Here is my very subjective take on 2007.
1) Google buys doubleclick
The number one in search and the company with the largest ad network on the planet decided that it’s was time to put some (ad)sense into it! Buying doubleclick Google looks set to become the worlds leading display advertiser. I am already looking forward to what the Mountain View people will buy this year.
2) Facebook launches social media ads
Zero to one million members in Norway in one year is not too bad. But for me it was the launch of their advertising concept that was the big story. Global reach, local presence with endless targeting possibilities. Still in its infancy it can only get better and I project a 2008 packed with news from facebook.
3) Microsoft enters the online advertising race buying Aquantive and a small stake in facebook
2007 was the year that Steve Balmer decided that he would not only talk about Google but actually try and do something. The Aquantive deal will bring opportunities across Microsoft channels that hopefully can give many of them a boost. What Microsoft and facebook are up to, I don’t really know.
4) Marketer’s world wide realizes that Second life is just that and that they won’t have to close shop in real life just yet!
Thank God this hype worn off during the first part of the year. I am not saying it’s not interesting, I am just saying that there is so much else more interesting.
5) Iphone
It came, it looked good and it conquered! People bought it and they started to surf the web. Numbers from UK shows that 60 % of Iphone users move about 25 MB of data back and forward per month. Only 2% of other mobile phone owners move the same amount of data. The floodgates are open, the ad dollars will start to move towards the cell phone in 2008. And did I mention that it looked good?
6) Search conquers Europe outside UK
Staggering growth numbers all over the continent and finally the media agencies and big advertiser are starting to see the light. The only problem is that many of the newly convinced see SEM as the only online solution, need to stop that! Mantra for 2008: SEM targets existing demand it doesn’t necessarily create more demand.
7) How difficult it was to find enough people!
Young people all over the world unite! Come and work with online media, we need you!
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Not exactly Fawlty Towers, by Even Aas-Eng
This blog is about the digital environment but I have taken the liberty this time to talk about something completely different. I think that we can call it marketing!
In November my wife and I went to Prague for a relaxing long weekend. As usually we had spent numerous hours online researching hotels and we ended up with hotel Icon. The Icon is a sleek, cool, boutique hotel just of the main street and their main selling point was that they had Hästen beds. A good selling strategy indeed!
The hotel was great, very cool rooms, great food and they served breakfast 24/7. Why anyone hasn’t done that before is beyond me!
But the most fantastic thing about the hotel was the service. The Icon is a small hotel and has a very intimate feel to it and it’s the absolutely amazing staff that provides this feeling. Service not only with a smile but with a genuine smile.
Ok, so we where very happy with our stay and we where absolutely sure that we would book again for our next trip to Prague. Then we where hit with some serious CRM!
Yesterday I received a letter from the Icon hotel. I thought they finally had found out that we had emptied out the mini-bar during our last night and here was the bill…
But no, the letter was no less than a happy birthday card from the Icon hotel (my birthday is today) and it was signed personally by all members of the staff.
So easy, yet so effective. The Icon went from being a great hotel to the greatest hotel in a split second.
I promised you some marketing and here it is. If you are going to Prague you most stay at the Icon hotel. It’s by far the best hotel in Prague and one of the best in Europe. You might think it’s expensive but you are wrong! A suite is about 200 EUR per night which is a bargain considering that you sleep in a 2x2 meter hästen bed and are pampered by the greatest hotel staff anywhere in the world.
Ok I maybe went a bit over the top there but its really a fantastic place, check it out at http://www.iconhotel.eu/en/welcome.php or look at the tripadvisor reviews here: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g274707-d646535-Reviews-The_Icon_Hotel-Prague_Bohemia.html
Just disregard the first review from some old stuck up Americans!
Merry Xmas!
In November my wife and I went to Prague for a relaxing long weekend. As usually we had spent numerous hours online researching hotels and we ended up with hotel Icon. The Icon is a sleek, cool, boutique hotel just of the main street and their main selling point was that they had Hästen beds. A good selling strategy indeed!
