Southern Comfort dumps old media, and pours (pun intended) their entire $8 million media budget on the Net. Let’s hope they’ll spend it smarter then they did on this ad four years ago.
What’s wrong with this banner? Nothing – unless you place it in context. It appeared just days after Hurricane Katrina almost wiped out New Orleans… which gives the words “where anything can happen” a special meaning. And if you think it was just an innocent mistake, read the details here.
Related posts:
- Southern Comfort Pours Entire Media Budget Into Digital
- Southern Comfort Dumps Cable For Hulu, Facebook
- SoCo and Lime, and Facebook, and Hulu…
- Southern Comfort goes all in on web advertising
Tags: ads, adsense, advertising, Blogging, blogs, Hulu, marketing, southern comfort
Is Tivo Selling Out Their Customers?
Customer Service, Marketing / PR December 10th, 2008
Zat’s Not Funny reports that Tivo is getting ready to push advertisements whenever you hit Pause on your remote.
Using the TiVo Pause Menu, advertisers can, for the first time, reach audiences with targeted product messages displayed within the pause screen of a Live or Timeshifted program. The feature provides an original solution for advertisers seeking to capture the fast-forwarding viewer. It’s another example of how TiVo offers unique and different solutions for advertisers looking to get viewers to watch advertisements.
Another example of offering solutions to whom? Certainly not their customers.
Tags: ads, advertising, business model, Customer Focus, dvr, marketing, television, tivo, tv
Freezing Heat. Dumb Ads.
Humor, Marketing / PR October 24th, 2008
Screenshot from Yahoo Weather this morning:
We’re expecting heat today, and Yahoo (weather.com) placed a snowy pic, offering all sorts of winterizing services along with my forecast. I guess it did not notice the weather display was in Celsius, and 31C is about 88F.
For more advertising blunders see:
- The Irony of Contextual Advertising
- Contextual Advertising Blunders
- The Scary Thing about Contextual (?) Advertising
- From The Ad Targeting At Its Finest Department
Tags: adbrite, adsense, advertising, Adwords, contextual advertising
FAA Failure – Golden Vista Ad
Humor, Marketing / PR August 26th, 2008
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, this one certainly belongs to the contextual ad blunder series.
(Source: IT Project Failures)
Additional ad blunders:
- The Irony of Contextual Advertising
- Contextual Advertising Blunders
- The Scary Thing about Contextual (?) Advertising
Tags: adbrite, adsense, advertising, Adwords, contextual advertising
AdBrite = AdDumb. Why You Should Avoid In-line Ads, Whether Contextual or Not.
Blogging August 20th, 2008
Here’s a classic example for stupid “contextual” in-line ads:
Clicking on the “feature” link in this article brings up skin care products. The “tool” link in the first line points to Honeymoon Planning Services. Here are some more cases of “contextual” advertising gone bad:
- The Irony of Contextual Advertising
- Contextual Advertising Blunders
- The Scary Thing about Contextual (?) Advertising
But all these mishaps aside, here’s another reason why you should avoid such in-line hypertext ads:
They seriously reduce readability. This article happens to be quite important, so the first thing I’d like to do is click on the link to the Google tool that allows me to protect my account (you should read the original article to understand what’s at stake). But I can’t – the link is hijacked. In fact I can’t even tell if there is any intentional, relevant link in this post. Blogs, wikis, you-name-it: online writing is all about linking and relevancy. But there’s only so many we can deal with: when your article becomes a link-jungle, it becomes impossible to find the meaningful ones, supporting your message.
See also: Ridiculous Advertising – or the Case of the Hijacked link
Tags: adbrite, advertising, gmail, Google, hacking, hypertext, in-line ads, security, ssl
I often find out what’s happening in the world just be looking at the keyword activity in my blog referral log. Like today, when I received readers looking for news on the earthquake in Japan. This is actually sad, I feel bad for people looking for real info and getting “hijacked” – I am clearly not an earthquake expert, not even an authority on the subject. All I did was point out how Twitter had been the first to report on several quakes in China and Japan, long before the major news-wires, and miraculously (and unfortunately) my post became the #1 hit for the Japan earthquake search on Google for a while, even preceding Japan’s Meteorogical Agency, which should be the ultimate source for such information.
This isn’t anything new, I’ve seen some of my posts get into top Google positions before – but it’s more understandable when I write about a more obscure subject, or a startup nobody else covers… like Brainkeeper, where my post was #1 for months, preceding the company’s own site. Being #2 for the fairly generic search on saas very small business is a bit more surprising, and #1 for Microsoft Outlook Sluggish is certainly rather unexpected. Yahoo, for a change, lists my fairly old post as #1 for the very generic search term Startup Executives, and how on Earth did I get to dominate the igoogle for google apps search? 
Recently I’ve noticed it almost doesn’t matter what I write about, I can get a premium position for certain relevant keywords. As much as I am enjoying it (hey, who doesn’t like Google Juice), there’s something fundamentally wrong with this system. I think blogs are somewhat overrated, and perhaps individual posts should be weighted on their own merits, not the Google Juice of the main blog itself.
But there’s another conclusion we should draw here. Content is really king, to the extent that it can compete with advertising. Businesses should take notice: you can pay for AdWords, or get to the top by developing your own content – and organic hits are worth more than paid ads. 
There’s another side of the coin here: if you don’t develop your own content, someone else will – and you may not be happy with the results. I’m not sure UPS enjoys seeing my post immediately under their site for the google search UPS Tracking…
So once again: the old adage “Content is King” has got a new meaning. I’ve been contemplating this for a while, and am getting ready to announce a new initiative in the next few weeks.
