Web Wednesday Singapore 15.0 - At Geek Terminal - Wednesday May 27, 2009 - 6:30pm

Jaime Ocampo, the APAC Head of Business Development for Mobile at Friendster will be sharing with us all of the great things Friendster is doing on bringing social connectivity into the mobile space. Jaime is a known mobile specialist where before Friendster, he was the Head of Sales and Marketing SEA for EA Mobile.

Come join and find out more about this fast growing new digital opportunity!

And don't forget about the ad:tech offer:

Web Wednesday attendees will stand a chance to win 2 complimentary conference passes or refer 5 of your industry peers whom you think would be keen to attend and purchase a full conference pass at only US$500! Click here to view the form, fill it out, and send it back to Ad:Tech.

For conference pass purchase and redemption details, please contact Daphne Yuen at AdTech, DID: +65 6513 0601

See you next Wednesday!

Remember: This month we return to the Geek Terminal on Wednesday, May 27th from 6:30-8:30 (and onwards).

Digital/Web Wednesday Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur Tonight

Hey sports fans.... apparently the Digitial/Web Wednesday Malaysia 3.0 event is happening tonight in Kuala Lumpur.  They are up to their third event and have a speaker- the new VP for comScore in Asia Pacific.

I attended the last event in April and it was pretty good- Jordan and crew had about 80 people and it seemed to be all of the movers and shakers in the Digital World in KL.  Was great for networking and catching up with friends in the industry.  If you are around- you should attend.

The event starts at 6:30pm and it will be held at Souled Out in Mont Kiara.

Dont know what they will call it yet- apparently there is a bit of a bun fight about the name....   Until it is resolved we will call it Digital/Web Wednesday Malaysia.

"Google’s Outage Was Asia’s Fault"

That was the sensational title on TechCrunch. Google re-routed some traffic here and there to pass through Asia. As someone commented in that post, why was it "Asia's fault" when Google was the one who futzed up and sent traffic to unknown destinations? We can accept some responsibility for SARS, but this?

The Google Blog has this explanation:

===
This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern...
5/14/2009 12:15:00 PM

Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That's basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time. An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and "always on," so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again. All planes are back on schedule now. Posted by Urs Hoelzle, SVP, Operations
===

I experienced intermittent problems with access yesterday: Gmail and such. Here's my theory:

Google was re-tooling some of it services that it has been customizing for particular partners and clients .... like say... inSing.com !!! So while they were playing around with the DNS servers, some one probably was off by a digit or so and "kablooey!" traffic went everywhere.

What made me think of this? Well, I went to the launch party on Wednesday and thought it was a pretty cool offering. So yesterday, I went online to check it out. Good Stuff! I signed up for an email account and realized that it was a "grey labeled" Gmail account with inSing branding.

So to offer this kind of service with partners, Google would have to play around with the DNS and such. Make sense? Anyhow, I wonder if this has anything to do with the error I got below, or it is just Beta teething problems.

NY Times: Apple & Google Conspiracy

The New York Times published an article regarding the Federal Trade Commission's inquiry into ties between Apple's and Google's Board of Directors: "Board Ties at Apple and Google Are Scrutinized".

"Apple and Google share two directors, Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, and Arthur Levinson, former chief executive of Genentech. The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 prohibits a person’s presence on the board of two rival companies when it would reduce competition between them. The two companies increasingly compete in the cellphone and operating systems markets.

Antitrust experts say the provision against 'interlocking directorates,' known as Section 8 of the act, is rarely enforced. "

Because Apple and Google compete and partner in many areas ("co-opetition"), the FTC wants to make sure there is no collusion or conflict of interest:

- Google, for instance, worked with Apple to design early versions of some its services, like Gmail and Google Maps,.

- Mobile phones, in particular, loom large in the future of both Google and Apple. Much of Apple’s fortunes these days are tied to the success of the iPhone.

- Google, for its part, has said repeatedly that one of its biggest strategic opportunities is to expand its online advertising empire into mobile phones... It also produces the Android operating system for mobile phones that compete with the iPhone. The system currently powers the T-Mobile G1, a phone that some analysts say is the most capable of a number of rivals.

- The Android operating system is being built into lightweight portable computers known as netbooks, which may compete with some Apple laptops

- Apple makes the Safari Web browser while Google makes the competing Chrome.

