Earlier this month, Google admitted that a glitch in its system had resulted in the sharing of private documents that users had uploaded through Google Docs. The incident only affected about .05% of documents, the company said. But the fact that it occurred at all has some privacy advocates asking what other security breaches might lie in store for Google users. Now, the Electronic Privacy Information Center is asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate all Google applications that allow people to store media in the "cloud"--including Google Docs, Gmail, Picasa and Google Calendar. "The Google Docs data breach highlights the hazards of Google's inadequate security practices, as well as the risks of cloud computing services generally," the group states in a complaint filed this week. Specifically, the privacy organization is asking the FTC to probe whether Google engaged in an unfair or deceptive business practice by telling users that uploaded material would remain private, but then failing to deploy "commonsense" security measures. "Google represents to consumers, 'Rest assured that your documents, spreadsheets and presentations will remain private unless you publish them to the Web or invite collaborators and/or viewers,'" states the complaint, which quoted directly from a Google Docs help page. "Google's inadequate security practices ... caused substantial injury to consumers, without any countervailing benefits. The harm was reasonably avoidable, in that the damage could have been avoided or mitigated by the adoption of commonsense security practices, including the storage of personal data in encrypted form, rather than in clear text." Google said in a statement that it had received the complaint, but hadn't reviewed it in detail. The company also said it had polices in place "to ensure the highest levels of data protection." The advocacy group requested that the FTC take a host of actions, including shutting down Gmail, Picasa, Docs and Google's other cloud computing services. But that outcome is unlikely, according to Seattle-based cyberlaw expert Venkat Balasubramani. "It's very unrealistic," he said, adding that the recent breach resulted from an unintentional glitch and was limited in scope. This isn't the first time the Electronic Privacy Information Center has asked the FTC to rule against Google. Two years ago, the organization unsuccessfully lobbied the FTC to block Google's $3.1 billion merger with DoubleClick. The FTC was already scrutinizing the broader question of whether the rise in cloud computing services poses risks to security. This week, the agency held a two-day meeting addressing the topic.
CBS Interactive and the creators of lonelygirl15 on Wednesday launched a social media platform to drum up support for the upcoming CBS TV series "Harper's Island." Produced by Eqal--the digital studio that created the hit Web-series lonelygirl15 and KateModern--Harpersglobe.com features original content designed to introduce audiences to the mythology behind Harper's Island--a vacation destination in the Pacific Northwest from which visitors rarely return alive. For Eqal, the partnership represents a cautious strategy in an unforgiving business climate, according to Miles Beckett--who, along with Eqal co-founder Greg Goodfried, is executive-producing Harper's Globe. "We've gone toward partnerships and away from launching original properties because the market is so terrible," Beckett said on Wednesday during a panel at the 2009 Media Summit in New York. On the new site, fans can become part of the experience by viewing videos, interacting with the story, participating in the lives of the characters and communicating with the online community. The weekly original episodes featured on the site are designed to complement the TV show's story line with overlapping characters, locations and plots, which will continue to evolve throughout the first season. In addition to being available on HarpersGlobe.com, all content will be available at CBS.com, TV.com, CBS Mobile and across the CBS Audience Network. Still, according to Beckett, it hardly matters where consumers experience the content he's producing, as long as they experience it. "Ours is a super-syndication plus aggregation model," he said. "We don't care where the audience is." The 13-week mystery series is slated to debut on CBS on April 9. CBS Interactive and Eqal first partnered nearly a year ago to develop original projects, and provide first-look opportunities on multiplatform show concepts.
