Targeting Well-defined Audience Segments

Accessing the Internet at high speeds has several positive effects on Internet usage resulting in higher connectivity and new sorts of services.

Due to better transparency today its possible to reach one's audience when they are searching online, while researching a product or service and when they are spending time online on activities like social networking or watching videos.

I'm expecting more new touch-points in 2008 due to an evolving digital landscape, just thinking of innovative messaging services...

Phantastic capture, taken at Playa Chica, Tarifa, Spain, southernmost point of Europe.

Labels: advertising, bizdev, photos, spain, travel

  ¶ 'Targeting Well-defined Audience Segments' posted by eA : 7:41 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Consumer Recomendations more Influencing than ever Trends and consumer reactions in terms of communications and marketing can best be monitored in blogs and other consumer-generated media like web pages, newsgroups, emails sent-to companies, chat lines, forums and message boards.

A recent study from eMarketer showed that consumer opinions are no longer a local phenomenon: Word-of-mouth works worldwide and is more effective than traditional forms of advertising.

'Yet more than three-quarters of consumers surveyed worldwide find that consumer opinions are the most effective form of advertising, according to a Nielsen study.'

Web 2.0 features give control to the user, increase brand loyalty and customer retention and can make products and services benefit from a word-of-mouth.

Here are some more significant success factors:

• Strong brand
• Highly automatized work flow
• Media-compatible staged content
• Low problem cases
• Mastering rapid changes in technology
  
• High stability at payment solutions and CMS

As experience showed easy to use tools do have a huge impact on the way people and companies interact in communications, digital media and business. Putting increasing efforts into successful website operations with a focus on making consumer opinions an essential part of a website can result in making a profit, generating significant online revenues, developing online branding, creating successful online products or attracting subscriptions.

Labels: advertising, ecommerce, markets, web2.0

  ¶ 'Consumer Recomendations more Influencing than ever' posted by eA : 12:18 AM  0 comments links to this post

  2007 Year of Third Party Widget Developers As the market dynamics and content delivery systems change 2007 is the year of widgets. I've written already about Current and Future eCommerce Challenges leveraging network effects, Web Widgets as a Distribution Channel, of course Facebook's Open Platform as a Serious Trend for Future Marketing and Facebook Sets Trend for Distributed Networks.

Web widgets bring the Web to you, prominent use is iGoogle (released a set of tools in 2005 called Fusion), Google's personalized start-pages are frequently used as an information resource and a preferred place to personalize trust worth and up-to-date news and services via gadgets.

Inspired by the success of iGoogle, Google introduced a new pilot program dedicated to helping developers create richer, more useful Google Gadgets: Google Gadget Ventures

1. Grants of $5,000 to those who’ve built gadgets we’d like to see developed further. You’re eligible to apply for a grant if you’ve developed a gadget that’s in our Google gadgets directory and gets at least 250,000 weekly page views. To apply, you must submit a one-page proposal detailing how you’d use the grant to improve your gadget.
2. Seed investments of $100,000 to developers who’d like to build a business around the Google gadgets platform. Only Google Gadget Venture grant recipients are eligible for this type of funding. Submitting a business plan detailing how you plan to build a viable business around the gadgets platform is a required part of the seed investment application process.

Recently comScore introduced a new report called comScore Widget Metrix to serve advertisers wich relevant facts:

'“The recent explosion of user-generated content has helped create a worldwide marketplace for widgets,” said Linda Boland Abraham, executive vice president at comScore. “comScore is excited to be providing measurement for this developing content medium.”'

'comScore’s analysis of the top ten Web widgets worldwide revealed that photo-related widgets dominate the top positions. In April 2007, Slide was the top widget provider with a worldwide reach of more than 117 million unique viewers, or 13.8 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience. Other top photo-related widgets included RockYou (82 million viewers), PictureTrail (31 million viewers), and Photobucket (28 million viewers). '

'As more and more sites across the Internet employ Web widgets, the worldwide penetration will continue to grow. In April, widget penetration was highest in North America where 40.3 percent of Internet users visited a Web site with an embedded widget, followed by Western Europe (24.3 percent) and Latin America (17.5 percent).'

