WPP owned 24/7 Real Media has been suspended by the IASH for failing to comply with an a audit of ad placement in July.  This news follows hot in the footsteps of recent evidence of ad misplacement by networks, the most high profile advertiser being Orange. 

Ad misplacement is a key issue when considering the use of blind networks as part of a display advertising programme.  Although these networks offer certain “guarantees” with their placements and you can select to appear on certain channels, by the very nature of the channel, you can never be 100% sure that misplacement isn’t occurring.  You have to rely on the regulatory bodies like the IASH conducting regular audits and clamping down hard on any offenders, which thankfully they appear to be starting to do.

The temptation is always there, due to the rock bottom CPMs, to utilise a network within your media plan but cost is not always the best way to plan display advertising.  After all, the primary aim of any display campaign should be to build brand awareness within your target customer base.  Blind media buys achieve neither of these objectives as you open yourself up to the risk of negative brand association with unsuitable sites, and you don’t know who is seeing your ads. 

Blind networks are becoming a thing of the past as companies expect more from their online advertising and this can only strengthen the position of intelligent media planning agencies.  My advice is to avoid them when planning other than in extreme circumstances.  Get you lower cost impressions and clicks from paid search and focus your display advertising on reaching the right people at the right time with the right message.

Yahoo sent out an email last week to its partners announcing some changes to the way it will be mapping keywords from July 29th.  In the past Yahoo has mapped certain keywords to others within its paid search listings much in the same way as Google broad match works.  As a former pay per click campaign manager this often caused me head aches as their mapping, which was supposedly done to improve the quality of their search results, seemed to penalise the professionals willing to spend the time building high quality keyword lists.  Funnily enough, it also had the affect of reducing the keywords available in their market by mapping low cost keywords to higher cost ones, hence making them more money.  Strange that isn’t it.

The other issue with their system was that they just weren’t very good at accurately mapping keywords together.  One specific example I vividly remember is when they decided to map all the listings from the keyword “home loan” to the keyword “mortgage”On the face of it these may sound like pretty similar words, but in the finance market a home loan is another way of describing a loan secured against you existing property, not a mortgage to buy a property.  What this meant for advertisers (I was working on secured loans campaigns at the time) was that overnight, you started to receive a large amount of costly, irrelevant clicks and aso ended up displayed irrelevant ad text.  There was no warning with these changes and at the time went they were gong through this mapping process it was a case of keeping a very close eye on keyword level spending to understand when a change may have been made.

It seems that no Yahoo has seen the error of its ways and is unmapping an initial list of 772 keywords, although they havent disclosed how many this leaves still mapped.  This is good news for professional PPC managers as it makes the job more complex which brings more need for their services.  It is easy for an advertiser to manage a keyword list of maybe 100 keywords but if this keyword list becomes 1000 or even 10000, with targeted ad text needed for all, it becomes a lot harder. 

A fill list of the keywords to be unmapped can be found here

Over the coming months it is safe to assume many advertisers will be tightening their belts and reducing or even halting their media spend.  When times are hard it is often the marketing budgets which are the first to go, with companies focussing on maintaining, rather than growing their operations.

However, when affiliate marketing is done correctly, it should be guaranteed return on investment, with zero risk to the merchant company.  So if you were a marketer, looking for the best place to spend your budget in a time of uncertainty and increasing pressure to perform, where would you turn?

The volume of business is never going to be on the same scale as other media channels but when you are just looking to cut costs and keep a business ticking over that isn’t necessarily going to be your biggest concern.  So maybe affiliate marketing is going to see a bumper period as the recession continues.  It is certainly a good time to be pushing the “no risk” message that only really affiliate marketing can truly tout.  Before jumping in feet first however you must ensure you have a sound affiliate strategy and the correct quality assurance system in place to ensure you avoid some of the common pitfalls associated with affiliate marketing.

Google has this week launched into closed beta testing its new media planning and buying tool, to be know as Google Adplanner.  The web based software enables media planners and buyers to build schedule’s for their clients using Google’s placement network.  The functionality looks pretty neat with the ability to filter the sites based on demographic and geographic factors and the ability to see all the volume information currently available through the adwords interface.  In itself the adplanner tool is only useful for the placement network and so has limited use to the every day media planner.  But you have to assume that somewhere along the line this functionality will be rolled out across non google sites, and if incorporated with double click adserving technology, will transform Google into an adserving and media planning provider.  One to look out for as Google tries to strengthen its grip on non search related markets.

Google’s long awaited entry into the virtual world has taken place in the last week with the launch of their competitor to Second Life, lively.com.  According to the Google blog the initial idea came as they “looked around the social web and wished that it could be less static”.  I’m not quite buying that seen as Second Life has been around for a while now but that
doesn’t mean it isn’t an interesting entrant.  Much like in Second Life you create an avatar for yourself although in Lively.com this is in more of a cartoon vein and in more of a Sims fashion.  You can also create your own rooms within the world and customise their look and decoration.  You can then hang out with your friends in the rooms you create, which brings in the social element.    The interesting part comes with how and where you engage with lively.com.   The system enables you to embed your room into your blog or website, and interact with it directly without the need to visit lively.com.  Whether this is enough of a selling point I am not sure but lively.com will certainly appeal to the youth market more than Second Life and lets face it, the younger generation are much more likely to spend ours chatting to friends online, even more so if they create a cool avatar for themselves in the process.  I was never a big fan of Sims, and never really got into Second Life, so I don’t think Ill be rushing along to set my account up.  But if the Alexa rankings below are anything to go by lively.com could create a bit of a stir in the world of social media.