The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.
Some are watching it on the Web, others will be at the Googleplex. Me, I’ll be among the latter. I’m trekking down to Mountain View in a few minutes.
Even though famed chef Charlie Ayers is leaving, I’m looking forward to eats on Google (hey, I’m nearly 8 months pregnant, give me a break), and, of course, I’m looking forward to hearing what execs have to say. Should be an interesting scene. Wonder if the new global communications head, Dan Senor, will be in attendance.
I’m trying to cover the whole state of California this week and am checking out the Kelsey Group’s “Drilling Down on Local” conference in Santa Clara. Returned from LA last night. The Super Shuttle driver took me down the Pacific Coast Highway on the way back to the airport, so got some great views of coastline, Malibu, the Santa Monica pier, etc.
So far so good on the Kelsey Group show. Have already seen quite a few familiar faces and also got to shake hands with someone I’ve met through blogging — Tony Gentile of buzzhit blog, who is apparently blogging the conference. Looks like it was worth the trip.
Google is back this April 1 with a new product announcement, Google Gulp. This is a sign my blog is around a year old, as I recall one of my first rants was about Google’s Gmail PR fiasco last year. Some interesting notes from the Google Gulp FAQ that give some (humorous) hints about the company’s marketing/PR philosophy.
4. What if I don’t want to use Auto-Drink™?
No problem – simply turn off Auto-Drink™ on your Google Gulp preferences page.
5. Well, shouldn’t Auto-Drink™ be default-off?
You mean we should cripple a perfectly useful feature just because of a little bad PR?
6. Yes.
Okay.
7. How can I get my hands on a Google Gulp?
This “limited release” beta product is available to anyone who turns in a used Google Gulp bottle cap at any local retailer. If you don’t have any Gulp caps, ask a friend to give you one.
8. What if none of my friends have a Gulp cap to give me? Can’t you just give Google Gulp to anyone who wants it?
Well, we’re thinking about it, but, um, you have to understand that there are many considerations which go into deciding how to distribute —
9. I mean, isn’t this whole invite-only thing kind of bogus?
Dude, it’s like you’ve never even heard of viral marketing.
At least the company has a sense of humor about the controversies it causes.
UPDATE: Battelle, in a post very similar to mine (journalists think alike, I guess) says the company’s jokey privacy language weirds him out. I agree that it does sound a bit cavalier.
Also, people are saying Google Gulp “caps” are finding their way onto eBay. No time to check it out.
Gary’s up in Redmond for the MSN Strategic Account Summit and weighs in on the new ad platform. In short, he says “this is a big deal.”
I agree completely. What’s fascinating to me is that this isn’t just a self-service paid search ad bidding interface. It’s “the first component of MSN adCenter” which will “give advertisers a one-stop shop from which to plan, execute and adjust their online campaigns.” (Quoting from the press release here.)
And if Steve Ballmer’s remarks in the keynote were any indication, online is just the beginning. Microsoft wants to build the technology to enable the targeting and delivery of ads to a whole bunch of other Internet-enabled platforms. (ClickZ coverage is here.)
Ballmer in the keynote:
The whole way, in some senses, in which you even buy what you consider today to be traditional TV media is absolutely going to change over the course of the next probably two to three years, and the technologies that enable that, both on the consumer end, and on the advertiser end, we’re absolutely, here at Microsoft at least, investing in, and have a leading edge position relative to what’s going on in the market.
So we need to make sure that our dialogue with you is a lot about what’s going on in traditional existing online today, but also talk about how the future of some of these other media will essentially merge with the online type over the course of the next several years. And we look forward to engaging with you in that leading edge dialogue.
Meanwhile, the newly-unveiled paid search platform part of it ain’t so shabby itself (though only the French and Singaporeans get to play with for now) where it comes to data and targeting. Here, Yusuf Mehdi demonstrates the new technology by describing a scenario in which a sporting goods retailer goes to buy for a campaign around March Madness:
We’ve done something that’s pretty unique with our technology. If you come down here below, we’ve actually taken the breadth of information we know about our customers on MSN, through registration data when people sign up for a Hotmail account, or an instant message account, or they customize their homepage. We enrich that data through third-party sources, so that we can overlay wealth index and demographic information, and then we map that to the keywords.
So that when you come down here. you can see that the data now in the keyword for basketball, according to our search queries, and this is data that we actually pulled from our network, believe it or not, it shows that the keyword basketball it tends to be more female than male that is actually searching on that keyword, and you see the demographic range of that age group. Then you see things that are lifestyle-indexed, so for example, we can see for example, a big popular group, the second series leaders, and the description of that marketing target. And then, of course, the wealth index.
Tom thinks Google’s in trouble. Why? It’s the ads.
UPDATE: Tony Gentile weighs in with a very well-reasoned response.
Wow. 1600 paid attendees at SES New York. So sorry I’m not one of those 1600, but someone’s gotta man the fort. Hope everyone is having a good time and is finding the show as valuable as I always have. I know our roving ClickZ correspondents are soaking it all in.