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November 30, 2008 - December 6, 2008

December 4, 2008

Jokes.com Relaunch, McDonald's Sponsorship

I'm not sure how many hours of my adolescent and teenage life I spent watching standup comedy on TV (it seemed like every channel had a standup show). But I don't think it was a waste of time, and expect to spend more hours browsing through the newly launched Jokes.com site.

Comedy Central has revamped the site in a big way. It's not just a facelift. They literally had multiple editorial people plowing through standup video from their archives going back about 10 years, attributing metadata to countless clips, and slicing and dicing shows into individual jokes, or thematic riffs.

Watch Bill Hicks mocking creationism on the "A-List." Or check out Bob Odenkirk in his early (awkward?) standup days. You might have to sit through an in-stream ad first. (Sadly, they don't have that old Brian Regan bit about little league.)

Of course, there are lots of younger (and living) comedians, too. And one of 'em, Christian Finnegan, was at the launch lunch at Comedy Central HQ yesterday (pictured here in his cool 'Mats shirt).

Sure, all that editing and metadata-ing work facilitates SEO. But there's another interesting and potentially revenue-generating outcome. The site's content -- which also includes text jokes and text versions of the video bits (yes, more SEO) -- can be readily organized according to theme. The Comedy Central folks created hundreds of tags for Jokes.com content (George W. Bush, Gross-Out, Marriage).

That means they can easily generate a page dedicated to a certain theme or themes for a sponsor. Take McDonald's, which will sponsor a football-themed video section in conjunction with the Superbowl.

Posted by Kate Kaye at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

DOJ Was Rarin' to Sue as Google Scuttled Yahoo Deal

Just how close did the Justice Department come to filing anti-trust charges against Google and Yahoo over their search advertising deal?

About three hours close, according to an Am Law Daily interview with Sanford Litvack, the bulldog litigator hired by the DOJ to investigate the outsourcing agreement.

"We were going to file the complaint at a certain time during the day," Litvack told Am Law. "We told them we were going to file the complaint at that time of day. Three hours before, they told us they were abandoning the agreement."

After the deal was scuttled, an apparently disappointed Litvack went back to his firm, Hogan & Hartson. "We felt pretty good about it, we felt pretty confident. Yeah, I would have liked to have done it."

More from the Am Law story:

The never-filed government complaint would have charged that the agreement violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, Litvack tells the Am Law Daily in one of his first interviews since the companies canned the venture. Section 1 bans agreements that restrain trade unreasonably. Section 2 makes it unlawful for a company to monopolize or attempt to monopolize trade.

"It would have ended up also alleging that Google had a monopoly and that [the advertising pact] would have furthered their monopoly," Litvack says.

The complaint would have sought a preliminary injunction to stop the agreement from going forward. "The fact that we filed a lawsuit would not by itself have stopped them," he says. "We would have had to get an injunction from the court, and we would have sought that."

Posted by Zachary Rodgers at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 3, 2008

New York Post: Miller Not on a Yahoo Hunt After All

The New York Post has called foul on a Wall Street Journal report claiming Jonathan Miller is scraping together funds for a possible Yahoo bid.

The former AOL chief exec is indeed raising cash, according to the story, but not to acquire Yahoo. Rather the moves are part of his capitalization efforts on behalf of his investment firm, Velocity Interactive. The story adds Miller has entertained a Yahoo investment in the past, but nothing is imminent.

Posted by Zachary Rodgers at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 2, 2008

Jonathan Miller Said to Pursue a Yahoo Stake

Former AOL chief executive Jonathan Miller is raising money to support a potential bid for Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal has heard from sources. (Update: A conflicting story in the Post says Miller is indeed fund raising, but that the money is for Velocity Interactive rather than Yahoo. More details.)

According to the story:

Mr. Miller has been talking to private equity investors and sovereign wealth funds for months in hopes of raising money for a Yahoo deal, and it is unclear whether the talks have progressed or are just continuing, these people say. Mr. Miller believes he can do a deal that would be worth around $20 to $22 a share to Yahoo shareholders, these people say, which would involve raising about about $28 billion to $30 billion to purchase the entire company.

As WSJ points out, the general palsy in lending activity right now makes such a fund raising job seem like a pipe dream.

Posted by Zachary Rodgers at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Newspaper Web Revenues Drop Again in Q3

People who report news for a living don't like hearing about other news operations doing poorly. It just doesn't bode well. Until less than a year ago, though, newspapers seemed to have a glimmer of hope through their online businesses.

Not anymore -- at least for the time being.

After its first ever reported drop in online ad revenue in Q2 2008, the industry drifted another few notches in Q3. According to the Newspaper Association of America, online paper sites brought in $749.8 million in Q3, a drop of 3 percent from a year before.

At that time, Internet ad revenue reached $773 million, having risen a healthy 21 percent over Q3 2006.

Overall, combined print and online spending fell 18 percent in Q3 2008 to $8.9 billion.

