On The Turning Away

A story on the online edition of German magazine, Spiegel, gives a glimpse of what is to come at Google, internationally. One can hardly escape the impression that Deutschland is in awe with the “ad machine”.

“One year ago, the company decided to massively enter local markets via the Internet and mobile phones. Maps provided by Google Maps and three-dimensional urban vistas provided by Google Earth will provide a platform for advertising, advice and information: Where is the nearest shoe store? What time does the harbor boat trip begin?”

Hence it goes some way toward explaining Google’s agressive hiring of late. Regardless of what “Googleness” entails, no alpha males need to apply. Hmm, we wonder whether the subtleties of “alpha males” may have been lost in the translation.

Yahoo! came out swinging yesterday with a massive effort to drive traffic by creating Web brand channels - “Brand Universes” - based on hot entertainment products, as it’s under increasing pressure to make better use of the plethora of services and functions it offers.

Based on its own statistics, Yahoo chose the top 100 list by deciding which brands had the most passionate audiences in the demographics it was looking for. For example, last November Yahoo launched wii.yahoo.com, designed to be a central depository of all things Wii (Nintendo’s Wii video game player). It builds social networking features around it by offering materials culled from whthin Yahoo, such as pictures by Flickr photo and Yahoo Answers, and links to articles and blogs about Wii. The site has attracted an audience of 1.2 million unique viewers and will be “pushed” to places on Yahoo where Wii fans might be in the new branding effort.
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In a fight for survival amid dwindling ad revenue on print, some regional newspapers are embracing fledging efforts including adding MySpace style social media features to their Websites to increase “reader engagement”.

Successful local newspaper-based social networks have morphed into a social hub shortly after the papers began posting fliers telling area bands they could post their own fliers online. Some added user blogs, profiles and forums to their Websites and early results indicat that “social use” now accounts for 15% to 20% of the traffic.

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While Time Inc is wholly focused on an ad-supported digital model, Dow Jones is embracing “a bit of a race to the middle”, aiming at finding a balance between paid and free online business models. On the whole, Dow Jones generates about 70% of its revenue from the print side of its business, which includes Wall Street Journal and Barron’s.

WSJ.com, the trophy digital asset of Dow Jones, has about 800,000 subscribers who play $99 a year. The site, along with its related free sites, generates “$50 million or so” in advertising revenue. While abandoning the paid model would result in more page views and advertising inventory, DJ execs don’t believe they could “monetize that inventory today” to make up for the loss from susbscription revenue.

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Maria Bartiromo, aka “Money honey”, seems to have a knack for getting big shots into hot water. Last April, she famously said on air during afternoon trading in New York that the new-ish Fed chief Ben Bernanke had told her the market had misinterpreted his testimony to Congress that the Fed might pause its interest rate tightening cycle. A razzmatazz ensued.

Fast forward to January 2007. Bartiromo’s glamorous friendship with Todd Thomson was purported to have claimed her friend’s scalp at Citigroup. Perks worthy of “money honey” Thomson offered included a seat on a Citigroup corp jet during a trip to China and frequent invites to corporate events. But the comparison ends there. Last year, it was the Fed chief who was taking the heat. This time around, however, both the money honey and her employer, CNBC, are in for a thrashing. Update after the jump.
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Organic living and wellness are abuzz recently as scores of Websites have cropped up in this space. iVillage jumps out of mind - the so-called “boomer women” are often cited as its target demograpic. In the wake of Steve Case’s Revolution Health, Time Inc is said to be mulling a health and wellness portal, making it the latest - and a tad late - entering the fray.

Aged 30 to 55 - the trailing age of the baby boomer, these women are the primary homemakers and child-tenders as well as breadwinners but were never hippies. “She may be a new mom at 45, a CEO at 30. And she won’t be a senior until she’s 70.” The standard demographic slice-and-dice won’t work when you want to reach boomer women. Marketers are advised to “advertise to a life stage” - her needs as opposed to her age, whereas in the past age was a shorthand for where someone is in her life journey.

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Further tidbits trickled out from AlwaysOn new media confab on video ads. In a move to dampen media frenzy over the purported pre-roll ads at YouTube, a Google exec said yesterday that Google is currently testing other methods of serving video ads, including postroll ads and interstitials, but hasn’t yet settled on a monetization scheme for YouTube.

Critics of pre-roll ads such as GM/Planworks dismissed it as “an interruptive model”. Others adopted a more soft tone. Dow Jones Online, for example, said marketers continue to buy pre-roll, given “the demand is there from the advertisers”. The post-roll format has its distractors as well - if you put your 30 or 60 back there, do you know if anyone’s going to watch it? The debate wages on.

After a day of always-on media, everyone retired to the bar for free booze.

(Courtesy of Cakes of Light, h/t flavorpill)

We were not at the AlwaysOn new media shindig at the swanky Mandarin Oriental in New York. Nor did we watch the Webcast of this morning’s panel on a headline-grabbing subject: Are There Chinks in Google’s Advertising Armor? But we know in today’s always-on world our last resort would be blogs. And blogosphere certainly doesn’t disappoint.

Webmetricsguru gives a good review of the goings-on, not to mention the plug for the ambience: copious amount of booze, no less. On search - Google invented the game of search monetization and dominates it; video - Google snapped YouTube but will its ambition in video ads pay off?

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