The Federal Trade Commission is considering proposing a do-not-track mechanism that would allow consumers to easily opt out of all behavioral targeting, chairman Jon Leibowitz told lawmakers on Tuesday. Testifying at a hearing about online privacy, Leibowitz said the FTC is exploring the feasibility of a browser plug-in that would store users' targeting preferences. He added that either the FTC or a private group could run the system. Leibowitz said that while Web users on a no-tracking list would still receive online ads, those ads wouldn't be targeted based on sites that users had visited in the past. Three years ago, a coalition of privacy groups including the World Privacy Forum, Center for Digital Democracy and Center for Democracy & Technology proposed that the FTC create a do-not-track registry, similar to the do-not-call registry. At the time, the online ad industry strongly opposed the idea of a government-run no-tracking list. Currently, many people who want to opt out do so through cookies, either on a company-by-company basis or through the Network Advertising Initiative's opt-out cookie (which allows users to opt out of targeting from many of the largest companies). But those opt-outs aren't stable because they're tied to cookies, which often get deleted. The Network Advertising Initiative recently rolled out a browser plug-in that enables consumers to opt out of targeted ads by NAI members. Leibowitz also told lawmakers that he personally favored opt-in consent to behavioral targeting, or receiving ads based on sites visited. "I think opt-in generally protects consumers' privacy better than opt-out, under most circumstances," he said. "I don't think it undermines a company's ability to get the information it needs to advertise back to consumers." Online ad companies say that behavioral targeting is "anonymous" because they don't collect users' names or other so-called personally identifiable information, but Leibowitz said that it might be possible to piece together users' names from clickstream data. He told lawmakers about AOL's "Data Valdez," which involved AOL releasing three months' of "anonymized" search queries for 650,000 users. Even though the company didn't directly tie the queries to users' names, some were identified based solely on the patterns in their search queries. Several lawmakers expressed concerns with behavioral advertising during Tuesday's hearing. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said she was "a little spooked out" about online tracking and ad targeting. McCaskill said that after reading online about foreign SUVs, she noticed that she was receiving ads for such cars. "That's creepy," she said, likening it to someone following her with a camera and recording her moves. She added that if an "average American" were to learn that someone was trailing him around stores with a camera, "there would be a hue and cry in this country that would be unprecedented." Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) both expressed concern that privacy policies weren't giving Web users enough useful information about online ad practices. Rockefeller proposed that some companies were burying too much information in lengthy documents that consumers don't read. "Some would say the fine print is there and it's not our fault you didn't read it," he said, adding, "I say, that's a 19th-century mentality." Kerry added that he didn't know that consumers understood how companies use data. "I'm not sure that there's knowledge in the caveat emptor component of this," he said.
Audio ads will become the next step in Google's advertising network, according to sources. The service will support the Android streaming music that Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra announced and previewed at Google I/O 2010 in May. Susan Wojcicki, Google vice president of product management, wrote a blog post in February 2009 describing Google's exit from radio but plans to explore online streaming audio. "Instead we will use our technology to develop Internet-based solutions that will deliver relevant ads for online streaming audio," she wrote. "We are dedicating a team of people at Google to explore how we can best add value for advertisers, broadcasters and listeners in this emerging advertising space." The Web-based, or cloud, version of the Android Market and the Music app will allow consumers to access their music from Android-based handsets. Some now say the application will become available in YouTube, too. The 10-, 15-, and 30-second audio ads will support Android streaming music and YouTube videos through a streaming music channel, according to David Szetela, Clix Marketing founder, citing a DoubleClick employee. The call to action becomes the banner ad when music clips play. Streaming music on Android and YouTube will become an instant advertising channel for Google and advertisers. The platform will attempt to compete with Apple iTunes and Pandora, but the advertising will bring in the bucks. "Google, in some sense, is like the Conde Nast of the online world," Szetela says. "All they need to do is roll out a new publication. People will buy the publication, but Google can also sell advertising in it." Reports from the New York Post suggest Google could launch its search-related music store as early as November in time for the holidays. Apparently, Android VP Andy Rubin has been hashing out the particulars to license about 27,000 songs from New York-based Harry Fox Agency. A Google spokesperson said the company doesn't comment on rumors.
