Search marketing firm BeyondROI is about to launch a product designed to automate the labor-intensive process of selecting keywords, the company said Thursday. The product, Beyond Words, distills a list of keywords from URLs and then feeds them into search campaigns on Google and Yahoo! Search Marketing. Beyond Words, which has been in closed beta testing for the last two months, is slated for release within the next three weeks. John Haney, BeyondROI's chief technology officer, said that most of the product's functionality is available now--but before the release, the company wants to add a few refinements to the way keywords are selected. For example, if the advertiser is primarily interested in getting traffic to the site and promoting its brand name, the algorithm will select a wider range of more general keywords, whereas if the goal is mainly to drive sales, it picks fewer, more specific keywords. At release, the product will be able to send the generated keywords only to campaigns using either Google or Yahoo!, but Haney said that it can be made compatible with any search engine that publishes its application program interface.
In what is becoming a quarterly ritual, Google Thursday again announced another record earnings period, posting revenues of $1.578 billion--up 96 percent over the third quarter of last year. The earnings were far rosier than the company had led investors to expect last quarter, when Google brass cautioned that the summer typically is the weakest time of year for advertising. "Although this is typically a slower season for Internet properties, we had another exceptional quarter," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a teleconference with press and analysts. "Our focus on end users and on quality of information and advertising worldwide continues to work extremely well." The search giant's net income rose to $381.2 million, $1.32 per diluted share, which is up from $52 million--19 cents per share--during the same period last year. Analysts had predicted earnings of $1.22 per share. Google Chief Financial Officer George Reyes attributed the continuing upsurge in profits to product improvements. This quarter, Google increased its spending on research and development by about $56 million--from 14 percent of total revenue last quarter to 15 percent of total revenue this quarter, Reyes said. According to eMarketer analyst David Hallerman, the uptick in research and development spending indicates that Google plans to come out with new products. "They're shooting out so many different ideas, and they're not all going to stick in terms of revenue--but they have so many of them," he said. In a conference call with the press and analysts, Google co-founder Sergey Brin mentioned that the company had offered to provide wireless Internet access throughout San Francisco, and had taken steps to offer Voice over Internet Protocol telephone service. Google was considering expanding in both areas, he said. Hallerman also pointed to the large sum of cash that Google now holds on hand--$7.6 billion, according to Reyes--as another indicator of strategy. "Bottom line is with cash like that, they're going to be asking what smaller companies can they buy up--what partnerships can they buy into?" he said. eMarketer's research estimates that 2005 will mark the first year that Google's revenue will outstrip that of competitor Yahoo!. Google will close out the year with over $3.6 billion--or 28 percent--of total U.S. online ad revenue, Hallerman said. eMarketer's research puts Yahoo!'s end-of-year earnings at $3.1 billion, or 24 percent of total U.S. online ad spending.
The rich media creative reads: "High profits... Low start up costs... $9.5 billion in annual sales." Then, a pause--to allow viewers to ask themselves which new Silicon Valley startup the ad is plugging. But, instead of a freshly designed corporate logo, the face of a girl appears, showing viewers that it is human beings on the block, not semiconductors. The creative, executed by Carat Fusion--part of Aegis' Carat--is part of an online ad campaign for Lifetime Television's original TV movie, "Human Trafficking," about the world sex trade, its victims, and the U.S. government's struggle against it. Since the campaign launched online on Oct. 5, 65 percent of viewers have interacted with the rich media units, Carat said Wednesday. The campaign, which included targeted media planning and creative development, has run on both entertainment sites like Yahoo! and news sites such as Washingtonpost.com and Newsweek.com leading up to the mini-series premiere on Monday on Lifetime Television. On Newsweek.com, the average amount of time spent with the ad was over two minutes, according to Carat. "We knew entertainment sites were an obvious starting point, engaging people who are actively seeking programming content and scheduling," Tamara Birdsall, engagement specialist and vice president-creative director for Carat Fusion, said in a statement. "We also opened our placements to include news sites to give the program and the tragedy real world weight. The creative we developed uses facts and statistics to convey that while 'Human Trafficking' is a fictional account, it is based on a growing global threat that is very real." The creative features broadband video in a format in which the ads begin with self-propelled video of the movie trailer, and when viewers roll over the unit, it shows the expanded trailer with sound. In addition to the video, viewers have access in the expanded unit to character sketches, "true cases" of human trafficking in the United States, a "take action" button, and an e-mail reminder--all within the ad itself to increase interaction. "We launched an aggressive marketing campaign consisting of a strong mix of traditional and non-traditional platforms," Catherine Moran, vice president of marketing for Lifetime Television, said in a statement. "A key component was the interactive environment which allowed users to experience the full scope and depth of the movie."
Brad Greenspan, founder and former CEO of Intermix Media Inc., agreed to pay $750,000 to settle charges with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer relating to adware. Among the accusations was that Greenspan ordered Intermix employees to bundle adserving programs--which trail consumers online and serve them pop-up ads--with other software, and also to make such programs hard to remove. This summer, Intermix agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle charges brought by Spitzer relating to adware/spyware programs. Intermix also agreed to permanently stop distributing ad-serving programs. Neither Intermix nor Greenspan admitted wrongdoing as part of their separate settlements. Shortly after the settlement between Intermix and Spitzer was announced, Greenspan said he gave a $50,000 grant to the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington, D.C. organization that campaigns against spyware. In July, News Corp. reached a deal to purchase Los Angeles-based Intermix, parent company of popular social networking site MySpace.com, for $580 million. Greenspan, who stopped acting as CEO two years ago but remained the company's largest shareholder, unsuccessfully tried to scuttle the deal. He outlined some of his objections to the deal on the Web site Freemyspace.com, and also went to court in a bid to block a shareholder vote. Despite Greenspan's efforts, the deal went through at the end of last month.