Advertising

Stuff that Steve Jobs told me today

Posted by ngreene on Apr 8, 2010 in Technology

I skipped lunch today so that I could watch the Apple launch for iPhone OS 4.0. I actually watched three different feeds to make sure that I got a few different perspectives. Thanks to the folks at GDGT, engadget, and TUAW. Here is what Steve Jobs had to say:

300,000 ipads sold on first day 450,000 ipads have been sold as of today
600,000 books have been purchased
50,000,000 iPhones have been sold to date (85,000,000 devices that use apps if you count iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads all together)
1,500 new APIs for developers to integrate with.
In first 9 months of push notifications, over 10 Billion have been sent out
Over 50,000 games available

7 Tentpole Features

Multi-tasking! (Background Audio streaming / VOIP (e.g. Receive a skype call when phone is locked, check out restaurant at same time) / Background Location for GPS or Social Media with enhanced privacy / Push Notifications / Local Notifications / Task Completion / Fast App Switching)
Folders (Organize your apps in sub-folders instead of switching between screens / even put a folder on the dock / as easy as dragging and dropping one app onto another)
Enhanced Mail (unified inbox / more than one exchange account / open attachments with apps downloaded from the app store / organize mail by thread)
iBooks (not just for iPads anymore / buy once, read anywhere / sync pages an bookmarks)
Enterprise Features (better mail encryption / mobile device management / wireless app distribution / SSL VPN / exchange server 2010 support)
Game Centre (Social Gaming Network / Invite Friends to play / matchmaking / achievements)
Mobile Advertising (allow developers to use location based ads in apps so that apps can be free / iAd keeps you in your app / deliver interaction and emotion / interactive and video content within the ap because the ad delivery system is part of the OS / Apple sells, hosts and delivers the ads / developers get 60% of the revenues / all done with HTML5 / over 1 Billion Ad opportunities per day)

A whole lot of other stuff that developers will be able to do:

This OS update will be available this summer for iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch (Some features won’t work for 3G, 2G, or 2nd Gen Touch), but not until the fall for the iPad.

One Thousand Pages Viewed

Posted by ngreene on Apr 7, 2010 in Projects

This site has been running for just over a month and this week marks the one thousandth page viewed!

In the grand scheme of things that number is really nothing, but it’s the first milestone and I am pretty excited about it.

A few stats from my first thousand page views:

- Most visitors to this site are visiting on apple products
- The most popular post to date was about how Lindsay Lohan is NOT the Etrade Baby
- 2/3 of visitors have come back more than once
- Only 10% of visitors are using any version of Internet Explorer
- The top referring sites for links coming into this site are: 1) Facebook, 2) Google, and 3) Twitter
- This is the 29th post, not including the static site pages

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how things are going so far.

I’m really looking forward to the next release of WordPress (3.0), which will include a feature that allows users to manage multiple blogs with one installation.

I would like to have a little more focus. When I think about blogs that I really like, the one thing that they have in common is some central theme that defines a reason for people to visit. I realize that this blog is really more of an assortment of my thoughts and random musings.

The problem is that my attention wanders too much to maintain a single point of interest for more than a few posts. I love having the ability to add tags to posts because, after just 29 posts, I can start to see the topics that I like to write about the most.

So far, according to my tag cloud, my favorite topics are Advertising, Google, and the iPhone.

Advertising is an obvious area of interest for me, given that I’m in the business. The iPhone is a tool that I never leave home without so it’s got to come up pretty frequently. The surprise for me is how often I write about Google.

Going forward, I can definitely see the iPad popping up in popularity of my tags. I’ve had one for two days and I am absolutely loving it. I will write a proper review shortly, but I want enough man hours on it to be able to have a valid opinion to share.

I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to settle on a single theme for a blog so, until I do, I will continue with what I’ve been doing for another month and see how things progress.

In any case, thanks for reading and, for most of you, thanks for coming back after having read the first time!

No iPhone optimized site, Are you kidding me?

Posted by ngreene on Apr 4, 2010 in Rants

If you’ve tried browsing the internet from an iPhone, iPod Touch or, for those lucky early adopters who got their hands on one, an iPad, you’ve come across scenarios where you are faced with the blue Lego block from hell.

For those who haven’t seen this little bugger, this little symbol represents web content that has been developed in flash.