Brands that buy rankings through paid search on engines powering retail Web sites experience better sales. After searching for a product on a retail Web site, most shoppers click the top results on the page. In fact, about 94% of shoppers click on the first to tenth product to look for lower prices, key product features and preferred brands. So say findings from a joint study conducted by comScore for Searchandise Commerce and iProspect released Tuesday. The study aimed to determine whether search-ranking position secures a higher percentage of clicks. Paid search supports the backbone of Google's business model. But does that business model carry through to retail site search -- and do premium positions in search rankings garner a higher percentage of click share? It turns out that consumers are twice as likely to use the site search box to find additional product category, brand or model information as to browse the initial landing page. Aside from attempting to determine if the basic search engine ranking structure applies to site search on retail search engines, Searchandise set out to confirm whether consumers rely on retail Web sites for product information. While shoppers tend to vary the order, retail Web sites and search engines are typically either the first or the second step in the shopping process. The study suggests that retail Web sites are used as a source of price and brand options, promotions and sales. Many look for customer and expert reviews, price, and recommendations. Moving the ability to rank higher in the on-site search feature of a retail Web site would naturally give the consumer products goods (CPGs) company an edge. Landing listings at the top of the search ranking make it easier for consumers to find information about a company's products and services, and two-thirds of shoppers compare product and price information or read product descriptions on retail Web sites before making purchases. But while many begin the shopping process online, nearly half still purchase offline. That works, too, according to John Federman, president and chief executive officer at Searchandise. He says more than half the people who research products online buy them in the store. Although more consumers are beginning the process online, shoppers still want to see, touch and interact with the products in a physical store prior to purchase. Consumers turn to the online channel for ease of comparison, 61%; breadth of information, 47%; and convenience, 51%, while 62% of consumers admit that the physical stores provide the tactile in-person experience. Of those shoppers who purchase offline, 57% say pricing is one of the main motivators for purchasing online, followed by free shipping at 57%, promotions and discounts at 50%, and item availability at 32%. The study also made recommendations for marketers. Pricing factors tend to attract online shoppers, but the inability to see, touch, and feel the product tends to discourage shoppers. Retail sites become an opportunity for marketers to showcase CPG items not only through text, but video and other forms of media. The study took two approaches: FocusSite Analysis, and Survey-Based Analysis. The qualitative phase consisted of two online focus groups hosted in April 2010. It lasted two days. The survey analysis defined the path through the purchase funnel during each stage in the process.
As it seeks to broaden its offerings to capitalize on the social media explosion, email service provider StrongMail Systems has acquired digital agencies Conversa Marketing and Magnetik. The two firms, which have worked together on strategy and design for some time, will be combined with existing StrongMail employees to create a standalone unit within the company known as "ThreadMarketing." One focus will be using email and social venues for customer relationship management (CRM). Michael Della Penna, CEO of Conversa and a StrongMail board member, will head the new group -- moving off the board and becoming a StrongMail executive vice president. Magnetik founders Will Kunkel and Doug Steinberg will serve as creative directors. The group will be based in New York, the home of Comversa and Magnetik. Terms of the deals were not disclosed. Conversa clients Castrol and People.com, among others, will now shift over to ThreadMarketing. Conversa has core competencies in customer relationship management, seeking to use social media to improve lifecycle connections with consumers, partly through Facebook and Twitter. Magnetik is focused on creative for emerging and traditional interactive platforms. Email service providers have been increasingly making acquisitions and building in-house systems to swiftly move beyond email delivery roots into the social and mobile spaces -- though they are looking to bring analytics capabilities from email to the emerging channels. StrongMail CEO Sam Cece stated that "email remains the critical foundation for nurturing each customer relationship," but there is a need for "mastering the various digital marketing channels. ThreadMarketing head Della Penna has previously sreved as the CMO at Epsilon, where in part he led lead-generation operations. He stated that "when looking at how the online marketing world has evolved over the past two years, the importance of having a single view of the customer has never been more important." Based in Silicon Valley, StrongMail is backed by venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital and Evercore Ventures. StrongMail is tabbing the new unit as "ThreadMarketing, a StrongMail company."
