AOL, Google: Searching for the Benjamins in Display Advertising

By Sheila Shayon

The first online advert ran on Oct. 24, 1994, on HotWired, the forerunner of Wired Magazine. It was 468 x 60 pixels and asked:

“Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.”

And we did. The click-through rate was 42 percent. (For the record, Global Network Navigator ran the banner two or three weeks earlier, but HotWired garnered the coverage.)

Today’s display ads are virtual micro-sites, replete with interactive, social elements, animation and video. An example of an award-winning rich media ad:

In three days, this campaign earned 170 million impressions, 50,000 clicks and 17,000 hours of brand engagement, according to Google.

JPMorgan analyst, Imran Khan, predicts an $8.3 billion display advertising economy in 2010. The name of the game in the digital space has moved from search to advertising as the big brands step further into open access platforms with suites of tools and metrics to make it easier for advertisers and agencies to create and ’self-serve’ display ads and track and measure their effectiveness.

DMB spoke with Jeff Levick, executive vice president, AOL Advertising; and Rachel Nearnberg, Global Communications & Public Affairs, Google, about their advertising platforms.

AOL
AOL recently launched a beta version of Advertising.com Ad Desk. Levick was on the floor of Ad Tech San Francisco, where he said AOL’s presence in the middle of the exhibition was attracting traffic and attention. “It’s the most exciting experience at AOL you can imagine. We’re still testing Advertising.com Ad Desk, and learning as we go. It’s a huge leap forward, as it opens up all the inventory we have as well as gives access to a massive number of properties across the web through Ad.com.”

The AOL network has 78 of AdAge’s Top 100 advertisers and 70 of comScore’s Top 100 publishers. ‘Lead-back targeting’ is a distinguishing feature for AOL’s new platform, which allows advertisers to target their ads, and once it’s seen, re-target the same ad across the web. AOL’s suite of tools allows for retargeting consumers who have:

• Visited your website (Advertiser LeadBack)
• Seen or clicked on your ad creative (Creative LeadBack)
• Visited a webpage that you’re sponsoring (Sponsorship LeadBack)
• NOT visited your website - a great way to reach more unique visitors (Reverse LeadBack)
• Searched for a relevant word or phrase on AOL Search (SearchBack)

Formats include rich media, video and widgets, and AOL Advertising’s ad serving platform, ADTECH, manages campaigns across multiple platforms for web publishers, ad networks, agencies and advertisers.

“Transparency and control are the future of online advertising,” Levick says. “Providing clients with a greater level of personalized control over digital marketing campaigns is paramount as organizations continue to look for innovative ways to promote their brands and evaluate their ROI when planning campaigns.”

The build-out of Advertising.com Ad Desk over the last 10 months has deep-dived into technology to create the ‘lead-back targeting’ capabilities. Ads uploaded by the users are virus scanned and monitored as they run, as well as reviewed for ad spec compliance, quality and content.

Next up, Version 2 will deliver increased Reporting and Insights tools and metrics. “We’re connecting the advertising experience to the publishing side of the house. Church and state are talking,” Levick added.

Google
We all heard Eric Schmidt’s prediction that display advertising would be Google’s next billion-dollar business. According to Nearnberg, “In such a fragmented media landscape today, with users on social media sites, e-commerce, blogs or online games, the challenge is where best to reach people and how to tailor ads across thousands of sites and track performance.”

According to Google data, US users spend 12 hours online per week, about 32 percent of their media time. But online advertising comprises only 13.6 percent of US advertising spend. “Scale and reach are the key challenges, and serving display ads is a more sophisticated and complicated process than search,” Nearnberg says. “Our Content Network enables keyword, contextual targeting between ads and content.”

The Google Content Network serves hundreds of billions of ad impressions to more than 500 million Internet users worldwide every month. It includes several Google properties including Google Finance and YouTube, and reaches 100 countries, with ads in 20 languages. Major publishers include New York Times, LinkedIn, Univision, About.com, and Food Network. “94 of the top 100 Ad Age advertisers have run campaigns on Google Content Network - display not search,” added Nearnberg.

For smaller businesses, Google’s Display Ad Builder, offers designed templates that enable the creation and distribution of an ad in minutes. The goal is to make display advertising as simple as search, those functions being complementary. “20,000 advertisers using Display Ad Builder are first-time users. We are adding the science of search to display advertising,” commented Nearnberg.

