Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 7/31/09

Advertising/Marketing

The upfronts are finally beginning to move forward and the networks are finally starting to log some sales. It’s not like commercial time is flying off the shelf though, and the take for networks might be in the $1 – $1.5 billion range, down from over $9 billion last year – even though they’re not conceding as much on pricing as buyers were initially asking them to. Networks have still, though, only booked 25 percent of their inventory and the Fall season is only two months away. Declines in CPM rates have not been as great as buyers were hoping for but still more than the networks were angling for.

I actually don’t think the call by some publishers to do away with ad networks is about anything other than them wanting to stop blogging from being profitable, thereby eliminating the new media competition they see biting their heels.

Spending on word-of-mouth marketing efforts reached $1.5 billion last year according to PQ Media and is expected to grow over 10 percent this year. In-game ads also continue to grow.

The next big thing in the marketing industry is the connecting of consumer’s offline behavior with what they do online. All of this is over and above, of course, what people are voluntarily sharing about themselves on social networks and blogs.

Media

The AP thinks its copyright infringement anytime there’s a link and a headline to its content, whether that means in a blog post or simply the results of a Google search. Rex Hammock points out why this argument is completely insane on a number of levels and Danny Sullivan realizes that, by this definition, the use of Google by AP employees means they themselves are engaging in blatantly violating copyright.

The idea of “nichepapers” makes a lot of sense, but mostly because that’s exactly what the blogs have been doing for years now. This model also kind of necessitates an aggregation system, either in the form of an RSS reader or something that looks very much like a newspaper, collecting the niche content in one place for people to sort through.

Social Media

NewsGator is shutting down their free, online RSS reader and recommending people switch over to Google Reader, making it easy for people to sync with that product. I used to use NewsGator and am disappointed to see it go since there were a lot of things about it people used, including its integration with Microsoft Outlook and such.

Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 7/17/07

Advertising/Marketing

People are voluntarily sharing more information than ever before even as they don’t want advertisers mining their online behavior for the purposes of serving up ads, despite research that shows ad relevance – and subsequently click rates – go up as a result. That’s an interesting paradox of the current age that’s free of easy answers.

People say they don’t go online for product and service recommendations but frequently share their own experiences and recommendations on those social sites. That seeming contrary behavior doesn’t mean brands are free to not participate and in fact should absolutely do so if they wish to remain relevant.

More coverage of the “sponsored posts” issue, this time focusing specifically on “mommybloggers” – the favorite of PR people everywhere for their influence and social circle – and the way they interact with the brands that are keen to get their attention. All of this has prompted one blogger to call for a “PR Blackout” week among mommybloggers that would be free of sponsored posts, product reviews and other such material and instead get back to moms talking about their kids, marriages and other topics that the blogs are *supposed* to be about. Caroline McCarthy points out that a week is not exactly a major period of time and highlights other wholes in the entire frustrating issue.

Nielsen has expanded its web measurement panel to be eight times larger then it had been, allowing for a larger sample size of sites and behavior and hopefully resulting in more accurate results.

Stephen Baker at BusinessWeek takes a look at the evolving world of behavioral targeting in advertising and marketing.

Despite the availability and growing acceptance of other forms of metrics, a Forrester report says most online marketers are still dependent on click-through rates to determine success.

Media

PaidContent rounds-up some of the thinking that’s been published about what to do with BusinessWeek in the wake of news the title’s publisher was looking to put it up for sale.

The editor of The Financial Times made comments expressing his belief that within a year most media organizations will be charging for content. He admits he’s unsure how the payment models will work from either the publisher or the reader standpoint but sees it as something that’s inevitable.

One initiative that’s leading that charge is Journalism Online, a company begun by media personality Steven Brill, that wants to create a single platform for multiple pubs to setup pay walls of some form. That group says it is getting close to launch but hasn’t released an initial affiliate list yet not because of lack of interest but because new pubs are being added so fast the list is out-of-date as soon as it’s updated.

