Yahoo and Wenner Media on Wednesday announced a cross-promotional content deal involving various properties, including Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, Us Weekly and Yahoo’s omg! and Yahoo Music. Under the agreement, editorial teams from both companies will work together to co-produce exclusive content around different entertainment topics. In addition, Us Weekly and Rolling Stone will each have branded pages on omg! and Yahoo! Music, respectively, while omg! and Yahoo! Music will have branded pages on UsMagazine.com and RollingStone.com, as well as in the two magazines’ print editions. Content from Men's Journal will also be distributed on Yahoo for the first time. "This deal is a powerful combination of talent and content that will enhance our users' daily habit of entertainment news consumption," stated Rich Cusick, Yahoo!'s vice president of entertainment and lifestyles. "We're marrying Yahoo!'s deep content reserves and massive online reach with Wenner's reputation for quality entertainment content.” Teaming with Wenner Media also helps Yahoo further rejuvenate its music offerings, following content-sharing deals over the summer with Spotify and Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio. The deal reflects Yahoo’s broader push in the last year to collaborate with major media players, including ABC News CNBC to bolster its original programming.
Google released a revised search app for iOS that adds a Siri-like voice-recognition service to its Android service on Apple phones. Marketers will find the audio searches serve up much more comprehensive and relevant information in query results, compared with typing keywords into a search box, even for complex names and spellings. The change will be a wake-up call for marketers resting on their expertise. Open the free Google Voice Search app on an iOS device, tap the microphone icon and speak a search request, such as directions from Huntington Beach to San Francisco. Google tells users the best route to take — and how long it will take to get there. Aside from mobile apps, voice search integrates into car navigation systems, entertainment consoles and Web site search functions. In some cases, experts predict ads with audio and graphics will take the place of text. Marty Weintraub, founder of aimClear, said improvements in voice search will continue to erode the importance of what he calls "classic SEO." They will open new lines of studies in optimization and that prove a correlation between the action and the intent. Marketers will need to add keywords and phrases to lists that compensate for variations in the way people talk. Not dialects, but grammar. The voice commands translate into text, so engines like Google can match keyword that optimize Web sites and trigger ads. Google's Knowledge Graph provides a snapshot view of search queries to give the search technology an understanding of people, places and things in the real world. In an earlier post, Amit Singhal, SVP of engineering at Google, describes the technology as "a critical first step" toward tapping into the collective intelligence of the Web to build the next generation of search. While Google taps into big data across its network of sites and expertise in search, Siri's integration with data from Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine for computing answers, provides an interesting rival. Erica Sadun explains how Siri can use Wolfram Alpha by prefixing requests with "Wolfram," which makes voice search incredibly powerful. She explains: "You might say, 'Wolfram, what is the square root of 2?' or 'Wolfram, graph x-squared plus three.'"
Yahoo Japan, an information portal, has tapped BrightTag, a data integration platform, to support the underlying infrastructure powering the collection of data and delivery of re-marketing and media services. The multiyear partnerships announced Wednesday makes data instantly accessible to advertisers, as it moves through the cloud in real time. It gives Yahoo Japan's advertisers a way to connect and collect through a unified data layer to drive online marketing strategies with more precise targeting. Marc Kiven, founder and chief revenue officer at BrightTag, refers to the company's business model as the Fedex of data. "We pick it up and deliver it, making first-party data more valuable and easy to access," he said. "Yahoo Japan has recognized the hurtles that the U.S. market faces today with all the various fragmentation of services available to a Web site owner, and all the tags needed to work with service providers." The service offers one universal tag powered by BrightTag that encorporates all their marketing services. It enables companies like Criteo, which recently received $40 million series D funding led by SoftBank, to become more effective, explains Mike Sands, president and CEO. Softbank is Yahoo Japan's majority owner with a 40% stake; Yahoo owns 33%. The partnership supports BrightTag's vision of a tag-less Web world, where the notion of tag containers and dumping tags on a Web site disappears, replaced the connection with a conduit that allows advertisers to work more efficiently. BrightTag facilitates interactions between Web site owners, publishers and digital marketing services, so the first-party data might include the price, the color, the style, the texture, the size and other information required by search engines, demand side platform or other ad-related companies to serve ads or content. The partnership also supports BrightTag's expansion plans. The platform is used on Web sites in more than 150 countries. Most recently, it acquired a London-based competitor to increase its European presence.
