October 20th, 2008 elitani
Google is vowing to introduce more Arabic products to the market as it looks for ways to enrich the internet experience of web users in the Middle East.
The search engine giant, which is exhibiting at GITEX Technology Week for the first time, intends to strengthen its regional offering in line with the investments it is making in local staff and infrastructure.
“We are working on parallel opportunities and the result will be even more Arabic products in the near future,” promises Yasmina Brihi, regional marketing manager for the Middle East and North Africa at Google.
We already have 15 products available in Arabic so we have made great progress and there is a lot of emphasis on that. But we’re not only working towards localising products, we’re developing new products and features as well.”
As more of the Arab world comes online, Brihi expects a sharp acceleration in the adoption of Google products and tools in the region.
Visitors to Google’s stand in the DIC Pavilion are invited to get the lowdown on the company’s portfolio, including the services it now provides in Arabic. Its Knol, Gmail and iGoogle tools have all been developed in Arabic, as has Chrome, its latest web browser. The company also has representatives on hand to explain how its search advertising and enterprise applications offerings can support Middle East businesses.
“The way we do business is always to start with the users,” explains Brihi. “All of our innovation comes from looking at what the user wants and giving them what they need to empower them for a more interesting life on the web.”
Google’s appearance at GITEX represents a milestone for its Middle East operations, which continue to expand in size. “We have been ramping up over the last two years by investing on several fronts. In terms of physical presence, we now have offices in three of our key markets - Egypt, KSA and the UAE. We have also invested heavily in terms of products with the Arabic market in mind,” insists Brihi.
Posted in Online Marketing- Middle East | No Comments »
October 18th, 2008 elitani
By Cathal O’Toole on Thursday, October 16, 2008
The global mobile advertising market will, according to some industry sources, be worth over $18.5 billion by 2010. Not only will it offer operators a new revenue stream that has, as yet, not been fully ascertained by them, it also offers the media industry one of the most exciting means of mass-audience targeting and message delivery in the history of advertising.
Mobile advertising is still evolving, with multimedia content and latest 3G-and-beyond network capabilities creating major opportunities for high-speed service and advertising delivery. TV, for example, already one of society’s major advertising vehicles, is now reaching the mobile and mobile TV advertising is a forgone conclusion. Funding future mobile content is likely to rely on a degree of mobile advertising with brands gathering to support and sponsor the most popular content received by subscribers.
In the Middle East and Africa, where both saturated and developing mobile markets exist, what is apparent is that each of these market profiles will gain from mobile advertising in different ways.
In saturated markets, the primary concern of the senior management of mobile operators is where further growth will come from. With their shareholders demanding further returns but with subscriber numbers and ARPUs level, at best remaining static, operators must pursue alternative revenue streams. Advertising is a very compelling, alternative revenue choice that can augment the traditional product lines of messaging and minutes.
In the region’s developing markets, the main issues are often the low ARPU per customer and the difficulty in expanding profitable product usage in environments where per-capita incomes are low. Mobile operators have multiple customer touchpoints and mobile advertising allows them to bring a second payer to the market. Now, instead of each minute or text just being paid for by the mobile subscriber, the costs can be part-subsidised by the advertiser in return for the placement of advertisements on the subscriber’s traffic. In addition, operators can place advertising within traditionally non-revenue-generating traffic like missed call notifications. In this way, traffic growth can be part-funded by the advertising industry in return for gaining access to a brand new channel through which to communicate with consumers. In situations where the choice between feeding your family, or using your mobile phone is very real, the potential advantages, to the operator of introducing mobile advertising are considerable.
However, it is vital that any advertising campaign takes into consideration the appropriate advertising mechanism to deliver the message to the target consumer segment. In markets where the handsets are low-end and are unlikely to be used for anything other than calls, texts and alarm calls, the right advertising medium is text based. Where browsing is more commonplace, or where subscribers are more used to multi-media, then MMS or browsing-based advertising makes sense.
One important factor in the early stages of this new business model for advertisement delivery is that strategic partnerships between key mobile industry players and the media / advertising industry will be crucial. The principal point here is that in order to successfully build an advertising business – and indeed to make it a success in any operator’s environment – the operator must work with a solution provider that is partnered with a market-leading media agency. Without this level of partnership and without the expertise that both the media agency and the solution vendor bring to the table, it will be very difficult to deliver successful campaigns.
Addressing Prepaid Users
In Africa and the Middle East mobile advertising presents an ideal opportunity for prepaid users to receive the latest mobile services, until now priced beyond their reach, but now potentially at a much lower cost because the services can be funded by advertisers and the operators. MMS, WAP and VAS, like mobile downloads, can all now be made affordable to the typical prepaid user.
