LONDON, July 27, 2006 (PRIMEZONE) -- Quantech Electronics Corp. (Pink Sheets:QTCE), software developer for marketing communications, announced today that Quantech has received excellent responses from its key clients to a presentation of its new "friction-free" marketing system, currently under development.
Full Article: http://www.primezone.com/newsroom/news.html?d=102836

By Rebecca Lieb | July 28, 2006
Nearly every summer, I have the honor (and the very great pleasure) of spending a few days with a small, very elite group of some of the top direct marketers in the country; the old school, envelopes, inserts, labels-and-stickers kind. All are clients of the legendary Jim Perdiew, a DM consultant with a waiting list for wannabe clients. As one member of the group whispered to me the other day, "I've never gone through a tougher interview in my life than the one when I was trying to get Jim to take me on as a client." Full Article

MySpace a launch pad for next-gen media biz
News Corp. charts 'what's next'
By Diane Mermigas

First of two parts.

CHICAGO -- What do you do for an encore after you sold Rupert Murdoch on the idea of buying an exploding online lounge called MySpace?

Fox Interactive Media president Ross Levinsohn knows what his next move is. Social networking, he assures, was just the beginning. Full Article

By Robin Neifield

July 26, 2006
Online, behavioral targeting is primarily a performance-based media tactic. For online retailers that means sales, frequently incremental sales at a lower cost per sale. Yet achieving optimal results requires a clear understanding of the specifics of what you're trying to achieve, including key performance indicators (KPI) and their relative prioritization in the overall program. That understanding must be communicated to those do the media planning and optimizing, those who prep the site, those who analyze the program results, and those who set the budget. Everyone needs to be on the same page. Here are three common objectives for e-tailers and how behavioral targeting programs can support those goals. Full Article

by Phil Leggiere, Friday, Jul 28, 2006 11:15 AM ET
WITH UPWARDS OF 90 PERCENT of American adult consumers using the Internet to research travel-related plans and purchases, travel firms theoretically have a raft of data about consumer behavior to leverage. The industry's current challenge, as Greg Saks, director of travel practice for Boston area-based industry research firm Compete explains below, is how to translate that data into deeper customer knowledge. Full Article

By Giselle Abramovich
July 21st, 2006

Air carriers like Southwest Airlines can more effectively understand the strength of their brand by looking at the extent to which consumers are researching them online.

Compete Inc.’s travel practice division took a close look at the travel research behavior of 2 million U.S. consumers on an ongoing basis. The effort also included research and booking behavior for each region of the United States. Full Article

Coral Gables, Fla. – July 7, 2006 - Terra.com, the US Hispanic portal of the Terra Networks global Internet group, has selected Revenue Science to provide behavioral targeting across its network. Revenue Science’s superior technology provides Terra.com a new offering to help advertisers reach their target audiences more effectively and efficiently. Full Article

NEW YORK – June 27, 2006 - Revenue Science, the leader in behavioral targeting for brand and search advertising, announced today that JupiterResearch has named the company as a category leader in behavioral targeting, as well as the single provider with the greatest reach. In addition, the report noted Revenue Science’s advanced technology and reporting capabilities. Full Article

By Anna Papadopoulos

If you still think of Yahoo's behavioral targeting solutions in terms of Fusion and Impulse, it's time you set up a meeting with your Yahoo representative. Yahoo recently upgraded its behavioral targeting platform. As a result, the company replaced its Fusion and Impulse products with new targeting terms, "Engagers" and "Shoppers." The mastermind behind these product developments is Richard Frankel, senior director of product marketing at Yahoo. In a recent interview, Frankel provided an overview of the developments and the thinking behind them. Full Article

by Jason Glickman, Monday, Jul 24, 2006 2:00 PM ET
Seventy-four billion dollars. Let me repeat, with emphasis: Seventy-Four Billion Dollars. That's what advertisers will spend this year to buy airtime on TV in the U.S.

The limp upfronts have gotten a lot of press and naturally, advertisers are getting some pressure to explore online video opportunities in an effort to "integrate the silos." Full Article

A report published on August 8, 2006 claims to reveal “pervasive reproducible problems in the way third-party click fraud auditing firms gather and report their data” according to Google. Google claims that auditing firms overestimate the number of clicks that occur within an advertiser’s account.

Google claims that the commonly used approximately 14% click fraud rate could not possibly be realistic and is troubled by it. Of course they are. And so is every other pay-per-click provider worth a scrap across the globe...

