AdViking

In an interesting week when Microsoft is pushing ahead with the Yahoo attempt, the Ray Ozzie thumbprint is felt in the cloud, the deal to purchase Fast Search & Transfer (disclosure below) has been announced to have been closed.

Now the deal has closed, Microsoft will be able to deliver on the strategy that Bill Gates outlined in his final keynote at the Sharepoint Conference 2008.

Disclosure:  Some of AdViking is employed by FAST and Microsoft.  More details on About.

Adviking notes that Google have turned the screw in terms of search-driven PPC. Not only do they have greater search share, but they also earn more per page view. Is this merely down to increased competition within the keywords? We don’t think so.

Think about this: Google offers time targeting, geo targeting, offline editing, publishing of phone numbers on ads, hands-off editorial process, wider range of payment options, tight control over keyword and a much more intuitive UI. Do they do this for the advertiser? Yes and no. Talk to any advertiser and they will tell you that targeting is crucial, they know their target cost per acquisition and Google comes out very favourably. All of the list mentioned either makes targeting easier (= more valuable, = higher spend), or the process of publishing quicker. Google ENABLE.

What about Yahoo! ? They launched their new Search Marketing product with much fanfare, but it pales when matched up to the above list. It sort of has geo-targeting… but that’s about it. Worse, it seems to hamper advertisers: the editorial process can be a real pain, ‘advanced match’ is rather arbitrary and they make odd decisions… For example you could have an offline editor, but access is restricted. Medium and low value campaigns are capped to just 20 ad groups (so clients who would spend more don’t). They could offer time-targeting, but don’t.

AdViking wonders whether the hook-up on ads between Google and Yahoo! is also because Google is so much better at extracting value because it understands advertisers, rather than DISABLING them, like Yahoo! does. Maybe they should take some notes…

Credit must go to MSN, they have tried to catch up with Google. AdCenter started off clunky, but has add good functionality and targeting, including profiling. It’s not quite there, but improving rapidly. However MSN has one giant challenge: low reach! By the time a business has set up Google for a trial, and then moved on to Yahoo!, they omit MSN - some still think that Yahoo! run MSN ads (they used to a couple of years ago). Not only that, but because of the low reach, geo targeting or profiling becomes pointless because it reduces even popular terms to the odd click through a day. So, the challenge for MSN is to ENGAGE - both the public who still don’t use their search much, as well as the advertiser who sees it as ancilliary to business.

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.

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 couple of interesting items about the proposed deal by Microsoft to acquire Yahoo! came out over the last couple of days.

Analysts Give the Thumbs Up to the deal

Reuters provided details on a poll they ran against the Wall Street analysts who cover Microsoft and Yahoo! Some breakout of the numbers given:

• 28 of the 30 respondents say the deal will be done
• 1 of the nay, holds out hopes for AOL
• 1 of the nay, thinks it will be blocked by regulators
• 14 expect MSFT to close the deal at the initial offer
• 4 expect MSFT to convert the deal to all cash
• 12 expect MSFT to raise the price between 413.50 & $35 per share

The full story was in the iht on Sunday.

Exec Meet & Greet

WSJ and others have reported that on Monday, Senior Execs from Microsoft and Yahoo! met so that Microsoft could outline what the vision for what a post-merger entity would look like. The agenda for the meeting was similar to those that Yahoo! held with AOL and News Corp. What’s interesting is that this is the first time the companies have spent some face time together since the unsolicited bid was announced.

Is Yahoo! being tactical by playing nice before Ballmer gets hostile ahead of the Yahoo! board meeting or is Jerry Yang realising that in the face of a hardening economy, he should probably shake hands on this one before it’s too late.