Ads

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.

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After a long battle with YouTubers, Nintendo is ready to compromise. The house that Mario built is ready to play nice with content creators and will soon launch a YouTube affiliate program. According to a pair of tweets from the official Nintendo of Japan Twitter account, the company will share revenue with content producers who make approved gameplay videos under its new YouTube-friendly setup. Nintendo has yet to announce any further details, such as content requirements or when the program will go live, so everyone may not be welcomed. However, it’ll also be interesting to see how this new initiative coincides with the upcoming release of Mario Kart 8, which just so happens to have a YouTube upload feature built directly into the game.

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L’Oréal’s lead marketing executive is heading to Google. After little over three years with the cosmetics maker, Marc Speichert is taking his talents to Mountain View to help the company court new advertising partners. He’ll report to former Procter & Gamble exec, Kirk Perry who joined the search giant last fall.

 
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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.

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Google announced today that it has acquired marketing platform Adometry to help improve its Google Analytics products. In the short-term, Adometry will continue to offer its products and support its current customers but also work with Google to make the platform available to Analytics customers:

We’re deeply committed to the customers and relationships we have cultivated over the years. Adometry will continue to offer the same excellent service our clients have come to expect, and there will be no immediate changes to our current offerings or contracts. We’ll be reaching out to all of our customers individually to discuss future plans in the coming weeks.

Google said that it would be using Adometry to complement its “existing measurement & analytics offerings” for Google Analytics Premium, while Adometry noted it will work with the Google Analytics team “to offer great attribution solutions for both our customers and theirs.” A little on the Adometry platform and how it works from the company:

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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.

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5eXnF5RdFI]

Google is about to unveil some new product announcements for AdWords and related businesses, and above you can watch the whole thing live through Google’s own livestream of the event. With only a few minutes before the event starts, it looks like the company’s Vice President of Product Management for AdWords Jerry Dischler will be unveiling a new mobile app installs product for Search and YouTube just as Twitter is launching a similar offering…
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With the introduction of a new CEO and a few personnel shifts, Microsoft is definitely making some changes, but along with its corporate restructuring, the company appears to have a new take on marketing as well. Derrick Connell, Microsoft’s corporate vice president in charge of Bing recently stated during an online Q&A session that the company was done with its highly publicized Scroogled ad campaign.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WohB8WDYCZ0]

Really. In a bid to promote the G Flex as “the most human phone ever,” LG created the type of ad that is likely to make you want to head rapidly in the opposite direction the moment you catch sight of its phone …

Our review is slightly better.

via BGR
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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.

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For the last 5.5 years I sat at the helm of TmoNews.com, a site I founded with a passion and focus for all things T-Mobile. Unfortunately, circumstances happen and you try and move on and that’s exactly what I’ve done by landing at 9to5Google.com. I’ve long known Seth, Mark and Jordan and the rest of their team as a great bunch of tech bloggers and I know this is the kind of place that will allow me to introduce the same level of creativity, passion and joy as my previous role.

Writing about Google is a huge task and a challenge I welcome with open arms. From Chrome, to Android, Chrome OS and everything in-between I’ll tackle Google topics head-on and do so in a way that provides both news reporting as well as insight into why the story matters to you.

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We first brought you the story of a 30-year-old man finding his lost mother and family using Google Earth earlier this year, and Google has posted an emotional video on YouTube of Saroo Brierley telling his story of technology leading to his reunion.

Brierly was disconnected from his family at the age of five in a turn of tragedy, and decades later saw Google Earth as an avenue to search the streets he recollected in fragments for answers of his origin. Check out the compelling video below:
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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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Among other smaller additions, Android Police found a pretty big change coming to Google’s Gmail 4.6 App this week: Ads.

While El Goog hasn’t officially activated ads on mobile yet, the App is getting ready for them with a bunch of new code tailored around bringing ads to Gmail. Snippets are pasted below

<string name=”ad”>AD</string>
<string name=”ad_will_not_save”>Will not save ad as message</string>
<string name=”ad_will_save”>Will save ad as message</string>
<string name=”ad_dismissed”>Ad dismissed</string>

The above appears to suggest that you’ll be able to save ads as messages. Like an ad? Save it, and it’ll become part of your inbox. Don’t like it, and it’ll get dismissed. Very interesting, isn’t it?

To support ads, a whole brand new library was added called… ads:

com/google/android/gm/ads/

Inside, we have 8 classes, all related to ad presentation – toasts, teaser, sender header, ad header, ad border, and the ad view itself:

The likely move isn’t at all surprising and with Google popping ads disguised as email in Gmail tabbed interface and well, that’s how Google makes money.  You didn’t think Gmail was really free, did you?
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Reuters reports that Motorola is currently shipping 100,000 Moto X handsets a week – though not necessarily selling this number.

Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside said “When you set up to ramp a factory you need a plan, and we have shipment targets we need to make with our carrier partners, and where we need to be right now is 100,000 units and that’s where we are.”

Woodside would say only that direct sales to customers were “substantial”. Either way, we suspect the company must be secretly disappointed in the numbers … 
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