Is Yahoo Loosing it?

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Tim Judd

I was at the Adtech show last week, meeting with the great and the good of the online advertising world, and it was to say the very least a very interesting few days. The largest single topic of discussion could be broadly characterized as “what’s up with Yahoo?” The current excitement comes from the changes we have all seen since their new fearless leader took charge. For the longest time, Yahoo and Google have pursued quite different search growth strategies. Google has focused on growing the Google.com brand, driving as much traffic to the mother ship whilst offering only the breadcrumbs of revenue represented by AdSense to the wider world. It is theoretically possible to get hold of a real Google search feed to offer to end users, but you have a stronger chance of being elected the next Pope after this new one than getting hold of one.

At the same time, Yahoo built a syndication network; where at one point, pretty much any site or tool with a pulse could offer Yahoo powered results to online searchers. The results of the strategies speak for themselves… Google search giant… Yahoo not so much. Obviously that’s not the only thing that made the difference, but it was a factor. Yahoo, having taken the syndication route, did a pretty good job of doing that and in so doing spawned an entire industry of folk dedicated to offering Yahoo results to all comers getting chubby at the Yahoo buffet… then came regime change.

Marissa Mayer is a very smart cookie, and as an original Googler is no doubt used to the Google way. She shocked pundits early in her rein by down playing the importance of search in the future plans of Yahoo (search …smerch…who needs it!?), and supposedly spurred on by the denizens at Bing (who power Yahoo search), she has “set her cap” (I’m watching a lot of Game of Thrones right now so tend to lapse into old English on occasion) against syndication. High quality search traffic which used to score 8 all day long now scores 5 one day, then 7 the next, then 4.5, then nine. Clicks jump from 30 cents to 3, and back for no obvious reason. It’s not just us seeing this… all over AdTech sharp young men with shaved heads, and intense women with power purses were hurling themselves out of high windows or could be seen sobbing into their third Martini at lunch.

The net result of all this weirdness has to be that syndication revenues are cratering at Yahoo. That wouldn’t matter if they already had 68% of the market like Google has, but for a relatively distant third place which has relied on syndication for so many years, this change in strategy is a lot like the Republicans deciding that they don’t need the Old White Guy vote in favor of a rainbow TuTu… it’s cute… but the other guys already have that model and who is going to pay the bills? The hope in the conference was that someone would get bored or freaked out and things would return to normal… but if the new normal is this, the next AdTech San Fran may well be five guys outside the Starbucks at the Moscone center.

Targeting Twitter

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Tim Judd

Good news from Twitter today for those of us looking to reach potential customers where they hang out online. The explosive growth of social media in recent years should (in theory anyway) have been a Godsend to any advertiser looking to make a personal, and hopefully effective, connection. The problem is that despite all the hoopla and excitement, the verdict still seems to be out on social engagement as an effective medium. Today’s announcement from Twitter that it will allow advertisers, especially small businesses, to target by interest, gender and device represents another step in the right direction. The use case they point to is (for example) a golf products company who might want to target people who follow Tiger Woods.

It certainly seems like a good idea. My concern is that, as far as I can see so far anyway, it doesn’t allow for geo targeting which would be problematic for a bricks and mortar local business looking to drive foot traffic or a plumber looking for more clients in their service area. In our experience, a good majority of local businesses only want local clients… running a national campaign would be potentially wasteful. We have tested with social media multiple times, but for the kind of results we are looking for it simply doesn’t convert as well as search does by significant margins… orders of magnitude in some cases. Is it likely that this Twitter approach will work any better, only time will tell. There are some reasonably good stats out there, which indicate that for the kind of local and time sensitive clients we serve the more immediate level of Twitter engagement scores better than the more passive Facebook engagement.

Whether either will rise to anywhere near the level and target-ability of search remains to be seen. The complicating factor here is of course as always, mobile. As mobile usage continues to explode, the available real estate for any kind of advertising declines. Social media has sprinted to mobile devices; indeed so, that Facebook was caught so flat-footed with mobile contributed to their stock problems last year. All the signs are that end users are resistant to ads in their mobile social experience. They don’t mind it quite as much in search, as frequently the commercial result is the right answer to the question. It will be interesting to see if squeezing albeit targeted ads into the limited Twitter real estate on mobile devices will fly. We will certainly test it out and we will keep you posted.

“Twas the Blog Before Christmas”

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Tim Judd

It’s nearly that time…I don’t think I’ll be posting much over the break, so here’s what probably amounts to my final post for 2012. Looking back over close to 100 blogs throughout the year it’s striking (to me anyway) just how much happens in our space and how much that impacts the real world around us.

