Judge Says 'There's An Ad For That...' And It's Ok For Now

from the let-it-play dept

Recently, AT&T sued Verizon over its "There's A Map For That" ad, that mocked AT&T's 3G network coverage, while playing on the Apple iPhone slogan of "there's an app for that." It seemed like an odd thing for AT&T to do, as it really just called more attention to the ad and the differences in 3G networks. Now, to make matters even worse, a judge has refused to issue an injunction stopping the ad. That doesn't stop the lawsuit, though, and the ad might still get taken down if AT&T wins, but it's unlikely Verizon's ad campaign is going to last until the lawsuit is finally decided, anyway. So for now, all it's done is driven a lot more attention to the ad, in which Verizon comes out favorably.

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Ad Blindness Rules: Even Fewer People Clicking Ads

from the bye-bye dept

We've been discussing why online advertising is often a bad idea for advertisers (not so much for many publishers, but that's a different issue), as ad blindness rules the day. Now there's even more evidence, as the already tiny clickthrough rate on online ads is dropping, rapidly. Basically, it sounds like more and more people are simply ignoring online ads, which is to be expected, since they rarely (if ever?) add much of value. This is the advertisers' fault. There are lots of ways that advertisers could actually add value for consumers/readers/users online -- but they're all so scared to death of actually taking that step. Instead, many are so focused on obsolete metrics like the CPM, that they're unable or unwilling to really branch out and try marketing and advertising programs that actually are effective. Simply tossing up more ad banners isn't doing the trick. Really engaging with users would help, but most brands still haven't figured out quite how to do that, even if it isn't particularly complex.

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Unemployed? Blogging? Don't Put Ads On Your Site Or You Might Lose Your Unemployment Check

from the well-how-about-that dept

For quite some time, many people credited part of the rise of blogging to the fact that many folks in the tech industry found themselves out of work in the wake of the dot com bubble bursting. Suddenly there were lots of tech geeks, who were always online and had stuff to say -- and now plenty of extra time to say it. It didn't take long for a whole slew of tools to pop up to make that happen, and voila, blogging revolution. I'm not sure I really believe that story, but there have been some suggestions that the current financial crisis my lead to something similar, with the unemployed speaking up online. Except... you might not want to do that if you're unemployed and in New York. Forbes is reporting that a lawyer's unemployment benefits were greatly reduced, because his blog earned about $1/day in ad revenue. The whole thing sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare, with NY State asking her to get a form from her new "employer" who didn't exist. Then NY Department of Labor started giving her all sorts of contradicting information, and eventually an "investigation" into her "business" -- during which time her unemployment benefits were stopped entirely. She's now pulled the Google AdSense from her blog (total earned over the life of the blog $238.75).

It's really stunning how various labor departments are simply ill-equipped to handle a modern labor force. Reading through the story of this lawyer is not at all surprising. While most of our employees are in California, we've had employees in a few other states, and none of them seem to know how to deal with the idea that people in their state might work remotely for a company in another state. Just last week, we were dealing with one particular state, where we had an employee who hasn't worked for us in nearly two years -- but the state insists we still owe taxes for him and on our "office" in that state, for every day since he no longer worked for us. We've written letters, filled out forms, spoken to people at the local labor department -- and all to no avail. Every couple of months, they send us an updated statement insisting we still owe them money for someone we haven't employed in ages. All of these labor departments are designed based on an old model whereby there was a big company that had a presence in the state, and employed people. They can't handle the idea that someone might work remotely or that people might make some other income from a blog or other source. One of these days, perhaps they'll update their systems, but until then, it's just a bureaucratic nightmare.

