Category: Yahoo!

YouTube Makes itself Big Brand Marketer Friendly

We suggest YouTube will be transformed as it seeks financial favors from big advertisers. Such brands will be given favorable treatment. Google’s YouTube is now in the process of building up its advertising sales staff. Here’s an excerpt from its job announcement for ad sales Reps to be based in Santa Monica, New York, Boston, Detroit, and Chicago [my italics]:

“Join the country’s leading and fastest growing advertising sales organization. YouTube, a Google company, is looking for an Advertising Sales Representative to work in our Detroit office within our sales organization.

Founded in February 2005, YouTube is a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube originally started as a personal video sharing service, and has grown into an entertainment destination with people watching more than 70 million videos on the site daily.

Main responsibility is to drive revenue for the YouTube business unit and consult with brand advertisers and interactive agencies on how to leverage the YouTube platform and participate in the YouTube community.”

YouTube and other social networks need to serve the public interest. They will likely, however, become commercial communities foremost. But that’s not a real community. So, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and the crop of social networks on broadband (including mobile) must make their business model transparent. They need to make public what major advertisers get, in terms of access to users, data, placement, etc. Google should be playing a leadership role here, as well as Microsoft, Yahoo! and other key services.  They also should promise to always provide free and prominent civic space for candidates, issues, and public interest content.

Two Books to Read about Behavioral Targeting and Interactive Marketing

Nothing like getting it from those that practice it. I urge all regulators, public interest consumer advocates, journalists, and others concerned about their privacy (let alone other key civil society issues) to read:

Fishing From a Barrel: Using Behavioral Targeting to Reach the Right People With he Right Ads at the Right Time. Rob Graham. Learningcraft Press.

The Online Advertising Playbook. Joe Plummer, Steve Rappaport, Taddy Hall, and Robert Barocci. Wiley.

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Beyond Tipping Point, Acxiom Deal Shows Data-Driven Deal-making Gone Wild (FTC,

Just for the record, the proposed buy-out of Acxiom illustrates what a unique moment we face. It’s a crossroads for the future of the digital media, as it relates to competition, privacy, content creation. It’s also a test for regulators & the Democratic-controlled Congress. Who will come first—the public interest or vested wealthy ones?

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Online Advertising–and then there were only two

From Online Media Daily (excerpt & our bold):

“The deal was not about the $40 billion in interactive advertising Microsoft projects marketers will spend this year, said Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division, in a conference call Friday morning. Instead, it’s a bet on the future of the total $600 billion advertising market as spending continues to shift to interactive channels, he said, adding that Microsoft now has a soup-to-nuts offering.

“As we look at how the market is evolving, we think there will only be two large-scale advertising platforms … and we will be one of them,” Joe Doran, general manager of Microsoft’s digital advertising solutions unit, told OnlineMediaDaily. (The other being Google/DoubleClick.)

“Microsoft’s $6B Deals Caps Watershed Month for Digital.” Laurie Peterson. Online Media Daily, May 21, 2007.

This excerpt from another article is about data related to marketing, but has broad privacy implications as well:

“If Microsoft gains access to all the data, across all the engines, for aQuantive’s entire client roster of search clients, it will be sitting on a treasure trove of information that it’s never seen before — and which should have Google feeling very nervous. The same is true, of course, for the information that DoubleClick’s Performics can provide to Google. To a network, an agency is a wealth of competitive data — a fact about which all of the networks are undoubtedly aware.”

“Why Conglomeration Could Be Bad For Advertisers.” Mark Simon. Search Insider. May 21, 2007.

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Chronicles of New Media Consolidation: Three Companies Control Ad-serving market

From Technofile Europe: “This deal basically completes the elimination of independent ad-serving technologies with any market share. Ad serving on the Internet is now controlled by Microsoft (Atlas), Google (Dart) and AOL (Ad-Tech)…Consolidation in the ad serving technology market — And then there were only three ad servers: aQuantive (acq Accipiter), DoubleClick (acq Falk eSolutions), AOL (acq Ad-Tech).”

A Reason to Fear GoogleClick, Microquantive (hoo?), YahoRight(bebo?), TimeWarnThird Screen, WPP/Real, etc.

