The internet has fundamentally changed the way consumers make purchasing decisions about cars, altering the role both manufacturers and dealers play in the process, a new study has found.

A third of British car-buyers think the web makes them less dependent on dealers at the pre-sale stage and gives them more control of their purchasing according to digital media company, Specific Media. Half say the internet gives them a wider range of opinion  bringing them to the forecourt better-informed having done their own online research, casting dealers in a post-sales role.

Two-thirds of consumers now use the web to research vehicles before purchase with 38% citing the experience as “interesting” and 32% as “enjoyable.” By placing control of information gathering into the hands of car buyers, the internet has become a major force in the purchasing process, with three-quarters of motorists citing the web as an important influence on their decision.

Despite the dominance of the internet in deciding which car to purchase, it has yet to challenge the forecourt when it comes to actual purchase behaviour. The findings show that well over half of consumers still purchase from a main dealer and a fifth buy at other dealers and garages – this compared to just three per cent of cars that are bought through online auctions, sales sites and other web locations.

Read More: Specific Media

Ad Tech’s Behavioral Targeting Shift

Curt Viebranz was the president of Platform-A, the ad network division of AOL, where cost-per-click campaigns often ruled.

But now, Viebranz believes that as last-click analysis falls out of favor, ad tech startups are looking for ways to appeal to the perennial need of brands to maximize ROI, regardless of their specific marketing objectives.

According to Viebranz, who spent 17 years at Time Warner and its predecessor company, Time Inc, this trend is reflected by a slew of rebranding efforts and consolidations in the industry, as many startups are shifting their focus towards attribution services and away from behavioral targeting. This shift, Viebranz, believes, is being driven by some of the newer companies in the space looking to get brands to “kick the click-through habit” by creating better attribution models and better methods of evaluating consumer data.

Besides attribution, these newer companies are promising they’ll be sensitive to privacy issues, a key worry for brands, Viebranz said.

“As an auto client told me two weeks ago, “I want to be sure that if I work with you guys, I’m not going to wake up and find myself on the cover of the Wall Street Journal,’” said Viebranz, now the CEO of Korrelate. “Brands want to bring more dollars online, but they are sensitive to privacy concerns.” Korrelate, formerly Ad Summos, has rebranded to focus on connecting online media usage to offline purchases.

Read More: DigiDayDaily

Vibrant, the global leader in premium contextual advertising solutions, announces it has retained five of the UK’s largest premium publisher sites within its impressive portfolio following reviews and pitches over the past three months. Dennis Publishing, AMRA, Northern & Shell, Incisive PTG and IDG have renewed contracts to continue their long-standing exclusive partnerships with Vibrant in the UK.  This follows the retention of auto site HonestJohn, in January this year.

Gary Rayneau, Trading Director of Dennis Publishing, says: “Vibrant has been a consistent commercial partner of seven years, and we’re pleased to continue our relationship.  They have proven to be experienced and innovative in the contextual advertising area.  This means we are offering advertisers and therefore consumers a rich experience that complements our premium editorial.”  The agreement brings a further 13 new properties into the partnership and Dennis Publishing is now working with Vibrant across 20 premium sites covering the core Automotive, Technology and Lifestyle verticals.

David Cleave, Digital Manager of AMRA, comments: “Vibrant continues to beat the competition when it comes to the premium nature of their creative and the advertisers that they work with, and this is a key consideration for us in ensuring a positive user experience across our network.  We are really proud to have renewed our agreement with Vibrant.”  AMRA, backed by parent company Trinity Mirror plc, is a recognised leader in regional media representation for the past 30 years.  The deal with Vibrant will include sites across the UK, with key regional publications: The Birmingham Mail; Coventry Telegraph, walesonline.co.uk and Surrey Herald.

Read More: PRNewswire

How Web Ad Attribution is Gamed

Just about every media buyer would agree that above-the-fold ads are more valuable than those at the bottom of the page. But often those ads on the bottom, which are far less likely to be seen by people, are priced higher. This a huge problem created by improper usage of algorithms and misaligned incentives in a broken Web ad attribution system.

The problem stems from the fact that the entity to serve the last ad before a conversion is given full credit for that conversion. That means the last ad on a page, even if it is tiny and not viewable, receives full credit because it is the last one to load. This is a complete waste of advertiser dollars — and a risk to the exciting developments in programmatic ad buying.

The mis-attribution is tantamount to what happened in the bond market, prior to the economic collapse. Towers of B-minus paper were packaged together and rated as AAA by the rating agencies. That house of cards eventually came crashing down, and so might this one if credit is not assigned to real value creation, rather than to faulty attribution tricks.

Read More: DIGIDAY

Aiming to reduce redundancy and offer more integrated online ad services, Cox Media Group said Tuesday it will merge its Cox Cross Media and Adify units to form Cox Digital Solutions. The new company will be led by Cox Cross Media head Steve Shaw and promises to facilitate online buys across Cox Media properties and third-party niche content networks.

Adify, which helps publishers build vertical networks and serves ads across the 180 networks it powers, was acquired by parent Cox Enterprises in 2008 for $300 million. The move has helped Cox expand its online ad operations and create vertical networks around its own properties, which include newspapers and radio and TV stations as well as related Web sites.

In 2009, for instance, Cox used Adify to build an auto-related ad network around its AutoTrader.com brand. Now the company will tie the Adify platform more tightly into its own digital ad operations to offer agencies and advertisers more efficient placement across its 1,300 local media sites in 145 markets as well as national reach through the more than 7,000 specialty publishers it works with. That adds up to traffic of about 135 million unique visitors a month, according to Cox.

Read More: MediaPost

New Year, New Attribution Model

A few years ago, marketers discovered that most of the conversions happened without an associated click in display advertising. Then, a little while later, view-based conversions were added to the performance metric. While it was a small step forward, the obvious question is: if the last click is not always indicative of the user’s decision to convert, why would the last view be any better? In short, it’s not.