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Indian Company Sues Google For Showing Competitors Ads... Even Though It Places Ads On Competitors Too

from the what's-good-for-us... dept

There have been plenty of misguided lawsuits against Google, when someone gets upset and realizes that competitors are buying AdWords on their name or other trademarks. But, of course, that shouldn't be a trademark violation (unless the resulting ad is confusing). It's just well-placed marketing. Furthermore, even if it is trademark infringement, it shouldn't be Google's liability, but the party who bought and created the ad. However, the lawsuits still keep coming -- with the latest one being in India. But what makes this one special is that the complaining company seems to be buying those types of ads itself. So while it's complaining that competitors' ads show up on searches for its own name, it had no problem buying ads on competitors' names. Why not just try competing by offering a better service, rather than worrying about how competitors advertise?

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AMC Theatres Pull Movie Listings From Washington Post; Post Hopes Movie Attendance Drops

from the we've-seen-this-movie-before dept

Remember back when you used to check the local newspaper for movie listings? To be honest, I can barely remember when that happened. These days, it's just easier to look up the info online. However, many newspapers apparently still print movie listings -- and apparently (I had no idea...), this is actually paid advertising by the theater chains. AMC Theatres, however, is realizing that most people now get movie times online and has pulled its listings from the Washington Post (via Romenesko), leading some readers to believe, incorrectly, that the Post had dropped the listings (similar to the way many newspapers have dropped stock listings). But, since this is ad revenue, the Post is actually quite upset about this, and worried that other chains might follow suit. So it's actually hoping that theater attendance will drop, and AMC will be convinced to pay for movie listings again. Of course, the data itself is factual information, and if the Washington Post really wanted to, it could print the times itself -- but, instead it clearly wants the advertising money (and to prove why it thinks AMC is making a mistake). It will be fascinating to see what happens, but I get the feeling that even if AMC is convinced to come back, it won't be long before movie theaters stop paying newspapers to print showtimes.

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Mary Kay Sues Yahoo For Inserting Ad Links In Emails

from the trademark-fun dept

We've seen way too many lawsuits involving companies suing search engines for trademark infringement due to paid search adveritisng, but the latest lawsuit is a bit different. It appears that Mary Kay (who has a long history of being an aggressive enforcer of trademark) has sued Yahoo because of the way it inserts ads in email. Apparently Yahoo employs that incredibly annoying process of hotlinking certain text words to pop up advertisements. I've seen this on various websites (now blocked thanks to No Script) but I didn't realize Yahoo used the same annoying process in email as well. Mary Kay claims that this is confusing, and this actually does raise some interesting legal questions. First of all, I could see how some people might actually be confused by these sorts of ad links. While they usually look a little different than a real hyperlink, unless you're paying attention, you might get confused and think it's a normal link, rather than an ad. But that just speaks to confusion over what the link is. Once you hover over it, it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly that it's an ad. I have a lot more trouble believing that it would then confuse many users. That said, even if it is confusing, there's a question as to whether or not Yahoo should actually be liable for any confusion. After all, it's just using an automated system to insert these ads. I might argue that it's obnoxious, annoying and unnecessarily intrusive, but it's not clear that it should be illegal.

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Morons In A Hurry Can Figure Out That There Are Different Facebook Mafia Games

from the kiss-of-death dept

Apparently, today's mobsters are intellectual property lawyers. Back in February, we wrote about a ridiculous lawsuit between the creator of an online game, Mob Wars, and the online creator of the game Mafia Wars, claiming copyright infringement. Of course, the whole claim was silly since the game itself is based on a rather common game concept that was around for ages before either of these games existed. Rather than fighting a silly court battle, why not actually compete on features? So now we've got a new battle, between Zynga (makers of Mafia Wars) and Playdom, the makers of yet another game, called Mobsters, with Zynga claiming trademark infringement due to the way Playdom is running ads for Mobsters.

But the details seem like this is an abuse of trademark law to harm a competitor rather than a legitimate complaint. Zynga's complaint is that Playdom put up an ad that read: "Like Mafia Wars? Click here to play Mobsters. Its [sic] got henchmen, mini games, message boards and sophisticated style." Zynga claims that this is somehow confusing because it doesn't include Playdom's name anywhere. However, it seems abundantly clear that the ad is for a different game and they're just targeting players of Zynga's game. That's not trademark infringement. That's targeted advertising. It's why Pepsi is allowed to run ads trying to get Coke drinkers to switch. You can use the name of your competitor in an ad.

