know | Future

The New York Times has an excellent article (free registration required) recounting Google’s reluctant rise as an advertising powerhouse since it gave in to carrying advertising, albeit on its narrowly defined terms, back in 2000. With 6.1 billion dollars in ad revenue this year, Google is becoming a force to be reckoned with as the NYT says:

That is more advertising than is sold by any newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network. By next year, Mr. Noto said, he expects Google to have advertising revenue of $9.5 billion. That would place it fourth among American media companies in total ad sales after Viacom, the News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company, but ahead of giants including NBC Universal and Time Warner.

By applying science to what has been a poorly understood art, Google has the potential to disrupt the very foundations of advertising. And they have the numbers to prove it: users click on Google ads on average 50 to 100% more than those on Yahoo or any other web page. On the other hand, they may just be headed for a gigantic backlash against their cold by the numbers style of advertising. Read below for additonal commentary…

Google has already experimented with buying blocks of space in print and then reselling it to its clients. The New York Post has an article (free registration required) describing the incipient foray into TV space planned by the everexpanding search engine giant. This is important because it represents a potential first step into a true market of TV advertising that networks have been battling for years. The last time that anybody attempted something like this was Enron in 2001 before its collapse.

You need to take the long view of this, (more…)

Update

CreativePro has a new article up talking in depth about Aperture and though it is strictly based on what Apple has made public and an interview they conducted, it provides more detail and some screenshots of the product. If you are an agency IT guy, you need to be ready to get at least one copy in to test. Though I suspect, and most concurr, that Aperture will not kill Photoshop like Final Cut killed Premiere, it may be close.

Apple has just surprised everybody (except me of course, I said they had something extra up their sleeve) by introducing Aperture a RAW format end to end workflow and photo editing software. There have been some rumblings that the Macromedia Adobe merger would endanger Photoshop on the Mac platform. Though Aperture is not as feature rich as Photoshop, it is finetuned to provide services needed by photographers not provided by Photoshop and as such may eat into their market. Some of the features are a lightbox, versioning that provides non-destructive modification to originals, etc. Aperture will be available in November for $499.
read more at Apple’s web site.

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Do the advertisers behind this gem really think that anybody in their right mind is going to click on this ad? It has been so gobbledygooked as to make it invisible, yet that is a real random sample I copied today from a Google AdWords result. And I am sure there are much worse ones out there and that they are legion. If Google does in fact take over the world, I believe that we will all better get good real fast at making simple text snippets compelling enough for users to click. MediaPost, a search marketing publication has an article on today’s newsletter that offers some very practical advice on how to go about just that.

Early today Sharp eyed european users were able to browse to something called Google base which apeared to be set up as a site where users could add content directly into the Google database. The twist is that the example that they used was real estate classifieds. The site seems to be back as of this writing here but functionality seems a bit sketchy. It let me add an item but I can’t login to finish posting. Now, I know that it seems that everybody is just watching every little move that Google makes and that folks feel too much attention is being paid to them by the media, however, no matter how paranoid it may seem, they have been on a rampage lately. This is what having all that mad IPO money has done to them and is an enviable position for anybody to be in.

In any case, it does seem that they are about to set free into the Google Labs something akin to a Google The story is discussed in detail, well, all over the web and the blogosphere but you could start here and here, and here…

Microsoft has released a bug fix for Office 2004 for Mac to fix problems with service pack 2 that could cause Entourage to nuke entire mailboxes off Exchange servers. Our friends at MacWindows have some more info on the problems.

If you have yet to take a look at Zimbra, an open source Exchange replacement, this may be a good time to take a peek.

Software publisher Extensis announced the December availability of a new version of their workflow/catalog system Portfolio. Though the web features have been extended to allow for custom searches to autopublish collections to the web, and support for SQL has been added, it is still essentially a client-server product.

Adverblog reports on two new vectors for marketers in the UK to get advertising to your cell phone:

• Over the air - In the UK, 3G operator 3 has announced a deal to deliver video advertising to users cell phones, details are sketchy but you can read more about it in this article in the Media Guardian (Free registration).
• Via Infrared - As part of the promotion of the new movie Goal! Feref Digital in the UK has deployed infrared enabled bus shelters that allow you to download the movie’s trailer and enter a contest for a walk-on roll on the planned sequel.

The question is how many people, other than professed geeks wil download stand alone advertising, completely devoid of content to clutter up the memory of their cellphones. Again, this is only the beginning as you can clearly envision the ads supporting real content download. This will keep the ever more greedy cell operators getting a revenue stream and give the users access to free cntent. Everybody wins…

Radio Talent Zoo will feature an interview with an advertising star every week. The first podcast is a fifteen minute interview with Lance Jensen, founder of Modernista! in our own backyard of Boston. They need to include it in iTunes but for now you can get it by going here..

E Ink and Phillips have announced a breakthrough in electronic ink technology: a 10.1 inch flexible e-ink tablet with a resolution of 100 dots per inch (comparable to standard newspaper). This is another step towards a prctical electronic newspaper. Electronic ink is an ideal display medium for books, newspapers and magazines as it needs to be powered only to change and is a purely reflective mechanism that needs no backlighting and is as sharp as ink on white paper.
The full text of the release is here…