In an earlier ClickZ column, I discussed the importance of going beyond the last click or last ad impression and described why an incorrect attribution model will lead to suboptimal results. Well, a new year calls for a new model – multi-touch attribution where all interactions within an association window are considered to have influences over a user’s conversion.

The power of digital advertising offers more than just targeting with higher precision; it also provides instantaneous feedback on how ads perform. With consumers exposed to increasingly more ad impressions and interactions of different media types, it’s become harder than it should be to explain how each event along the path to conversion affects the user’s decision. In the analytics sense, the current flawed last-touch attribution model suffers from the lack of a probability framework. Since the last touch (click or view) is defined by the conversion event, it’s difficult to calculate the probability. Therefore, it’s nearly impossible to measure the true influence of the last touch.

Read More: ClickZ

AdExchanger.com: What is your perspective on the attribution challenge within the broader context of measurement and analytics?

EB: We see the lack of a viable attribution metric as a central, if not the central dilemma facing digital marketers. The industry is drowning in data, but decision-making remains subjective because marketers know that the last ad model can lead to wildly suboptimal decisions. A typical case is where bottom-funnel tactics receive the entire budget, while the top-funnel sites that are actually driving demand get little or nothing. If no one has faith in the metrics, the accountability model suffers. At the end of the day, the growth and power of digital media is constrained because we are still facing this fundamental measurement challenge.

How is the MIG’s attribution offering unique?

In developing ZAP Attribution, we focused on two major gaps in the market – lack of objectivity and lack of accountability.

Prevalent attribution solutions rely on an analyst to assign weights to different impressions. However, the rationale for these weights is ultimately subjective. This is the objectivity challenge that we solved – ZAP Attribution is powered by an algorithm that determines the impact of each impression on conversion. ZAP Attribution is one hundred percent data-driven. There are no assumptions, and the model delivers fact-based, unbiased results. This in and of itself is an important step forward for the industry.

The second issue is accountability. The attribution challenge goes beyond merely assigning credit beyond the last impression. The attribution algorithm should accurately predict the impact of an optimization decision on performance. We have benchmarked ZAP Attribution relative to the last ad model in terms of its predictive power and our solution outperforms by a wide margin. This means that optimization decisions based on ZAP Attribution metrics will actually deliver the intended gains in performance. It is this gain in predictive power that differentiates ZAP Attribution from other solutions on the market and will be the driving force behind its adoption.

How does data drive the model?

Our Zeus Advertising Platform (ZAP) and its suite of applications, including ZAP Attribution, are built on the comprehensive data foundation of user-level data stored in the Zeus data warehouse. The ZAP Attribution model leverages this atomic-level data and incorporates the core drivers of performance across media, frequency and recency along with other factors. Because ZAP has robust cross-channel tracking capabilities, the model is applicable across all digital channels. For example, we can determine the impact of display on search or affiliate marketing. These capabilities enable marketers to understand complex cross-channel relationships, identify the true drivers of conversion and maximize the value of their media investments.

Read More: AdExchanger

Does Google Really Know Anything about Display Advertising?

I have honestly been pretty unimpressed with Google when they have ventured beyond search.  I mean, it’s just a fact that they are the biggest when it comes to search and search advertising, but whenever they have ventured beyond that, into display, TV, etc., I’ve been pretty critical.

Mostly, I’ve been critical because up until now, their solution to everything other than search is to approach it as if it’s search – making them a one trick pony.  Google TV is search on TV, for example, which to me makes it dead on arrival.  As I mentioned in a previous post, who wants to type in a search box on their TV?  Yuck.  Sounds like a lot of work.

I have also been critical of them because, for a company that helps others to market themselves, their marketing of their own products is pathetic.  If you take a look under the hood, the number of cool technologies and tools Google has is mind boggling: Goog 411, Google Talk, Google Docs, iGoogle, etc. But, for whatever reason, they are content to just try and let these services market themselves. Hey Google, time to drink the Kool Aid.  Makes one a bit concerned when a company comes up with marketing solutions when they have a hard time marketing themselves.

But, as usual, I digress.  Recently, an article in the NY Times talked about some things Google is thinking about and doing in display advertising that frankly surprised me because a) they didn’t feel like they were just more search solutions for non-search problems and b) they seemed to hit upon a few key factors that feel right. 

Read More: MelesMusings.com

Vibrant Media, purveyor of the once-confusing double-underlined hyperlinked ads in news articles, may be going for an IPO.

The New York-based internet company has hired a chief financial officer, Jeffrey Babka, who is known in the investor community as an IPO specialist.

“He fits into the business really well from a culture perspective,” said CEO Doug Stevenson. “He’s got a tremendous track record for success.”

Mr. Stevenson cited Mr. Babka’s previous role as CFO of NeuStar, a telecommunications company that launched an IPO in 2005 and raised over $700 million in the process.

“The markets were pretty difficult that year,” Mr. Stevenson said, “and that was one of the best new-tech IPOs of 2005.” More recently, Mr. Babka was chief financial officer at Sophos, a global IT security company based in Oxford, England, which was acquired by Apax Partners this past June at an $830 million valuation, according to the company.

It’s just the latest sign the digital media IPO market is heating up, though there are reasons companies considering the move should be cautious.

A host of internet companies have recently been touted as the next big digital IPO, but it was Demand Media that set the bar when it filed for public offering this past summer. The content company specializing in low-cost, how-to content is looking to raise $1.5 billion with its offering, which is being underwritten by Goldman Sachs. The company has yet to announce the actual offering date, but industry analysts said Demand’s announcement opened the gates for others to start looking at public offerings of their own. Some of the more high-profile companies that are reportedly ripe for an IPO are Yelp, LinkedIn and Hulu.

Read More: AdAge

Price Floors, Second Price Auctions and Market Dynamics

One of the things that is often discussed but not often written about are the market mechanics that surround the new RTB enabled exchanges & SSPs. From a design perspective most marketplaces these days have adopted some modified form of a second-price auction. The winner of the ad impression pays the seller not his actual bid, but the second highest bid.

