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ERIC

See More on Google versus The US Government

I lot of friends, including my wife, have said to me, "why are you so harsh on Google lately?" This kind of surprises me because I don't think I have been. Sure this is the third article I've written on Google as of late and you are probably wondering if I may dump blospot and pop over to Typepad instead.

Let me set the record straight. I love Google and the products that they bring to the marketplace. I also know a lot of people at Google and they are all great. Google also brings a ton of competition to the marketplace and, it didn't hurt that my former employer was part of the IPO group.

However, they are in it to make money, just like everyone else. Have you seen their stock price recently and their marketcap? It is outrageous. You know what else you need to learn about Google? How about their corporate mantra? Read #4 and #6. #4 is titled Democracy on the web works and #6 is You can make money without doing evil. Interesting huh? Let's see how democracy on the web and making money without doing evil has been forgotten or at least thrown out temporarily when it comes to making money.

Democracy on the web
First, Google decides not to help the United States Government in understanding how existing filtering on the web protects children from porn and predators. It IS a primary part of a ruling on the COPA act. Now, they are the only ones from the Big 4 that stood up to the Government. Some people think that Google is standing up to the US to protect individual freedom and who knows, first this data and then they hand over PII information on individual's searches.

Last time I checked, the US Government, the best Democracy on the great blue spot in the Milky Way protects our individual rights and not Google. And, you know who basically asked for the check on the existing filtering technology - The Supreme Court. Now lets look at the other side of the spectrum - China.

China and Google - Perfect Together?

China - the last time I checked was Communist. You remember those people, right? They were pretty popular up until 1989 or so, when Reagan's pressures finally led to the crumbling of the Soviet Empire and only really left Cuba and China as strong Communist nations.

Fast forward to 2006 and everyone loves China now a days because you guessed it - a billion or so people buy a lot of goods; that is when their government allows them to make some money. You know what the Chinese still practice - good old government censorship. Freedom of speech in China, the kind like we enjoy in the USA, does NOT exits. Hell, you can't even get a good search result without some form of censorship.

Now, Google decides to help the Chinese Government continue to oppress their people by making it easier to censor search results. No, not the Google. we can make money without doing evil company. Yes that Google; well maybe not the Google that originally wrote those words, but the Google that is now making a ton of money. Read this article from CNN entitled Google To Censor Itself in China to see for yourself.

I don't know about you, but when the same company decides to stiff the Democratic US Government in the name of freedom and then turns around and helps a Communist China continue their oppression, one has to wonder who we are dealing with. Maybe Google should re-read their Corporate Values Statement again and decide if they really want to make some money the free speech, democratic way which up until now has helped their stock grow from about $90 to $433.

Think I'm the only one that feels this way - check out Bambi's article over at CBS MarketWatch (require free registration) titled Google Shows Its True Colors. Again, makes you want to move your blog to Typepad.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

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Birthday Gift 3 of 3

It is January 26th and I think I’ve extended my birthday as long as I can. So, let’s finish up handing out some birthday gifts.

When last I wrote about my birthday gifts, I examined how audience duplication rates can impact your media buying strategy. Basically by understanding your duplications, you don’t have to spread your marketing dollars around. So, that brings us to the next strategy, which is building relationships and getting volume discounts.

Building Relationships
Like all things in this country, media buying depends on whom you know and what your reputation is. Do you like to beat up publishers and/or agencies? You do? Well, guess what, you are probably paying more for the same impression than the next guy. Wouldn’t you mark up your rates with a handling fee for a tough client? I would, no matter how much you spend. If you treat your publishers badly, you will probably burn out your account team, if you even get one, resulting in retraining. Sounds familiar, huh?

Building great media relationships is a pretty straightforward process. Just be honest with what your goals are and try and share as much data as legally possible. I had no issues with sharing click and conversion data with the publishers so they can optimize and see how they were doing. Of course, I got legal approval to do this. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to share your overall media buying strategy. As some of you know, I had a standard stump speech that I would give whenever I met a new member of the publisher’s team.

Remember build good relationships. If you have trouble with that, remember one of my favorite personal quotes:

Be nice to people who give you money, serve you food, provide you with data, and sell you media.

Volume Discounts, Baby
So, now you are armed with duplication rates and good relationships with your media counterparts. Now what? Easy, buy media on as few sites as possible that give you the reach that you are looking for. That way, you’ll maximize the amount of money spent on the sites, probably get a good account team, and then you’ll enjoy volume discounts.

