Adtasm.com | Ads in Media

ATWICK Passengers landing at Gatwick airport are being greeted by a giant naked pole dancer. The 9,000 sq m (100,000 sq ft) image is painted on grassland under the incoming flight path.

Planning officers are investigating whether permission was granted for the advertisement, which promotes a website. The Council to Protect Rural England said that the display was “a tacky advert which set a nasty precedent”

[Source: Giant Gatwick advert lands in trouble-News-UK-TimesOnline]

Youtube crosses the cultural boundaries and will soon come in nine different flavors. With increasing demand for multilingual and multicultural videos Google has announced that Youtube will now have nine new domains in Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Ireland and the UK. You can read the entire story at the Official Google Blog.

In response to many requests, each new site is fully translated and localized for each country including content (Featured Videos, Director Videos, Promotions), as well as the interfaces, search, user support, and such community features as video ratings, sharing, and content flagging. And these new localized versions are built using Google
search technology, so you can quickly find more of what you want to see. Perhaps best of all, you can continue to use youtube.com, or move to one of these localized sites — and switch seamlessly between the two. Happy creating, viewing and sharing!

Oh I’m so excited now I can watch people from around the world act stupid… and think of the foreign girls. Thank you Google for being so damn good.

Seth Godin, offers us an opinion piece about responsibility in marketing.

His argument is that:

1. Marketing Works. A lot of money is being spent.
2. If marketing works, it means that free choice isn’t so free.
3. People can argue all they want about free-choice and the market, but the facts are there that certain marketing, tobacco, etc. ruins the market it exists in (A sort of tragedy of commons but the resources being memes).

If you get asked to market something, you’re responsible. You’re responsible for the impacts, the costs, the side effects and the damage. You killed that kid. You poisoned that river. You led to that fight. If you can’t put your name on it, I hope you’ll walk away. If only 10% of us did that, imagine the changes. Imagine how proud you’d be of your work.

Certainly, people disagree, including Rick Toone:

Knowing that, you probably don’t want me to judge what would be considered responsible marketing. The world would look very different if I did. But, I respect the rights of others who choose to live by alternate values.

So, by whose values would we judge responsibility?

I’m inclined to throw responsibility back on the consumer.

I’m personally inclined to agree with Rick. Seth’s ideals can only have one net conclusion: a formulation of a big brother government, or a perfectly homogenized society in which everyone believes the same. Where is free will then?

There are plenty of things that kill. Snowboarding, hiking, swimming, as well as smoking, or eating too much. It’s these choices that lead to a free society that makes advertising and marketing possible, period. Otherwise, we might as well all dress in beige jumpsuits, get up exactly at 9, take a 20 minute walk (not run, because we might trip and fall) on the grass, eat oatmeal, go to work, come back, exercise, have sex twice a week, then go to sleep at 10– or whatever is the most optimal for our physical well being, regardless of personal choices. The fact of the matter is, eating too much or smoking makes some people very happy– more happier than other choices. Economics is about choices with scarcity. Marketing is about influencing these decisions. Doesn’t mean we don’t have free choice, just because the statistical trend is towards what markets want me to do.

Perhaps marketers think too highly of themselves. Maybe the simple awareness of a product can influence choices, and the whole field is the art of making people aware of the choices they have. There is a reason why smoking and eating too much are problems. They are fun to do sometimes. Desserts, cheeseburgers, and fries taste great, and people smoke for a lot of reasons other than their nicotine addiction.

Say goodbye to your old SEO tricks and make way for the new more rounded SEO tactics. With the advent of Google’s Universal Search and the recent launch of Ask3D text heavy SEO tactics may take backseat to digital asset optimization. SEO may have to broaden its perspective to encompass the new larger horizons brought about by multichannel search results. Lee Odden of toprankblog.com offers his full take on the SEO overhaul.

Both Google’s Universal Search and the new Ask3D interface that show users more information from more sources (news, images, products, video, etc) in the first page of results illustrates the need to consider more media types than standard text documents. There are already quite a few opinions on what effect such a combination of data sources presented within first page search results will have on the future of SEO. Google offers some advice here.

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?