MIVA beats Google at Condé Nast

Here in the UK, MIVA have won a prestigious account with Condé Nast. The pay-per-click engine gets exclusive rights at powering the PPC content network for all 12 sites controlled by Condé Nast Interactive U.K. This means 54 million extra impressions for MIVA. The sites include Stylefinder, Vogue.com and Vanityfair.co.uk.

MIVA beat Yahoo and kicked off Google.

This is also an email deal. I suspect it may have been that which won it for them. MIVA will also put their pay-per-click adverts in 500,000 opt-in emails. Here's a comment from MIVA's press release which talks about it.

"Two MIVA Pay-Per-Click Ads will be displayed in each email newsletter through MIVA's proprietary MIVA Mail technology. The technology which underpins MIVA Mail ensures that the latest Ads from across MIVA's network are displayed regardless of when emails are opened."

Gosh. I'm almost tempted to sign up to a newsletter to see how the updating content ads work. An iframe or JavaScript insert in an HTML newsletter? Risky! Spam and security filters around the world will brickwall those emails.

Any one got an example of an email with a MIVA Mail ad in it?

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit

A thousand apologies my friend

I see a lot of out of office auto-replies. Very often, you work hard to make a deadline for a client, get the email off on time only to discover that they're out of the office that whole week. Why we had that deadline in the first place often remains a mystery.

One contact I have in Google, however, always has a good out of office response. I much prefer to get a quick response to my email but if I have to wait then I prefer to wait in style. Today's out of office response is:

Subject: A thousand apologies my friend

Hello there. Thanks for emailing me. It's always nice to feel loved.

I am afraid I must make the most humble apology to you. I'm in an all day meeting both today AND tomorrow. Currently, it is today, rather than tomorrow, so I will be there for one more day. If it's super urgent, the best thing I can recommend is a ticket.

If you're a customer trying to get hold of me, then you should contact your account manager who should be able to find me, and demand my services for your benefit.

If you have a moment, I recommend you take a peep at this.
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/40255643/

Then, pray consider how long it must take to build this http://youtube.com/watch?v=bcu8ZdJ2dQo or http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3289828455192017532 that

Be Social: del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Reddit