Online Marketing Mavens Blog

It has been a tough week in my world of online media planning and buying! Two campaigns were set to go live with new sites, rich media vendors, and complex creative. So many things that makes Internet display advertising great were utilized with the buying and creative aspects of these campaigns. As usual, timelines were tight, things were changed mid-stream, and there were unexpected hurdles.

I love my job for many reasons, one being that I am obsessed with the Internet, but at times like these I feel exhausted due to the complexity of it and the number of people each well-planned online campaign relies on. The funny thing is, my frustration drives me online to re-connect with friends, blog, watch silly videos, you name it. It’s just funny, that’s all I’m saying

Here is me looking not into it today.

But this too, shall pass, and tomorrow I will be excited about applying new targeting capabilities to my clients, and reading awesome articles such as this one!

Next time I will take time to formulate quasi-intelligent conclusions about online marketing, but today, I just want the internet to hug me back.

In the almost two years I’ve been in interactive media planning and buying, I’ve seen advertising networks blossom and grow into a viable complements to almost every online marketing plan. Whether it be with behavioral, demographic, or contextual targeting, networks help build efficient reach across the long tail of the web. Skittish, brand protective marketers have been given assurance that risque content can be easily avoided, including un-patrolled user-generated content.

According to ComScore’s Nov 2007 rankings, Advertising.com just beat out Yahoo! as the largest reaching web property, with 86% online reach. Now that is pretty impressive!

Last week, Clickz reported that some ISPs were starting to cookie behavior across the entire web with the potential to sell segments to advertisers or networks. While advertising networks monitor what is on their network and create targeting channels accordingly, ISPs will be able to look at behavior across the entire web including search. While this is only being tested at this point and claims not to track very personal things like health queries and sex site visits, it still scares me! As we can now reach 86% of the web with one ad network, is it really worth tracking a user’s every move to reach other other 14%?

This functionality may introduce a lot more targetable segments, are we just risking getting too niche with our focus? I’ve spoken out for behavioral targeting in the past, but tracking one’s every move doesn’t seem like it’s worth the risk.

In an interview conducted by BtoB, Jeffrey Pruitt of iCrossing and President of SEMPO discusses future trends and challenges in search marketing. I enjoyed this trend interview and article because I’ve started to see these trends develop in my experiences with search.

I could relate to the near term challenges for search, one being maintaining visibility in universal search. As the search results contain more and more images, video, maps, and even recipes, I wonder if companies are moving more towards understanding this and optimizing for it? Google’s unpredictable results on many searches may lead one to not take it so seriously. However, ask.com is known for leading the way in universal search vs Google results.

The challenge, noted by Pruitt, is to create content that not only appears in universal search but also forms meaningful connections with them that extends beyond the text-based search. Hmmm. Connect with the searcher? You mean online? Heck yeah!

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