The online advertising world is moving so fast that I can’t hardly keep up with it — just in the last few days, the MarketingVox e-newsletter has delivered a slew of stories that suggest new opportunities for campaigns and advocacy groups to spread their messages online:
- Social networking advertising frenzy. eMarketer predicts some $900 million in advertising on social networking sites for 2007 — and $2.5 billion by 2011.
- Behavioral targeting. Yahoo’s introducing ad targeting based on users’ online activity to their advertising network, and MySpace plans to do the same for ads on its site — trying to get a more valuable slice of that soc net advertising pie.
- Online purchasing of offline ads. Google radio and print ads are useful, but what about TV? Ebay’s TV time purchasing system is getting some use, and the “Television Bureau of Advertising (TVB) said 21 broadcast groups and two rep firms have signed up for TVB’s new ‘ePort’ eBusiness platform, which will let advertisers, agencies, broadcasters and station reps electronically send media proposals for stations’ airtime, Web sites, local digital channels and other digital platforms.”
- Going mobile, locally. Gannett is complementing its hyper-local focus with 100 locally targeted sites optimized for cell phones and including ads.
- Wanted: political advertising. Online ad network BlueLithium is packaging its services with political campaigns and advocacy groups in mind, though Clickz sounds a bit skeptical about whether or not they’re offering anything new. Nice quotes from online politics veterans Michael Bassik and Eric Frenchman.
Special bonus article! Be sure to check out yesterday’s Wired piece on Google search advertising by the presidential campaigns. What opportunities are they missing? Who’s doing it right?
– cpd
Re: the last item about buying Keywords on Google. This tactic was a very big deal in this year’s French presidential campaign. Sarkozy’s party used it to great effect (recruited supporters in the hundreds per day at dirt-cheap rates). So, drawing on that experience, let me speculate about what’s going to happen next in the U.S:
– candidates will get a clue and start buying Adwords with their name, but also the name of their opponents (hint: the latter won’t like and will take it out on Google)
– everytime there’ll be big news (hurricane, breaking news, Paris Hilton’s latest…) which tends to draw lots of eyeballs to Google, expect the whatever-happened-today keyword to point to the page of a candidate’s site with his/her position on the topic du jour
– opponents will urge their supporters to engage in whack-an-adword games (also known as click fraud) to cost as much money per click as possible to the other campaign and drive up cost of acquisition of a new visitor to the advertiser’s site. Hint: there’s something quirky about Google Adsense’s algorithm that actually makes the ad even more relevant, thus visible to web surfers when lots of people click on it, making the manoeuver counter-productive over time.
– Every time candidate A will say something bold or stupid, expect a google adword to appear with that very statement, and a direct link to some YouTube video showing a different statement exhumed from the past.
Wanna bet on this? 😉