Second price theory works as follows: Imagine that I’m selling a Monet painting. There are people that want to buy it and each has a maximum price he’s willing to pay but of course doesn’t want to pay a penny more than he has to to get the actual painting. If I tell my buyers that they’ll only pay the second highest price then each can safely give me their maximum price because they know they’ll only pay the amount they need to to beat the next highest guy. That sounds nice right? Second price auctions maximize revenue and make everyone’s life easier and create simple and efficient markets.

The problem is, reality doesn’t seem to quite follow the theory when we look at advertising today. Take a look at the below yield curves for two publishers coming in from two different exchanges. Both of these exchanges use a second price auction model.

Read More: MikeOnAds.com

Nielsen Testing a New Web-Ad Metric

Nielsen Co. is working on a service that would offer advertisers and Web publishers a new stream of data to improve audience measurement for online advertising, a move that may bring more ad dollars to the sector.

As with TV ratings, the new service requires the participation of media outlets, in this case Web portals and other sites.

So far, the media-measurement firm has lined up Facebook Inc. as a participant, according to people familiar with the matter. Other websites are expected to join as it moves out of the testing phase.

Nielsen is expected to unveil the new product next week at Advertising Week, and will conduct a test of the service shortly, according to people familiar with the matter.

The new stream of data would be an “online GRP,” these people say. A GRP, which is short for Gross Rating Points, is a formula that measures the reach and frequency of an ad, a method that has been used by the TV business for decades.

To get the new data, Nielsen will blend its demographic panel data with information from participating online companies about the people seeing a particular online ad, according to people involved in the research.

Information will vary from website to website, but in general it might indicate the age group and sex of a particular Web surfer and maybe even location, according to a person familiar with the process.

Only anonymous data will be given to Nielsen for the service, according to several people involved in the process.

Nielsen competitor comScore Inc. has been providing GRP data for online ads but advertisers say there is need for more competition in the area as it will drive improved measurement. ComScore tracks by age, sex and household income, among other things.

Nielsen already has lured marketers such as Procter & Gamble Co., the world’s biggest advertiser, and several big media-buying firms such as Publicis Groupe S.A.’s Starcom MediaVest to test the new research, say people familiar with the situation.

P&G declined to comment. Facebook and Starcom MediaVest referred calls to Nielsen.

Media buyers—executives who decide where and how marketers allocate their ad dollars—and advertisers have long complained they need an online measurement that is comparable to the way other media are measured.

Marketers often use site traffic as a gauge when they decide to buy Internet display ads—the ads that include graphics and text and appear alongside the border of the page. But traffic alone isn’t a perfect indicator of an ad’s effectiveness.

When people click on the ads, their specific actions can be tracked. But display ads are clicked on just a fraction of the time. That leaves room for an additional layer of measurement.

Media buyers say having an online GRP has the potential to give marketers a way to do apple-to-apple comparisons of media.

Having the information, they say, could lead to advertisers shifting more of their ad budgets to the Internet from other media like television.

The service will give advertisers “better accountability from the publishers, right now we don’t know whether the right people saw the ads,” according to a person involved in the process.

Nielsen’s latest push comes as it faces increased pressure in the media research business. A host of new players have begun offering measurement services over the past few years.

Some of the country’s biggest media companies and advertisers have joined forces and formed a coalition that is trying to come up with new ways of measuring audiences.

Industry trade groups—including the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Association of National Advertisers and the America Association of Advertising Agencies—have been working to create a governing body to help facilitate the online ad measurement business.

The soft economy has added more urgency to the call for better online measurement since marketers are under increasing pressure to prove their ad dollars are working.

Online advertising has enjoyed healthy growth rates but the business still trails other media such as television.

Last year, marketers spent $52.6 billion on TV ads in the U.S. and $20.3 billion on Internet advertising, according to ZenithOptimedia, a media buying firm owned by Publicis Groupe.

The money in the online-ad business is “still a drop in the bucket” compared with television, says Keith Richman, chief executive of Break.com, an online video site focused on the male market.

Break.com has itself been trying to figure out a way to give its advertisers some type of GRP measurement but says it believes a broader industry-wide movement is needed.

Read More: WSJ.com

Direct response marketers have been using various statistical models for decades to determine how to predict human behavior. They’ve built proven models that can help a marketer reach a highly targeted audience with a high degree of reliability and show that audience a message that has a higher probability of success than a random untargeted message. The easiest way to see this at work is to buy a house.

Two years ago, I bought a house (my timing was impeccable). Within weeks of my mortgage closing, I began to receive all sorts of interesting things in the mail. This was interesting because I explicitly opted out of having the data from my mortgage shared with anyone (or so I thought). As it turns out, this isn’t really possible — at least, I wasn’t able to pull it off, and I am aware of how the DR industry works. The average consumer hasn’t got a chance.

The kinds of mail I began receiving included lots of offers for things like mortgage refinance (despite that I had only bought my house weeks before), various types of insurance (most were flavors of home warranties), and then literally hundreds (possibly thousands) of offers from local businesses to try their services. This included some that were logical and tied to my physical relocation to a new neighborhood — various dentists, hair salons, landscapers, accountants, hardware stores, and roofing companies.

The DR industry has statistical models that clearly show the series of marketing opportunities that are associated with major life events. So when you have a baby, there are many things you’re likely to need to buy. When you buy a house, it’s very similar (in fact, these events are highly correlated). For instance, having a baby frequently is followed by purchasing a new (and safer or more spacious) car, SUV, crossover, or minivan. Life insurance is another highly correlated purchase.

Read More: iMediaConnection

Display Advertising Views Have ‘Positive Impact’ on Consumer Behavior

In a period of about 10 minutes of web surfing, how many advertisements would you say that you see? Ten? Fifteen? A new ad on every new page you visit?

The point: display advertising has become a huge part of our online experience.

Yet measuring the value of online ad impressions has proven to be much more challenging for advertisers than measuring results from traditional advertising. While click-through rates (CTRs) and search is easily quantifiable, impressions from display advertisements aren’t quite as obvious.

