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Monday, June 29, 2009
Back in 2007, we briefly reviewed the major M&A activity in the digital ad serving technology and digital agency spaces. Many of our panel observers felt that Google and Microsoft should immediately divest themselves of the agency parts of the DoubleClick/Performics and Aquantive/Razorfish acquisitions, to clear out some of the conflict of interest inherent in major agencies owned by the sellers of supposedly performance-based, impartial media platforms.
Google moved relatively quickly to divest itself of Performics, whereas Microsoft held onto the Razorfish business -- until now.
Amazingly, the $6 billion acquisition of Aquantive counted as Microsoft's biggest ever acquisition. Considering its size and clout, Razorfish (formerly Avenue A | Razorfish) has had a relatively quiet two years since then. Perhaps this can be chalked up to this mega-agency's DNA; its first go-round in Bubble 1.0 was in the fast-hiring, website-overbuilding, overvaluation heyday of 1995-2000. And the company still seems to favor slow-loading, expensive-to-build, semi-indexable pages. Like ALPO, a recent client win for Razorfish, could it be that Razorfish represents a previous era of overpackaged, overstrategized goods with the same old ALPO inside the can?
While some may ask why Microsoft is selling this business, Daily Finance reporter Douglas McIntyre proffers: "What it is doing with the company in the first place is anybody's guess."
Certainly, if the long delay in selling Razorfish was helpful in demonstrating that Microsoft's decision-making process was totally independent of industry opinion that they should divest sooner, the delay was effective. Unfortunately, the value of the asset may now be sharply reduced. But so are many assets... such as the parts of Yahoo Microsoft is still considering strategically partnering with or buying.Labels: msft, razorfish
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Microsoft has gotten us one step closer to the hard-line Traffick stance of jail time for click fraud. Making money by directly yanking money out of advertiser pockets in industries like auto insurance must have felt very good to these alleged fraudsters: until the day they were slapped with a $750,000 lawsuit. Ouch.Labels: click fraud
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
A lot of ink gets spilled about everything digital media. And some wonder why those of us in the search side of the industry are, well, a little bit... noisy.
You can see why by visiting Alexa (or if you have a subscription, a service like Hitwise). For your favorite site, check out the tab called "Clickstream". The website that is most visited prior to visiting your favorite site is, of course, Google.
It might look like:
23% Google.com
10% Google.ca
Or it might look like:
15% Google.com
8% Some other site.
Or in some other cases Yahoo actually is still key (though not necessarily Yahoo Search):
12% Google
11% Yahoo
And the "post visit" clicks are also (although, hopefully, less so) to these search engines as well. Users either go back to the search engine right away due to search dissatisfaction, or they use a search engine for something else, after they're finished with one task.
Other common upstream and downstream sites are site closely related to your favorite site, like
icanhazcheezburger.com
pga.com
etc.
Or functionally related ones like:
sphinn.com
wordpress.com
youtube.com
Or, increasingly,
twitter.com
as people tweet what they find.
For some popular sites like cuteoverload.com, Twitter is hitting 2 and 3 per cent of post-visit visits. For this blog, Traffick.com, Twitter clocks in at an amazing 10% of downstream visits!
Still though, Google is at the top of pretty much every list of upstream and downstream clicks for pretty much any website.
Bing.com? The bad news is, the site is too new and too little-used to show up in many upstream lists at all. The good news? Downstream, it shows up in the list for blogs like this, and tech industry publications. Microsoft will need much more than mentions from the likes of us, though, to gain market share.
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Remember how Yahoo helped Google rise to prominence, then dominance, ultimately obliterating the search and portal brand that gave it that timely helping hand? If you've been in the industry less than five years, you don't. In 2001, Google's future was still far from assured. But the power its brand gained during its two-year partnership to display Google results on Yahoo did serious damage to Yahoo's brand, and bought Google the credibility it needed to move to top-of-mind as the world's leading search engine.
Is Google about to do the same favor to Twitter? On the surface, it seems that adding microblogging search capability that features mostly Twitter results would only benefit Google, by giving it equal or superior capability to the as-yet-to-be-honed Twitter Search. Another feature to solidify the world's leading search brand. So as for whether this helps Twitter do to Google what Google did to Yahoo: probably not. Google today is far more than Yahoo was in 2002-2004. Still, it's interesting to contemplate the possibility that a deal that looks only so-so for Twitter might have a salutary effect on Twitter's already strong brand, and turn out to be the mainstream exposure they needed to go from hot to white-hot.Labels: google, twitter
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
Friday, June 12, 2009
 Even in a down economy, or perhaps because of it, companies are investing more than ever in performance-based digital marketing. So it's perhaps no surprise that the SES Toronto conference turned in another strong performance this week. I was delighted that so many of the top speakers (too many to name here, really... ok... Mark Evans, Keith Boswell...Miriam Warren... ok I'm stopping...) we invited were able to make it. And if I do say so myself, the tracks (Nuts & Bolts, Corporateville, and Geek) seemed to be working well in getting folks connected with the type of knowledge they need in this fast-moving field.
The demands on marketers have begun to change more rapidly as reputation management, social media, and universal, personalized, blended, local, and mobile search have created a much wider array of relevancy signals and visibility channels. While introducing newcomers to the basics, the theme of the show was intended to expose us to data and debates about what's new in the field. I feel that companies that opt not to show up to these events - especially those constructing digital marketing plans from scratch - may be failing to ask the right questions in planning. It's too easy to fall into the trap of micromanaging tactics based on 2002 assumptions, on one hand, or to concoct hip-sounding but amateurish attempts to bust into social media (the Meatball Sundae syndrome).
For a quick flavor of how the conference went for some, we offer for your consideration a list of tweets about SES Toronto 2009; some of the SES Toronto interviews posted on YouTube; and a selection of the pictorial evidence on Flickr.
Our keynote speakers, Tara Hunt and Emanuel Rosen (who just tweeted that Toronto is now his favorite city in North America!), deserve special thanks for helping us "anchor" digital marketing in real-world reality. Search engines measure relationships and relevance, but in the past have done a poor job of it. Marketers who only focus on the tactics suited to imperfect search technology from the past fail to see the need to create a variety of connections and authentic social capital upon which strong referrals are built.
The opening night party at The Drake Hotel (Acquisio sponsoring, with co-sponsors Page Zero and NVI Solutions) must have been good, too. MJ Lepage of Acquisio (pictured here) convinced me to speak French. I was shy at first, but those Acquisio t-shirts have amazing powers of persuasion.Labels: ses, ses toronto, ses toronto 2009
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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