From Ad Age

YORK, Pa. (AdAge.com) — If a consumer types a brand name into the Google search box, a home-page link should — and likely will — appear as one of the top listings.

But does the same thing happen when typing in a generic keyword relevant to that business? Say, “home repair” for Home Depot or “gifts” for Harry & David? That depends on how well they’re optimized for Google. And in the case of those two examples, Home Depot and Harry & David website links don’t even make it to the first page of Google, according to a recent study by Covario that evaluated the search-engine optimization health of 100 branded websites.

There are many reasons why a brand might not appear high on Google search. It could be that too many companies are vying to optimize the same keyword, or that a competitor’s linking strategy is more robust, or that the brands simply aren’t buying keyword ads. Covario tested for what it determined were three key indicators of search health: content usage, link strategy and technical construction.

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Endeavour Marketing & Media – A Full-Service Advertising Agency in Murfreesboro, TN

From AdAge (original article)

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — For some marketers, a new year means a new agency. If that’s your company’s annual resolution, you should know that line of thinking will lead to a bad reputation in adland.

Agency new-business executives and industry search consultants report a growing blacklist of sorts, composed of marketers that tend to put ad duties into play every year or two. Thanks to rapid turnover in the chief marketing officer seat (a CMO’s tenure averages 28 months, according to the most recent figures from executive search firm Spencer Stuart) and pressure to perform amid the troubled economy, long-lasting agency-marketer relationships are becoming more rare.

“I have a huge disagreement with people changing their agencies like they change their underwear,” said Jane Bedford, partner at the Bedford Group, a consultancy based in Atlanta. “Our clients tell us it takes them about three to six months for them to get fully engaged with their agencies. It’s very difficult for an agency to get up and running, and totally please the client, within the first year.”

And that’s coming from an exec who actually benefits when accounts go into review.

Take Chipotle: In January 2004, the burrito chain tapped Mother, New York, to be its first advertising agency. Six years later, that account has cycled through four different shops: After Mother came TDA Advertising & Design, Boulder, Colo.; Devito/Verdi, New York; Butler Shine Stern & Partners, San Francisco; and, its latest, hired this month, Compass Point Media, a division of Campbell Mithun in Minneapolis.

Thinking twice
The regularity with which Chipotle changes its agencies is more than most. But it’s hardly the only marketer with a penchant for flitting from shop to shop. Retailer Ikea and luxury automaker BMW are known for frequently reviewing their creative and media accounts, and Mitsubishi Motors North America moves its ad business around a fair amount as well.

Too many reviews could also mean that, over time, the very best shops will think twice before going after those accounts. “Agencies do a risk assessment when deciding whether to pitch an account, and there’s definitely a toxicity factor they look at. If [a client] does a lot of reviews, the client gets blacklisted,” Ms. Bedford said.

Even at a time when agencies are hungry for more revenue, such flip-flopping has consequences: Two different new-business executives said two accounts they wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole are 1-800-Flowers and Quiznos, as the businesses seem to be too volatile, regardless of their billings. The marketers did not respond to requests for comment.

Another consequence is cost: Constantly opening reviews can be incredibly costly and disruptive to both the marketer — for whom travel and other fees associated with agency reviews racks up — and the agencies, which shell out thousands of dollars in the hopes of crafting the perfect pitch that could win the business. If they do land it, there’s often an added cost of having to quickly ramp up freelance and full-time staff to work on the new account.

Michael Houston, chief marketing officer at Grey, New York, said the window for agencies to prove themselves has lowered dramatically.

“Results in our business are no longer evaluated on a semi-annual or quarterly basis, but on a monthly, weekly and sometimes daily basis,” Mr. Houston said. “Couple that with the level of dollars attached to the advertising line item on a client’s balance sheet, and we find clients forced to justify their marketing ROI in a way never seen before. In that process, agencies sometimes become the scapegoat, with the easy solution being to call an agency review.”

Consistency
What’s more, “serial reviewers” risk damaging their brand with inconsistent marketing messages.

“Clients shouldn’t be constantly jumping ship,” said Lisa Colantuono, managing partner at AAR Partners. As communication between consumer and client evolves, “they need to work together with their agencies. If that foundation is constantly changing, the marketer is hurting themselves in the long run in terms of building brand loyalty with the consumer.”

The Association of National Advertisers, the marketer’s trade group, doesn’t exactly see it this way. The ANA’s position is that conducting formal agency evaluations on a regular basis offers the best chance for fixing problems before frustration sets in. It believes that the companies that have two-way assessments at regular intervals have the most-productive relationships. “Having a formal agency evaluation process is always imperative but even more so at a time of heightened focus on marketing accountability,” Bob Liodice, president-CEO of the ANA, has said.

