That’s the word from Rupert Murdoch’s keynote interview at the McGraw-Hill Digital Media Summit in New York yesterday. And that number is growing at a rate of 30% per quarter.
Tag Archives: advertising
dMarc founders leave Google
Looks like Google’s plans to reinvent the way radio ads are bought has hit a rough spot. Online Media Daily reports Chad and Ryan Steelberg, the founders of dMark, an automated radio ad placement company purchased by Google in January 2006, have left the company.
The brothers resigned amid reports of growing tension between dMarc, the company they founded, and Google over differing approaches to radio ad sales. There was also said to be tension over the limited remuneration dMarc could expect under the performance-based terms of its original deal with Google.
Get A Mac: Surgery, Sabotage, and Tech Support
In the first new Mac ad, PC is getting surgery in order to receive all sorts of upgrades to run Windows Vista. Tech Support involves the PC receiving a camera upgrade (via masking tape to the head) so that he can do important business things like videoconference, only to find out that Macs come with built-in iSights now so they don’t need to upgrade. In Sabotage, the PC has decided to sabotage the commercial altogether and replace the Mac with another actor who says everything the PC wants him to say. [Infinite Loop]
The men and/or women responsible for writing these commercials are the very same people that played Keep-Away with the fat kid’s hat a lunch time in the 7th grade. Until he cried.
Google deal with CBS Radio imminent?
Merrill Lynch broadcast analyst Jessica Reif Cohen expects Google will team with a CBS Radio in a wide-ranging advertising deal. In a nutshell, Google would allow advertisers to bid for radio airtime using some of the same functionality as its online sales tool. But again, no deal has been announced.
Cohen estimated that a Google deal to sell 10% of CBS Radio’s advertising inventory would generate approximately $200 million in revenues and that the upside for CBS would be two-fold: “1) attracting new (likely smaller) advertisers to its platforms a la Google’s experience with search, and 2) creating a more efficient sales model that reduces the friction/cost of selling advertising.” [LostRemote]
Marketing through cell phones
Brandweek has a good article on how marketing on cell phones is finally starting to work:
“Crammed into his seat on his way into Manhattan, a businessman uses his cell phone to log onto Weather.com just to see if there’s some sunshine on the way (“Seventeen inches of snow expected by the weekend.”) Just then, a bright blue banner ad with white lettering pops up on and grabs his attention: “Aruba” …He clicks on the banner ad, and his phone dials an 800 number, connecting him to an Aruba Tourism booking agent. “
The article includes several good examples.
Why social media is important to marketers
I don’t know how old this info is (or how accurate) because I can’t find the original post, which is somewhere on the Church of the Customer Blog. Bart Cleveland includes these factoids in a recent post at Small Agency Diary (AdAge.com) to underscore why social media is important to marketers:
- By March 2006, 84 million Americans had broadband at home, a 40% jump from 2005 figures
- By March 2006, Pew estimated 48 million Americans were regular online content creators
- By the end of 2005, 139 million people in the world had a DSL (broadband) connection
- In 2005, $6.7 billion worth of digital cameras were sold in the U.S.
- About 41% of all cell phone owners use them as content tools
- By the end of 2005, just over 1 billion people were online — that’s 1/6th of the world
- Asia represents the world’s most populous online segment
- By July 2006, 50 million blogs had been created and their number was doubling every 6 months
- About 7,200 new blogs are created every hour
- By 2006, 10 million people were listening to podcasts in 2006; by 2010, it’s expected to be 50 million people
- About 100 million videos are viewed every day on YouTube; about 65,000 videos uploaded every day
- In 2006, MySpace had over 100 million registered members, most of them from the U.S.
Talent more important than size
That is one of the lessons of Web 2.0, according to AdWeek’s Bob Greenberg:
“Long before they became global behemoths, the great (advertising) agencies of the past were small businesses built around people of uncanny creative ability. What’s amazing is that our competition in the future will come from exactly where we started: small teams of creative geniuses with ideas galore on how to capture the hearts and minds of consumers. Only now they probably don’t work in agencies. At the same time, they have a fully democratized means of content distribution that doesn’t rely on captive audiences. Lesson No. 2: Talent is more important than size.”
Good look at the Google Ad Creation Marketplace
Can Google Audio Ads be as easy and effesctive as Google AdWords? That was the question Donna Bogatin (Digital Markets) put to André Bergeron, owner/operator of Babble-On Recording Studios. She wanted “a radio production talent insider take” on how the Google Ad Creation Marketplace will impact the radio advertising industry. Bergeron seems to know what he’s talking about.
“Dollar-A-Holler Radio ads have been around forever. The local Hi-Fi Store owner could always go into the local station and bark off a series of sale prices in shrill tones that would annoy anyone within earshot. This would be no different, really. There is so much more to effective messaging, to branding, to understanding how people listen to the radio than simply writing down “for all your underwear needs” and handing it off to Johnny promo voice to record.
Part of why people can’t stand listening to the radio is the quality of the ads, they’re, by most estimations, shouted, boring, and insultingly simplistic, and, if there are a lot of them, it just magnifies the mind-numbing nature of them.”
I think that sentence really sums it up. That reality will ultimately prove to be The Big Problem for radio going forward. Shitty commercials in an era when we no longer have to listen to them in order to hear the news and music we want.
Andre Bergeron emails an additional thought:
“Throughout a programming day, the station dresses itself with a carefully crafted image using music, personalities, promotions, etc – to create “a brand”, if you will. Then a stopset comes on and it’s like the advertisers are allowed to dress the station in clown’s clothes, leisure suites or horizontal stripes.”
When advertisements become recommendations
“As we move to an age where the only true advertisements are recommendations, what is the role of the traditional advertisement going forward? Recommendations I understand. They can come in many shapes and forms. People you know and trust telling you about products and services they like … A matching engine that takes your “buying” intentions and connects them with someone else’s “selling” intentions.”
[JP Rangaswami via gaping void]
How Google Audio Ads work (PowerPoint slides)
The folks at ZDNet’s Digital Markets have some PowerPoint slides that illustrates how Google Audio Ads work. And this from Voices.com:
“Google has positioned the Audio Ads system to serve both top-level advertisers, as well as the advertising agencies themselves. The graphic also shows 75% of the transactions coming from the agencies, and only 25% from independent advertisers. This is likely because advertising agencies already have media planning and media buying personnel, not to mention existing relationships with local and regional radio stations.”
The lables in the little blue rectangles are: Radio Stations, Networks and Rep Firms. Which suggests that advertisers will simply have another option for placing their ads on radio stations. And if Google can make it easier or cheaper or more effective (i.e. feedback, reports, etc)… they’ve added value to the process.