“[Success] is going to be in the companies that can maintain and grow audiences and are not trying to control content. I think we will start to see companies aggregate audiences in interesting ways.”

[via B2Day]

Steve Rubel comments on “press releases being dead” and says something wonderful in the process:

People want the facts but they also want to hear the news in a human voice, not from an automaton - “we are pleased” quotes won’t cut it anymore, sorry. And the phrase “today announced” will one day fall by the wayside.

Better late then never. If you’re a user of Google’s content match network on Adsense, you can now apply a “site exclusion feature.” This allows you to control which of Google’s content partners you’d like your ads to be displayed on.

Up until now I’ve avoided Google’s content match. With the exclusion feature now available however, its time to start experimenting again. I’ll keep you posted on the success.

Bit of a shocking prediction by Rishad Tobaccowala during his keynote at the OMMA conference on Monday. Rishad said:

“At some stage it becomes more expensive to buy Google than to buy network television.”

Tobaccowala predicted that interactive advertising will go up by 20 to 30% a year for several years thanks to things like the rising costs of pay-per-click and the need to make creative more attention-getting.

[via Marketer Today]

Mental Note: Pay-Per-Click advertising network FindWhat.com said today they’ll change their name to Miva.

Online News Squared (a new blog that’s doing a nice job of curating the “news about online news”), points us to a Interactive Advertising Bureau study that shows online advertising revenue totaled $2.8 billion in the first quarter, a 26 percent boost from the same period in 2004.

While these gains are impressive, I think one can safely assume that majority of these revenues are still coming from a select group of very large web advertisers. Particularly those in the travel and automotive sectors. It would be interesting to look at the numbers not as a whole, but rather from some sort of tiered perspective that compared the spending of small, mid and large sized businesses.

Good article about search engine advertising over at DM News talking about the importance of not treating every click-through with equal importance.

Points out that we need to analyse the path of “clickers” through the site, to see if they browse and leave, or they browse and buy. Furthermore, before starting the campaign, it’s also very important to evaluate the kind of search engines we want to advertise on. Users with different characteristics use different search engines. For example DMNews explains: “AOL traditionally has been seen as the search space of choice for the less Web-savvy Internet user. That might make it a better place to sell a beginner-level product that helps people understand the Web better.”

Planning has an important role also in search engine marketing. It’s not just a question of choosing the right keywords, it’s also relevant where you place them.

[via Adverblog]

Thomas Directories is going all digital. No more “Big Green Book” says SearchViews.

“It has been our strategy for the last 10 years to eventually eliminate the print properties. It was just a matter of how long it would take.”

One of our clients here at ten24 has advertised in the Thomas Directories for years, and with good success. But as he pointed out to me a couple years back, is anyone really picking up that big book anymore. “It’s much easier to seek it out online.”

Goldman Sachs says the online advertising industry is expected to increase by 28 percent to reach $12.3 billion in 2005.

From Adverblog:

Online advertising is growing, but it’s also getting more and more complicated as Bambi Francisco explains: “Successful online advertising isn’t just about a clever campaign; it’s about mathematical computations”. You’d better study mathematics if you want to get this business right…

ClickZ Stats identifies April’s top Internet advertisers by expenditure. Total spent - $258.6 million. If Goldman Sachs is right, that number will grow quickly. They are calling 2005 a “breakout year” for online advertising and predict that online advertising could account for as much as 7% of the ad market by 2009 with search marketing representing more than half of all ad dollars spent.