Location-based social networks are presently on the tip of everyone's tongue -- and arguably with good reason. Fresh off a funding round worth $20 million, Foursquare just hit 2 million users, Twitter is busy revamping its Places feature, and CNNMoney just tapped Gowalla to support its annual "100 Best Places to Live" list. Yet based on some preliminary research, Forrester analyst Melissa Parrish doesn't believe the time is right for marketers to begin investing significant sums on their LBSN strategies. "Though many LBSNs are gathering steam, the landscape is fragmented and the programs can't scale just yet," says Parrish. Indeed, Forrester finds that just 1% of U.S. online adults are actually using LBSNs weekly, while 4% of them have tried them at least once. "The sample size of this 1% of adults who use LBSNs regularly is small, so our findings on their behaviors is directional only, but our research shows that these users are typically young, male, well-educated, and influential," Parrish explains. Highly influential individuals, LBSN users are 38% more likely than the average U.S. online adult to say that friends and family ask their opinions before making a purchase decision. As such, Parrish isn't surprised that many marketers are interested in LBSNs and their users. "Given the directional breakdown of the users, it's not surprising that marketers who are already dabbling with these services are those that often experiment with new technologies as a way to stay current and to reach key portions of their consumers," she writes in a related report. One early-adopting marketer, Chili's Grill & Bar, recently offered a limited-time promotion in which subscribers to Foursquare could receive a free order of chips and house-made salsa for checking in at their restaurants nationwide. To date, Foursquare has also partnered with Bravo Media, Zagat, Warner Bros., and HBO. Still, Forrester's Parrish believes that most marketers should wait on the sidelines until larger industry players -- like Facebook and Yahoo -- can offer location-based services at true scale. "With large companies preparing to enter the market (I'm looking at you, Facebook and Yahoo) the time for marketers to get involved is coming," she writes in her report.
Razorfish has carved out a new practice area aimed at helping CMOs get products and services to market more quickly. The initiative is based on the agency's "agile" methodology, in which designers and technologists rapidly create rough drafts of Web sites and digital marketing campaigns, then modify them based on customer feedback. The idea is to launch projects faster than they could be going through the traditional approach of developing projects to completion before going live. The Razorfish Agile practice led by CTO Ray Velez involves a training program for CMOs to adopt the rapid-prototyping techniques internally as well as understand them better in working with Razorfish. "CMOs are letting go of their obsession with producing one-shot campaigns based on a single idea," said Velez. "The agile test-and-learn approach is becoming especially popular as CMOs respond to pressure to prove their value constantly through innovation." Razorfish says it has employed the agile approach for years with clients including AT&T and Ford. More recently, the agency used agile methods to help develop personal finance site Bundle.com., working out of a Razorfish development lab in New York to quickly create a beta version of the site in time for a January 2010 launch. The new Razorfish practice will encompass 50 experts in the agile system, and the training program will educate clients on topics such as how to schedule and estimate costs for an agile project and how to build teams using the constant-iteration process.
Granting new media greater representation on its Board of Directors, The Advertising Club on Tuesday night named five new inductees for the 2010-2011 period, including Jerry Canning, industry director of financial services at Google, and Tim Castelli, VP of Eastern sales at AOL. Other new board members include Marie Devlin, SVP of advertising, media and sponsorships at American Express; Audrey Siegel, president and director of client services at TargetCast TCM; and Marty St. George, SVP of marketing and commercial strategy at JetBlue Airways. Further recognizing the rising prominence of new media, The Ad Club plans to give this year's Rising Star Award for outstanding support in program development and social and educational event planning for the Young Professional unit to Dina Gold, associate account planner at Facebook. This year, The Ad Club's executive director, Gina Grillo, is stepping in as president for C. Thom Gruhler, while Gruhler assumes the position of chairman of the Club. In addition, the nine executives receiving The Ad Club President's Award for exceptional contributions and consistent commitment to Club initiatives and programs include Laurel Rossi, president of Strategy Farm, and Rick Song, senior director of U.S. sales at Microsoft Advertising.