What? Don’t think it is that simple. It is. How do you think the company I formerly worked for was rated as the 17th largest online advertiser in the United States? We didn’t spend as much money as the University of Phoenix, which is EVERYWHERE. Seriously, we were ranked that high because of the three simple steps I outlined over these past few posts – duplication rates, relationships, and volume discounts.

That’s all there is. Happy birthday

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

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Google and The Government Part 2

A few days back I wrote an article on Google, The Internet and The Government writing that I found it odd that Google was the lone internet giant to withhold non-PII data from the Government as it investigates how effective existing filters are for the Child Online Protection Act (COPA).

Well it seems that I'm not the only one that thinks it is a little odd. If you read the subpoena found on my original post on the subject, the Government claims it bent over backwards to work with Google, but to know avail.

Read this article today found in Marketing Vox, titled Outing Google's Dirty Little Secrets. Or how about this article over at Forbes.com titled Why Google Won't Give In. Interesting huh?

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

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Google, The Government and The Internet

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal there was an interesting story titled In Threat To Internet's Clout, Some Are Starting Alternatives (link here for seven days) . Basically, it talked about how the US Government, specifically the Commerce Department, oversees ICANN for assigning web addresses and developing all those nifty .xyz's like .XXX for porn sites (coincidently it is delaying this assignment). A lot of foreign countries don't like the fact that the US Government, for all intense purposes, owns the internet and can shut down any internet suffixes in the event of a war or terror attack.

Now, what I found fascinating about this article is how fearful a lot of countries are that we could shut down a part of the internet. So, under an anti-Bush cover, they said they need to build their own country specific internet. These new country internets would allow access to ICANN addresses but not the reverse, in effect, shutting themselves out of US traffic.

I have nothing against setting up back-up plans, but one has to wonder why something that is working so well and has brought the world closer together, would need competing technologies, which would in effect, split the world up again. I think the only group of people that needs to fear discrimination are the folks that are interested in .XXX sites.

Speaking of adults sites, did you see the news regarding Google and the US Government today? It seems that in order to comply with the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 that President Clinton signed into law, the government must prove that existing "filtering software are less effective that the statutory restrictions in protecting minors" from you guessed it sexually explicit material. Remember this is a law President Clinton signed into law.

In order to prove this, the Government needs non-PII data from Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. And you know who refused? You know smart guy - Google.

Now I'm not going to debate the merits of the law and by reading the subpoena, you can see that the Government tried to work with Google, but Google refused. Personally, I think it is about time that Google grew up and realized that it is not some cute little search site and has to behave like one of the big boys. A company with $118 Billion market cap and likes to compete with MSN and Yahoo, should know that if you get big and rich enough, eventually the US Government pays attention to you.

Don't agree with me? Read the subpoena for yourself and decide.

Morals of the story here? 1 - the US Government is in control of the internet. 2 - be careful what you search on - you never know who is looking. 3 - You want to run with the big dawgs, get out of your Cali cube!!!

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

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Advertising Today Jan 18 - The Bad and The Ugly

Time for this week’s installment of The Bad and The Ugly courtesy of two articles I read yesterday and today.

First The Bad

In today’s Wall Street Journal, there is an article interviewing Richard Castellini who is VP, Consumer Marketing for CareerBuilder.com. The article describes CareerBuilder.com’s strategy for advertising on this year’s Super Bowl. Among other topics covered is using monkeys in advertising and their strategy for running the ads. And, that’s when I started thinking about monkey business for Super Bowl Advertising.

The rationale for running last year’s ad was that brand perception in the marketplace lagged competition (ie, Hotjobs and Monster) and the ads were a great way to get the message out and energize the company. Plus, when they looked at the results they saw record gains in traffic and search the week after the Super Bowl. They seemed very proud of these accomplishments and looked forward to this year’s advertising.

Hmmmm – it seems to me that they should have used the advertising dollars on improving their product (when was the last time you used their site?) instead of spending $2 million per 30 seconds to drive traffic to their website and jazz up their employees. No wonder marketing departments sometimes get a bad reputation in companies.

Now The Ugly

In yesterday’s MediaPost there was an article that WhenU and 1800Solutions are bundled with download disasters. What this means is that these two marketing tools are bundled with - you guessed it – Spyware. This makes my stomach roll around in fits.