Here is an article that I just read this morning:

And this is what it was supposed to look like on a regular browser:

As you can see, I miss out on the video on this page using an iPhone, but I have no idea that this is what is missing unless I go back to the site using a different browser.

This got me wondering about how many people are having this issue so I checked the stats for this site. Looking only at visitors to this site who are using an iPhone or iPod Touch (It’s a little early to hope for iPad visitors!), I can say that, for sure, 18% of my traffic cannot see flash.

And that 18% is not counting visitors using software like Click to Flash on a Mac, intended only to view flash when it is needed rather than letting it eat up your battery power and CPU usage while slowing your web browsing experience.

My point is this: If any publisher knows that up to 18% of their users will have a crappy experience every time they see the blue Lego block from hell, why not put steps in place to ensure that there is an alternative?

The advertising community has come up with a brilliant solution to this problem. You will notice in both of the above sceenshots that the advertising banner and box ads show just fine. This is not rocket science, this is a policy put in place by an advocacy group (e.g. in Canada the IAB) that insists that all campaigns running flash provide a backup gif or jpg image that can be served in it’s place for users that do not have the flash plugin.

How hard is that? If a publisher absolutely has to have their precious flash, why not put some kind of backup to ensure that those of us who have chosen incompatible devices are able to either see what we are missing out on or, even better, offer us an alternate experience.

I think that this whole argument will be moot in a few years. I’m in the camp that wants to see the use of flash for published content go the way of the Dodo.

I know that sounds somewhat hypocritical given the sexy flash Tag Cloud you see to the right if you are not visiting on an iDevice, but you should be aware that the folks visiting us from an iDevice see a normal Tag Cloud that gives credit to the developers of the sexy flash Tag Cloud if they are using this full site. Alternatively, I have provided iDevice users the option of an iDevice optimized site that delivers only HTML content to ensure super quick load times.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that flash has it’s uses. I love flash for advertising purposes because it allows a single file to be served quite simply and, with the backup strategy already in place, quite effectively to all kinds of devices and browsers. I just think that publishers need to be cognizant of the fact that they are alienating a portion of their visitors by providing crappy user experiences.

I know that I am, and will continue to be, more loyal to sites that are aware of me and that cater to me as a visitor.

The Future of Marketing

Posted by ngreene on Mar 24, 2010 in Media

Advertising is a constantly changing world. There’s always something new and exciting right around the corner.

Today, over and above what is considered “traditional” media, advertisers have a plethora of options in the digital space at home, in the office, or on the go. Advertisers can connect with people in real life with experiential marketing and good old word of mouth advertising is making a big come back with the increased use of social networking.

The changes seem unending and sometimes a little overwhelming, but I have to admit that, as a consumer, I am starting to look forward to some of the new technologies that have to be getting very close.

For example, I carry an iPhone. This handy device, and most of the smartphones on the market today, have built in GPS capabilities, internet access, and an ability to be constantly connected. Today, almost nobody is taking advantage of the fact that I am carrying around a device that could be providing me with location based opportunities.

I think the game Foursquare is just the beginning of location-based marketing. I think in a few short years the company who figures out the best way to get users to announce their presence and request opportunities to receive location-based advertising will be the next big player.

For those who are not familiar with Foursquare, it is a very simple game: you “check-in” whenever you go somewhere, and you earn “points” and “badges” for every activity that you complete. You get a few points for doing the same things every day and you get bonus points for going to new places, adding in locations to the Foursquare database, or for random fun stuff such as the Bender badge for going out to bars four nights in a row.

Where it gets interesting is when you start to add a few “friends”. Once you have a network, you start to get their locations pushed to your device when they check in. And when you go to a location that a friend has been, you can receive “tips” about that location as you arrive. Sometimes the tip is a point of interest, but sometimes the tip is a recommendation that might even be relevent to you, such as “try the chicken wings, best in the city”.

Now imagine that businesses can tap into users as they volunteer to announce that they are arriving with some sort of beacon. I would love to “check in” at a restaurant and be sent a message telling me what the specials are for the evening. Or walk into a movie theatre and be sent a message of how many open seats are availabe in each theatre when I am choosing which movie to watch.

All of a sudden opportunites are tailored to me at a time and place where I can take advantage of them.

