Marketing in Europe? Display Works

comScore released a new study today examining the effects of display advertising in the European market—and it’s pretty dang impressive. The study (well, actually, report based on more than 20 studies) indicates that, despite minimal clicks on the ads themselves, “those exposed to online ad campaigns in Europe were 72 percent more likely to visit the advertiser’s website and 94 percent more likely to conduct a trademark search query on the advertiser’s brand, compared to a control group of similar Internet users who were not exposed to the campaigns.”

These figures are pretty staggering—especially when compared to US figures, which comScore reports as “an average lift of 49 percent in site visitation and 40 percent in trademark search queries across hundreds of ad effectiveness studies.” The European lift effects were most significant during the first week after exposure, but didn’t drop off dramatically.

comScore Director of Marketing Solutions Mike Shaw said in the press release,

These results help illustrate how online advertising works. Despite the long-held obsession with using clicks to measure campaign performance – which reflect only the immediate impact of an ad — the comScore studies demonstrate that the Internet is clearly effective as a latent brand-building medium. Europeans appear to be particularly receptive to online advertising, and whether it’s due to better creative, less ad clutter, or greater receptivity to online ads, the implication for brand advertisers is clear: ignore online as a brand-building channel at your own peril.

And I guess it also shows that it pays to know before you go . . . ad shopping.

What do you think? Why might Europeans be so influenced by display ads?

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FTC Still Examining GoogleMob—Wants Feedback from Rivals

Now here’s a great way to gather totally, completely unbiased information about a potential merger: ask the companies’ competitors. Okay, so the FTC isn’t completely crazy—of course other companies in the market would have a pretty good idea what the industry looks like and what a big merger might do. But still, we can only hope the FTC will remember to take their opinions with a grain of competitive salt.

AdMob, the popular mobile advertising company, and Google, the wanna-be-popular mobile advertising company, announced the deal in November. Google gave AdMob $750M in stock in the deal. The next month, consumer groups began lobbying against the deal. Now the FTC wants both advertisers and rivals to make sworn statements about the pending merger.

The probe isn’t public, but sources say the commission is “investigating whether Google’s proposed purchase of AdMob would reduce competition in the market for Internet advertising on mobile phones.” (Kind of a duh.) Google says it’s continuing to talk with the FTC and cooperate with requests for information.

Bloomberg consulted Thomas Ensign, an antitrust lawyer, on the matter. He said, “It’s difficult to envision a scenario where this development, if true, is positive for Google-AdMob, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the agency is going to challenge the deal.”

Just over a year ago, the US Department of Justice was hours from filing anti-trust charges against the search giant over another major advertising deal (with Yahoo). Is Google pushing their luck with this merger? Will GoogleMob hurt the mobile ad industry? Will the FTC stop the deal?

Google Reader Asks Us to Play

Google Reader Labs is adding a new way to view your feeds—Play. According to the blog announcement, this was conceived as a way to help introduce people to Google Reader—people who “aren’t interested in taking the time to get Reader set up” but are interested in using it. I hope both of you are happy .

But really this layout is primarily designed for people who want to view graphics or video—on autoplay, oh joy—and only a couple lines of any accompanying text. The white-on-black layout works well for showing off images, but not so well for that text.

Plus, to read a full article, you have to click on a “read more” link, which opens the full post within Google Reader Play—so still in the white-on-black layout that’s always so popular among people who read things online:

The layout includes many of the social features of Google Reader—the star, the Like button and the share button (the RSS button on its point). It also has a few settings: hide the thumbnail viewer, use magic layout (I only pushed that button when I had an all-text post up, though, so it didn’t do anything), view settings (All items, New items, Starred items, Liked items or Categories (to view top items in select categories)), or view the images in a post in a slideshow.

While it looks slick, I’m not sure this is going to make it any easier for people to overcome their initial aversions to the setup process—and if they want to, I don’t know, read blogs with Google Reader, they may not be a big fan of Play.

If you want to experiment with Play, you can log in to your Google Reader. View a folder and select View in Reader Play from the folder settings (above the items) or from the drop down:

I’ve tried just going to Google Reader Play, but after letting it load for ten minutes, somehow I doubt I’m going to get anything.

