahoo (YHOO), “will lead the company’s global brand efforts, and is responsible for developing and executing Yahoo!’s brand marketing approach including brand management, corporate messaging, integrated marketing and advertising.”

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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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A study of twelve people is not statistically relevant, but it does make for interesting headlines!

According to the Catalyst Group, 1 in 3 Google users preferred the search experience of Bing over the search leader. OK, so that was actually 4 of the 12 total people that Catalyst studied in a report obtained by TechCrunch, but hey, Bing will take all the good news it can get, right?

What is amazing is that when the test subjects were asked to rate Bing on specific criteria (visual design, organization of features, filtering options, and relevance of results), Bing handily beat Google in everything but result relevance. Arguably, that is the most important criteria, but most of the study participants thought that both search engines tied on result relevance. So even though Bing ranked better on design, and tied on relevance, that was not enough for most of them to switch.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was honored as Media Person of the Year at this year’s Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. As he addressed the festival, however, he pulled a bit of a Calacanis (you guys do remember when Calacanis called SEO “bull@#&%” in an SES keynote, right?). Ballmer told the assembled media and advertising gurus that, basically, we can kiss the good old days of rolling in dough goodbye.

Among other tales of doom and gloom, as reported by the Guardian:

• “I don’t think we are in a recession, I think we have reset. A recession implies recovery [to pre-recession levels] and for planning purposes I don’t think we will. We have reset and won’t rebound and re-grow.”
• “There won’t be [only traditional] newspapers, magazines and TV programmes. There won’t be [only] personal, social communications offline and separate. In 10 years it will all be online. Static content won’t cut it in the future.”

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Since taking the helm at Yahoo in January, CEO Carol Bartz has consistently emphasized one of Yahoo’s greatest strengths: its brand.

But now they may be changing all that—literally. According to BoomTown, Yahoo is looking to revamp its worldwide fortunes with a major rebranding. But for once the company’s strength might be working against it. Says BoomTown:

Yahoo’s branding campaign will certainly have to be a big deal, given that it is one of the top Internet sites in the world and has massive name recognition.

And Bartz has been vocal about the importance of touting Yahoo as a well-known brand, even as she has said a lot internally and externally that she detests purple.

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Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton has been bitten by a vampire. He claims that Google is the “digital vampire” that has been “sucking the blood” out of the newspaper industry.

I totally agree!

Hinton must have been bitten by a vampire. How else do you explain such nonsense coming from the man responsible for one of the largest publishing companies–and owners of The Wall Street Journal.

He continues his deluded rhetoric:

[Google] didn’t actually begin life in a cave as a digital vampire per se. The charitable view of Google is that the news business itself fed Google’s taste for this kind of blood.”

By offering its content free on the Web, the newspaper industry “gave Google’s fangs a great place to bite,” he continued. “We will never know what might have happened had newspapers taken a different approach.”

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It appears that Google and China are playing a game of brinkmanship–and Google’s losing.

After continued threats from China, Google apparent still hasn’t done enough to prevent porn from being easily found at Google.com. In response, China pulled the plug on access to the search engine.

Attempts to access Google.com and Gmail from different computers in Beijing started failing after 9pm local time, but the websites could be accessed through proxy servers – normally a sign that a website is being blocked by internet censors.

Whether the "outage" was a warning shot across Google’s bow or not, we don’t really know.

Cui Jin, spokeswoman for Google China, confirmed that access was cut but would not speculate if it was linked to the government order on cleaning up its act.

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