What’s Next for Online Advertising

Bumped into an interesting of well adviced opinions on the matter and just couldn’t help myself quoting some excerpts of it:

Bant Breen (Interpublic Group): Streaming video is very promising. But can we build a new industry on it? It has to be scalable. Advertisements on blogs yield lower response, that doesn’t mean that we are against advertising on blogs. I have mixed results in the viral space, but we have to be open, very open to these things.

Jason Rapp (New York Times): Standards in measurements, streaming formats etc. are needed. Advertising is a mixture of art and science. We’re focusing on the science now, but let’s not forget the art.

Ron Belanger (Yahoo): We cannot confuse direct response marketing with branding. Measurement will be the first step. Behavioural targeting is interesting, but segmentation adds complexity. For us, volume is more important than segmentation. For us, it matters which channel is important for which brand.

Jeff Lanctot (Avenue A – RazorFish): [Google] brought the accountability in the market. There will be a window of time in which new emerging models will not be accountable, e.g. podcasting. But the time will come where they will have to be accountable. On behavioural targeting: it’s just about segmentation of the user base to get more effective targeting. Not enough advertisers are telling a story. We have to engage the user, otherwise we fail.

Jed Nahum (Microsoft Adcenter): We will have to agree on standards, text lengths etc. It would be good if we could agree on API standards. Online advertising is not well suited for small business, but software solutions will make that better.

Read full and more here.

Related: The Future of Online Advertising

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Google Related Content for Your Website

It seems that couple of weeks ago:

Google has modified it’s robots.txt file to include a line which may signal the beginning of a new search feature — similar content search.  This innocent looking piece of text (“Disallow: /relcontent”) appears related to “Disallow: /relpage/” which has existed in the file for a very long time.

Zdnet Blog also wrote at that time:

It’s unclear how this speculated feature could differ from the existing “similar pages” functionality –  I thought using “related:” was designed to find similar content already.

Well after all it seems that things started to get clear. It seems that all is about some snippets to get inserted and syndicated by users in their webpages that look like this one:

Google Related Content
The feature seems to be still in tests, but is probably yet to come out soon.

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Romanian Blogging is Going Mainstream

Besides some long discussed and not that good articles in which romanian mainstream media talked about the growing blogosphere there are some good things happening lately.

hot news bloggingI’ll start with the last that I personally noticed: Hotnews.ro, my favorite news source, started blogging at blog.hotnews.ro. Excellent news and I hope the blog will be at least as good as the site itself. This blogging initiative is basically following the, probably better known, one of Evenimentul Zilei. And more than that there is another blogging attempt: Blogul lui Dinescu, which I was actually expected for a while now. It is a beginning and I’m still looking for some of the big names to jump in.

RoBlogFest 2005More than that, Dragos is hosting the RoBlogFest 2005 2006 . Check it out and go find out more about romanian blogs, read, make up your mind and vote, as you can do it until next thursday, March 9th.

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