Ecommercepartners.net

I was irked to see my favorite fake-news source The Onion – which I love both in hard copy and online, with the i-bonus of its hilarious podcasts “Onion Radio News” – being chided by the smart people at Online Media Daily for not having a video element on its site. But I was just as immediately cheered, because OMD’s sharp-eyed boys and girls had noticed that The Onion is indeed planning to post video-clips.

They had seen online ads (what else) at Craigslist (where else?) seeking video-editing staff who are “familiar with The Onion’s style of comedy. Looks like “Onion Video News” is on its way.

Good, is all I can say. For my own enjoyment, certainly, but also for the improving business prospects of The Onion, which incidentally has already been attracting the powerful buying-out interest of the mass entertainment giant Viacom, according to Variety magazine. Moving pictures can only add to its visitor stream, and to its ability to attract advertising.

Sites like The Onion – indeed just about any popular site these days – do seem to need video. The market researchers at eMarketer Inc recently reported that – unsurprisingly – video advertising is the fastest-growing area of marketing on the Internet.

And lo and behold – not before time, some would say – that phenomenally growing web entity YouTube.com (which of course is entirely based on video) is starting to assertively monetize its previously fun-loving and apparently pretty uncommercial operation.

YouTube rolled out a new ad platform that offering two main features – brand channels, where companies can create their own programming, and (a new notion) “participatory video ads,” some of which will direct users to the new brand channels.

The brand channels allow marketers to create their own programming, customize visual content with logos and other graphics, and accumulate audiences. The “participatory video ads” have their ongoing home in the upper right-hand corner of YouTube’s home page; when users click on them the video begins playing in place, next to a menu of clips posted by users.

CEO Chad Hurley says the new video ad units can serve to guide users to sponsored clips as well brand channels. The upper-right-hand corner unit, he promises,

“gives advertisers visibility in our system without disrupting the user experience.”

While the site initially and quickly captured the imagination of advertisers with its free, virtually limitless posting of video clips, including ads, the company had not previously come up with a good way to direct users to such content–which could easily get lost in the sea of short video clips that proliferate at YouTube..

Now, advertisers can link home-page video ads to other clips on YouTube, or to their own brand channels, and users can forward video links to friends and contacts. The combined effect of all this will be, according to Hurley, “recreating the viral nature of the site in a branded context.” Users also can share clips with friends and post links on their Web sites or blogs.

Warner Bros. is among the first big media companies to use the new ad units to promote an upcoming album. In their case it’s “Paris”, the debut “musical” effort from alleged celebrity Paris Hilton. Ah well – there was bound to be a downside.

Well, the next wave of saturation-style commercial activity over the airwaves – that I’ve long been predicting -  is now showing signs of actually arriving. (Every writer likes to say “I told you so”, and he needs to be indulged now and again, just to keep him forming professional judgments.)

Cellphone users in the United States are now getting used to seeing advertisements popping up on their screens (text message (SMS) advertising). And I can report that mobile phone advertising is on the verge of a massive explosion, with campaigns now in the works on a scale that previous technological constraints made unattractive or unreliable.

Recently mobile network operators have begun to revel in much faster networks, and handset manufacturers are providing bigger screens, even on smaller, slim-line phones – and with fuller color, too.

The biggest element in changing our – the audience’s – receptiveness to such an an advertsiign medium is the increase in text messaging. Around 30 percent of the 217 million mobile phone users who are currently registered use their instruments to send SMS messages, according to veteran, Boston-based market researchers and consultants, the Yankee Group. Also softening up the market is the growth in wireless web-surfing, and the ubiquitous availability of video.

Advertisers, of course, are bowled over by the demographics which offer a predominantly much younger audience. TV shows aimed at the 18-25 year-olds are making a point of urging their viewers to send text messages as a way to express preferences, say by voting for their favorite character or responding to a poll question.

When cellphone-users access sports results, advertisers have been quick to place their banner ads alongside the scores, and if a phone-user subscribes to a video news-clip service, a pre-roll video ad is the perfect way to reach them with a commercial message

Maybe the biggest attraction for advertisers is the fact that – unlike television sets in even the most eager viewers’ homes – young people’s ever-essential cellphones (and many now don’t even bother to have a landline) are virtually NEVER OFF, and they’re always at hand. How attractive is that for a communicator, of any kind?

The Yankee Group’s survey says about 42 percent of cellphone subscribers are open to receiving mobile advertising if it’s relevant to them. Madison Avenue, we know, will delight in such stats and aggressively exploit them.

