Facebook copies Google and Google copies Facebook, the history continues...

Starting this afternoon, Google will allow users to vote plus-one on search results they find useful, and to share that preference with their connections in Gchat, Gmail, Google Reader, Buzz, and soon, Twitter. Users will see both the total number of plus-one votes, as well as the names and photos of their contacts who have stated a preference.

It's the most aggressive foray into social search to date and the first time Google has added a direct social signal into search results. Over time, Google will integrate the plus-one into the search algorithm itself so human votes will impact search ranking.

"When someone recommends something, that's a pretty good indicator of quality," said Matt Cutts, Google principle engineer for search. "We are strongly looking at using this in our rankings."

Google is also adding the ability to vote plus-one on search ads. Internal tests have shown that plus-one votes increase clicks; Google won't charge for the functionality, but expects better ads to return more plus-ones and in turn, more clicks. Higher click-through rates can improve quality scores meaning marketers with better ads could pay less for a given keyword or position.

"We will provide reporting in AdWords for plus-ones," said ads group product manager Christian Oestlien. "Our belief is that advertisers will see increased performance from ads with personalized annotations."

The changes are some of the biggest to the visual architecture of search, the classic list of blue links, as well as its functional underpinnings. Plus-one buttons and social connections are going to join a search results page getting more and more complicated with both real-time and local search results, in addition to search ads which have also added functionality.

Traditionally, inbound links have been the strongest indicator of relevance and component of page rank. Last year, Google added Twitter results to also surface results that are more recent. Adding the "plus-one" will add another social component.

"Injecting a social layer into the algorithmic search is key to relevance," said Dave Karnstedt, CEO of Efficient Frontier. "Do a search on 'DVD player' today now you will see 35,000 results in less than 3 miliseconds. It's meaningless, but if you can sort through those by people who have given a social signal and those rise to the top, I think that can only enhance the user experience."

But the biggest move here may not be about search at all, but about taking another swing at the social networking business, and at Facebook itself. The first time any user clicks on a plus-one button, they will be prompted to create a Google profile, as well as given the opportunity to adjust privacy settings.

Microsoft's Bing integrated Facebook "likes" into search results late last year but hasn't integrated them into its actual algorithm, meaning a "like" has no impact on search rankings. Google has no immediate plans to add Facebook connections to the system, partly because they don't have the right to do so. "It would depend on whether that data were available," Mr. Cutts said.

"Its important for Google to bring in social influence into search results to prevent the social web from becoming a parallel universe," said Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i, a unit of Dentsu. "I do think they need to have the Facebook ' likes' in there because you're going to have two webs, the social web and the open web."

In addition, Google will be allowing publishers to add the plus-one button, so users can vote plus-one on content outside of search, and ultimately improve the ranking of that content in organic search results. Google has by far the largest publisher network, including web sites that use DoubleClick for ad serving or Google's ad exchange, so penetration of the "plus-one" will be immediate and comprehensive.

The question is whether Google can keep bad actors from gaming the "plus-one" system for fun or for profit. Google, to its credit, has a lot of experience filtering out attempts to game its algorithms. "The worst case is you just ignore them," Mr. Cutts said, adding that more complexity makes that more difficult. "If you give somebody five signals -- and give them five more -- it can actually get harder for spammers." 
@Adweek

Are clicks overrated?

Late last year, AOL announced it would be revamping its ad platform, shrinking the number of ads it serves and expanding the sizes of those ads. In some cases the ad units would be four times larger than they were before. The move was seen by many as AOL’s attempt to address the abysmally-low click-through rates on display advertising, and senior executives admitted that they would see an immediate drop in revenue as a result of it; their hope was that in the long run advertisers would flock to the new platform and pay higher rates for these more successful ads.

According to several studies, click-through rates — the number of people who actually click on an ad — run well below 1 percent on most sites, and each year these rates get lower and lower. Some industry analysts have said this is a result of “banner blindness,” the idea that we inadvertently train our eyes to ignore certain parts of a web page, including sidebar and banner ads.

Depending on which side of the aisle you are on, these metrics are either a blessing or a curse. On the one hand, the Internet allows us to measure ad success like never before. In the past, advertising agencies would have to employ arcane formulas using Nielsen or circulation numbers to guess how many eyeballs saw a 30-second spot on television or a full-page ad in The New York Times. Now, we can open up Google Analytics or click-tracking software to determine exactly how many users engaged with an ad. We can even in some cases determine conversion rates, measuring not only how many people clicked on an ad, but also how many actually purchased a product after making the click. These metrics are a welcome relief to the client who famously said, “I know I am wasting half my advertising budget; I just don’t know which half.”

But many publishers and advertising agencies have expressed frustration that their industry is beholden to such confined measurement. By focusing so much on direct response, they argue, advertisers are missing out on the larger branding opportunities afforded by creative advertising. The Geico Gecko is not successful because he inspires people to jump up from their couches and purchase car insurance; he’s successful because when a person decides months later to shop around for car insurance, his image springs to mind.