This year we have seen mobile usage and commerce explode worldwide but especially in the US. We typically lag the front runners by a year or two and this year mobile finally made it happen. Over all mobile search volume went from less than 10% to (by some reports) closer to 25% of traffic and it’s possible that mobile will outstrip desktop next year..a full year earlier than expected. At the same time local traffic grew dramatically. That’s perhaps not that surprising given the growth in mobile, but as the guys who have been saying that local is the next big thing I take a certain amount of satisfaction in the 30-50% local intent query numbers we are seeing.

2012 saw the reshaping of social after the debacle of the Facebook IPO. There is still a lot of opportunity in social and more recently there has been some encouraging data on how social may eventually monetize. What I find most intriguing is the idea of using social signals from the relatively few who do engage socially with a product or service to generate a profile of what a customer might look like then target that potential customer in volume through search and social media….it’s complicated and sometimes slightly creepy stuff.

In 2012 Google continued to rule supreme in spite of multiple assaults for “evil” behavior at home and abroad. As I type the FTC is wrapping up it’s investigation into Google and it looks like big G will skate unharmed on their home turf, they may yet have a tougher job convincing their tougher critics in the EU. I feels like almost every day there is some new announcement or development which makes out engagement with the real world as expressed through the virtual world of search and mobile deeper, richer and sometimes scarier.

The world we serve, that of driving new clients to huge numbers of local businesses through search and all kinds of new media has become both more exciting and much more complicated. Given the plethora of media the choose from (search, SEM,SEO, social, local display and mobile to name but a few) and the continued decline of traditional media it’s becoming almost impossible for the average SMB to navigate that complexity. We solve for that by using all those new media on a massive scale to drive the high quality leads the local businesses need. We spent much of 2012 developing the machines needed to make that happen reliably and at scale, 2013 will be the year that hits big.

On the grander scale our industry has enabled revolution and reform and has been attacked by tyrants around the world. We have created enormous amounts of new wealth (and destroyed quite a bit with Facebook). Search is becoming pervasive and in some ways invasive. The mobile device is becoming the prime way of engagement for many more activities and with recent developments in both Apple and Android location based commerce (L-Commerce) will likely become ubiquitous in 2013 changing our world yet again.

For my self, on Leap Day I married my last and final wife, saw my oldest son graduate college and working with our team of hard working, inspired and inspiring people we reshaped our business to lead the upcoming local revolution. I trust your year was equally happy and productive. I wish you and yours a wonderful Holiday Season….Merry Christmas to all…. and to all a good night.

A Very Mappy Christmas

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Tim Judd

The recent hoopla over the return of Google Maps to iOS has focused on the accuracy, splendor and coolness of their revamped app. I have to agree it’s terrific. I’m fairly frequently critical of Google in these pages (nothing like biting off the hand that feeds you) but I will happily give credit where it’s due with this new app. However (you knew there was a however coming right?) it raises a set of larger and perhaps more interesting questions beyond how gosh darned neat the thing is.

So very much of what we do is essentially local. Much of the hoopla surrounding the space this year has been to do with local. It seems like every other company (including my own) is essentially trying to solve the local dilemma. We have location based apps for pretty much everything from reviews and coupons to directions and deals. Millions have spent on geo-fencing to allow stores to pull of the ‘Minority Report” greeting individual customers with appropriate messages as they enter or pass their stores. Millions more have been spent building user bases for coupon or loyalty programs so we can get offers from our favorite coffee shop. Reviews have long been a mainstay of all things online, add the exploding world of mobile to that and we have a valuable and high energy mix.

Pretty much all of the above can be best experienced with a smart mobile device and a really good map app. Google maps is just that. So in 2013 look for Google to further expand their reviews and check in options way past just the Zagat they purchased. I’d expect them to add a checking and review feature probably closely tied to a virtual geo-fence program offered to members of many loyalty programs. Look for coupons and daily deals pushed to your map app together with offers from Apple’s Passbook and or Googles Maps/Fieldtrip. The ability to pay with your mobile device although missing from iPhone 5 is already in some handsets and is likely to be in many more in the very near future. Either way, maps are central to all things local and Google has snatched the crown back. 2013 should be interesting.