With display ads, it’s extremely common that while seeing your ad may not compel the viewer to take an action at that moment, it could inspire a later course of action. This is “the power of the view.”

Last year, comScore and Starcom USA released a study showing a sharp drop in the number of U.S. Internet users who click on display ads. This is why advertisers should consider the positive impact on their display ads of “the view” in relation to consumer behavior.

Read More: SearchEngineWatch

How Do We Bring Brand Dollars Online

As we all know, the balance between the amount of time people spend on the internet and the online share of marketing dollars is way out of whack.   Yet even as we all point to the problem, and as every VC pitch deck for a digital media venture includes the cliché slide showing the imbalance, the gap between offline and online dollars has remained wide.   As hard as it is to admit, the problem lies not with uninformed marketers who don’t realize how efficient internet advertising is.  The reason why the gap exists is that internet advertising still largely sucks and we have a lot of hard work to do to fix it.

To bring those dollars online we must build a media ecosystem that is better than television or print.   At the core of that problem are three challenges we need to overcome as an industry:

• The first challenge, which I have written about in the past on these pages, is that we have to be able to deliver scale to marketers where they can spend hundreds of millions of dollars easily and effectively.  If large media buys require cobbling together dozens or hundreds of independent sites or networks, we will never achieve scale and large marketers will not be able to utilize their budgets.
• The second challenge is that we must deliver quality audience experiences where marketers can use all the tools in the advertising quiver to amuse, beguile, entertain, educate and generally capture the attention of their audience.  I will leave that topic for another post, but if the miserably tiny and insufficient 300×250 ad unit is the apex of the canvas that we will provide for communicating, I am tendering my resignation today.
• And last for the topic of this post, before marketers will bring their dollars online at any scale, we must provide them with control and ultimately trust in the how, when, where, and why of their online advertising.

Read More: AdExchanger

The shoes that Julie Matlin recently saw on Zappos.com were kind of cute, or so she thought. But Ms. Matlin wasn’t ready to buy and left the site.

Then the shoes started to follow her everywhere she went online. An ad for those very shoes showed up on the blog TechCrunch. It popped up again on several other blogs and on Twitpic. It was as if Zappos had unleashed a persistent salesman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes,” said Ms. Matlin, a mother of two from Montreal. “It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it’s a little creepy, especially if you don’t know what’s going on.”

People have grown accustomed to being tracked online and shown ads for categories of products they have shown interest in, be it tennis or bank loans.

Increasingly, however, the ads tailored to them are for specific products that they have perused online. While the technique, which the ad industry calls personalized retargeting or remarketing, is not new, it is becoming more pervasive as companies like Google and Microsoft have entered the field. And retargeting has reached a level of precision that is leaving consumers with the palpable feeling that they are being watched as they roam the virtual aisles of online stores.

Read More: NYTimes.com

Integrated DR Marketing for Multi-Channel Retailers

Since the launch of AdWords in 2000, Google has worked with advertisers and their agencies to increase brand and product awareness — and to drive sales — by helping advertisers reach the right person, in the right place, at the right time, through the effective use of search advertising. The success of this tactic has generally been measured by connecting search advertising campaigns to revenue within the e-commerce domain.

As consumers have become accustomed to a multi-channel world, however, it has become important to look outside the “e-commerce box” to measure search campaign success. The goal in doing so is to find the correlation between search advertising and overall company sales, both online and offline, as customers are present in both places.

In recent times, a growing number of our customers have asked us and their agencies how they should approach the concept of quantifying online’s impact on in-store sales. We recently thought through the concept with Razorfish and came up with a joint POV; you can find that on the Razorfish site, here.

Read More: GoogleRetail.Blogspot.com

When marketers buy television spots, they can turn on the tube and watch them run. Magazines and newspapers? Marketers can flip to their ads. But when it comes to online inventory, the questions still linger: Are my ads truly running where and when I want them to? Am I wasting impressions and ad dollars serving ads in front of the wrong audience, or are they subject to impression fraud? Are they running next to content that might be offensive to my audience or on the same page as one of my major competitors? Most of us may have chuckled over humorous examples of the wrong ad in the wrong place, but it isn’t that funny if it’s happened to you.

Most advertisers are already sold on the value of good online marketing and understand how leveraging the digital world for their end goals is an important part of their marketing mix. So why are we seeing consumer media time online rise to almost 40 percent but online budgets still only represent a portion of that ratio?

When asked why the big dollars aren’t yet flowing like they could into the channel, most decision makers seem to have an issue with trust — whether it be in brand safety concerns, unproven measurement, etc. Ultimately, the currency of choice is trust, and for some marketers, especially ones rooted in deep, traditional advertising familiarity, the online world is still a bit of a mystery. In the same vein, can you imagine if you went to buy a thousand shares of Apple and instead were given a thousand shares of a worthless penny stock? Would you continue to patronize a restaurant where you weren’t guaranteed to get the meal you ordered? Even hardcore digital advocates admit that there are still questions — and a few bugs left to exterminate –within virtual inventory.

Read More: iMediaConnection

Pushing Boundaries: Exploring the Evolving World of Display Media 

Digital media agency, FRWD, hosted digital event Pushing Boundaries: Exploring the Evolving World of Display Media yesterday at the Fine Line Music Café in Minneapolis. Industry leading publishers, demand side platforms, data aggregators, verification and survey tool providers gathered to help each other prepare for, and profit from, the fast-changing world of online advertising.  MediaMath, Simpli.fi, BlueKai, DataXu, Lucid Media, ADSDAQ Exchange, [x+1], and Rocket Fuel; among others exchanged ideas on the direction of the industry during 4 panels and 2 keynote presentations.

The transfer of data integration into ad exchanges and DSPs coupled with technology and real-time bidding (RTB) capabilities are increasing at a rapid rate, almost as rapidly as the industry is changing. Joe Zawadzki of MediaMath predicted that the industry transformation from “Mad Men to Math Men” will occur by 2012 at which point “Don Draper will be replaced by your high school Dungeon Master.” 