Earlier this month, a company called MediaMind released a comprehensive study on the performance of financial services display ads. MediaMind specializes in hosting ads and collecting a variety of performance metrics for advertisers. If Goldman Sachs wanted to advertise on NYTimes.com, for example, MediaMind would host the ad on its own servers and give the NYT a link to pull the ad onto its site. The company would then measure how many times the ad is loaded, how many people click on it, and even how many hover their mouse over the ad without clicking — what MediaMind refers to as “dwell.”

For this particular study, MediaMind analyzed 28 billion ad impressions and terabytes of data to determine what kinds of financial service ads — whether for banks, credit cards, or insurance companies — performed best. The average click-through rate on such ads is .09 percent, with an even lower post-click conversion rate of .03 percent. Perhaps more encouragingly, though, the “dwell” rate for these ads was 4.26 percent, meaning that nearly one in every 20 users hovered his or her mouse over an ad — an indication, MediaMind said, that the ad carried influence even if it didn’t lead to a click. The study claimed financial service ads had an overall conversion rate higher than their click-through conversion rate — .16 percent vs .03 percent — because some of the users who didn’t actually click on the ad still visited the advertiser later. One of the biggest takeaways from the study was that a user’s engagement with an ad sharply falls after the first time he has seen it, meaning that if he sees an ad on NYTimes.com and then later on WashingtonPost.com, he’s much less likely to click on the Post’s ad than a reader who is seeing it there for the first time.

To understand the click-through rate dilemma many advertisers face, one merely has to dive into MediaMind’s findings about which kinds of ads perform best: The highest click-through rates were for credit cards, while the lowest were for car and home-owners’ insurance. Ariel Geifman, MediaMind’s principal research analyst, explained to me in a phone interview that the credit card ads perform better because many people are almost always willing to try a new credit card with a better rate. But why did the insurance ads perform so poorly? “We think it’s because users only need a policy once a year, so you only need to get people at the point when they’re thinking about it — which is really hard,” Geifman said. “Unlike credit cards, users are not actively shopping for better insurance offers all the time, only once a year. You have to tempt them with an offer exactly at that point in order to get them to consider it.”

Display advertising, in other words, is lacking a Geico Gecko strategy.

Geifman told me that despite pushes for advertisers to take a much more “holistic” view, they’re still measuring their success on click-through and conversion metrics.“People try to focus more on the tangible rather than the intangible metrics,” he said. “In the furture, display advertising is going to be a lot more focused on branding.”

But will it? John Battelle, founder of Federated Media and a board member of theInteractive Advertising Bureau, has spent a lot of time contemplating this question. Federated Media is an ad network that provides advertising for hundreds of publishers, seeing more than a billion ad impressions a month. (I’ve written for some outlets that use FM advertising.) “No matter what, we have to live in a world where the question, ‘Does the consumer click on my ad?’ is the fundamental and only consistent signal in display advertising that is universally understood,” Battelle said in a phone conversation. “That impulse has a lot of implications. When people optimize click-through rates, it changes all sorts of decisions that can inevitablly lead down a path towards, in essence, the direct-response approach to advertising. Which is to say, if you optimize your creative — your media buy, your placement, everything — to this one signal, and you tell your agencies and your publishing partners that’s what’s most important, you’re going to get behaviors that drive clicks. And that sort of ignores a very large percentage of the value of advertising, which has to do with changing the perception, awareness, and potentially other important signals of value in the ecosystem. Unfortunately, it’s something we’ve had to live with because it’s the only standard that’s easily measured.”

To show the short-sightedness of such metrics, Battelle cited a comScore study that found in 2009 that 4 percent of Internet users drive a whopping 67 percent of all advertising clicks. Do we really want to target our ads, he asked rhetorically, to such a small user base — the online equivalent to those who respond to late-night infomercials?

Though the display advertising industry has been slow to battle this trend, it has taken steps to ameliorate it. Part of the problem, as the recent AOL ad revamp indicated, is that display ads are small. It’s very difficult to replicate the full-page ad of a print newspaper or magazine, and there’s only so much you can convey in a tiny box on a website’s sidebar. In 2009, Federated Media launched a product called an Ad STAMP that allows an advertiser to purchase multiple ad slots and effectively take over an entire page. The same year, Daily Kos hosted a “skin” advertising platform for a then-upcoming Frontline program called “Obama’s War.” The skin wrapped around all the Kos content, effectively bombarding the reader with the brand (while not intruding on the actual blog posts). BlogAds, a North Carolina-based ad network that serves ads to Daily Kos and hundreds of other blogs, has also experimented with including social content from sites like Twitter directly into the ads themselves.

In an interview last year, I asked BlogAds founder Henry Copeland which industries should rely less on click-through rates and more on long-term brand influence. He pointed to the entertainment industry as one example. “For instance, with TV shows or with a movie, very few people buy the ticket online,” he said. “So the real measure is you spent X amount in advertising and then you put this many seats in movie theaters.”

