I was reading Marketing’s fourth annual survey into the top loved and hated brands and noticed the fickle nature of the public in their views on brands, and undoubtedly linked, their advertising campaigns.  What struck me from the survey, more than the strange appearance of AOL at number 2 in the top 50 hated brands even though their UK profile doesn’t warrant such a high profile spot, was the number of brands named highly in both the most hated, and most loved lists.  In the main list you actually only have two brands appearing in the top 20 of both, these are The Sun and Nokia (via ngage in the most hated), but if you get down into the different tables for the individual markets it is much more apparent.  I suppose you could just argue that the more you drill down by market, the less brands their are and so the more chance of a brand appearing in both lists but if you take such a broad market as “fashion” you would imagine there are enough brands out there to limit duplication.  But yet in this particular category 3 brands appear in the top 5 for both hated and loved!  Topshop is number one hated and number 5 loved, Levi’s is number two loved and number 4 hated, and Next is number one loved and number 3 hated.  How can brands be perceived in such a different way?  Is it simply that such well known and high profile brands are more likely to stir an extreme emotion in users where as slightly lesser brands stay under the radar a little more?  Your guess is as good as mine.  I have listed some of the other occurences of this below, focussing on the digital areas of the survey (as that is the topic of the blog after all!):

The saga of who will buy/merge with Yahoo continues with the announcement they are in talks with AOL about a potential merger to take on the digital world.  It is difficult to see how two very similar operations could effectively pull together to take on the market as is pointed out by Mashable.  They are both a web portal offering search functionality, display advertising and personal email so what a merger would achieve is slightly confusing unless the both of them are willing to merge their systems for the greater good of taking on Google and Microsoft in their respective strong holds.  The only benefit I could see is if by merging their two media selling/buying operations they could aim to offer the advertiser greater reach through one point of call but this is a tenuous link at best.  Maybe they have something else up their sleeve whcih could surpries us all but for me there is little benefit in such a merger.

Ive finally gotten round to having a little think about the big news story of the week, Microsoft tabling a bid of $44.6 Billion in cash and stock to buy its rival Yahoo.  There has been no official comment from Yahoo on the reports but I thought Id document my thoughts on the impace this could have.

The portal market

Yahoo and MSN are the two big players in the portal market, the one stop shop for all you web needs, search engine, web mail, news feed, weather reports, all in one place.  This is where Microsoft will gain a massive advantage and pretty much gain complete dominance.  Aside from the ISP sites, which gain their visitors through having a default homepage setting in the ISP setup process, Microsoft will have a dominance in this field comparable to Google’s in the search market (more of that in a minute!).  So what does this mean to MSN? Well instantly they will take on board the lions share of the portal advertising revenues around the world.  Yahoo has built an advertising model which is highly lucrative and brings in a huge amount of revenue each year, utilising the latest behavioural targeting technology to keep online advertising moving forward.  MSN obviously has its own advertising model and ideas on how the market is going to advance but they will automatically boost their ad revenues with the purchase.  It also sets them up well for the predicted rise in online ad spend over the next few years, from $40 billion to $80 billion if you believe the predictions, dominance in a market this size is a mouth watering prospect.

The search market

This is where it gets really interesting.  Microsft has struggled to gain a foothold in the search market since it launched its own PPC model in 2006 and I forecasted in a previous post (Microsoft sets its sights on 40% market share) that a purchase may be on the cards if they were to achieve their targets.  The purchase of Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM), if part of the deal, would possibly take their market share into the double figures in the paid search arena.  Their system is good at present, the quality of their traffic is good, its just the volume they have been missing.  YSM would help boost this and make them a legitimate number 2 in this arena and they undoubtedly have the fire power to make dents in Google’s dominance (see their response here).  It does raise the question, what does this mean to search agencies?  the market which was due to fragment with the launch of wikia search, AOL breaking out in the US, Ask hinting at the same, is now significantly consolidated if this deal does actually go through.  Does this make SEM simpler? Not really but it could be perceived that way, a post for another time I think.

How do they manage it?