Panel speakers throughout the afternoon explained the details of successful ad exchanges and DSPs, specifically the capabilities of combining data and audience research targeting with the need to assure brand protection, transparency, and the unique market dynamics of RTB.  

Read More: FRWDCO.com

Google and the Search for the Future

To some, Google has been looking a bit sallow lately. The stock is down. Where once everything seemed to go the company’s way, along came Apple’s iPhone, launching a new wave of Web growth on a platform that largely bypassed the browser and Google’s search box. The “app” revolution was going to spell an end to Google’s dominance of Web advertising.

But that’s all so six-months-ago. When a group of Journal editors sat down with Eric Schmidt on a recent Friday, Google’s CEO sounded nothing like a man whose company was facing a midlife crisis, let alone intimations of mortality.

For one thing, just a couple days earlier, Google had publicly estimated that 200,000 Android smartphones were being activated daily by cell carriers on behalf of customers. That’s a doubling in just three months. Since the beginning of the year, Android phones have been outselling iPhones by an increasing clip and seem destined soon to outstrip Apple in global market share.

True, Apple sells its phones for luscious margins, while Google gives away Android to handset makers for free. But not to worry, says Mr. Schmidt: “You get a billion people doing something, there’s lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We’ll get lots of money for it.”

“In general in technology,” he says, “if you own a platform that’s valuable, you can monetize it.” Example: Google is obliged to share with Apple search revenue generated by iPhone users. On Android, Google gets to keep 100%. That difference alone, says Mr. Schmidt, is more than enough to foot the bill for Android’s continued development.

And coming soon is Chrome OS, which Google hopes will do in tablets and netbooks what Android is doing in smartphones, i.e., give Google a commanding share of the future and leave, in this case, Microsoft in the dust.

Can it all be so easy? Google’s stock price has fallen nearly $150 since the beginning of the year. Financial pundits have started to ask skeptical questions, wondering why it doesn’t give more of its ample cash back to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. Some suspect that all that temptation merely encourages Mr. Schmidt, along with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page—the triumvirate running the company—to splurge on gimmicky ideas that never pay off. Fortune magazine recently called Google a “cash cow” and suggested more attention be paid to milking it rather than running off in search of the next big thing.

But to hear Mr. Schmidt tell it, the real challenge is one not yet on most investors’ minds: how to preserve Google’s franchise in Web advertising, the source of almost all its profits, when “search” is outmoded.

The day is coming when the Google search box—and the activity known as Googling—no longer will be at the center of our online lives. Then what? “We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledges. “I mean that in a positive way. We’re still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.”

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.

Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn’t know you wanted to know. “The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically,” Mr. Schmidt says.

Mr. Schmidt obviously has an eye to his audience, which this day consists of folks with an abiding devotion to the newspaper business. He speaks in sorrowful tones about the “economic disaster that is the American newspaper.” He assures us that in the coming deluge trusted “brands” will be more important than ever. Just as quickly, though, he adds that whether the winners will be new brands or existing brands remains to be seen. On one thing, however, Google is willing to bet: “The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads. That’s our business.”

Mr. Schmidt is a believer in targeted advertising because, simply, he’s a believer in targeted everything: “The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

That’s a bit scary when you think about it. But for investors and executives the big question, of course, is which companies will control these opportunities. Google may see itself as friend and helper to the media business, but it also clearly sees itself in control of the targeting information. Says Mr. Schmidt: “As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that’s basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time.”

Between here and there, though, the company faces ever-growing legal, political and regulatory obstacles. The net neutrality debate, which Google has led, has taken a sudden turn that has many of its former allies in the “public interest” sector shouting “treason.”

What was most striking about the set of net neut “principles” Google produced this week with former antagonist Verizon was that they didn’t apply to wireless. “The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy,” Mr. Schmidt told one news site. “And that’s really an FCC issue, not a Google issue.”

Wait. Isn’t the future of the Internet wireless these days? Isn’t wireless the very basis of the new partnership between Google and Verizon, built on promoting Google’s Android software? But Google has now broken ranks with its allies and dared to speak about the sheer impracticality of net neutrality on mobile networks where demand is likely to outstrip capacity for the foreseeable future.

If that weren’t about to become a sticky political wicket for the company, it also faces growing antitrust, privacy and patent scrutiny, fanned by a growing phalanx of Beltway opponents, the latest being Larry Ellison and Oracle. “There’s a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledges resignedly. “The first opponent will be Microsoft.”

Mr. Schmidt is familiar with the game—as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, he was a chief fomenter of the antitrust assault on Bill Gates & Co. Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do—make sure its every move is “good for consumers” and “fair” to competitors.

Uh huh. Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find “creepy.”

Really? Some might be skeptical that a user with, say, a thousand photos on Picasa would find it so easy to walk away. Or a guy with 10 years of emails on Gmail. Or a small business owner who has come to rely on Google Docs as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Isn’t stickiness—even slightly extortionate stickiness—what these Google services aim for?

Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

“I mean we really have to think about these things as a society,” he adds. “I’m not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things,” he says.

Not that Google is a doubter of the value of social media. Mr. Schmidt awards Facebook his highest accolade, calling it a “company of consequence.” And though “there is a lot of hot air, a lot of venture money” in the sector right now, he predicts that one or two more “companies of consequence” will be born among the horde of new players just coming to life now.

A skeptic might wonder whether, despite present glory, Google itself might yet prove a flash in the pan. The company has enormous technological confidence. Mr. Schmidt describes how YouTube, its video-serving site, almost “took down” the company in its early days, thanks to the swelling outflow of video dispatched from its servers to users around the globe. Salvation was the “proxy cache”—lots of local servers around the world holding the most popular videos. “The technology that Google invented allows us to put those things very close to you,” says Mr. Schmidt. “It was a tremendous technological achievement.”