Social Media

Fox Interactive wants to turn MySpace into an entertainment portal, according to reports. I’m confused as I thought that’s what it already largely was. Mashable thought likewise until it saw numbers from Hitwise that said differently. There also seems to be some lack of mission clarity internally.

I’m having increasing problems with companies that only respond to customer complaints when they’re being voiced on social networks and blogs while they still outsource and minimize the importance of their phone or other systems. The story of “United Breaks Guitars” is what’s got me thinking about this again.

Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 7/10/09

Advertising/Marketing

The New York Times advises that ad agencies need to drop their problems with internet companies and make friends if they want to survive. We would laugh in this day and age if we read about advertisers having problems working the television broadcasters in the 1950s and we’ll probably laugh at how much hand-wringing was done in the ad industry over the internet 30 years from now.

Intuit invites only a few select hardcore users of QuickBooks into an enthusiast community, but those people wind up providing a ton of content, recommendations and tips to others, an arrangement that allows them to run a high-quality site while cutting their own tech/customer support costs. That’s contrary to the conventional “let everyone in” approach some people advocate but it’s working for them so good job.

A Microsoft advertising executive lays out the case that the growth of the online advertising industry is largely dependent on the adoption of traditional media measurements like reach and frequency and a de-emphasis of hard metrics like click-rates. It’s an intriguing argument and one that I think is going to become more widely held as time goes on.

Amazon has applied for a patent relating to its Kindle e-book reader that could hint at plans for ad-supported versions of books being made available, possibly as an add-on to someone buying the physical version. It’s unlikely they’re going to go placing ads alongside paid-for electronic versions. That being said, no actual plans have been announced and it’s all speculation at this point.

Facebook is outpacing MySpace not only in visitors but also in its attractiveness to advertisersaccording to a new eMarketer study.

Media

Time Inc’s Maghound magazine buy/subscribe/swap site is not doing so great – at least as measured by new subscriptions racked up – after a year of operation. Those within the company say that’s somewhat because they haven’t done much promotion while they work out the issues. I’d say continue with it and see if it works out.

The Associated Press and Media Standards Trust are working develop a standard for micro-formats for newspapers that will hopefully help their news stories appear higher in search engine rankings by maximizing the effectiveness of each story’s meta-data. This is going to be interesting to watch, especially when some of the more forward-thinking blog owners see what’s being done and adopt their own version of these standards.

Social Media

A recent survey by WorkPlace Media says only 43 percent of employees are actively updating the social networks they frequent while at work and even then most only spend a half-hour or so doing so. That’s good news for employers but bad news for advertisers looking to reach those folks during the day.

Sarah Perez writes about what FriendFeed could do to be even more useful in the wake of their announcement of real-time search functionality being added.

I agree that Twitter has to do something about the spam problem if it wants to continue to be brand-friendly, but not for the reasons laid out in this MediaPost article. If brands take to Twitter to attract an audience, they’re not going to want that audience constantly bombarded with messages to follow someone for hot pix in the wake of the official dispatches from a legitimate company. Forget advertising appearing on the pages, it’s the disruption of the stream that’s going to be the biggest problem.

Facebook has launched its first official widget, the Fan Box, that allows members to take their activity streams to their own sites. It’s an interesting move since the taking of that content off-site would seem counter-intuitive but also has some benefits for both the brands that are on Facebook and the social network itself, most of which are captured by Ian Schafer.

Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 6/26/09

Advertising/Marketing

Yes, the FTC is looking into paid placements of online mentions that aren’t fully disclosed by the author. But I’m hoping that what Andy Beal says is right and that most writers won’t have to worry about it since there’s nothing wrong with what they’re doing. For those worried, a simple bit of disclosure should suffice nicely.

Yahoo is launching a new self-service ad product, something it’s hoping will attract the attention of local and other smaller businesses. At least one person who deals with the local advertising market, though, thinks that this sets the entry bar too high for businesses that are used to having programs built for them and don’t have the skills or the time to do it themselves.