What do you think? Would you like to Play?

Google: Developments in China Coming “Soon”

Last week, Chinese officials reported that Google was in talks about their threats to leave the country (or only partially) if they’re forced to continue censoring search results. Also, Chinese officials reported that Google was not in talks with the government.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt declined to comment on the state of negotiations a conference in the United Arab Emirates today. However, he did say that “we’re in active negotiations with the Chinese government, and there is no specific timetable,” although he promised “Something will happen soon.”

Google announced a hacking attempt targeted at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists in January. They suspected that the attack may have originated in the Chinese government on some level, and announced they would no longer agree to censor search results. However, nothing has changed—yet.

Soon after Google’s statement, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented on the matter, urging China to review the breach as well. This prompted suspicion that Google’s withdrawal threats were directed by the US government. Schmidt denied that today:

“The Google action was not in any way advanced or coordinated with the U.S. government except post-facto,” he said in response to questions. “Google’s discussions are with the Chinese government, and they do not involve the U.S. government. The U.S. government’s doing its thing unrelated to Google.”

Schmidt’s statement is pretty open-ended: “something” and “soon.” What kind of timeline do you think we’re looking at—and what do you think the end result will be?

Did Google Ignore an Italian Takedown Notice?

The verdict on the Italian YouTube court case verdict seemed pretty clear: sentencing Google execs to jail time for an invasion of privacy in a video posted (by someone else) on the UGC site was, well, “absurd,” as we said two weeks ago.

But some new evidence is coming out that may just justify at least the “guilty” verdict from the Italian court—since that’s all the Italian judge released (i.e. he didn’t publish his reasoning). According to TechDirt, there are now reports that Google may have ignored a takedown notice on the video.

…Oooooor not. While Google Translate is woefully inadequate in translating the Italian article intelligibly, it appears that the takedown requests in question (if they exist) might actually be from users—i.e. people without legal standing—via the site’s feedback form. Although that could certainly alert the company that inappropriate content had been submitted by a user, it’s a far cry from an official legal filing.

It’s also hard to tell because Google hasn’t apparently responded adequately to requests from the prosecution to provide copies of any legal takedown notices (although I believe the article says they have provided a copy of one such filing: “Google Inc. has sent not only evasive replies on the comments made [on the video page] but also on removal requests (having produced only one on that SB)”). Furthermore, the EU has no guidelines on what constitutes a sufficiently fast response to a legal takedown notice (or even a clearly defined process for filing takedown notices).

Still, it hardly makes sense to sentence executives who probably never saw any takedown notices (whether or not they were filed), didn’t abuse the child in question, didn’t tape said abuse and didn’t post the video, to jail time for invasion of privacy. TechDirt points out a fine for ignoring (or losing) a takedown notice would be a far more appropriate penalty.

What do you think? Did Google receive a takedown notice? Who should be punished, and how?

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Will YouTube See $1B Next Year? (And More Captions)

And it’s time for everyone’s favorite non-Olympic sport: YouTube Valuation Speculating! Come one, come all, this is not a spectator sport. If you’ll recall, last year we had valuations from Credit Suisse and Ramp Rate, working with a $240.7M revenue (CS foresaw a $470M operating loss; RR predicted only $174M).

Now CitiGroup has thrown a hat the ring—with much better news for YouTube. This year, they predict, YouTube will see gross revenue of $945M (net $614M), and next year they’ll bring in $1.1 billion (net $737M). Either way, that’ll be almost enough to break even with even the most pessimistic estimates of operating costs.

However, CitiGroup based their revenue estimate on MySpace’s CPM price. Does that even make sense?

Pretty graphic of the comparisons:

In other news, YouTube is expanding its accessibility. Back in November, Google announced that some select universities and other partners would be receiving automatic closed captioning on their videos. Now YouTube is spreading the love—all videos where the audio is clear and in English will soon have captions.