In the AOL Way, leaked to the Business Insider last year, the company indicated that an individual blog post needs about 7,000 pageviews to generate a profitable amount of advertising revenue. With the average cost per piece of content pegged at $84 and a target of an average gross margin of 50 percent, that puts AOL’s CPM at $18. In other words, it hopes to generate $18 for every thousand pageviews it generates. At a .09 percent click-through rate, we’re looking at about $18 per click. Given that you can get much better rates on advertising platforms like Google Adwordsand Facebook’s targeted display advertising, it isn’t hard to see why a publisher would want to steer an advertiser’s focus away from raw clicks alone.

“You don’t build brands by optimizing for clicks,” Battelle told me. “There needs to be other measurments as to whether your audience is aware of and gaining value from the messaging you’re doing on these sites through display advertising.”

Of course, some would accuse these publishers of trying to put the new clothes back on the emperor. But as AOL shifts further away from its declining subscription revenue and more toward an ad-based model, it’s not surprising that it wants to convince advertisers that there is, in fact, value in a banner and sidebar ad. How much value is there will determine whether Tim Armstrong’s quest to build a content-based company will result in success or dismal failure.

Facebook May Hire Robert Gibbs, Former Obama Aide

Facebook is in talks to hire Robert Gibbs, President Obama’s former White House press secretary, for a senior role in helping to manage the company’s communications, people briefed on the negotiations said.

Facebook is seeking out Mr. Gibbs ahead of an initial public offering planned for early 2012, these people said.

Olivier Douliery/European Pressphoto Agency
Robert Gibbs left the White House in February after two years on the job.

The talks are still at an early stage and no formal offer has been made, these people said, adding it remained possible that the discussions could collapse.

Mr. Gibbs, who left the White House in February after two years on the job, had been planning to help establish President Obama’s re-election campaign before taking a private sector job, these people said.

Facebook, however, is pressing Mr. Gibbs to consider the job more quickly, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversations were supposed to remain confidential.

A job for Mr. Gibbs at Facebook could be worth millions of dollars. While details of his potential compensation package have yet to be discussed, people briefed on the talks said that he would receive a cash salary as well as shares ahead of the initial offering. Facebook is being valued by some investors at more than $60 billion and could be the largest offering in history.

In recent weeks, Mr. Gibbs has consulted several of his former White House colleagues about whether he should take the job, including David Axelrod, President Obama’s former senior adviser, who is helping to head a re-election team, these people said.

Mr. Gibbs and a spokesman for Facebook declined to comment. 

Facebook is increasingly in the public eye and is looking to build its communications team ahead of an initial offering.

Investor interest and the attention the company received from the movie “The Social Network” have put increasing pressure on the company communicate better with the public about its products and its policies.

Facebook has also become a focus of Washington as lawmakers and regulators grapple with online privacy issues and Internet security. Facebook has already stepped up its lobbying efforts in Washington, which have included discussions with the Federal Trade Commission, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The company had a minor public relations headache when a planned offering of private stock by Goldman Sachs to investors in the United States had to be shelved because of worries the offering would not comply with Securities and Exchange Commission rules.

Goldman completed the offering instead with foreign investors.

While Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder, often acts as the public face of the company, Mr. Gibbs may be able to help communicate the company’s message in the media, to investors and policy makers.

The job is based at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., these people said. Mr. Gibbs would be brought in to work under Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president for global communications, marketing and public policy. Mr. Schrage came to Facebook in 2008 from Google.

Last week, Mr. Schrage hired Caryn Marooney, the co-founder of the OutCast Agency, a large public relations firm in San Francisco, to become the director of technology communications at Facebook.

Mr. Gibbs has recently held talks with a number of other companies, people briefed on those conversations said. His name has also been floated as a possible chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Politico reported.

@Andrew Ross

First UK augmented reality digital outdoor campaign - Lynx Excite

Cable TV on your tablet?

Time Warner Cable is pushing the envelope on video and making some TV networks uncomfortable in the process. The cable provider's new iPad app allows subscribers to watch live shows -- much as they do on TV -- at no extra charge as long as they do it at home using a cable modem authorized by Time Warner Cable.

The plan is to also enable other tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy, and ultimately any device with a screen, such as a laptop or a phone.

The question is whether Time Warner's current agreements with cable networks permit this capability, and how ugly that will make the next round of carriage negotiations with the networks.

Time Warner Cable execs argue that their current deals with cable networks cover the capability because the app doesn't receive video over the public internet. The gatekeeper in this case is the wireless modem, which allows Time Warner to make sure that content is streaming to devices in the home of a cable subscriber.

The notion here is that now that TVs have internet connections and computer chips, increasingly there is little difference between devices. But Time Warner Cable's app has taken things a step further by providing live TV, which erases the difference between traditional TV and devices like tablet computers.

Comcast's Xfinity iPad app streams TV to subscribers -- but only includes individual shows on demand. Comcast has a slightly different stake in all this than Time Warner Cable. Comcast owns a large stable of cable networks, while Time Warner Cable is a pipe to the home. But Comcast still believes it has all the rights Time Warner is asserting right now. "Our rights cover any device in the home and we want to be on all of them," said spokesman Alex Dudley.