Opting Out of Yellow

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Tim Judd

It’s not often that I LOL when reading anything. The other day I did when the author used the phrase ‘treeware” as in hardware, firmware,software and for the archaic paper component “treeware” very funny….I intend to steal that phrase and claim it for my own. For years I have called yellow books ‘dead tree products’ and the process of moving the book from my front door to recycling is often the only exercise I get. The accumulation of treeware on door steps is symptomatic of the crazy mess the yellow books find themselves in. Most people are somewhat aware that yellow pages have been suffering horribly with the decline in their core business over recent years. What most don’t realize that central to their problems are greatly exacerbated by the debt they accumulated a decade or more ago when times were great and many groups went on buying sprees to build huge publishing groups. Now the advertisers have gone but the debt remains. I read the other day that in order for Dex to complete their deal with SuperMedia either their debtors will have to agree to a restructuring or both of them will have to go bankrupt (again) to complete the deal. Similarly Hibu in the UK (formerly Yell) have suspended debt repayments until they restructure their financials causing their stock to plummet by over a third.

It’s not all bleak news. The yellow book industry has just proved that they are able to deliver an elegant end to end online experience through the recent launch of www.yellowpagesoptout.com. It’s a bold move and one which the Association of Directory Publishers is to be commended for making.Simply by registering I was able to opt out of receiving the five yellow books which litter my front yard. A couple of clicks and I was done….I’m now a treeware free zone!

Street Fight …Not and Windows 8 Search

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Tim Judd

I was excited to attend the Street Fight conference in New York this week. I even moved flights to get to NYC ahead of the Hurricane Sandy. Street Fight pulled the plug on the entire event Sunday morning and looking at the forecasts and the impact so far it’s entirely understandable. Just in case you haven’t come across it Street Fight is all about “Hyperlocal.” Hyperlocal is the catch phrase Du Jour for all things local. It looks at content, commerce and strategy for all things local and has a nice edge about the industry….which can be a bit dry and dull. They have an excellent daily roundup of all things local and if you don’t already subscribe you probably should. They have rescheduled to mid January and I’ll be there then. Good luck to all those in the path of the storm…stay safe we on the West coast we’ll be thinking of you.

Meantime Windows 8 was announced and although I haven’t managed to lay my hot little hands on it yet they do look to have done some very interesting stuff around the new search. The whole Window 8 paradigm offers a range or key tasks as objects on the desktop rather than a list of items or programs. The new search follows a similar theme. The traditional Bing is still available but the new Bing is optimized to work with new Microsoft Surface OS devices and I do like the way they present results as a matrix of easily clickable cells rather than the traditional list of blue links. The way the results work is interesting also. It lets the user push the results bar to the side and navigate within search without the constant back and forth of traditional search. Bing also has a range of search Apps which let you focus on a topic like travel or images. I think it’s an interesting paradigm and I look forwards to working with it.

Yahoo Surrenders Local

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Tim Judd

As I have mentioned in many previous posts I like Yahoo….I have always liked Yahoo. Back in the day when they were the cool kids complete with huge goofy purple chairs they didn’t let being wildly successful turn them into corporate monsters. They have famously had a horrible last few years with Google cleaning their clock in search and multiple other miss steps. When Marissa Mayer assumed control it was clear that she had to pick the battles she was going to fight. Back when she joined in July I appealed to her from these very pages to put Local on her to “fix and focus on” list. I didn’t think for a moment she’d hear me (I’m not that delusional) but I was saddened a little to see in her recent discussions around Q3 results that Yahoo won’t be focusing on local going forwards. It’s understandable, Yahoo local is broken. As one of the people who attempts to work with them on behalf of our clients they have been grinding to a halt recently. It would take an effort worthy of the New Deal to jump start the platform so it’s understandable that the resources might be further diverted from this red headed step child. Central to Yahoo’s Brave New World is (of course) mobile. Call me crazy but don’t local and mobile go together? The recent Apple Maps fiasco points at how hard it is to do maps and by adoption, local. Yahoo Local as a directory has been stuck without focus or a reason to thrive, and has missed the kind of location based innovation and reviews championed by FourSquare and Yelp. Could Yahoo have taken on local as a central part of their mobile strategy, probably. However if the end game for Yahoo is to land on the carrier deck of one of the other flag ships in the continuing online Battle of Midway being waged by Apple, Google and Microsoft it probably makes less sense to invest in something which could be improved with minimal cost by simply signing over the entire thing to another player like Bing.

A moment’s silence please in memory of Yahoo Local.

