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Filed under: Yahoo!, Web

Yahoo! rolls out first video ad in new marketing campaign... about You

by Brad Linder Sep 28th 2009


Yahoo! is embarking on a new marketing campaign to convince users that the company's web services are all about "You." The mission is to reposition Yahoo! as a consumer-focused company. A few days ago, we mentioned that Yahoo!, for example, was unloading enterprise email service Zimbra and classifieds company HotJobs, which aren't really aligned with the new mission statement.

That said, if you look at the company's first TV spot for the campaign, you'd be hard pressed to tell exactly what that mission was. For about 55 seconds, Yahoo! clearly wants you to hear the word "you" a lot. And that ad is certainly dynamic, features vibrant colors, and locations from five different countries.

But you have to wait until the last few seconds of the ad to even find out what the company is... and there's absolutely nothing in the ad to explain how you'll be able to "consumer, share, buzz, destroy, earn, flirt, or watch." Of course, a TV spot that showed Yahoo! Messenger, Mail, Buzz, Video, or other web-services would be a heck of a lot less interesting.

What do you think? Is the new ad effective? If you haven't visited Yahoo! in a while, does it make you want to give the company another try?

Tags: advertising, yahoo

Filed under: Security, Google, Yahoo!

Google and Yahoo banner ads delivering trojans

by Jay Hathaway Sep 28th 2009

Users who clicked on booby-trapped banner ads served by Google's DoubleClick and a Yahoo-owned service called Right Media ended up having their machines infected by a trojan, according to a report from The Register. The sneaky ads showed up on the Drudge Report, Lyrics.com, slacker.com and horoscope.com. Google says that publishers who use DoubleClick have to approve the banner ads that show up on their sites, implying that these four sites are at fault for the attack on their users.

The trojan itself was installed via an infected PDF file that opened and closed when a user clicked an ad. It's called Win32/Alureon, and it opens backdoor access to infected machines. This is serious business, and it's hardly the first time we've seen "malvertising," but who's to blame when it happens? Should site owners who buy ads have to scan them first, or should the big ad networks be responsible?

Tags: advertising, doubleclick, google, malware, security, trojan, yahoo

Filed under: Business, Developer, Adobe

Adobe gets into advertising biz, teams up with Gigya

by Jay Hathaway Sep 21st 2009

After Adobe's recent acquisition of analytics giant Omniture for $1.8 billion, there was a lot of speculation that Adobe was beginning a foray into the advertising. Now we've got some more clues, since Adobe's partnering with Gigya, a company that distributes widgets and advertising. Now, Adobe's got its fingers in every part of the process, from content creation to ads to analytics.

Adobe's new Distribution Manager lets developers share their Flash widgets on 70 sites, tracks traffic for the widgets, and serves ads. Destinations include Facebook, MySpace and iGoogle, amongst others. It also supports mobile devices, including Windows Mobile and Symbian phones. The iPhone is also (sort of) supported, but without Flash, the widgets have to be part of approved app store apps. Developers can follow their traffic and ads with - what else? - an Adobe Air app.

[via Techcrunch]

Tags: adobe, ads, advertising, distribution, false, flash, widgets

Filed under: OS Updates, Windows, Microsoft

Microsoft launches Windows 7 ad campaign, and it's sickeningly sweet

Windowsby Brad Linder Sep 11th 2009



Sex sells. You knew that. But you know what else sells? Cute. And that's the approach Microsoft is taking with its first ad for Windows 7.

Microsoft has been putting out high profile ads for the last year or so, promoting PCs and briefly Jerry Seinfeld. But for the most part these ads have been based on image and haven't really mentioned Microosft's core products: it's operating system.

The latest ad features Kylie, a little girl who we earlier learned was a PC. This time she has put together a slide show displaying some of the nice, happy words that people have said on the internet about Windows 7 along with happy pictures of ridiculously cute things like a bunny wearing a hat.

Of course, the ad still doesn't really tell us much of anything about the actual product. But you know what? Sometimes the best ads don't. If you want to know about Windows 7's security features, new taskbar, improved media center functions, or other tidbits, you just have to hop online and look them up. This is the kind of ad that's supposed to make you feel good about the product, not teach you about it.

You can check out Kylie's first ad for Microsoft after the break. The funny thing is that at the time it was launched, Kylie's "I'm a PC" video was one of the few in the series that actually showed some of the things you can do with a PC, and implied it was so easy a 4 and a half year old girl could do it. I'm not quite as convinced that she could really have put together the slideshow above on her own... or have chosen the music.

