Lawrence Gee | Marketing, Internet, Creativity, Strategy

Go Go Google Gadget

Apparently Google is continuing its efforts to push advertising to be more dynamic, engaging, and interactive.  It has apparently been testing its latest ad format - Google Gadget ads - since May 2007 but now is starting to slowly rollout. 

According to Google’s help - “If gadget ads are enabled in your account, you will have received an invitation to create gadget ads from the Google support team. If you haven’t received this notice, don’t despair: We expect to offer Google Gadget Ads to other advertisers in the future as the launch progresses.”

This looks like a better alternative to rollover video ads as it provides the user a greater chance to interact with the ad without committing to going to the actual site.  For an example, click here.

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New Criteria for Google Search Results?

I was doing a random search on Google yesterday and noticed something funny.  At the top of the search results were results with time stamps!  I did some searching after that and found out that it is something that Google has been working on to give the most relevant, up-to-date results. 

This is the first time I noticed or came across time stamps and it made me think about the implications this could have for SEO purposes.

1. Are more highly updated webpages really more relevant for user searches?  I’m inclined to say no but I think it might make sense to have a separate section of the search results that is time related.
2. Would news sites and blogs that often have the most refreshed content be even more valuable? Depending on the impact of timeliness on Google’s search formula, these sites would obviously become more valuable. 
3. Google can’t crawl every webpage every minute to find the most current content so how could you ensure your site is part of Google’s spidering more often? I think the goal for Google still remains the same.  If you are relevant for search results, this issue will go away.  But of course, there will be people who find ways to manipulate the system in order to get ahead on page rankings.

Very interesting stuff…

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Air Google One

Google has too much money.  Interesting article on how they paid their way to use NASA-run Moffett Field, up in Mountain View.  I used to drive past Moffett Field on my daily commute to work on the parking lot known as the 101.

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Locking Up Web Real Estate

Not that Google needs an even bigger stranglehold on web advertising but they now have an exclusive deal with CNN. 

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The InVideo Revolution?

YouTube announced today that it is introducing a new ad format for its videos.  Dubbed InVideo ads, the ads are semi-transparent and occupy the bottom 20% of the video frame that start playing 15 seconds after the start of the clip.  After playing for 10 seconds, the overlay ads then shrink to a smaller button.  Of course the ad and button are clickable. 

Right now, YouTube is charging a flat rate of $20 CPM (per thousand viewings).  If you look at the most viewed YouTube video of all time, it has received 55,943,502 views.  That would have cost an advertiser a little of $1.1 million.  Not bad considering some paid search campaign budgets and the amount of impressions it would have received over the past year.

I think this is an important step to get a standardized working video advertising business model.  Video Ads charging a CPC can’t be far behind.  Some kinks that probably need to get worked out are determining what ad goes on which video, can video creators limit and/or choose what ads to display, and measuring the impact of these ads on sales.

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