YouTube recognized their captioning isn’t perfect: “[Google software engineer Ken] Harrenstein took time to point out that the captioning isn’t perfect, showing how the words ‘SIM card’ got transcribed to ’salmon.’” Users will still need to check the captions on their video for accuracy. (But hey, I’ve seen worse in TV closed captions, so perhaps the Deaf are used to it.) And at least some Deaf students are enthusiastic about the offering as-is:

(…So the biggest benefit is that they’ll be able to understand music videos better? That’s the best example YouTube could show them?)

What do you think? Will captioning help boost YouTube’s popularity? Is MySpace’s CPM a good measure to estimate YouTube’s revenue?

Google Getting Even More Personal–Starred Results

For once, an advance in Google personalized search I actually like. They’re adding the same stars we’re so used to in Google Reader and Gmail to personalized search results. The starred results let you mark favorite sites to show up at the top of future posts—and it doesn’t appear to affect the rankings of the rest of the organic results.

As Google puts it:

With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl].

The stars are replacing an old feature in personalized search: SearchWiki. Says Google, “In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn’t like changing the order of Google’s organic search results.” (Which probably isn’t to say they actually disliked reranking sites, but just that they didn’t do it very much. Seriously, it just wasn’t super useful.)

Any SearchWiki notations you made will be saved in your Google Account. If you want to continue to make notations in SERPs, Google recommends Sidewiki, its browser-based, publicly-edited sidebar wiki for commentary launched back in September. Last we heard, Sidewiki hadn’t really taken off—maybe this is Google’s push to create new, passionate users.

The stars are all set to go and will be rolling out for all signed-in users in the next few days. So far, there’s no indication starred Google Reader items will have any relationship with this effort beyond the passing similarity.

One big drawback for marketers, of course, is that every step forward in personal search may mean we’re less likely to be able to rank a site universally—or even tell if our site is showing up for most signed-in users. Plus, we may have to sign out to get the “neutral” results for reporting (although if you’re starring a client’s competitor in your SERPs, “sumbuddy’s doin it wrong”).

What do you think? Do you like the idea of stars and the simpler interface to mark sites you’d want to see in SERPs again? Or do you worry about personalized search affecting marketing? Would you like to see your Google Reader starred items showing up for relevant searches?

Attention, Bloggers: We Have Arrived

Okay, it’s not the first time, but it does seem like a rather momentous one: bloggers are now being granted press passes from the City of New York. These passes allow qualified journalists to and even sometimes within police and fire lines (within reason, of course)—and everything from bloggers to other online-only content providers.

Although bloggers are often recognized as press members at sporting events and even political meetings, a city officially recognizing online media as a legitimate news source isn’t something we’ve seen happen very often. Giving online content providers the same rights and privileges that they extend to traditional media shows a pretty impressive respect—and it does feel like bloggers have finally arrived.

The old policy required tear sheets from print media to prove the applicant’s work in print media. Radio and TV submitted tapes, but there was no way to claim to be a member of the press if your work wasn’t running through “mainstream” sources.

And that’s all about to change. Reports MediaPost:

Under the new proposed policy, the New York Police Department would be able to issue press passes good for two years to any journalist who has personally attended and reported on at least six qualified events in the city in the preceding two years, regardless of whether the reports were published online, in print newspapers, magazines, books or other media. Events that will qualify include city-sponsored activity — like a press conference or parade — as well as emergencies where the city has set up do-not-cross lines. The proposal also allows inexperienced journalists to obtain single-use press passes.

Okay, so realistically, this doesn’t affect the vast majority of bloggers. Even if you’re operating within the New York area, you’re probably not covering traditional news events. (But hey, if you are—woot for you!) But it does set an important precedent: a government legitimizing bloggers as journalists.

I also like that NYC is allowing inexperienced journalists to gain officially-sanctioned experience. One of the most populous cities in the world is encouraging its citizens to report on its goings on and official activities. That’s pretty radically transparent, don’t you think?

But perhaps most interesting: this is also happening at the hometown of one of the top newspapers in the country—one that’s struggling to adapt to the Internet. Recently, the New York Times has decided that their many popular blogs will be behind their pay wall (or possibly just count toward your pay meter limit) next year—is NYC’s move to legitimize competing bloggers going to be another nail in the Gray Lady’s coffin? What do you think?

Parlez-vous Chrome? Sí, sí, ¿cómo no?