The hotel was great, very cool rooms, great food and they served breakfast 24/7. Why anyone hasn’t done that before is beyond me!
But the most fantastic thing about the hotel was the service. The Icon is a small hotel and has a very intimate feel to it and it’s the absolutely amazing staff that provides this feeling. Service not only with a smile but with a genuine smile.
Ok, so we where very happy with our stay and we where absolutely sure that we would book again for our next trip to Prague. Then we where hit with some serious CRM!
Yesterday I received a letter from the Icon hotel. I thought they finally had found out that we had emptied out the mini-bar during our last night and here was the bill…
But no, the letter was no less than a happy birthday card from the Icon hotel (my birthday is today) and it was signed personally by all members of the staff.
So easy, yet so effective. The Icon went from being a great hotel to the greatest hotel in a split second.
I promised you some marketing and here it is. If you are going to Prague you most stay at the Icon hotel. It’s by far the best hotel in Prague and one of the best in Europe. You might think it’s expensive but you are wrong! A suite is about 200 EUR per night which is a bargain considering that you sleep in a 2x2 meter hästen bed and are pampered by the greatest hotel staff anywhere in the world.
Ok I maybe went a bit over the top there but its really a fantastic place, check it out at http://www.iconhotel.eu/en/welcome.php or look at the tripadvisor reviews here: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g274707-d646535-Reviews-The_Icon_Hotel-Prague_Bohemia.html
Just disregard the first review from some old stuck up Americans!
Merry Xmas!
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Facebooks flying start, by Even Aas-Eng
Things move fast in the online media world. So fast that the product facebook flyer pro that was launched a couple of weeks back is already gone and replaced by facebook social ads! But it’s still the same product so it doesn’t really matter. So my plan with this post was to dig a bit deeper into what effect facebooks latest move has on the online advertising world. I briefly touched this in my last post and I will go further into details in this one.
So what is facebook social ads? Well it’s a mix between a text and a simple display ad. Whats “social” about it? You can target your ad based on “social” parameters. When you create the ad you first pick the country you want to show it in. Then facebook tells you how many people that have a profile in that country (940.000 profiles in Norway) After that you start with your segmentation. You decide if you want to target females or males, you choose age, political views, education background, religious view and relationship status. If you like you can also target people based on interest and where they work. You can segment your campaign all the way down to 20 people.
So how will this work for a brand advertiser? Pretend that you are the Swiss watch maker IWC and that you have a few people in the Norwegian market that are potential clients of yours. You create your facebook ad by choosing the following:
Country: Norway
Gender: Male
Age: 30-65
Education: College Graduate, Major in Business
Political views: conservative
Relationship status: singles and people in relationships
Interest: investing, watches, wine
Workplace: ABG, Artic Securities, Orkla Finans, Glitnir, Enskilda
The point is that you can define your target group pretty precisely. And I am pretty sure that hypothetical campaign above would be quite successful. Now think about how much a company like IWC would be willing to pay for such segmentation… Obviously this is just an example and a profile like this probably doesn’t exist in Norway but it makes a point.
You can use the system for extremely targeted campaigns like my example but also for campaigns where reach is key. If you want to reach Norwegian females between 20-35 you have about 250.000 profiles at your disposal. So it’s a tool for large brand advertisers and small local businesses and it’s a tool for targeted niche campaigns and those who need volume. It covers both the head and the end of Mr Andersons long tail…
In my last post I mentioned something about facebook flyer being an adwords killer. It isn’t but it will be one of the only alternatives to Google’s adsense system that has huge reach and targeting possibilities. So it’s not a threat to Google but a great supplement for advertisers. If it where to be a threat they need other publisher than just their own site.
But interestingly enough facebooks ad move probably tells us a lot about what Microsoft and Google are launching pretty soon. Segmentation across communities, news sites, blogs, e-commerce sites and IM tools. This is why they bought Doubleclick and Aquantive. Imagine placing your ad within Google’s adsense network on the criteria from my example above. That makes contextual advertising look kinda bleak don’t you think?