Research from Harris Interactive suggests people are over-hyping online word of mouth, with their study saying offline recommendations or discussions carry more weight than their online counterparts. The numbers skew slightly more in favor of online among younger respondents. This is another one of those issues where each new survey will suggest something different but it’s worth noting the back-and-forth.

Google is introducing AdSense for Mobile Apps as a way to help developers of applications for a variety of platforms, including its own Android and the iPhone, monetize those creations even if they don’t charge for them directly.

Some shows are commanding higher ad rates for their online streaming through Hulu, TV.com and other outlets than they are for their main, traditional television broadcast. You can mark the day old media began officially dying….NOW.

Media

It shouldn’t be surprising that few news organizations have a solid set of social media guidelines in place when you know that few companies of any sort have a solid set of social media guidelines in place. That being said, there seem to be a couple examples of reasonable guidelines in this story, where the employer is taking a “Hey, just don’t be irresponsible on Twitter” stance.

A newspaper-content licensing agency in the U.K. is actually considering trying to collect royalties on behalf of papers for links to stories. That’s right, links. So even if someone links to a newspaper story without reprinting content the agency would try and collect a fee. Not right on any level.

Google is once again being blamed as the source of all problems for newspapers when it’s actually a combination of a half dozen things, none of which is Google and many of which reflect the “we’re the only ones that exist” attitude that dominated the early web, that have papers in this position.

A Reuters editor has told the governing body of the Olympic Games that they need to change their accreditation rules to accommodate and acknowledge the insta-publishing reality.

Social Media

Wiki creation service WetPaint is launching a new product that seeks to measure online interest – judged by participation and engagement with related social networks and site – in television shows. The most interesting thing about this story is that it’s not a company that you’d usually associate with tracking and measurement doing it.

Similarly, a new deal between TiVo and Quantcast would seek to offer a single, unified metric that spans both TV and online advertising. This would save marketers having to cluge together disparate numbers from two – or more – different reporting services and give them a better sense of how their cross-platform campaigns were running.

MySpace is suffering from a serious lack of cool perception right now. But as Catherine P. Taylor says it can get some of that back by involving social media bigwigs in its future developments and plans.

Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 6/19/09

Advertising/Marketing

New research from Forrester predicts the number of marketing emails received will double between now and 2014, reaching an average of about 25 per day for every adult, or roughly 9,000 per year. That comes with spending that’s expected to roughly double, but a good amount of that spending will be wasted on messages that are never opened or which wind up being marked as spam.

A majority of marketers, according to a report from Forbes, are planning on increasing their budgets for “viral marketing” activities. This makes me want to cry for a number of reasons, including the fact that “viral” is not a strategy, it’s a result. That and other numbers can be found at PaidContent.

The creation of branded content – once seen as a major growth area for online marketing – is now stalling because of shrinking ad budgets, unreliable metrics and more. Some parties are having success but they’re few and far between and usually those with massive distribution channels already built in.

YouTube has introduced the option to view either a longer pre-roll commercial or a handful of in-stream spots. That’s very similar to what you can do on select videos on Hulu.

It’s not that all that surprising that the members of Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium are more interested in the ad targeting technology than they are in the actual job ads sharing portion of the deal. That focus is only becoming more apparent as we continue down the recession and the job problems that it brings with it.

Another report saying ads work better when they’re presented alongside contextually-relevant content. I look forward to next month when a report is issued showing ads work better when they’re out of context.

TV buyers aren’t so much buying, at least not until the networks make some price cuts. It’s not likely they’ll skip TV entirely, but if they don’t get what they feel to be a good deal in the upfront market they could just decide to wait and buy in the scatter market, a move that the networks would like to avoid since it doesn’t give them as much cash on-hand or let them plan for the year as well.

