I thought this was a validating article for those who have been arguing with me about this for years.

Study: Context Matters for Online Ads

June 16, 2009

-By Lucia Moses

Like print ads, context matters when it comes to the effectiveness of Internet ads, according to new findings from media researcher McPheters & Co.  Analyzing the effectiveness of Internet banner ads, McPheters, collaborating with Condé Nast and CBS Vision, found that online ads running on sites with related content were 61 percent more likely to be recalled than ads on sites with unrelated content—a finding that would seem to undercut the case for ad or behavioral networks, which target viewers based on their Internet usage habits.

“The behavior networks are more focused on who they get in front of instead of the environment sites provide,” said Rebecca McPheters, CEO of McPheters & Co. “This says the site on which your ad appears matters.”

The firm also found that not all types of sites are created equal when it comes to recall. Social-networking, shopping and food sites generated the highest recall levels (29 percent to 39 percent), while search and portal sites had the lowest (under 5 percent).

Wouldn’t it be fun to see Google get its ass kicked?  Nothing personal, just good fun seeing the big guy knocked down.  Well, it’s not happening any time soon, but what goes around eventually comes around.

Check out:  www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Wolframalpha (annoying name, isn’t it?) makes use of contextual algorithms as compared to Google’s general keyword and link-based algorithms—so it’s pretty smart if you ask it something it knows.  Wolfram might say about Google, “to a hammer everything is a nail.”

[As a reminder, context is always king—the evolution of the web is about narrowing context to create more and more relevancy and engagement—see the name of this blog if you need proof.]

The first public version of Wolframalpha is more about discovering specific information than it is about discovering websites that contain specific information.   Of course, one of Wolframalpha’s subject-matter domains could easily be website discovery—that is, the entire business of  website discovery could be just one of the many domain-specific algorithms Wolframalpha offers.  On the other hand, what Wolframalpha provides is already a small subset of what Google currently provides, to a degree, so long as the questions posed to mister Google aren’t too tough.

It can be said that Wolframalpha is just the latest flavor of directed search with a few semantic chops on the side.  But this time around I believe there is real potential to cover much more domain-specific ground than previous efforts—wikis have taught us much.  Can Wolframalpha (or similar efforts) adequately cover what most humans currently discover via traditional keyword search?   The current “social search” efforts (let’s leave Twitter et al out of it for the moment) may be irrelevant, but there’s no doubt that capturing the world’s knowledge with domain-specific algorithms will take the work of many hands.

It’s  obvious that domain-specific algorithms are more interesting (provide more relevancy) than generic keyword algorithms.   Isn’t that why search within Twitter has everyone aflutter?   But we’ll all get over the novelty of social discovery and the real-time web soon enough because I believe something much smarter is coming, and on it we will flow.

FAQ of the day: What about Google Connect?

The short answer:

Anytime the large social networks make it easier for us to help our customers (web publishers) promote audience growth, it’s a very good thing.

The long answer:

While few and far between, my blog posts have always been about the opportunity large social networks and traditional portals have to begin serving publishers across the entire web.  I’ve used phrases like “open portal”, “anti-portal” and “the distributed web” to describe this opportunity.  In sum, if the major players hope to extend their ad networks to credible publishers across the web, they will have to earn that inventory by helping publishers grow their audiences. After all, Fox and NBC have to earn the right to place ads across their network of independent television stations by providing their affiliates’ programs that grow ratings. The same is true for internet ad networks.

Recent “openness” initiatives by MySpace, Google and Facebook Connect begin to ask the right question: How can we begin providing value to the universe of websites outside our domain? It’s a first step, but only a baby step.

While these initiatives allow website publishers to make limited use of mega-portal social information, they don’t empower publishers to aggregate and own their own user profiles and social graph information.   I believe this limitation is fatal if the major social networks hope to interoperate with high value web publishers in a meaningful way.  Moving forward all serious publishers want to contextually inform their advertising experiences and user applications with real-time user data that is unique to their audience. It is therefore essential that publishers own and control their own community profile management, reporting and social graph engine.

Providing publishers their own social graph engine is core to the KickApps product offering.  In fact all KickApps applications (e.g. UGC, social networking, widget building, programmable video players, media management, member management), along with 3rd party OpenSocial and Facebook apps, are fully integrated with the KickApps social graph engine out of the box.    What’s equally important is that we provide a full set of APIs, customizable feeds, widget builder tools and a plug-in architecture such that our publishers can easily build and deploy their own custom applications that make full use of our social graph engine.

The KickApps platform will certainly integrate with Google Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpace because these initiatives may help our website publishers accelerate audience growth by tapping into “friends” on the big social networks. But this value to publishers is modest relative to the benefits of leveraging their own social graph engine. KickApps will continue to earn long-lasting relationships with publishers because our sole mission is to serve them.

More analysis from around the web:

Google Friend Connect: What’s the Point? Mike Gunderloy, Web Worker Daily, GigaOm Network

Why should I, as a webmaster, set aside part of my page for you to have a conversation in? Why should you, as a user, come to my site to talk with your Facebook friends, rather than using Facebook? Why should I have to choose which identity to share with a site, rather than just logging in with OpenID and interacting with other users of that site? What are we getting in return for pushing another stream of data through Google?

