[youtube=http://youtu.be/CZrGDo9Grgk]
Google has just posted four new Google Wear ads to its YouTube channel that show off the device in every day situations. Compared with the mostly technical videos Google has posted for its Android Wear wearables platform thus far, the commercials look a lot more like TV spots aimed at regular consumers.
Google appears to be experimenting with new “Listen Now” ads in search results for streaming music services including its own Google Play Music and competitors like Apple’s Beats Music. The Wall Street Journal first noticed the ads and confirmed the new format with Google:
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YouTube has acquired a startup called Directr according to a post on the company’s website, as noted by the Wall Street Journal. Directr is a startup that makes two iOS apps for video creation—one focused on everyday users, and the other designed with small business marketing videos in mind.
The company says that for now, “everything you love about Directr is staying the same.” Directr’s current employees, however, will be joining the YouTube video ads team. Neither party has said how much the buyout cost yet, but Directr has confirmed that despite the change of ownership, it will continue to offer its current apps, which will now be available for free.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cme5PtvdOtA&list=UUWwgaK7x0_FR1goeSRazfsQ]
Samsung shared a few new ads today for the new Galaxy Tab S series of tablets, that it officially launched back in June. The tablet, which comes in 8.4-inch and 10.5-inch variants, includes a 2560×1600 Super AMOLED display and that is the focus of the marketing message in two of today’s ads titled “Mom” and “Artist”. The other ad, titled “Judge”, shows off the tablet’s multitasking features.
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In a blog post, Google today announced that it is adding product ratings to its Product Listing Ads within searches. The stars will come from a variety of reviews and sources, including merchants, third-party review sites, users, and more. Google says that adding product ratings to its Listing Ads within searches will drive higher traffic through these ads. The company claims that this change also helped increase click-through rates of Product Listing Ads in early testing.
We believe these ratings will help differentiate products across google.com and google.com/shopping and will help merchants drive more qualified traffic through Product Listing Ads. In initial tests, product ratings also helped increase click-through-rates of Product Listing Ads.
Google announced changes to its ad policies earlier this week that could have a big impact on its revenue: the search and advertising company has declared that it will no longer allow ads for sexually explicit websites through its AdWords platform, according to CNBC.
Any ads found to be in violation of the updated policy will be removed from the network, Google told advertisers that could potentially be affected in an email. This change only impacts the company’s ad offering, not search results or any other products, so while some sites may see an impact, it won’t be as big a hit as if listings were removed from search.
Today, Google announced that it has acquired video advertising firm mDialog. A post on DoubleClick’s official Google+ account welcomed the ad company to the team and reaffirmed its commitment to helping publishers monetize their content.
Google announced today that it has finished the rollout of its new AdMob to more than 200 countries and as a result the company will stop accepting apps into Google Play based on its old SDK on August 1st. Following this initiative, the search giant will sunset AdMob’s legacy platform on August 31st. After this, legacy ad units will stop working and the outdated AdMob UI will no longer be accessible.
Google has a creative way of advertising its products and its latest effort is quite a doozy. On May 30th at 10:45pm (local time) the company will air a live music performance by Sam Smith from London’s Roundhouse venue that will broadcast across a full ad break on the UK’s Channel 4. So what’s with the quickie concert? It’s an advertising platform for Mountain View’s digital music service.
Those who expressed concern about Google’s acquisition of Nest may have have been right: the company has told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it may choose to serve ads on “refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.”
The WSJ reports that Google made the statement in support of its contention that it shouldn’t have to break out ad revenue from mobile devices …
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Google announced a new ad format today that the company hopes will give publishers additional freedom when monetizing their websites. This new marketing tool is called “magazine ads” and it have nothing to do with publication subscriptions in Google Play.
When it comes to tech on the web, Google is typically a trendsetter, but even the most revolutionary companies miss a beat every now and then. Perhaps in an effort to get with the times, the software giant has announced some new designs for its text-based web ads. Recognizing that people are browsing the web across multiple devices, Google has adopted a new font and color scheme that should make its text ads easier to digest. These ads now default to a blue and grey layout with a Roboto font. Google is also aware that some people only visit the internet from mobile devices, so with finger tapping in mind, the company has resized its call-to-action button, making it user-friendly. While these new additions won’t likely stop abrasive advertisers from going too far, it does make some ads easier on the eyes and that’s a good thing, right?
With the release of a new flagship smartphone, you can pretty much guarantee that Samsung will release a new marketing campaign taking jabs at the iPhone. But in the case of the Galaxy S5, the company has turned things up notch. In the past we’ve seen Sammy make subliminal references to Apple’s devices, but the company has never mentioned the iPhone by name.
When Samsung launched its entirely free “Milk Music” service for Galaxy device owners in March, the “limited time” wording in its press release made us speculate that ads or a fee for the service would come in the near future. Today Samsung has finally confirmed as much in a blog post about the service posted to its Samsung Tomorrow blog. While taking some time to highlight features of the service, Samsung revealed that a $3.99/month ad-free “Premium Service” is on the way and that a free service will stick around but include ads. It looks like it will also offer an “Ad-free special introductory offer” that will let new users trial the service for free without ads for a limited time. Samsung says the new Premium Service subscription will be “available soon.”
Google is in the process of launching an all-new advertising campaign to promote YouTube, according to two reports from Ad Age. The campaign focuses on three specific video creators—Michelle Phan, Rosanna Pansino, and Bethany Mota—and will consist of several TV spots as well as some outdoor advertising (yes, that probably means there will be YouTube billboards).
Each ad will feature a different tagline that plays on the “You” in the YouTube logo to start a sentence related to the video creator in the ad, such as “You make confience THE must-have accessory,” as seen above at the end of one of Phan’s TV spots, or “You give cupcakes superpowers,” as appears on one of Pansino’s billboards. (Apparently super-powered cupcakes are a thing.)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUL4d4t17j4
Keeping up with the year-end videos, Google has just released another video, highlighting the best ads that appeared on YouTube this year. The company says that 2013 was the year in which “brands re-invented ads on YouTube – by making ads people chose to watch.”
To celebrate this amazing year, and gear up for what’s sure to be an even bigger 2014, we created this video to celebrate just some of the great work done by brands. Do you remember all of these? Which was your favorite?
The video shows off twenty ads, many of which ended up going viral. The ads are for a variety of things, such as the Honda, Oreos, Kmart, and Samsung.
Check out the video above.
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We all know that Google is BIG, BIG, BIG, but just how big is Google these days? During a keynote at Ignition 2013, Business Insider CEO Henry Bloodroot presented a slide that shows Google on course to exceed the revenues of both magazines and newspapers this year. In fact, almost all of Google’s expected $60 billion in revenue will come from advertising this year.
Google just announced that it’s rolling out Google Shopping– a.k.a paid product listing ads that appear in search results– in eight new countries. Starting today, Google users in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Turkey will be begin seeing what Google says are highly relevant ads that also include “rich product information” like images and pricing.
The Product Listing Ads appear in Google Search results as ‘Sponsored’ listings for queries that include “commercial intent.” But Google notes that it will also show product listings when it has “enough relevant products to match that user’s query.”
Users in the countries mentioned above should begin seeing the ads above text ads on the right side of search results starting today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-KTCKvn1cs
Google just posted a couple of its latest ads for its new Nexus 7. This time around the company is focusing on students with one of the new advertisements posted to YouTube showing a student multitasking on the tablet and another highlighting the new textbook rentals feature that Google started rolling out back in August.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8JqUlQj43M
Foursquare is squarely moving into Google’s territory with the announcement today that it is officially opening up its local ad platform to all of the 1.5 million claimed businesses in the app. That means that no longer will only a select group of partners be able to offer “Promoted” listings within the app– something Foursquare has been testing in recent months– but now all small businesses will have the opportunity to place local ads.
The benefit over, say, Google’s ads platform for local businesses, is the ability for merchants to actually see if their ad leads to a real customer walking into their store:
Today, we’re opening Foursquare Ads to all small businesses around the world. We’re moving past the days when business owners have to figure out if a “like” or a “click” has any meaning in the real world; now they can tell if someone who saw their ad actually walks into their store. We built this to be simple and flexible, learning from our four years of data and relationships with over 1.5 million claimed businesses. Any merchant can monitor how many people have viewed their ad, how many have tapped on it, and how many actually came into their store. Merchants know what they’re paying for – real actions and real customers.
Business owners interested in creating ads on Foursquare can do so at foursquare.com/ads.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3qeJKax2CU
Despite the device’s universally-abysmal reviews, Samsung is continuing to market its Galaxy Gear smartwatch as the wave of the future—and the past—with two new TV ads. The first, titled “A Long Time Coming,” Samsung uses clips from some of the most popular TV shows of decades past to set the Galaxy Gear up as the long-awaited wrist-mounted computer from Dick Tracey, The Jetsons, Knight Rider, and more.
The ad has a similar feel to Apple’s “Hello” TV spot, which it launched with the iPhone 5c last month, but rather than featuring customers using the advertised product, Samsung’s ad shows fictional characters using Hollywood’s various conceptions of the smartwatch.
Google today announced that it is launching a public beta for its new Web Designer tool that allows users to build interactive ads and other HTML5 content. Google says that with HTML5 ad spend expected to overtake Flash spend within the next two years, it’s aiming to provide easy-to-use tools that will allow publishers to quickly and easily create and publish HTML5 ads:
We’re working hard to solve this development challenge by offering agencies powerful yet easy-to-use tools for HTML5 production. In this vein, we announced DoubleClick Studio Layouts for HTML5 back in August, which lets you create HTML5 ads in minutes, and last week we announced Ready Creatives in AdWords, which creates HTML5 ads for you in seconds. Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta of Google Web Designer, a new professional-quality design tool that makes HTML5 creative accessible to everyone from the designer to the dabbler.
Google walked through a few of the features of Web Designer in its blog post:
It also noted that access to Web Designer will be free for all, at least for the time being.
The Web Designer beta is available to download on Google’s website. Google has a getting started guide here, and high-speed demo of an ad being created in the Web Designer beta is below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHj7fqbNaQw&feature=youtu.be
Increased competition in digital advertising doesn’t seem to be hurting Google: the company is on track to increase its market share to almost 33 percent this year, with a commanding 53% in mobile advertising. The projections were made by research company eMarketer based on an analysis of company reports, though both dollar and percentage figures are slightly down on its earlier predictions back in June …
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wHwKGw0Yno
Samsung just released a couple new Galaxy S4 ads on its YouTube channel that will likely be making their way to TV along with the many others its being airing in recent weeks. The latest ads don’t directly after the Apple or iPhone like some of the company’s past ads, but the first (above) does highlight Samsung’s Smart Switch feature that makes it easy for users to transfer their content from other devices. Another ad (below) focuses on Samsung’s built-in S Translate feature:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTO5xT1kgQk
