Michael Betts once owned a photography studio, but for the past couple of years he's made a business out of distributing images rather than taking them. Today his Toronto-based company, DigiSphere, offers the latest iteration of Fotoglif, a site that provides bloggers and other Web publishers free images taken by the same professional shooters who supply news agencies around the world. Previously, Fotoglif compensated the agencies for the shots that were published online; now it will cut bloggers in on the action too.
What's interesting here is how Fotoglif confronts a problem common to copyright holders online. Just as it's relatively easy to find and copy media online, it's brain-dead simple for Web publishers to grab photos from around the Net and slap them onto their sites. Sure, there are companies such as Attributor that crawl the Web to search for unauthorized uses of copyrighted material, helping the owners of the material to identify infringers. But the scale of the infringing is vast, and it's not clear how much return a copyright holder might get from a big investment in enforcement.
Instead of trying to track and stop infringers, Fotoglif's strategy is to offer online publishers something better than free ...
Advertising spending may have fallen 12% in the first quarter, but Microsoft doesn't seem to know there's a slowdown. Soon after it unveiled a massive campaign for its new search engine, Bing, which features people yelling about back pain and the composer Johann Sebastian Bach, it's unveiling a new ad -- for Internet Explorer 8.
This commercial, produced by Indiana ad agency Bradley and Montgomery, stars actor and onetime Superman Dean Cain as a confused intellectual in a public service announcement trying to help overweight women share pictures of lolcats.
They're not only showing us ads to persuade us to download IE 8. Microsoft also says that if people download the browser through BrowserForTheBetter.com, the company will donate eight meals to Feeding America.
So what's so great about this new browser that's motivating Microsoft to pay for yet another TV ad in a time when advertising isn't so popular?
It gives us a new feature called Accelerators, which allow you to, say, check out a map of a location without opening a new window. It allows us to comparison shop using a search bar and restore recently closed tabs. It crashes less frequently (we'll have to see about that one).
The new features in IE 8 "accelerate the task at hand with fewer clicks and less frustration, blurring the lines between services and browser," Microsoft says in a white paper you can download on its IE site.
Online advertising was hurting in Q1. Credit: Pascale Pirate Chicken via Flickr.
Remember when Internet marketers said they'd be immune to the recession because online advertising is more accountable? Well, it hasn't quite worked out that way.
Internet advertising revenue was $5.5 billion for the first quarter of 2009, a 5% decline from the same period last year, according to a report released this morning from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
The 10% decline from the fourth quarter, when revenue surpassed $6 billion for the first time, is the biggest decrease, percentage-wise, since at least 2001.
"The first quarter was really freak-out time this year," said Jose Villa, founder of Sensis, a Los Angeles interactive ad agency. "Everybody just slammed on the brakes."
Companies were deciding whether they should even advertise, he said, because they thought it might look bad to be spending on marketing in a tough economic climate.
"It was an unusual three-month period," he said. "It wasn’t really rational, and it went across all media."
By the second quarter, people started cautiously spending again, he said, indicating the next numbers from the advertising bureau shouldn't be so scary. At least, that's what the IAB is hoping.
"Interactive media continues to gain share of marketing spend," Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the IAB, said in a statement. "We're confident that growth will resume as the U.S. economic climate improves."
Having flirted with branded entertainment last year, NBC Universal is preparing a full lineup of original online videos that blur the line between content and advertising. It announced the first of these productions today: a series of webisodes called "CTRL," based on the 2007 short film "CTRL Z." The series, like the original film, was written and directed by Rob Kirbyson. But the plot has been augmented to give a featured role to Nestea, the Coca-Cola Co. brand that sponsored the production.
The idea behind branded entertainment is to replace interruptive commercials with an integrated message promoting the sponsor's product(s). Cameron Death, vice president of digital content for NBC Universal, said the company tried that approach for the first time with last year's "Gemini Division," a sci-fi whodunit starring Rosario Dawson. Five different brands were featured in the course of the series' 65 short episodes. To find sponsors for this year's programming, Death said in an interview, the company took a slate of programs in development to advertisers in January, then worked with the programs' creators to integrate the brands into the videos.
"CTRL 7" was the story of a beleaguered office worker named Stuart who discovered that he could control the action around him through commands on his computer keyboard. Think of how you might use keyboard shortcuts in a document or photo editing program; that gives you an idea of how Stuart edited reality. For the 10 new episodes, Kirbyson kept the same story line, with one twist: Stuart unlocks the powers of his keyboard by accidentally spilling a can of Nestea Red onto it. The point is to subtly convey that Nestea is "Liquid Awesomeness," as its trademarked tagline goes.