When it comes to tackling digital media, agencies and brands are still too locked into traditional ways of doing business to exploit the full potential of advertising and marketing online. "The agency business is good at siloeing itself to death," said Tim Hanlon, executive vice president and managing director of VivaKi Ventures, the investment arm of Publicis Groupe's VivaKi unit, at a panel on contextual media and advertising at Digital Hollywood's Media Summit New York conference Wednesday. Hanlon's fellow agency panelists shared in his industry self-flagellation, diagnosing and debating reasons behind the industry's uneven efforts to crack the code on interactive advertising some 15 years after the medium emerged as an ad platform. "We have all this money in TV advertising, and in interactive, but we still don't have a particularly good interactive ad model," said Trevor Kaufman, CEO of interactive agency Schematic. One of the obstacles panelists pinpointed was the difficulty in scaling campaigns online as easily as a TV campaign can be expanded across networks, specific programs and times of day. "You buy a Yahoo (home page) takeover, and what else are you going to do?" said Kaufman. "You can only buy so many banners." To give marketers more eye-catching options online, the Online Publishers Association this month introduced a trio of new, larger display ad formats intended to give shops like Schematic more room to showcase their creativity on behalf of brands. Bant Breen, executive vice president and global director of strategic development and innovation at Interpublic, highlighted the benefits of harnessing TV to online advertising via search. By buying specific search keywords related to TV spots, marketers can give consumers a way to get more information about a product or service or act on a message. "Clients are not optimizing for search off of TV spends," said Breen. "We know people watch those ads because it ties into search." VivaKi's Hanlon stressed the need for agencies and clients to throw out the conventional distinctions between advertising and marketing illustrated by the link between TV and search. "A lot of brand marketers now have them separated and siloed and funded differently," he said. "We should probably mash the best of those two together." To do that, agencies and brands must break down long-standing barriers between brand advertising and direct marketing, media-buying and creative, and among different media formats. "I don't know where those boundaries are anymore," said Hanlon, whose VivaKi group was created by Publicis last year as a central hub for its digital media services and partnerships. But how eager are companies to innovate and experiment in the midst of a punishing economic downturn? While the panelists advocated increased risk-taking by clients during lean times to take market share from competitors, marketers may not be heeding that advice. "Are classic brand advertisers going to retreat or is it different this time?" said Hanlon. "I still don't know the answer to that." Interpublic's Breen explained that clients are cutting back on spending, while Kaufman noted that clients are also pushing for 10% fee reductions because of economic pressures. Instead of cutting fees, he suggested that agencies offer to improve ROI by 20%. "That would be a more constructive way to approach the issue and that's how we're approaching it," he said. Only Mark Renshaw, executive vice president and digital practice lead for Publicis' Leo Burnett-Arc Worldwide unit, seemed to evince a predatory approach when he spoke of "stealing share" from competitors and "inflicting pain on smaller brands."
Imagine searching on Google for rare coins or Topps baseball cards. Aside from listing the brick-and-mortar address, directions and phone number, the search query might return the suggested retail price and the quantity in stock at each local store. That's the picture Chris LaSala painted this week at The Kelsey Group conference in Los Angeles. The Google director of local marketers and strategic partner development said the biggest problem the search engine faces in reaching that goal is the lack of digital content serving local markets. "There's a vast array of content specific to local markets, but the majority isn't available in digital form, so getting access to it isn't easy," he said. Small and medium businesses (SMB) have been reluctant to give Google access to digital content that is specific to local markets. Basically, it's because they don't have the time to turn hard copies into bits and bytes. "Getting the SMB to give us access is something we need to get better at," he said. "We aren't even close to where we need to be." LaSala estimates that Google has indexed about 10% of the available digital content geared toward local markets. "If you look at Main Street USA--the barber, the church, the synagogue and the sports shop--you might get the hours of service and address," he said. "But wouldn't it be great if you find out if you could get an Alex Rodriguez rookie card? If you knew it was in the shop and the costs, you could go down to the store and buy it. This is just an example of where we are today." LaSala admits that Google hasn't done as good a job in serving the SMB market as it would like. Many of Google's products don't meet their needs. Citing a Webvisibility study, he said 40% of SMBs go to the Internet first when they look for local data, yet less than half spend less than 10% for online ads. Aside from getting SMBs to provide more content in digital format, the biggest challenge has been to support them as advertisers. He suspects that while the features in AdWords drive success, they also hinder success, too. While the AdWords' platform lets businesses choose a host of advertising options, SMBs don't have time to pick keywords, design ads, decide on budgets for cost-per-click (CPC) campaigns, and pick sites they want to advertise on. "It's all these things the SMB doesn't have time to do," LaSala said. LaSala admits there's a gap between the design of the platform and the ability for them to carry out the campaign. Improving the gap might mean making Google Maps more intuitive or offering bundled services. There are plans to roll out new bundled services and APIs for SMBs that should align better with the philosophies of smaller companies, LaSala said. The sales force has seen a makeover, too, because Google has learned that selling into the SMB requires specific talents to understand the market. "We've retrenched with a smaller group of partners," LaSala said. "Google's not immune to pressures of effectively using the resources on our team, so we narrowed the scope to the partners that we think log the highest opportunities."