Said Grey’s Mr. Houston: “Desperation may be something new to many industries in the recession, but it’s something the agency business has known, embraced and perpetuated for decades. Agencies only have themselves to blame by playing right into the hands of these serial agency-review ‘players’ [and] making it too easy for the client to bully us.”

Endeavour Marketing and Media – A Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

From Steve Strauss for the American Express OPEN Forum (original article)

Jan 05, 2010 -

Want Page 1 search engine result rankings? Of course you do; we all do. Well, what if I were to tell you of a little known way that profoundly increases your odds of getting a Page 1 search engine result – might that be of interest?

I thought so.

The answer is video. But not just any old video. It has to be search engine optimized video. Properly post that, and according to a recent study by Forrester Research, you stand a 53 times better chance of getting a Page 1 Google ranking.

Yes, I know, the holy grail.

By now I’m sure you know all about search engine optimization – keywords and key phrases and incoming links and all the rest. The problem is, so does everyone else. That means that getting Google to think that your page is more valuable, more deserving of a high ranking than other pages, is harder than ever, despite all of your fancy SEO work.

That is where SEO video comes in.

What I am not talking about is simply putting a video on your homepage or some other desirable page. And similarly, I am not talking about submitting a video to YouTube and then embedding a YouTube player on your site. Neither of those will generate great Google results for your site because

1.     They are not search engine optimized, and

2.     Videos using YouTube result in click-throughs results for YouTube, even though the videos are re-posted on your site

But what will work – the magic bullet if you will – is video SEO. Video SEO is the process of using SEO tools with your video and then submitting the SEO videos themselves (not just the pages where the videos reside) to the various search engines.

Here is why video SEO is such an incredible Page 1 generator: First, search engines like Google are increasingly using “blended” search results – articles, video, pictures, and other forms of content. So video inherently gets more play because there is less competition for video results. And that is the second, and more important, reason. Because there is so much less of it, and because only very little of all online video is properly submitted with SEO, there is a disproportionate bias towards properly submitted SEO video.

You end up being a big fish in a very small pond.

So here is what you do:

1. Create some great video for your site. Note: Research indicates that if you have video on your homepage, up to 80% of your visitors will click that first, so it better be good!

2. Post it prominently throughout your site.

3. SEO it and submit it. Here’s the trick, and it is two-fold. First, you must optimize the video for search engines. That means key words and phrases must be used in the file name, in the captions, etc. Second, once posted on your site, you must then submit the video itself using XML tools to Google and the other search engines.

I know that last part may sound a little intimidating, but it need not be. There are some great online services that will submit the videos for you. For example, one I like a lot is Fliqz.com. Fliqz will, easily and affordably, index your pages and video, and properly submit them to the various search engines.

The upshot is that your videos and video pages should end up at or near the top of any default search results, the “Web” results, and not just the video results.

In fact, according to Fliqz, by using their “SearchSuccess” tools, “more than two-thirds of all videos submitted produce a first-page Google search result, and up to 25 percent have resulted in a number one Google ranking.”

Well, what are you waiting for?

Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

From Ann Handley (of MarketingProfs.com) for American Express Open Forum:

Dec 29, 2009 -

What do bacon, Bogota, yumberries and Foursquare have in common? They are all on the list of 100 Things to Watch in 2010 by the marketing communications company JWT.

Certain trends on the list suggest clear implications for businesses. JWT’s Ann Mack says that many items on it reflect broader shifts, like a growing action around health and wellness and environmental issues, to crazy-fast developments in the tech space.

There are also a number of trends tied to the so-called Great Recession (“trip bundling,” for example) and those that speak to various demographic, political and economic power shifts (“East Africa Wired,” and “TV for Tween Boys” among them). Interestingly for business, Mack says, the list “points to the way industries are redefining or reinventing themselves to survive or to fully leverage these power shifts.”

What trends might affect your small business in 2010? Here a subset you might find worth watching (as well as a few I found just plain interesting). The full list is in alphabetical order, below.

1. 3D at Home
3D is the new HD. Having successfully invaded the big screen, it’s on its way to the small screen: James Cameron, director of the new 3D film Avatar, will promote Panasonic’s 3D sets, out next year, which will compete with versions from Sony and Samsung.

See Rest of List

Reporting by Yinka Adegoke for Reuters

YouTube, which is owned by Internet search giant Google, is already known to have held talks with several major movie studios about renting movies.

Google’s vice president of content partnerships, David Eun, said in an interview that some full-length shows would not be available to YouTube under its current advertising model.

“We’re making some interesting bets on long-form content; not all content is accessible to us with the advertising model,” Eun told Reuters, who said content partners will be able to choose what works best for them.