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Tags: advertising, commercials, windows-7

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Filed under: News, Web services, Microblogging

Twitter tweaks terms of service, may be paving the way for ads

by Jay Hathaway Sep 11th 2009

The Twitter team just announced changes to the site's Terms of Service with a mass email and a blog post. The thrust of the post, written by Twitter's Biz Stone, is that not much has changed.

The change deal with spam, use of Twitter's APIs, ownership of tweets, and the possibility of Twitter advertising, and Biz's description of them is peppered with phrases like, "as we've said before" and "according to the rules we've been operating under for some time."

Although not much has changed, Twitter may be using the announcement to start getting users accustomed to potential advertising on the site. The new terms have this to say about ads:
The Services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the Content or information on the Services, queries made through the Services, or other information. The types and extent of advertising by Twitter on the Services are subject to change.

Biz says this is about keeping options open, but being up front with users that ads are one of those options could hold off a firestorm if they start showing up later. You still own your own tweets, and Twitter can still broadcast them through all of its services (including APIs).

The entire document's a lot more clear and unambiguous, even in the areas where the basic effect of the terms hasn't changed. Basically, Twitter is growing up, and it needed a more grown up TOS document.

Tags: advertising, biz stone, BizStone, terms, tos, twitter

Filed under: Internet

Advertising gone wrong: 23 poorly placed banner ads

by Adam Maras Aug 11th 2009

Have you ever come across an advertisement on a web page that just made you think, "wow. That really shouldn't be there."? I've come across a few in my time, but it looks like the folks over at BuzzFeed have been running into them left and right; they've compiled a collection of 23 examples of web advertising gone bad.

Their collection runs the gamut, having everything from an article linking coffee to heart attacks brandishing an ad from Folgers to Google providing "Are you a male virgin?" as a sponsored result to the search query "world of warcraft." BuzzFeed's commenters also provided a handful of user-submitted additions to the madness.

Also, if you're interested in more advertising faux pas, BuzzFeed has compiled 15 examples of poorly-placed billboard advertisements.

Tags: advertising, banner ads, BannerAds

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Weird Wednesday

Weird Wednesday: Internet advertising

by Victor Agreda, Jr. Aug 5th 2009


Remember back in the early days of the web when all you had to do was punch a monkey to win? Millions of pummeled simians later the online ad industry had to evolve... And evolve it has, with two distinct paths for display advertising:

1. In-your-face gigantic ads or ads that "do something" significant to distract you. Common examples include full-page "interstitial" ads that interrupt your browsing, anything that flies around the screen or busts out of its little box or anything that expands when you hover over it.

2. Creative, "viral" ads that are so clever, weird, gross or unusual that they are passed around despite their more than obvious marketing nature. Let's look at some of these, shall we?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I prefer the latter. Unfortunately tracking down "weird" ads isn't easy. Ad campaigns, by their nature, are dynamic and ephemeral. The Internet Archive doesn't cache dynamic ads, either, so some of those golden oldies may be lost forever. If you snag a pic, please let us know in the comments.

A few of the more clever online ads are presented for your consumption on the next page.

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Tags: ads, advertising, web, weird wednesday, WeirdWednesday

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Filed under: Microsoft

Life Comes Together: The Windows ad campaign that wasn't

by Brad Linder Aug 3rd 2009

Microsoft has garnered a lot of attention, much of it positive, for its recent ad campaigns. While a lot of people were left scratching their heads when the Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates ads started hitting the airwaves, Microsoft's "I'm a PC" and "Laptop Hunters" commercials have hit a chord, showing both that everyday people use PCs, and that there are a lot of choices for computer shoppers in a variety of price ranges.

But what about the ads that didn't make the cut? Blogger Long Zheng spotted a series of Microsoft/Windows ads in the Vimeo account of John McNeil, former creative director of McCann Worldgroup. The ad agency didn't get the Windows campaign, but judging from this series of 9 commercials, it's not for the lack of trying.

Like the commercial Microsoft eventually went with, these "Life Comes Together" themed ads don't really focus on the features of Windows software very much. But most do hint at one or two features that Windows or other Microsoft products have that help them fit into your daily life. You can check out of the rest of the videos at istartedsomething.