The Financial Times Group released its innovative semantic search tool, Newssift, in beta Wednesday. More than just a business-oriented search engine, Newssift uses a specialized relevancy algorithm developed by FT Search over two years to return results based on meaning and context with an interface that enables it to analyze the relationship between people, organizations, geographies, and business themes. "Newssift thinks the way business people think and interacts directly with the user, offering results that are meaningful, relevant and ultimately pertinent to important metrics like stock price valuation and corporate reputation," says John Greenleaf, the chief marketing officer of FT Search. The beta version of the tool draws from more than 4,000 business vertical news sources, which were hand-picked one-by-one, according to Greenleaf. The team has experimented with the number and variety of sources, and will continue to do so. In addition to evaluating and improving Newssift's functionality over the beta period, Greenleaf says the company will also evaluate how advertising is presented on the site, and has even engaged a special advisory board of top-level agency people and advertisers to assist with this aspect. Newssift offers various useful and intuitive ways to refine, expand or adjust a search and gives qualitative results that are not influenced by paid links or SEO. Typing in the word "Green" brings suggestions of organizations like Greenpeace or the Green Bay Packers, places like Greenland, people such as Alan Greenspan or Stephen Green and business themes like "green jobs" or "green energy." Selecting "green energy" returns links to articles and suggestions that will show green energy's relationship to stories in all the Newssift categories. There's also an element of browsing that allows people to find more than just what they were searching for. The suggestions allow a searcher to stumble upon relationships he might not have been looking for, but will find useful--for example, where Eric Schmidt figures in. Searches may also be expanded or refined at the term level. Hovering over the Ford Motor Co. after you've searched for Ford will bring a pop-up menu that lets you expand out to "auto & truck manufacturing" or dive down to Ford Capital B.V. Newssift also analyzes results and offers a pie chart showing how many of the stories returned are positive, negative or neutral and another that shows what sources they are from. Clicking on any of the wedges brings up the results for just that sentiment or type of source. Overall, the tool enables the user to dive deeper into research in a more informed and efficient way than he might otherwise have been able.
AOL has extended its Shortcuts.com coupon service to mobile phones, allowing users to get discounts on purchases while in grocery store aisles or elsewhere. Under the new program, Shortcuts.com members can now use their cell phones to select coupons while on the go and have them loaded onto grocery store shopping cards. When they swipe their cards at check-out, the coupon value is automatically deducted from their total bill. "Now consumers don't need to worry about whether they've remembered all of their coupons," said Kimberley Partoll, executive vice president for new ventures at AOL. "Shortcuts.com Mobile enables users to access coupon savings while they're doing their shopping and the coupons are available for use once they hit the checkout line." Coupons, both online and offline, have enjoyed a resurgence in the last year as consumers increasingly look for ways to save money amid the recession. In an online retailing report issued last month, comScore pointed out that traffic to coupon sites in December was up 46% from a year ago. Searches on the term "coupon," meanwhile, have tripled, and more than half (53%) of the online population is using coupons more often. Shortcuts.com works with major grocery chains including Kroger, King Soopers, Fry's and Dillons, and its electronic coupons are redeemable at more than 4,000 individual stores nationwide. It plans to announce another grocery chain partner this spring. The new mobile site can be accessed by any cell phone with a Web browser and requires no application download. Users can also search for coupons by categories such as baking, dairy and health and beauty. Within a category, they choose from a list of brands from Huggies to Healthy Choice to add coupons. New users must first sign up online via PC before logging in from cell phones.
Oodle plans to expand its classified network to support a variety of categories from cars to homes and rentals, adding functions and tools that tap into social networks, CEO and founder Craig Donato told Online Media Daily. Roommates in college towns would have an option to post on MySpace or Facebook, tying the classified ad into their profile page. "We're not really talking about it right now, but these would be great tools to help you find a roommate," he said. "Anywhere you are trying to find other people the social environments are powerful." San Mateo, Calif.-based Oodle, which launched in 2005 with the mission to reinvent classifieds, now works with about 200 companies including Facebook, MySpace, Wal-Mart and Fox Broadcasting. Oodle indexes listings on the Internet--about 500,000 new ones daily. Facebook's Marketplace has already relaunched as a "social classifieds" application in the U.S. to let consumers see the people who sell the items they want to buy. The tool, which launched earlier this month, ties the listings of sellers to their profile. It makes the marketplace "conversational," Donato said. Posting a listing on your profile allows friends to comment, share it with others, and show their approval or disapproval. It's meant to remove potential scams and fraud in a marketplace typically filled with anonymous sellers and buyers. This week, Oodle began rolling out the Facebook tool internationally in the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland and other English-speaking countries, followed by an English version for non-English-speaking countries around the world. Other languages should follow, Donato said. Consumers post a listing on any on the sites and it's pushed across the entire network. Car dealership, real estate agents, landlords and others also can use Oodle through monster.com or autobytel.com. Oodle offers a tool that resembles Google AdSense, but for classified listings. Anyone can post a listing for free, but tying in a bid ranks it higher in the search results. About 80,000 sources are indexed, not all of them are paid. Donato describes the tools as a combination of a Craigslist-type of free-style posting and professional listings. Another feature that Oodle has developed through the years is technology that scans listings posted to any of the sites across the network to remove or flag inappropriate listings. "If someone posts a classified for tickets to a baseball game, we know who the team is playing on the night of the game and can add information to the listing," Donato said.
