I was playing around with Google Video the other day, and I couldn't help but notice the top rating clip - a 3 minute epic enticingly entitled "Webcam Girls Go Wild". It was kind of suprising to see something like that there - considering how famously conservative the 'Do No Evil' crew are about adult content. Purely in the interests of science and humankind, I clicked play. And got a surprise.
It is fascinating watching Google expand its sphere of influence into offline media. Their acquisition of dMarc Media Networks
will add the ability to research, buy and manage radio campaigns to
their online advertiser tools. Similar capabilities for television,
outdoor, newspaper and magazine advertising will not be far away.
As any retailer worth his salt knows - its not how much you sell that counts, its what you sell it for. The rebounding online advertising economy has obscured a critical fact. Many online publishers have no idea when it comes to managing inventory and yields, and instead embrace a value destructive approach to sales which neither serves their shareholders nor advertisers.
Blogging, podcasting, mobile picturing taking, file swapping – lately you might be forgiven for wondering whether there is any limit to the technology bandwagons consumers will happily jump on. Yet there is method to their madness. In the main, technology has stopped being the calling card of myopic ubergeeks, and become as embedded in average people’s lives as the TV or telephone. Forget applications. It’s all about appliances.
When it comes to advertising space, you can really have too much of a good thing. However traditional ways of dealing with remnant inventory - discounting and supply restriction - have caused chronic problems for online publishers. So, just how do you give advertisers more of what they want, and less of what they don't?
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