Note to Google: You Can’t Please Everyone!

AdViking notes that Google has just backed down on it’s full ‘Trademark Protection’ policy in the UK. It had previously allowed brand owners to block anyone advertising on their keywords or using their brand names in their adverts. Google claims that because this change of policy only affects keywords and not advert copy, it will stop passing off… but that depends on how clever the ad copy is!

The reality of the situation is that Google are opening the marketplace back up on these terms and, lets face it, once the competition starts up, then the brand owners are only one position of many.

However, AdViking believes that the takeup of such trademark protection was snowballing as increasing brand owners were taking advantage of it. Reports in the news that AdWords revenues were stalling was affecting share price and, hey, who are Google not to listen to their poor, starved, shareholders?

We also welcome the opening up because Trademark Protection policy was actually being used for price fixing… or at least attempts at price fixing. A few months ago you’d have loads of adverts on ‘cheap peugeot’ on Google UK, now there is only one.

So, bring on May 5th, when the market hots up again! Should be interesting…

Microhoo or is it YahAOL?

It’s heating up to end game as there’s plenty of moves on the potential purchase of Yahoo! by Microsoft.

To AdViking the way Yahoo is going about it is a reminder of Wargames and at this point Jerry Yang is making sure that no-one will win, especially his shareholders which they can’t be happy about.

The big three moves are:

1. WSJ reports that Time Warner and Yahoo are close to making a deal for AOL (minus the access business) to join Yahoo
2. Yahoo have announced they are going to run a two week trial to run AdSense ads
3. New York Times reports that News Corp. may have flopped over to joining the Microsoft bid

AdViking thinks the last one as being the most interesting. If you have a combined Yahoo, News Corp and Microsoft then you have a truly viable alternative to Google in the digital ad space and this then creates opportunities through out the digital advertising ecosystem. e.g.: for technologies like OpenX; indy ad networks like adconion; or indy publisher networks like Federated Media.

Google is Selling DoubleClick’s Performics

On the back of the close of the DoubleClick acquisition, Google has started to cut numbers and have has made some interesting moves with Performics, the SEM part of DoubleClick. They have first separated it into two business units: affiliate marketing and search marketing. And second, have announced that the search marketing business is up for sale.

This is generally seen as a positive move, as it avoids a potential direct conflict of interest. In other words, customers would be paying Google to get higher rankings/results.

Tom Phillips, Google’s director of DoubleClick Integration, says this about it:

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party. We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers.

This is a very positive sentiment from Google and only those with a really cynical industry view would say that any purchase price of Performics would have to include some understanding about maintaining a special relationship to ensure Performics can continue to take advantage of all they have learned during their time at the Googleplex.

A Serious Threat? Google’s Second Search Box

With the launch of Google’s Second Search Box are Publishers under a serious threat to their digital revenue streams? AdViking believes this is the case for two primary reasons:

• Lost Revenue
• Loss of User Control

Lost Revenue

Based on the recent crunching of revenue numbers, the general trend seems to be that Google’s revenue growth is at the cost of traditional media owners. Meaning that if any Publisher doesn’t see this as an additional direct and competitive threat to their business, then they really need to wake up and smell the coffee.

From early feedback AdViking has received, Publishers are giving mixed reviews to the Second Search Box. The more forward thinking and strategic are aghast and the less aggressive aren’t too worried and are saying that increased traffic will make up for the lost revenue of that initial hit. This is erroneous thinking for a few reasons:

In the short term, the loss of traffic will lead directly to lost revenue.

In the medium term, by counting on this additional boost in traffic, Publishers will become even more indebted to Google for driving traffic.

In the long term, as Publisher metrics worsen (eCPM, traffic, etc.) then this will lose to the further loss of advertisers as they spend more and more money with Google.

Loss of User Experience Control

Publishers have spent a lot of time and money working on the User Experience, especially as Search as moved to the primary method of finding content, the relevancy models for their search results.

By allowing Google to apply a one-size-fits all model, then all of the benefits of knowing your content, knowing your users, etc. is thrown out the window.

Below are two different examples that show the negative impact of the Google’s Second Search Box on User Experience.

Bear Stearns on New York Times

Laptop on BestBuy

Postscript:

• Official Google post about Second Site Search
• The cynic in AdViking questions, will these feature go away after the end of Q1?

Google Blames Their Technology

Eric Schmidt is singing a different tune from his troops this week in an attempt to calm down a storm brewing with the World Association of Newspapers, the defacto global organisation for newspaper publishers, about WAN’s attempt to level/organise the playing field around the way content is distributed across the Web.

Last week, at the Guardian’s Changing Media Summit Rob Jonas, Google’s head of media and publishing partnerships in Europe, said in his keynote that the current standard (robots.txt) “provides everything that most publishers need to do”. In response, Gavin O’Reilly, the chairman of the World Association of Newspapers and COO, questioned this stance as from his view Publishers strongly disagree.

This week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt changed the tune and told ITWire actually the problem is not that Google doesn’t want to implement it, it’s just that they are having problems implementing it.

• Current standard, Robots.txt is limited to telling crawlers that you can or can’t crawl the content
• New proposed standard, Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) provides Publisher with much more control, such as putting a time stamp on how long content can be used.

It’s probably too obvious a point to make and maybe AdViking is getting too jaded here. But it seems to be that isn’t in Google’s self-interest to solve the tech issues to implement this new standard that gives Publishers much more control over how their content is used. If I was working at Microsoft Live Search, ASK even Yahoo! in the crawler team, I would be looking to pony up to WAN and the other publisher groups to get ACAP supported and get a quick PR win.

A Fuller View on the Google Ad Manager

Following on from the news that the acquisition of DoubleClick by Google has been given grace in Europe and therefore has been closed, Google announces what’s a potential game changer with the release of Ad Manager. Sister site, A Fuller View has more details including a bold prediction about what the future holds for ad serving in 2008.

Microsoft and FAST: Bill Gates at the SharePoint Conference

Off the main topic of AdViking, but interesting none the less. As predicted in the post about Getting Religion about Search, some more visibility into Microsoft’s thinking about the importance of Search and how they see FAST helping in this battle was revealed at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008.

In the Bill Gates keynote, he talks about the Microsoft approach to Enterprise Search, which is there are three levels to enterprise search and for each of these they have an offering:

1. Entry Level - Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express
2. Infrastructure - MOSS 2007
3. Specialized - This will be covered by FAST

As for FAST, Bill then goes on to say this:

FAST is best in class enterprise search, and it’s got great scale, it handles special data types. In a lot of businesses, this has turned out to be a very, very important tool for them.

Bill then introduces Richard Riley, Senior Technical Product Manager, who does a demo of Search Server Express but more importantly does two demo’s of FAST/SharePoint integration. The first being a great demo of FAST entity extraction to provide navigators mashed up with Silverlight to show the coolest document preview AdViking has seen so far. The second is a demo of zero-term search and how that can applicable to a SharePoint deployment.

You can get the video here (750 kbps) or you should be able to find it from this page: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/sharepointconference/materials.mspx

• Scroll to 14:25 to see Bill Gates last day at Microsoft (In case you haven’t seen it)
• Scroll to 47:50 to see Bill Gates discuss search and FAST
• Scroll to 54:45 to see the FAST/SharePoint integration

Also, Microsoft has made some interesting announcements about providing SharePoint and Exchange as online services. All of this, mapped up with the proposal to purchase Yahoo! reads to AdViking like Microsoft is starting the year very aggressively and are looking to take the fight to Google.