And of course there is already applications for the newly released Apple iPhone. I'm excited to watch this development to take off in the mobile space.

Labels: advertising, apple, google, networking, widgets

  ¶ '2007 Year of Third Party Widget Developers' posted by eA : 12:53 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Promoting Google Checkout with AdSense Referrals Just discovered referrals for Google Apps and Checkout:

Google Checkout:

'When a user you refer to Google Checkout has an account in good standing and completes a transaction of at least $10 (before tax and shipping) within 90 days of sign-up, we'll credit your AdSense account with US $1.'More on Checkout

Google Apps:

'You will be credited (US $5) when someone clicks your referral and signs up for Google Apps with a domain that has not already been signed up for the service. The domain must then have one or more Google Apps email accounts in use for four consecutive weeks.' More on Productivity

Labels: advertising, checkout, google

  ¶ 'Promoting Google Checkout with AdSense Referrals' posted by eA : 4:00 PM  1 comments links to this post

  eBay back to Google Advertising When Google announced two weeks ago it would hold a Checkout party that coincided with the beginning of eBay Live!, eBay announced that they would take away all their US ad spending and they did it, but for the purpose of an experiment and treatment to find out how dependent on Google Advertising they are. The timing was just a coincidence. Via internetnews.com:

eBay spokesman Hani Durzy said 'that while eBay was pleased Google canceled the controversial "Freedom Party," the timing of its experiment was mere coincidence.'

Well, if eBay wouldn't need Google Advertising... eBay depends on the traffic from Google namly both, organic and non organic traffic, but Google does not depend on the traffic from eBay - and it's a global marketplace and I'm expecting Google to gain further market share in the search category. Via internetnews.com:

"We are now slowly turning AdWords back on, in a much more limited way than before," eBay spokeswoman Catherine England told internetnews.com in an email.

In a statement emailed to internetnews.com, Google said eBay remains a valued partner: "Over the last seven years, we have worked closely with eBay to drive customers to their site and build value for their business and the business of their sellers. We look forward to a continued partnership."

Google and eBay created the two most successful business models, search and auctions, on the Internet, but expanding into new markets led to an increasing competition in several other products and services (Rebranding into Google Product Search).

Google Base and Google Product Search compete with Craigslist, Kijiji, Shopping.com and of course eBay and the last year launched Google Checkout competes with PayPal, especially with the PayPal Express Checkout, where Google Checkout recently surpassed PayPal Express Checkout in terms of customer adoption, view interesting comments here.

More on Checkout:

• Google Checkout Surpassed PayPal Express Checkout (US)
• Google eBay Collision after eBay Live!
• Google's Integrated Checkout Strategy
• Current and Future eCommerce Challenges

Labels: advertising, checkout, ebay, ecommerce, google

  ¶ 'eBay back to Google Advertising' posted by eA : 8:20 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Increasing Demand for Online Video and Rich Media Advertising The latest report from PointTopic shows that the world broadband closes in on 300 million subscribers in Q1/2007 with the top 10 broadband nations holding three quarters of the world broadband subscriptions (USA 60,362,830; China 56,258,499; Japan 26,533,000; Germany 16,142,750; France 15,304,900; South Korea 14,102,888; UK 13,953,000; Italy 9,348,250; Canada 8,010,139; Spain 7,185,932) and with the number of broadband subscribers within the OECD increasing by 26% during 2006 further growth is for sure.

Accessing the Internet at high speeds has several positive effects on Internet usage resulting in higher connectivity and new sorts of services. Clickz News reports that 'advertising online will nearly double by 2011 and broadband adoption will increase demand for video and rich media advertising':

"The major source of growth in the Internet area is from advertising budgets being moved from traditional to online media," said Karsten Weide, program director, Digital Marketplace: New Media and Entertainment at IDC. "At the biggest risk are newspapers and broadcast television; every single traditional media will lose revenue to online advertising."