Media

BusinessWeek will experiment with putting an “enhanced experience” behind a print wall that’s only accessible to paying subscribers. All the content from the magazine will still be available for free to everyone, but subscribers get something extra.

Consumer wants and media wants are, unfortunately, moving in opposite directions when it comes to how online content is monetized.

The Associated Press is negotiating through the press as it stares down the expiration of its contract with Google. It wants terms more favorable to it as it faces the need to reduce fees it charges to newspapers again and basically looks at an increasingly bad business model.

Social Media

Yep, customer service is and should be a major component of a company’s social media plan. But I think the key, as this author states, is in making sure that it’s used in a way that’s scalable. One-on-one interactions like those that are cited in some of the more popular case studies just aren’t going to work over the long hall.

Huh. Turns out Twitter search, often held up as the shining example of monitoring the real-time web, only accounts for a fraction of a percentage of overall search activity. That shouldn’t diminish the role it can eventually play, just means that some people need to settle down and get some perspective.

Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 6/12/09

Advertising

Izea is readying a Pay Per Tweet program that should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. The details are somewhat similar to what the company offers bloggers and which has been the subject of a ton of discussion over the years. I’ve never been a fan but the company has never been one to shy away from making its case and I have to respect that, as well as the discussion they’ve sparked, which has led to some of the guidelines many of us now see as givens.

The Daily Beast and other online publications are forgoeing traditional banner ads in favor of customer advertising options that they’re offering to buyers in the hopes they’ll see them as breaking through the clutter.

Stories about Google trying to break further into the display ad market have been written for at least two years now, with this being the latest one. This is one area of online advertising the company doesn’t rule and so it’s a prime area for growth for it.

Media

Staci Kramer at PaidContent has some of the best commentary about the meeting a couple weeks ago of some of the biggest newspaper executives about how they’re going to get paid for their content in the near future. This particular post has to do with a proposed universal system for papers to collect payment from sites as well as a single online classifieds program. She picks up the key point, which is that if even one site decides to go it alone and doesn’t stick to the plan it can all fall apart very, very easily. Erik Sherman at BNET makes a strong case for people needing to make a strong case – one that’s backed up by hard numbers and not just lofty opinions and feelings of what’s “right” or “true.”

Speaking of level-headed commentary, Jon Fine provides just that in the ongoing conversation about paying for news content online. He hits the nail on the head when he says that “news” isn’t something you repeatedly go to like a song or movie.

New research shows, unsurprisingly, that time spent with mobile apps is eating into time people spend with other media.

USA Today sees mobile device distribution as one of the keys of its future survival. At the same time it’s developing a subscription-only electronic edition that would replicate in digital format the newspaper itself.

Social Media

Time Magazine runs a cover story on Twitter and gets everyone talking.

Twitter, in response to a lawsuit by St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, is launching Verified Accounts over the summer. It’s just a trial at first and will focus on people who are seen as being at risk for what is, essentially, identity theft and then spread out to include everyone who runs some sort of “official” account for a person or brand.

I don’t always agree with Jonah Bloom but I do find a lot of common ground with him in his call to not repeat the siloed mistakes of the past, with social media being a siloed unit that acts independently of the rest of a firm or office.

If you’re up at 12AM Eastern you’ll be first in line to take advantage of Facebook finally allowing everyday users – and more importantly brand managers – to grab a vanity URL on the social network. Marshall Kirkpatrick is in no hurry to grab his since, as he points out, he already owns his own website and so Facebook is a secondary concern to him. I agree with Marshall’s points as to why this isn’t an absolute priority, but I will probably grab mine when I get around to turning on the computer Monday morning. If you’re still interested Caroline McCarthy has a solid how-to.

No kidding.

Both blogs and Twitter accounts get abandoned. This shouldn’t be surprising at this point.

Gotta love Turner Classic Movies launching a social network for fans of classic movies. The site will allow members to write blogs, engage in conversations with others and list their favorite stars and movies.

Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 5/29/09

Advertising

The CW is launching a campaign for their new fall shows that will acknowledge the current variations on the idea of “talking about” a show. The ads will feature copy such as “TV to blog about” and “TV to text about” and more. If you ask me the campaign says more about The CW’s target demographic than it does about communications technology.

Gotta say, the video of Jimmy Kimmel’s routine in front of ad buyers at ABC’s upfront comes off a lot less like a “kick in the crotch” to the network and more like a “cynical take on the reality every knows but doesn’t acknowledge.” Isn’t the role of a comedian to point out the ridiculousness of an institution?

One of the biggest challenges facing advertisers these days is finding a way to effectively tap into and monetize the real-time web. The problem is that advertising is, by and large, a laborious process that does not adjust easily or quickly and the web is increasingly doing just that.

The online classifieds category has more than doubled since 2005 according to Pew Research, with newspapers and traditional purveyors of classified advertising missing out on almost all of that while craigslist and its ilk have been the primary sources of that growth.

Marketers are very worried, according to a new survey, about the hijacking of their brand online, but many don’t know what to do about it.

Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium is actually showing signs of success, with some papers saying participating in the program has increased their online ad sales and subsequent revenue.

If you watch Hulu and find the volume of PSAs to be…interesting…since it means that spot was unable to attract an advertiser here’s why: Media buyers don’t know what to do with it. It’s too big to warrant a traditional online video approach but too small to fit into a traditional TV approach. Bank on this – When Hulu figures out how to maximize its revenue and get over this roadblock the advertising world will be in for a rather substantial shift.

In an effort to retain ad dollars some online publishers are becoming more agreeable to full-site takeover ads, a type that advertisers love since it gets in front of people’s eyeballs in an aggressive fashion. I’m not saying they’re the best idea, but I’d expect to see more of them on high-profile sites that want to make brand advertisers happy.

Media

Good luck keeping up with and finding the people who are illegally using your copyrighted material, says Liz Gannes. The cutting edge will always include a small subset of people determined to misuse the creations of other people and the way the law functions means companies are constantly playing catch-up. For those looking to try to find out where their content is being ripped off, there are a couple of tools profiled by Forbes.

The economic reality of printing the title has cause the Newspaper Association of America to cease publication of Presstime, the trade group’s magazine on the industry. Presstime will continue to exist online, but you have to marvel at the meta of the decision.

YouTube is giving content partners, especially those from networks and other media companies, more control over both the advertising within and the presentation of their shows and videos on YouTube’s site. The idea, as is often the case with YouTube, is to make the content more attractive to brand advertisers and bring more of their money to that site.

Social Media

As Jordan at MarketingPilgrim says, don’t quite take a study reporting people don’t have their purchasing behavior influenced by social media at face value. There are lots of ways it, like any other advertising platform, influences thinking that isn’t immediately recognized and so it would seem niave to say it doesn’t influence people at all.

Have fun with it, but make sure social media isn’t taking over your life.

Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 5/8/09

Advertising/Marketing

YouTube is reminding some of its top content producers that placing their own ads in their videos violates the site’s terms of service. YouTube and owner Google obviously don’t want producers selling their own ads for a variety of reasons, ranging from the simple fact that it cuts them out of the ad dollar equation but also because it has the potential to create a situation where a producer-placed ad conflicts with a YouTube-sold ad. Cause that’s just awkward.

But…I thought 2009 was supposed to be the year of mobile advertising? Is..that…not actually happening? Apparently not.

While it might not be growing at the same rate is has been the last couple years, 2009 is still on track to end with online being the fastest-growing portion of advertising spending. Specifically, a new survey says more money will be heading to online ad networks as marketers look to increase the reach of their ads. Of course the survey was conducted by an online ad network.

A new bit of research by Nielsen shows that people at gas pumps outfitted with digital screens not only find them interesting and entertaining but also recall the ads displayed with a high amount of frequency. That’s good news for the advertisers looking to target drivers at the pump.