So in conclusion; Hooray for facebook social ads and lets wait for Google and Microsoft
If you want to read more about facebook social ads and their polling tool! You should read this http://www.facebook.com/ads/
So what is facebook social ads? Well it’s a mix between a text and a simple display ad. Whats “social” about it? You can target your ad based on “social” parameters. When you create the ad you first pick the country you want to show it in. Then facebook tells you how many people that have a profile in that country (940.000 profiles in Norway) After that you start with your segmentation. You decide if you want to target females or males, you choose age, political views, education background, religious view and relationship status. If you like you can also target people based on interest and where they work. You can segment your campaign all the way down to 20 people.
So how will this work for a brand advertiser? Pretend that you are the Swiss watch maker IWC and that you have a few people in the Norwegian market that are potential clients of yours. You create your facebook ad by choosing the following:
Country: Norway
Gender: Male
Age: 30-65
Education: College Graduate, Major in Business
Political views: conservative
Relationship status: singles and people in relationships
Interest: investing, watches, wine
Workplace: ABG, Artic Securities, Orkla Finans, Glitnir, Enskilda
The point is that you can define your target group pretty precisely. And I am pretty sure that hypothetical campaign above would be quite successful. Now think about how much a company like IWC would be willing to pay for such segmentation… Obviously this is just an example and a profile like this probably doesn’t exist in Norway but it makes a point.
You can use the system for extremely targeted campaigns like my example but also for campaigns where reach is key. If you want to reach Norwegian females between 20-35 you have about 250.000 profiles at your disposal. So it’s a tool for large brand advertisers and small local businesses and it’s a tool for targeted niche campaigns and those who need volume. It covers both the head and the end of Mr Andersons long tail…
In my last post I mentioned something about facebook flyer being an adwords killer. It isn’t but it will be one of the only alternatives to Google’s adsense system that has huge reach and targeting possibilities. So it’s not a threat to Google but a great supplement for advertisers. If it where to be a threat they need other publisher than just their own site.
But interestingly enough facebooks ad move probably tells us a lot about what Microsoft and Google are launching pretty soon. Segmentation across communities, news sites, blogs, e-commerce sites and IM tools. This is why they bought Doubleclick and Aquantive. Imagine placing your ad within Google’s adsense network on the criteria from my example above. That makes contextual advertising look kinda bleak don’t you think?
So in conclusion; Hooray for facebook social ads and lets wait for Google and Microsoft
If you want to read more about facebook social ads and their polling tool! You should read this http://www.facebook.com/ads/
Monday, October 29, 2007
A little bit about everything, by Even Aas-Eng
The problem with writing a blog about online media is that there is so much stuff happening all the time. That means that if you haven’t posted anything in a while it gets difficult to decide what to write about. That’s where I am today! So I have decided to do things a little bit differently this time and provide a summary of interesting events that have taken place the last month.
First Microsoft finally makes a move and invests in facebook. From the outside it resembles Googles deal with myspace a couple of years back. They are paying to distribute display and search ads, they are buying themselves a ad network. Microsoft is buying 1,6% of facebook for 240 million dollars, this values the company to 15 billion in total. This means that the price for social media has had a rising curve the past years… Murdoch bought myspace in 2005 for 580 million dollars and Google bought youtube for 1,65 billion in 2006.
Let’s stick with facebook. There have been rumours for a while that they would launch an ad concept with social targeting possibilities. This month the facebook flyer appeared and yes there are interesting segmentation options. But even more interesting is how this product resembles the adwords model. It’s a long tail tool open for small and medium sized companies and perfect for small local campaigns. You buy based on CPM or CPC with your own credit card. So the concept could really be the first adwords competitor to appear in quite some time. Unfortunately though the people I have spoken with that have tried it says that its full of bugs.