The Yahoo-Bing Search Alliance will result in a dramatic shift in the paid search marketing industry, changing the way advertisers manage their pay-per-click marketing programs. Under the new alliance, which starts this fall for U.S. accounts, advertisers will be required to use Microsoft's adCenter to manage both their Yahoo and Bing paid search advertising programs. As an advertiser, what do you need to do to prepare your search engine marketing campaigns for the transition? There are several steps you can take to ensure your campaigns continue to function smoothly before, during, and after the transition to the new unified management platform. Before we dive into the nuts-and-bolts of what you can do to prepare your campaigns for the transition, it's important to point out that you should start the process of transitioning to Microsoft adCenter now; waiting will cause undue headaches a few months from now, when you'll be deep into launching your critical Holiday 2010 campaigns. In our own research at my company, Marin Software, we've found that about two-thirds of large advertisers have begun to prepare their campaigns for the transition to a single Bing-Yahoo platform. If you're one of those advertisers who hasn't started the transition yet, it's time to get cracking! For most search advertisers, the move to a single Bing-Yahoo platform will require adjustments to keywords, creative, bids, and analytical reports in order to maintain existing programs. Remember, this change isn't just a chore, but an opportunity. By combining your Bing and Yahoo programs on a single platform, you'll be able to streamline your search marketing efforts and more easily access the combined query volumes of these two engines. Here are some strategies to make the Search Alliance transition as painless as possible: Take stock of your programs. Among advertisers spending more than $100,000 a month on paid search, the average marketer spends 17% of its budget on Yahoo and only 5% on Bing. What's more, about 13% of advertisers do not currently run any campaigns on Bing. If you're one of the many search marketers with a smaller or non-existent Bing program, you'll need to invest in new keywords on Microsoft adCenter to maintain your paid search marketing revenues after the transition. Taking stock of the state of your Bing campaigns today can help you to assess the priority and level of effort required. Decide on a transition plan. Before you begin adding keywords to your adCenter accounts, it's important to have a strategy. There are three options for getting your adCenter campaigns to parity with your previous Yahoo programs: you can augment your adCenter campaigns manually; you can copy your campaigns over from Yahoo; or you can attempt to replicate your Google campaigns in adCenter. If your adCenter campaigns are reasonably built out already, then the first option likely represents the least work and the lowest risk. The second option, copying your Yahoo campaigns over to adCenter, is supported by the Search Alliance. Adding Yahoo campaigns will be the easiest way to capture the same traffic you were receiving before, but remember Yahoo uses different match types and has different character limits for ad copy than adCenter does. If you plan to port Yahoo accounts over to adCenter, make sure to expand keywords to include misspellings and plurals, and modify creative to meet adCenter character limits. If this option isn't appealing, your Google campaigns have a similar structure to Bing campaigns, but copying these over will require a manual effort to download, format, and upload bulk-sheets to adCenter. Regardless of the option you choose, make sure to double check your landing pages and tracking URLs to avoid issues with missed traffic or miscounted conversions. Prepare to bid with little history. As you build out your unified Bing-Yahoo search program, the new keywords you create in adCenter will lack the click and conversion history required to make effective bidding decisions. Adding to the complexity, the bid settings of any old keywords on Yahoo will be irrelevant, because the traffic and auction characteristics for the combined engines will be different. To prepare for this situation, make sure your bidding solution can create bids for new keywords and adjust quickly to changing traffic data. In order to start bidding accurately with a limited history, use data from similar keywords to determine bids. As individual keywords accumulate history, you can begin to weight their data more heavily into bidding decisions. Monitor performance and react quickly. The transition itself will be a period of change, with keyword auctions clearing at new prices and traffic levels for some keywords rising dramatically. The best way to capitalize on this change is to proactively monitor keyword and campaign performance. Set up automated alerts that notify you when a keyword or group hits a specific threshold in terms of clicks, conversions, quality and cost. For terms that exceed benchmarks for performance, you can add similar keywords to your programs using misspellings, plurals, or even raw queries associated with the keyword. For high-volume keywords that end up lagging in quality and ROI, try switching out the copy to see if you can boost overall relevance and conversion. The Search Alliance transition is an opportunity for the smart marketer to optimize for the new combined traffic patterns. The transition to a unified Yahoo-Bing ad management platform doesn't have to be a nightmare. Use this opportunity to fine tune campaigns, jettison poorly performing keywords, and analyze gaps in your programs. In six months time, you'll benefit from a streamlined search management process that gives you more time to invest in optimizing campaigns. More importantly, with lower management overhead and increased inventory, the Search Alliance represents an opportunity to grow your paid search programs through the new combined channel.