In a development that is causing Wall Street analysts to speculate that there might be more to the story, Google held its annual meeting Thursday, and the most striking news about it was the fact that co-founder and CEO Larry Page was not present. The company told investors that Page had “lost his voice and was unable to speak” at the meeting, but they also said he would not be able to speak at next week’s Google I/O developer conference or even the company’s second-quarter earnings call. “We have no specific reason to think there is anything more to Larry’s condition, but we find it odd that the company would already rule him out of the second quarter call, which is likely still a few weeks away,” J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth write in a note to Google investors this morning. “We think this could raise some questions among investors. We note that Larry does not appear to have posted on Google+ since May 25.”
WPP’s Mindshare is teaming with Google in a new global venture designed to educate companies about mobile technology and expedite their use of the medium in their marketing plans. The venture, called the “Mobile Garage,” will start with teams of Mindshare and Google specialists in New York, London and Singapore. Mindshare clients will have access to the teams, which will provide expertise on search optimization, app development, strategic planning and other aspects of the mobile sector that clients can utilize as they evolve within the mobile space. “Working with Google on mobile will give our clients a competitive advantage in a key battleground both now and for the future,” said Nick Emery, CEO Mindshare Worldwide. Emery, who was promoted to the top post at the media shop earlier this year, added: "We designed Mindshare to be open source and to work with the best partners for the benefit of our clients. It’s about trial, experimentation and the speed to redesign our business.” Mindshare currently works with sibling WPP mobile shops Joule and H-Art. The Mobile Garage venture will complement those existing relationships. Google, in turn, will have access to Mindshare clients and gain a better understanding of marketer expectations within the sector. According to the agency, mobile search traffic has increased 400% over the past two years and will continue to grow sharply. And as marketers say they are struggling to keep up with developments in the industry, mobile trade group GSMA and research firm Machina predict there will be 24 billion connected devices by 2020, comprising a $4.5 trillion industry. Matt Brittin, vice president, sales and operations, Northern and Central Europe at Google, stated: "We have adopted a 'mobile first' philosophy at Google to keep pace with the rapid acceleration in consumer mobile usage."
Every image tells a story on television, but not a complete picture without real-time tweets connecting TV with online, says Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, speaking at Cannes Lions. The biggest challenge, it seems, is that broadcast TV needs a dependable partner -- but by Thursday the added tweet volume from the ad festival appears to have sent the site offline. Earlier in the week, the site boasted that there were more than 15,000 online posts across social media referencing #CannesLions, with 95% coming from Twitter. On Thursday, as of 12:40 EST, the site went offline. Remember #failwhale? Broadcast TV needs a reliable social media partner. While it all began with lower thirds serving up at the bottom of TV screens during broadcasts, Twitter pushed the concept of using the site to bring TV viewers online and connect them with other socialites to create a community in real-time. A producer's guide explaining best practices for connecting TV audience through tweets went up on the Twitter's site in early June. TV shows have tapped the social site to raise ratings. The company developed an analytics package to track the continuous tweets during television broadcasts. The sharp spikes correspond to major moments in a show. Last year, Twitter and technology partners stepped up following tweets to TV, bringing real-time content to TV shows. But the interaction between viewers and TV content presents another dynamic that makes the big screen more relevant to marketers. Costolo also said Twitter would begin offering promoted advertising in 50 additional markets this year, reducing its reliance on revenue from the U.S. Twitter's worldwide ad revenue should rise 86.3% to nearly $260 million -- up from $139 million in 2011 -- and $45 million in 2010, eMarketer estimates. About 90% of Twitter's revenue comes from the United States, but this year, $26 million in ad revenue could come from overseas, the research firm said. Earlier this week, Twitter introduced Cards, making it possible to attach media to tweets that link to content through a few lines of HTML code on the Web site. A "Card" is added when site visitors tweet links to the content. It automatically attributes content to the site. There are three types of Cards: summary, photo and player.
Microsoft Bing rolled out an update to its image search feature on Thursday, just weeks after redesigning its search results page. The company said images make up about 7% of searches. Bigger pictures now replace tiny thumbnails. The suggestions tool offers refinements on queries for specific topics to make it easier to filter images by color, layout, size and type. Microsoft is not the only engine to make changes to image and video search. Yahoo said it partnered with stock photo agency Getty Images to alter its image and video search engine. Through the partnership, Yahoo will connect searchers to more than 20,000 photos daily. Getty photos will become available in Yahoo search results within minutes of being uploaded. The full-screen viewing option -- HTML5 technology -- also supports a tiled thumbnail view that displays larger content when the cursor rolls over the image. The video will start to play when the cursor hovers over it, similar to the option in Microsoft images. Yahoo also introduced a search-while-you-watch feature for videos for those interested in searching for a video while watching the content. It now shows recommended and trending topics. Two types of filters on the left rail help to find the highest-quality images. An icon identifies photos with at least 2 megapixels and a 1024 x 768 aspect ratio. For high-quality videos, Yahoo uses adaptive streaming technology to optimize the viewing experience.
