Social Marketing Fails to Combat Malaria: Umm no kidding.

“The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Professor Chris Curtis has joined the Earth Institute’s Professor Jeffrey Sachs to call for the mass distribution of free insecticidal bed nets to replace social marketing as a means of controlling malaria in Africa.

…dismiss social marketing of long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs), which limits subsidised sales of bed nets to vulnerable groups such as under fives and pregnant women, or those who can afford to pay, as false economy. …. They call for malaria-endemic countries to abandon social marketing in all malaria-affected areas, and to change to a policy that regards antimalarial commodities as public goods to be available free of charge for mass distribution.”  http://www.news-medical.net/?id=26876

***Umm what the hell? Social Marketing to reduce malaria? Try nets and DDT.  Its a well known fact that mosquitos hate AJAX.

Omniture: The Next Big Acquisition?

From Barron’s:“Omniture (OMTR) shares are looking higher again today after jumping $1.73, or 8%, yesterday, after CNBC’s Jim Cramer speculated on Friday that the company could be the next to be acquired in the recent feeding frenzy in the online advertising sector. He said the company could be a good target for Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) or Yahoo (YHOO), and that if awarded a comparable multiple to aQuantive (AQNT), which is being acquired by Microsoft, then the stock could be worth as much as $35 a share.Brent Thill, an analyst at Citigroup, wrote this morning that he agrees that the advertising analytics company “is a strong takeover candidate at some point,” he says he does not believe there is a near-term deal in the works.” He also notes that with the stock up 59% year-to-date and 23% over the past two months, and with no near-term buyout likely, “OMTR is now faced with higher expectations for the core organic business.” “ There is a lot of speculation in the online marketing community about what companies might be targeted for acquisition (the one I work for as well).  I would not be surprised to see 3 or 4 established companies gobbled up in the next quarter.Full article below:http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/index.php?s=omniture

Yahoo Combining Its Sales Team

Yahoo! Inc is overhauling the way it sells advertising in the US. Yahoo! announced it will combine two 1,000 ad sales people at Yahoo! will now sell advertising across its platforms. Yahoo! Hopes this will interest marketers who are increasingly looking for ways to spread their marketing dollars. Yahoo! has seen sharp fall in profits during the first quarter, and said recently that weak display ad revenues would impact on second quarter results.

Good luck Yahoo! You are my home page, but I do 99% of my searches on Alta Vista….just kidding…its Google.

FTC to Look Into Online Marketing Practices

Responding to complaints by Center for Digital Democracy and US PIRG, the FTC will hold a Town Hall meeting dedicated to the issue in the fall as part of a larger effort to engage the public on technology issues. CDD’s executive director its director Jeffrey Chester was not mollified, “The FTC is still lagging in its understanding about how digital marketing practices threatens our privacy online. While such ‘town halls’ are useful for the public, the so-called ‘expert’ agency designated to protect our privacy should be ready to recommend safeguards–not urge more investigation.”The CDD wants the government (long known to respect the privacy of internet users ) to look into the practices of online marketers and prevent them from creating ‘dossiers’ on internet users without their consent.  If anyone would like to look at the dossier I have compiled on them, their children, and their dog, please send me a check immediately.    

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/06/gov-regulators-.html

Some study says 80% of consumers take action based on online video ads- I call BS

From Internet Retailer “Online video advertising is proving to be an effective method of persuading consumers to visit web sites, go to a store or make a purchase, according to a new study from the Online Publishers Association.

Of the 80% of consumers who have watched a video ad online, 52% took some sort of action, including checking out a web site (31%), searching for more information (22%), going into a store (15%), or making a purchase (12%), the study found. Visitors to media sites (magazine, newspaper, cable, broadcast and web-only retailers) were more inclined to take action upon viewing a video ad than visitors to portals and user-generated content sites. ”

Ummm…don’t most people find them highly irritating and a pain to get rid of? There is a strong whiff of animal excrement.

Ebay vs Google: The Fallout

Scot Wingo, my boss and all around good guy, is probably the guy most closely associated with, and most knowledgeable about, Ebay (outside of people within Ebay itself). Ebay is not my thing. C’est la vie.  So when Scot writes about the economics of Ebay, he has a ton of data behind his pronouncements. Scot Wingo writes about the Ebay Live, Google Party, pulled adspend fiasco of last week. An excerpt:

“…we have had reports from about 10% of our top-sellers (100/1000) that they saw a material 20%+ drop in sales the day eBay stopped buying Adwords last week.  We’ve gone in and verified that this is indeed the case.  What’s interesting is these businesses typically share several things in common:

• They are in “practicals” categories (non-collectibles)
• They tend to have a higher fixed-price component than auction
• They are concentrated in long-tail style businesses (lots of skus vs. narrow skus) such as sporting goods, BMV, some auto-parts and apparel.

Interestingly when we look at our overall GMV, there are enough sellers that came up during the same time that it washed out overall. (For example, consumer-electronic businesses did well in the week).

Taking these datapoints, it supports my thesis that eBay supplemented the loss of google traffic with some less-specific/targeted/long-tail traffic (probably banners) and that lifted the tide of the overall eBay ocean, but there were definitely areas that suffered a low-tide effect from the AdWord “test”.  ”

For the whole article hit the link!

http://ebaystrategies.blogs.com/ebay_strategies/2007/06/faq_what_was_th_1.html

MSN Expands Negative Keyword Management

I received this earlier today: 

Dear Jeffrey,

On Saturday, June 23, Microsoft adCenter will upgrade, expanding negative keyword management to the campaign level.*

During this upgrade, adCenter will be temporarily unavailable for up to 14 hours, starting at 10:00 A.M. Pacific Time. Your keywords and ads will continue to run during this time. After this upgrade, reporting will be delayed for up to 24 hours. To see when your data was last updated, check the timestamp on the bottom of adCenter Reporting tab.

*Negative keywords help to prevent your ad from being displayed to customers who are unlikely to click your ad. When you apply negative keywords at the campaign level the changes apply to all ad groups in the campaign.

Microsoft respects your privacy. To learn more, please read our online Privacy Statement.

Please do not reply to this e-mail message; it is an automated e-mail, which is not monitored for responses. For assistance, contact our Microsoft adCenter Support Team.

Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052 
 

We’d also like to highlight several of the latest features advertisers are using to better manage campaigns. Read these adCenter Blog posts for more detailed information on:

• Editing your keywords in bulk and previewing ads
• Creating multiple account performance reports and new information on misspelled keywords
• Importing campaigns from other search advertising programs

If you have any questions, please contact our adCenter Support Team.

Sincerely,

The Microsoft adCenter Team