But the networks might not see it that way, wanting to control distribution outside of the traditional TV with separate agreements for "TV Everywhere" services letting cable subscribers log in and access content via the internet. Networks also want to distribute content to as many different paying distributors as possible, as well as directly to the consumer.

But where it really gets complicated is when Time Warner Cable wants to extend this capability outside the home, which even cable execs say will require a different agreement with the networks.

Right now the content in Time Warner's app includes most pay-cable networks, but not broadcast or ESPN because Time Warner Cable hasn't worked out technologically how to synch local broadcasts or black out sporting events that aren't sold out locally. Time Warner Cable does have a "TV Everywhere" deal with ESPN, and Mr. Dudley says the technical issues for iPad access will be worked out soon.

This ratchets up the already contentious relationship between networks and cable and satellite operators. Cable watched in awe as the broadcast networks gave programming to Hulu while simultaneously demanding carriage fees from cable and satellite companies, a dispute which made its way into cable negotiations. Expect Time Warner Cable's app to add another layer that will play out at the negotiating table.
@Mediapost

Young Users Hating On Brands

Bad news for brands enamored with the possibility of connecting one on one with each and every consumer through the magic of social media: Young people don’t want to be friends with you. 

According to a new report from Forrester Research, just 6 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds who use the Web desire to be friends with a brand on Facebook—despite the fact that half of this demographic uses the site. 

Among Web-connected 18- to 24-year-olds that figure does double—meaning that 12 percent of that demo is OK with befriending brands—though the vast majority of young adults are not, per Forrester. 

Even scarier for brands: Young people don’t want brands' friendship, and they think brands should go away. “Many brands are looking to social media as a strong digital channel to communicate with these consumers, since it’s where 12- to 17-year-olds are spending so much time,” wrote Jacqueline Anderson, Forrester’s Consumer Insights Analyst, who authored the report. “But research shows that it is important to consider more than just consumers’ propensity to use a specific channel: Almost half of 12- to 17-year-olds don’t think brands should have a presence using social tools at all.” 

To arrive at these conclusions, Forrester surveyed 4,681 Americans aged 12-17 on the Web in September of last year. 

So what should brands do? According to Forrester’s report, they might be better off being more reactive than proactive, and they should listen. Just 16 percent of young consumers expect brands to use social media to interact with them, and 28 percent expect those brands to listen to what they say on social sites and get back to them. 

Regardless of their willingness to interact with brands, nearly three quarters of 12-17 year olds—74 percent—use social networks to talk about products with friends and make recommendations.


@Mike Shields

Magazines' iPad Editions Struggle to Keep Your Attention

Readers have more trouble focusing on magazines' iPad editions than publishers initially predicted, according to the latest study in a growing effort to figure out tablet computers.

"We thought that of course there's a lot of activity going on on an iPad, when there's so many things you can be doing -- between email, Netflix, playing games, reading magazines -- but they're actually bouncing around a lot more than we thought," said Megan Miller, research and development program director at Bonnier, which publishes titles including Popular Science, Field & Stream, Parenting and Ski.

iPad Popular Photography 
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"If you sit someone down with a magazine, within seconds they're researching the products that they could buy," Ms. Miller said. "If they see a snowboard in a snowboarding magazine, they'll bounce over to Amazon to check the prices on it."

The study, from Bonnier and ad agency CP&B, reflects findings from 15 focus groups in three cities that were designed to include heavy print magazine readers, heavy iPad users and heavy consumers of magazine content on the web. Next Bonnier and CP&B will try to apply the results to developing new ad formats for tablets. A pilot series of these ads will appear in the Popular Science iPad app late this spring.

It's already apparent that the study has implications for magazines. Publishers have been telling advertisers that their iPad editions combine print's ability to engross readers with digital media's interactivity. The way publishers have been building their apps, however, now seems to have given interactivity the upper hand.

That might be a good thing. People want to use digital magazines as "exploration springboards" and don't like content that seems like a dead end, the study found. And marketers will obviously be happy if iPad editions trigger a lot of shopping. But it also implies that publishers need to think about their goals for the iPad edition and how to get readers back once they've bounced off to Amazon or elsewhere.

"We wanted to figure out ways to make it possible and make it attractive for people to come back to the magazine content again and again," Ms. Miller said. "And we wanted to find reasons to get people to have more touchpoints with magazine content. And we wanted to find a way to make ads more interesting. So we did this study to dig in deeply and find out what exactly are the activities people have with magazines, how they interact with online magazine content vs. magazines on a tablet vs. a print magazine."

People often mistake editorial screens in iPad editions for ads, the Bonnier and CP&B study also found. "It was really strange," Ms. Miller said. "When there was a full-bleed whole page dedicated to a product, people said, 'Yeah, that's an ad.' And we selected people who were from an educated demographic. They were not dummies. So we realized that we need to do something to make it clear."