What do you think of the ads? Did Microsoft make the right call in passing up on these and going with its current campaign? Or would you rather have seen these ads on the air?

Tags: advertising, commercials

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, web 2.0

Facebook sez, "Don't mind us, we're just whoring out your photos"

by Lee Mathews Jul 16th 2009

Follow up: AllFacebook pointed out that this was a bit off the mark. The ad was created by a third-party advertising network using Facebook's API. Their post cautions "Facebook continues to let third party ad networks use your photos as well, and making the privacy setting changes outlined in this viral message will not remove your photos from third party ad networks."

How do you feel about what Facebook does with your content? Post your thoughts on our Ask DLS post!

[original post below]

But it's OK. Really!

See, according to Facebook it's all part of the acceptable use policy you agreed to. No, I'm not kidding. That red box above contains an ad that was displayed to Peter Smith, who no doubt agrees that the woman in the image is hot -- although he suspected she wasn't single. You guessed it, that's his wife - consultant Cheryl Smith.

Is this not the same Facebook that just went back and retooled a TOS that users found objectionable? Didn't they just finish apologizing and kissing our butts over the crapstorm that ensued?

Here's what the Facebook settings page has to say:
Facebook occasionally pairs advertisements with relevant social actions from a user's friends to create Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends. These respect all privacy rules.
All you have to do to prevent this is sign in to Facebook and click through to (get ready) -> Settings -> Privacy -> News Feed and Wall -> Facebook Ads -> Appearance in Facebook Ads and click "no one." Unless, of course, you want to be semifamous and have your picture used to push some garbage product or website without your knowledge. (note: when I tried to make this change just now, the site returned an error. oh, and it might not work in Firefox either due to a 'bug.')

I guess since we can turn this abomination off we shouldn't get too worked up about it. Still, it's pretty damn unsavory to use someone's friend's face to advertise a product and give the appearance that that friend might endorse it.

Yes, if it had been my wife's face staring back at me I would have had a good laugh. And when I stopped, I would have been right pissed that Facebook thinks this qualifies as "acceptable use."

Update: curiously, though my setting was "only my friends" earlier and I was unsuccessful changing it myself it has somehow changed to "no one." Did Facebook just pull a switcheroo to save face?


[via End of Web]

Tags: acceptable-use, advertising, facebook, fail, privacy, TOS

Filed under: Audio, Google, VoIP

Advertising coming to Google Voice?

by Brad Linder Jul 16th 2009

Google Voice
If you've been wondering how Google plans to make money off of Google Voice, the company's voicemail, telephone routing, and general VoIP applications, here's a hint: advertising. That's pretty much how Google makes all of its money. The question is, what kind of advertising?

I'd kind of assumed that Google would place contextual ads on the Google Voice web site next to transcripts of your voicemail messages, much the way it does with Gmail. And it still might. But Google has also filed a patent for a system that would insert audio ads into your phone calls. The patents also describes a system for determining the caller's location in order to geographically target the ads.

It's not necessarily as obtrusive and annoying as it sounds. The ads would be played while the phone is ringing and you're waiting for a person to pick up, or at other times when you're not talking. It's not entirely clear whether Google will roll out this feature. I personally would rather not listen to adds every time I make a call, so I'm kind of hoping the company doesn't.

I also think if Google were going to insert audio ads into your phone calls, it would have been nice of the company to roll out this feature before launching the service. But Google Voice is still only open to beta testers with invitations, so you could argue that there's time to make a major change like this before launching the service more publicly.

[via Unwired View]

Tags: advertising, google-voice

Filed under: Blogging, Google, Web

Blogger turns 10, now Google wants to make (more) money from it

by Brad Linder Jun 18th 2009


Blogger ads
Google's blogging service, Blogger is turning 10 in August. Google published a list of fun facts about Blogger today, including the fact that 2/3rds of Blogger's traffic comes from outside North America, the most popular sport for bloggers using the service is soccer, and at any given minute, 270,000 words are written on Blogger.

But while Google provides users with tools to publish Adsense ads on Blogspot sites (which can certainly help the company raise a fair bit of cash from all of those words), Google doesn't require users to post ads. And that means some users are basically using the service for free without generating any real revenue for Google.

Now Google Operating System reports that Google appears to be experimenting with another revenue generating opportunity. It's starting to place ads on the page that pops up when bloggers publish a post. These ads will never be seen by the readers of your blog, but there's a chance that some bloggers may click on contextual ads related to the articles they've been writing.

