Microsoft launched a new methodology for tracking the effectiveness of online advertising termed “engagement mapping” - this has previously been called “conversion attribution.” The full MS release is here. Also worth reading this interview from Sept ‘07 with Brian McAndrews, Microsoft’s senior vice president of advertising and publishing solutions for more on the background this new ad measurement system. The super short digested version of this news is that: engagement mapping a smart and more balanced way to measure the effectiveness of ad spend on-line that does not reply solely on the users’ last click. Last click heavily favors paid search vs. display (banners).
Also, hoping that Simon expands on insight from this week’s Fast Forward search conference in Florida. I am guessing he’s got his silver card on BA by now with all this travel.
Well, that’s wrap for this working week. And here’s funnny one strip from xkcd - enjoy!
According to a piece in SAI today Google may be “very exposed to US recession.” I would agree with some of the logic in this insider analysis. However, Google has so much organic growth, new products and ways to optimise their business that they may be able to weather things better than most. The key points are:
A significant percentage of Google’s customer base is exposed to economic weakness(logic below), and As consumers spend less, the ROI for many Google advertisers will drop–and this will cause them to spend less on Google (We concur with this view, which is still a minority view.)
I would more inclined to think that online companies that are more on the margins, such as 2nd & 3rd tier networks (such as Miva, Looksmart, Infospace and others) would suffer and some may likely perish is a US recession. What do you think?
This PR about a display click rates from Starcom and others is very interesting. I will have to try to get a copy of the full study and report. Looks like the über clickers (or should be call them super clickers?) are distorting reality… Not sure this is good news for online advertising. My initial thought is we will likely need and see wider studies on general “conversion attribution” of online advertising - ie, you need a solid mix of ads (including display) as this helps drive conversion on your search both paid and natural, etc… Quoting directly from the PR:
Starcom, Tacoda and comScore’s “Natural Born Clickers” findings suggest “the click is dead” as go-to measurement of effectiveness for brand-building display advertising campaigns
The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.
I am a few weeks late noting this news - that OpenAds raised $15.5 million in series B funding. The round was led by Axel Partners. That’s a significant round and only 6-7 months after raised $5 million in series A funding last summer. The company is London based, so I will see what I can find out any inside info about the companies’ plans not that they have a bigger bank account. With all the consolidation in the on-line ad technology space over the past 18 months - I can see a lot of opportunity for the open source strategy. Apparently, OpenAds have a new hosted service that is in beta - interesting.
No surprise here, that Microsoft is making a bid to buy Fast Search & Transfer (FAST). For the standard overview check out SEL or Marketwatch for more info.
An unnamed source unofficially said:
Organizationally, the plan is that we [FAST] become part of the SharePoint organization within the Microsoft Business Division (Microsoft’s largest division). This means that we will drive Microsoft’s enterprise search initiatives globally, with FAST technology becoming a key part of the Microsoft enterprise search offerings.
FAST is a B2B company and generally seen as the leading enterprise search player, competing with the likes of Autonomy, Endeca and the open source Lucene. I think it is also interesting to note:
That much of FAST’s customer base are actually B2C players (=audience reach and traffic)
FAST has made forays into the media space in the past, for example with the launch of FASTMedia last spring - see this piece on ZDNet
I would advise the integration team at MSFT to consider the following:
FAST has a large installed base of media and telecoms/mobile customers (many are top tier players, especially in Europe) using FAST’s search technology to power site search, local/IYP search, ecommerce and other search applications (like video, intranet/behind the firewall and various subscription services). TAKE AWAY: integration points for other MSFT products, potential ad network synergy.
FAST has a performance/pay-per-click/search advertising (sort of an “ad words in a box”) platform named AdMomentum. TAKE AWAY: another ad product and valuable publisher partnerships to embrace.
There is significant general web search expertise in the company (Note: FAST sold All The Web, which was a great search engine, to Overture [now part of Yahoo] back in 2003). TAKE AWAY: R&D talent pool for web search.
I would imagine that some of the FAST media and advertising assets might end up in other parts of the MSFT empire in their on-going battle with GOOG.
Here’s the full official PR blurb from the FAST website:
Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: “MSFT”) today announced that it will make an offer to acquire Fast Search & Transfer ASA (OSE: “FAST”), a leading provider of enterprise search solutions, through a cash tender offer for 19.00 Norwegian kroner (NOK) per share.
This offer represents a 42 percent premium to the closing share price on Jan. 4, 2008 (the last trading day prior to this announcement), and values the fully diluted equity of FAST at 6.6 billion NOK (or approximately $1.2 billion U.S.). FAST’s board of directors has unanimously recommended that its shareholders accept the offer. In addition, shareholders representing in aggregate 37 percent of the outstanding shares, including FAST’s two largest institutional shareholders, Orkla ASA and Hermes Focus Asset Management Europe, have irrevocably undertaken to accept the offer.The offer will be subject to customary terms and conditions, including receipt of acceptances representing more than 90 percent of FAST shares and voting power on a fully diluted basis, and receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals on terms acceptable to Microsoft. The complete details of the offer, including all terms and conditions, will be contained in the offer document, which is expected to be sent to FAST shareholders during the week of Jan. 14, 2008. The transaction is expected to be completed in the second quarter of calendar year 2008.