I think the more we zap TV ads, the more important it becomes for brands to integrate products and services into the video programming and deliver an emotional outstanding experience for the audiences.

Video has become one of the strongest growing fields on the Web - Google Video Search recently gave its strategy a new direction towards a more comprehensive video search engine differentiating itself from YouTube incorporating more popular Web video sites.


Searchable sites include Yahoo! Video, MySpace, Vimeo, Veoh, AOL Video, Revver, Guba, YouTube, Google Video and more, which make it the most comprehensive video search engine providing best coverage far beyond 50% of the current free online video market making even fancy videos findable without swapping the search engine. Further expansions could include this list of video sites.

A frame on top of the page displaying the video search field including related items and the search result item page below represent the new item page.

With a current Web video market share of 45% YouTube dominates the Online Video market with an attractive user audience loving Internet-based clips and videos they can view, listen, interact with and participate when, what and how they want.

YouTube experiments with its embeddable player version displaying related videos. It might have the potential to increase the number of delivered web videos with several viral options at the end of the video.


As the market dynamics and content delivery systems change a user doesn't have to care about video standards any more, just upload a film and the website does the rest for one - Blogger in Draft recently got a new video upload feature. More:

• Current Business Models for Free Online Video
• Google Reader Supports Video Now
• Trendy: More Online Video Entertainment in 2007
• Web Widgets as a Distribution Channel for Advertising

Labels: advertising, branding, markets, trend

  ¶ 'Increasing Demand for Online Video and Rich Media Advertising' posted by eA : 4:05 PM  0 comments links to this post

  Web Widgets as a Distribution Channel for Advertising Web widgets bring the Web to you, prominent use is iGoogle (released a set of tools in 2005 called Fusion), Google's personalized start-pages are frequently used as an information resource and a preferred place to personalize trust worth and up-to-date news and services via gadgets.

As the market dynamics and content delivery systems change Web widgets or gadgets, badges, modules, capsules, snippets, minis and flakes, embeddable chunks of code written in Adobe Flash or JavaScript represent an application of a third party with a destination target including social networks, blogs, wikis, personal homepages and even desktops have proven to be an excellent way to distribute the message to the end-user.

With Facebook's new strategy for further expansion focusing on distribution deals 'Facebook as an Open Platform' resulting in an explosive growth for both, the social network and the services benefiting from a word-of-mouth and of course ground-breaking networking technologies and disciplines setting a serious trend for the future, Web widgets as a very successful way to distribute the message to the end-user might be the end of the page view as a metric for measuring a site’s popularity.

comScore introduced a new report called comScore Widget Metrix:

'“The recent explosion of user-generated content has helped create a worldwide marketplace for widgets,” said Linda Boland Abraham, executive vice president at comScore. “comScore is excited to be providing measurement for this developing content medium.”'

'comScore’s analysis of the top ten Web widgets worldwide revealed that photo-related widgets dominate the top positions. In April 2007, Slide was the top widget provider with a worldwide reach of more than 117 million unique viewers, or 13.8 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience. Other top photo-related widgets included RockYou (82 million viewers), PictureTrail (31 million viewers), and Photobucket (28 million viewers). '

'As more and more sites across the Internet employ Web widgets, the worldwide penetration will continue to grow. In April, widget penetration was highest in North America where 40.3 percent of Internet users visited a Web site with an embedded widget, followed by Western Europe (24.3 percent) and Latin America (17.5 percent).'

Popular widget platforms include Widgetbox, Clearspring, GoodWidgets, I'm expecting more companies opening up their platform to optimize value, to broaden reach and to attract the attention of niche markets and markets that did not exist before.

Labels: advertising, markets, networking, web2.0, widgets

  ¶ 'Web Widgets as a Distribution Channel for Advertising' posted by eA : 11:35 AM  0 comments links to this post