What makes advertisers think that they could use WhenU.com to get legitimate traffic? With all of the improvements with ad serving and legitimate behavioral targeting, why not just avoid these types of Spyware companies?

Are you using either of these two for your internet advertising? Unless you are in the porn or gambling business maybe you should just stop it. Once you get 1800Solutions stuck on your PC and can’t remove it, maybe then you’ll try a legitimate alternative.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

The New Blog on AT&T

Last week I wrote a blog critiquing the New, New, New AT&T advertising campaign and it occurred to me that I made an error. Not a big one mind you, but an error nonetheless and I wouldn’t want to ever be accused of spreading non-truths. Stay with me on this one.

I pretty much wrote that I thought the $100 million advertising campaign relaunching the new, new, new, and really new AT&T was a complete waste of money. For example, why spend all of that money in the New York market when pretty much the brand name was still recognizable. If you wanted to spend that kind of money, it should have just been spent in SBC territories. Look at all of the red spots on the map; that’s pretty far away from the New York market!!! You also could have saved the money for the inevitable rebranding of Cingular back to AT&T Wireless.

Anyway, all day long you can’t turn on ESPN Radio without hearing that the show was brought to you buy, the really, really, really new AT&T and everywhere you look on the internet you can find an AT&T ad. Heck, the only place that is safe is watching Josie and the Pussycats reruns on the Boom Network with my kids.

BTW – which one is your favorite Pussycat? My favorite was Melody – kind of an early version of Chrissy Snow.

Oops sorry about the diversion. So, I did make an error in describing the campaign as a complete waste of time. It is not. The new, new, new, new, really – I promise it is new AT&T is a complete win for the media agency, publishers, newspapers, radio shows, heck anyone that has advertising space to sell is winning out on this campaign. I even had an ad on my blog, but I didn't get any money from it because none of you readers clicked on the ad. Shame on You!!!

The folks that got any slice of this media buy (except for me) will have a great quarter and I hope some of my friends did make their 1st quarter – oops what am I talking about, 2006 goal in the first month of the year. Congratulations – now go switch jobs before someone asks you to beat out your 2006 numbers.

That’s if for today. Welcome to the new, new, new, new, new, new, new

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Birthday Gift 2 of 3

Well, it is over a week since my birthday and I’m still in a giving mood; I’m not sure why because only little kids string their birthday celebration out as long as this. In the last post I decided to give away some of my most treasured secrets when it came to how I turned Harrisdirect into the 17th largest US advertiser on the internet. Unfortunately for you, I waited until this post to give anything away. Oh and one more reminder, these are my personal strategies for online advertising; nothing proprietary to any former employer is being revealed.

Audience Duplication and The Internet

Are you like me and visit a specific site more often than others? You know the kind of sites that are called Yahoo! or MSN and perhaps you even have a customized homepage with one of them. Then from those sites, you go on your merry way to other sites. Some of my personal favorites are Backstreets, WSJ, World of Warcraft, and NY Times. Of course, each one of these sites is putting a cookie on my PC and as well as any 3rd party ad servers that are serving ads on the behalf of advertisers.

Bingo I’m the same cookie visiting multiple web sites. In all likelihood, the individual sites don’t know where else I’m visiting and they certainly count my visits and impressions when selling to potential customers.

Think about how often you web surf. Everyone does it. That’s why the big portals like Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and even Google are in the game of building tools and adding content to keep you in their family of sites longer. The more visits and the longer the length of stay, the more money they can charge advertisers for the traffic on the site. You didn’t really think that Google is not in the business of making money did you?

However, there is one type of company that knows the duplication rates. They are the 3rd party ad servers and any other types of tracking companies. That’s due to the unique cookie placed on your PC.

Now How Do You Use This Knowledge?

Quite simply it means, don’t waste your advertising dollars on multiple sites within your category. You need to know what your actual audience duplication rate is on your ad buy, not just what publishers or research tells you. And, the best source of that data is your 3rd party ad server because it is centrally serving your advertisements across your media buys.