According to Comscore, “average lift of search activity when display was added to a campaign was 155 percent.”  Douglas Anmuth, a Barclay’s Capital media analyst, predicts that display ads will account for $1 billion in revenue in 2010, or about 4 percent of Google’s total sales.

Experts agree that the gold rush towards display advertising is still early stage. Predictions for the advertising landscape in the near future include: data will be more valuable than awards; ROI will be the metric of success; engagement will trump creativity; and the technology deep dive will continue - with those who can afford to own their own - in the driver’s seat.

In April 2005, DoubleClick released a white paper, “The Decade in Online Advertising (1994-2004) - Online Advertising.” The summary included: “Advertisers still lag consumers in their adoption of digital media. As broadband reaches more American homes, as entertainment companies develop more digital content, and as televisions, mobile phones and other devices further blur the distinction between “online” and “offline,” all advertisers will be forced to adapt faster to the new media environment or struggle to stay relevant.”

Five years later, the struggle continues - but advertisers are adapting faster, listening more to their consumers, and making online engagement a more worthwhile endeavor.

Google Search Seeks Speed

Amit Singhal discusses the future of search at the SABEW conference./Chris Prentice

By Matt Robinson

Google is synonymous with search, but could be onto to something greater: inference. Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and tweaker of Google’s search algorithm since 2001, says search is beyond key words and at the door step of understanding language. Singhal, speaking at the annual Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference in Phoenix held in late March, used some examples. If you google “GM cars,” you get General Motors, but if you google “GM food,” you get genetically-modified. “Search is about matching meaning to what users want,” he says.

Another example, if you google “panasonic lock TV,” you get hits about “parental control.” Singhal says marketers probably didn’t like the word “lock” and went with the nicer “control.” But Google infers the difference. Other points made at the conference include:

• Information wants to be free he says, but that doesn’t mean websites shouldn’t impose a pay wall, citing that good content costs money. But differentiating that good content from “McContent” - quick, cheap generated content - is difficult since the language between the two is often similar.

• Web content is suppose to be free. And citizens with information are better ones. Singhal sees China inhibiting its best interest by restricting search.

• The future of Web search is still based on the what made google popular: speed. “We are crazy about speed,” Singhal says. He noted that if a user’s is slowed down by 200 milliseconds, the site will end up losing traffic. Relevant algorithms are now more important than ever, he says. “As the amount of information has exploded, the importance of relevance has gone through the roof,” he says.

• The kind of information that people seek on phones is much different than what people search for on their computer. Singhal sees a future in location-based advertising.

(Images from home page are courtesy of the Tuscon Citizen.)

Hulu Hops Onto Caption Search Technology

By Dave Fidlin

With the Internet maturing and online video become the norm - not a novelty item - enhancements are being created for streaming content. Caption searching, one of those enhancements, was added recently to the popular site Hulu. But a smattering of smaller companies had already been offering a similar service before Hulu added the feature to its site in late December.

Hulu Labs, the online video portal’s development arm, is running the feature in beta while engineers continue to work on perfecting the technology.

In a statement, Eugene Wei, Hulu’s vice president of product, says the feature will enable users to search for captions of thousands of videos across hundreds of shows. For now, Wei says users can access the feature through Hulu Labs’ website. Eventually, a feature tab will be included on all Hulu shows that have captions.

Wei points out how captions search might be beneficial to a viewer of an online video. Wei says he was watching an episode of “House” recently, and a joke between main character Dr. Foreman and Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin took place. Wei says he was in a quandary when he wanted to watch the episode a second time.

“I couldn’t remember which episode it was in, let alone which moment within the episode,” Wei says in the statement. “With the new caption search, I just type in ‘Mike Tomlin,’ and voila.”

Jason Blackwell, practice director with ABI Research, says features like Hulu’s caption search will be an asset to users with online content growing exponentially each year.

“It’s going to be important for all service providers,” Blackwell says. “I think (Hulu’s caption search) is an important step in what will become the future.”

Blackwell says ABI will soon begin to study features like caption search and examine specifically how it can be beneficial not only to online video, but other specialized services, such as pay TV and other cable and satellite services with a user interface.

While Hulu’s caption search is breaking new ground for the company, it is not a pioneer in the technology. Numerous smaller companies have offered similar services, some as long as five years.

One of those companies, Realtime Transcription Inc., offers a service called Transendia. Tanya Ward English, technology director for Realtime Transcription, says Transendia offers a video search based on the full text of a transcript, in addition to glossary tags for non-spoken information within a video.