What's especially disappointing is that some of Zynga's investors, such as Fred Wilson and Brad Feld, have long complained about misuses of intellectual property law to stop competition -- and now they're supporting a company that appears to be doing the same thing. It's a waste of money that should be going towards competing and making a better game, rather than worrying about what competitors are saying in their ads.

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Alternative Weekly Papers See Spike In Adult Ads Following Craigslist Decision

from the and-there-they-go... dept

Back in November, when Craigslist first caved in to misguided complaints from various state AGs, we pointed out that this wouldn't do anything to stop prostitution -- it would just make it go elsewhere. And, indeed, that's exactly what happened. But, of course, that wasn't enough for the AGs who started grandstanding again a couple months ago, leading Craigslist to cave in again. So... what do you think is happening? Well, reader mikez points to a report noting a sudden and unexpected spike in adult classified ads in alternative weekly papers who had seen their business hit hard as such ads transferred to Craigslist. And, of course, as Craigslist had already pointed out, many of the ads showing up in those alt papers were already much more explicit than anything on Craigslist. In the meantime... with all these regular newspapers looking for additional business models, maybe they should start accepting those types of ads...

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Surprise: Advertisers Win Money From Google For Over-Budget Clicks

from the didn't-see-that-coming dept

Back in 2005, we wrote about how Google was sued because AdWords users were being charged more than their "daily budgets" for ads on the site. The case initially got plenty of attention after pretty much all of the mainstream press reported that the Howard Stern listed as a plaintiff was "the Howard Stern" of radio fame -- though, that was later disputed. Either way, the case itself (famous Howard Stern or not) was still interesting. Since advertisers pay based on clicks, and the price of the clicks isn't always known until the click happens, the "daily budget" that any advertiser sets for ads is impossible to match exactly. Thus, there will be days when the daily budget is exceeded -- but that wasn't acceptable to those suing, who found the whole thing misleading. After a court refused (twice) to give summary judgment to Google, it looks like the company has decided to throw $20 million at the problem to make it go away via settlement (a decently large chunk, of course, goes to the class action lawyers who brought the suit). This is a bit of a surprise, since you would think Google has a pretty clear case, as the terms of its agreement with advertisers was pretty clear on what was going on -- but perhaps Google thinks it's smarter to just pay up and keep advertisers happy.

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Ad Exec: Let's Save Newspapers By Throwing More Money At Newspapers

from the for-the-good-of...-um...-nostalgia? dept

Sinan Unur (an economics professor from my alma mater) writes in to point us to a column in AdAge, where an ad exec says that advertising agencies should rescue newspapers by focusing on newspaper advertising again. As Sinan points out, this doesn't make much sense, for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it shouldn't be the ad agencies that decide where to put the ad dollars, but the clients who employ the ad agencies. I'd argue it's even more ridiculous, because if you're focusing on newspapers out of a sense of nostalgia (which seems to be the crux of the article's argument), then you're actually failing your clients, by putting their ads in a place where they might not be most effective. While it's nice to see one industry interested in helping another struggling one, rather than the typical stories casting blame around -- it's difficult to see this as a reasonable solution to the newspaper industry's woes.