Now let’s take it a step further. I imagine Google coming up with the next part simply because they are the only company that I trust enough to be able to pull it off. Imagine being able to cut out some of the advertising noise that we are bombarded with every day. Depending on which source you choose to believe, North Americans are exposed to 3,000 to 5,000 ad impressions per day across all media that we are exposed to as we live our lives.

I would love to be able to give information about myself to a company like Google and have them truly tailor my digital and mobile experience to my interests. This would inherently need to be a multi pronged approach:

1) Let me tell advertisers who I am (age, sex, life stage, job function, demography, etc), what I am interested in, what types of decisions I make, and what my attitudes are towards a useful set of parameters.

2) Let me choose to share my location when I am willing

3) Track my search behaviour to predict changes to my status (e.g. If I search for baby strollers, I’m either about to have a baby or want to be able to be a resource to someone else who needs that information)

4) Serve me up with ads that are extremely relevant, wherever I am and from whatever device I choose to consume media.

5) Allow me to override any information that I do not find useful and refine the relevance of what is being served to me as frequently as I wish. Ideally, the more feedback I give, the more relevant the advertising to me could be.

6) Keep my information, both shared and derived, private so that no individual, corporation, or government can possibly access that information.

The privacy piece is the biggest concern with this coming to fruition, but I feel confident that Canada is on the forefront when it comes to privacy issues and that the right company (ahem… Google) could actually pull something like this off.

I predict that the combination of voluntary user participation in the consumption of advertising, combined with an increased prominence of location-based marketing will be absolutely huge once someone figures out how to do it properly.

Money is such a tricky thing

Posted by ngreene on Mar 23, 2010 in Philosophy

I read a great article in The Globe and Mail today: Joint or separate bank accounts? That is the question

This is a very common issue that couples face and it’s nice to have someone bring attention towards making it okay to talk about.

My wife and I recently had to make some decisions about how we handle money in our household. We ended up going to a bank and having a very honest conversation with one of their personal banking representatives.

I have to say that it really was like that Scotiabank TV ad where the couple sits with a bank rep and when the woman pushes the finance information in front of the male partner and he turns his head away so that he can’t see their finances. We were both surprised by each other’s attitudes when it came to managing money. In retrospect, it is surprising that it took more than 2.5 years for us to sit down and talk about money.

At the end of the conversation at the bank, we ended up opening a joint account to manage our monthly living expenses. We didn’t combine our finances completely because we both agree that everybody needs their own private money to manage and do with what they choose. We both receive our income to a personal account and then contribute an appropriate amount every month towards the common bills.

We’ve been using the new system for two months now and it seems to be working very well. We both feel more confident that everything is covered every month and we are already making contributions towards both personal and shared goals.

My favourite quote about money came from a true gentleman who, coincidentally, shared more than 30 birthdays with me:

“I never like to talk about money, I don’t think it’s important once you are not hungry. After a while, you’re nothing but a caretaker or a custodian.” ~ Honest Ed Mirvish

I guess all that really matters is that both partners agree that the system that they decide to use works.

LIFT ~ The Advertising Campaign

Posted by ngreene on Mar 22, 2010 in Business

GoDaddy gave me $75 in Google AdWords credit as part of my signing up for hosting. They also gave me $50 towards facebook advertising, but that will have to wait for another day because I simply haven’t taken the time to set it up. I thought I would throw together a simple campaign to see how it worked.

Here is my very first AdWords ad:

As of today, I have gotten 7,952 impressions based on my keywords and I’ve gotten 9 clicks. That doesn’t sound like much, but that means a 0.11% click-through rate, which is much higher than I expected.

All of my clicks have come from the Toronto search term. Honestly, I was really just going through the exercise to figure out exactly how to set up an AdWords account. I never thought anyone would actually click on one of my ads. It’s pretty cool.

I have $67 credit left so I guess I will see how far that goes. If you came here through a Google sponsored link, Welcome!

Blog Tweaks

Posted by ngreene on Mar 13, 2010 in Projects

I can’t believe how many options there are with WordPress. I am very impressed.

I have spent pretty much all of my spare time this past week tweaking and re-tweaking this site. I thought that I would share my configuration as of today and give credit to those who deserve it.

THEME:
I have decided on the theme Pixel 2.0.1 By Sam over at samk.ca It seems to be the best layout and look that I’ve found yet for my purposes. Since I like this so much I have also downloaded Motion 1.0.4 and Function, but haven’t had time to play with them yet.