These are the media mergers public interest advocates and those concerned about Internet freedom should be focused on. The big deals are about controlling the future of much of the digital world. Nearly $11 billion has recently been spent in “deal activity” notes Online Media Daily. One key issue is privacy–since the business model behind all these acquisitions is the sweeping up and targeted use of our data. Here’s what one marketing analyst wrote about these online ad mergers and its implications for our data-driven marketing world:


“Microsoft, Yahoo and Google each has huge databases of consumer and business names filled with profiles, preferences, opt-ins and online activity histories. Imagine integrating the data they hold with content they create or license to create turnkey 1-to-1 and one-to-many multi-channel digital communications streams. The possibilities are astounding, assuming they can get beyond their own internal politics and product silos and withstand increased anxiety about Big Brotherism.”

Youth Health Crisis: New Report on Digital Marketing of Food & Beverage Products

I co-authored a report released yesterday. For those concerned about the obesity crisis, it’s a useful resource. It also offers a good overview about the forces shaping the global media system. It’s available here.

Regulators Must Stop Microsoft/aQuantive as well as GoogleClick

Today’s announcement that Microsoft is swallowing the immense aQuantive digital marketing apparatus is no surprise. Having lost the leading third-party online display giant Doubleclick to its archrival Google, Microsoft is desperate to remain relevant in online marketing. The $6b acquisition of aQuantive provides Microsoft and its adCenter platform with the digital marketing clout of Atlas. Atlas products include services designed to super-charge brand-marketing friendly ads utilizing rich media, broadband video, search, etc.

The deal is more proof that the FTC better wake-up and do something about the consolidation of the online advertising market. That agency can’t address the hypocrisy though of Microsoft lobbyists. They have beseeched advocates, including this blogger, to stop the Google-Doubleclick merger. All along we knew that Microsoft was desperately seeking a deal, including with Yahoo!
We will discuss the deal later in this column. But it underscores what we’ve been saying, including in our November 2006 complaint to the FTC. There’s major and troubling consolidation occurring in the online ad market. If we want to see competition and content diversity thrive online, regulators need to act. Perhaps our friends in Europe at least will. They certainly need to examine the landscape over the last few weeks. Yahoo! acquires the remaining interest of Right Media for $680m; Time Warner’s AOL buys German-based adTech and Third Screen Media; and ad giant WPP snatches up 24/7 Real Media online ad firm for $649m. Something, we suggest, is going on. Is the FTC listening?

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Generation Digital: MIT Publishes Sample Chapters of New Book

Kathryn C. Montgomery new book–Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet–will soon be in bookstores. MIT Press has just placed a sample chapter and other information online.

Disclosure: Kathy’s my wife. But nepotism aside, she is one of the most articulate and insightful writers about new media.

Microsoft and IM. Using “Cause Related Engagement” to Validate Interactive Advertising & Data Collection

A series of questions need to be broadly addressed about the proper dimensions for interactive digital marketing, including privacy, individual autonomy, economic fairness, and ecological balance. But some NGO’s (see list) are so so eager to partake of the interactive advertising spoils, they partner with (or permit) digital marketers to engage in practices which should be questioned–not condoned.

Take the “I’m Making a Difference” campaign from Microsoft. The company has tied-in its digital advertising campaigns with “cause” marketing efforts. As Microsoft marketer Mich Mathews explained this week at its Strategic Account Summit:
“…people are driven to get engaged in topics they feel very personally passionate about. So another path that we’ve been exploring is this thing called cause-related engagement. We’re using better technology in our communication services to help people speak up for social causes that they care about. What you’re seeing here, is a new initiative from Windows Live. We start a conversation using IM, Microsoft shares a portion of the program’s advertising revenue with some of the world’s most effective organizations that are dedicated to social causes.

With every instant message, customers help address the issues that they’re feeling most passionate about. It could be poverty, child protection, disease, environmental issues. All you have to do here is sign up and start an instant message conversation, then every ad you see in your message window contributes to the grand total that we’re going to send to the cause. This program is really inspiring people to get involved and make a difference.

Now, even though the campaign to date has largely been un-media, it’s already gone as great pass-along, which illustrates the power of mixing great content with a compelling cause. And in the first months we’ve had hundreds of thousands of new sign ups to Messenger and an increase in page views per user, which, of course, is great for our advertisers, and even greater news for those charities who are involved.”

But before charities and nonprofits agree to be involved with such efforts, they need to fully vet both the privacy issues and the overall impact digital marketing will have on society. If we are to have a global digital medium that fully supports a civil society, NGO’s must be leaders in shaping the new media environment. That means being conscious and responsible–and not just blithely accepting the money.