AdCenter Officially Now Serving Yahoo (US & Canada)

This week the US & Canada witnessed the latest integration to the merger of Bing & Yahoo!. Their entire advertising search will now be powered by adCenter, meaning advertisers now have access to both of their services, which accumulates to 27.9% of all searches according to the last stats published by comScore.

Although both companies merged and now hold an integrated search advertising program, Bing and Yahoo! still continue to develop their own individual features to deliver better results and performances catering to their users. 

For instance, Pipon recently posted news on Bing & Facebook Social affairs, consisting of socialising Bing search and excluding un-affecting Yahoo!.

In turn Yahoo! earlier this month made some significant changes to its interface, explaining its purpose as part of their continuous strategy to deliver unique user experience and to increase user interaction to help drive high quality traffic into the combined marketplace.

Although there are some negative speculations surrounding Yahoo! and Bing and also Google leading the market, Pipon can’t wait for the integration to be Global. The potential of using the combined marketplace would benefits advertisers and small businesses to reach wider audiences.

In addition, although still too early to tell as there are no indications of this, Yahoo! implementing Bing social search could benefits their overall goals to provide their clients with higher exposure and conversions. This could potentially raise their status and presences in the internet marketing industry.

PPC - AOL's Project Devil, Could It Be Apocalyptic To the Existing Display Advertising?

Presentable, extremely interactive, more relevant but most of all bigger and better is what AOL had in mind when they created 'Project Devil'. So what is it and why could it end the contemporary form of display advertising?

It is a new method of advertising products using online-magazine style content on the display advertising network. A user’s advert appears on the whole right side bar of a webpage and their ad solely occupies the ad space without any competition. The ad formats and features available range from Interactivity, video and social media integration and all in one package.

AOL launched this project last month; starting with a couple of their websites; ‘moviefone.com’ and ‘StyleList.com’. Plans are undergoing to include eight additional websites in their network by November 2010; potential brand currently campaigning on the network includes Cheerios, Macy’s, Sprint, Suave Professionals and Pillsbury Crescents. Websites not owned by AOL will also be part of the network to expand their segment.

This form of display advertising is AOL’s solutions to minimise noise within the communicative process of internet advertising. Devil reduces page clutter, keeping the acutely targeted audience focused on the client’s advert. The additional benefits, which Pipon believes is Devil’s unique selling point, is its ability to blend the adverts on a webpage they’re placed on, & interact with the visitors without their knowledge of its commercial purposes.

Granting it is too early to advise and forecast its performance and expectation, Pipon believes this could be a new web innovation, inspired from magazine advertising to give great exposure to clients, however it raises a couple of issues which if not tackled can halt its potential accomplishments.

For instance, currently cost of running a campaign on Devil is high, which in return limits their clientele to big brands. In addition to that, their display advertising structure restricts the ad placement to one advert per page, which unfortunately affects their click rates to decrease.

Dirk Freytag, SVP at AOL and CEO of AdTech claims not to be concerned in a statement by ClickZ News, where he explains that “although the inventory volume (AOL’s) has decreased, ad revenue has remained the same. The company expects its ad revenue to grow as the Devil promos are disseminated across its sites”

PPC: Google Resurrected 'Simple Ad' To Lead Businesses

Simple Ads, a notion created to help small businesses to advertise easier on Google’s AdWords. The approach, which was conceived quite a few years ago, was never officially launched because Google was supposedly never satisfied with the end results of the product. The product was intended to help small businesses use AdWords faster and more efficient by automatically creating and managing their campaign for them without the need of a third party agency.

Although the project was put on hold, Google didn’t stop their attempts to support and assist small businesses. They created various ad products which focus heavily in supporting small businesses; such as Local Listing Ads and Tags.  

Those SMBs ad product won’t the only one targeted at small businesses anymore, as early this week Google resurrected their Simple Ads project and manage to complete, and launching under the enthusiastic name ‘Boost’.

It is presumably at a testing stage within certain markets, however its functions has been posted as automatically creating campaign for business focusing on a business’s sector and information in the listing. No bidding, No keyword research, all a business need to do is set a monthly budget and Google will take care of the rest, like decide on the keyword triggers.

The only requirement SMBs are expected to ensure is a Places page set up, which is essential for setting up ‘Boost’. Working to Google’s advantage this will forces businesses create a Places page.

Pipon believes 'Boost' could be a significant breakthrough for small businesses that cannot afford services provided by internet advertising agencies. However, Pipon also believe, in comparison to'Boost', internet marketing services take a more personalized approach to help establish a successful campaign. In addition, using an internet marketing agency like Pipon provides small businesses with the flexibility of targeting a wider audience using other internet advertising programs such as AdCentre, Twitter and Facebook.

It would also be interesting to observe Boost's performance in comparison to using AdWords manually and  how Google would market this ad product to SMBs. It is too early to determine if ‘Boost’ would affect the internet marketing industry, however by simplifying AdWords, renders the program more attractive to a wider audience.

SMM: Bing’s Treasure Map creates Hunters on Facebook

Bing latest endeavours, is the lucrative and unquestionably expensive internet marketing strategy for the rapper, Jay Z, upcoming book called ‘Decoded’ published by Random House. Utilising their alliance with Facebook, they are attracting fans on Facebook to a treasure hunt to find pieces of the book in the virtual world and the real world, mainly in London and New York.

The concept of the campaign derived from the memoir’s title, ‘Decoded’, which aspires to get fans from around the worlds to unearth and decode all the pages of the book before its release next month. The processes of the treasure hunt consist of a multi-platform search experience and interactive game. For instance a user will need to go on bing.decodejay-z.com and enter the contest, which also uses the search engine map to find locations of the pages. 

The indications on Bing to the pages are all relevant to the artist’s career and music. However, if you find that you do not know some of the answers, Bing has placed a search box under the response box to help those unbeknownst to the answers.

Facebook users can access 'join the hunt' by just accessing the “Decode Jay-Z with Bing” page, and additionally the Jay-Z and Bing Facebook pages give out clues to participants.

Bing’s communication director explicates the marketing strategy as a method to create a connection with the artist’s fans base and the search engine because findings from their research defined plenty of them as being ‘heavy searches’, "So we can reach this audience with a really engaging experience that hits a topic they're passionate about and it's a great way to build affinity for Bing."(Lisa Gurry)

She also mentions that this being Bing’s first interactive game, it is somehow a test runner, and based on the amount of users interacting on the platform (decoded Jay-Z site) with outline Bing future attempt in similar projects.

This venture is indisputably grand in various scales and very well coordinated with potentially lucrative results. Both the artist and Bing are getting plenty of publicity from the campaign, however separately Bing is getting more traffic from it and the artist is also getting his royalties.

This type of social media marketing is exceptional for a business, the exposure is massively great and the interactions with the users are highly beneficial. Pipon could advise and guide a company in this type of endeavour by developing a marketing analysis of the business’s image on a social media spectrum.