But with YouTube, as with lots of Google projects, there remains the question of how to make money. Google captured the search wave and shows every sign of positioning itself successfully for the mobile wave. As for the waves after that, your guess may be as good as Mr. Schmidt’s.

Read More: WSJ.com (entire article here)

The banner ad is the Web’s original advertising format, but many have viewed it as a disappointment. Prices for display ads quickly tumbled, and marketers fell in love with targeted search options.  That’s not to say display units are on their way out. On the contrary, tens of millions of dollars in venture capital is flowing into ad technology. Investors are betting that a market the Interactive Advertising Bureau pegged at $8 billion in 2009 can quickly grow five times or more with the help of better machinery. (See also: “Display Ads Aim for a Banner Year.”)   “If you take the logic behind targeting to the extreme, it’s all about discovering hidden tier-one inventory,” said Terence Kawaja, managing director of GCA Savvian Advisors. “There’s a lot of inefficiency in inventory pricing.”  Inventory aggregator AdMeld is the latest company to benefit from this belief, closing a $15 million Series C round of funding that brings its backing to $30 million. Norwest Venture Partners led the round, which included AdMeld’s previous VCs as well as a strategic backing from Time Warner Investments.  AdMeld operates a tech platform that publishers use to maximize the amount of money they make from display ads. Publishers like Discovery, Fox News, Reuters and Pandora use its yield-optimization software to determine how best to package display ad inventory for audience-based buys.

Read More: AdWeek

Simplifying The Narrative

Josh Chasin of comScore can definitely count me among his fans.  He wrote a great article late last year on the limitations of CTR as a metric.  A couple weeks back he wrote another great one that I have been looking for a moment to comment on.  Between the upcoming product launch and the 1 year old I finally found a little time, somewhat belatedly.  As I read it, the main theme of Josh’s most recent article was that as an industry we have inhibited the migration of brand-focused budgets online with complex and conflicting narratives, which cause advertisers essentially to throw up their hands and look for reasons not to spend.  I couldn’t agree more.  In fact, I don’t think Josh would object to framing this as a different angle on the same idea I discussed in a post last year (Josh – feel free to comment if I am taking your name in vain).  Regardless of the angle we each take on the story, we’re clearly in violent agreement that the narrative needs to be simpler.  Josh is also quite correct that the 30-spot is an extremely compelling creative format, next to which a hastily-assembled static banner can look, well, flat.  However, as I have previously noted, within 5 years about 80% of households will have the capability to fast forward through that compelling creative.  Online creative formats get more compelling every year – it’s not hard to imagine a well-made pre-roll, rich media or even animated flash creative execution comparing favorably to a TV ad that is watched at 10X normal speed with no sound.  Even before DVRs reach their inevitable tipping point, the research shows that online advertising drives sales at least as well as TV.

Read More: Brand.net

The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets

Hidden inside Ashley Hayes-Beaty’s computer, a tiny file helps gather personal details about her, all to be put up for sale for a tenth of a penny.  The file consists of a single code— 4c812db292272995e5416a323e79bd37—that secretly identifies her as a 26-year-old female in Nashville, Tenn.   The code knows that her favorite movies include “The Princess Bride,” “50 First Dates” and “10 Things I Hate About You.” It knows she enjoys the “Sex and the City” series. It knows she browses entertainment news and likes to take quizzes.  “Well, I like to think I have some mystery left to me, but apparently not!” Ms. Hayes-Beaty said when told what that snippet of code reveals about her. “The profile is eerily correct.”  Ms. Hayes-Beaty is being monitored by Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company that uses sophisticated software called a “beacon” to capture what people are typing on a website—their comments on movies, say, or their interest in parenting and pregnancy. Lotame packages that data into profiles about individuals, without determining a person’s name, and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers. Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s tastes can be sold wholesale (a batch of movie lovers is $1 per thousand) or customized (26-year-old Southern fans of “50 First Dates”).  “We can segment it all the way down to one person,” says Eric Porres, Lotame’s chief marketing officer.

One of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found, is the business of spying on Internet users.  The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry. 

• The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.

• Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.

• These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.

The new technologies are transforming the Internet economy. Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages.  In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests.  The data on Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s film-watching habits, for instance, is being offered to advertisers on BlueKai Inc., one of the new data exchanges.  “It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.”  The Journal examined the 50 most popular U.S. websites, which account for about 40% of the Web pages viewed by Americans. (The Journal also tested its own site, WSJ.com.) It then analyzed the tracking files and programs these sites downloaded onto a test computer.  As a group, the top 50 sites placed 3,180 tracking files in total on the Journal’s test computer. Nearly a third of these were innocuous, deployed to remember the password to a favorite site or tally most-popular articles.

But over two-thirds—2,224—were installed by 131 companies, many of which are in the business of tracking Web users to create rich databases of consumer profiles that can be sold.  The top venue for such technology, the Journal found, was IAC/InterActive Corp.’s Dictionary.com. A visit to the online dictionary site resulted in 234 files or programs being downloaded onto the Journal’s test computer, 223 of which were from companies that track Web users.  The information that companies gather is anonymous, in the sense that Internet users are identified by a number assigned to their computer, not by a specific person’s name. Lotame, for instance, says it doesn’t know the name of users such as Ms. Hayes-Beaty—only their behavior and attributes, identified by code number. People who don’t want to be tracked can remove themselves from Lotame’s system.  And the industry says the data are used harmlessly. David Moore, chairman of 24/7 RealMedia Inc., an ad network owned by WPP PLC, says tracking gives Internet users better advertising.  “When an ad is targeted properly, it ceases to be an ad, it becomes important information,” he says.  Tracking isn’t new. But the technology is growing so powerful and ubiquitous that even some of America’s biggest sites say they were unaware, until informed by the Journal, that they were installing intrusive files on visitors’ computers.

