[InfoGraphic] Google’s 2011 Revenue Break-Up – Top Spenders on Google Ad-Words in 2011
![What Industries Contributed to Google's Billion in Revenues? [INFOGRAPHIC]](http://www.wordstream.com/images/google-earnings.png)
© WordStream, Provider of AdWords solutions.
Samsung’s “We’ve Been Samsunged” Super-Bowl Ad-Teaser denting Apple’s Domination?
Have you been Samsunged?
As much as I love Apple for the brilliance in design, precision and high quality prducts, I am getting wooed by Samsung’s recent ad-camapigns. Clearly Samsung is green with envy by Apple products but then they are trying really hard and I must say it can pay off.
Android activation numbers are mind boggling and especially the two recent ad campaigns shows Apple to be buidling green lock-ups to lock people up with their expensive Apps regime. While it projects Samsung to be the cool open world economic app store through Android MarketPlace! It makes Apple fan boys feel bad about:
- The long waits they have to go through during launch of new Apple products
- Paying for apps that Samsung users get free of charge
- And the launch of Apple iPhone 4S while the fans expected iPhone 5
The two recent Samsung Ad-Camapigns saying: “We’ve Been Samsunged” are really poking fun at Apple
1) We’ve been Samsunged: The ad-campaign teaser that Samsung is running for the Super Bowl.
2) And the previously run ad-campaign making Apple fan boys feel bad about standing in queues.
Do you think Samsung’s efforts are really denting Apple’s smartphone domination?
Who in India is Spamming your Inbox?
I am sure every one hates SPAM and we continue to get SPAM in our inboxes. We try all sorts of ways to block SPAM but then email SPAMMERS find new ways to reach our inboxes.
I recently installed Plaxo for my outlook and I was running some filters on it. I created a filter of people who are not in my address-book and have mailed more than 3 times in past 3 weeks. I hit upon over 100 such contacts and started wondering how is this possible that I have over 100 contacts who have mailed over 3 times in the past 3 weeks and they are not in my address book.
I copied all this data in an excel sheet to see what is happening here. Used some quick excel functions to filter out the email addresses using the LEN(), LEFT(), RIGHT() functions in excel. After obtaining the final email list, I started putting them in categories, spam status and industry type.
The three columns I made were:
1) Category of email – Let’s say I have subscribed to an advertising industry news letter, so I called it industry newsletter. Let’s say Linkedin or Twitter sends me some regular transactional emails about who connected / followed me then I called them as Professional or Social networking updates. Similarly for Banking, Finance, HR, Marketing, Technology, Travel, Food, Airlines etc.
2) Spam Status – I assigned 3 separate statuses to these mails:
- Subscribed
- Spam
- Transactional
So for example, if I have subscribed to a newsletter, I called it Subscribed. If I get a Banking transaction alert, I called is transactional and some crap that hits my inbox, I called it Spam.
3) Industry Type – To generalize and clearly categorize my emails I started putting them under broad industry segment eg:
- Advertising
- Airlines
- e-Commerce
- Entertainment
- Finance / Banking
- Food/Beverages
- Gaming
- HR
- Market Research
- Media
- News
- Publishing – Includes all blogs, online information sources and general publications.
- Real Estate
- Technology
- Telecom
- Travel
Below is a chart which summaries my findings.
Key findings:
- Publishing – Is the highest SPAM generator category in India. Like fake job sites, fake deals site and these new online deals-online commerce sites which are all publishing crap content on blogs and their sites and are acquiring email addresses and spamming.
- Finance / Banking – I keep getting a lot of SPAM from finance / banking vertical too. This is mostly about invest here or invest there. Best schemes to make more money and why my life is in danger so I should insure myself crap.
Surprisingly media and other sites are following much better ethics in emailing.
This was my experience. And my guess is that if I monitor this data over a larger sample size and longer time period this will show seasonality eg: Jan-March quarter more finance/banking SPAM as the year is ending everyone wants you to invest and buy insurance. And hence the increased SPAM. VS during Diwali or similar festival season, you would see more SPAM for consumer brands trying to give the biggest discounts on their products.
Where do you get SPAM mails from and what do you do to block / deal with it?
Infographic – @Sachinuppal My Twitter Personality Analysis done using @visually
I am a Twitter Novice who supports a Geeky Grin with a journalistic dressing sense and some circumstantial evidence suggests that I am obsessed with shopping. I have 2 followers for every person that I follow. I am less chatty and suffer from low enthusiasm while still being able to maintain interest of the followers.
