Advertisers are increasingly attracted to advertising on eBay and eBay is increasingly happy to accommodate them, much to the chagrin of some of its sellers.To this end, the auction site is setting up an International Ad Division , headquartered in Bern, Switzerland.

What advertisers want is to run campaigns on a global basis rather than on a country basis, in particular larger players such as Royal Mail and Mercedes-Benz.

“Working with advertisers in local markets, we came across an increasing demand for international campaigns, and campaigns across multiple territories,” said Christian Kunz, head of advertising international at eBay, via ClickZ. “This service will offer a flexible and scalable solution for international advertisers and agencies.”

What attracts advertisers to eBay is the high propensity of the auction site’s users that want to shop. Couple that with the huge amount of transactional data held by eBay Advertising, and the ever-growing collection of highly niche categories, and it’s not hard to see why eBay is an attractive proposition.

Source:BizReport.com

Mobile advertising has been the next big thing for a while now. But although text messaging is popular among young adults, the 160-character format has yet to become a mass influencer. Still, consumers who respond to mobile ads are most likely to engage with text messages, according to a survey of mobile users ages 15 and older in the US by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA). Seven out of 10 respondents to the DMA’s “Mobile Marketing: Consumer Perspectives” study who had acted on mobile ads said that text messages for a product or service had prompted their actions. That was more than three times as many as responded to a mobile Web offer or coupon.

But even text messaging is not about to replace other marketing mainstays such as e-mail or direct mail. In fact, only 1% of US Internet users surveyed in February 2008 by ExactTarget picked text messaging as their channel of choice for opt-in communications. Instead, the medium is better-suited for targeting specific audiences, and as part of multichannel campaigns.

Text messaging may not dominate mobile advertising as more mobile users with sophisticated phones and data plans come into the fold (think iPhone and its ilk). Yet the simplicity and compatibility of texting is likely to ensure its long-term appeal in the same way text-based e-mail has remained viable.

In the meantime, the bigger issue is when mobile advertising will become a common campaign tactic. For most marketers and advertisers, mobile is still only getting experimental budget at most.

Mobile advertising’s toddler status was reflected in a February 2008 iMedia Connection survey of US online marketers. Although about one-quarter of respondents said they were open-minded enough to decide on a case-by-case basis whether to use mobile ads this year, more than two-thirds said they would do no more than dabble in the channel.

Facebook unveiled a new layout, sporting fresh profile pages designed to help members better organize their social lives. But the redesign is drawing complaints from users who say the new site is difficult to navigate and criticism from application developers who worry that the changes will alienate their patrons.

Facebook’s changes come as it competes with rival MySpace to become the primary online social network. MySpace also reorganized the layout of its profiles this summer to help make information easier for members to find.

A central part of the redesign includes an expanded Wall, which is the section of a member’s profile page where friends can post comments and photos. The Wall now incorporates details about a user’s recent activities, previously found on a separate feature known as the news feed. Other applications, such as games and trivia quizzes, as well as personal details, are now on separate tabs in an effort to cut down on clutter.

But Jonathan Dach, 22, of the District, said the new design breaks up profile pages too much, making it more time-consuming to browse the site.

“Splitting up the information . . . forces users to continually click through links to new information,” he said. “Every time we do that, Facebook gets to reload the advertisements. To view someone’s profile in its entirety, I now have to view at least four times as many ads.”

Other users are reluctant to try out the redesigned profile pages, which are currently accessible on an opt-in basis as the redesign is gradually rolled out to all of Facebook’s 80 million users over the next few weeks.

“I don’t want it to change — that gives me a whole set of things to figure out on Facebook, which, as I get older, I have less time for,” said 22-year-old Yesenia Estrada of Gaithersburg.

One goal of Facebook’s new layout is to reduce the clutter from the applications users have downloaded to their profiles. While the colorful games and animated graphics used to dominate profile pages, the applications are now on a separate tab. Facebook said this will give users more control over where they place applications on their profiles.

Some small application developers fear that losing that valuable real estate on users’ profile pages will stunt their ability to attract new users.

Others say they need more time to revamp their applications to fit Facebook’s new design, which the company announced in May.

“It took me a year to write all these apps, and Facebook expects me to totally rewrite them in a month,” Chris Claydon, a developer in Britain, wrote on Facebook’s developer forum. “Why even attempt the impossible?”

Larger developers say the redesign will let members show off their favorite games and applications, which will help them gain more users. “For existing apps with a lot of users, you’re likely to fit into the new world,” said Tim O’Shaughnessy, co-founder of Hungry Machine, which has developed programs that let users review books, movies and beer, for example. “If you’re launching a new one, it’s going to be a little harder to get visibility.”

Kevin Foreman, chief executive of Bevy, a fashion marketing company, in May launched an application aimed at women who like to swap fashion tips. He hopes the redesign will let users show off the application more prominently, rather than automatically being displayed at the bottom of a profile as it used to be.

“We may not see super-growth, but our loyal users will showcase the app because they want to, not because they were tricked into it with spammy techniques,” he said.

