TNS bought Compete for $75m.
Wow. I wonder if Alexa is valued at $75m.
TNS have a product called 6th dimension which is a large marketing intelligence panel of about 1m million users in the States. I imagine they'll merge/integrate into that.
I can only hope that Compete's normal service via Compete.com continues as normal. It may just have been a branding tool (which worked very well, given how TechCrunch backed it) so I guess there's a risk that the service there will be cut back a bit or, more likely, we don't see any new developments to draw our attention.
I also note the lack of news on Compete.com about the deal. Nothing in the blog yet - which explains why TechCrunch and the SEM blogs haven't yet picked up on this.
Update: Ah. Here it is Compete.com's blog post. Looks like I was right about the 6th Dimension tie in.
Monday, March 03, 2008
Compete.com bought for $75m
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Chris Di Cesare: YouTube's New Marketing Director
Here's a name all gamers will know - Chris Di Cesare. Well, perhaps gamer marketing geeks anyway.
Chris Di Cesare was the director of creative marketing at Microsoft. Simply put he put much of the ooomph into the hype around Halo 3, the Xbox 360 and even the first Xbox.
He's not at Microsoft any more. He's surfaced at Google and will be YouTube's first director of marketing. Yeah, like YouTube needed any more status with the hipsters of the web? :)
Friday, September 14, 2007
Dopez votre audience
I'm back from Paris. What a great city!
French Googlers are great fun! It was a pleasure to meet so many. I don't think I bumped into any one from Google or Yahoo while I was at the E-commerce Paris expo (just private events after it) but Mirago and MSN adCenter were there. I know Google Analytics did do a presentation too.
Okay! It's time to remind readers that this is a personal blog. These opinions are my opinions and not those of the company I work for. Even with that important caveat in place it is also to true to say that the company I work for doesn't engage in mud slinging or slagging off competitors.
It just so happens that the company involved in this post is involved in search (or, if I picked up the French correctly; referencement).
This post is actually an example of why you need to localise your marketing efforts. What may work in one country may not work in another.
One of the companies at E-commerce Paris were handing out pens that looked like syringes. They had a hi-lite end, an ink end and looked pretty funky.
Here's the catch. The other side of the syringes was less funky (to me and my British ways, at least).
The text says "Dopez votre audience" which is best translated as "dope your traffic".
I get the idea. You want a boost in your traffic - here's a syringe with some performance enhancing dope!
Eek! For the life of me, I can not imagine any search agency attempting such a marketing angle in the UK or the US. The association to cheating in sports is just too strong.
If a sprinter does well - people begin whispering about stamina enhancing drugs. Doping charges. Disqualification.
There's no way that professional sport trainers would waltz around an athletics conference handing out fake "dope your results" syringes. They'd get thrown out.
Why would you want to crystallise all that negative imagery and then apply it to your own brand and the performance of your clients websites?
Honestly, I've not checked out the client base of the company in question but I wouldn't be surprised if I discovered black hat techniques galore.
Given all the doping scandal in this year's Tour de France I'm surprised a French company would be promoting doping a wise way to move forward too.
What they should have done, I think, is talk about SEO health checks, keeping the site fit or even remedies to heal sick sites. Then they could have employed a pair of booth babes to strut around in nurse uniforms and hand the syringes out. Now that would have been attention grabbing and a positive message!
Anyway, if the syringes are currently working for them in France then I hope they change tactic before trying to enter the UK market!
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Copywriting
I was trying to come up with an easy way for a client to express the paradigm shift that copywriters face when they are used to writing for traditional media have start to writing for the web. I came up with this:
When you're writing for paper you want to inspire your readers to think.
When you're writing for the web you want to avoid forcing your readers to think.
What do you think? Too mild? Too marketing-talk?
Friday, February 02, 2007
CondéNet and Flip.com
In a few days Flip.com launches. It'll be a great experiment. A very interesting experiment into the power of social media and marketing in this "new age" of user driven leadership. 
Of course, for Condé Nast Flip.com is not an experiment. It's a business. One that they hope will succeed. It was only a few days ago that I found myself writing about Condé Nast's Stylefinder.com as a fashionable sister to Reddit. I do wonder if Reddit's lack of style embarrasses the sisters. If you scroll to the bottom of Flip.com (currently in holding page phase) you'll see that the social news site is missing from the list of sister brands.