In the example above, let’s say you are looking for my demographic and have an ad buy on NY Times and Yahoo. Use your ad server to figure out what the duplication rate is between the two. What you’ll find out is that every site in your ad buy will have a huge overlap with portal type sites and perhaps an enormous overlap with other publishers. You’ll be able to eliminate a site or two from your media buy, thus making yourself more efficient and perhaps even plowing those dollars into another site with unique traffic or move the dollars into a site already in your ad buy. The latter part is for the next addition of my birthday gift to you.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Birthday Gift 1 of 3

Well, it was the 10th anniversary of my 29th birthday on Friday and I had quite a big weekend. Plus, it was also my first official week not belonging to corporate America since I was a collegian at Rutgers College of Engineering. And, that reminds me of a story.

When I was a Senior I was asked to talk to incoming freshmen on how great it was being an industrial engineer during The Introduction to Engineering Course. So, I showed up in my Bruce Springsteen t-shirt and proudly proclaimed –

“Being an industrial engineer is great. It will help me pursue a career in business and marketing; plus it is a great background for getting your MBA.”

Well, the department head, Dr. Elsayed A Elsayed was not too happy with me because I probably set recruiting into the department back a few years. However, that was truth and it helped me understand analytics, numbers, and problem solving better than the average marketing manager.

Anyway, back to my original story. Since it was my birthday and I love getting gifts, I thought for once I could turn around and give a gift back to you. That gift is the secret of how Harrisdirect was listed as the 17th largest advertiser in the United States. As you can see from the link, HD was sandwiched between the University of Phoenix and Earthlink, and according to eMarketer, spent $3.7 million in September 2005. Now, that's where the fun begins.

As anyone will tell you, the reported media spend is often incorrect, but since it is wrong for everyone, you usually can believe the rank order. However, the number and the rank order were wildly wrong for HD. I can’t tell you what was actually spent, but what anyone else that was remotely close to the program could tell you, is that our online marketing program was one of the greatest facades and best-kept secrets around.

Now, I don’t like to kiss and tell and some things I can’t tell, but what I will lay out is part of my personal media strategy honed over buying a lot of online media since oh, about 1999. It is so simple and based on good problem solving and logic that even Dr. Elsayed A Elsayed would be proud that I put some industrial engineering skills to good use.

My personal strategy came down to three basic understandings of how buying on the internet really works:

1. Understanding audience duplication rates


2. Building trusted relationships with your media partners


3. And, volume discounts, baby

Well, that’s it for today. You’ll have to tune back for Part 2 because I want to keep my blog shorter and I like to lengthen my birthday celebration. So,

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

I've Seen This New AT&T Before, Haven't I?

Did you watch last night's Rose Bowl, read this morning's Wall Street Journal, or listened to ESPN Sports Radio yesterday? Well I did and I couldn't help but be bombarded with AT&T's new advertising campaign. As reported in Media Daily News, the new campaign themed Your World, Delivered is supposed to be the biggest of either of the two previously stand-along telecom giants, The Old AT&T and SBC. According to the article, the campaign is valued at $100 million for 2006.

Yes, I worked at AT&T for 10 years and I loved my time there and I still have my long distance with them. Heck, I was happy to see that two of my calling plans that I launched are still active. However, $100 million to launch a branding campaign seems like an awful lot of money. Do the current ads talk about new products or calling plans? No. It announces that SBC and AT&T joined forces to form the New AT&T.

As I recall, AT&T still has huge brand awareness and telling people SBC is now part of it seems like a waste of money. Couldn't the powers that be have spent a chunk of that money on fighting Vonage in VOIP. How about entering the internet space for acquiring customers? I did seem some New AT&T online ads, but they had no call to action and were black and white. Here's another idea. How about saving the money for the inevitable branding of Cingular back to AT&T Wireless?

The Old AT&T used to launch big campaigns to move the needle especially when it came to acquiring customers. Remember the iPlan; I still don't know what that was, but I remember it. How about Beaches which showed a woman working on the beach with her cell phone? That was a great ad. However, the Old AT&T stopped those big monolithic campaigns and started focusing on direct marketing and product specific advertising. That seems like a more modern strategy.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

The Chicken Lady Cometh

A few days ago I wrote a blog about What Came First, The Chicken or The Blog and I had no idea how popular it would be. First of all, I had my all time high of 175 page views (in the big scheme of things, that's a ring on an gnat) in one day.

Also, my sister started her own blog today. Unfortunately, she didn't go for the url that I had listed (www.chickens4pets.com), but went with chickens4pets.blogspot.com. I could have updated the original post with Toni's new blog, but according to the mybloglog stats, www.chickens4pets.com is my number one link out so why change?