I tried writing a couple of test posts on several sites I've created using Blogger, but I didn't see any ads. If you use Blogger and have started noticing ads in the admin interface, let us know in the comments. It seems like a small price to pay for using a service that lets you host and update a blog for free. But I could certainly see it annoying some long-time users.

Tags: advertising, blogger, blogs

Filed under: Social Software

Twitter: Our business model will be add-ons, not ads

by Brad Linder May 19th 2009

TwitterTwitter is probably the hottest startup around without a business plan. Over the past few years, Twitter has gained millions of users, become a media darling, and started attracting celebrity tweeters like nobody's business. But the company isn't really set up to make money... yet. But Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says that's all coming soon.

What's interesting is that Stone says Twitter will buck the trend set by other web services by staying ad-free. Instead, the plan is to make money from "various add-on-tools and services" for business and professional users. For example, analytics tools, or a directory of commercial Twitter accounts. Some of those tools could be available by the end of 2009.

Stone says the company doesn't plan to show ads next to messages because a) it's not "interesting," and b) because it could tick off users. The first point sounds a bit odd, but the second one makes sense. While Gmail users have long been used to seeing ads near their email messages, imagine if every fifth message you received on an instant messaging client was an ad.

[via The Inquistr]

Tags: add-ons, advertising, twitter

Filed under: Security, Web services

PrivacyChoice opts you out of third-party cookies

by Jay Hathaway May 12th 2009

After surfing the web day in and day out, you've probably piled up a lot of advertising cookies. A lot of major ad providers, like Google, for example, save cookies and track browsing activity to provide better ad targeting. Unless you know that you can opt out of this stuff, you don't have much of a choice about this stuff. Privacychoice has collected the opt-out features of a lot of major advertisers in one convenient button, so you can stop all of their cookies at once.

Privacychoice works by giving you blank cookies for all of the sites on its list, so they don't have any information about you, but they also don't try to set new cookies without asking you. Sure, you could just set your browser to block ALL third-party cookies, but maybe you have some non-advertising sites with cookies you care about. Privacychoice is a way to get rid of annoying cookies without giving up the good ones. Be sure to switch off your ad-blocker when you're setting up Privacychoice, but go ahead and turn it back on when you're done.

Tags: advertising, cookies, opt-out, privacy, privacychoice

Filed under: Web, Humor

Planet of Internet is down to just one street

by Jay Hathaway Apr 6th 2009

It would be fair to say that everyone at Download Squad was amused when we stumbled onto Planet of Internet a year ago. The idea behind the site -- and its grandiose press releases about entirely changing the way you'll browse the web -- was that people and companies would buy houses in Planet of Internet's pixel-art cities, and use the site to browse and communicate with one another. Apparently, advertisers weren't rushing to colonize Planet, because it disappeared from the web sometime last year.

Much to our bewilderment, Planet of Internet seems to have been reincarnated in the form of the slightly less ambitious Streets of Net. There's only one street right now, featuring eight buildings. Only two are occupied. Somehow, I'm not sure that the problem with Planet of Internet's business model was the scale. Planet or Street, I just don't see people being attracted to what's essentially a pixel-art MMORPG without the massive, the multiplayer, or the game. The thing is, these guys aren't that bad at what they do. They could probably make more money in an hour designing outfits for some low-res kiddie multiplayer game than they'll make in the entire lifetime of selling $3-5 buildings on Streets of Net -- even if it does last, as they claim, "as long as the Internet exists."

Tags: advertising, bad-ideas, pixel-art, planetofinternet, planetoftheinternet, streets-of-net

Filed under: Audio, Internet

Last.fm postpones international fees

by Brad Linder Mar 30th 2009

Last.fm
Internet radio service Last.fm is holding off on a plan to begin charging customers outside of the US, UK, and Germany a monthly fee to access streaming music. The move has received a fair amount of criticism, primarily from users who don't want to shell out 3 Euros a month to pay for the service.

In a blog post today, the company explains that it hasn't been able to make enough money from advertising in each country where the service is offered to support the service. Last.fm is holding off on charging subscription fees until it makes a few changes including the ability for users to purchase gift subscriptions for friends and pay for transactions using services other than Paypal.

[via Mashable]

Tags: advertising, internet-radio, last.fm, subscriptions

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