Entries Tagged 'Advertising' ↓

Aviva has a guide on branding a startup. I have not seen an article on Aviva before, but I have read through the guide and it does offer up some gems for any online entrepreneur. Most of it revolves around developing an online personality for your web site and extending it across the web (and in real life) in various clever ways. Don’t expect this to be a quick solution. There are 99 tips for a reason - hard work is required to properly brand your startup and get it out there. But this isn’t a bad starting point.

While doing my usual daily perusal of digg, I found a useful video of Stacy Williams describing some liberties that Google and Yahoo may take with your search engine ad campaigns. This short video (just under 4 minutes) was filmed at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in Chicago, and in it Stacy touches on the following three points:

• Sometimes ads are not active even if Google/Yahoo say they are (because they are actually in the process of editorial review).
• Search engines may change your ad match types (broad vs exact and so on) sometimes without notification. Stacey gives a funny example.
• Swapping of text ad titles and descriptions in certain scenarios.

The moral for us online entrepreneurs is that if you are using search engine advertising to promote your new business, you may need to pay closer attention to those ads than you thought.

These days, it seems that every Internet entrepreneur is trying to form a business around the explosive growth of Internet advertising. There is continued debate about the sustainability of such a business model, with the real life outcome having dire consequences. After all, let’s not forget that companies like Google form the majority of their business (and profit) around online advertising.

To extend the debate, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP recently published a study of Internet advertising revenue. Sprinkled about this study are words of optimism. For instance:

Interactive advertising, with its eighth consecutive quarter of growth and the largest single quarter ever, is on pace for its biggest year.

Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs Inc., probably bases the majority of his business on Internet advertising. He’s had a large amount of success. Weblogs has some of the most successful blogs out there to their credit (Engadget, Joystiq). It’s no surprise that he’s posted a commentary on the study called The real story of Web 2.0: Advertising 2.0. Here is what he believes:

How far will this trend line go? Think 20 more years of similar growth.

Will it get steeper? Absolutely.

Why? Video and audio advertising hasn’t even started to move to the Internet in a major way.

There are a multitude of ways to get involved in and to benefit from this growth, but don’t let it lure you away from your core business. In other words, if you aren’t an advertising company, don’t let ads dictate how you run your business. As a web entrepreneur, the temptation to slap ads all over your page may be irresistible, but don’t lose site of what it is you are really trying to accomplish.

Case in point: Massive makes a business out of putting subtle advertising into games, but you don’t see the game developers they work with churning out games purely to convey ads (most of the time). The developers recognize that their purpose is to produce fun, entertaining games. Advertising complements their business, but it isn’t their core business. Learn from that, and you are well on your way to becoming a part of Advertising 2.0.

Article Tags: Internet Advertising