And unlike a Kindle, which can "drop away" from readers' minds as an e-book takes center stage, iPad users seem to always be aware, perhaps first and foremost, that they're using the device. People in the study said they weren't "reading," "playing" or "surfing"; they were just using an iPad.

The decisions that lead to reading a magazine's iPad edition, moreover, are very different than the decisions that lead to reading a print edition. People traditionally pick up magazines' print editions for a specific purpose. But they often pick up an iPad with "iPadding" in mind and only then decide what to do with it.

@Adweek

Will fingerprinting replace the "cookie"?

Several startups are experimenting with technologies that could completely overhaul the way connected devices are targeted and tracked.

Using new products from companies like BlueCava and Ringleader Digital, advertisers will be able to link and track individual consumers on their mobile phones, desktop PCs, tablet devices, games consoles, TVs - even their cars - and serve them ads based on activity across those devices.

They will do so using a process often referred to as device fingerprinting, an emerging device identification technique which could eventually replace the cornerstone of online measurement and data collection, the cookie.

When a connected device accesses content or services, it transmits bits of information about its properties and settings. For example, a smartphone might communicate details of which operating system and browser versions it's running, its time zone, and which carrier network it’s using, to name but a few.

These individual signals can be collected and pieced together to form a unique, persistent "fingerprint" for that specific device. That fingerprint can then be assigned an identifying number, and used for similar purposes as a cookie, such as ad targeting, frequency capping, and other forms of tracking.

Replacing the Cookie

The technology applies not only to mobile devices, however, but also to desktop computers, tablet devices, and potentially any device with a data connection.

"Our ultimate goal is to replace the cookie," David Norris, BlueCava's chairman and CEO, told ClickZ. "Cookies are temporary tattoos that fade away, but [fingerprints] don't fade away. Cookies had their point in time, but we've moved far enough along for a more sophisticated system now."

Because cookies reside on users' machines they are subject to deletion and expiration, and are rendered useless if a user decides to switch to a new browser, for example.

Fingerprints, however, track devices themselves, rather than the cookies placed on them. Even if the characteristics of a device change, its fingerprint is simply updated to reflect those changes. If, for example, a user upgrades his browser, the device can still be uniquely identified using other characteristics, and its fingerprint is simply altered to reflect the changes.

To illustrate the process Norris used an analogy of a person walking into a small grocery store two days in a row. The second time the person visits the store he might have changed his shirt, but the storeowner will still recognize him based on other characteristics such as height, hair color, and numerous other variables. In theory, just as no two shoppers are the same, neither are two devices.

Based on this principle, Norris said BlueCava's technology can uniquely identify a device 99.9 percent of the time using around 50 pieces of data broadcast from a desktop browser.

Mobile Devices, Tracking and Targeting

Besides desktop computers, fingerprinting technology has arguably more potential for mobile and tablet devices, which typically can't be tracked easily using cookies.

In light of that opportunity, Ringleader Digital has developed a similar technology to BlueCava, but is focusing its efforts squarely on the mobile ad market. Dubbing its Media Stamp product "the mobile equivalent of the desktop cookie," it can be used for similar purposes such as frequency capping, conversion tracking, and potentially behavioral and data-driven media buying opportunities also.

"We can uniquely and persistently identify the top 100 U.S. devices 100 percent of the time," Bob Walczak, CEO of Ringleader Digital, told ClickZ. "The issue in mobile has been that third party cookies work on less than 60 percent of devices, based on our testing. This is because the carriers strip them off at the gateway, the devices can't accept them, or they are shipped with third-party cookies turned off. There are so many different, fragmented market standards, so our aim was to create a single, simple solution," he said.

Ringleader has positioned itself as a technology provider, licensing its wares to publishers, ad networks, ad servers, and essentially any party with a use for them. Meanwhile stealth startup TapAd is in the process of developing a similar solution, but plans to focus more heavily on the direct provision of real-time bidded, data-driven opportunities for advertisers.

Tying Together Multiple Devices

Owing to the fact that a fingerprint can effectively last for the lifetime of a device, BlueCava's Norris described opportunities to identify relationships between numerous individual devices.

For example, if an e-commerce bookstore is using BlueCava's technology it can tie the unique fingerprint of a desktop PC to information about its user's behavior on the site, such as the books he or she viewed recently. If that user then signs into her account from a mobile device, the user could be served information on books tailored to her specific interests and past behaviors.

Of course, that type of customization is already possible through the use of login and account data, but once a user signs in from both devices BlueCava could assume a permanent relationship between the fingerprints of the two devices, whether they are logged in or not. In theory the bookstore could then serve ads to that user's desktop machine anywhere across the Internet, based on the last mobile browser session.

In another scenario the bookseller may choose to share that data with a third party which might also benefit from being aware of the association, such as a footwear retailer, for example. If the user visits the footwear retailer's mobile site, it could subsequently advertise to the user's desktop even though that machine has never interacted with its own site directly.