In these markets operators are very proactive building subscriber communities, which offer users products and services like IM (equivalent to Google Talk, Yahoo IM etc). For example, Zain is appending its own brand adverts on instant messages so reaching its own subscribers across 20 networks, or with local messages within a single country or even urban region.
Other operators like Wataniya, Etisalat and the MTN Group are building subscriber communities to offer more services like VAS and roaming at lower rates, which will only be possible when linked with mobile advertising. This applies particularly to the huge prepaid segment.
Mobile advertising is also a way of reaching those members in a population with low literacy levels. Although they have a mobile, these people would otherwise not see daily newspapers and other advertising media other than outdoor advertising, which is widespread through the MEA region.
Mobile Advertising Delivery
Methods of mobile advertising can be categorised three ways: advertising over messaging, advertising during browsing sessions, or advertising that employs media or VAS applications.
Advertising over messaging is where advertisements are sent using SMS, MMS, Instant Messaging, or other messaging media. The advertising engine will recognise and append the message appropriately with a targeted advert for the receiving subscriber. Selection of the advertisement is based on user profile criteria, time and date, type of message and in the case of Peer to Peer messages , keywords in the original message body. Once the advert is inserted into the SMS/MMS by the Ad Engine, it is then sent back to the SMSC (or MMSC), to complete message delivery.
Advertising during mobile Internet browsing sessions, offers an experience similar to advertising on the Internet. With a surge in the number of mobile Internet sites available to advertisers, typically as companion sites to traditional web pages, together with a more sophisticated mobile subscriber base, display-type ads on such mobile sites are a more viable option for advertisers. Mobile Internet ads consist of text, graphics, or both, and offer the audience a number of response options, such as a simple click-through, which may reach a product registration page, or a click-to-call option to a call centre, or a click-to-buy option with a purchase appearing on the user’s mobile phone bill.
Media and VAS-related advertising and handset/content-related advertising is the final category. Here an advert is inserted into a service experience such as: Ringback Tones or Interactive Voice Response (IVR), on mobile TV or using idle screen time on a mobile device. For example, an IVR message may promote a brand by telling the caller, “before entering your PIN to retrieve you messages did you know that ‘Brand Name’ is on offer…?” Though similar to messaging-domain advertising an ad in this case is received via an application such as Ringback Tone service or Voice Messaging from outside the network provided by a third party content provider.
Future Imperatives
For mobile advertising to gain effective momentum and reach its optimum potential as quickly as possible, there is an absolute imperative for the industry to work together. Advertisers / agencies need to work with mobile operators and vendors to build a supply chain that can deliver good quality advertising, and can report on this in ways that are useful for all parties.
This new media space is a very complex development, unlike that of, say, broadcast media, so platforms implemented by operators need to adhere to commonly-agreed guidelines – and it’s not just the platforms, it’s about the reporting / planning / campaigning – effectively, the design of the whole mobile advertising eco-system that requires agreement and co-operation, now.
Posted in Online Marketing- Middle East | No Comments »
October 18th, 2008 elitani
By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times-Washington PostNews Service
Internet advertising revenue in the US for the first half of 2008 totalled $11.5 billion, up 15.2 per cent from the same period last year, according to numbers released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau on Tuesday. Not so shabby, right?
But when you consider that in 2007, revenue in the first half of the year was up 27 per cent from the same period the previous year, and that in 2006, revenue climbed 36 per cent from the previous year, the growth numbers aren’t that impressive.
“From what I see, this is a similar pattern to the last slowdown in 2001,” said David Silverman, a partner in the entertainment, media and communications practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which worked with the Interactive Advertising Bureau to come up with the numbers.
Silverman said the second half of the year typically sees more spending than the first half. But this year, he said, this may be different “given the continuing slowdown and economic conditions”.
Search continued to dominate online spending, accounting for 44 per cent of money spent advertising online, up from 41 per cent the previous year. Spending on classified advertising, at $1.6 billion, fell to just 14 per cent of the pie.
Still, online looks healthy when compared with other advertising sectors. Zenith-Optimedia on Tuesday cut its forecasts for the overall US advertising market in 2008 and 2009, predicting growth of 1.6 per cent this year rather than the 3.4 per cent it had initially projected. In 2009, ad spending in the US will grow less than one per cent, the firm said.
“All advertising is somewhat depressed, and online advertising has fared better than average,” said Joe Apprendi, chief executive of Collective Media, a New York-based online advertising firm. “It’s going to grow, which isn’t the case with all media.”
Posted in Online Marketing- International | No Comments »
October 18th, 2008 elitani
By Miguel Helft
In the next week, the two biggest sellers of online ads, Google and Yahoo, will disclose their third-quarter financial results. They are expected to report widely different results which mirror the increasingly diverging fortunes of two forms of online advertising: search ads and display ads like banners and video clips.