Death said Kirbyson was given "complete free rein" to tell the story as he wished, with the provison that he find a way to work Nestea into it. The sponsor consulted with NBC Universal on how its brand would be portrayed, Death said, "but it's still a writer's product." That's the company's general approach to branded entertainment: although the program creators are briefed about the brand and the attributes the sponsor wants to promote, "we still want them to do what they do, which is tell great stories." He added that "CTRL" is a good example of what branded entertainment isn't: "It isn't Stuart looking straight into the camera and talking about how great Nestea Red is."
To some media watchdogs, that's precisely the problem. They complain that the practice isn't transparent enough, and should be more clearly labeled as advertising. Not surprisingly, Death disagreed. "I think viewers are infinitely more intelligent than we sometimes give them credit for," he said. For Coca-Cola to reap the full benefits of its sponsorship, "CTRL" fans need to know that Nestea is bringing it to them -- and viewers are smart enough to understand that. "It's a really interesting balance," he said. "I don't think there's anything less honest about it."
NBC Universal plans to distribute "CTRL" this summer through a variety of channels, including Hulu.com, cable video-on-demand services and a dedicated website. Death was coy about the rest of this year's digital line-up, saying only, "We have a lot in the pipeline."
Credit: Image of the short film "CTRL Z" courtesy of the film's website.
With one quick download, Google's browser will soon enable users to do something that the company can't be happy about -- block online ads.
Google Chrome, the company's recent entry into the Web browser market, will begin accepting software extensions developed by third parties, similar to what Mozilla Firefox has offered for years.
The company, which derives the vast majority of its revenue from online advertising, recently made an API tool kit available to developers that would help them create powerful extensions to Chrome.
These third-party features aren't available yet to the public, but an extension called AdSweepwill be one of the first on tap. Similar to a popular extension for Firefox, AdSweep hides advertising on Web pages.
The extension has been available since March, but Google hasn't yet cemented a way to easily install such features.
Asked for comment, Google did not directly address the issue.
"We are designing Google Chrome's extensions to be flexible enough to support all different types of features, and we are encouraged by the development that we've seen in this area so far," a Google spokesperson wrote in an e-mail.
Surely AdSweep, specifically, isn't the source of that encouragement, right?
"Put a different way, we are encouraged by the work that developers are doing as they experiment with building tools on our extensions platform," the spokesperson wrote.
Google, being an advertising company at its core, probably won't benefit from ...
Microsoft's new Bing search engine, unveiled this morning by CEO Steve Ballmer, is being positioned as an alternative to the busy, confusing search engines of today. This more elegant and intuitive "decision engine," Microsoft says, will help consumers distill useful information on commerce-friendly topics such as shopping, travel, health and local business.
The new engine, which will launch next Wednesday, will vary the way it displays results based on the type of info a consumer is looking for. It might be an Expedia-like list of airplane flights, an Amazonian array of customer reviews and price comparisons for digital cameras, or Yelp-esque view of local restaurants, sortable by factors such as price, parking or atmosphere.
"Bing helps you overcome search overload," says a promotional video on
the product's website. To do that, it presents search results in a more logical, user-friendly format, "instead of spitting them out in order of popularity."
The rather negative tone of words like "spitting" and "overload" seem to suggest that market-leading search engines like Google may be bludgeoning consumers with more data than they need.
Rather than introducing a revolutionary approach to presenting information, Bing appears to stitch together its own versions of the Web's most popular planning and decision tools, potentially saving consumers the trouble of navigating to specialized sites.
Microsoft’s redoubled focus on commerce-related search is likely a reflection of the online advertising market, in which sellers pay more to put their ads in front of consumers who are already shopping.
The company's search tools captured just 8.2% of the market, according to comScore's April 2009 report. That put the company a distant third behind Google (64.2%) and Yahoo (20.4%).
Intel's new ad campaign seeks to make consumers more familiar with the brand. Credit: Intel.
You may not know it, but Intel pioneered the microprocessor, invented the USB standard and helped build Silicon Valley into the thriving tech powerhouse it is today.
You'll likely know all that and more soon enough: Intel is about to launch "Sponsors of Tomorrow," a massive advertising campaign in more than two dozen countries that seeks to make people more familiar with the chip maker's brand.
"We want people, when they decide they need a new laptop, to make sure they're going to look at Intel inside," said Nancy Bhagat, director of integrated marketing at Intel. She said the Santa Clara, Calif., company hopes consumers will be as insistent about Intel products in their electronics as people once were about NutraSweet in their diet drinks.
Intel says the campaign is its first to focus on its overall brand rather than specific processors or products. The ads will appear on TV, billboards, the Web and ...