That capability could also aid cross-channel conversion attribution. For example, if the user transacts on a desktop, the advertiser may conclude that the purchase intent can be traced back to the user's initial ad view on a mobile device.

According to Norris, the multi-device opportunities aren't limited to mobile devices, desktops and tablets. He suggests any number of connected devices have the potential to be tracked and linked through fingerprints. The company is already exploring possibilities surrounding video games consoles and TV sets, and Norris suggests the same principle could even be applied to the systems embedded in cars.

In theory, BlueCava's technology could eventually be used to link and track your cellphone, desktop PC, tablet device, games console, TV, and car, and serve ads based on your activity on any or all of those devices.

Fingerprinting and Device Data

This concept of data sharing is a key part of BlueCava's offering, through what it calls the Device Reputation Exchange. Using a similar model to cookie-based data vendors such as BlueKai and eXelate, BlueCava's partners are invited to share their knowledge of each fingerprint's behaviors, effectively building up a profile specific to each device.

Advertisers can then dip into that pool and use the data to buy media on a real-time basis via ad exchanges and demand side platforms.

However, the advantage of using fingerprints versus cookies is their longevity and persistence, which enables richer and more thorough behavioral data sets to be tied to the devices, alongside the relationship data described above.

As a result, the technology could enable advertisers to buy audience-based media with increased confidence compared to existing cookie-based solutions across numerous platforms and devices.

According to Norris, BlueCava has identified "hundreds of millions of devices" to date, and expects to have identified over one billion devices by the end of the year. Each of the existing device fingerprints is already tied to some form of data in the Reputation Exchange.

Opting out and Privacy Implications

Both BlueCava and Ringleader offer consumers the opportunity to opt out of tracking and targeting, as do most major cookie-based technology providers. As government concerns surrounding online data collection continue to escalate, the prospect of a new tracking tool is likely to be heavily scrutinized.

According to Norris and Walczak however, opting out of fingerprint tracking is more effective than the cookie-based opt-outs currently being promoted by industry self-regulatory efforts such as the Digital Advertising Alliance.

Owing to the fact that a fingerprint lasts for the lifetime of a device, a user need only opt the device out once for it to be opted out forever, Norris said. Cookie-based opt-outs, meanwhile, last only for the lifetime of that cookie, which can be deleted or moved, and effectively opt the user back in as a result.

Norris suggested, therefore, that his company's technology already satisfies the "do-not track" principles currently being explored by the FTC, since it allows users to opt out of both tracking and targeting independently.


@clickz

Video View=Facebook Like?

When a "view" is counted on a site like YouTube, audiences and brands alike know what it means: someone chose to watch a video. Increasingly, there are a proliferation of video ads that capture the same characteristic, from pre-rolls giving viewers a choice of which ad to watch to skippable pre-rolls to in-banner units that viewers click to play.

Despite online video's massive growth -- daily unique video viewers grew 31.6% in the past year, according to ComScore -- metrics for pricing and measuring video advertising have not evolved in tandem. The primary way video advertising is bought and sold today is cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM). As Dave Morgan pointed out, CPM pricing in general has its limitations, leading to cross-comparisons that can be misleading, like comparing radio to TV. Online, CPM pricing equates a "clean-forward" video experience with a rich-media or display ad experience, despite proven differences in effectiveness. Further, as different ad formats proliferate in a pre-roll constrained world (e.g. click-to-play video ads) with a variety of pricing models, cross-comparisons can be difficult. 
To address this shortcoming, TubeMogul proposed and Google endorsed a new metric -- cost per view (CPV) -- to the IAB Digital Video Committee for review. CPV pricing would apply to all video ads that are user-initiated, distinguishing ads that viewers choose to watch from those that simply load by default within a video player or on a page, which would continue to be priced in "impressions." For example, a "view" would be counted for video ads watched through pre-roll ad selectors, completed pre-rolls that offered the viewer an option to "skip," or in-banner video ads that users click to watch. An "impression" would be logged for all other video ads.

Why define it this way? Viewer intention to watch an ad is widely seen as a proxy for whether a brand message is being delivered and consumed. In the next year, Kantar Media will release joint research with us analyzing specific benefits in detail. Early numbers from YouTube's TrueView in-stream ads -- which let viewers choose whether to watch an ad and only charge an advertiser if a viewer completes the ad -- are promising, with 20%-70% choosing to watch an ad. Still more research by Vivaki on Hulu's pre-roll ad selector also demonstrates the value in measuring user-initiated views.

Formalizing CPV at the ad server level would also bring clarity to advertisers that are currently buying both user-initiated and auto-initiated video with no ability to distinguish between the two since impression tags are used for both. More broadly, the proposal would likely broaden interest in video for advertisers of all types and sizes since marketers know more about what they are buying.

This proposal does not argue that all placements are created equal, or that viewer-initiated views are inherently more valuable. No one would argue that a pre-roll that automatically plays on a premium publisher site (i.e. Discovery Channel) without viewer choice is less valuable than a viewer-initiated view in low-end inventory. Nor does the proposal argue that simplified metrics, like a gross ratings point, should not exist for online video to provide cross-comparisons to metrics widely used for TV. What the framework provides is an additional level of detail on viewer engagement that never previously existed.