Google Confirms Friend Connect Erick
Schonfeld, TechCrunch

But it is not there yet. For instance, it doesn’t work with Google’s Social Graph API, and many more social and identity networks still need to be connected.  …The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday).  However, Glazer also says that he wouldn’t be surprised if eventually Google or somebody else makes it possible for Websites to combine the Friend Connect data with their own.

Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect Charlene Li, Groundswell

Prying Open the Social Graph Stacey Higginbotham, GigaOM

I enjoyed Hooman Radfar’s post re semantic web at  Widgify. When semantic web finally rolls out in a meaningful way I doubt consumers will have any idea that they just experienced the “semantic web”.  They’ll just find that many separate services that they normally use in an ad hoc fashion are suddenly integrated in more interesting ways.  Semantic web will also bring new ways to navigate the internet.  More on that later.

By Eric Alterman
Published February 29, 2008

iMedia Connection

Widget providers increasingly are bypassing portals and distributing
content directly to user-controlled pages, requiring portals to evolve.
KickApps’ founder explains.

The universe of websites has a very long tail, and soon it will be
clear that earning real estate on those websites will be the primary
mission of every major portal. Widgets will play an ever-increasing
role in this evolution.

Prediction: Portals like AOL, MSN and Yahoo will eventually generate
more impressions and ad inventory by exporting widgets to third-party
websites than by serving retail traffic within their own domains.

Most people are still trying to figure out what widgets really are
and their importance, but few are looking at the role traditional
internet portals will play in this new ecosystem. The major content
portals like AOL and Yahoo used to define “distribution” when it came
to web content (as both creators and acquirers of original content).
Then widgets came along and increasingly “distributed” that
distribution power to individuals and their personal pages (e.g. social
networking pages, blogs).

The problem for traditional portals is that content producers and
third-party widget providers increasingly have convenient ways to
bypass portals by distributing content and other user experiences
directly to consumer-controlled pages. While the major portals often
own social network traffic (e.g. AIM Pages) and feed aggregators (e.g.
MyYahoo), that traffic increasingly is splintered by third-party
content and widget providers. In short, the entire web community is
aggressively fishing in portal waters, and there are good reasons to
expect that trend to accelerate.

The first step in recognizing that future growth lies beyond their
portal walls was expressed through a series of multi-billion dollar
acquisitions of various advertising platforms: AOL buys Tacoda, Yahoo
buys RightMedia, Google buys Doubleclick, Microsoft acquires aQuantive,
etc, etc, etc. But how will these ad networks compete for inventory
across the ever-expanding universe of independent websites?

CPM guarantees and ad intelligence are ultimately limited product
differentiators because hyper-competition can only mean commoditization
and profit erosion, and mega agencies like WPP are also entering the
advertising network game with their own acquisitions (e.g. 24/7 Real
Media). What’s a traditional portal to do?

There are several possibilities, but I believe the winning strategy
for traditional portals is to extend the reach of their advertising
platforms by offering independent web publishers something portals have
produced very well for years within their own domains: compelling
content and highly interactive user experiences. To do this, portals
must package and deliver these experiences in a highly viral,
self-serve fashion. That means widgets.

Portals can evolve into hubs that serve an essential purpose in the
evolving widget ecosystem, connecting the creators of content and
interactive user experiences with the universe of independent websites.
So in addition to inviting third-party content widgets into their own
environments, portals that wish to thrive must also become major
exporters of content and interactive user experiences. “Open-Portal” or
maybe even “Anti-Portal” may be the best way to describe this new beast.

But will marketers, web publishers and content creators willingly
submit to portal hegemony once again? The answer is yes, I believe, so
long as portals deliver what these players really need. Creating richer
media experiences and more audience interaction requires increasingly
complex technology. So the kind of portal widget platform I’m talking
about must include functions such as easy media management, profile
management and administration; consumer experiences now require more
technology than most publishers and content creators can reasonably
afford.

Portal platforms must also distribute widgets that click to deeper
user experiences (e.g. “Deep Widgets”) on landing pages that engage
users with both editorial and user-generated content. In that sense,
widgets distributed by portals become windows into richer, more
engaging user experiences that generate incremental ad inventory,
monetized by both portals and their website affiliates. These landing
pages must maintain the branding of independent websites with the help
of APIs, CSS and customizable templates, and must similarly enable
member and profile integration with the existing user base.

The idea of internet portals morphing into “wholesalers” of
programming to many thousands of “affiliates” should not be surprising.
Wholesale distribution is the driver of nearly every major industry
(from manufacturing to major media). The television and film industries
have worked that way for decades. NBC earns the right to sell
advertising across thousands of independent television stations by
providing those stations programming that is often aggregated from many
sources. Similarly, internet portals must earn the right to place
advertising across the entire internet by leveraging a sophisticated
platform to distribute both content and interactive programming.

While portals like Yahoo may capture dominant market share
relative to other websites, their audience growth is modest relative to
the aggregate audience of large and small websites across the internet.
The universe of websites has a very long tail, and soon it will be
clear that earning real estate on those websites will be the primary
mission of every major portal. Widgets will play an ever-increasing
role in this evolution, and marketers, for one, are beginning to take
notice.

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It was a pleasure watching the KickApps troops in action over the last few weeks.  Our new release is the result of an amazing team effort, and I’m looking forward to sharing KickApps 3.0 with our customers. 

Stay tuned—we have a few more big surprises on the way.