Espoo, Finland / Seattle, USA - Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Loudeye Corp. (Nasdaq: LOUD) today announced that they have signed an agreement for Nokia to acquire Loudeye for approximately USD 60 million. Loudeye is a global leader of digital music platforms and digital media distribution services. Under the terms of the agreement, Loudeye stockholders will receive USD 4.50 per share in cash for each share of Loudeye common stock. By acquiring Loudeye, Nokia can offer consumers a comprehensive mobile music experience, including devices, applications and the ability to purchase digital music...

MTVN Advances Strategy Of Super-Serving Audiences Across Every Platform; Acquisition Will Expand Online Portfolio With Casual Gaming And Video Sites

New York, NY, and San Francisco, Calif.–Aug. 9, 2006–MTV Networks (MTVN), a division of Viacom, Inc. (NYSE: VIA, VIA.B), today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Atom Entertainment, Inc., a portfolio of four leading online destinations for casual games, short films and video, for $200 million. Acquiring Atom Entertainment advances the company’s multiplatform strategy of building an engaging universe of music, gaming, entertainment, news and interactivity for targeted audiences...

In my commentary entitled “Google and MySpace ink $900M Deal”, I wrote “imagine how lucrative this relationship is going to turn out to be once Fox and Google square away the behavioral targeting side of this game.” Bambi Francisco just wrote an article highlighting the notion that “One of the most intriguing stories about the Internet isn't how much wealth it's created, but rather its impact on society.” Eric Schmidt recently said…

Publishers Beware: Your coverage market can outgrow you

Let this go out as a warning to all online publishers; keep an eye on your market and watch for outgrowth.

If you are a mass market publisher, you are less at risk of the below because your news is already very diversified. But if you are a niche publisher then read slowly, because this is a serious risk you face on a daily basis.

Online publishers need to be on heightened alert on a daily basis to keep tabs on their coverage market and to make sure that they are looking for signs that their coverage market has begun to outgrow them. When your coverage market outgrows you, it means that it has reached the point to which it may no longer need you as a traffic or supportive source. For example: say you birthed a content site on an entirely new form of email marketing...

Photo fraud on behalf of certain news agencies is nothing new. From time-to-time many news agencies have been caught red handed shall we say; embellishing the accuracy of the photos they send out to hundreds of thousands of readers. Here is a classic method allegedly used recently.

The argument that the news agency does control the reporter or photo journalist in the field is no excuse. The agency is responsible for the validity of every single piece of news and information (including images) this is published on any of its properties, whether they be print or web based.

I love games. If I had invested every dollar I turned into “4 quarters” I spent on video games between the ages of 10 and 18 in Bill Gate’s grand vision at the time, I would probably have a cool quarter-mill working hard for me right now. But that’s the past. Then again, I loved every eye jerking, pulse pumping, heart pounding, sweaty palm moment of it; so there.

In-game advertising, while in its infancy seems on the surface to have a whole lot of potential. As I mentioned in my previous post Consumers Want Permission Based Behavioral Targeting, advertising and the Gen-Ys are wrapped tight. Advertising is so much a part of their world that to separate the two would be like removing the birth mark from the head of Mikhail Gorbachev. Neither one would ever be the same; the birth mark or Mikhail...

The Public Broadcasting System website; PBS.org will be adding a new slot to it's online ad inventory.

Customer confidence in e-business is climbing. On a scale from 1 to 100, according to the recent American Customer Satisfaction Index, e-business satisfaction has increased 0.80% to 76.5 in Q2’06, up from 75.9 in Q2’05...

Brought to you by: JMP Securities

ComScore disclaimer. While comScore data can be inaccurate over shorter periods of time, as suggested by comments from several Internet companies during their 2Q06 conference calls, we believe the comScore data is directionally accurate for most companies over longer periods of time.

We use comScore data to identify user and usage trends for companies within our coverage universe and across the Internet that are contrary to our expectations or Street consensus. We do not for our purposes nor would we recommend that investors make investment decisions based on comScore data alone. However, we do believe it is important for Internet investors to keep an eye on the comScore data in order to 1) identify the beginning of longer-term trends within the space, 2) help inform investment decisions, and 3) inspire questions to ask management and industrysources relating to the accuracy or inaccuracy of the data.

John Brock
OMAnalyst
8/28/2006

As effective as a 2 minute spot and as elusive as a blink of an eye, these Buckyball-like 5 second ads are gaining popularity but will they do the job?

