I ran across this Google ad put on by well-known brand and (ostensibly) Facebook partner, Blockbuster. Apparently, you can’t put the word “Facebook” in an ad on Google and have to say “Face book” according to this particular promotion. Seems a bit ridiculous, don’t you think?

The ad links to http://www.blockbuster.com/movieclique, the Movieclique Facebook app site on Blockbuster.com… and ironically I saw this ad on a Facebook app itself, Scrabulous. So much for having a tight relationship with a major brand I guess?

Walking back to my hotel from Ad:Tech New York through Columbus Circle, I saw the Writers Guild picket line in front of the Time Warner building. I snapped a few quick photos including “Honk if you want Lost to come back” and of course the huge inflatable cigar-chomping greedy pig!

This was funny - according to this, an advertising agency set up a fake blog for a prospective client (Panera) and then comment spammed a well-known subject-matter blog with a link to their site. Things like this emphasize to me (1) how early we still are in this weblog thing, (2) how widely the this blog thing has propagated now that everybody wants their own piece of it and (3) how the social ‘rules’ of discourse for blogging and especially, for the commercial use and misuse of same have not yet really completely crystallized yet.

Check this out, Bob Parsons (head of Godaddy.com, one of my favorite online firms and my domain registrar of choice) has his own blog where he discusses their decision to advertise on the Super Bowl and all the controversy surrounding it. Great reading: “Remember, one of the main differences between GoDaddy.com and all those .coms that advertised in the 1999 Super Bowl? and then went up in smoke — is that Go Daddy actually makes money.”

Gary Stein of Jupiter makes a good point about so-called adware essentially being “acquiesce-in” instead of truly “opt-in”. With reference to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s support of WhenU, he indicates that people agree to have these types of software installed in a value exchange for allowing other desired software/services to be provided to them at no cost. His implied point is that if people had a choice, they would not install the adware, and (obviously) just have the service they truly desire for free.

This reminds me of a television advert from a few years ago, that tried to explain to us consumers why advertising in our newspapers was beneficial. Step by step, it showed a newspaper having advertising removed from it with a counter indicating the price increasing as the ads were stripped away. And the amount of news they could print also decreased overall– leaving us with less news for an astronomical price.

The economics of traditional advertising are far more fuzzy than direct marketing: what is the true value of an ad impressions, how does brand come into play and also, what is the annoyance/attention cost for the user and how might it negatively impact results? These impacts also will not be evenly distributed across the viewing/reading population - some users will be negatively impacted but knowing how and to what extent is exceedingly difficult.

Internet advertising is part direct, and (increasingly) part awareness/brand building. With the introduction of context available online, publishers (especially like WhenU and Claria(Gator)) can better target advertisers’ messages to people who are in market for their goods, and thus (presumably) would be less annoyed in seeing these messages. But even though these devices are more direct-marketing than anything else, the overall annoyance impacts (of a different type) while still largely unknown seem to be minor still since these firms appear to be doing very well in teh marketplace.

Thus the essential conundrum: Internet advertising is becoming better, but also fuzzier… more like the offline world but at the same time, it is evolving it’s own unique qualities: the evolution of contextual marketing continues.

Glad to be here in 2004 — I’ve also just returned from vacation so hopefully I will have time for some (long overdue) new entries shortly! Come back soon!

Found this on Daypop today, iPod’s Dirty Little Secret. Wait for it to load and enjoy. “Might as well buy another one…”

Gary Stein blogs about Google removing search results pointing to Kazaa Lite (a “hacked” version of Kazaa without the popups). Guys like Google and eBay, essentially information marketplaces again and again risk alienating users, reducing the purity of their information, and destroying the scale of their model by doing this.

I guess I’m usually amazed that this type of stuff doesn’t happen more - but also amazed at the set of laws we have that can allow someone to throw up their hands and say they’re not responsible for what people post on their site (which is fine and good) but also then take it upon themselves to remove something. The Church of Scientology - Google issue is a perfect one nicely covered at Microcontent News.

Less in the public eye are the rules Google has for its AdWords buyers - e.g. you may not use superlatives (the “best” online content site) which are impossible to prove or verify, but some have run into issues trying to list ads for “bestsellers” etc. Rules may be needed, but whether they are fair and even-handed is far from certain… I don’t think letting the Google community decide what is acceptable would necessarily be right, but perhaps there is a way to (more transparently) incorporate both advertiser and (non-lawyer) user feedback? Democracy is a good servant but (unfortunately) a poor master.