YouTube is keen to bulk up its licensing of full-length programs alongside the popular short clips uploaded by users that currently dominate the site.

But Hollywood studios and TV companies are reluctant to cannibalize revenue streams, such as from cable TV and DVD sales, by offering premium programs for free viewing on the Web — even under an advertising revenue-share model.

Some of the options being considered by YouTube include variations of monthly subscription models such as those seen with cable TV providers.

Another option is a movie rental model similar to Apple Inc’s iTunes or Amazon.com. YouTube has held talks about rentals with Lions Gate Entertainment, Sony Pictures, and Warner Bros,

Though YouTube is easily the most visited video site in the United States with more than 125 million users a month, many analysts see rival Hulu, which carries full length shows, as the future of the Web video business.

Hulu, owned by NBC Universal, News Corp, and Walt Disney, has rapidly become the No. 2 video site in the United States and has sold out on key ad inventory.

Eun insisted that advertising revenue would continue to be YouTube’s mainstay and said that its content partners would start earning meaningful ad dollars in 2010. “If we just continued to focus on our advertising model that would be enough opportunity to create meaningful revenue,” said Eun.

“The biggest opportunity today is advertising and we’ve just begun to scratch the surface,” he said ahead of a presentation to analysts on Tuesday.

YouTube has short-form videos from a range of partners including CNN and TNT, ESPN and ABC; and full length-programs from partners including the UK’s Channel 4 and Channel 5.

VEVO

YouTube is also backing an advertising-driven business in partnership with the music industry for a new site called Vevo which launched earlier this month.

Late last year the Warner Music Group and YouTube fell out over fees, leading to videos from artists like Madonna and Red Hot Chili Peppers being yanked from the site. The two sides came to an agreement in September. However Warner Music has yet to join Vevo, which is backed by Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, Sony Music and music from EMI.

YouTube had previously been required to pay upfront licensing fees in the tens of millions of dollars to secure rights to carry the videos, according to people familiar with the talks. The new Vevo partnership is purely an advertising revenue share, according to Eun.

He said of the previous YouTube relationship with the music business: “Our interests weren’t aligned. There wasn’t as much downside for the labels but there also wasn’t as much upside for them.”

By Laurie Sullivan for SearchBlog

Google rattled a few cages Monday when it began rolling out what it calls the real-time Web and personalized search queries. While it’s clear how this will influence people searching for information on Google’s engine and how live updates from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace will appear in search query result, it’s less clear how the changes will affect marketers’ SEO and PPC campaigns.

AimClear CEO Marty Weintraub calls real-time search and Web personalization “huge,” an “inevitable evolution” he saw coming for years. The roll-out of the latest feature creates a “seismic explosion with far reaching implications to exacerbate an already difficult reality.”

Describing that reality in his dramatic rock-star style, he says that personalization confuses the average users, including some fairly sophisticated marketing pros that already have no idea what they’re looking at in query rankings. “Personalized search candy-coats what users like and hate — polarizing SERPs to the user’s predilections,” he says.

There’s no way for the uninformed to tell what’s what, and this rollout makes things messier. Clicking on the competition’s results in Google will return more of that competitor’s results in the search query until the history of that click lapses.

For those who conduct vanity searches, typing their own name into the search query returns their very own personalized SERPs skewed toward their own site, he says. “Searching unpersonalized [log out of Google services, include the pws=0 variable, opt out of Web history] only tells the story before Google scrambles SERPs for individual people,”  Weintraub says. “We’re pretty much screwed.”

Measuring traffic and site conversions that marketers control and analyze will become the best method to evaluate the prominence of organic listings, according to Weintraub. “If organic traffic increases on a page for a specific keyword, then it’s reasonable to assume that page’s ranking in the ‘average’ Google result has improved,” he says, adding that the opposite is true if traffic decreases. In either case, marketers need to consider mitigating factors.

Search marketers also must learn how to communicate to search novices such factors as seasonality, increased search interest and economic conditions. Weintraub calls it a daunting task because it’s rare to find a marketer who can quickly grasp these concepts. Most have no idea how to interpret the data they look at and feel emotional about what they perceive as rankings, he says.

Reliable SEO Founder David Harry says Google has been using behavioral data in AdWords and AdSense products long before it was introduced to the regular search index. This move will likely see more demographic options for advertisers, as well as weaker organic listings moving to the second page. Some of these findings were discussed in a white paper, “A Study of Google Ranking Flux and Personalized Search,” on real-time search he published earlier this year.