Offering the right product at the right time, recruiting media company Career TV has scored its first national TV syndication deal with the Fox Business News channel. For the past years, Philadelphia-based Career TV has produced a monthly half-hour Web series for 18- to-25-year-old job seekers, which streams online at CareerTV.com and is carried on about 400 college campus networks nationwide. More recently, the dire national job market has generated a great deal of interest in the company, while increasing traffic to the site from 300,000 to over 1.3 million unique monthly visitors in less than a year. "Right now, there are a lot of people looking for help," said Sean O'Grady, a senior producer at Career TV who will anchor the show. "Fox Business will help us reach an audience of 44 million nationwide." Named "Career TV," the Saturday afternoon show is expected to make its debut on Fox in early April. Along with producing the shows, Career TV has brought on several multichannel sponsors, including Lockheed Martin, Verizon Business, Ernst & Young and Accenture. Meanwhile, PriceWaterhouseCoopers will be a "name sponsor" for a segment called "Feed Your Future." "These are all advertisers that are looking to connect with job seekers, particularly at an entry level," O'Grady said. Career TV--a subsidiary of Universum Inc., a Swedish-based international marketing company--also works with clients like CBS Interactive on an individual basis to produce and distribute local recruitment videos.
Everyone is speculating about where the online advertising industry will go in 2009. Here are a few predictions. 1. The shrinking of "premium" inventory and premium CPMs As the economy goes down, unsold inventory has gone up -- from about 40% last year to 70% this year by some estimates. What does that mean? Web sites that once resisted the urge to sell off remnant inventory at remnant prices or on CPA are going to have to bite the bullet. In fact the whole concept of "premium" can only exist with a scarcity of supply in relation to demand. But the Internet is a game-changer. Consider, media buyers have seen their choices go from four major TV networks to hundreds of stations with addition of cable to literally millions of Web page options. It has become a buyers' market and Web publishers are going to have to learn to adapt. 2. Faster-than-predicted online ad spending growth Most forecasts show traditional offline advertising spending declining and online showing a modest increase. But based on the sheer number of brand advertisers we've seen come to our network looking to do online what they can no longer afford to spend offline, I'd say the forecast for online growth is overly conservative. From ad production to media placement, the fact remains that online costs way less than offline. You can say TV is like Neiman Marcus, and online is like Wal-Mart. And we all know how well Wal-Mart is doing. 3. More online consumer protection We've got our first-ever BlackBerry-toting President, whose savvy online fundraising and campaigning helped get him into office. Given that knowledge combined with a willingness to regulate, it's a fair bet that his administration won't shy away from cleaning up the remaining Wild West elements of the Internet. Already we are seeing a crack-down on negative-option abusers among nutriceutical marketers and others. And they are just getting going. 4. The ascendancy of marketing 2.0 Marketers had a tough time getting their heads around Web 2.0. With the ascendancy of user-generated content, they lost a lot of the control they once had over their brands. They didn't like it, but they had no choice but to adapt. Now, the same can be seen in how they market online. Fact of the matter is that the Internet is too vast a place, with too many nooks and crannies, for any single marketing department to master it-hence the explosion of affiliates each offering specialized knowledge on how to maximize their niche. Advertisers are begrudgingly admitting the value of this system. As the marketing head of a billion-dollar brand recently told me, "I hate relying on affiliates for search. It means my own team is not doing the job. But our search affiliates are getting results we haven't been able to get on our own." 5. Increased privacy concerns due to increased behavioral targeting Concerns about online privacy have been on the rise. In 2007, 61% of adult Americans said they were very or extremely concerned about the privacy of personal information when buying online versus only 47% in 2006 according to a study by the USC Center for the Digital Future. But now we have a down economy. And a down economy leads to increased focus on ROI leads to more behavioral targeting to minimize waste leads to more capturing of consumer data. Increasingly desperate, digital marketers will get increasingly aggressive. And if consumers find out the true extent, more backlash can be expected. 6. Branded response becomes more than just a catchphrase The title of one article I read in a trade recently pronounced "The Death of Branding." No doubt a provocative overstatement to lure readers, the fact remains: Advertisers are neither willing to nor can they afford to wait to slowly change perceptions over time. They need sales and leads now, and they're pouring more money into direct response to get them. But direct response traditionally has focused on results to the exclusion of the image projected. That's going to change. Not wanting to cheapen or otherwise compromise their brand, big name companies engaged in online DR are going to insist on some semblance of brand standards. And in doing so they will find that it IS possible to go after results while reinforcing the brand.