Example 69 – Hot and Shitty – Online Banner Advertisements
A friend of mine was searching for Van Halen songs on PirateBay (;P), Just searching!
While searching, he ended up seeing an ad (screenshot below). Now can you guess what is this ad going to link to?
This is what I call crappy online banner advertising to generate shitty traffic to the site which leads to nothing.
No conversions, no revenue almost nothing. Though, it does eat up your marketing $$s.
These are being run by DMG media , DSNR media group. I wonder sometimes if they really mean what they say on their sites:
Results Based Performance Advertising
If the result expected is to generate crap traffic, sure, this will do the job. But I thought as entrepreneurs and businessmen would like to generate traffic which converts and leads to a fruitful customer and a relationship that lasts, where does such banner advertisements stand?
BTW: Any guesses still to which site’s ad is this? If you are in India and visiting Piratebay.org, you might just see the ad, click on it and see where you end up… and do share what you think about this…
Quick Snapshot: Top 100 Twitter Influencers in India by Industry Type
Bollywood Tops the list of Top 100 Twitter Influencers in India by Industry type by a majority share of voice of over 47%. Bollywood is followed by Indian Media at 14%, Indian Businessmen at 13% and Cricketers at 11%. Indian bloggers too have a 9% share of voice on twitter and a 6% Share of Voice is held by politicians.
2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,100 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.
“Math Men” hand-in-hand with “Responsible Mad Men”
I was reading Scott Brinker’s blog Chiefmartec when I saw this article on the hot debate running at AdAge.com. This all started with Kendall Allen’s article on The Dangers Of Online Advertising’s ‘Math State’ and then Joe Zawadzki responded the following week with a rebuttal: Why the “Math Men” Will Set Online Advertising Free.
I particularly like the point that Joe Zawadzki makes:
There’s no unringing a bell: math and technology are part of [the] future of marketing.
But it’s not art or science, people or machine. It’s mad men AND math men.
This got me thinking about the evolution of marketing and why it has reached a state of driven by “Algorithms” and “Math Men” driving the same.
I think it has to do with the speed of new businesses, the impatience of failing fast or learning faster. With the evolution of fast growing business models and the pressures to deliver sales and ROI or even profitability, it’s imperative to run experiments and figure out what works the best for your business. The online media provides that ability, the ability to run experiments and to be able to learn about your customers, to understand the customers and the ability to make changes in communication messages with controlled audiences. All this is provided by automated frameworks that are agile and helps you focus on finding out what matters.
In earlier days, we used to see brands believing the “Mad Men” on the positioning routes that they thought was right and brands spending tons of money to back that up. However, the ROI or “responsibility” to deliver that ROI was less significant. In today’s world, these data models, advanced neural ad-networks, real time bidding and likes help you test the market to really find out what works and what doesn’t. It makes the mad men think harder than earlier times.
I have statistically significant data that suggest that the creatives done by the in-house brick and mortar team of 20 somethings focusing on data and maths (focussing on better Call to Actions, weight of creatives, direct message etc) performed 25% better to drive sales VS the creative agency’s creatives which were more focused on the design and creative messaging.
If you think too hard about the message and finally that message is not performing for you, you can always make changes to your campaigns. This was not possible earlier in traditional media (that easily). Today if the mad men have given you the message, they should take responsibility of the numbers too. Yes, there are math men to support with all the technology prowess to be able to bring that responsibility to the forefront.
I think a lot of work that mad men did can now be done by experimentation by math men. I understand that this puts a lot more pressure on the mad men to own up and bring more responsibility to the table along with their creative hats. Is that too much to ask for in the world where you can measure things?
I would add on to Joe’s point and say: It’s math men AND “responsible” mad men.
Facebook VS Google’s who’s social and who’s unsocial?
Amidst Facebook’s admittance to a anti-google smear campaign, Facebook introduced new features to it’s share feature where you can select “where on facebook” you want to share and “with whom” and with “what privacy levels” (see pic below).
This comes into place especially when Google’s rumored Social Network Circles (denied by google) came to light. The social circle was supposedly based on the philosophy of Real Life Social Networks by Paul Adams who left Google to join Facebook and these new features are pretty much in line with the same philosophy.
But all this makes me as a consumer think – Who is really Social?
-
Archives
- January 2012
- May 2011
- November 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- January 2010
- September 2009
- June 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- June 2005
- May 2005
- March 2005
- February 2005
Blogroll
-
Meta
