The cash for comment affair was an Australian scandal that broke in 1999, concerning paid advertising in radio that is presented to the audience in such a way as to sound like editorial commentary. John Laws, a shock jock radio presenter for Sydney talk back, was accused of misusing his authority as an announcer. (Wikipedia)
Is it just me, or this (no doubt clever) new innovation from Google does sound similar?
I work in digital media and only too aware of the enormous benefits that data provides to marketers by allowing to narrow down on virtually any segment of the market. Targeting is becoming so sophisticated in fact, that that the quote that goes as ‘half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, except I don’t know which half’ (John Wanamaker) is losing relevance.
Users can benefit from relevant and contextual advertising, yes, but let’s be honest. There is stuff you just don’t want to share. So if you have a Google Account, and also concerned about your data being used, follow these simple instructions on how to delete past history and prevent recording going forward. You have till the end of today (i.e. before 1 March 2012).
One of the smoothest cross promotion examples I have recently seen. Vic Gundotra (previously from Microsoft, but since 2007) from Google (note nice big logo in the background) praising Mercedes S Class and coining the phrase ‘magical software’… Nicely done.
Clever idea, straight from the Google blog:
To be quite frank, Google prompted this post with their own acknowledgement of the 122 year anniversary of his birthday, although I thought it was more respectable to post a video of the real Charlie Chaplin himself. What a talent.
If you want to see Google’s doodle, check out www.google.com today.
Hackers Discover Google's Unreleased Cloud-Based Music Service | Fast Company‘A hacker from the XDA-Dev forum found something interesting when he forced the Motorola Xoom Android tablet's music app onto his Android smartphone: a "Sync Music" feature. So the hacker tested the out the feature. He uploaded the music from his memory card into Google's cloud, wiped the memory card clean, and found that he was able to pull the music back down from the cloud. […] Google is reportedly launching a music service later this year that will feature cloud-based storage and a subscription service. No word yet on a release date, but the existence of the "Sync Music" button leads us to believe that it isn't too far away.’
Since Google announced their ‘intention of purchase’ of DoubleClick in April of 2007, CEO Eric Schmidt has been talking about display advertising with great ambition. As he said in the press release following the ‘07 announcement, he believed the DoubleClick acquisition was going to ’accelerate the adoption of Google's innovative advances in display advertising’.
The purchase went through in November 2008, in the press release of which, Schmidt said that ‘DoubleClick gives Google the leading platform for display advertising, enabling [them] to rapidly bring advances to the market in technology and infrastructure that will dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurability and performance of digital media for publishers, advertisers and agencies. In addition he mentioned that ‘the combination of Google and DoubleClick [will] deliver better, more relevant display ads’.
And only last year, at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in March 2009 CNN quoted him saying that they are in the process of building an ad exchange that will ‘apply the Google magic’ to placing display advertising online. (additional source Techpulse)
And since Schmidt has implied on many occasion before that display advertising is their next billion dollar business, it’s no surprise that a couple of days ago (February 2010) Google appointed Barry Salzman as Head of Media Platform (including display), who is all about efficiency.
More on that later...
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Also quoted on