Major marketers and agencies who influence over $4 billion in advertising spend are attending the event, including Aetna, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Bloomingdales, Digitas, IBM, ING, Kenneth Cole Productions, L’Oreal, Macy’s, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Media Contacts, Mediacom, Mediaedge:cia, MediaVest, Mercedes-Benz, Michael Kors, Movado, Moxie Interactive, MPG, Nautica, Nestle, Neo@Ogilvy, Ogilvy, Optimedia, P&G, Pfizer, Pizza Hut, Saatchi & Saatchi, Saks Fifth Avenue, Sanofi-aventis, Schering-Plough, Six Flags, Starcom MediaVest Group, The Martin Agency, Unilever, Virgin Mobile, Weight Watchers, Wells Fargo, Wendy’s, Wyndham Worldwide, Zenith Media and more.

Why you need to be there: Executives attending this event are looking to spend in social. Meet them, learn what they are learning and understand their needs. Gain a competitive advantage by networking with these decision makers as they decide how and where to spend their budgets.

What’s the focus: Industry-leading advertisers, publishers and platforms tackle big issues and provide real-world, real-time solutions for leveraging social media. Featuring an all-star roster of speakers from Kraft, MillerCoors, Del Monte, Forrester Research, Reckitt Benckiser and more.

When: Monday, May 18, New York
Where: The Roosevelt Hotel, Madison Avenue & E 45th St, Mezzanine Level, New York, NY 10017

The sponsored links are misleading because they make representations and/or suggestions about the efficacy of TYSABRI, but fail to communicate any risk information associated with the use of this product. In addition, the sponsored links inadequately communicate TYSABRI’s indication and fail to use the required established name. Thus, the sponsored links misbrand TYSABRI in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the Act) and FDA implementing regulations.

The letter went on to say:

These sponsored links, however, fail to communicate any risk information, and their casual approach to TYSABRI treatment is extraordinary in light of the potentially lethal risks of the drug and the stringent controls over its distribution.

Sponsored links that appear beside search results on Google, for example, have a limited number for characters for the advertisers to display their message. With some of the drugs carrying a long list of warnings, I wonder how the pharmaceutical companies can list all the side effects. CNN was able to get a reply from a Google spokeswoman:

Google Inc. (GOOG) spokeswoman Sandra Heikkinen said the Internet-search company has been working with the pharmaceutical companies to make sure their ads align with FDA regulations. She said the companies have control over what appears in the sponsored ads.

Google can, for instance, provide a link under the ads by pharmaceutical companies to display the side effects and warnings, but in that case I wonder how it’s different from the landing page that is linked to by the ads and displays the warnings? It seems from the letters that warnings and information on the side effects placed on a landing page isn’t enough to communicate the risks.

Companies receiving the letter included: Forest Laboratories, Cephalon, Bayer AG, Novartis AG, Merck, Eli Lilly, Roche Holding AG, Genentech, and Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc.

While most other social networks are trying to get into virtual goods and finding ways to monetize international audience, Habbo is enjoying being the leader in the space. In 2008, Habbo generated $74 million in revenues from selling virtual goods and advertising.

According to Sulake, the parent company of Habbo, virtual goods were in very high demand during December 2008, causing the sales to surge by 20%.

Timo Soininen, CEO of Sulake Corporation, issued the following statement:

“Our success in 2008 was a realization of the hard work we have put into Habbo. Constant site updates, usability improvements and a refresh of avatar clothing and accessories have all contributed to boosting our user experience and numbers. More teens than ever are visiting Habbo and they are staying longer.”

“We are confident that our Habbo business model, which is based primarily on user sales and supported by advertising, is a clear strength in the current economic climate. We do see opportunity to grow our advertising revenue with advertisers looking for targeted and cost effective social media solutions. Furthermore, IRC-Galleria, our social networking service for young adults, has continued to grow both in user and advertising revenue.”

Recently several other social networks are focusing on turning to virtual goods as a new source of revenue. Hi5, Imeem, Facebook and several others have been trying to make the virtual economy model work. Imeem, for instance, launched its own virtual currency. If the recently announced layoffs at Hi5 and Imeem are any indication of the success, then it’s safe to say the model doesn’t seem to be working for them.

The primary difference between Habbo and other social networks that are failing with virtual goods is that Habbo is built around virtual goods while others are trying to incorporate virtual goods into their own “ecosystem” to help members generate social capital.

Yesterday, Adrollo launched it’s advertising network for the iPhone. Adrollo is pitching itself as “your best iPhone ad solution” allowing you to “easily switch and add ad networks on the fly.”

In addition to being an ad network, Adrollo allows you to create and publish your own custom ads for free so you can promote a paid app with your free app.

One of the things that sets Adrollo apart from the competition is that it guarantees 100% fill rate.

Adrollo also offers a CPM optimization service across all your ad networks.