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer on Thursday defended Microsoft Corp’s need to make heavy investments in its Internet businesses but said the company was “done,” for now, with pursuing Yahoo Inc . “There’s nothing under discussion between the two of us,” Ballmer told investors of how six months of various talks had reached an impasse earlier in July.

“We had a set of principles, we talked about them, it didn’t work out,” he said. “Fine, we’re done. We can move on.”

The message for Microsoft’s annual meeting with Wall Street analysts, an all-day affair at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, was that it had a post-Yahoo plan to turn around its online services division and a strategy to take advantage of future opportunities, even as its Internet chief departs.

“There is this huge, huge, huge new opportunity around the Internet and online and we have to embrace that opportunity and invest in that opportunity,” Ballmer said.

Shares of Microsoft have fallen 8 percent over the last week since the company forecast an outlook below Wall Street estimates and revealed an additional $500 million investment into its online unit, even as it chalked up further losses.

Charles Di Bona, a software research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said Ballmer’s comments did not give enough details about how that additional investment will be spent and how the company arrived at that decision.

“It’s spending $500 million dollars and then it says we’ll tell you later how we’ll spend it,” said Di Bona, who has an “outperform” rating on Microsoft. “The market’s concern is not about how it is running its core business. It’s about decisions about larger chunks of money that people can’t track.”

Ballmer said Microsoft is willing to endure online division operating losses that amount to between 5 percent to 10 percent of the company’s total operating income, which reached $22.5 billion in fiscal year 2008, until the search and advertising business reaches “scale.

With the Olympic Games just a month off, some brands are looking to extend their sponsorships with social media programs. Lenovo has created 100 athletes’ blogs in an attempt to align itself with some less mainstream sports, such as field hockey and modern pentathlon. It gave the athletes laptops and video cameras to chronicle their preparation for the games.

“We wanted to do something that shows our tech prowess, not something that uses the Web as billboard,” said David Churbuck, vp of global Web marketing at Lenovo.

Lenovo turned to Google for help with the program. Google is providing blogging software via Blogger and video hosting through YouTube.

In keeping with the ethos of the social Web, Lenovo is not hosting the blogs on its own site. Most athletes either had their own sites or established them for this project. Lenovo is adding distribution by highlighting the blogs on its Web site at www.lenovo.com/voices.

Lenovo has asked the participating athletes to show a “Lenovo 2008 Olympics Blogger” badge on their sites. Most have done so, said Churbuck. It isn’t asking for any mention of Lenovo products, he added.

“I don’t want to be in the position of telling them what to write,” he said. “It’s their blog, they can do what they want.”

The blogging program is complemented with a Facebook effort that lets users virtually identify themselves with their country’s teams. Federated Media and Citizen Sports created country applications users can add to their profiles. So far, more than 100,000 have been downloaded.

” A brand like Lenovo working within Facebook is interesting because that’s the nut that a bunch of people are trying to crack,” said Jeff Ma, CEO of Citizen Sports. “Most brands and agencies don’t even know how to advertise on Facebook. There’s still a lot of education.”

Lenovo’s not alone in expanding its Olympics marketing socially. McDonald’s has also expanded on its traditional Olympics advertising with a social strategy centered around its first alternate-reality game. Called “The Lost Ring,” the AKQA-created game has been operational since April. In that time, McDonald’s boasts more than 2 million visitors in 100 countries have played it at some level. “The Lost Ring” challenges players to solve mysteries surrounding the Olympics.

“It’s an opportunity to engage with the youth culture around the world in a very meaningful and creative experience — one I’d say they can’t get anywhere else,” said Mary Dillon, McDonald’s chief marketing officer. “We want to be on the cutting edge of innovations.”

Dillon said the by-product of taking a plunge into a new area like an ARG is the rub-off effect it might give the McDonald’s brand among young consumers.

“We would hope the same community would be a little surprised McDonald’s is bringing this to them,” she said.

McDonald’s is pleased with participation rates for the game, Dillon said, though she admitted some of the extra benefits, like positive buzz, were more difficult to quantify than traditional ad metrics.

Those intangibles were the lure of the Lenovo athlete-blogging program, said Churbuck.

“The old model of blunt impressions, the billboard model, is not going to do it for me,” he said. “I’m far more interested in how many comments we drove, the traffic to athletes’ blogs, downloads of the applications. Those are more tangible expressions of engagement with the brand than clicks.”

Source: adweek.com

Did we really need more research to tell us that intrusive ads annoy consumers? Well, it seems some marketers missed a meeting in the late 1990’s and need to be taught a lesson in subtlety. To that end, I’ve devised some top tips on how to make sure your visitors don’t stick around.

In 2007, half of Internet users left a favorite website due to “intrusive advertising”. That figure has now risen to three-quarters according to new figures released from HowTo.tv. The message? Consumers will not put up with advertising they deem to be in-their-face and annoying; they will up and leave your website.

Since commerce came to the Internet there have been cries of disdain from Internet users about bad marketing, but over a decade later it continues. So, in an attempt to get the message though, I thought marketers might listen to ways in which to guarantee only a quarter of website visitors stick around.

1. Ensure the consumer has no way to avoid seeing that pop-up ad that greets them to your website. In fact, the harder you make it for them to close the pop-up, the better.