Okay, back to Microsoft. Their new exec Brian Mcandrews (former head of aquantive) has stated the bleeding obvious; display ads will trump search in the years to come. This is off course already the case in many European markets where SEM is playing catch up and I am sure it will happen in the states to. Apparently this is suppose to solve Microsoft’s challenges in the advertising market, it doesn’t. They still has to get into search (buy yahoo!) and they are also trailing googles enormous inventory for display ads (adsense/site targeting, youtube, myspace deal) A good start I guess would be to buy more of facebook so that they can sell display ads in the US as well, this is not covered by the deal mentioned above.
And at last! The daily show with Jon Stewart will revamp its website and actually show their content there! Revolutionizing stuff, apparently advertiser will also be able to buy ads!!
Great news for all Jon Stewart fans and it’s great to see that Viacom is doing something for the users, not just suing youtube!
First Microsoft finally makes a move and invests in facebook. From the outside it resembles Googles deal with myspace a couple of years back. They are paying to distribute display and search ads, they are buying themselves a ad network. Microsoft is buying 1,6% of facebook for 240 million dollars, this values the company to 15 billion in total. This means that the price for social media has had a rising curve the past years… Murdoch bought myspace in 2005 for 580 million dollars and Google bought youtube for 1,65 billion in 2006.
Let’s stick with facebook. There have been rumours for a while that they would launch an ad concept with social targeting possibilities. This month the facebook flyer appeared and yes there are interesting segmentation options. But even more interesting is how this product resembles the adwords model. It’s a long tail tool open for small and medium sized companies and perfect for small local campaigns. You buy based on CPM or CPC with your own credit card. So the concept could really be the first adwords competitor to appear in quite some time. Unfortunately though the people I have spoken with that have tried it says that its full of bugs.
Okay, back to Microsoft. Their new exec Brian Mcandrews (former head of aquantive) has stated the bleeding obvious; display ads will trump search in the years to come. This is off course already the case in many European markets where SEM is playing catch up and I am sure it will happen in the states to. Apparently this is suppose to solve Microsoft’s challenges in the advertising market, it doesn’t. They still has to get into search (buy yahoo!) and they are also trailing googles enormous inventory for display ads (adsense/site targeting, youtube, myspace deal) A good start I guess would be to buy more of facebook so that they can sell display ads in the US as well, this is not covered by the deal mentioned above.
And at last! The daily show with Jon Stewart will revamp its website and actually show their content there! Revolutionizing stuff, apparently advertiser will also be able to buy ads!!
Great news for all Jon Stewart fans and it’s great to see that Viacom is doing something for the users, not just suing youtube!
Friday, September 21, 2007
Finally we are getting somewhere, by Even Aas-Eng
Myspace has for the past six months been trying out their new ad platform customizing ads to their users based on their psychographic data. Myspace has an enormous amount of data about what their user do, what they don’t do, what they like, who their friends are, who’s their hero’s, what’s their previous responsiveness to ads and a lot of other things. All in all they are now offering advertisers a segmentation tool that we have not seen before.
Let’s walk around the mine field of privacy issues that surrounds this topic and talk about what this development means for the commercialisation of the web.
Three weeks ago I attended a seminar where Jack Myers spoke on the development of US online media prices. He told us that the average price per CPM had dropped significantly the last years. The reason for this being the abundance of online inventory (blogs,communities,chats,etc). The opportunity however is that with good targeting tools we should be able to segment that massive WWW and be able to show ads just to those people we want to reach. This will be positive for advertiser as their ROI will increase, it will benefit media companies as they will make more money on each user and it will benefit the agency scene as campaigns get more complicated and their competence is needed. It’s a win/win/win situation! Why this development has taken so long is beyond me.
We are really talking about a long tail tool here. Ad technology that incorporates user’s demographic and behavioural data will enable advertisers to utilize the long tail of websites. Media campaigns will turn extremely fragmented and complex but they will also be accurate and extremely effective. The technology enables us, human heads makes it a success.
Ad networks will be the big winners. Big pools of traffic gathered in Google adsense or at advertising.com will be split into countries, counties, cities, borrows, gender, age, income, education, professions, hobbies and sold to the highest bidder with a product that matches perfectly. Volume is key or volumes of niches are key, the ad networks have it. The person that I recently talked to in Norway that said she was sceptical to ad networks as a channel for advertising has tough times ahead!