WIDGETS:
The hasn’t been enough time for me to really get deep into the world of widgets. There are just so many and the descriptions for a lot seem very similar so I need to take a day and just play around with what is out there. The search cloud that you see to the left is WP-Cumulus with the primary author Roy Tanck I love how this looks on the blog. It’s actually the best tag cloud that I’ve seen anywhere. My only complaint with this widget is that I could not change options from the settings page, but instead had to make my tweaks (size, speed, etc) on the widgets page. Not really that big of a deal once you figure out that the settings page doesn’t work. The only other widget that is in use as of today is the twitter feed at the bottom. That was a simple cut and paste from the Twitter Widgets Page.

PLUGINS:
I have tried so many plugins that I was getting nervous about how things would be impacted by installing, activating, deactivating, and deleting as much as I did. I’m sure that I’m not done yet, but I feel pretty happy about my setup at this point. I will provide a complete list of what I have active below:

1) Ad Integration by ThaSlayer. This is a very easy to use implementation for pretty much any advertising requirements. I have no real aspirations of making any money off of advertising on this site, but I wanted to at least have a better understanding of what it takes to get ads onto a blog. On the other end I set up a Google AdSense account and I was up and running the same day I installed the plugin. Everything works beautifully. I haven’t yet figured out how to get the ads out of my main content into the right rail, but I’ll figure that out at some point.

2) All-in-One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert. I checked out a few of these SEO options and this seemed the easiest to install / use. I’m not sure how to tell if it’s working for me yet, but it’s only been a few weeks.

3) Digg Digg by Yong Mook Kim This is the best looking of these social buttons apps. Easy to install and customize. I really wish I would have searched for this plugin first instead of trying to pick up the code for the buttone independently … would have saved me a lot of time.

4) Facebook Connect by Adam Hupp I never imagines it would be so easy to connect my blog with facebook. The instructions were great, even for someone like me who likes to try and just turn it on first to see shat happens. The few points where I wasn’t sure what to do, the instructions and options page were intuitive enough to allow me to work through what probably should have been somewhat frustrating.

5) Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachold I’m not sure that I actually need this plugin with the All-in-One SEO Pack installed, but it sounded different enough that I thought it could be useful.

6) Ultimate Google Analytics by Wilfred van der Deijl With one touch of the button I was able to connect to Google Analytics. I was surprised how easy it was to get a Google Analytics account and transfer the needed info into this plugin. Literally, within 5 minutes I was up and running. Now I just need to figure out how to get some traffic to the site!

7) WPtouch iPhone Theme by Dale Mugford & Duane Storey Once again, this is a true turn-key solution. After activating, I was able to visit the site from my iPhone and immediately the touch version was able to detect the mobile platform and serve the mobile version as default. It also has a quick button at the bottom allowing users to toggle back and forth between the mobile and full versions of the site.

And that takes us to today. I’m sure that I’m not done. This seems like the kind of project that can evolve into a hobby that is never really done. At some point I want to take a look at what other people are doing on their sites and pick up some best practices.

In the meantime, I’m pretty happy with my setup.

Ad Blocking

Posted by ngreene on Mar 7, 2010 in Media

I just read a great article that I found on Digg:

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love.ars

I have never purposefully gone to ars, but every once in a while I end up over there on a link from sites like Digg. (As an aside, this article prompted me to add ars to my bookmarks and it made me think about my criteria for what it takes to make my bookmark bar.)

In this case, I was impressed with the honesty of the writer in addressing the issue of visitors using ad blocking and how that impacts the viability of a medium size website. The social experiment that they conducted to determine how people would react if a website were to deny content to ad-blockers is the most interesting test I’ve seen in a long time.

I have never used an ad blocker myself. I actually like ads as part of the browsing experience. Much like magazines and newspaper, I find that the ads can add an extra dimension if they are contextually relevant.

I look forward to the future of behavioural targeting. I imagine a technology that would allow me to opt in to share as much information as I please, including browsing history, life stage and additudinal information to make it easier for advertisers who have products that I would be a likely candidate to consider.

Relevant ads make the experience better, as long as they are not overly intrusive or have a noticable impact on my browser’s performance.

Posts Tagged "Advertising"