2. What’s a pop-up without sound? Woo them with some clunky musak or keep them amused with a persistent buzzing noise.

3. Your ads will really stand out if you can make them as irrelevant as possible. To maximize this effect, pay no attention whatsoever to your target audience’s needs.

4. Consumers love big, gaudy “whack the mole and win a million” banner ads that obliterate half the screen – the bigger and gaudier the better.

5. Scripts that crash a consumer’s computer are always successful in diverting them away from your website.

6. Take up as much space as possible on each webpage with ads, leaving just enough room for some token content.

7. Make life fun for your site visitors by including ads that float across the screen, blink on and off in various different locations or that trick them into clicking on them.

8. Gambling, porn and horror movie ads are particularly favored ad topics, pepper your website liberally with them for a professional look.

Source: BizReport

Facebook may be the hottest thing without the name iPhone, but ads on the social networking site are not. According to a post on the “Welcome to Reach Students Blog,” ad click-throughs on Facebook are pretty low, even with precise targeting. Why are ads on Facebook flopping?

Marketers have leveled similar complaints against MySpace, but even MySpace’s ad performance — clocking in at around 0.10% — far outpaces these numbers.The primary users of Facebook are college students, or the infamous Gen Y. This is the generation that was raised on the Web and, if we are to believe reports from many of the leading Web gurus, they don’t respond to interruption advertising.

Most agencies still use banner advertising on the Web. Of course, they also use AdWords and other forms of contextual advertising, and I am sure some of these poor performing ads were text links. Plus, Facebook is supposed to offer this amazing contextual ad program. The context could be just another form of interruption advertising, especially for the generation as

Web savvy as this one. What if contextual advertising is just as doomed as old-school banners with the younger generation, especially with the college-oriented, career-bound segment of it that Facebook targets. Seriously, what if Gen Y treats contextual ads the way you and I treat standard Web ads? What if they’re already callous to context? This is a distinct possibility I don’t see many marketers talking about.

The poor ad performance on Facebook — and the lackluster ad performance on MySpace — could the first signs of this.

Source:informationweek.com

A new targeting tool is set for release from ValueClick. The tool is a predictive behavioral targeting tool which provides marketers with anonymous consumer behavior and then predicts future behaviors based on the past information. The Precision BT suite combines Precision Retargeting and Precision Profiles, giving marketers unique insight into consumer behavior.

“What makes Precision Profiles unique is our access to a critical mass of anonymous consumer online experiences and the way our technology dynamically categorizes and transforms them into hundreds of interest segments,” said Matthew Boyd, senior vice president, ValueClick Media. “Combined with the ability for our optimization technology to identify the best possible context in which to serve an ad, we have assembled the most scalable, data-driven audience targeting platform for marketers to achieve their brand and direct response objectives.”

By using predictive algorithms, marketers are given insight into the segments and times that consumers’ visit certain websites, publishers or content sites. This is very valuable information because by knowing when and where consumers will “stop by” they can determine where and how they will advertise, thereby increasing campaign ROI.

The anonymous information provided to marketers includes web browsing, interaction with ads and search and shopping behaviors.

The quest to find the best ways to advertise to online video viewers continues with VideoEgg stepping up to the mark and injecting a bit of fun into online advertising.As YouTube plans to resort to pre- and post-roll advertising, VideoEgg shows that there are better ways to engage the viewer than disruptive tactics. The new web video ad units that the rich media ad network is rolling out are designed to make advertising more interesting.

The new features, as described by VideoEgg in their recent announcement, are:

- Live: Use real-time RSS feeds to continually update the ad experience.

- Local: Deliver ZIP code-specific messaging.

- Rich: Easily deploy and track a rich multi-video ad experience to increase user interactivity.

- Shop: Bring the browser to the user, merchandising multiple items in a single real-time ad experience.

- Share: Viral capabilities help spread the message through virtually any communication or social channel.

As well as allowing marketers to push highly targeted and relevant advertising to an engaged audience, VideoEgg operates on a cost-per-engagement basis only charging when there has been sustained user interaction with an ad.

“The ad experience is ripe for innovation,” said Troy Young, VideoEgg’s chief marketing officer. “We need to replace the banner with portable media experiences that leverage the power of video, feeds, maps, and localization. We can get consumers to engage–we just have to make online advertising more interesting.”

It appears that buzz targeting, demographic targeting, AdSense for Video, geo-targeting and even revenue share couldn’t bring in enough ad revenue to keep pre- and post-roll advertising from YouTube’s door.Things really must be tough if recent reports are true that the online video site is to adopt an advertising format that, according to its own survey, most of its audience dislikes.

According to YouTube group product manager Shashi Seth, “Pre-rolls and post-rolls did not perform well on our platform. [In our testing,] 75 percent of our users were unhappy with them.” Another limiting factor for YouTube is that they only sell ads on material that has been approved by media companies and other partners which, according to the WSJ’s recent coverage, accounts for just 4% of the site’s video clips. It will be interesting to see whether this move will see a backlash from YouTube users or perhaps a migration to other online video sites.