Since the Federal Communications Commission is auctioning off more of the radio spectrum to corporations who are eager to get into wireless technology, the much greater network capacity that will result is bound to lead to a faster wireless web. More information will be transmitted, more quickly, to more mobile devices that in turn will be developed to store more data. You can expect me to come back online in the not-too-distant future, to say once again “I told you so”.

Do you have – oh, of course you have – an e-mail inbox overflowing with unwanted messages? It’s becoming the bane of internet living, as we all know, having to clear our mail every day of spam. I have a friend who has to do it every HOUR.

But how much, I wonder, is this clearing operation we all do an example of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” – as my old Scottish grandmother used to rather graphically say?

According to a new survey (Aug 3rd, 2006) from e-mail marketing services company Return Path, more than one in three consumers mistakenly report e-mail that they have actually chosen to sign up for as “junk” or “spam,”

Out of 2,035 Web users who were surveyed 36 percent said they hit the “spam” button when they want to unsubscribe to e-mail that they have previously agreed to receive. Almost that same proportion–31 percent–said they don’t use the “unsubscribe” links that are found in commercial e-mails.

The over-reporting of spam of course presents a troubling problem for e-mail marketers because senders that have been wrongly characterized as spammers can wrongly end up on the blacklists that are amassed by service providers.

The odd thing is – and it’s a hard obstacle to get past – that many consumers appear to believe they have no choice. Those who trash their messages as junk were asked why they didn’t take what the well-informed would see as the obvious course of clicking the “unsubscribe” option. Their general answer? A lot said that they were suspicious.

They thought it could all be part of a sneaky plan to hook them further – that clicking ”unsubscribe” would simply result in yet more e-mail. Verbalized reasons given by respondents for not trusting this option included: “If I do I just get more junk” and “They only use this as a ruse to certify an email address,” and “Most often they do not work.”

The study also found – something that’s decidedly unsurprising in today’s competitive e-commerce climate – that a large proportion of the e-mails that consumers receive every day are commercial in nature. Nearly half of those surveyed said that over 60 percent of their inbox contents were commercial mailings.

The commercial mailers maybe need to educate their addressees better about their options.

I look at the this article as a little piece of vindication for myself. It’s been tough explaining what I do to friends and family over the last 6 years or so. While in college everyone else was pursuing the normal degrees.. Me, I wasn’t pursuing any of them.

Instead I focused on a little known process we called SEO, and search engine marketing in general. I’ve endured the torture of birthdays, holidays and other family/friend oriented events where I continuously tried to explain my field of work to the always inquisitive and often times critical, friends and family. Needless to say.. many of them thought I was a bit of a kook. Some even thought i was full of $hit..

It didn’t help that my older brother was a fine up-standing corporate citizen working with a world renowned software company (and still is). His story goes over much better with the crowds. When I began to tell people what i did… their attention quickly turned back to my brother in a manner similar to, “So Sean, have you cashed in your stock options yet? Do you think you could get your brother Ryan a job there too?”

Well folks… instead of asking me what I do (then ignoring my answer or doing a bit of eye rolling) and whether or not there’s an actual future in it, allow me to point you to this quick synopsis entitled “4 Jobs on the Cutting Edge“. And I quote:

This is an especially important task in today’s Internet-driven world, where many customers first learn of an organization and its products or services through the Web. Because of a shortage of experts in this relatively new area, many top SEOs receive multiple job offers.

So there it is.. direct from a 3rd party we see SEO listed as a HOT JOB of the FUTURE. And not just a hot job… but on the cutting edge too. See, mom and dad..? I wasn’t making this whole thing up and I really do have a bright future! Lucky for me, I’m more than 6 years into this field and can honestly say that I am now one of the most experienced individuals in the industry today. I had to sweat it out though.. As with anything new, there were no guarantees of a future.

And to anyone out there that I’ve tried explain my field of work and you didn’t quite get it, I’d like to stress the following point one last time:

No.. I am not the guy that causes those Pop Ups..

SEO is a true and legitimate process with an end goal of creating the most valuable user experience possible through logical site design, architecture and a clear message. The search engines were built for the users and as long as we conitnue to build our sites for users, we will continue to drive success.

Stats are not everything, I believe. Indeed Mark Twain summed up my general attitude in his famous pronouncement – for which he himself incidentally claimed no authorship, crediting it instead to the wily British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli – “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics”.

But every now again a set of numbers will arrive on your desk that seem to sum up neatly what’s going on in a given field – and that’s happening a lot nowadays in the world of commercial information exchange – otherwise known as the mass media.