California's top law enforcement official said this week that she is warning nearly 100 app developers that they are violating a state law requiring them to post conspicuous privacy policies. Developers that don't start offering privacy policies in the next 30 days could face fines of $2,500 per download, Attorney General Kamala Harris said. She added that her office plans to send warnings to the most popular apps available on mobile platforms. A 2003 law, the California Online Privacy Protection Act, says commercial Web site operators that collect personally identifiable information from state residents must conspicuously display links to privacy policies. While that law predates smartphone apps, Harris says she believes it applies to mobile apps. Earlier this month, she took to Twitter to criticize United Airlines for failing to include a privacy policy in its app. "Fabulous app, @United Airlines, but where is your app's privacy policy." she tweeted. United offers a privacy policy available at its Web site, but Harris' office says that a privacy policy at a Web site is only sufficient if the site is "reasonable accessible" to users within the app. United reportedly said it is taking steps to ensure that it complies with California's privacy law. Harris hasn't yet named the companies she is targeting, but OpenTable, Delta and United Airlines are believed to be among them, according to press reports. In February, Harris convinced six companies with app marketplaces -- Google, Apple, Research in Motion, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Amazon -- to say they will require that apps available on their platforms have privacy policies. Several months later, Facebook agreed to do the same. Jules Polonetsky, director and co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum, said that Apple's iOS6 makes it easier than before to provide a privacy link. "The new App Store now provides a very visible privacy tab for consumers," he says. "Now that iOS6 has been out for some time, app developers don't have any reason to delay in setting up a policy." A study by the Future of Privacy Forum in June found that 61% of the most popular apps had privacy policies. Locked Phone from Shutterstock
Domino's Pizza is getting into the streaming media business. Thanks to a new partnership with Lionsgate UK, customers in the region can now rent a digital version of “The Hunger Games” or “Dirty Dancing” with their pepperoni pies. Dubbed Domino's Pizza “Box Office,” the online service is shooting for a slice of the increasingly lucrative streaming media market. Whether the service will come to U.S. shores remains to be seen. “We have no plans for this program in the U.S.,” Tim McIntyre, vice president, communications at Domino’s Pizza, explained via email on Wednesday. In recent years, technological advances have made it easier for anyone to enter the media business. Along with bootstrapped upstarts, traditional media and entertainment companies are facing a real threat from multinational corporations. Starbucks has been upfront about its rationale for offering free Wi-Fi in its countless locations — to promote its “Digital Network,” which serves as a walled garden for premium content. No money changes hands between Starbucks and content providers. Giving away restricted access to their fare is a marketing plus for media companies. Last spring, Facebook added digital movie rentals to its repertoire through a distribution partnership with Warner Bros. Due to increasing competition on all fronts, Netflix this week lowered projections for streaming subscribers.Netflix, which ended the third quarter with 25.1 million domestic streaming customers, now expects to end the year with 26.4 million to 27.1 million streaming subscribers -- which would still represent a gain of between 4.7 million and 5.4 million customers year-over-year. Through its primarily franchised system, Domino's Pizza operates a global network of more than 10,000 Domino's Pizza stores in 73 international markets.
Global marketers should note that global consumers' confidence is still improving -- albeit slowly.A study from The Cambridge Group, a Nielsen company, says a third-quarter index score of 92 grew one point versus the previous quarter. But this shouldn't be seen as a strong recommendation for the near-term.Dr. Venkatesh Bala, chief economist at The Cambridge Group, stated: “Consumers played it safe in Q3, especially in Europe, which still faces a very precarious economic situation despite some recent stabilizing policy initiatives by the European Central Bank. Export growth from China, especially to the euro zone, has slowed substantially accompanied by restraint among consumers there."North America and Europe are the only two improving regions -- rising three points to 91 in the former, and one point to 74 in the later. Consumers are still cautious, the study says, in the face of an uneven recovery in U.S and Europe, both which are still plagued with high unemployment.Asia-Pacific and the Middle East/Africa regions remained flat results -- with Asia-Pacific staying at a 100 index and the Middle East/Africa at 98. Latin America declined two index points to a score of 94.Overall, consumer confidence rose in 52% of global markets measured by Nielsen in Q3, compared to 41% of markets in the previous quarter. Confidence increased in 30 of 58 markets, declined in 19, and remained flat in seven.
Hurricane Sandy put one quarter of the wireless cell towers in the Northeast out of commission, according to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who warned that number may increase unless power is restored in a timely fashion. Although Genachowski didn’t give a precise number of cell phone towers damaged or deprived of power by Sandy, it is easily in the thousands. In 2010, the FCC estimated the total number of wireless cell towers in the U.S. at 266,623, and a large proportion of these are located in the densely-populated Northeast region. In August 2011, Hurricane Irene disabled about 6,500 cell phone towers. While it is rare for cell phone towers to actually topple over in a storm, many will have been damaged by flooding in ground-level equipment rooms or windblown debris. This huge repair job means it could be weeks before some towers are restored to service -- and the number of cell towers out of service could actually increase in coming days. One of the biggest issues facing cell tower operators is loss of power, and cell towers currently relying on backup generators could begin running out of fuel over the next week, Genachowski noted. Given the widespread disruptions to the power grid, which utility providers say could take 10 days or more to repair in places, it’s possible more cell towers will go dark. Outages were reported in cell service and cable systems beginning Sunday evening and increased as Hurricane Sandy made landfall, battering New Jersey and New York City Monday and Tuesday. Verizon said two key switching centers in Manhattan were severely affected by the storm. The company’s corporate headquarters in Lower Manhattan and offices in Long Island and Queens were also flooded, knocking out backup power at those locations. AT&T and Sprint also reported service disruptions resulting from power outages and storm damage. Telecommunications Tower from Shutterstock