Advertisers want to start basing what they pay networks on an engagement model. Oh good. Cause we all have a single definition of what “engagement” means, right? Right?

Media

I think it’s great that some media companies are taking positive steps to embrace digital media in their business models, I think it’s a bit slanted to give them a pass on their early online efforts by saying they just got “steamrolled” by Google like everyone else. Quite the contrary, there was a whole segment of the population that embraced Google and found ways to work with its algorithms and such. That segment is, to borrow a phrase, the people formerly known as the audience. Newspapers now want to make up for lost time by acting like victims but the reality is they missed a lot of boats early on.

I think Newsweek’s idea to not worry about breaking news and instead focus on context and deep reporting is exactly what it and other organizations need to do to survive. Stop competing with everyone on search and start doing what blog writers who have other jobs can’t, which is utilize resources they don’t to go beyond the breaking news and add value to stories.

TVWeek has become the latest publication to announce it will shut down its print edition and go online only.

Online

Twitter will begin indexing the links people include in their updates, meaning their search feature will become much more rich, going beyond whatever people are able to say in 140 characters in into the stories behind those links.

Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 5/1/09

Advertising/Marketing

I have to love the story that ABC has some sort of super-secret metric for their advertising that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that those ads lead directly to sales for the advertisers. Unfortunately they can’t prove it because advertisers are reluctant to share numbers on the resulting sales.

Pretty sure I and most of the people I know were already aware of the notion that, in our role as marketers, being polite to people on social networks and not hammering them with irrelevant invitations or messages was a good idea. But just to reinforce that fact the Internet Advertising Bureau in the U.K. has issued a statement to that effect.

Statements being made by the FTC and other governmental regulators make it sound like the window for self-regulation of the behavioral-targeting ad industry might be closing soon. While there are no proposals being bandied about yet, if the big players in this market don’t come up with some guidelines that protect consumer interests and lay out best practices as well as restrictions, it’s clear the FTC is ready to step into this conversation. Unfortunately a rampant outbreak of Don’tKnowWhatTheyreTalkingAbout seems to have broken out among the lawmakers.

General Mills has recruited 900 bloggers – 80% of which are moms – into a new product sampling and review program. Deals like this that are huge in scope and give the marketing industry media an excuse to write the word “mommyblogger” often get a lot of coverage and analysis while more targeted efforts often languish. The program, and others like it, is designed to take advantage of the fact that women put a lot of weight behind the reviews of other women they consider peers in online communities.

If there’s a decent call to action and some value for the consumer, smartphone users are actually clicking on ads they see on their mobile devices.

Media buyers and agencies are embracing the change enacted by some cable news channels that keeps the crawl of news at the bottom of the screen going during commercial breaks. Instead of being concerned it distracts from the ad they feel it’s helping people pay attention and not fast-forward if they’re doing some time-delayed viewing.

An upcoming Forrester report on the state of the interactive advertising industry shows there’s still growth occurring and in it future, with “social media” programs being the biggest winner in terms of percentage of dollars. Mike Manuel, though, points out that “social media” touches a number of different departments and not all of this is going to marketing initiatives.

Greg Verdino writes about the idea of “earned attention” as being something the marketing industry needs to shoot for and I couldn’t agree more.

Media

A new study shows that cross-media multi-tasking, specifically instances of people going online while also watching prime-time programming on television, almost doubles between Monday and Thursday. That could be a boon to advertisers who include a URL in their ads since it means people could immediately react and go to their site, but that would necessitate a strong call to action to visit the site, which is something most ads astoundingly lack.

More people are watching more content on multiple platforms according to research from Accenture. Some of the stats are a tad misleading – the story shifts from talking about television-type shows to the more generic “online video” and I think there’s a broad swath of content they’re talking about – but overall I agree with the notion that as content becomes available on more platforms people will shift their habits to whatever fits their needs.