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Yet Another 'Savior For The Music Industry' Shuts Down

from the down-down-down dept

Over the last few years, as the recording industry has finally started to at least come to terms with the idea that its market is changing, industry insiders keep looking for "a savior." That's a new tech-focused company that will somehow come up with the magic model that revitalizes the recording industry's revenue stream. You begin to notice a pattern with every one of these: the hype is never based on users flocking to the service. They're always based on a big PR campaign and quotes from recording industry insiders. In the early days, there was PressPlay and MusicNet. Then, there was the "new Napster" and Rhapsody. More recently, there's been SnoCap, TotalMusic, Qtrax and plenty of others. They get buzz, with the stories reporting how the industry is "supporting" these innovative new startups. But they never seem to go anywhere. The latest is SpiralFrog, which got some buzz for being "ad supported" music, which has never made much sense to us. It's now shutting down, just as pretty much all of the other "saviors" have done.

And yet... file sharing sites are thriving.

It all comes down to the same thing: you don't compete with free by being lame. And, all of these "saviors" have focused on paying the record labels first, and giving users a reason to use them second (or sometimes even further down the list). The record labels are desperate for new revenue, so when they make these agreements, they're so costly that it's impossible for any of these startups to make money -- and since they're bound by all sorts of restrictions, the services tend to not be very compelling anyway. That's a recipe for disaster. Perhaps before the press declares the next major label-backed music startup the "savior" for the industry, the reporters should take a look at the littered path of failures.

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Utah Allows Elected Official To Lobby... And Vote For Bill Her Company Is Pushing

from the utah-politics-at-work dept

Tim already covered some of the problems with Utah's repeated attempts to ban (or greatly limit) keyword advertising on trademarked terms. However, there were two separate disturbing issues related to this, both brought up by Eric Goldman, that seemed worth discussing. Both involve two of the legislators who voted on the bill. The first, Rep. S. Clark, voted against the bill, but for flabbergasting reasons. You see, it wasn't that he disliked the idea that companies would be blocked from advertising on competitive keywords, it was because he wanted to pin all the liability on Google:

"We should be going after the Googles that are creating this problem. They're the villains." .... "If we're going to use the strength and resources of the state to go after businesses, then we ought to go after the business that is causing the harm. ... We ought to go after the Googles with the state's resources and reputation."

Then, there's Rep. Jennifer "Jen" Seelig, who voted for the bill. But, that shouldn't be surprising. You see, even though she's an elected official in the state legislator, she's also still employed as a registered lobbyist for 1-800 Contacts, the company that has been pushing the bill. Apparently that sort of conflict of interest isn't seen as a problem in Utah.

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Who Says Users Don't Want Competitors' Ads in Search Results?

from the complex-markets dept

A couple of years back we noted that the Utah legislature was considering legislation that would have banned companies from buying search ads related to their competitors' brand names. EFF and others said the law was likely unconstitutional, but the legislature passed it anyway. The legislation was such a disaster that last year the Utah legislature repealed it. Incredibly, despite all the negative publicity the 2007 bill received, and despite assurances from legislators that they'd learned their lesson, the backers of the legislation haven't given up. This year they introduced yet another bill restricting keyword advertising that passed the Utah House but died in the Utah Senate a few days ago. Given the tenacity of the bill's sponsors—1-800-Contacts is reportedly the leading backer of the proposal—the proposal may very well come back in future years.

Proposals to regulate keyword advertising have come in for a lot of criticism, but one person who's willing to defend the Utah proposal is Harvard's Ben Edelman. He argues that the Utah bill is necessary to avoid consumer confusion. He suggests that when consumers search for a trademarked term (say, "Hertz"), they're expecting to see search results related to that company, not to the company's competitors. He argues that if a consumer really wanted results from a variety of different companies, she would have chosen a generic term like "car rental" rather than a specific brand name. But James Grimmelmann points out a couple of problems with this reasoning. First, it shows an awfully low opinion of the intelligence of the average consumer. More importantly, there are circumstances where a consumer wants to see ads for a firm's competitors. For example, a consumer may be considering buying a particular company's products, but might want to check out that company's competitors before making her decision. Searching for that company's name is a quick and easy way to find out which other companies consider themselves to be in the same market. In contrast, the customer may not know which generic terms precisely describe that company's market. In Grimmelmann's example, it might be easier to ask for all companies in the same market as "Godiva" or "Hershey's", rather than having to describe precisely which segment of the chocolate market we're interested in.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Online Publishers' Solution To Falling Ad Revenues: Bigger, More Annoying Ads