Sitting through a 30 second ad for a 2.5 minute video clip is frustrating yes. But, will sitting through a 5 second ad move you? And will it be worth an advertiser’s hard earned advertising spend?

China Second only to US & Spanish Users Jump 216.7%

According to Internet World Stats, Chinese internet usage by language has risen to 144,301,513, accounting for 13% of all users, while the US (English) 312,924,679, accounting for 30% of all users. China is second only to the US.

The number of Spanish users captures 7.5% of the internet and has risen to 78,166,075.

John Brock
OMAnayst
The biggest challenge an online business faces is getting leads to the website. Here are 3 proven steps you can take to help transform your staff into “Advocate Traffic Pushers” and increase the number of unique and repeat visitors to your company’s internet property.

By John Brock

Good-bye Steve ya nutty bugga!

We’ve lost an ambassador to the animal kingdom over the weekend. Steve Irwin known across the globe as the “Crocodile Hunter” fell victim to the stab of a stingray while he was shooting footage for a wildlife documentary. A one-in-a-million tragedy, the lovable wildlife expert with a heart of gold and a passion for everything wild brought laughter and education to all those who watched his often hair raising interactions with wild creatures of all types. Steve Irwin will be missed the world over. My thoughts go out to his wife and two children, of whom millions have watched (I included) grow over the years.

What do Steve Irwin, Google and the MythBusters have in common? What gives them the ability to drive their brand home, to reach into the heart of millions and always come out on top? They are involved in completely different disciplines, yet their success in penetrating their market, reaching out and touching their audience is rare. A wildlife expert, a high-tech media information giant and two kind of weird guys that test if things are as they seem or all successful and all loved by millions. Why?

“Micropayments are means for transferring money, in situations where collecting money with the usual payment systems is impractical, or very expensive, in terms of the amount of money being collected. Generally, micropayment systems accumulate many micropayments, and collect the accumulated amount of money as one regular payment either before or after the transactions. ... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayments”

If you want to make the same amount of money and keep your customers happy while they are forking over their cash, then you should try to adopt a micropayment strategy for your online business.

By John Brock | September 11, 2006

Pay-per-click networks Kevorkian like behavior aids in the kill-off.

New and veteran advertisers are commit click suicide by submitting tens of thousands of keywords or more just to get traffic, hoping that they may convert into sales. The result; hundreds and thousands of clicks that aren’t worth a rats a$$ occur every single day across the internet.

I was watching Ted Koppel and his 3 hour show on “Price of Security” two days ago. During the discussions the panel talked a lot about the apparent extreme existential anxiety that has been instilled in the American public pertaining to the potential threats of Saddam Hussein at the time and current Al Qaeda and other Islamic Terrorist organizations. The panel and audience talked about privacy issues concerning the casting of the huge electronic surveillance net by the NSA and CIA in hopes to catch the small percentage of extremists that would want to do us harm and if that impedes on American civil liberties.

I won’t go there...

by John Brock
In numerous cultures throughout the world, mature and elderly citizens are treated as precious resources to be guarded, protected and learned from. Young adults and children clamor to their side in eager anticipation to listen to stories of wisdom and insight. They are approached when things go wrong and others look to them for guidance and answers. They are respected and loved.

The “Bid Gap”, it is the numerical (value) difference between two adjacent bid positions. For example, if bid position 4 has a value of $0.82 and bid position 5 has a value of $0.50, you have a significant bid gap of $0.32.

By John Brock
Second tier PPC (pay per click) distribution channels are fighting for their lives. MIVA (formerly FindWhat.com), LookSmart (formerly LookSmart with money), Kanoodle, Enhance Interactive (formerly Ah-Ha), Interchange Corporation (formerly just ePilot), are you starting to see a pattern?

Second tier PPC is struggling to keep its head in play so that it can get punched around some more. Fighting click-fraud takes money, takes resources and takes time, all of which 2nd tier players don’t have much of. Moreover, they shouldn’t count of Google to calm the waters for them. As I stated in SuperClick Theory, Google has seen the light and is heading for it, minus the zombies, living dead and really messed up front yard.

It is click-fraud and it’s destructive, but is it as rampant as some want us to believe? Some networks are publicly taking the fight on. However, without full transparency advertisers are left to guess or take the network’s word regarding how much hard earned dollars may be siphoned from their budget. Here to help us understand a bit more about click-fraud and how we can fight against it is Stuart DePina, Chief Executive Officer, Who's Calling. Headquartered in Kirkland Washington, with a branch office in Irvine, California, it’s helping to win the fight against click-fraud by opening up the processes surrounding it for everyone to see. Let’s see what Mr. DePina has to say.