- Apple’s iTunes and Google’s YouTube are increasingly competing as venues for distribution of music and videos. And the two companies have photo-editing services.

- Both Google and Apple share a rival in Microsoft, which competes with the two companies in some areas.

- "Mr. Schmidt joined Apple’s board in 2006, about five months before it unveiled the iPhone. Google announced its plans for Android, its mobile phone operating system, nearly a year later. Since then, analysts have speculated that Mr. Schmidt’s position on Apple’s board could become untenable. Google has said he recuses himself when Apple’s board discusses mobile phones."

India’s version of “Twitter” Has Millions of Users and Makes Money!

TechCrunch reports that SMSGupShup has 20 million users and makes USD 150,000 per month. And it's all SMS based!!!!

===
"The service can only be accessed via SMS, which works just fine for India’s 400 million mobile phone users (there are just 40 million broadband Internet users, Sheth says). Users sign up and use the service all via text messages. They never need to visit the website at all.

The service’s main variable costs are fees for text messages, and Sheth says that they’ve had to implement caps to keep costs under control. But as the service grows, says Sheth, they are able to negotiate much better pricing. Already SMSGupShup accounts for 400 million monthly text messages, around “5%-6%” of the total Indian market.

Three months ago the service added advertising to messages. Three months in and they’re making $150,000/month in revenue. Not bad for a SMS-based service."

===

Anyone heard of something similar for Indonesia or the Philippines or Vietnam?

Anyone want to launch such a service in those markets with me?

"The Online Ad Recession Is Officially Here"

A few weeks ago, I posted about the dismal projections made by various analysts and organizations regarding the growth of online advertisting.

TechCrunch now declares that "The Online Ad Recession Is Officially Here". Below is a chart of the quarterly aggregated online ad revenues of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL - the four largest Web advertising companies. "If you add up the online advertising revenues of these four online advertising bellwethers, the total online advertising revenues for the quarter came to $7.9 billion, a 2 percent decline from a year ago and a 7 percent decline from the fourth quarter."



Here's the same data looking at % change year over year.
"On an annual basis, the revenue growth just keeps going down from 18 percent growth in the third quarter to 8 percent in the fourth to this quarter’s 2 percent dip. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, the decline is even steeper... These numbers represent global advertising revenues, and include network revenues paid to affiliates through AdSense and Yahoo’s ad network."

You know what???

2010 year-over-year numbers are going to look awesome...

People DO trust online sites as a news source

eMarketer has an article titled: "Does Anyone Trust the Media?"

"Globally, the most trusted information source was friends, with 42% of those surveyed saying that they trusted word-of-mouth recommendations. About an equal number trusted TV news (41%), online news (40%) and newspapers (39%). "

Here are the stats for a few countries in Asia Pac:

Online news beats TV in Australia, barely trails TV and Newspapers in China, 6 points behind Newspaper in Japan, and South Koreans are equally distrustful of all sources of information.


Here's what European countries look like:


Americans and Canadians. It's interesting that Americans are much less trustful of the traditional media than Canadians, but only differ by 4% when it comes to online news. Does the "pull factor" of interactive media make it more trustworthy and relevant than a "push factor" of traditional news? As in, I can "pull" the news from whatever sources I want to enrich my view of a subject matter vs. getting "push" news from a tradition publisher's (possibly biased) view.


So the question is: "WHY IS DIGITAL ADSPEND STILL AT 5% OR LESS?!?"

Comscore: "Cost Per Click Based Advertising Models Fail to Monetize the Full Impact of Online Ad Exposures for Publishers"

I ran across this release from the comScore press section.

Essentially it says that banner ads and paid search ads contribute to offline sales as well as branding. Here are some interesting charts:

1) For the studies in which both retailers’ online and offline sales were analyzed, for periods ranging from two weeks to three months after the initial exposure to an online display ad, the incremental online sales lift was 27 percent and offline sales lift was 17 percent

Lift in Retailers’ Online and Offline Sales among Internet Users Exposed to Display Ads Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore Brand Metrix, Norms Database
	Monthly Sales ($) per Thousand Exposed Consumers
	Control	Test	Lift
Online Sales	$994	$1,263	27%
Offline Sales	$9,905	$11,550	17%

2) A substantial lift in visitation to the advertiser’s Web sites can be observed in the weeks following an exposure to a display ad, even though click rates are less than 0.1 percent. Specifically, there was a 65 percent increase in lift in the week following the first ad exposure and a 46-percent increase over the four weeks following the first exposure, underscoring the latent branding effect.