Goldman Sachs International acts as financial advisor to Microsoft; Merrill Lynch International acts as financial advisor to Fast Search & Transfer.
Please Note: I worked for FAST from June ‘05 to Sept ‘07 and mainly on the AdMomentum product - see TC piece over here for more on that adventure.
Positive comments from Sue Feldman at IDC - full piece here (login access only) and some highlights below:
IDC believes that there are deeper reasons for believing that Microsoft’s acquisition makes sense for both companies….
[Including] Ad Momentum, a monetization platform for search queries. Ad Momentum uses matching technology to match ads to queries and documents, handle ad word auctions and payments. It was launched in 2007, and could become an important product with the right (Microsoft) marketing muscle behind it as companies try to grab a portion of the multibillion dollar online advertising market.
…
FAST brings Microsoft a collection of technologies that should prove valuable across many of its products. It also brings them the expertise that they will need in deploying this complex technology. In turn, FAST acquires the resources that support their strong vision. Their understanding of the broader role of search in the future will help to shape the market’s understanding, now that they have Microsoft’s resources behind them. They are shortly to bring to market a new generation of their information access platform. With Microsoft’s help, it could be made a gold standard for information access in the enterprise…
Nothing new in this post. This is just a list of some of the interesting things I noticed over the past couple of weeks and want to dig into when I get some down time over the X-Mas holiday…
Ask.com’s Top Real Deal Searches of 2007
1. MySpace 6. Cars
2. Dictionary 7. Weather
3. Google 8. Games
4. Themes 9. Song Lyrics
5. Area Codes 10. Movies
Apparently total measurable ad spend is slowing, this is interesting has having spent time blogging and exploring the social media side of the Web over the past couple of months I can see that smart advertisers and marketers will be doing other types of activities that support advertising. This is meme that ties into the global microbrand idea and what Buzzmachine posted as well. This requires some digestion.
This is a sweet post over on O’Reilly Radar - Web 2.0 and Advertising: Do We See Eye to Eye? - I found this piece to be very insightful. The big take always plus a little bit added on are that advertisers or people working in the ad/media space must:
respect the consumer
listen
engage in a conversation
focus on having a great (or at least a good) story to tell
focus on the storytelling, try to entertain
and make sure you have a good product, we don’t need more crap in our lives
This Microsoft (MDAS) video is great fun, so I had to put it here - enjoy!
I’ve been following some of the reports and post from the Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media: 07 conference being held out in LA this week. The Local Onliner, Screenwerk and Praized should give you a good flavor of the event.
The Kelsey Group Conferences are high quality and always worthwhile. They are great for business, learning and networking. However, I was reading this post on Screenwerk and it struck a cord with me. I’ve been to a few ILM and other TKG conferences over the past few years but agree that perhaps more on how than why would be good. As someone who has grown up online (vs. coming from a more traditional or offline publishing background) I would even push that statement a little further and say there needs to be more detail into what is working, what is not working and what are the challenges in the local space.
So, I had a thought that maybe it’s the size of the event? I mean no disrespect – TKG events are premier conferences, please attend if you can. However, a bit like social networking (ie, once to big or to general, people look for smaller more elite networks etc) maybe some smaller or even off the radar events are where more in depth and serious discussions are happening and the firmament is starting to brew up some new ideas and innovations? I am sure many of the offline discussions and smaller side meetings at ILM are truly interesting.
I am helping to organize a small but high caliber Local Search Summit here in Europe next week. This will be the 2nd event this year (the 1st one was in Munich in April, perfect place great weather and of course beer gardens) and so far they have been largely self organizing. I can’t list the participants at the moment, but can tell you we are meeting in another city famous for beer and that we have 7 top tier publishing groups joining.
The groups attending are generally multi-national and diversified in terms of owning yellow pages, newspapers, classifieds, TV, radio, online and mobile properties. The geographic coverage is more than 20 countries in EMEA and Asia-Pac. The unifying theme is all these companies are committed to online/digital and are using local search to help drive and unify their online strategy. Here is a draft list of topics to be discussed (below) and as you can see there is a significant focus on advertising.
Local Search Summit – draft agenda:
Local Advertising: what’s working and what’s a challenge
Advertising: the network oppportunity, ad exchanges vs. ad marketplaces
The future with mobile and pay-per-call
SEM Platforms for Local Media
Mapping
Semantic Search and Contextual Search
Local audience. Global language. How Search is extracting context out of confusion.
The role of directory companies in local search
The impact of UGC and social networking on Local Search
I will report back from the Summit with some observations and hopefully some new insights in mid-December…