from the sledgehammer-on-a-thumbtack dept

Things aren't looking good for the online ad market: reduced spending by advertisers combined with the fact that people don't pay a whole lot of attention to banner ads portends doom and gloom. While the first part of that equation might be out of online publishers' control, they're trying to tackle the second part not by recognizing that advertising needs to be engaging or interesting content in order to be satisfying, but rather by clubbing internet users over the head with some new, huge and intrusive banner ad formats. Say hello to the Fixed Panel, which is a huge vertical banner that "scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls", the XXL Box, which is pretty much exactly what it says, and the Pushdown, the biggest of the bunch, which rolls down from the top of the page to get right in the user's face. The trade group behind these new formats says they are "designed to help stimulate a renaissance of creative advertising on the Internet that meets the needs of marketers by better integrating their messages into the fabric of the Web." That sounds like a lot of buzzwords, but conspicuous by its absence is any mention of the user's experience of these ads. These ads might grab users' attention through brute force, but will the experience be a positive one? It seems likely that intrusive advertising that gets in users' way will simply make the current situation worse by driving users away from the content. This is a further reflection of just how dead the captive advertising model is. Consumers have plenty of choices about where to get their content online; if a publishers' advertising keeps getting in their way, they'll move on and get content from somewhere else.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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The Vastly Different Approaches Of Google And Yahoo When It Comes To Newspapers

from the strategy-shift dept

About a month ago, Google dumped its program to try to help sell newspaper ads, admitting that it had been something of a failure. It wasn't a huge surprise why. Google entered the space assuming that it could reform the newspaper ad business the same way it revolutionized the online ad business. But it neglected to realize some of the massive differences in the markets. Meanwhile, the NY Times is noting that Yahoo's much more collaborative approach to newspapers is actually a shining success story for both Yahoo and its newspaper partners. Rather than trying to revolutionize the entire market, Yahoo is simply working within the process by which newspapers already sell print ads, to add targeted online advertisements as well. And it's working amazingly well.

In the meantime, with Google dropping its newspaper ad sales effort, it seems to be going to the other extreme: it finally started putting advertisements on Google News. For years, whenever angry newspaper insiders would complain about how Google News was somehow "profiting" off of their hard work, people would respond that Google didn't even put any advertisements on its news search engine. However, now that this has changed, pretty much everyone is expecting lawsuits to follow. Personally, I can't see how the newspapers would win such a lawsuit (and, think that they have much more important issues to spend money on), but given Google's willingness to cave to book publishers and authors, you can bet some newspaper publishers are hoping that Google will be forced to throw money in their direction as well.

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What Happens Once MySpace's Deal With Google Ends?

from the then-what? dept

You may recall, that a few years ago, MySpace (or, rather, News Corp.) signed a $900 million advertising deal with Google. The deal guaranteed at least that much in revenue from Google, even if the ads didn't really earn that much. Basically, Google felt the need to do the deal to keep competitors off of MySpace. However, as people have finally started realizing that advertising on MySpace (or other social networks) isn't working out, it's worth noting that the clock is ticking on the deal. There's still a bit more than a year left on the deal, but Google has been shying away from similar deals, and there's growing evidence that ads on social networking sites just don't pay. The Google deal may have helped keep MySpace afloat for the past few years, but without a replacement things may get trickier.

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It's Not Ad Standards That Have Killed The Online Ad Business

from the it's-crappy,-annoying-ads dept

We've been pointing out for some time that any business that relies on traditional display advertising to make money is in for a world of hurt because almost no one pays attention to those ads. There's a simple reason for this: they're not at all relevant or useful. They're often annoying. And, most importantly, they're not what anyone is on a page to see. When people surf to a web page, they're looking for the useful content -- and most advertising is not useful content.