Ward English says Transendia caters to a higher-end market. Many of the company’s clients do not want videos hosted on such public sites as YouTube. Instead, she says, those clients opt to use a customized player with full search and playing options from Transendia.

“One of the most useful and unique things about our technology, I think, is something upon which we have a patent pending,” Ward English says. “That’s the ability go pin-point search video or audio files directly from a text search engine like Google or Bing.”

Ward English, a self-described advocate for people with hearing loss, says caption search technology is especially beneficial for online users who have such a condition.

Blinkx, another smaller, specialized company, was launched in 2005 and went public two years later. Suranga Chandratillake, CEO and founder of Blinkx, says his company offers an advanced video search engine feature that gives online video users an opportunity to not only search for captions within a program, but to look for titles and episode names of particular programs.

“We can extract a lot of information from what’s going on inside a video,” Chandratillake says. “Our video search engine doesn’t just work on our own site. It can also get results from other sites like YouTube, or any other site with video out there.”

Chandratillake says Blinkx has been a popular service with advertisers, and revenue has doubled in the past three years.

More companies are sure to join Hulu, Realtime Transcription, Blinkx and others as the quest continues to make caption search technology an integral part of online video.

UK Launches Semantic Data Site: Will the Rest of the World Follow?

By Linda Broughton

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credited with conceptualizing if not inventing the World Wide Web, is not finished yet.

Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, both appointed as Information Advisors to the UK Government, are coordinating Data.gov.uk. Data.gov.uk plans to provide the general public with a single access point to all the United Kingdom’s national, regional and local statistics, surveys and studies - all the information in the UK collected under the umbrella of the national government.

In a passionate speech at TED, Berners-Lee explains that no data is an island - it’s the relationships between different data that make the data valuable, insightful and useful. And these relationships are not often visible to the human eye - if anything, our own preconceptions and individual personalities often interpret rather than understand the relationships between different data, closing us off to real social trends and concerns.

Berners-Lee wants to use the Web to bypass the human attempts to dress up data for personal or political purposes. Instead, he wants the Data.gov.uk platform to expose the real significance buried within the data-to-data relationships through encouraging the digital mapping of raw, unadulterated social, political and economic data. Berners-Lee calls this ‘linked data,’ a precursor to the semantic Web that he believes will one day explain the meaning behind how we collect, calculate, evaluate and use the data that we post online.

Not all of these data relationships will be obviously significant - imagine an application that maps the relationship between data discussing the annual amount of Cadbury chocolate sold in Yorkshire and the corresponding annual number of failed marriages within the same geographical location and time period. However, the project is expected to help identify unexpected and insightful data relationships, insights that would normally take several decades and hundreds or thousands of brilliant socialist scientists, statisticians, psychologists, focus groups and public policy experts to simply suspect.

The automatic data relationship mapping will allow the UK government and the UK public to discover connections, trends and causal relationships that will inform public policy for decades to come. If implemented properly, Data.gov.uk could come very close to comprehensively mapping and explaining the past and real-time behavior of the public - and thus allow platform users to accurately plan the future of a society.

Of course, the key to the concept is the raw data. Currently, there are already third-party applications that map roads and potholes in the UK, provide statistics and information about the location of doctors throughout the UK, and give up-to-date information about local schools. This is useful data to aggregate but it is not yet generating anything that a few quick, targeted searches online can’t. The next push will encourage interested developers to create applications linking the different data to generate data relationship maps that give researchers at think tanks and academic institutions something to ponder and investigate.

Supporters of the open data movement are urging private businesses to follow the UK government’s example and release their raw data to the public. If the private sector keeps its data too close and too secret, the sector risks losing potential profits that would arise from information generated by an external comparison and review of their aggregated data. Moreover, the private sector makes up an important part of modern society. Accurately identifying, explaining and impacting public trends requires more than the government’s analysis of the population’s behavior, it requires an accurate understanding of the public’s practices in commerce and industry.