Speaking of MyBlogLog the links on the side are absolutely awesome and are mostly free. I get free tracking on mybloglog and for a nominal fee of $25 per year I get outgoing and incoming links. Through FeedBlitz people can receive emails of my recent posts - for FREE and finally Technorati lets me have a search box. These are awesome.

That's it for today. Welcome to the blogging world NYchickenlady

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

What Came First The Chicken or The Blog

I was visiting with my sister a few days ago and she was a little bit down on the internet. She has an awesome product that she sells online; they are exquisitely hand-designed eggs. Check them out at http://www.keepsakeeggs.com– she is quite the artist. Anyway, she ran a campaign on Google a year ago and she didn’t get meaningful results from her campaign. So she said, “Eric, how am I supposed to get rich via the internet if a Google search campaign doesn’t drive traffic that converts?” I tried explaining to her the whole starving artist phenomena but she didn’t bite. So, let’s take a look at what went wrong and how a blog on raising chickens could help my sister.

So, You Have A Chicken Farmer for a Sister?

My sister, Toni, lives in Dutchess County NY and decided that raising chickens would be a great hobby. I was surprised that she knew the difference between a hen and a chicken (side note – this reminds me of a favorite line from Seinfeld – if the rooster is having sex with the hen, then who is having sex with the chicken?). Toni takes the chicken eggs and using a special process that coats the eggs with a colorful polymer layer. Bingo, Toni has a very beautiful unique gift. Raising chickens on her own, she has developed a lot of experience in buying, caring, and raising chickens. Heck, I found out on Monday that she performs autopsies on dead pets to understand what happened to them. Yes it is true; I have a chicken farming sister.

To Google or Not To Google, That Is The Question

So, Toni wants to get rich like every other starving artist and asks me what she should do. I said, start a search campaign on Google and get some traffic. So, she turns on her campaign and you know what happens? Her ROI is pathetic. It turns out that when she does get traffic from her campaign, they don’t turn into paying customers and those clicks turn out to be pretty expensive. You say to yourself, “Eric, aren’t you featured in the press talking about search? How can you bash Google? “ Well, I’m not bashing Google at all. Quite the contrary, here’s what is going on with my sister’s campaign.

Toni is in the gift giving business and is up against MAJOR advertisers (ie – Hallmark) who can outspend her on a per click basis. Also, she is selling decorative eggs, which means she has a very seasonal product (Easter). Net, net she is in a very competitive space going up against big advertisers. That’s why her campaign failed. Any clicks she paid for came at a big CPC and when they did click, using normal shopping cart abandonment rates, the math doesn’t work on a CPA basis. What is she supposed to do?

Blog Where The Fish Are

As you can see, I really enjoy blogging. It’s not that I just discovered it, but being employed by an online broker has some drawbacks and one of them was that I needed to have our compliance team review before I published anything. Now, I love the compliance team at Harrisdirect (some more than others), but I felt uncomfortable with having to get an approval, plus didn’t it waste company time if I need to get these approvals. The big reason I enjoy blogging is that a regular person like myself, can generate CONTENT on the internet with just a laptop, internet connection, and a story. Bingo – you are competing with the big boys for content, and as anyone will tell you, content is KING.

chickens4pets.com

So, Toni should start a blog on raising chickens (http://www.chickens4pets.com/). She could write about buying chickens for pets, caring for chickens, feeding chickens, eggs, toys, building chicken coops, and plus, a whole commentary on performing chicken autopsies. The amount of delicious content is endless. Once Toni has her blog going she’ll need to get traffic to the site. That’s where Google comes into play.

Instead of using Google to drive sales, why not use Google to drive traffic to the blog? Of course the blog will have advertising and links back into Toni’s gift site http://www.keepsakeeggs.com/ so she can monetize the traffic. Plus, if she builds up enough visitors she can turn on an ad sense campaign to generate her own CPC revenue. Hopefully, with enough traffic and paying customers, Toni could really start frying up some eggs. So now instead of competing with the big gift giving retailers on a CPC basis, she can build up her own traffic at a much more cost-effective basis.

See, you thought raising chickens and hatching eggs would have nothing to do with a blog. That’s it for now. I need to make a western omelet for dinner.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric