As the desire for content control continues to increase and the cost of internet-connected TVs continues to decline, penetration of Smart TVs is predicted to reach nearly half of American households by the end of the holiday season. Just in time for the growing adoption of the new technology, LG is teaming up with online video advertising network YuMe to bring advertising to TV sets in a new way. Without needing a separate device such as a Roku or Boxee, people who own LG internet-connected TVs will see ads not only while watching programs, but also while searching for programs to watch.

Toyota Motor Sales USA will be the first sponsor, but we expect to see more as companies like Samsung, Panasonic and LG are beginning to develop partnerships with YuMe and/or Tremor Video. Spreading use of the technology, plus consumers’ shifting tastes to over-the-top video options with more control and substantially less advertising, challenges marketers to reach and engage this audience without annoying them.

Advertisers must remember the importance of providing ads that are interesting and relevant to the consumer. The new technology conveniently lends itself to this objective, something LG and YuMe intend to capitalize on. The application providers will also get a cut of the revenue, as well as approval of the ads that will air while their product is loading. Ad networks, TV manufacturers and content publishers working together to make internet-connected TV ads contextually relevant for the consumer means that everyone wins, including the advertisers gutsy enough to take a chance with new technology.

In advertising we are always talking about putting the right message, in front of the right person, at the right time. The rapidly evolving advertising technologies online allow us to get closer to this goal then ever before. When it comes to search marketing people are typing in exactly what they want, and therefore giving you as an advertiser an opportunity to capitalize on this.

Many companies take advantage of this and deliver highly tailored ads to match the search queries. The result is that people expect their ads to be targeted so when you see an advertisement that doesn’t fit with your search query, it can be quite offensive. I was researching some text ads for a campaign when I ran across a perfect example from Wal-Mart of why you should make sure that your agency is using negative keyword targeting for their search campaigns.

It would have taken 30 seconds to add “coping” as a negative keyword to prevent this from happening.

This ad represents two failures. Firstly the ad clearly shouldn’t be displayed for this search query. Secondly the ad itself has a typo, which is a minor detail given the offensive nature of the keyword it is paired with but it is yet another sign that their QA process failed.

This is particularly bad given that the company is Wal-Mart, which people are far more likely to pounce on for blunders such as this. When a person types in “coping with a death in the family” I don’t think they want to see this message from Wal-Mart, especially not at this time.

In true integrated fashion, TargetCast, with the help of media partner Slate, successfully put together a location-based cross platform engagement strategy designed to target the higher education community and encourage them to roll over assets with TIAA-CREF.  The program included digital banners, content syndication, and promotional ad units fueling interest for the Slate Gabfests. At the live event, there was signage, marketing collateral, live reads, as well as a special “guests of honor” dinner with TIAA-CREF participants and Gabfest and Slate talent and management. The Gabfest is a weekly podcast series operated by Slate focusing on Politics, Sports, and Culture. Collectively, the three podcast editions attract more than 1MM downloads a month. TargetCast secured a sponsorship opportunity for TIAA-CREF to take the Gabfests on the road, executing live events at key universities and institutions around the country.

TIAA-CREF, providing the higher education community with financial services, understood that engaging their participants through quality content within a venue for relevant live programming, would be a door opener to growing assets under management.  The campaigns proved highly successful with significant lift in assets under management directly attributable to the Slate Gabfest events.  The Gabfests have been recognized by AdAge as the “Best Podcast Series” recently winning their Vanguard Award in 2011 and will continue to be an integral part of TargetCast’s media strategy for TIAA-CREF into 2012.

For more information about the AdAge/Vanguard Awarded Slate Gabfest, follow this link:  http://adage.com/article/special-report-media-vanguard-awards/media-vanguard-awards-digital-natives/230922/)

Social media makes it socially acceptable to be super-intense about our favorite things—I’m talking singing-with-our-eyes-closed passionate about our favorite foods, pictures of dogs frolicking in leaves, workout routines, limited edition action figure collections, and especially TV shows. 

People are watching more TV than ever—35.6 hours per week according to a Nielsen estimate.  That’s an average of 5 hours per day.   Yikes. Recently, a spate of sites similar to Foursquare have cropped up in response to our ravenous entertainment appetites allowing users to “check in” to their fave shows.  Like checking into a restaurant or bar on Foursquare, these sites—Miso, Getglue, Philo, Comcast’s Tunerfish, and IntoNow—enable users to let friends know what show their boob tube is dialed into in real time. The Intonow app, kind of like Foursquare and Shazam’s love child, lets users check into a specific episode by having their Smartphone listen to the program on TV.   The goal of all these sites, of course, is creating connections—connecting show watchers to each other and to new content.

Another way to up the ante on our favorite shows is through social viewing.  At Adweek’s Targetcast-hosted discussion Phoenix Rising: How Technology is Transforming Foundational Media, panelists presaged that social viewing would be the next big thing.  Gabbing to your best friend on the phone after the show’s over? So archaic—nostalgic as a Rockwell painting!   Social Viewing sites like Paltalk enable people in different locations to watch the same video at the same time AND chat about it.   Paltalk offers video chat rooms, which they refer to as screening rooms.  The screening room streams the same video to all attendees and enables them to chat.  With social viewing sites, there’s no need to mentally file away that witty commentary for later—viewers can share their shock, outrage, laughter, sadness, and elation in real time too.

Google has had an ongoing problem with providing fresh content and until the launch of the “Freshness” algorithm earlier this week they didn’t have a solution – only a series of quick fixes.

During 9/11 when there was a massive number of searches for “world trade center” related terms nothing showed up except outdated informational pages about renting office space and tours. As a result they had to add links directly from their homepage to news sites to divert users away from using their search features.

On the more recent side of the war in Afghanistan we saw better but still flawed search results from Google when news broke about the death of Osama Bin Laden. Google began putting “Google News” in search results years ago to provide up-to-the-minute content at the top of search results that were tied to current events but this fix is only a band-aid on a larger issue.

If you look at the screenshot below (source: Search Engine Land) you will see that while Google News provided people with fresh content the actual algorithmic search results below were about the White House Correspondents Dinner and one of President Obama’s past budget speeches although the user intent was clearly focused on what had just gone down in Pakistan.

Google started to get into a bit of a rut with its search results, pushing down the actual results with Google news, Twitter updates, and other additional features to liven up the search results pages but not the actual search results themselves.

Earlier this week Google announced an actual fix to the problem of outdated content- a “freshness” algorithm update was launched on Monday building off the infrastructure established by the Google Caffeine update. Caffeine did not change the actual search results, it was a new way to collect and index information on the web.

Caffeine was designed to radically change the way that Google indexed content, giving them the ability to quickly index frequently changing content. The update that Google released on Monday is an algorithmic change that will utilize this high-speed indexing system to provide fresh search results.

What impact does this change have? It allows Google to respond to three separate scenarios where fresh content is necessary for a good user experience, impacting 35% of all search results in the process. Quoting from their announcement:

• Recent events or hot topics. For recent events or hot topics that begin trending on the web, you want to find the latest information immediately. Now when you search for current events like “occupy oakland protest”, or for the latest news about the “nba lockout”, you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old.

• Regularly recurring events. Some events take place on a regularly recurring basis, such as annual conferences like “ICALP” or an event like the “presidential election”. Without specifying with your keywords, it’s implied that you expect to see the most recent event, and not one from 50 years ago. There are also things that recur more frequently, so now when you’re searching for the latest “NFL scores”, “dancing with the stars” results or “exxon earnings”, you’ll see the latest information.

• Frequent updates. There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you’re researching the “best slr cameras”, or you’re in the market for a new car and want “subaru impreza reviews”, you probably want the most up to date information.

This is a seismic shift in the SEO world, but it wasn’t unexpected. It has been clear for many years that Google wanted to move in this direction for those of us that were prepared the changes have provided a nice boost to organic search traffic.

Regardless of industry there are ways to provide fresh content whether it be starting a company blog, releasing a new product line, or finding some other way to engage your users.

Through this update Google has made it clear that if you don’t start paying attention to your content, you will be left behind.

It has been estimated that in the first weekend since its introduction Apple would sell 4 million iPhone4S phones; the only forecasted hurdle would be ensuring supply/availability of the product would meet the expected demand.  Then came a collective sigh of disappointment from the technophiles and early adopters who closely monitor development of new gadgets.  It turned out that there was quite a bit of downgrading of iPhone4S sales estimates attributed to its lack of major enhancements from the current iPhone4.

We thought it would be fun to take a look at other new technology products and examine how their launch sales fared in the early days after their introduction.  Some of these new products have been tremendously successful, but it is also amusing to look at those that did not quite live up to expectations.

Recent technology introductions initial sales results:

2011-2012 Broadcast Season – early disappointments:

Reminder of some product misfires:

What does this mean for marketers?  Obviously it takes more than company reputation to gain and sustain public interest in your products.  Products must live up to the hype, provide a positive user experience and of course, be supported by impactful creative and well targeted media plans developed to introduce these new products to the marketplace through the most appropriate channels.

Continued from Voyurl Part 1 – Watching Yourself Browse

I’ve officially been a member of Voyurl for nearly 2 months now and I have to say that I like what I’m seeing so far in terms of what information is available. I’m told that I have visited 4,337 web pages and spent 3 days, 20 hours and 39 minutes browsing in that time (2,698 sites and 1 day, 6 hours and 26 minutes in the last month alone). Other fun facts Voyurl has shared with me include:

Voyurl also provides a variety of different ways to look at the breakdown of visited categories. The visual presentation is enticing and made even better with the ability to hover over any section to get the detailed information about each category.

I think my favorite graph offered is the browsing patterns among categories. This not only shows the sequence of category visits, but the frequency with which you engage in that pattern. And to make things easier, hovering over a category shows only that category’s patterns, as illustrated in the second graph below. For example, I navigate from a news site to a technology site much more often than I go from news to entertainment.

Like any new online company in the beta testing phase, Voyurl has some kinks to work out. Some of the charts seem to show incorrect or incomplete information and the zoom functionality on others only works occasionally if at all. My biggest complaint so far is the categorization of some of the web pages. For example, Hulu’s homepage is labeled as Entertainment, but pages that actually stream shows are uncategorized. This miscategorization happens on other websites as well, leaving a large chunk of my browsing unrepresented in all of the category charts.

So far this information serves no other purpose than to be interesting and amusing. Voyurl tells me I have not browsed enough to get some information, including recommended websites. Hopefully I will get enough browsing in soon to continue with Voyurl Part 3…

Steve Jobs died today.  I’ve never met him, but I’ve listened.  Closely.  He has inspired me to take chances.  To innovate and build products.  He has motivated me to do more, grow more, push harder and be the very best I could be every day.  Be the best I could be for my family and for those I work with.  He helped me understand the power of change and realize the contribution of dedication toward a vision.  I’m sick and sad but I’m thankful for the time he spent in the spotlight allowing people like me to know him better and live to a higher potential because of his inspiration.

Steve Jobs:  You will be missed.

In a recent New York Times article, Mickey Meece describes her news consumption routine: pick up the paper, toss it on the table with intentions to read later, get the news on her iPad instead. She lists out her regular rotation of news sources, which are different than mine and probably different than yours as well. Unlike the days when everyone received the same newspaper and without the myriad additional sources available online, our consumption of printed news is becoming more instant, customizable, and as a result, more segmented.

But this comes at a price. Not only for the newspaper industry feeling the pressure from an ever increasingly digital world, but also for the consumer. Meece points out numerous news aggregating apps for tablets that were created as a way to access all the information a newshound could want, all in one place and exactly how you want it…if you’re willing to work for it. Until the day when apps can read our minds and know what we want, we still have to go through the manual labor of telling the app to build something full of must reads while leaving out the clutter.

Is it worth it to today’s ever-on-the-go consumer though? We could be content to sit back and have the news companies deliver to us, either physically or electronically, the stories their editors deem important enough to print and simply pick and choose which sections we want to take in. Or we could be proactive and use those electronic sources to become our own editors to get precisely the newspaper we want, thus becoming more engaged and empowered readers.

These one stop shops are not only a convenient way to gather all of our favorite news sources and content sections, it should also be a way for advertisers to conveniently target interested consumers. Yet while sampling 5 of the aggregating apps Meece mentions, I was not served a single ad unless I clicked through a headline to read the story on the source website. A lack of ads seems such a waste since I am consciously handing the apps my interests along with my attention. The increasing customization available through these apps will benefit consumers as well as advertisers, if only they’re willing to put in the effort.

The number one search engine is celebrating its 13th birthday this month. According to the company the exact date has changed over time based on when employees feel like having cake, so we haven’t missed it just yet!

Google has clearly come a long way in the last 13 years though it feels like it has been with us forever. As the history and advancements of Google could provide for a novel, it would be easier to check out the company timeline.