Another winner will be communities. Think about all the info that you have added to your facebook profile. Your favourite music, movies, books, pictures, info about your travels, basically your entire life is there. What a potential advertising goldmine! Facebook is working on a similar product as Myspace and it’s my guess that it won’t take long before we can read about it in ad age.
Search is another interesting area. The logic behind search advertising is really what started this whole trend. Present ads that in some way match the search. Very easy to understand and very effective. Everyone that has Google toolbar have seen the search history box, interesting isn’t it? Don’t you think that your search log says quite a lot about who you are and what you do? Google hasn’t used this knowledge in their adwords technology yet (as far as I know!) but they will and when they do it will make search marketing even more effective.
This all looks a bit scary but it makes perfect business sense! The comforting bit for all users is that they will group us, they won’t come after us as individuals. At least not yet………
Let’s walk around the mine field of privacy issues that surrounds this topic and talk about what this development means for the commercialisation of the web.
Three weeks ago I attended a seminar where Jack Myers spoke on the development of US online media prices. He told us that the average price per CPM had dropped significantly the last years. The reason for this being the abundance of online inventory (blogs,communities,chats,etc). The opportunity however is that with good targeting tools we should be able to segment that massive WWW and be able to show ads just to those people we want to reach. This will be positive for advertiser as their ROI will increase, it will benefit media companies as they will make more money on each user and it will benefit the agency scene as campaigns get more complicated and their competence is needed. It’s a win/win/win situation! Why this development has taken so long is beyond me.
We are really talking about a long tail tool here. Ad technology that incorporates user’s demographic and behavioural data will enable advertisers to utilize the long tail of websites. Media campaigns will turn extremely fragmented and complex but they will also be accurate and extremely effective. The technology enables us, human heads makes it a success.
Ad networks will be the big winners. Big pools of traffic gathered in Google adsense or at advertising.com will be split into countries, counties, cities, borrows, gender, age, income, education, professions, hobbies and sold to the highest bidder with a product that matches perfectly. Volume is key or volumes of niches are key, the ad networks have it. The person that I recently talked to in Norway that said she was sceptical to ad networks as a channel for advertising has tough times ahead!
Another winner will be communities. Think about all the info that you have added to your facebook profile. Your favourite music, movies, books, pictures, info about your travels, basically your entire life is there. What a potential advertising goldmine! Facebook is working on a similar product as Myspace and it’s my guess that it won’t take long before we can read about it in ad age.
Search is another interesting area. The logic behind search advertising is really what started this whole trend. Present ads that in some way match the search. Very easy to understand and very effective. Everyone that has Google toolbar have seen the search history box, interesting isn’t it? Don’t you think that your search log says quite a lot about who you are and what you do? Google hasn’t used this knowledge in their adwords technology yet (as far as I know!) but they will and when they do it will make search marketing even more effective.
This all looks a bit scary but it makes perfect business sense! The comforting bit for all users is that they will group us, they won’t come after us as individuals. At least not yet………
Monday, September 17, 2007
Have you seen the Iphone? By Even Aas-Eng
I am not a gadget freak and that is probably why I didn’t get to see the Iphone in action before I visited NYC a couple a weeks ago. On a rooftop terrace at a slick hotel a New Yorker was kind enough to give me a little tour. And I was impressed indeed. Lets look beyond the fact that the phone looks damn good and that it probably will become an even bigger fashion icon than its mp3 sister. Let’s also disregard all the small flaws and that it’s not customized to European conditions, they can and will fix that.
The real interesting thing about the Iphone is the internet. One of the most boring discussions we have in our industry is web for mobile. What will happen with WAP? Will we see the same growth in mobile advertising as we did with web advertising? You will never use your cell phone as you use your laptop. All these questions where buried when I saw the Iphone in action. Web and mobile will merge and this is the first real step. You can use the Iphone surfing the web, with its zoom in zoom out opportunities you can easily navigate any webpage. So do we need WAP pages and specialized mobile ad-networks, probably for a while but in the long run the web will prevail.