Data.gov.uk may soon be the way for the UK government (and anyone else interested) to keep several fingers not only on the pulse of modern UK society, but on its stomach, windpipe, eyes, mouth, ears, etc. The platform and its third-party applications may soon provide an in-depth and automatic monitor of modern British, Scottish and Northern Irish daily public life. Do the industries want to jump in now, developing their own applications and supplying their own data to complete the public picture, or will there always be a yawning gap in the data buried in the private sector’s own digital databanks?

http://www.opte.org/maps/tests/

A Mind of Its Own: Search Engine Technology Ever Pervasive

By James Zipadelli

Americans performed more than 15 billion searches in January, which is up 3 percent from the month before, the audience measurement service comScore says. The latest search engine rankings show that Google is still king when it comes to search engines. “Google Sites accounted for 9.9 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.6 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.7 billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (375 million),” the release says.

Although Google spokesperson Nate Tyler declined to comment on Google’s numbers, he did say that Google Suggest Technology is an effective way to help users search for what they are looking for.

“As you type into the search box on Google Web Search, Google Suggest offers searches similar to the one you’re typing. Start to type [ new york ] — even just [ new y ] — and you’ll be able to pick searches for New York City, New York Times, and New York University (to name just a few). Type some more, and you may see a link straight to the site Google thinks you’re looking for — all from the search box,” Google’s Help Forum says. (Ask.com and Microsoft were not available for comment at press time.)

Kevin McFall, co-founder of the vertical search engine RushmoreDrive.com, says the level of difficulty “is pretty high” for anyone trying to gain a share in the search engine market because established search engines spend large amounts of money on marketing and advertising. However, he says there are ways a new search engine can differentiate themselves from their competition. RushmoreDrive.com was a sister site of Ask.com and was shut down in June 2009 due to the recession.

“One must position the value of one’s search in such a way as to change existing behaviors and habits of those who already use Google, Yahoo, AOL or Bing by offering them a reason to change and then delivering a rich enough experience to warrant their frequent return,” McFall says. “One must also realize that instead of taking on the major search players head on, one must find a way to backdoor them to get a slice of the market share instead of trying to compete directly.”

According to McFall, he was able to do this with Rushmore Drive.com by marketing his website as a discovery engine and a search engine. “We achieved the ability to deliver a richer and more relevant set of results through our unique index and page ranking algorithm, along with a distinguished universal results page, which delivered text, image, video and blog results all in one page,” McFall says.

He also suggested search engines that have a social component would be more successful long-term.

There are also specialized websites that find search engine technology useful. For example, Healthline Networks uses search engine technology to help customers with health and drug information.

Healthline Networks CEO West Shell says, “We’ve found out that consumer search can be complicated when it comes to health. Consumers and doctors speak different languages, and often consumers don’t know what to look for when they start.”

Shell says the technology Healthline Networks uses is based on “semantic taxonomy,” or classification, of health information. He also says the technology is always being updated to ensure customers have the latest information available and that they are partners with health carriers like Aetna.

Rich Kahn, CEO of the search engine eZanga.com, says his search engine is being redesigned and should be finished by late 2010.

The redesign allows eZanga.com to “significantly increase the number of sources we pull information from, improve our relevancy algorithm so that our results will be more accurate to the queries performed by our users [and] designing new technologies, that are not used by any other search engine at present, that will improve how we display our results to users in a way that will be more useful to our users,” Kahn says.

2010 API Developers’ Conferences Round-Up

By Ron Callari

This year API developers’ conferences are flourishing as Web and Mobile Platforms are expanding the playing field. From well-attended repeat events like MacWorld and Apple’s WWDC to first-time events like Twitter’s Chirp event, official conferences for third-party developers will cover mobile devices, OAuth, geolocation, enterprise applications and much more.

In layman’s terms, to understand Application Program Interfaces (API) in its simplest form - it’s analogous to relying on others to perform functions that you may not be able or permitted to do by yourself, such as opening a bank safety deposit box. Similarly, virtually all software has to request other software to perform some functions to extend its usage potential.

The practice of publishing APIs has allowed web communities to create an open architecture for sharing of content and data between communities and applications. In this way, content that is created in one place can be dynamically posted and/or updated in multiple locations on the Web.

This year’s round-up of developers’ conferences is listed here chronologically.

360|iDev
April 11-14
San Jose Convention Center
San Jose, Calif.

360|iDev started in San Jose, March of 2009, and will be back in April of 2010. The Silicon Valley is exploding with iPhone development companies and iPhone related startups. After the initial success of their first 360|iDev, 360|iDev San Jose plans to build and expand on that momentum this year. The intent of the conference is to bring the best and brightest minds in the development community together for 3 days of intensive sessions, social interaction, best practices and innovative new ideas.

