I’ve been thinking about two competing online ad trends:
1) Advertisers/publishers are getting better and better at targeting ads.
2) Consumers are getting better and better at ignoring ads.
Targeting improvements have come on multiple fronts.  Advertisers have an increasing understanding of who is consuming content, in what context, and what exactly is being […]

In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft recently invested $240 million into social networking all-star Facebook at a $15 billion valuation.  Just to put things in perspective, that places Facebook as the fifth most valuable internet company, sitting squarely between Amazon at #4 and Interactive Corp (which runs Ask.com, Hotels.com, and a […]

There’s a lot I like about career discovery startup Path 101’s intended trajectory. As I wrote last week, the company is “tackling 3 million+ publicly posted resumes on the web (and any others the company can get its hands on) and working on organizing that information.” Such work could hold exceptional […]

I’m curious as to what’s happening to certain of our online form entries.  Most of them comprise of address, email, or other information that is plugging directly into a back-end database and either serve as query against or populate preset tables. These are permission-based entries which we, as consumers, thoughtfully offer and generally […]

La Quinta Inns & Suites is bringing their corporate slogan, “wake up on the bright side,” to new use - as title for a series of comics advertising the company’s service. The “advertising as content” storm has been brewing for some time but rarely has it been implemented as explicitly as […]

E-commerce providers have a problem: they lose a significant percentage (some cite 75%) of customers that have made it to checkout. It’s shocking. A huge, stare-me-in-the-face, gaping opportunity that’s been acknowledged for a long time. Plenty of ancillary businesses recognize it and offer solutions, which beget another […]

For those of us keenly watching digital media businesses unfold, Yahoo!’s purchase of Rivals.com deserves attention.  First announced in April, the deal was reportedly signed today. 
We’ll get to valuation and deal metrics in a minute.  Let’s start by delving into Rivals’ business.  The Brentwood, TN-based company offers collegiate and high school sports specific […]

One of my better moves at DrJays was taking our outsourced online advertising campaign in-house and buying ads directly with Google, Overture, and others.  The flat per-click rate our partner was charging us far exceeded what we needed to spend on what was then a relatively uncompetitive keyword market for “urban streetwear” brands.  I waded into the copy […]

I missed a coming attraction in my January e-commerce prognostications: webinars as direct-to-consumer marketing tool.  Traditionally the webinar (or “web seminar”) has been utilized by research houses as another distribution point.  More recently they’ve seen traction in the B2B (business to business) space as a way to conduct an informational sales pitch to numerous enterprise leads […]

In all the hype over Google’s online office suite and forthcoming erosion of Microsoft market share, I’ve seen no mention of Google’s most recent Redmond inspiration: the ill-fated Microsoft BOB.  For the past week I’ve had Google’s new “theme” customization running on my personalized Google homepage and it’s 1995 all over […]