In a posting on AdSense blog regarding termination of video ad units, Google announced:

Starting today, the option to sign up for video units is no longer available to new publishers. If you’re currently displaying video units, we recommend that you start removing the video unit code from your pages as soon as possible so you can optimize your available ad space in advance. Please be assured that any earnings you’ve generated from video units in the past will still be credited to your AdSense account.

AdSense launched video ad units in May of 2006. In the blog post announcing video ads, Google said:

Introducing the newest member of the AdSense ad family–click-to-play video ads. Video ads will compete in the same auction as text and image ads for placement on your site, and as we’ve mentioned before, increased competition in the ad auction means increased revenue potential for you. Video ads open your site up to a whole new type of advertising that is engaging and highly relevant for your users.

AdSense is telling users that if they are interested in publishing YouTube videos, they can do that using YouTube’s embed feature.

Publishers who have already deployed video ad units using the Leaderboard or Skyscraper format “will direct users to YouTube.com, while other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players.”

Those who have deployed “other video unit sizes will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players.”

The video ad units never really became mainstream. I don’t recall seeing but a few of them.

Part of the reason for my in-laws to join Facebook was that my wife was using Facebook to post all the photos of our now four months old daughter. 

My mother-in-law is actually on Twitter as well. Both me and my wife had to convince her to join but all that effort paid off because now we can easily stay in touch with her. Both me and my wife have activated device updates for her tweets, so whenever she tweets, we instantly get a text message on our cell phones. Of course, she’s protected her updates on Twitter so only people she explicitly allow can follow her tweets.

Since she lives hundreds of miles away, this allows her to share things that she wouldn’t bother writing an email about. Although email started out as an informal medium of communication, in my opinion it has become too formal of a medium for communication.

Who has the time to craft an email when you can use Twitter  to send your updates within 140 characters?

In fact, more adults are joining the social networking phenomenon every day. So much so that USA Today is featuring an article on how Baby Boomers are getting busy on social networks. The article talks about Kirk Douglas, who is 92 years old and “faithfully updates his page once a week.”

Recently, my wife pointed out that one of our local politicians has started following her on Twitter. She told me that this politician also has an active Facebook group. President Obama and the recent Presidential Elections can be credited for giving a huge boost to Twitter’s popularity. For politicians, not having a presence on social networks might make a difference between winning and losing an office.

One thing to remember is that not all social networks will benefit from Baby Boomers’ adoption of social media. For instance, I cannot imagine my in-laws regularly using MySpace, Friendster or Hi5. It’s the power of their social graph on Facebook that got them hooked.

Behavioral targeting is important because it helps generates relevant advertising which helps users discover content, products and services that’s relevant to them. At the same time relevant advertising helps businesses find a more relevant way of engaging and informing consumers.

Consumer dissatisfaction increases when they are served that are not at all relevant to their interests. For example, we have all seen the ads which ask you to punch a  monkey or a politician. Not to mention ads that are amazingly annoying due to the overwhelming reliance on flashing. Yes, it catches attention but it also annoys users.

Now there’s a right way and a wrong way for advertisers to implement behavioral targeting. The wrong way in my opinion is where a user’s privacy is not respected. Some companies (and I won’t name them here) partner with ISPs and snoop every page a user visits to gather behavioral targeting data.

The “right way” is somewhat subjective and would be defined by laws, regulations and best practices within a particular region that the behavioral targeting company operates in. What’s considered PII (personally identifiable information) also differs from region to region. For example, in UK, IP addresses are considered PII whereas in other countries they might not be considered PII.

To communicate good practices for online behavioral advertising (OBA)  companies operating in UK, IAB UK has developed a number of recommendations that are “based on three core Principles — notice, user choice and education– with the goal of building trust and understanding in OBA and enhancing users’ ability to control the use of information for these purposes.”

A summary of these guidelines for implementing good practice principles for online behavioral targeting and advertising include (read the  PDF linked below for  details):

Notice for Behavioral Targeting:

A behavioral targeting company should

• provide clear and unambiguous notice to users that  data is collected about them for the purposes of behavioral targeting. The notice should include information about what types of data are collected, how these data are being used and how users can decline behavioral targeting.
• require its contracted partners to provide clear and unambiguous notice that data are being collected and used by third parties for the purpose of serving behavioral targeting.
• make reasonable efforts to enforce the relevant provision of the contract, if it learns that a contracted partner is in breach of the notice requirement
• give, via its privacy policy, reasonable notice to users of any material change to its privacy policy with respect to its collection and use of data for the purposes of behavioral targeting, if it provides behavioral targeting on its own domain(s).

User Choice and Behavioral Targeting

A behavioral targeting company should

• provide an approved means for consumers to decline OBA with it.
• provide information on how to decline OBA with it and ensure that this information is prominently displayed and easily accessible on its website.
• provide the IAB with an up-to-date URL to this information so that the IAB can link to this information from its information portal.
• obtain consent to process data for the purposes of OBA where the processing of data requires such consent.