TWITTER Chirp
April 14-15
Palace of Fine Arts Theatre
Herbst Pavilion, Fort Mason Center
San Francisco, Calif.

Twitter’s first official conference for developers, Chirp was just scheduled for April 14-15 and will cost developers $469. It’s a two-day event with a conference covering OAuth, geolocation and streaming, among other topics, and then a 24-hour hack day for first-time developers to work with seasoned pros. There are only 800 seats available, so developers who have not signed up yet, are encouraged to do so at the earliest.

FACEBOOK f8 2010
April 21-22
San Francisco, Calif.

According to their fan page, on May 24, 2007, Facebook launched their Facebook Platform alongside 800 developers and entrepreneurs at their first f8 conference in San Francisco. Many developers built the innovative applications which paved the way for future development. Today, there are over 500,000 applications on Facebook.com, and over 300 of those have more than one million users each.

This year will be Facebook’s third f8, to be held in San Francisco on April 21-22, 2010.

Become a fan of their f8 Page on Facebook to get updates and information (including how to register) as they make these announcements. Check out the videos and photos from prior f8 conferences and developers can also share their stories and experiences from the past.

GOOGLE I/O
May 19-20
Moscone West
San Francisco, Calif.

Google I/O brings together thousands of developers for two days of deep technical content, focused on building the next generation of web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open web technologies such as Android, Google Chrome, Google APIs, Google Web Toolkit, App Engine, and more.

I/O will feature over 80 sessions ranging from introductory talks to deep dives on the nuts and bolts of a particular technology or product. Fireside chats will also return this year, where you can ask questions to Google engineers in an informal, intimate setting.

The Developer Sandbox, first introduced at I/O 2009, returns this year. The Sandbox will feature over 100 developers who have built applications based on technologies and products featured at I/O. These developers will be on hand to demo their apps, talk about how they built them, answer questions, and exchange ideas.

WEBAPPS ‘10
USENIX Conference on Web Application Development
June 23-25
Boston, Mass.

Since 1975, the USENIX Association has brought together a community of engineers, system administrators, scientists, and technicians working on the cutting edge of the computing world.

Join them for the first USENIX Conference on Web Application Development. WebApps ‘10 is a new technical conference designed to bring together experts in all aspects of developing and deploying Web applications. Web-based applications are revolutionizing both the features that can be delivered and the technologies for developing and deploying applications.  The full program will be available at their Web site some time in March 2010. Check out their Web site for announcement details.

APPLE
World Wide Developers Conference 2010
Moscone Center, San Francisco
June 28-July 2

According to a Wikipedia listing, the WWDC 2010 venue is unknown at the present time, but the conference will, in most likelihood, be held in California as an Apple “corporate event” has been scheduled at the normal WWDC venue, the Moscone Center, for June 28 through July 2.  Information on last year’s event can be found at their 2009 event website.

MICROSOFT
Microsoft Professional Developers Conference
(No venue or date scheduled at the time of this posting)

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (or PDC) is a conference for Windows developers.

It covers new and upcoming technology from Microsoft, and so only occurs in the years when there is something new to talk about. The conference is typically hosted by the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, Calif.

The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is Microsoft’s premier gathering of leading-edge developers and architects. Attendees come from around the world to learn about the future of Microsoft’s developer platform, exchange ideas with Microsoft technology experts, and network with fellow professionals. This is the conference you need to attend if you want to stay ahead of the curve, and get a head start on planning your company’s products and technology investments.

Microsoft’s PR department has indicated that interested parties can learn more about the future conference dates, industry-leading speakers and registration info by visiting their website.

BLACKBERRY Developer Conference
September 27-30
Marriott Marquis
San Francisco, Calif.

Stay up-to-date on what’s coming up at the 2010 BlackBerry Developer Conference. The conference is a dedicated forum for the developer community to immerse itself in all aspect of creating consumer and business applications for the BlackBerry platform.

What you’ll take home is some of the following:

• The inside scoop on developing for the BlackBerry platform and the very latest in software, hardware and tools from RIM and its partners
• Invaluable information directly from RIM experts who will personally share their expertise
• First-hand experiences from developers who have successfully created, integrated and managed wireless applications
• Best practices from industry leaders to shortcut development cycles and drive new applications to market

For readers who have been involved with any of these conferences, feel free to provide us with your feedback. And if there are any Developer Conferences not listed here that you feel are significant, please comment on that as well.

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