The Journal found that Microsoft Corp.’s popular Web portal, MSN.com, planted a tracking file packed with data: It had a prediction of a surfer’s age, ZIP Code and gender, plus a code containing estimates of income, marital status, presence of children and home ownership, according to the tracking company that created the file, Targus Information Corp.  Both Targus and Microsoft said they didn’t know how the file got onto MSN.com, and added that the tool didn’t contain “personally identifiable” information.  Tracking is done by tiny files and programs known as “cookies,” “Flash cookies” and “beacons.” They are placed on a computer when a user visits a website. U.S. courts have ruled that it is legal to deploy the simplest type, cookies, just as someone using a telephone might allow a friend to listen in on a conversation. Courts haven’t ruled on the more complex trackers.  The most intrusive monitoring comes from what are known in the business as “third party” tracking files. They work like this: The first time a site is visited, it installs a tracking file, which assigns the computer a unique ID number. Later, when the user visits another site affiliated with the same tracking company, it can take note of where that user was before, and where he is now. This way, over time the company can build a robust profile.

One such ecosystem is Yahoo Inc.’s ad network, which collects fees by placing targeted advertisements on websites. Yahoo’s network knows many things about recent high-school graduate Cate Reid. One is that she is a 13- to 18-year-old female interested in weight loss. Ms. Reid was able to determine this when a reporter showed her a little-known feature on Yahoo’s website, the Ad Interest Manager, that displays some of the information Yahoo had collected about her.  Yahoo’s take on Ms. Reid, who was 17 years old at the time, hit the mark: She was, in fact, worried that she may be 15 pounds too heavy for her 5-foot, 6-inch frame. She says she often does online research about weight loss.  “Every time I go on the Internet,” she says, she sees weight-loss ads. “I’m self-conscious about my weight,” says Ms. Reid, whose father asked that her hometown not be given. “I try not to think about it…. Then [the ads] make me start thinking about it.”  Yahoo spokeswoman Amber Allman says Yahoo doesn’t knowingly target weight-loss ads at people under 18, though it does target adults.  “It’s likely this user received an untargeted ad,” Ms. Allman says. It’s also possible Ms. Reid saw ads targeted at her by other tracking companies.  Information about people’s moment-to-moment thoughts and actions, as revealed by their online activity, can change hands quickly. Within seconds of visiting eBay.com or Expedia.com, information detailing a Web surfer’s activity there is likely to be auctioned on the data exchange run by BlueKai, the Seattle startup.

Each day, BlueKai sells 50 million pieces of information like this about specific individuals’ browsing habits, for as little as a tenth of a cent apiece. The auctions can happen instantly, as a website is visited.   Spokespeople for eBay Inc. and Expedia Inc. both say the profiles BlueKai sells are anonymous and the people aren’t identified as visitors of their sites. BlueKai says its own website gives consumers an easy way to see what it monitors about them.  Tracking files get onto websites, and downloaded to a computer, in several ways. Often, companies simply pay sites to distribute their tracking files.  But tracking companies sometimes hide their files within free software offered to websites, or hide them within other tracking files or ads. When this happens, websites aren’t always aware that they’re installing the files on visitors’ computers.  Often staffed by “quants,” or math gurus with expertise in quantitative analysis, some tracking companies use probability algorithms to try to pair what they know about a person’s online behavior with data from offline sources about household income, geography and education, among other things.  The goal is to make sophisticated assumptions in real time—plans for a summer vacation, the likelihood of repaying a loan—and sell those conclusions.  Some financial companies are starting to use this formula to show entirely different pages to visitors, based on assumptions about their income and education levels.  Life-insurance site AccuquoteLife.com, a unit of Byron Udell & Associates Inc., last month tested a system showing visitors it determined to be suburban, college-educated baby-boomers a default policy of $2 million to $3 million, says Accuquote executive Sean Cheyney. A rural, working-class senior citizen might see a default policy for $250,000, he says.  “We’re driving people down different lanes of the highway,” Mr. Cheyney says.  Consumer tracking is the foundation of an online advertising economy that racked up $23 billion in ad spending last year. Tracking activity is exploding. Researchers at AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute last fall found tracking technology on 80% of 1,000 popular sites, up from 40% of those sites in 2005.

The Journal found tracking files that collect sensitive health and financial data. On Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.’s dictionary website Merriam-Webster.com, one tracking file from Healthline Networks Inc., an ad network, scans the page a user is viewing and targets ads related to what it sees there. So, for example, a person looking up depression-related words could see Healthline ads for depression treatments on that page—and on subsequent pages viewed on other sites.  Healthline says it doesn’t let advertisers track users around the Internet who have viewed sensitive topics such as HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, eating disorders and impotence. The company does let advertisers track people with bipolar disorder, overactive bladder and anxiety, according to its marketing materials.  Targeted ads can get personal. Last year, Julia Preston, a 32-year-old education-software designer in Austin, Texas, researched uterine disorders online. Soon after, she started noticing fertility ads on sites she visited. She now knows she doesn’t have a disorder, but still gets the ads.  It’s “unnerving,” she says.

Tracking became possible in 1994 when the tiny text files called cookies were introduced in an early browser, Netscape Navigator. Their purpose was user convenience: remembering contents of Web shopping carts.  Back then, online advertising barely existed. The first banner ad appeared the same year. When online ads got rolling during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, advertisers were buying ads based on proximity to content—shoe ads on fashion sites.  The dot-com bust triggered a power shift in online advertising, away from websites and toward advertisers. Advertisers began paying for ads only if someone clicked on them. Sites and ad networks began using cookies aggressively in hopes of showing ads to people most likely to click on them, thus getting paid.  Targeted ads command a premium. Last year, the average cost of a targeted ad was $4.12 per thousand viewers, compared with $1.98 per thousand viewers for an untargeted ad, according to an ad-industry-sponsored study in March.  The Journal examined three kinds of tracking technology—basic cookies as well as more powerful “Flash cookies” and bits of software code called “beacons.” 