Lift in Advertiser Site Visitation Among Internet Users Exposed to Display Ads Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore Brand Metrix, Norms Database
	Advertiser Site Reach
	Control	Test	Lift
Week Following First Ad Exposure	2.1%	3.5%	65%
Weeks 1-2 After First Exposure	3.1%	4.8%	54%
Weeks 1-3 After First Exposure	3.9%	5.8%	49%
Weeks 1-4 After First Exposure	4.5%	6.6%	46%

3) Online display ads can cause an increase in search queries that involve the advertiser’s trademark brand name. Specifically, the average lift in branded trademark searches for the online advertisers studied was 52 percent in the week following the first ad exposure. The norms data also show a substantial continued impact, with a 38-percent lift in trademark searches in the four weeks following the first ad exposure.

Lift in Branded Trademark Search Among Internet Users Exposed to Display Ads Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore Brand Metrix, Norms Database
	Percentage Making a Trademark Search
	Control	Test	Lift
Week Following First Ad Exposure	0.2%	0.3%	52%
Weeks 1-2 After First Exposure	0.4%	0.5%	46%
Weeks 1-3 After First Exposure	0.5%	0.7%	40%
Weeks 1-4 After First Exposure	0.6%	0.9%	38%

iMedia Weekly: The Phils, Portal security, Holistic Analytics & Scientific Marketing Approaches

Published: May 05, 2009

The Philippines: A new era of relationship marketing

By Quad dela Paz

Consumers in The Philippines now have endless methods of finding and getting information. The challenge for marketers? Consumers are now open, brands must follow.

3 tips to securing your portal -- and protecting your customer

By Amuleek Bijral

Organisations that instill confidence in their customers by ensuring their personal and business information is safe will have a competitive edge. Here are three ways to do this.

A holistic approach to web analytics

By Chandler Nguyen

The best way to take advantage of web analytics is to gradually build a company culture that embraces actionable analytics and tracking.

A scientific approach to marketing

By Marcel Lee Pereira

Global information services company Experian recently launched its complete marketing services offering across Asia Pacific. Glenn Parker, managing director of Experian's Marketing Services division, Asia Pacific, shares how data-driven marketing can help organisations maximize results and investment.

"Should Ad Networks Pay Publishers For Stolen Content?"

Ran across this article in TechCrunch.

The Fair Syndication Consortium - made up of Associated Press, Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, Politico and others - want ad networks to go after anyone "for aiding and abetting the destruction of their businesses and sometimes the wholesale theft of their content."

===
The Fair Syndication Consortium is initially trying to address a legitimate problem on the Web: the proliferation of splogs (spam blogs) and other sites which do nothing more than republish the entire feed of news sites and blogs, often without attribution or links. There are tens of thousands of these sites, perhaps more. Rather than go after these sites one at a time, the Fair Syndication Consortium wants to negotiate directly with the ad networks which serve ads on these sites: DoubleClick, Google’s AdSense, and Yahoo primarily. For any post or page which takes a full copy of a publisher’s work, the Fair Syndication Consortium thinks the ad networks should pay a portion of the ad revenues being generated by those sites.
===

This website seems to be one of those "splogs". I took the title of this post from TechCrunch itself! So there... Ha!

So go after our ad network. Oops, we don't advertise anything on this site.

"Aye, there's the rub." Oops, now Shakespeare is going to come after me for using that line from Hamlet's famous "To Be Or Not To Be" soliloquy.

According to Attributor (related to the Consortium), this is how much money splogs are making from other publishers' content:

And the ad networks that are helping these splogs?
"Go after those three ad networks, and the majority of the problem could be solved."

Good luck!

Geert Desager's Presentation @ Web Wednesday Singapore V14.0

There were lots of positive feedback from Geert's presentation the other day. He flashed the slideshare.net link at the end of preso, but I am not sure how many people managed to write it down or remember it (considering that it was after a few drinks.)

Here's the presentation below. Follow the link to Slideshare if you like to see some of his other work.

Webwednesday Fashion Online Advertising April 2009

View more presentations from Geert Desager.

Pictures from Web Wednesday v 14.0

Hi All,

I finally got around to uploading some of these pictures that I took last Wednesday. I am guessing we had over 90 people there.

Click to see larger images.