Several high-profile brands including Virgin Media, BT and O2 have inadvertently bought advertising placed in front of neo-Nazi content on Google’s video-sharing site YouTube. The Guardian reports that the neo-Nazi groups Blood & Honour and Combat 18 have participated in Google’s AdSense program, which means that both Google and the extremist groups have earned money from ads placed alongside their videos on YouTube. The report claims that the groups are using their YouTube channels "to provide links to extremist materials and neo-Nazi Web sites, where discussion groups and literature can be accessed." Because AdSense is an automated program, neither Google or the aforementioned brands knew that the ads were being placed near questionable content. And because Google does not pre-screen video content uploaded to YouTube, Google didn’t even know the neo-Nazi videos were there. However, once it was alerted to their presence, Google removed them immediately. YouTube certainly promotes free speech, but per its rules, it does not permit “hate speech,” which it defines as “speech which attacks or demeans a group based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, and sexual orientation/gender identity." That may be, but The Guardian points out that Google wouldn’t say whether it plans to put any protections in place to prevent a repetition. The search did say, as it has before, that due to the volume of content uploaded to YouTube -- 60 hours of video per minute or nearly 10 years worth of content every day -- that it cannot pre-screen content before it is uploaded; instead, it relies on users to flag inappropriate videos. When told that its ads were appearing next to neo-Nazi content, Virgin Media replied that it was “concerned” and would work with Google and its advertising partners “to understand what measures can be put into place to prevent these occurrences going forwards."
A recent series of three posts on the Harvard Business Review blog by Karen Freeman, Patrick Spenner and Anna Bird explored some of the myths about how consumers make decisions. I think each of these has direct implications for search marketers, so over the next three weeks I want to explore them one at a time. The first, titled “What Do Consumers Really Want? Simplicity,” talks about the breakdown of the purchase funnel. The HBR bloggers contend the funnel, which has been around for well over a hundred years, no longer applies to consumer behaviors. I concur, and said as much in my book, “The BuyerSphere Project.” We differ a little on the reason for the demise, however. The HBR team credits the demise to cognitive overload on the part of the consumer. We’re simply bombarded by too much information on the purchase path to fit it all into the nice, simple, rational filtering process captured in St. Elmo Lewis’s elegant funnel-shaped model. The accompanying research, a survey of 7,000 consumers, shows decision simplicity was the number-one thing people wanted when making a purchase. I agree that information overload is part of it, but I also believe that two other factors have led to the end of the purchase funnel. First, the purchase funnel assumes a rational filtering of options based on careful consideration of a consumer’s requirements. I don’t think this was ever the case. Emotions drive our decisions, and more often than not, rationality is applied after the fact to justify our choices. Prior to the Internet, emotion was tough to distinguish from rationality, as buyers didn’t have much control over the content they accessed during the consideration process. They were limited to whatever the marketer pushed out at them. So, whether driven by emotion or logic, they tended to go down the same path and display many of the same behaviors. Given the pervasive believe in humans as rational animals at the time, it was not surprising that a logic-driven model emerged. The other factor, as I alluded to, was that the Internet shifted the balance of power during the purchase process. Suddenly, we could choose which paths we took during the consideration process. We weren’t all forced down the same path, according to some arbitrary notion of a funnel-shaped model. What became clear, when consumers could choose their own path, was that the simplicity of the funnel model bore little relation to the actual paths consumers took. And those paths were driven by emotion. People bounced all around, depending on what they were looking to buy. They could go all the way to a shopping cart, then suddenly abandon it and go back to a destination that would be considered “upper funnel” and start all over again. From the outside looking in, this resembled a bowl of spaghetti much more than it did a funnel. So, we have a trio of suspects in the death of the purchasing funnel: cognitive overload, emotion trumping logic, and consumers gaining more control over their consideration path. All lead to an interesting concept to consider: laying an online path that anticipates the emotional needs of the buyer, and yet keeps the information presented from overwhelming them. For example, marketing has traditionally taken a “turf war” approach to persuading a prospect: “as long as they’re on our turf, we do everything possible to close the sale. But this doesn’t really match up with the three trends we’re talking about. What online consumers are looking for, according to the HBR research, is a safe online zone that will make their decision easier. Rather than going from site to site, collecting information and filtering out overt marketing hyperbole, what consumers want is a single information source they can trust. They want to be able to lower their “anti-BS” shields, because being a rational, cynical shopper takes a lot of time and effort. Today, it’s extremely rare to find that trustworthy information on a site you can actually purchase from, but it’s starting to happen in some high activity categories, where independent portals facilitate this simplified approach to shopping. Travel comes to mind. But let’s consider what would happen if a brand’s website took this approach. Rather than bombard a prospect with exaggerated sales pitches, putting them on the defensive, what if a more neutral, objective experience was provided? After all, why shouldn’t the decision path be built on your own turf, giving you a home field advantage?