"The demand side of the market is looking for quality measures of engagement, which this proposal helps codify," said Bill Lederer, CEO of Kantar Video. "This just may be the next generation of work previously done by 'The Pool.' We are looking forward to conducting market studies on it.”

"If advertisers knew that they were buying viewers that were actually paying attention, I believe you would see budgets increase," Paul Kontonis, VP-brand content at Digitas. "Standardized 'cost per view' metrics and pricing get us much closer to that goal."

Most video advertising on the Web today is made by brands whose goal is simple: convey a message to captive audience. While "views" should not be viewed in a vacuum and are not a perfect metric, they provide additional detail to measure and price paid media on that basis. This additional level of detail would make it easier for brands of all sizes to adopt video advertising online. 

@Adweek

ComScore Releases “The 2010 Europe Digital Year in Review”

Report Showcases 2010 Digital Landscape in Europe and Highlights Trends for 2011

ComScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released The comScore 2010 Europe Digital Year in Review. This inaugural report provides a comprehensive overview of key trends in the European digital media landscape, including market-level data on user demographics, social networking, online video, mobile, and search in 18 European countries -- Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

“Europe is currently the world’s second largest digital market behind Asia Pacific and Europeans continue to embrace new online and mobile offerings. The key to tapping into this region is to understand the behaviour and individual market dynamics that contribute to it,” said Wolf Allisat, comScore EVP for International Markets. “Europe’s digital market is poised to keep expanding in 2011, and understanding where the growth occurs in a region as vast as this will be crucial for marketers looking to drive their business among Europe’s diversified markets.”

To download a complimentary copy of The comScore 2010 Europe Digital Year in Review , please visit: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/2010_Europe_Digital_Year_in_Review 

Social Activities and Mobile Lead Growth Prospects in Europe


In 2010, Europe saw growth in several key areas, in part due to continuing technology adoption across markets and game-changing developments in the digital world, such as the expansion of social networking platforms across existing third-party sites, strong growth of smartphones and mobile media usage, innovations in e-commerce, and rollout of new devices tailored for connected media consumption.

This report provides an in-depth look at various media platforms and usage categories across Europe. Key findings highlighted in the report include:

•                The Netherlands and United Kingdom led in engagement, with users in both markets spending approximately 25 percent more time online in a month than the European average of 24.3 hours. Europeans spent the most time on search, social networking, and directory sites, with Facebook garnering the largest share of Europeans’ time (11.7 percent) out of all media properties.

•                Europe experienced a 10.9 percentage gain in social networking penetration over 2010 – the highest seen in any global region. Facebook was the leading social networking sites in 15 out of the 18 markets. Local social networks in the Netherlands, Poland, and Russia continued to retain their majority share of the market.

•                Display advertising reached 97 percent of users in the UK, France, and Germany in December 2010. In all three markets, Social Networking was the leading publisher category serving display ads.

•                The use of online coupon sites in Europe grew by 162 percent in 2010, showing coupon sites emerging as a key driver of online consumer behavior. France, the UK and Italy led local markets in the use of online coupons and deals, with Italy showing the highest gain at a 15 percentage point increase in coupon site usage.

•                Although the number of unique online video viewers in Europe held steady overall, there was significant growth in video viewership to TV sites. By the end of 2010, 16.3 million viewers were watching videos on TV sites in Germany – an increase of 14 percent from last year.

•                Smartphone penetration in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy grew in 2010 to reach 31.1 percent of mobile users. This was fueled by high rates of adoption of the Google and Apple smartphone operating systems, with Google Android experiencing a 951-percent gain and Apple experiencing a 115-percent gain.

Search intensity in Europe varied across individual markets, with searchers in Poland exhibiting the highest average searches per searcher across all markets. Google continues to lead the search market in Europe, reaching 9 out of 10 Europeans. 

Local ads on Facebook

After years of fits and starts, Google's latest push into local online advertising suddenly looks serious -- and even professed internet novices like Barbara Oliver are noticing.

The owner of an eponymous boutique jeweler, Ms. Oliver depends on advertising to drive people to her hard-to-find third-floor shop in Williamsville, N.Y., near Buffalo. Not satisfied with TV and other advertising on which she spent $40,000 last year, she hired a consultant who bought $50 a month worth of Google search ads targeted to an 80-mile radius around Buffalo and set up a web page in the Google Places local directory service. That netted her enough new business that she has slashed her other ad spending by 40%. "Now I'm getting more people who say they found me on Google," Ms. Oliver said.

Google aims to reach many of the millions of other businesses like Ms. Oliver's that want to attract potential customers nearby. After failing to crack radio and print advertising several years ago and still struggling in TV ads, Google views local online advertising -- both by national brands and by smaller businesses such as restaurants and plumbers -- as a juicy target. "It's a big focus for me this year," said Susan Wojcicki, Google's senior VP-product management and the search giant's top ad products executive. "It's a huge opportunity where we can do things we haven't done before."