Harry sees real-time search as a bigger problem for social sites because it could motivate spammers to hit sites harder. “It crosses over more to the social media marketers than SEOs,” he says. “They are totally spamable. We played around yesterday spamming the stream and it was quite easy to do. I’d say, shockingly, OneRiot did a better job of filtering out the noise.”

Next week, Harry plans to test real-time search with Bing, Google, FriendFeed and OneRiot by running some queries to see how the quality of results stacks up between them.

Real-time streams will likely not influence PPC campaigns because most people don’t trust random Twitter posts from people they don’t know, Harry says. For the most part, users must trust the listing to click on the paid search ad in the right rail. Anonymous social recommendations don’t typically convince people.

Gone are the days where SEOs can, to a certain degree, ignore social media strategies and focus merely on traditional SEO techniques, according to Peter Young, SEO guru at Holistic Search in the United Kingdom. Real-time search could potentially take the SERP ranking position from sites focused on news and information, he says.

Social media has become an integral part of the SEO remit and will directly impact what potential customers see near the brand listing.

Young plans to keep a close eye on the scale of the MySpace integration, and where Google goes from there. Companies vying for the No. 1 ranking in search engine result queries could experience challenges in the ranking of real-time Twitter, MySpace and Facebook feeds and updates.

Pointing to a page streaming Twitter tweets about Tiger Woods as an example, Young says that while Woods isn’t a traditional brand, the real-time results from Twitter sits in the middle of the page among the organic search results. If the news trends higher, it could potentially become a problem as results rise to the top, he says.

“I certainly think this will have a more profound impact on results sitting below the Twitter feed and those above,” he says. “The scramble for the top positions will become fiercer. That may mean more people invest in PPC to gain more control of their presence.”

Endeavour Marketing and Media, A Murfreesboro, TN Advertising Agency

From AdAge

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Consider that $3 million you just dropped on a 30-second Super Bowl spot a waste of money — unless you’ve got a smart, calculated search-and-social-media strategy behind it.

Last year, the ads from the big game racked up 99.5 million collective online views, according to Visible Measures, which tallies viral-video data; 98.7 million people watched the game on TV, per Nielsen. It’s further proof that while Super Bowl is still valuable because it’s one of the last high-profile, mass-media TV events, it’s maximized with an ongoing online effort.

“Social media provides a longer shelf life for people’s campaigns,” said Anthony Iaffaldano, senior director-strategy and innovation at Reprise Media. “It’s about who’s got a plan in place to take the equity they’re building through all this activity and activate it after the game. Social media becomes more valuable as you continue to engage.”

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From Grant Gross for the New York Times

Yahoo on Monday rolled out a new tool to allow users of its advertising networks to control what targeted ads they receive, in response to growing demand from consumers.

The beta launch of Yahoo’s Ad Interest Manager comes as U.S. lawmakers and privacy groups have increased pressure on online advertising networks to limit the personal data they collect and allow consumers more control over behavioral advertising. It also follows the launch of similar tools by other Web sites including Yahoo competitor Google.

Also on Monday, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission will host the first of a series of workshops on privacy, with online collection of data and behavioral advertising among the topics explored.

Yahoo recognizes the focus on targeted advertising coming from the FTC and the U.S. Congress, but user demand is what really drove Yahoo to create the privacy tool, said Anne Toth, Yahoo’s vice president of policy and head of privacy. “We’re really happy about being able to give this kind of transparency and control to users,” she said. “I’m certainly hearing from users that they are demanding greater control of their online experience.”

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U.S. retailers spent 7% more on paid search campaigns between October and mid-November 2009 across all major search engines — Google, Bing, Yahoo — compared with the same time last year, according to the SearchIgnite Mid Q4 2009 U.S. Search Marketing Report released Monday.Consumers continue to buy online, but many are spending less on average per transaction. During the first half of the quarter, conversion rates rose 17% year-on-year, but the average order value declined 27%.

People are buying online, according to Roger Barnette, SearchIgnite president. “We’re feeling pretty good about how the quarter will end up,” he says.

Retailers allocated a higher percentage of ad budgets to Bing this holiday season. U.S. retail marketers dramatically increased their search spend on Bing — up 47% compared with MSN in the year-ago first half of the fourth quarter. Average order values on Bing are 21% higher than across all engines.  Read Rest of Article

From Emily Steel in the Wall Street Journal

Sprint Nextel, Volkswagen, Xerox and other major marketers are rebooting their strategy for buying Internet search ads, seeking more bang for their buck as they work with limited ad budgets.

Some of the new strategies include tweaking the types of search ads they buy, coordinating campaigns geographically and boosting promotions on social-networking sites. The shift comes as search-advertising matures and marketers realize that pouring more money into the medium doesn’t necessarily translate into more sales…Read Rest of Article