1.68 People

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Tim Judd

I was at a fascinating conference last week. It starred the great and the good of marketing in general and online in particular…it’s not often I get to share a panel with CMOs of fortune 1,000 companies. There was much hand wringing and chatter about social media. I thought that was interesting in part because I really expected social to be fully adopted and integrated by these marketing behemoths. The repeated refrain was to the effect that ‘we may hate it but we have to do it although we can’t work out what (if any) return it generates’.

I was impressed by a bunch of really interesting data that was shared by some of the speakers. The data I found most interesting surrounded how much of the brand conversation happens in social media. One of the CMOs (I think it was Johnson and Johnson…if I misremember I apologize) revealed that in their exhaustive tests something like 8% of the total brand conversation happens in social media. The rest of the conversation happens face to face, in the car over the phone…where ever people have conversations. The other key stat I found compelling was that in the world of social media 21% of all users are thought leaders. They are the ones who post the most, have the most friends and followers, who start conversations and who set agendas.

That presents a real challenge for marketing folk. Getting to those relatively few people is crucial to moving the dial on product awareness and success. The math is probably a stretch…but with 21% of social media leaders driving the lion’s share of 8% of all brand conversations that means that for every hundred people in the online swim of things just 1.68 people are really all that matter. Reaching those 1.68 people is the challenge.

Following the (New) Money

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Tim Judd

Here’s a pop quiz for you:

By current trends in 2014 online advertising spend will exceed spend on which of the following media:

A Outdoor
B Magazines
C Radio
D Cinema

If your guess was “all of the above” you are correct. According to data from Zenith Optimedia in just over a year online ad spend will eclipse all other categories except for TV whose market share continues at a solid 40% albeit with that 40% spread over many more points of exposure. That’s amazing growth by any analysis. When we look at the online category we’d expect to see the lion’s share of the money going to search and thus by adoption by Google. Whilst the category is projected to grow significantly the relative share which search is projected to garner drops from over 60% today to just over 55% in 2014. That’s not a huge drop but any kind of drop in any search metric is worthy of note. I happen to think there’s an even larger upside in the non search bucket. As re-marketing grows in popularity so more and more display inventory becomes more valuable. The largest single player in the display world is Facebook with about 50% of all display inventory. Part of the dramatic decline they have endured has come from their inability to deliver value through targeted display.

AdWeek is happening this week in New York. I wonder how large a convention center we would need to get everyone who works in magazines, radio, outdoor and cinema advertising. I’m guessing it would have to be a pretty large venue. In contrast the online industry get together I attend tend to be only a few thousand big at the very largest. Google employs about 35,000 folks add in the rest of the industry it might just scrape 50,000 employees industry wide, that’s an amazing concentration of power….and quite new one. If this much power changed hands this quickly in political terms we’d call it a revolution…or maybe a Coup d’état.

New Depths of ‘Wrong’

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Tim Judd

“If it bleeds it leads” is a cliché which plumbed new depths the other day with the suicide of a car-jacker live on Fox. It was remarkable that after the horrible medium close up which absolutely allowed we the audience to experience the clearly distressed and who knows crazy car-jacker shoot himself in the head the talking head explained that as the offender pulled off the road they went to a delay so that they would be able to intercept anything inappropriate, presumably in anticipation of just this kind of episode, either way the delay didn’t go into effect. A mortified Sam Sheperd (the Fox presenter) explained that there were many cases when they prevented us from being exposed to content which is “just wrong.” The problem was that their technology went wrong and they ran the death live. What he didn’t apologize for was the basic premise that this kind of garbage is even news in the first place. A car chase (unless the chase has just assassinated the president) isn’t news, it certainly isn’t real time news worthy of interrupting other coverage. I live in sunny So Cal and we get a lot of this kind of local news dreck out here. This seem to be more of a west coast phenomena, (this episode happened in Arizona) I don’t remember this being anywhere near as prevalent on the east coast perhaps because the denser airspace makes helicopter pursuit much less common.

We watch the criminal or crazy drive (typically at a sedate pace) through the streets of a city chased by the police for exactly the same reasons so many watch NASCAR….for the opportunity to watch something go wrong live. The fact that the dead man’s children were able to watch their father die on YouTube makes the whole thing even more repellant. It’s a kind of blood sport…and it’s entirely unsurprising that the news pariahs cover the games because we watch the games. I’m reasonably sure we could see public executions on pay per view…that doesn’t mean we should. Stick to covering juggling dogs, Dancing With The Stars and other high profile news stories, car chases aren’t news…move on.

ThinkJudd

I think therefore I search

Category Archives: Local