User Education and Behavioral Targeting

A behavioral targeting company should

• make information available to educate users about OBA and ensure that this information is easily accessible.  This may include information provided to users in easily understandable language and user friendly format (for example online video) about the collection and use of data and how to decline OBA.
• provide the IAB with an up-to-date URL with this information.
• also provide a link to the IAB’s information portal

Mechanisms for Opting Out of Behavioral Targeting

• Networking Advertising Initiative (NAI) Opt-out Tool and a IAB Member’s own opt-out tool where that IAB Member is also a signatory to the NAI,
• Webwise
• NebuAd
• Clear and easily understandable information in a Member’s privacy policy about how to control and delete cookies

In addition to the recommendations above, IAB also recommends that no behavioral targeting company should create OBA segments intended for the sole purpose of targeting children under the age of 13 years.

What’s missing in the recommendations is specifics about various guidelines regarding PII. For example, should behavioral targeting companies store the URLs? What about the user names that might appear in the URLs? What about policies regarding how long IP addresses can be kept? In addition, what about encryption guidelines etc? For now, IAB has left those decisions to its members which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What do you think?

The full text of the Good Practice Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising is available on IAB site.

The whole notion of pay-per-click advertising is based on performance. An advertiser pays a high price for a pay-per-click campaign because he/she expects the conversions to happen relatively easy.

The thought here is that when running an effective pay-per-click campaign, the more you spend, the more you should be able to convert. The more you convert, the more your bottom line should improve. The more the bottom line improves, the more budget you should have for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns.

Based on that ground John argues that the notion of budget when applied to pay-per-click advertising doesn’t make sense. In order for this claim to hold true, one thing must happen: you must be running an effective campaign. By effective campaign, I mean that your conversion rate is healthy. Of course that means you must be generating revenues.

Another important element in ensuring an effective pay per click campaign is having landing pages that are optimized for conversion. Often times I see pay-per-click ads leading to pages with absolutely no clear conversion goals. On conversion pages, the goals is to convert a user as quickly as possible without confusing them by presenting hundreds and hundreds of links.

You also need to be careful about click fraud. In the pay-per-click world, click fraud runs rampant. By carefully monitoring your click logs and analyzing them you can ensure your pay-per-click budget is put to good use.

There are many more factors that together make a pay-per-click advertising campaign effective. I will cover these in a later post.

One important thing to consider is that all pay-per-click is NOT created equal. The pay-per-click traffic generated from a search engine like Google might be far more valuable than pay-per-click traffic generated from a site that runs Google AdSense. In other words, search advertising can be more effective than contextually targeted advertising.

If you are running a pay per click campaign for promoting your blog with no clear conversion goals (and yes, there are people doing that), then you, of course, need a budget. Here distinction between brand marketing and conversion marketing is important. For brand marketing, one way or the other you’re going to need a budget. For conversion marketing you can let the demand (clicks) on your pay-per-click decide the “budget.”

So, unless you can see pay-per-click advertising model working for you in a healthy way, you should continue to operate under a budget.

That said, I see where John is coming from and I agree with him that search marketing is stronger than ever. It is one of the best ways for SMBs to deliver their message to prospect. Plus, with a well organized and executed campaign, you can easily track ROI on your investment.

Late last year, a total of 989 users in US, UK and Italy were surveyed. The results of the survey shouldn’t be a surprise to someone who regularly visits online publications of the newspapers.

Among the areas neglected by newspapers are search engine optimization and social media tools.

Search engine optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, makes it easier for search engines to find and rank content on a publisher’s website.

Social media tools allow a user to share a story on their favorite social network or social communications platform such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, digg etc.

With Twitter becoming more and more popular, many users including myself, use links posted by people I follow as a mechanism for filtering out news that worth reading. After all, if someone whom I follow on Twitter has taken the time to share a link, the chances are high that I might find it interesting.

Another important factor is lack of functionality provided by an internal search engine that a newspaper offers on their site. Often times, to save cost, websites go with the first available search engine that they can easily implement on their site without paying attention to the relevancy of the search results it generates.

Even when a search engine is available to search the newspaper site internally, it is not promoted as prominently as it should be. According to the Gartner study, only 20 percent of the respondents use search tools offered by a newspaper or a magazine site.

The survey also found that newspaper sites don’t facilitate sharing their news stories on Twitter even though many newspaper organizations have their staff on Twitter.

More than half of the respondents (52 percent) said when they find interesting content, they read it immediately compared to 9 percent who to bookmark it to read it later.

Almost a quarter of the respondents (24 percent) said they share the interesting/good content they find via personal communication tools such as IM or email whereas only 7 percent of the users “usually or often share content via embedding into social network sites.”

It is crucial for the newspaper publishers to integrate social media tools into their content management system “ecosphere” to equip users with the tools that can help them become effective brand stewards.

The full report, Newspaper Publishers Must Do More to Empower Brand Stewards, is available on Gartner website.