DigitalMediaTrends.com

Social Networks Adversely Affect U.K. Ad Growth

The news from the U.K. today shows that MySpace -- in about 12 months -- has easily catapulted to the top of the social networking pile, attracting more than 10 million visitors in the U.K. last month, more than double second-place Bebo, with 3.96 million uniques, and Facebook, 3.2 million. However, in a separate study, GroupM media forecasters said that the surging popularity of social networks in Britain is proving to be a drain on the growth of Web advertising. Why? Two reasons: one, consumers are spending more time social networking at the expense of professional news and entertainment publishers; two, the fact that users create the content is a detractor to big-spending global advertisers, which don't want their brands placed on content with no corporate control. Does the same hold true for the U.S.? You bet, which underscores the need for marketers and social networks to figure out the advertising conundrum. More ...

Nielsen Turns Away From Page Views

Nielsen/NetRatings today is expected to announce an unprecedented move in the practice of Web site measurement: It is planning to do away with rankings based on total page views and begin tracking how long visitors spend at Web sites. New broadband technologies like online video and other embedded Web applications, called "widgets," are making page views less relevant in determining a Web site's usage. Nielsen already uses its panel data to measure the average time consumers spend on a given Web site, in addition to the number of user sessions, but now it will focus on presenting both metrics, to give advertisers, investors and analysts a much broader picture. Nielsen will still measure page views, but no longer rank Web sites by them. More ...

When Creativity Meets the Machines

The sci-fi thriller Minority Report has aged well. At five years old, its depiction of a world saturated with super-targeted ads has proved prescient as real-world digital technology has begun to deliver on its promise. One thing not addressed in the Hollywood flick: Who would create all these customized ads? Today, tech providers like Yahoo and upstarts such as Spot Runner and Visible World are building tools that can turn a dozen creative executions into 1,200 or even 12,000 permutations. More ...

Zenith: Online to Grow 29% Globally This Year

Zenith Optimedia has predicted slow but steady growth in total global advertising budgets for 2007, with a 3.7% increase over last year -- but a 29% growth in Internet spending -- to $33.5 billion. In addition, Zenith predicts online ad spending will grow by 82% between 2006 and 2009, while the rest of the ad market grows by 13%. More ...

5 New Online Advertising Tactics We Fear

Mashable has put together a list of the scariest online ad innovations to come down the pike. Topping the list is Yahoo!'s SmartAds product, which delivers banners with creative tailored to user searches and behavior. Too "Minority Report" for Mashable. Other boogiemen are mostly predictable, PayPerPost, which seems to rankle every blogger not involved, and Google domination. More ...

Yahoo! Automates Banner Creative

Yahoo! is introducing new technology that automates the creation of banner ads, allowing advertisers to run potentially thousands of permutations tailored to user behavior. Called SmartAds, the rich media banners are created on the fly, combining Yahoo!'s trove of user behavior data with inventory feeds from advertisers. The result is executions based on what users have searched for and one on Yahoo! matched up with product listings from advertisers. More ...

Widgets Revamp Advertising On Social Networks

It's not surprising to hear that the social-networking generation prefers to choose their own marketing messages rather than receive random banner ads from marketers. A study of more than 1,200 kids ages 9 to 17 and about 1,000 parents across the country, finds that many consumers enjoy playing with ad-related features of their choosing on their personal profile pages. These findings are "likely to fuel a push by digital ad agencies to get marketers to experiment with new ways to advertise on social-networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace." So-called "widgets", downloadable software programs that can display anything from animated graphics, videos, photo, sharing, music or live chats, could become the ad wave of the future. Indeed, if consumers have to accept advertising in exchange for free Web content, why not let them choose their advertiser? The phenomenon could usher in a whole new era of interactive, performance-based advertising, letting consumers "digg" their favorite ads by either voting on them or posting ad widgets to their social-networking profiles. This also fits in with the findings of the Alloy study, which found that today's consumers do not want random advertising on their profile pages. More ...

Yahoo Launches Behavior-Based SmartAds

Yahoo today launches behavior-based SmartAds, a product that epitomizes the blending of brand and direct response advertising. It allows advertisers to target their message and creative on-the-fly and triggered by online user behavior. More ...

Blinkx Beats Google With Speech-Based Video Ad Net

Google has been working on AdSense for video, but little is reported about its progress. That may be because it's original partner, Viacom, is now suing the company for $1 billion. Big G's legal problems have opened the door for smaller guys to create the much-needed networking products that could make online video advertising a force. London-based blinkx is readying such an ad platform. Called blinkx AdHoc, the new product will launch next Monday as way to target ads alongside or in Web videos based on speech-recognition technology. The program allows advertisers to buy specific words spoken in videos as well as categories created by analyzing its overall context. The ads--pre-roll, mid-roll or post-roll--will then be delivered to videos appearing on a publisher's site, selected from their own advertiser inventory, that of an ad network, or blinkx. More ...

Panama Gets High Marks

On his Searchblog, John Battelle publishes the findings of Interpublic SEM firm Reprise in its early interactions with Yahoo's Panama search ad system. Overall, the search firm calls Panama "a significant upgrade over the previous Yahoo DTC (Direct Traffic Center) system, but it worries about the complex system's ability "to access the long tail of the market." The Reprise study evaluates Panama's campaign management and performance, user interface and technology over a three-month period (January-March). In terms of SEM performance, the cost-per-click for keywords actually dropped 6.2% during a period where the average CPC for Google AdWords increased 2.8% and Microsoft's adCenter a whopping 9.6% -- a good thing for search marketers. The good news for Yahoo is that Reprise also found that its clickthrough rates went up dramatically, bringing [the CTR] in line with our average Google CTRs. More ...