More than half of the sites examined by the Journal installed 23 or more “third party” cookies. Dictionary.com installed the most, placing 159 third-party cookies.  Cookies are typically used by tracking companies to build lists of pages visited from a specific computer. A newer type of technology, beacons, can watch even more activity.  Beacons, also known as “Web bugs” and “pixels,” are small pieces of software that run on a Web page. They can track what a user is doing on the page, including what is being typed or where the mouse is moving.  The majority of sites examined by the Journal placed at least seven beacons from outside companies. Dictionary.com had the most, 41, including several from companies that track health conditions and one that says it can target consumers by dozens of factors, including zip code and race.  Dictionary.com President Shravan Goli attributed the presence of so many tracking tools to the fact that the site was working with a large number of ad networks, each of which places its own cookies and beacons. After the Journal contacted the company, it cut the number of networks it uses and beefed up its privacy policy to more fully disclose its practices.  The widespread use of Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash software to play videos online offers another opportunity to track people. Flash cookies originally were meant to remember users’ preferences, such as volume settings for online videos.

But Flash cookies can also be used by data collectors to re-install regular cookies that a user has deleted. This can circumvent a user’s attempt to avoid being tracked online. Adobe condemns the practice.  Most sites examined by the Journal installed no Flash cookies. Comcast.net installed 55.  That finding surprised the company, which said it was unaware of them. Comcast Corp. subsequently determined that it had used a piece of free software from a company called Clearspring Technologies Inc. to display a slideshow of celebrity photos on Comcast.net. The Flash cookies were installed on Comcast’s site by that slideshow, according to Comcast.  Clearspring, based in McLean, Va., says the 55 Flash cookies were a mistake. The company says it no longer uses Flash cookies for tracking.

CEO Hooman Radfar says Clearspring provides software and services to websites at no charge. In exchange, Clearspring collects data on consumers. It plans eventually to sell the data it collects to advertisers, he says, so that site users can be shown “ads that don’t suck.” Comcast’s data won’t be used, Clearspring says.  Wittingly or not, people pay a price in reduced privacy for the information and services they receive online. Dictionary.com, the site with the most tracking files, is a case study.  The site’s annual revenue, about $9 million in 2009 according to an SEC filing, means the site is too small to support an extensive ad-sales team. So it needs to rely on the national ad-placing networks, whose business model is built on tracking.   Dictionary.com executives say the trade-off is fair for their users, who get free access to its dictionary and thesaurus service.  “Whether it’s one or 10 cookies, it doesn’t have any impact on the customer experience, and we disclose we do it,” says Dictionary.com spokesman Nicholas Graham. “So what’s the beef?”

The problem, say some industry veterans, is that so much consumer data is now up for sale, and there are no legal limits on how that data can be used.  Until recently, targeting consumers by health or financial status was considered off-limits by many large Internet ad companies. Now, some aim to take targeting to a new level by tapping online social networks.  Media6Degrees Inc., whose technology was found on three sites by the Journal, is pitching banks to use its data to size up consumers based on their social connections. The idea is that the creditworthy tend to hang out with the creditworthy, and deadbeats with deadbeats.  “There are applications of this technology that can be very powerful,” says Tom Phillips, CEO of Media6Degrees. “Who knows how far we’d take it?”

Read More: WSJ.com (Entire Article Here)

The minute that marketers use multiple media buying channels for advertising campaigns, they’re faced with an attribution conundrum. At a basic level, attribution is the analytics process of determining how effective each media buying channel is at producing the desired advertising outcome. It drives most of the campaign optimization decisions, such as budget allocation and tuning of campaign tactics.  At first blush, the challenge of attribution may seem solvable by simply assigning tags, specifying conversion events, and then letting ad servers report the performances on all the tags. But like most things in digital advertising, it’s not that easy, and in a media landscape of multiple media buying channels with real-time bidding strategies, many marketers are left wondering if their less-than-perfect attribution model is providing sub-optimal performance or even wrong decisions.  The current attribution model is the “last-ad wins” model. Basically, the last ad impression before the user conversion event gets 100 percent of the credit. Savvy marketers know that this instant gratification model oversimplifies the consumer decision process. Let’s pretend you see a great ad while watching the World Cup finals online. Chances are that you’re not going to rush to your online store to make the purchase right away. However, the next time you shop online or in stores, the influence of that brand is very likely at work. Attributing this type of delayed influences gives marketers visibility into what combination and sequence of ad messaging leads to conversions. It also provides the needed dials to optimize during dialogs with their consumers.

Read More: ClickZ

Twitter Sees Sizable Ad Business

Twitter is ready to declare success in its initial revenue-building efforts, and casts an even wider net by launching limited-time deals feed @earlybird, which provides time-sensitive offers from advertisers.  Disney has signed up for the first offer: a two-for-one ticket promotion for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which debuts in the U.S. today. The tweet takes users to a Fandango page to purchase the tickets with a discount code.  The @earlybird program is the latest addition to a growing set of revenue makers Twitter is trying. Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer, said it would continue to test concepts that can accelerate activity already happening on the service. Many companies, including deal-of-the-day services Groupon and Gilt Groupe, use Twitter to spread deals.  ”There’s going to be lots of iteration and testing,” he said. “So far it’s working.”  The company divides its business into two pillars: advertising and commercial services. Under advertising, Twitter is offering brands both Promoted Tweets, which appear in search results, and Promoted Trends, which are on its home page. @earlybird falls into the commercial sector, which includes business tools.  Coca-Cola reported that it saw 86 million impressions in a day and a 6 percent interaction rate for its Promoted Tweets campaign tied to the World Cup. Those results, Costolo said, are “not atypical” for ad campaigns on Twitter.  ”I’m confident the ad platform already works for big brands in terms of the reach and engagement we can provide,” he said.  The key for Twitter’s advertiser approach is finding activities happening on the service and amplifying them, Costolo said. @earlybird, for example, will exist as a regular tweet from Disney’s account. The @earlybird account, which already has 46,000 followers, will retweet the message. Similarly, advertisers can only run a Promoted Trend for something that is already showing momentum on the service. Old Spice, for instance, ran a Promoted Trend yesterday to hype its ad campaign featuring the actor in its “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercials sending videos to well wishers in social media.

Read More: AdWeek