Tags: advertising, adword, Blogging, content, Google, google juice, marketing, pagerank, search, SEM
When Your Technology Fails, Hire More Sales…
Marketing / PR, Startups June 17th, 2008
That seems to be the Technorati recipe: TechCrunch reports they have a new Sales VP with a 7-person sales team, and a new marketing lead. This build-up was likely in preparation for the new business, Technorati Media, a newly launched blog advertising network.
Technorati indeed needs a business model, so if this is it, fine. It’s just frustrating that they’ve spent the past two years in search of business models, while their service gradually fell apart. Anyway, in the spirit of the new-new business, I suggest they sell advertising on the Technorati page we see most frequently:
This was the rant – for details see: CNET News.com, Maple Leaf 2.0, Web Strategy, Trends in the Living Networks, A Media Circus, Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim
Tags: advertising, blog advertising, business models, Sales, technorati, technorati monster, technoratty
Privacy Advice from the Last Century
Misc, Software, Technology December 27th, 2007
I’m still wondering if the How to Safeguard Your Privacy Online post on GigaOM is real or a parody. No, I’m not talking about the advice for the paranoid, which includes gems like:
Do not make international phone calls.
Do not have a home broadband connection.
After all, these are for the paranoid… but let’s look at some of the tips for most of us, assuming we fall under the Feeling Practical But Not Paranoid category:
Do not use desktop search tools like Google Desktop or Microsoft Desktop Search.
Do not use webmail from a service provider like AT&T, Google or Microsoft.
Do not use browser toolbars or desktop gadgets.
Remove all social network accounts.
Clear your browser cookies after every session.
Change your local username daily.
He is so right, yet so wrong. Yes, the above are all real dangers on our privacy – but hey, we all know since Scott McNealy we don’t have privacy anyway. He got chastised for his famous declaration in 1998 – perhaps he was a bit ahead of his time, but things got a lot worse (better?) since then.
Let’s just look at cookies. The obvious Privacy 101 principle in the 90’s was to control them. Since then we’ve seen an army of cookie-washer products, the popular browsers all offer their own privacy/cookie settings – yet all this works less and less. Quite a few sites – including blogs – will fail to load properly when seemingly unrelated, third-party cookies are blocked. Sometimes they work, but next time you come back to the site, there’s just a white, blank screen. This is ugly. Since I can’t easily figure out what blocked the site, I typically end up deleting all browser cookies as well as all cookie-rules. Then the game starts again – some of the sites / blogs take minutes to rotate through dozens of cookie-requests, literally making it impossible to read their own content. I’m about to give up: might as well just enable cookies – privacy is long gone, anyway. Besides, if I am getting ads served up, they might as well be better targeted.
Not using search? Web-mail? Changing user-names daily? C’mon… it would be completely impossible to live with these rules. We have long given up any resemblance to privacy for the sake of convenience. Get used to it. Unless you want to shut down the Internet, remove any computers from the house and lock yourself up in your home. Better yet, move to a remote island, where everything is low-tech and healthy. 
Tags: advertising, convenience, cookies, inetrnet, privacy
The Irony of Contextual Advertising
Marketing / PR, SaaS October 29th, 2007
I fully agree with Ionut: Gmail’s spam filtering is amazingly effective. I don’t really care about how they do it, as long as it works this well.
But there’s a bit of irony in his post on Google Operating System, and it comes from none other than Google: just as soon as he’s done praising Gmail, Adsense serves up ad ad from a competing service: onlymyemail.com.
Funny thing is, competitor or not, Adsense is correct: the ad is as contextual as it can get, since the article was about spam filtering.
Of course it could have been a lot worse…
(P.S. the pic is only for illustration of what I found on Ionut’s blog; I am not running ads here)
Update: Donna Bogatin found another Web Blooper.
Tags: adsense, advertising, blog ads, contextual ads, Google, Online Advertising
The Blog Poll Platform You Should Avoid
Blogging, SaaS, Software, Technology March 14th, 2007
(Updated)
Polls are an easy, simple way of getting immediate customer/reader feedback, and also letting the voters know what their community thinks.
There are a number of good products to chose from, like dPolls often seen on TechCrunch, the platform GigaOM is using (whatever it is), Blogflux and Majikwidget seen at Guy Kawasaki’s, PollDaddy used by the ReadWriteWeb …etc. I tend to use Zoho Polls, which, other than its native display also allows me to easily chart out the results using Zoho Sheet. All these apps have a clean interface, are easy to use and immediately display vote results right where you voted (in the blog).
The one you should avoid is Blogpoll. My friends at Atlassian put out a poll, and after voting, and a ridiculously looong wait, this is what I saw:
WTF… where’s my poll? Ahh, perhaps that blue bar that says “your title”? Yes. If you scroll down, you can actually see your poll results in a tiny box, surrounded by a jungle of advertising.
Now, I understand the economics of a free service, but guess what: when you overdo advertising so badly that customers have too look for what they came for … chances are, they won’t be repeat customers. And that’s the end of your service.
(P.S. Jon, I hope you’ll still invite me to the User Conference…)
Update (3/15): Jon is now running a poll on what’s the best poll software… cast your vote over at Atlassian.
Tags: advertising, atlassian, blogflux, blogpoll, dpolls, majikwidget, online polls, polling, zoho polls
Zoli Erdos
