Devour The Web

Its acquisitions of Digitas and Business Interactif last year helped boost Publicis’ digital revenues to 18 percent of the total pie in Q1 as the holding company continues to expand online and in emerging markets. The strongest growth rates were in its digital businesses, which soared over 20 percent, followed by media activities.

That said, the quarter just ended was a fairly quiet one for Publicis on the digital front, though it did trumpet a new relationship with Google and rebrand its India and Singapore-based marketing services unit as Solutions | Digitas. Publicis’s Asia-Pacific, Africa and Middle East businesses grew at a much higher rate than did its North America and Europe operations, where it makes its big money.

Publicis’ other units include media services powerhouses Starcom MediaVest and ZenithOptimedia. Big account wins for the quarter included Delta (Digitas), BT, Cadbury, Bank Of America (Starcom Mediavest), L’Oréal (ZenithOptimedia), and Miller (Saatchi & Saatchi).

Sponsored Links

“A gossip is one who talks to you about others; a bore is one who talks to you about himself; and a brilliant conversationalist is one who talks to you about yourself.” ~Lisa Kirk

Any questions?

The 3 Most Important SEO Marketing Secrets
 by: Glenn Ford

Follow these three easy marketing secrets and enjoy success as you watch your site climb in the SERPs.

a) Your SEO Marketing Strategy Should Target The End User

Most SEO Marketing strategies may work dramatically in the short term but fail quickly simply because it has been designed without the end user in mind. There is always this obsession to please search engines and to do things to “trick” search engines to give your site the top slot in searches.

In actual fact the real client that every SEO marketing strategist should have in mind is the end user and not the search engines. The end user is that person out there who will use their favorite search engine to seek out all sorts of information.

The end user is always looking for content-rich and well-written sites. This means that any SEO marketing that places emphasis on these qualities starts with a huge advantage.

Advertising network Adify is being acquired by Cox Enterprises for $300 million, the Associated Press is reporting. The deal is said to be announced today.

“We’re absolutely convinced at Cox that online revenue is continuing to grow,” John Dyer, Cox executive vice president for finance, told The Associated Press.

Adify is one of many ad networks that have emerged over the past year.
It got its start in the niche vertical network world by introducing a network of blog sites associated with Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States.

Retailers promoting Earth Day in their e-mail messages this year increased to 16 percent, up from a measly 4 percent in 2007.

That trend was noted by RetailEmail.Blogspot, which tracks the e-mail marketing campaigns of more than 100 large online retailers.

Tactics varied among retailers. Some such as Banana Republic donated a slice of sales to green charities; others such as OfficeMax promoted energy-efficient products, said Chad White, editor-at-large of the Email Experience Council and founder of RetailEmail.Blogspot.

Other retailers promoted green products in recent weeks, but didn’t specifically mention Earth Day. Among them: REI, whose e-mail discussed recycling’s merits.

… and why I ‘m dying to get finally in the Google SERP

Have you also experienced that getting indexed on Google, despite the Google crawler visits each day your site, is getting tougher and tougher, not to say it’s apparently almost impossible in short term?! Between us, in the corridors of Google, they’re talking about the notorious ‘Google Sandbox’ theory. According this theory, a new website is first ’sandboxed’ and doesn’t get a ranking when the keywords of that website are not incredibly competitive. The Google Sandbox is in fact a filter placed in March of 2004 which new websites prevents from having immediately success in the Google search engine result pages. This filter “is only intended to reduce search engine spam”. The sandbox filter is not a permanent filter for your website, what means you can only wait, wait and wait until Google liberates you from this filter. In mean time, don’t recline, but write original and well optimized content; write, publish and share articles, place a link on other websites etc.

An example:

If you have a marketing business, chances are you get excited at the prospect of acquiring a new product to sell. One challenge to marketing, especially over the Internet, is the amount of competition. Affiliate programs often create an enormous amount of competitors offering identical products. Experienced marketers realize the benefit and excitement of being the first to make a new product offering of an affiliate product, or even better, their own exclusive product.

Suppose you’ve done your research and located a couple of products that you believe potential buyers are seeking, ones you feel are the next generation of hot, high demand items. You want to offer them and beat the competition to the niche market. You know you could really make a financial killing if you had exclusive rights to them, by marketing them yourself and through your own affiliate program. How do you acquire exclusivity of these products?

“The next great network will not be televised.”

With this, and other grandiose pronouncements, Warner Bros. Television Group unveiled two major new broadband sites, a couple of virtual worlds, and named some of the advertisers that will support the launch.

The WB.com, which comes out of beta in August, will be an online video-on-demand network featuring both library content and original Web productions. “We’re in the digital storytelling business,” noted Warner Bros. TV Group President Bruce Rosenblum, “and making a significant investment in our digital initiatives.”

The company was more tight-lipped about advertising opportunities, but did reveal initial sponsors include Mattell, McDonald’s and Johnson & Johnson.

In addition to distrubution partners including Comcast, AOL, Fancast.com, and some mobile carriers, WB created an application on Facebook. All content on the WB site will be available for viewing from within Facebook, and vice-versa: users can peruse Facebook from inside The WB.com.

KidsWB.com is the juvenile version of WB content on the Web. Integrated within the platform are two virtual worlds: Warner Zone, featuring characters from WBs extensive cartoon library, and DC Hero Zone, where Batman and his ilk can be encountered. It goes live sometime next month.

Barack Obama’s campaign paid over $145,000 to local media buying firm Centro in February and March, according to FEC filings. The Illinois Senator’s camp paid the Chicago-based company $138,000 in February.

My guess is that money went towards a pre-primary effort aimed at Texas and Ohio voters in February. The campaign went through Centro to buy homepage placements on Texas and Ohio newspaper and TV sites. In addition to purchasing media for the effort, Centro produced the creative. So, just how much of those dollars went towards creative services and other costs for the video-enabled ads vs. actual local media is unclear.

I’ll be discussing this campaign during a talk I’ll give on local online political advertising Thursday morning at the Kelsey Group’s Drilling Down on Local Conference. We’ll also be distributing a booklet on how the presidential campaigns have used local online media during the primaries.

You can download a PDF version of All Primaries Are Local: 2008 Presidential Campaigns Buy Local Online for free today!

Can You Survive Google’s Jagger Update?
 by: Craig Broadbent

Google recently carried out a major update on its ranking algorithm, dubbed “Jagger” by the SEO community. Many webmasters have been left scratching their heads, wondering why their websites are no longer appearing for search terms they previously ranked well for and gained traffic from. So what can you do in the aftermath of “Jagger”, and how can you safeguard yourself from future updates?

First, a little bit of history. What is a Google algorithm update?

Google, like all search engines, has an algorithm that is used to determine the order of their search engine results pages (SERPs). This algorithm is made up of over 100 factors used to determine the ranking of a page. The reason Google needs to continually update this algorithm is to combat unscrupulous search engine optimisers who figure out factors of the algorithm and then try to exploit them in order to gain high rankings. This exploitation usually results in poor quality, or “spammy” pages, which are irrelevant to the user and therefore not results that Google wants to provide.