ADV investments

Italian advertising investments trends

Via: IAB

Vintage signals

Back from holidays

Technology Perception

Technology will be (and already is) just an utility.
We will not think about it or... well... we will not want to think about it.
It has to be there, to simplify and enhance our lives, more and more, but without bother with uncomprehensible slangs, practices and requests.

Some weeks ago, a friend of mine signalled me an interseting research "All change: marketing in addressable media" by GroupM.
In the first page author writes "Anything that you grow up with is not technology": TV, cell phones, PCs, You Tube, blogs and social media, are not techonolgy.
What would you have thought ten years ago of an company unreachable for the lack of the telephone?
More or less, the same a teen might think today of a company without an interactive communication system. (Warning: e-mails too are getting old! As the News.com article states: Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead!

To reinforce this evidence (as reported by Reuters) two more surveys published by Microsoft and Viacom units MTV Networks and Nickelodeon.
Young people don't see "tech" as a separate entity - it's an organic part of their lives", said Andrew Davidson, VP of MTV's VBS International Insight unit
Here the entire article: Young keep it simple in high-tech world: survey

Thanks to: Andrea Di Fonzo

Italian Web 2.0

I'm working on Social Networks: scenarios, tools, strategies...
Here in Italy, on my experience, only few big companies have understood the role of this phenomena.
Compared with other european countries we are certainly not leading the run.
Consequently is very hard to find good studies on web 2.0.

Here is one of them, the author is Daniele Sommavilla Nielsen/NetRatings VP South Europe:
Web 2.0: lo scenario italiano e internazionale

And here another interesting research from Novatris:

14th edition of NetObserver

via: IAB

Social Networks Ad Spending

E-Marketer changed its prevision for ad spending on social networks in 2007 (from $865 to $900 million).
Should we just joy or should we start to fear a new crackdown?

MySpace and Facebook account for 72% of the revenues...
No wonder that new social networks are appearing every day and that existing websites start to add social network capabilities

Here a list of the most popular ones, ranked per Market share of visits (click to enlarge)


And here the article: The crowded world of social network

Click Fraud Rate

As reported by Click Forensics Click Fraud Rate is fast climbing.

Main evidences:

The overall industry average click fraud rate was 15.8 percent for Q2 2007. This is an increase from 14.1 percent for the same quarter in 2006 and 14.8 percent for Q1 2007.

The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 25.6 percent.
That’s up from 21.9 percent for Q1 2007 and 19.2 percent for Q4 of 2006

Traffic from botnets doubled from Q1 to Q2 2007 and contributed significantly to the increase in click fraud rates.

In Q2 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from France (5.1 percent), China (3.2 percent) and Australia (3 percent).


It's quite obvious that informations on how frauds affect PPC campaign and ROI might be useful to gather.

Click Fraud Network offer a tool to track up to 100.000 clicks per month.
It's called ClickForensic, and it's free (probably one starts to pay for a higher click number, or probably they would try to sell some "antidote tool"... no idea)
(Quite curious the extra-US origin of click fraud, and what's more I read about the research on an italian blog... )
However, I would try it (the free service).

Here the complete research: Click Fraud Index
Via: IAB Italia