NBCU launches online ad network for O&Os

NBCU has built an online advertising sales network, in another strike against third-party ad sales. The Universal Audience Platform (UAP) group will sell display ads on NBCU’s 10 owned and operated station sites as well as NBC.com and other sites on its network. Mediaweek reports that NBCU “will ’sharply curtail’ selling its inventory via third [...]

Groupon CEO: We doubled a local business in four hours

How valuable can a Groupon ad be to a local company? Groupon CEO Andrew Mason has some powerful examples. Check this out from WSJ:
“[W]e recently featured helicopter lessons in Boston and sold 2,600 in four hours. To put that in perspective, this fellow has been in business since 1985 and in the quarter century leading [...]

Revenge? Chicago mayor to post FOIA requests online

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley is going to have all FOIA requests posted on a city website. Daley has had a contentious relationship with the media (like his father before him) and you have to wonder if this is his way of taking a little dig at the media. Writes the Chicago Tribune “[the postings are] [...]

Apple introduces the iPad, its tablet computer

The wait is over. The long-anticipated Apple tablet is alive, and it’s called the iPad. Today, Apple introduced the device, which plenty of people are already calling “an iPhone on steroids.” Certainly, it looks like the iPhone’s bigger brother. The big difference is that you can’t make phone calls or send text messages from the iPad.

The iPad has a 9.7 inch (measured on the diagonal) screen, weighs a pound and a half and is a half-inch thick. One of the things I noticed right away is how much black space there is around the perimeter of the screen. I would have thought Apple would have the picture go closer to the edge. There are six models in all, ranging in price from $499 to $829, depending on the amount of storage you want and whether you want 3G capability; all the iPads work with WiFi, but the more expensive models work with 3G as well. AT&T will offer unlimited 3G data for $29.99 a month, or $14.99 for 250 Mb/month.

Among the more notable news here as well is that Apple is getting into the e-book business. Its iBooks software and store are reminiscent of iTunes. The software interfaces look spiffy. Mail, iTunes and Calendar all have iPad-centric looks.

Nielsen to merge online viewing into ratings

The Nielsen Company will now merge the information about online show viewing into its overall picture of how a TV program is doing. According to MediaPost, Nielsen will roll out “Internet meters” (presumably the computer equivalent of a “people meter”) in August. It will take that data and combine it with the existing Nielsen data [...]

One take on local advertising for indie news startups

In an effort to “find a way to pay for all this ‘journalism that matters,’” Justin Carder of Neighborlogs and the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog offers a rundown of the state of local advertising for indie news startups in Seattle.
Carder’s analysis comes in response to a query related to the 3-day Journalism That Matters conference [...]

NYTimes.com debuts huge new ad unit

Earlier this month, the Online Publishers Association introduced three new ad units for its members. Very large ad units. The idea is to counter the commoditization of standard display ads with a unique, eye-popping experience. Today, one of those magazine-style ads, a 336-by-860-pixel monster, debuted on NYTimes.com’s home page…

The larger ad units [...]

Local TV and small business video ads

While the internet yellow pages and city guides are selling advertorial video for small businesses, the biggest player of them all continues to aggressively pursue this emerging opportunity. Google has teamed with SpotMixer to give small businesses the ability to churn out their own videos and traffic them on Google’s Adwords network, both online [...]

Google’s long tail of advertising

According to a SEC filing, Google had 1 million advertisers in 2007 at an average spend of $16,000/each equaling $16.6 billion in revenue. Estimates put the number of advertisers now around 1.3 to 1.5 million. With that large number of advertisers, Google has a competitive advantage in contextually targeting them to searches and [...]

Tiger Woods and smart conversational ads

During a NYT panel discussion on the future of advertising, Lars Bastholm from AKQA gave this great example of conversational advertising:
EA Sports, the video-game company, is a good example. On YouTube, someone posted a clip of himself playing the company’s Tiger Woods golf game. He put it up as a joke, laughing at EA Sports, [...]

Borrell: The big local slowdown has begun

Borrell Associates has reworked its local online ad forecast for 2009. “For local interactive media, the big slowdown has begun a year earlier than we anticipated,” the reports reads. “The spending levels by local advertisers — which have grown at a frenetic 47% this year — are expected to slow down to a relatively [...]

Scripps: Online will support our papers by 2012

Rusty Coats, vice president for interactive at Scripps, is so confident about their online strategy, “that he projects that Scripps websites will sell enough ads to support the staff and costs of the print and online newsrooms by 2012, without staff cuts,” reports the NY Times. “If Scripps could achieve that, it would mark a [...]

If newspapers dropped their print product

Assume a newspaper has revenue of $100 million a year operating on a 15% margin with 60% of its costs and 90% of its revenues tied to print. Alan Mutter of Newsosaur runs the math:
“If the company abandoned print but were able to double its online sales to $20 million, it would lose [...]

‘Dozens and dozens’ of ad networks to die

That’s what Jeff Lanctot, chief strategy officer for Microsoft’s interactive agency Razorfish, predicts will happen in 2009. “There are probably more than 300 ad networks up and running and they aren’t differentiated on technology,” he said. “It’s all about arbitrage; they buy inventory for a low price and sell it for a higher price [...]

Borrell revises local ad spending forecast

This is no surprise, but still painful. Borrell Associates has scaled back its local online spending forecast for 2008 and 2009. Local businesses will spend $11.9 billion in online advertising this year, down from $13.1 billion. And in 2009, businesses are expected to spend $13.6 billion, down from $18.2 billion. “We [...]

Analyst: ‘Soft metrics’ ads to decline

“All eyes are on 2009,” said Canaccord Adams analyst Colin Gillis. “Display-advertising business models are under siege, as revenue visibility is increasingly unpredictable…. Display remains the domain of brand advertisers, and with its softer metrics is more readily seen as a source of spend that can be reduced.” And what about search? “We continue [...]

Yahoo launches newspaper ad platform

Yahoo has taken the wraps off APT (formerly AMP), its new display ad platform that has been under development with the newspaper consortium. In a nutshell, sites on the platform will be able to leverage behavioral data across Yahoo and the network to improve ad targeting. Agencies and advertisers, in theory, will spend [...]

Politico: Use us instead of D.C. wire service

This is interesting. The relatively-new politics site Politico.com has teamed with Adify to share its reporting for newspapers — both in print and online — with a revenue share. “As more and more news outlets close or scale back their Washington, D.C. bureaus, organizations will now have access to Politico’s unique, up-to-the-minute political coverage,” said Jim VandeHei, executive editor of Politico. “Rather than having to pay for a wire service to get political news, these papers get the benefit of using Politico’s content while making money on ads they don’t have to sell.” Hmmm, so drop AP, form a regional exchange and use Politico for DC coverage? Interesting. The initial partners in the effort include The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Denver Post and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Press release…

Local gets one-tenth of Obama online ad spend

Out of $5 million in online ad spending so far this year, the Obama campaign has spent just over $3 million on Google and $618,005 on Yahoo. So how did local media fare? $512,551 was spent through Centro, the local online ad agency — so just over 10 percent of the total. [...]

Google launches free ad serving

After months of beta testing, Google has launched AdManager, a full-service ad serving and management tool. And it’s completely free. You can integrate third-party ad tags and then compare CPMs with Adsense on the fly, selecting the ad with the highest return. Or you can turn off Adsense altogether. There’s back-end [...]