Posted by Kate Kaye at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Quote of the Day: Michael Wolff on MySpace's Audience

"…If you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people."

-Michael Wolff, author of new Rupert Murdoch biography “The Man Who Owns The News," in an interview with Jon Fine.

Posted by Zachary Rodgers at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Virgin Media Joins T-Mobile, Adopts Yahoo Mobile Search Tool

U.K. mobile network operator Virgin Mobile has partnered with Yahoo to power search functions on its re-launched mobile portal. As of December 8, the portal will take on the branding of its parent company, Virgin Media, and will integrate Yahoo's oneSearch technology.

Yahoo also said today that it plans to deliver mobile sponsored search results and contextually served sponsored listings via the portal early next year, and that it is focusing on, "creating the monetization engine for the mobile Internet."

Despite its troubles, the Internet giant appears to be making decent progress in the mobile search sector, having secured an exclusive deal with T-Mobile in February, representing 11 European Markets. At the time, a Yahoo spokesperson described mobile search as a "key area in the future of Yahoo."

Search results via the Virgin portal will now include photos from Flickr, financial data, integrated information from Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers, and downloadable content such as ringtones and mobile games.

Posted by Jack Marshall at 7:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 1, 2008

McCain Online Ad Spending Up to $2.36 M

The election is over but the Federal Election Commission reporting ain't. I just finished going through additional online media expenditures reported by the McCain campaign. The new estimate is $2.36 million. (I reported last month that the McCain camp spent $1.53 million according to 2008 FEC reports representing expenditures into October.)

As I noted then, McCain’s FEC reports are really cryptic - unlike Obama's which were quite transparent. So, the most I know is John McCain 2008 and McCain-Palin 2008 paid around $2.6 million for "media" to its Web ad consulting firm, Connell Donatelli. (I shaved off around 10 percent to account for fees and other ad charges that didn't go towards actual media buys.) Just to make it even more opaque, the McCain campaign lists the firm as "CD, Inc." But, my understanding of how the campaign operated is that Connell Donatelli, a.k.a. CD, handled the Web media.

Meanwhile, Obama's campaign reported individual expenditures to media firms, so I've been able to decipher much more about where they spent.

There's another wrinkle in that the McCain campaign also created a Victory Fund and a Compliance Fund to circumvent those pesky campaign finance regulations. I haven't seen any payments to CD in reports from those entities yet, though I've been told to look for them.

Posted by Kate Kaye at 2:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Media6degrees Launches, Fusing Behavioral and Social Marketing

When someone claims a digital network of 400 "friends," undoubtedly including everyone from middle school girlfriends to office acquaintances, it's not easy to tell who the real buddies are.

With this in mind, the founders of Media6degrees two years ago set out to build an ad platform that could trace an individual's real circle of friends. It did so by engineering a combination of cookies and ad server logs to pinpoint a person's interests and generate anonymous profiles of his or her real friends. The resulting ad network, which entered trial-mode back in May, has now been commercially released.

According to the company, any individual connected to an advertiser's existing customer respond to ads two to thirty times more often than consumers targeted with simple demographic and geographic targeting.

Media6degrees chalks up the propensity of these individuals to buy similar products to the psychographic likenesses that naturally exist between friends. While that may be so, I'm more inclined to credit simple word of mouth. Whatever. If the company's internal research is to be trusted, it would appear Media6degrees offers a compelling fusion of behavioral targeting and social marketing.

As CEO Joe Doran, an ex-Microsoftie, put it to me last spring, "The most important thing is not to look at the content but to look at the interactions between individuals. I'm defined not by my interactions on MySpace or on Facebook. I'm defined by my interactions with my friends."

Posted by Zachary Rodgers at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chad White Leaves EEC, Joins Seattle Agency

Chad White, director of retail insights at the Email Experience Council, has headed to Smith-Harmon, a Seattle-based e-mail marketing agency.

White, author of the Retail Email Blog, will assume the newly created position of research director at Smith-Harmon. The agency's headed up by Lisa Harmon and Aaron Smith.

The agency's clients include Costco, Williams-Sonoma, BabyCenter, and Leapfrog.

White will continue to work out of New York City, where Smith-Harmon has three team members, according to Harmon.

Posted by Anna Maria Virzi at 9:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oral-B: Power Ads for a Power Toothbrush

The New York Post's Page Six gossip section, including the Post nameplate, cleaned up with these ads from P&G's Oral-B promoting the Triumph electric toothbrush. In another era, a newspaper's nameplate was sacred territory untouched by ads. But those days are apparently long gone.

Posted by Anna Maria Virzi at 7:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 30, 2008

Starbucks: Cause Marketing and a 5 Cent Debate

During the holiday season, Starbucks Coffee will donate five cents from the purchase of select beverages to help finance AIDS programs in Africa.

A debate about the campaign is playing out on YouTube, proof that promoting a philanthropic endeavor can spur as much discord as selecting a coffee blend.

Posted by Anna Maria Virzi at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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