In October Google will integrate their mobile search ad-platform into adwords. They will use the same ads and run the same price model, as an advertiser you would have to opt in or out just as you do with adsense. It will be very interesting to follow the development of this revenue stream for Google (if they will share it!) with more and more Iphones or similar devices on the market I am sure that this will take off pretty quickly.
So the conclusion is: the Iphone is here, WAP is dead and long live the WEB!
The real interesting thing about the Iphone is the internet. One of the most boring discussions we have in our industry is web for mobile. What will happen with WAP? Will we see the same growth in mobile advertising as we did with web advertising? You will never use your cell phone as you use your laptop. All these questions where buried when I saw the Iphone in action. Web and mobile will merge and this is the first real step. You can use the Iphone surfing the web, with its zoom in zoom out opportunities you can easily navigate any webpage. So do we need WAP pages and specialized mobile ad-networks, probably for a while but in the long run the web will prevail.
In October Google will integrate their mobile search ad-platform into adwords. They will use the same ads and run the same price model, as an advertiser you would have to opt in or out just as you do with adsense. It will be very interesting to follow the development of this revenue stream for Google (if they will share it!) with more and more Iphones or similar devices on the market I am sure that this will take off pretty quickly.
So the conclusion is: the Iphone is here, WAP is dead and long live the WEB!
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
The rise and fall of sloggi.com, by Even Aas-Eng
I guess most of you have heard about the sloggi campaign or visited the site. (probably a lot more than those who admit it)
This summer they launched a contest in order to find the world’s most beautiful bum! User where to take pictures of their own behind and post them on sloggi.com
Here the bums where categorized by gender and country and rated! And yes there are a lot of nice bums on sloggi.com
The concept seems to have taken completely off in eastern European countries and it has gotten a lot of press around the world. The Nordics was no exception where the site got a lot of negative press. And yesterday the (sad) news came; they are shutting down the competition and blocking all users from the Nordics. The campaign will continue in other markets.
So what do we have here, the most successful user generated content campaign the world has ever seen or a dodgy porn site? Its probably a mixture. Creating a UGC campaign is all about the users. If they don’t contribute you have failed. In this case they certainly did and in that matter the campaign is a smashing success. But nobody should be surprised that people submit pictures of their bums and that other people want to look at it. There are thousands of other online examples of that………..
But the question is if this is effective advertising for sloggi, personally I have no idea.
On a peculiar note I would like to raise a question to sloggi. Did you guys screen the photos? I am asking because I couldn’t find a bum on the site that didn’t look good!!
The screenshot below shows you the page views on sloggi.com (blue line), vg.no (norways largest site) and expedia in UK. As you can see, sloggi has surpassed expedias traffic…………
This summer they launched a contest in order to find the world’s most beautiful bum! User where to take pictures of their own behind and post them on sloggi.com
Here the bums where categorized by gender and country and rated! And yes there are a lot of nice bums on sloggi.com
The concept seems to have taken completely off in eastern European countries and it has gotten a lot of press around the world. The Nordics was no exception where the site got a lot of negative press. And yesterday the (sad) news came; they are shutting down the competition and blocking all users from the Nordics. The campaign will continue in other markets.
So what do we have here, the most successful user generated content campaign the world has ever seen or a dodgy porn site? Its probably a mixture. Creating a UGC campaign is all about the users. If they don’t contribute you have failed. In this case they certainly did and in that matter the campaign is a smashing success. But nobody should be surprised that people submit pictures of their bums and that other people want to look at it. There are thousands of other online examples of that………..
But the question is if this is effective advertising for sloggi, personally I have no idea.
On a peculiar note I would like to raise a question to sloggi. Did you guys screen the photos? I am asking because I couldn’t find a bum on the site that didn’t look good!!
The screenshot below shows you the page views on sloggi.com (blue line), vg.no (norways largest site) and expedia in UK. As you can see, sloggi has surpassed expedias traffic…………
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