That mass media environment is of course dominated, in the United States at least, by network and cable television. They manage to command $74 billion dollar a year in advertising revenue. That’s a huge amount, and it’s open to drainage and re-diversion

The statistical dollop of statistics to grab my attention – just as I was reviewing the widespread disappointment registered by advertisers about network TV’s complacent offerings for the Fall -  comes from the Online Publishers Association. The OPA can naturally be seen as a biased source, but their methodologies are generally regarded as reliable. They tell us in a recent report that 25 percent of Internet users are now watching videos online regularly – and regularly means at least once a week. Such viewers inevitably (and, they report, regularly) watch video advertising along with their online videos and, again according to the OPA, 44 percent take some action after viewing an online video ad.

In the wake of such figures, excitement is building among some sections at least of the advertising community that they can start to aggregate a reach of millions that will (and they hope soon) rival television. Jason Glickman, CEO of Tremor Networks and an Internet advertising veteran, is especially taken with the way that online networks will often go out of their way to help with translating between online numbers and GRPs (gross ratings points) which in the broadcasting and cable world can sometimes frankly be murky. Glickman says, in MediaPost’s “Video Insider” newsletter, that this enables advertisers to slot clear numbers “right into their plans”.

One interestingly telling little feature of the stats: the reach of this newer medium is stronger at different times than the established media’s power periods. Online video increasingly dominates what TV moguls have long called, in their own proprietary coinage, “the day-part audience”. Thursday night television, supposedly the home of “Must-See TV”, is no longer the last, best opportunity to get the attention of consumers planning their weekends. That privileged position is now held by the internet on Friday mornings and afternoons.

Asi Erenberg is CEO of Ecommerce Partners

With the holidays just around the corner, industry experts are warning of a serious flaw in brick and mortar jewelry and diamond retailers’ business model. This month the New York Times’ E-Commerce Report noted that conventional jewelry retailers hoping to keep pace with their online competitors “faced an uphill battle” as “a growing subset of the jewelry-buying public prefers to buy their jewelry sight unseen.” Other industry analysts agree… Jewelry sales shine online
Forrester Research found “people bought $3.4 billion worth of jewelry online last year and will spend $4 billion this year. Offline, the growth is but a fraction of that amount.” And comScore Networks, a company that monitors consumer behavior and attitudes, found that while this year’s Valentine’s Day jewelry sales were disappointing for traditional retailers, online jewelry sales skyrocketed 24 percent! “Year over year,” experts noted, the online jewelry sector has “showed the most dramatic increase” of any industry.

The bottom line is clear. The Internet provides dazzling opportunities for jewelry and diamond retailers to show and sell their latest designs and product lines, and see profits soar. And it is equally apparent that continuing to operate the old fashion way is a risky business strategy indeed.

Ahh.. baby is born and what better to do than wrap him/her up in a cushy new baby blanket.  BabyBlankets.com is dedicated to none other than; baby blankets

A novel idea for a truely great product… These blankets generally last through childhood and often time become a piece of that childs security.  It’s great to see a site dedicated to the art of gift giving for new borns and we highly reccomend all new borns get their own soft, warm, lifelong baby blanket.

Asi Erenberg is CEO of Ecommerce Partners

A few days ago I visited a bookstore in the center of the city, when suddenly… I came across a pop up. “But I’m not on the Internet right now,? I thought to myself, “I’m in the real world – the one that once used to rule! How did a pop up get here… that repulsive creature from the world of the Internet?

Well, it turns out that it wasn’t a real pop up. It was the store assistant asking if I needed help, but the minute she approached me I thought, “Hey, what she’s doing is exactly what popup windows are supposed to do – grab my attention and introduce me to an important matter that I might miss.

On our website, for example, we use pop ups for “request a quote. This pop up appears only once to the visitors.

My statistics show that approximately 30% of those who have filled the form wouldn’t have done so unless I’d caught their attention using this irritating window.

My conclusion and the conclusion of many Internet marketers is that, even though the public doesn’t like it and all kinds of pop up blockers have been created, the pop up still works.

The pop ups themselves are not bad… bad pop ups are bad. And others may actually be good and useful.

Good uses for pop ups could be:

• To encourage registration to a newsletter.
• To introduce an answer to a potential question from visitors that on the one hand you don’t want to show on the page, and on the other hand you don’t want to send to a new page at the risk that they won’t return.
• To encourage downloading of a trial version of the program.
• To introduce attractive discounts.
• A survey. For example, to ask the visitors leaving the website why they didn’t purchase.
• To show a unique, prominent characteristic of the product or service.
• As with the assistant in the book store, to ask the visitors if they need help.