Spammers are taking advantage of the panic about swine flu. Credit: zugaldia via Flickr.
Security experts are warning today that computer viruses may be the next part of the swine flu outbreak. Spammers, it seems, have taken advantage of the worldwide panic over the disease to send out e-mails mentioning swine flu to try to trick people into opening them, according to McAfee Avert Labs.
The spammers advertise drugs and online pharmacies, McAfee said, and the lab "predicts more nefarious scams are coming," including links to malware-laden websites. McAfee has also seen an increase in domain names that refer to swine flu.
At least the spammers are creative. Some of the subject lines include: "Salma Hayek caught swine flu!" and "Madonna caught swine flu!" and "Swine flu in Hollywood!" Less exclamation point-heavy messages include "U.S. swine flu statistics" and "Swine flu in USA."
Ironically, McAfee's e-mail about this flood of spam also contained a subject line referring to swine flu.
Actor Alec Baldwin in a TV commercial for Hulu. Credit: Nicole Rivelli / NBC.
For an online video company, Hulu believes in the power of television. Naturally it loves television content – putting those shows online is a big part of Hulu’s raison d’etre, and its founding investors include News Corp. and NBC Universal.
But Hulu loves TVads as well. “Television works really well,” Hulu Chief Executive Jason Kilar said in a speech at the ad:tech trade show in San Francisco this morning. “We are spending millions of dollars to be in your living room right now.”
Thanks to those ads, including a satirical Super Bowl spot in which Alec Baldwin called Hulu a way to "reduce your brains to a cottage-cheese-like mush,” Kilar said that “our business jumped 49%.”
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Hulu has borrowed some retro ideas from television while updating them with the interactivity of the Internet. For instance, he said, in 1959, the TV show “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (which can be seen on Hulu) featured 26 minutes and four seconds of content; by 2009, “The Office” (also on Hulu) had 21 minutes and 49 seconds, with commercials continually encroaching.
“Year over year over year, another ad unit was added and the amount of content was dialed down,” Kilar said. “Advertisers had to work harder to cut through the clutter. We decided it would be more appropriate to go old school” and run shorter ads on its shows.
“You can make money with this strategy,” he said. “We charge a healthy, healthy premium to living-room pricing on a CPM (cost per thousand viewers) basis.”
The difference is that Hulu allows its viewers to choose what ads they want to see, and sometimes to decide if they want three minutes of ads spread throughout the show or shown up front as a movie trailer.
Kilar said Hulu obsesses over making sure its viewers, advertisers and content providers are happy. He did not address the most noteworthy controversy the company has faced in that regard -- its request that the service Boxee pull Hulu content. That dispute pitted customers, who loved using Boxee to watch Hulu shows on their TV sets, versus networks who did not want their shows available through Boxee. In a blog post announcing the decision in February, Kilar acknowledged the difficulty of the decision, but said that without network content, “none of what Hulu does would be possible.”
He did say Hulu intended to eventually expand internationally. “We have every intention to be a global service,” he said. “But right now, we are focused on the U.S.”
Many local advertisers are moving online from the Yellow Pages. Credit: frankh via Flickr.
Looking at the likes of L.A. companies such as SpotRunner, which is cutting staff and changing its business model to focus less on local businesses, you might think that businesses that deal in local advertising have a pretty bleak future. But Woodland Hills advertising juggernaut ReachLocal says that business is just beginning to heat up in the local online advertising marketplace.
The company today announced the ReachLocal Xchange, a platform that allows small business to advertise on a host of sitesrather than just major sites such as MSN, Yahoo and Google. As a result, different publishers will be able to compete for the $1,000 a month or so that ReachLocal's thousands of advertisers each spend on average buying ad space online.
"There's a flood of dollars moving online," said Zorik Gordon, co-founder and CEO of ReachLocal. "This will cause an explosion of more ad opportunities for small businesses."
He estimates that billions of dollars of local advertising are currently moving from the Yellow Pages and print publications to the online marketplace. ReachLocal will be able to help those advertise buy spots on sites such as Fox Audience Network and Ask Sponsored Listings, among 100 others.
"ReachLocal has done something potentially quite significant here, making local inventory more accessible to more marketers," wrote Greg Sterling, founder of Sterling Market Intelligence, on his blog.
ReachLocal was launched in Encino of 2004 with the goal of making it easier for small businesses such as dentists, plumbers and car dealers to advertise online. Advertisers liked the idea -- the business added 34 offices globally in 30 months. Venture capitalists liked it too: The company raised $55 million in a Series D round in 2007.
Depending on the model, your device features either a hard drive or flash drive that allows you to read and write files to it just like an external drive.
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