This seems rather obvious, but it hasn't stopped some folks who tend to rely on such bad display advertising from trying to rationalize why that market is rapidly shrinking. The NY Times quotes MSNBC.com's president, Charles Tillinghast, who says the real reason that display advertising is drying up is because the IAB agreed to standard sizes for display advertisements earlier this decade. To him, that meant that the display ads were distributed everywhere via ad networks, creating over-supply and commoditization, driving down prices.

While I don't deny that there may be an oversupply -- I doubt that a more limited supply would have made a big difference. The problem isn't with the supply. It's with the demand. Most people don't want such useless advertising, so they ignore it (sometimes with help from Adblock). If you want to make advertising work, the issue isn't getting rid of standardization, or worrying about commoditization, it's about making the advertisements into good content that people actually want to participate with, rather than annoying "ads" that they want to avoid.

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Psion Gets Google To Ban 'Netbook' In Ads

from the doesn't-look-that-way... dept

Late last year, we wrote about Psion's attempt to reclaim the word "netbook." Years back, the company had a marginally popular product with that name -- though it no longer offers such a product. The company was apparently upset at the commercial use of the word "netbook" which is commonly being used to describe cheap, small laptops like the EeePC. jkOnTheRun now has a story -- direct from Psion PR -- claiming that Google has agreed to block Google ads that use the term after recognizing that Psion has a trademark on the term.

Of course, advertisers can still advertise using the keyword "netbooks" but are apparently barred from actually using the word in the advertisement itself. So a search on "netbooks" still shows ads -- just none of those ads say "netbooks" anywhere. Thus, if you look at the netbooks search, you see all the ads refer to things like "mini notebooks."

This seems pretty pointless all around. As much as Psion may wish it still holds onto the name of a product it stopped selling years ago, the term has become generically accepted as referring to this generation of small and cheap notebook computers. Psion has had nothing to do with the current value in the word, and its attempt to take back control over the word it abandoned years ago is not, at all, what trademark law was intended to allow.

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Happy Birthday Facebook, Now Show Us The Revenues

from the maybe-they-got-some-birthday-money-they-can-use dept

Facebook celebrated its fifth birthday this week, and amid all the navel-gazing about what that means for the internet, one big question still hangs over the site: how will it monetize its popularity? This is an issue that continues to dog the social-networking space, as Om Malik points out that MySpace is struggling to generate revenues as well. These sites' massive amount of traffic and visitors, and the huge amount of time spent there, have traditionally not automatically equated to big advertising revenue, and there's nothing to suggest that's going to change soon, particularly given the slowdown in ad spending. If these sites are depending on advertising for revenues, they've got to come up with something more compelling than simple banner ads, which aren't delivering decent CPM or clickthroughs. While sites like Facebook and MySpace have plenty of life left in them, at some point, they're going to have to deliver an effective way to generate significant revenues.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Most Popular Superbowl Ad Created By Amateurs

from the funny-how-that-works dept

For the past few years, there's been something of a backlash against the idea of "amateur" content production. Folks like Andrew Keen and Nick Carr have taken to mocking such efforts and insisting that professionals are basically all there is worth trusting. And... then... Doritos holds a "Crash the Superbowl" contest where amateurs are invited to submit commercials, out of which the top 5 are to be aired during the Superbowl. Not only did Doritos get nearly 2,000 submissions, one of the ads was found to be the most popular ad according to USA Today's Ad Meter, beating out the traditional kings of the Superbowl advertising business, Anheuser Busch (and winning its creators a $1 million prize). The point, which is repeatedly missed by the elitists who claim only professionals can make content is that, even if most of the content made by amateurs sucks, the ability for almost anyone to create content means that those who can do quite well, even as amateurs, now have the ability to do so. The end result is that amidst plenty of bad content, there's also an awful lot of great content that never would have been produced otherwise.

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