The Chicago Tribune has put the brakes on a program that allowed online readers to access and comment on stories that had yet to be fully vetted and published. The kibosh came from editors who received complaints from writers and other staff members over this extraordinarily unorthodox idea.

Retail

Consumer feedback site Yelp.com is now allowing businesses to participate in the discussion and correct any incorrect information. There are a number of guidelines they must follow (stay on topic, this isn’t an advertising forum, etc) but it’s nice to see businesses being given an opportunity to at least respond.

The idea of collecting sales tax on online purchases is gaining steam once again as states continue to see falling local sales tax revenue and eye enviously states like New York that instituted such a tax last year.

Seems even with concerns about spending being on their minds, grocery shoppers are still giving increased weight to a manufacturer’s sustainability and other “green” practices when deciding what brand to purchase.

I’m torn between thinking the new initiative by Toys ‘R’ Us to put packaged goods and everyday staples in a new front-of-store section is either the best idea ever or the worst thing possible.

Social Media

Erin at Queen of Spain is calling out all the people who think of themselves and call themselves “mommybloggers” but don’t actually talk at all about their lives as moms, instead filling their sites with reviews and promotions. Kelby Carr hits some similar notes as well.

Data portability – functionality that allows online users to use a single login for multiple sites – will lead the push into the next wave of the social web according to a new report from Forrester Research. The thinking goes that even sites without a social networking component will be able to add “members” (there are hints of this in Google Friend Connect and other tools) and will be able to customize content based on the data these people bring with them about themselves and their networks.

Apparently people use Twitter for timely information updates. Huh. Similarly it’s not that surprising that Twitter doesn’t have a huge return-visit percentage, with a lot of people who sign up with outsized expectations not returning to it the next month. Those numbers are questioned, though, since a lot of people wind up not visiting Twitter but using a third-party app like TweetDeck

Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 4/24/09

Advertising and Marketing

Someone has gone out on a limb and speculated that the addition of Oprah Winfrey to Twitter could bring more everyday people to the micro-blogging service. You think?

All that online chatter, especially in the form of blogs and forums, can be mined by companies looking for real-time consumer feedback. Those insights can be used for a variety of business purposes, from gathering information on the consumer market to finding out what customers feel is either most important or missing from products and services. A separate study shows the marketing department benefits most from that information though others find value as well.

Older demographic groups are becoming more attractive to marketers for their stable income and willingness to buy things for not only their kids but also their grandkids.

Google is continuing to make a play for display ad dollars, releasing research that shows advertisers using it’s display content network have achieved a measure of cost effectiveness that’s even better than search. While search continues to be a point of strength for Google it needs display ads to grow as well.

Media agencies still face problems in building effective multi-platform campaigns because each platform has its own dedicated – and siloed – department that might not be communicating effectively with the other departments.

“Time Axcess” is the name of a proprietary ad network being launched by Time Inc. that will offer ad space on the sites for all of the publisher’s titles. Gannett is doing likewise.

McDonald’s is the latest food outlet experimenting with an in-store content network, bringing in programs from Discovery Channel and mixing in advertising of its own along with other branded entertainment.

Media

The New York Times is cutting sections from its print publication as part of its plan to survive falling advertising revenue. It will consolidate some of that content and look to find ways to get more money from online advertising as well, which isn’t all that surprising considering that’s what, roughly, everyone is doing.

TiVo has finally announced what I’ve long expected, which is its entry into the national ratings collection market, presenting an immediate and huge problem for Nielsen.

Online

If Twitter were to launch, as R/WW and others have reported, launch a universal login service that competes against Facebook Connect I’d prefer it since Twitter is more in line with publishing than Facebook, which is activity and profile based. It just makes more sense to my mind.

Online analytics company Omniture is launching a new service to measure viral videos, including reporting back on views and other hard numbers as well as softer ideas like comment sentiment.

Yahoo, as it was looking for money under the couch cushions, realized it still owned blog pinging service blo.gs and promptly sold it to Automattic, the company that publishes the WordPress blogging software.