ClickZ provides this list of the top 50 Web advertisers for the month of May.
Note that the rankings are in “media value” and not hard dollars spent, which would be a far more interesting list. In other words, there’s a lot of horse-trading going down.
You don’t really think Classmates.com spent 12.5 million on Web advertising last month, do you?
Takeaway for marketers: Rate cards? Ha!
The AOL Broadband commercial on my television this morning began: “For 20 years, America Online has been bringing people online …”
Wow — 20 years? That made me do a double-take.
Well, technically, 20 years is correct. The corporate history page on AOL’s own site reminds us that May 25, 1985, was the first landmark in AOL’s history: “Date of incorporation under original founding name, Quantum Computer Services, registered in Delaware.”
Okay. But AOL for Mac and Apple II didn’t launch until more than four years later. The DOS version came along in February 1991, and the Windows version of AOL was launched in 1993.
So yes, AOL’s been around for 20 years. Technically. But to be invoking that stat in a commercial, positioning themselves as the “we’ve been around the longest so we know what we’re doing the most” folks? Strikes me as the kind of stretch that would make Reed Richards proud. Or did I miss the mention of AOL in Bowling For Soup’s video?
Here’s an oldie but a goodie.
Go to any Amazon.com product page, and right there along with buttons for “Ready To Buy” and “More Buying Choices” and “Add To Wish List” is a button for “Add To Wedding Registry.”
I don’t know how much wedding registry business Amazon does. Probably a lot. But it sure leads to some unintentionally odd and funny results, of which “divorce” is just the tip of the iceberg.
Takeaway for marketers: Forget the notion of 100% control when you’re marketing online. No online system is absolutely foolproof. Enjoy the laugh and move on.
CMO Magazine alerts us to a Boston Globe article reporting on how bloggers are selling out. Here’s a taste:
Dot Flowers’s ad agency paid Cutler $5 this spring to promote the florist and put a link to its website on his blog …. Cutler, who does not disclose the payment on his blog, is one of more than 2,000 bloggers whom marketer USWeb enlisted to hawk products and services.
This story ought to raise all kinds of hell among bloggers. Should bloggers reveal these sorts of payments? Absolutely, especially in a world where we expect reporters to reveal when there are possible conflicts of interest in their reporting, particularly in business stories. (You’ve seen it a million times: “So-and-so is owned by our parent company this-and-such.”)
Ed Shull, a USWeb executive, says: “In our opinion, paying bloggers is no different than Tiger Woods getting money to wear the Nike logo.”
Fair enough. But Tiger’s getting millions. Everyone knows it and understands what that kind of sponsorship is all about. Bloggers are selling out the integrity of their blogs for a small pile of pennies.
“Bloggers are more trusted, I think, because they are human,” says Jeff Jarvis in this New Media Musings blog entry, and by and large I think he’s probably right. But maybe being human also means being greedy. Also fair enough. But if you want to make a couple of pennies off your blog, at least be above board about it. Go sign up with Adsense or Blogads.
Wreckless Eric famously sang, “Take the cash.” But I bet even Eric would have walked away from a five-spot if it meant compromising his principles.
Takeaway for marketers: If you’re going to advertise on blogs, don’t try and deceive blog readers. The deception may backfire. It’s not worth the risk.
Reuters filed this report on June 24 about the Internal Revenue Service investigating “whether unauthorized people gained access to sensitive taxpayer and bank account information.”
In 2002, Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., speaking in Chicago about the effects of the 9/11 attacks on the country’s financial infrastructure, said:
“I am confident that … we will achieve an even higher degree of resilience for our financial system, which will be effective in responding to the panoply of imaginable–and even some unimaginable–events.”
We heard plenty about “failure of imagination” in the wake of 9/11. I hope that identity theft on a grand scale — which could play all kinds of havoc with our financial infrastructure — is part of the current imaginings for those who are in charge of such things.