If you were using Chrome, you’d already know what that headline means. (Okay, probably not.) Chrome is integrating a translation tool in its latest beta version. If you browse across a site that’s not in your default language, it’ll offer to translate it for you. Which may or may not help you understand it . (Since this page is in English, it probably won’t help you with the title. Sorry.) Other improvements in this edition of Chrome include better access to your privacy settings.

The translation tool will use Google Translate. While machine translation is growing by leaps and bounds, however, it may not be enough to help you understand the page. We’ve seen many times that, like all machine translation, Google Translate isn’t a perfect tool—and many times, it can’t even convey the gist of the page.

I gave it another shot this time around. This one was pretty good (original):

The Basque Government has approved in the Board meeting today, the order of the Minister of Interior, Rodolfo Ares, laying down the aid, equivalent to six months of unemployment benefits, to be received by women victims of violence gender with the goal of independence from her abuser can and facilitate their social inclusion.

This one was pretty funny (original):

Russian tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov, who a year and half ago signed a EUR 390 million to acquire Villa Leopolda, the world’s most expensive house, you lose more than 40 million by backing down on the operation.

The Russian, also gave birth to a fortune in the nickel industry that Forbes magazine estimated at some 9,500 million, tried to give up buying the house and recover the deposits of 39 million that conducted by the spectacular home located in Riviera, southeastern France. But the High Court of Nice has ruled against the billionaire and friend of Mikhail Abramovich, owner of Chelsea soccer team, lose the money advanced before the final agreement.

(Sorry about the 40M Euros you just lost.)

But, hey, that’s some of the best work we’ve seen, considering that just over a year ago when Google Reader added the service, they didn’t even try to translate 38% of the posts we looked at, and another 38% didn’t make enough sense to get the gist.

So let’s see the progress over time (Blogger Gabriel Campanario’s original English version):

Google Reader translation, 11 Nov 2008	The last time I drew one of these kiosks to buy you a coffee without getting in the car was not stopped anyone to buy anything. But this time I was lucky and it went through two cars, which is in the parking lot of North Sound Vineyard Church.
Google Docs translation, 29 Aug 2009	The last time I drew one of these kiosks to buy a coffee without get off the car did not stop anyone to buy anything. But this time I was lucky and two cars passed by it, which is in the parking lot of North Sound Vineyard Church.
Google Chrome translation (via Google Translate), 2 Mar 2010	The last time I drew one of these kiosks to buy a coffee without download car did not stop anyone to buy anything. But this time I was lucky and two cars passed by it, which is in the parking lot of North Sound Vineyard Church.

Is it just me, or are we suddenly regressing?

What do you think? Will you use Google Chrome’s translate tool—if so, do you expect it to do a better job than this?

Is Microsoft Waging a Proxy War on Google for Antitrust?

Well, if the shoe isn’t on the other foot. Once upon a time, Microsoft seemed to be the biggest threat to free trade in the computer world, facing suits across the world. And now it’s Google’s turn—and coincidentally, Microsoft certainly looks like the man behind the curtain. In fact, two thirds of voters at the Wall Street Journal think it’s Microsoft’s machinations throwing the gauntlet down at Google:

How is Microsoft doing this? Certainly not directly (pot, kettle). No—it would have to be through backroom puppetry, which Microsoft of course denies. The evidence does appear highly coincidental. The WSJ outlines one instance where Google filed a two-sentence suit against a small site owing them $335,000 for AdSense—and got a 24-page antitrust countersuit, with Microsoft’s chief outside antitrust council listed as one of the litigants.

Note, though, that this is Microsoft’s outside council: he doesn’t work for Microsoft and Microsoft alone. It’s entirely possible that the small website searched out someone who was familiar with antitrust law and actions against Google.

Meanwhile, Google is facing scrutiny in Europe, including an antitrust suit from a Microsoft subsidiary which has prompted a European Commission investigation.

Naturally, many companies and individuals are concerned about Google’s dominance. Accusations and suits seem to be coming from all quarters, including the US government. Microsoft has used a few more open tactics to wage an antitrust war. These latest volleys might not be orchestrated by Microsoft—or are they? What do you think?

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