Google in recent months has unleashed a flurry of new local services and ad formats and expanded others. In an especially noticeable change to its search results, last October it tweaked its search engine to make local businesses and listings, including Google Places, much more prominent in response to a likely local-oriented query. The same month, Google moved Marissa Mayer, its high-profile VP-search products and user experience, to VP-consumer products, where her main job will be developing new geographic and local services.

"The core piece is really making the local business work," said Ms. Mayer. Google's overriding goal in local advertising, she said, is to anticipate what people might want -- a nearby restaurant, theater, or mechanic depending on their location, search history and other data -- before they actually know it. "Can we help a user find something useful to them without their specifically asking in a search query?" she asked.

If it can, that could pay off on the ad side. The online piece of the venerable $91 billion local business, whose sales channels include everything from Yellow Pages and newspaper ads to Google search ads and online directories such as CitySearch, will grow 18% this year, to $15.9 billion, according to market researcher Borrell Associates. That's more than online advertising overall, forecast for 14% growth.

The reason is simple: For all the fancy behavioral targeting based on your clickstream or purchase history, one prosaic data point may work best to attract potential customers: where you are. Advertisers quite often know the answer to that today, thanks to a raft of relatively recent developments, among them an explosion in net-connected mobile phones with Global Positioning System capabilities and social networks such as Facebook and Foursquare where people reveal their locations.

Google's interest in local advertising is partly defensive. New marketing methods and channels, from social network Facebook to daily-deal service Groupon to review site Yelp offer merchants and service providers simpler and sometimes cheaper alternatives to Google's search ads. Borrell expects search-ad spending by small- and medium-sized businesses to fall by 10% by 2015 as a result. Facebook, in particular, just became the most-popular marketing channel for local businesses, with 70% using it vs. 66% that use Google's search ads, according to a recent survey of 8,500 businesses by small-business social network MerchantCircle.

Boutique jewelry owner Barbara Oliver relies on Google search ads to promote her shop.

Google's local efforts date back to late 2005, when it opened a directory called the Local Business Center, renamed Google Places last April. Some 6 million businesses worldwide have claimed Places pages. But until recently, the company has struggled to come up with compelling new services for users and advertisers. Its Latitude location service is scarcely mentioned next to Foursquare's. Google also reportedly offered $6 billion to buy Groupon, only to be turned down in December.

Most of all, Google's AdWords search-ad system, which requires businesses to choose and bid on ad-triggering keywords, is often seen as too complex and time-consuming for most local businesses, which are more accustomed to simple, fixed-price Yellow Pages ads. "AdWords is like sitting in the cockpit of a 747 when you only know how to ride a bike," said Catherine Hillen-Rulloda, owner of Avante Gardens Florist in Anaheim, Calif.

Two ad formats rolled out last year are intended to remedy that. The first was Tags, which for $25 a month lets merchants buy a yellow pushpin on Google.com and on Google Maps highlighting their location. Google said tens of thousands of businesses are using them. Another product, launched nationally in late January, is Boost. Advertisers fill out a short business description, list a web page or free Google Place page listing, and set a budget as low as $50 a month, and the system creates an ongoing, automated search campaign.

To sell these ad products, Google has taken another leaf out of the Yellow Page publishers' playbook. Their local sales forces still hold sway among many time-strapped small businesses that buy an ad only because someone shows up at their door pushing them into it. "The hard nut to crack is the mom-and-pop operations," said Richard Holden, product management director for local ads. So last year, in a marked departure from its self-serve ad systems, Google hired several hundred sales people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere to promote Boost and Tags. It's uncertain how many more feet on the street Google will hire; reseller partners such as Yellow Pages publishers ultimately may handle most of those sales.

For everything Google's doing, its rivals aren't standing still either -- especially fellow digital natives. Yelp, which pitches itself as the last place consumers stop before spending money at a local business, attracts 45 million unique visitors a month to its 15 million reviews. It sells advertisers bundles of enhanced listings pages and search ads for $300 to $1,000 a month.

Others are teaming up to fight Google. Last month, pay-per-call ad startup Yext launched a $99-a-month program for small businesses to place a yellow tag similar to Google Tags on a dozen local-listings sites, including Citysearch, Yellowbook and MapQuest. CityGrid Media, an IAC unit that owns listing and review sites Citysearch, Insider Pages, and Urbanspoon promotes its local-ad and content network as an alternative to Google's local efforts. Facebook has introduced enhanced "Pages" for businesses and other groups, location check-ins and deal offers in addition to the locally targeted ads it has long offered.

Groupon has grown from an idea to more than $500 million in revenue in less than two years, largely on deals offered by local businesses. The big challenge Groupon and rivals such as LivingSocial present to Google as well as media companies, said Borrell Associates CEO Gordon Borrell, is that they're making advertising itself less relevant: Businesses don't pay until they notch a sale.

@adage