This will be interesting, does Yahoo become Microsoft branded?  or is it just another property of the technology giant?  Does it become Microhoo? Yasoft? Mahoo? or does it become Yahoo - a Microsoft company? and more importantly for internet marketers do they keep the two infrastructures separate, the advertising interfaces, the search algorithms, the display advertising models.  This is what will be the key determinant of what this means to the industry and what it means to digital agencies.

Whether the deal goes through remains to be seen, when it goes through is another question yet to be answered. What is undeniable is that it is going to influence the online advertising market significantly, in what way, remains to be seen.

Search engine land reported today the release of some new functional by ask which allows a user to upload their own personal background image for the search engine.  The functionality to add a skin to the background has been available since last year but this was only for predetermined images and wasn’t customisable.  I like the idea of customising the results page and this is a much simpler solution than Google’s which involves xml information rather than a simple image upload.  It is also much more flexible and interesting than msn and yahoo’s offerings which only allow the selection of different colour palletes for the page.

This functionality is just another stage in the battle for search engine supremacy but also for loyalty within internet users through added value.  Yahoo had this a long time ago through positioning itself as an information portal and one stop shop for your internet needs (email, news, sport, search…) a similar position taken by MSN.  Then Google smashed this with its simplicity and accuracy of results.  But even the big G has recognised the need to give people more and through iGoogle struck a balance between information on the page and usability by allowing the user to choose which information feeds they received.  The issue at the bottom of all of this is keeping people using your page/engine, setting it as their homepage, and a base for all their online activities.  If they can use your site for everything they need online whey would they go elsewhere?  The longer a user in on your site, the more searches they do, the more ads they view, the more ads they click, the more money you make! Simple.  Expect a lot more releases like in this in the next 12 months as the battle continues.

It’ll take a lot more functionality for Yahoo, Ask or MSN to catch Google but I do know people who now use the Yahoo homepage as they prefer it to Google so there is some movement going on.   You can check out the Ask function on the US site here, it is not yet available in the UK.

the fragmentation continues. hopefully the UK will follow suit and AOL will eventually decide to break away completely. the more the smaller providers continue to do this the less of a monopoly Google has and the better it is for people trying to survive in the market.

AOL Launches Private-Label AOL-Only Search Product
by Laurie Petersen, Monday, Apr 9, 2007

AOL TODAY LAUNCHES AOL SEARCH Marketplace, a private-label version of Google AdWords search allowing advertisers to place search ads only within the AOL network.
This marks the first time Google has allowed one of its partners to offer such a service. It is an expansion of a five-year strategic relationship between Google and AOL struck in December 2005 in which Google powered the contextual search ads found on the AOL service.
AOL Search Marketplace is designed to enhance the efforts of display advertisers on the AOL service, allowing it to offer deeper services and strengthen relationships with these advertisers, said Dariusz Pacsuski, vice president of search products for AOL Platforms. It has been tested with about 30 advertisers over the past five months.”
“We have found that there is a significant impact when search and display campaigns are coordinated,” said Mike Kelly, president of AOL Media Networks.
The service also gives AOL a better shot at getting some of the search advertising dollars that have gone to Google. AOL restructured to put a focus on a free ad-supported service last year, and has made online ad sales a top priority. AOL ad sales rose to nearly $2 billion in fourth-quarter 2006, up 49% over the previous year for the period.
“This brings what you can classify as a really strong second-tier player to the table,” said Stephen Chiles, COO of search marketing agency Reprise Media. “Anytime you can get diversity beyond the big three, that’s certainly a positive.”
“You can certainly hope that there will potentially be less spam since it’s a syndicated Google,” added Chiles, a former AOL executive.
Still, the service can only be viewed as a supplemental play because of the AOL volume, he said. According to comScore Media Metrix, AOL has 111 million monthly unique visitors, and search drew 311 million queries in February. Its latest public filing pegged the number of paying AOL domestic subscribers at 13.18 million.
AOL also announced two other search enhancements launching today. AOL Local Search is now in beta incorporating technology from MapQuest. It combines information from AOL’s CityGuide with geotargeted advertising to make it easy to find a location and get reviews of local businesses, restaurants and more.
A new AOL Shopping and Commerce Search is resulting from a partnership with PriceGrabber.com to provide a comparison shopping search experience.