Adtasm.com | Ads in Media

The smarty pants over at Google launched an interesting new feature to customize Custom Search Engines. By adding a small amount of code to your page you can now have a Custom Search Engine powered by Google that searches all the sites that link to your page for your specified query. You can read the full story at Googlecustomsearch.blogspot.com.

You can now create a CSE by simply placing a small piece of tailored code on a page on your site. With
that one piece of code, Google’s search technology will automatically include in your new CSE all of the sites you have linked to from that page, creating a dynamic, powerful and tailored search experience really quickly. Moreover, your new CSE will update itself periodically to include any new links added to that page.

Oh Google you make it so easy for people to love you.

Via Computerworld.com. EBay pulls ads from Google’s U.S. ad network.

EBay Inc. has pulled all of its paid search ads from Google Inc.’s AdWords network in the U.S., an eyebrow-raising move likely to be seen in the industry as a sign of deteriorating relations between the two Internet giants.

Competition between Ebay’s Paypal service and Google’s Checkout has risen considerably over the last year or so, with Google throwing its considerable weight behind its Google checkout (at times, offering cash back to first time users). Although both companies has characterized this move as a kind of “reallocation” of resources, the very fact that Google accounts for the lion share of all search engine traffic makes this more than a simple question of competition– where can Ebay go for SEM traffic now? Yahoo? haha.

The situation can very well change rapidly (perhaps both companies can work out a face-saving measure). Adtasm will keep you updated.

What can this mean for the keywords market? Look for certain prime spots (the ones directly on top of the listings) that Ebay puts a lot of money into, especially electronics goods, to open up. Prices probably won’t go down (does it ever?), but at least we’ll see some fresh faces on the top of the search listings for a change.

What’s better than the leading computer manufacturing companies coming together to make an energy efficient PC desktop that could help reduce entropy and possibly slow global warming? 20+ leading computer manufacturers and one Google combining forces to form the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. That’s right Google dawns the superhero cape and tights to help save the world, one search query at a time. The Official Google Blog has the full details of their most recent altruistic efforts.

Last fall we talked about our work on efficient power supplies in the capable hands of Ben Jai, Ken Krieger and the rest of our power supply team. Since then, we’ve become involved in several projects focused on environmental stewardship. Today, for example, together with Intel, Dell, EDS, the EPA, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, the World Wildlife Fund, and more than 20 other companies, we announced the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. After working on this initiative over the last few months, we’re delighted to join with so many organizations to form this new group. In particular this project should speak to every business with computers.

Looks like Google’s one step away from actually embedding itself into your PC desktop. I guess that’s one way of surpassing their most recent privacy issues.

For all you bloody bloggers Lee Odden from toprankblog.com gives a little lesson in understanding the Technorati charts and graphs. Read the full story here.

Just a quick post this am about one of the the common questions that came up during Media Relations Summit.
It was a question about how to now find the Technorati graphs that show incoming links. I guess a lot of people don’t trust or feel comfortable with Technorati’s “Authority Score” which is a bit like the Google Page Rank score given in the Google tool bar.

Some search engine marketers might be wondering if it really is advantageous to revive an old Adwords campaign. This is especially common when dealing with a new client who has had a previous Adwords campaign. The answer is relative to the older campaign’s performance. As Seroundtable.com puts it

As far as old campaigns go, if the account has a really bad history and not-so-good quality scores, it’s better to close that account and start from scratch rather than to revive an old account and have Google use that history against you. After all, as member Jeremy Brookins says, “if you move your keywords, Google continues to consider that keyword’s previous history. HOWEVER, it also will weight in an expected performance of the new
adgroup/ad/landing page, which can be a good or bad thing depending on your previous performance.”

Plus, if you are using an older campaign it will take less time to setup which can be a plus for the lazier… I mean busier SEM.

The Mail on Sunday, a UK based publication, has released a brilliant new ad with great viral potential depicting an imagined war between the sexes. It’s brilliant on a variety of levels.

Synopsis: The two sexes (male and female for the imagination challenged) line up against each other on a grassy battleground, clearly emulating the Braveheart war scene motif.  The men strike first, kicking soccer balls which bounce and splash mud on the screaming women. The women retaliate with a barrage of heavy hand bags. And so on. Eventually things settle down to reveal everyone reading magazines from their respective publishers, which happens to be Mail on Sunday.

Grade: B-  While I enjoy the viral nature of this video, the problem is that although its humorous and certainly something for the executives to brag about, doesn’t necessarily have the relevant messaging that particularly stood out. The finale was a bit anticlimactic and lacked the oomph of the initial few moments of pure hilarity.

It took me a while to understand that this video was even about some kind of publication. Then again, when is it easy to ever have relevant messaging for what looks like a generalized media site?

Obviously, the staff here at Adtasm can’t really work (or live) without Google, but Readwriteweb.com has the ground rules for a personal experiment you can try. How long can you go? I lasted all of5 minutes.

I wrote about this particular Internet phenomenon before, but I decided to highlight one successful campaign that used the power of the Internet to generate some viral buzz. This video was an illustration in the possibilities of viral marketing and one of the factors that put Youtube.com on the map in 2006.

Dove, in 2005, started a campaign that highlighted “real” woman, as opposed to the overly anorexic wisps of air that we see normally in commercials, print ads, and the like. Seth Stevenson, in a Slate.com article critiquing the campaign, noted overall the short term prognosis was excellent, but that on the whole that:

Sadly, this is not a winning play for the long haul. If Dove keeps running ads like this, women will get bored with the feel-good, politically correct message. Eventually (though perhaps only subconsciously), they’ll come to think of Dove as the brand for fat girls. Talk about “real beauty” all you want—once you’re the brand for fat girls, you’re toast.

A bit of a change in direction was expected to keep the message fresh, but the overall message was clear: beauty is often manufactured. Along those lines, a viral video was created by Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto, which had massive exposure in all avenues and media.

Synopsis: A plain woman steps into a studio for a photo shoot. The timing is increased, ever so frantically, showing the process in which the woman is made to look better for the billboard her photo will be placed on, from the make-up artists, to the photoshopping of the woman’s features.

Bonus: Here is a parody video, amongst many on Youtube.com, that kept the original video exposed and talked about for many months after.

They’re watching you… every click you make from bathrobes to adult sites Google is keeping track. Or at least for 18 - 24 months so says the latest Google blog addressing privacy issues. In attempts to calm the paranoid masses concerned with Google’s retention of user data geared to personalize searches Google has posted an official statement on The Official Google Blog site. They’ve also included a list of “reasons why we should collect your data and keep it”

We have a legitimate interest in retaining search server logs for a number of reasons:

• to improve our search algorithms for the benefit of users
• to defend our systems from malicious access and exploitation attempts
• to maintain the integrity of our systems by fighting click fraud and web spam
• to protect our users from threats like spam and phishing
• to respond to valid legal orders from law enforcement as they investigate and prosecute serious crimes like child exploitation; and
• to comply with data retention legal obligations.

Looks like they forgot “because we own the internet, and soon we’ll own you and there isn’t anything you can do about it, so quit complaining or we’ll email your mom a list of the sites you’ve been viewing.”

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Complain enough and someone’s bound to hear… and maybe even do something about it. That’s just what the fine folks at Google have done. To appease the woes of the common Adsense marketers Google has announced their upcoming launch of the brand spanking new Placement Performance report. Marketers can now get an in depth view of where their ads are being placed as well as site performance metrics to better gauge ad performance. Oh, Google you really are a marketer’s wet dream. You can get the full story at Clickz.com.