Unlike other forms of online advertising, local search is a precision instrument. Local search campaigns are not to be managed the same as CPM based or national pay-per-click campaigns.

Local search campaigns need to be managed in much the same way as a local newspaper or cable television campaign would be. It is very important to develop a local search campaign that is specifically orchestrated for the local area market. Too often I see local search campaigns that are nothing more than carbon copies of the advertisers’ pay per click campaign. This type of online advertising management will render a local search initiative useless. More>>

Recently the AP reported that Rupert Murdoch asked his wife to go to China to help with research regarding a potential Chinese MySpace deal.

Murdoch as been trying to go Chinese for while but has been unable to successfully integrate due to “restrictions on foreign media ownership”, another phrase for “Chinese government censorship”. Just keeping it real.

Murdoch says "We have to make MySpace a very Chinese site, which is really why I sent my wife there, because she's Chinese and understands it," he said.” That is wrong Mr. Murdoch, you have to make MySpace and very “free” site. Making it a very Chinese site by definition, because of the Chinese government would make it a censored site. If you can not keep it “free” than it shouldn’t exist there.

Hint: Chinese Censorship = Bad for Advertising.

Warning: If you sell 20” rims, don’t think that your online shoppers are all black, white guys and Spanish chicks love’m too!

Why is it important to know that according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, as of April 2006, Black online internet users trail behind at 61%. While Whites (non-Hispanic) reside at 73% and English-Hispanic are at 75%?

One of the most challenging aspects of doing business is getting noticed. The challenge is exaggerated if you are a small business with a limited marketing budget.

So how do you go about advertising like the big fish? The very first thing you need to do is to think tactically. Think about all the ways you could possibly advertise your online business; organic search, paid inclusion, pay-per-click / local search, behavioral targeting, contextual targeting, email marketing, viral marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, affiliate marketing.

Oh yea, there are tons of ways to advertise and market your products. But you should pick just 3. Let’s say you are an online catering business. Now pick 3 advertising and marketing vehicles from the above list that you can use to maximize your budget. Let’s choose; paid inclusion; pay-per-click / local search and word-of-mouth.

by Kevin Gold
Ehnhanced Concpets
Whether you want to maximize your paid search marketing or you are in the process of redesigning your website, you must think like your customer. Sure you heard it all before yet how well are you implementing it?

Two years ago, I began using ezine advertising as the cornerstone of my online marketing efforts. From the need to determine the most productive and cost effective ezines to advertise in, I stumbled upon a method that revealed the secrets of successful online marketers.

The Method
My method is easy to follow. There's 3 basic steps:

1.Examine several communication tools the experts use such as an email or sales page.
2.Compare these tools and search for similarties.
3.Collect the common points and implement those findings.

For example, suppose I want to find out how to construct or improve a sales page for a product I own or have resell rights to. The first thing I do is to get online and do a search. In this example, I search using the phrase "internet marketing experts index". Second, I open every sales web page the search produces in a multi tab browser (Mozilla). Third, I compare the pages looking for similarities. I note these down in Windows notepad, taking care not to overlook details such as fonts, colors, graphics, etc. Finally, I incorporate the information I collected into my own sales pages.

A revolutionary marketing device that I call article marketing I now will share with you. Now the sole question is can article marketing me? That depends on if you are looking to build pr, increase your inbound links, and boost your traffic. If you answered yes to any of the above questions then continue to read, and learn the tricks of the trade.

Before you begin to write your first article, you should ask yourself why I would use articles to market my website, in opposition to other methods. Well first of all it’s free, and what is more desirable than a new fresh free way to promote your website for free. Article marketing will also help build your inbound links and bring in a good amount of traffic, when written and distributed correctly.

Welcome to the first in our Search 101 series. These articles will provide introductions to topics in search marketing, starting with understanding how the search engines work and moving on to the opportunities they present business owners and how to manage different types of campaign.

This article is part two of a two part article; the first part can be found here.

Shopping or Price Comparison Results

As price comparison engines like DealTime (now Shopping.com), Kelkoo, and Price Runner grew in popularity, so the search engines began to see them as a potential threat; somewhere else consumers could search for products and online stores other than the search engines themselves. Over time they have integrated shopping results into their search results, either by buying a shopping search site (Yahoo! bought Kelkoo in Europe) or by building their own (Google built Froogle to provide shopping search and price comparisons).