It’s advisable, of course, to introduce the pop up only to those that didn’t carry out the relevant action. And this is done by planting a cookie in the surfer’s computer.

The timing is also important. It’s not appropriate to throw a pop up in the visitors’ face the moment they arrive (consider the assistant in the store offering help the minute you walk into the store – “Give me a break! would probably be your response). It’s possible, using JavaScript to delay the pop up and to introduce it only when the visitors leave the page.

The technology that controls pop ups is JavaScript, a language that runs in the browser environment. To program pop ups, it’s of course necessary to control this language.

By using JavaScript, it is possible today to overcome all kinds of pop up blockers. Pop up blockers are capable of blocking the browser’s new windows, but they can’t block a window that is on a new layer of the page, and therefore hiding the contents under it but still being part of the page.

An example of this technology can be seen on the following link in Ralph Wilson’s website that deals with marketing over the Internet:

If you wait a few seconds, a new window that will appear that prompts you to register to Ralph Wilson’s newsletter (highly recommended, incidentally – Ralph is one of the leading experts in the world on Internet marketing).

This window is not a new window in the “Bill Gates sense, and that’s why it won’t appear in the Task line of your computer and won’t be blocked by pop up blocker programs.

In summary, the correct use of pop ups can definitely contribute to improving the conversion ratio of your website! The new pop up technology enables pop up blockers to be overcome.

Wireless giant Motorola Inc – the number two handset maker in the world – is teaming up with U2’s campaigning singer Bono to launch a cell phone that’s intended to fight AIDS and other diseases in the developing world.

Bono’s “Product Redâ€? project now includes a special red version of Motorola’s slim SILVR model, on sale only in Britain for now, but with hopes to spread Europe-wide and to other continents later

Motorola and retailers who sell the phone will contribute about 3.5% of the sale price to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, set up by the UN’s Secretary General  Kofi Annan four years ago. Phone network operators are expected to donate a further 5 percent of each Red SLVR owner’s monthly phone bill.

The red phone will join a red American Express credit card (which sends 1% of its owner’s consumer spending to the Fund). Other corporate participants include the Converse unit of Nike, The Gap (selling a red T-shirt made in Africa) and Giorgio Armani who offers a range of – guess what, for Bono? – special sunglasses emblazoned with a Product Red logo.

Bono launched Project Red in collaboration with record producer and local Californian politician Bobby Shriver, son of President John F Kennedy’s founder-director of the Peace Corps (and his brother-in-law) Sargent Shriver

As often before, Bono has been winning over businesspeople to this latest project with sound commercial imperatives, beyond do-gooding. Motorola had already been trying to cultivate a hip, youth-engaged image with more edgy advertising – especially for its RZR and SLVR phones – and through marketing combinations with MTV and various hip-hoppers.

New corporate rival to YouTube’s video-sharing

YouTube.com was slapped down by the heavy corporate hand of the US cable TV industry (when its carriage of Stephen Colbert’s satirical performance within feet of President George W Bush was halted by C-Span, which had control of the original video coverage. Now YouTube’s whole concept of social networking through videoclips is coming under competitive fire from the corporate titan Time Warner and its internet arm, AOL.

AOL has begun quietly rolling out their new service, AOL UnCut, already up in beta test form for a while now. It will officially launch at the end of June or beginning of July, according to a low-key company announcement on May 14th.

Low-key is the watchword in other ways too. The service is certainly limited, at least for now, and far from open-source in nature. No one under 18 years of age can use the service. Users must have an AOL or AIM screen name, and must agree to the company’s terms of service. Membership will allow users to upload videos lasting up to five minutes – and they can come direct from camcorders, using the neat VideoEgg technology. But anyone across the web can watch the postings, regardless of AOL membership. The clips are converted to Flash 8 format, which is reminiscent of YouTube.

That increasingly evident mainstay of online community-building, LiveWorld, founded eleven years ago by Peter Friedman, who formerly built Apple’s internet services, has been hired by AOL to monitor the site for piracy and to remove illegal and/or offensive postings.

YouTube with its 13 million user-base may currently seem pretty unassailable, but there’s little doubt the Time Warner empire has its sights set on eating into such recently successful, organically-grown, “ground-up� community sites. As well as Uncut, the company has launched AIM Pages, which expands on AOL Instant Messenger, its 43 million-strong instant messaging network. AIM Pages will directly compete directly with MySpace.com, once a reputedly innocent teenage site until it grew a massive 70-million user-base and got bought out by Rupert Murdoch.