Experian® Hitwise® announced recently that Google accounted for 72.17 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending May 29, 2010. Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask received 14.43 percent, 9.23 percent and 2.14 percent, respectively. The remaining 74 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 2.03 percent of U.S. searches.
Brussels, Belgium agency, Happiness, won the 2010 Design Grand Prix in the Cannes awards for Toyota’s iQ font campaign. With a team composed of designers, Pierre and Damien from Pleaseletmedesign, pro racepilot, Stef Vancampenhoudt and interactive artist from openFrameworks, Zach Lieberman, a downloadable font was created based entirely upon the tracked movements of Toyota’s iQ. It’s pretty brilliant, actually.
If the font has not broken out on social media sites like Facebook yet, I predict that it just might – and in doing so, create a subculture of individuals that use the font to promote environmental awareness, given that the iQ won the UK’s Green Car Award in mid June.
In 2009, Wieden + Kennedy won a Grand Prix in the Cannes Awards for Nike’s ‘Chalkbot’ – an innovative and heartwarming approach to interactive marketing.
The Chalkbot was a computerized mechanism designed to print inspirational sayings that consumers submitted via SMS, banner ads, the Livestrong website and Twitter onto the roadway of the Tour de France. Over 36,000 quotes conveyed messages of hope, health and strength, supporting Livestrong and giving the organization a 46% sales increase and a fundraised $4 million.
For each message printed by the Chalkbot, their author was sent a photograph and GPS coordinate of the words they sent in.
Although this won last summer’s Cannes, it is revered as one of the most original event campaigns, and for good reason. The campaign’s success required an active public, something that so many companies aim to acquire but often fail. The ingenious thinkers at Wieden + Kennedy pulled off this campaign for the most part because, arguably, it meant something more to the public. It struck an emotional and inspired chord for the tens of thousands of individuals who participated in the campaign and that made the difference.
Google announced yesterday that it will be rolling-out yet another new feature to its already robust Adwords interface, entitled “Analyze Competition”. This feature “examines your account’s activity over the past two weeks and lists categories that represent the products or services you’re advertising. Categories are based on actual Google.com search terms and are matched up against your keywords, ad text, and landing page text. For each category associated with your account, you’ll see a bar graph, which shows your individual performance compared to the average performance of other advertisers in the same category.”
Currently, this roll-out will target only “a small number of advertisers using the English language AdWords’ interface,” but will be available to more advertisers over time. How long it will take for the full roll-out was not disclosed.
Personally, I am very excited to use this feature as I am repeatedly being asked these very same competitive questions from clients that “Analyze Competition” helps to answer. And yes, I’m a geek.
Analyze Competition, Google Adwords
Google recently announced the completion of their new indexing technology, Caffeine. Caffeine has been in the works and in the press for well over a year now, and its completion has been anticipated by many simply based upon the buzz that has surrounded it over the past several months. While the news is exciting to say the least due to the technology’s advanced abilities, the arrival of Caffeine seems to have appeared under much less hype than the anticipation itself.
Regardless of this sentiment, Google describes the indexing system as providing “50 percent fresher results for web searches than [their] last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content [they]‘ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.”
Google also provides a very useful description of how a search engine and its indexation work (along with a clever image [above] to illustrate the comparison between their old index and Caffeine). Read more…
Google, Google Caffeine, search index
The Stanley Cup was awarded late tonight. The sacrifice needed to win this coveted trophy is almost beyond measure. I’m a hockey player and have been in love with the game my entire life. I think about the game all the time and play as often as I can. To take the ice – the feeling – it’s liberating. You forget any problem, breathe deep and your lungs fill with the cold icy air. The puck drops and you go at it. It’s easy to understand the meaning of team when you play hockey. The team means everything. Watching the playoffs this year, you can see the anticipation, the desire and certainly you can see in a champion’s eyes – the will to win!
Congratulations to the Chicago Blackhawks!
Visit South Africa’s World Cup soccer stadiums right from your computer with Google 3D Warehouse. See local maps of the stadiums’ surrounding cities along with 3D models and brief historical details of each structure. This is an incredibly cool model created for G3DW which also incorporates a “Complexity” scale to gauge the level of detail.
During the WWDC’s keynote yesterday, Steve Jobs announced that the Bing search engine will be included as one of the search options (along with Google) within the Safari 5 browser. This is big news for the number three search engine (after Google and Yahoo) and could be perceived as Apple forging closer ties with Microsoft or a gradually diminishing relationship with Google. Either way the Bing mobile product was commended yesterday by Jobs, who said, “Microsoft has done a really nice job on this, it’s an HTML5 presentation, it’s great.”
Hulu has done well at commanding a decent CPM and really strong “big name” advertisers. While not profitable yet, media professionals are seeing Hulu as a nice extension to television, putting all video in one category (either TV, Online, or Mobile). Sight, Sound and Motion builds brand. Regardless of the forum, video is huge to communicate brand attributes. Six months ago, Vevo launched and cut deals with major networks including Google to provide a monthly unique impression total of more than 44 million. Not too shabby. They have also signed huge advertisers. Their model (at least for now) is to provide subtle marketing – one advertiser per short play video and some corresponding banner units. They offer their video content for free and make money from marketing dollars.
ABC’s model is different in that they will make money from consumers through a sub base – even if it is low cost. I don’t think it will work. Consumers have been trained to gain content online for zippo. I don’t think they will pay to watch ABC vids. Even with the consumer sub, ABC would play “fewer” commercials. Not a good combo. If they are going to charge a sub, they need to eliminate commercials. The two won’t mix well. While Hulu is moving to a pay for model, I’m not sure that will work well either. They are doing so as they try hard to figure out how to turn Hulu profitable.
Time will tell – to me, it seems the sub strategy has been tested before and it fails quickly. The model that seems to get results is as follows: High quality content, high quality video, massive unique impression totals and one advertiser for maximum ownership and the least amount of annoyance to the consumer possible.
Link: MediaPost ABC