I like Flip. It's going to be a like MySpace however there's a lot of clever marketing going on. Even with something basic like the banner slot Flip.com is different. As the girls sign up to Flip.com they're allowed to pick and target advertisers who will appear on their Flipbook. Don't like H&M as a brand? Not posh enough for you? Then you'll not let them advertise on your Flipbook.
Oh yeah; Flip.com greatly interests this search marketer but the real target demographics are teenage girls. All too often, teenage girls are too smart for their (and our) own good.
The best bits of Flip and CondéNet's experiement (sorry, business model) is the almost guerilla use of content. There is free image content on Flip. The girls get to scoop up this content and add whatever they like to their Flipbooks. The girls get to show off by having the best Flipbook.
The content is supplied by the advertisers. It's not branded. There's not even a logo. They're simply trying to make fashion merchandise cool. They're trying to get the girls interested. CondéNet charges the advertisers for the honour of supplying content.
It gets better and braver. The girls get to vandalise the images as much as they want. As a Flip.com user you're allowed to scrawl "this sucks!" over anything you want in your Flipbook.
Mike Shields over at Mediaweek has a source which suggests advertisers may be paying between $300,000 and $500,000 per content package.
Some people close to the project are talking. Jessica Ulin from OMD (sister agency of PHD, part of the Omnicom family) who deals with Johnson & Johnson's Clean & Clear has described the approach as the holy grail. In fact, Ulin and I seem to agree that this is an experiment.
“Advertisers are experimenting in speaking to girls in a way they want to be spoken to,”
“The way that advertising is woven into the site is pretty unique,”
“It’s all self-selected. It makes for a more qualified viewer. It’s really the holy grail, when a user identifies with a brand so much.”
As usual I'm left to hope that search engine optimisation and PPC have been thought about from the outset. Flip will use Flash and that's tricky.
(The I support nofollow still enjoys 1 sole supporter.)
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Reddit gets a fashionable baby sister
One of my favourite social news sites Reddit is due to get another fashion conscious sister. Stylefinder.com will be born on the 8th of March. That's the same day as Glamour relaunches. Glamour is the elder sister at the mighty age of 5.
Wondering about those family relations? We have this genealogy because Condé Nast bought Reddit back in October last year. I suspect many techie SEOers will never have heard of Condé Nast. They own a truck load of magazines. They own Wired. I suspect all techie SEOers will have heard of Wired.
I think Reddit have done well. Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian told Michael Arrington that as far back as 2005 they had raised $100k. Condé Nast clearly keeps the web firmly in mind when planning expansions and marketing activity. Nikki Preston from Mad.co.uk noted;
The campaign includes placing advertisements on bus panels servicing Manchester and London, ensuring that the brand is well covered by Google’s and Yahoo!’s search engines, putting advertisements in Glamour, and emailing its existing database of 500,0000 readers.
So Stylefinder.com and Condé Nast are thinking PPC at least and are hopefully in the position to launch an organic search friendly site. Judging by the name (and this is a complete guess) Stylefinder does have that "social search" vibe to it. Find something interesting on the online magazine - and show your friends.
Even if Stylefinder are social search/social media naive Reddit are still safely part of a web savvy family. Digg is still fishing around for concrete support, probably a buyer, while the speculation that their bubble will burst seems to ebb and flow through the world of blogger speculation.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Google's Marketshare compared to Yahoo, MSN and eBay
I like Compete. The traffic gauge shows signs of promise. It just needs more data. Their blog is in my Google Reader and it reminds me of Hitwise's. A good model to follow.
I sometimes look at Netcraft's topsites to see what the market is doing. I remember how gmail caused the https://mail.google.com domain to rocket up through the ranks. Look how much traffic eBay.de gets. Okay. The figures may be a little awkward. This traffic is collected by the Netcraft Toolbar and Netcraft's Toolbar URL appears in the top 50.
This pie chart looks at the top 50. Netcraft records the top 100.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Ouch! Publicis must be feeling the hurt
Gosh! This must hurt! ASDA, the UK supermarket owned by US giant Wal*Mart has ended their 17 year old marketing deal with French marketing group Publicis and awarded their £44m marketing account to Fallon.
There are a few stings in this tale. Firstly, this was a surprise pitch. Publicis would not have been expecting it. Secondly, this surprise pitch was called by ASDA's new marketing director Rick Bendel. Where did Rick Bendel come from? He came from... Publicis!
Agency SEM workers will know Publicis' Starcom which is a media buying agency which dabbles in PPC.
There's an introduction to this story on Brand Republic but you need a paid subscription to read the full thing.