Most analysts believe that the search advertising market — Google’s bread and butter and a business that the company overwhelmingly dominates — is holding up relatively well despite the economic downturn and the financial crisis. On the other hand, the display advertising market, which accounts for roughly half of Yahoo’s revenue, is suffering both from the deepening crisis and from a glut of Web pages, or inventory, that advertisers can choose from. The trends were apparent in the spring, but analysts say they have accelerated.
“Search largely has held up fairly well in the third quarter,” said Ross Sandler, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. However, Mr. Sandler, who conducts a quarterly survey of the market with the search advertising agency SearchIgnite, cautions that his research shows a significant slowdown in some segments of the search advertising market, like retail, in the last two weeks of September.
Over all, the SearchIgnite study, which tracks the dollars spent by existing advertisers, suggests search ads in the United States grew by nearly 27 percent from the same quarter a year earlier. Google, which receives more than half of its revenue from overseas, is expected to report net revenue of $4.05 billion, up 35 percent from a year ago.
At Barclays Capital, an analyst, Douglas Anmuth, largely agrees. “The economy has affected Google, but I think search and Google are holding up much better than any form of online advertising,” Mr. Anmuth said. “There are certainly some categories where you are going to have weakness,” he added, like retail, travel and finance.
Yahoo is a very different story, Mr. Anmuth said. He noted that the display advertising market had deteriorated in the third quarter. As the largest seller of display ads, Yahoo will suffer from that trend. And the company’s woes are compounded by the fact that it has continued to lose market share in search to Google. The company is expected to report gross revenue of $1.8 billion, up 6.8 percent from a year ago.
Much of what’s known about Yahoo’s troubles is already priced into the stock. The company’s shares are down about 45 percent since mid-June, when it ended talks with Microsoft and signed a search advertising deal with Google. (The deal is under review by regulators.) In the same period Google’s shares have fallen 35 percent, Microsoft’s, 16 percent, and the Nasdaq composite index, 28 percent.
Analysts generally say they believe that the impact of the financial and economic crisis on the online ad market will be more acute next in the fourth quarter and next year. Many have lowered their projections for both Google and Yahoo.
But they say the impacts are likely to be felt differently at both companies. Google, they say, may have to focus more on cutting its fast-growing expenses to maintain profit margins.
Yahoo’s situation is more dire. The company has been negotiating a deal to buy AOL from Time Warner for several months. With its stock price so low, and with so little support from shareholders, it is under pressure to do something more dramatic.
Posted in Online Marketing- International | No Comments »
October 18th, 2008 elitani
SAN FRANCISCO — For months, Google has promised investors that the company’s online advertising system would do relatively well in an economic downturn. On Thursday, it showed evidence that it may be able to deliver on that promise.
Google said that its growth rate continued to slow in the third quarter. But the company fared better than Wall Street expected as it reported a solid 26 percent jump in net income to $1.35 billion, or $4.24 a share, from $1.07 billion in the third quarter of 2007. The company’s results were bolstered by strong gains in online advertising and efforts by Google to slow hiring and rein in costs.
Google’s shares, which rose to $353.02, or 4 percent, in regular trading on Thursday, jumped another 10 percent after the company reported its financial results. However, they remain down sharply from their high of just over $740 last November.
Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said the results reflected marketers’ acceptance of a system that is better and more measurable than other forms of advertising. He said that while the economic environment was unpredictable, Google was poised to continue doing relatively well.
“We are very realistic about the macroeconomic climate, but we are optimistic about Google’s future,” Mr. Schmidt said during a conference call with analysts.
While Google is the largest seller of online ads, its relatively strong results are not indicative of the overall health of the Internet advertising business. Google relies primarily on search ads, the fastest-growing segment of the market. Since marketers use such ads to lure people to their Web sites, analysts say they believe they are among the last thing advertisers would cut during a recession.
“This is the first quarter when the wheels are coming off the wagon on the economy and they’ve been able to have a decent quarter,” said Youssef H. Squali, an analyst with Jefferies & Company. “Google’s business model has proven to be better than that of your typical Internet company because of its focus on performance.”
Google said revenue for the third quarter, which ended Sept. 30, grew 31 percent, to $5.54 billion, up from $4.23 billion a year earlier. The growth rate is a further indication that Google’s business is maturing. The company’s revenue grew 56 percent in 2007 and 73 percent in 2006.
Google’s net revenue, which excludes commissions paid to advertising partners, rose to $4.04 billion, roughly in line with the $4.05 billion that analysts expected. The company beat Wall Street’s profit expectations. Excluding the cost of stock options and other items, Google’s income was $4.92 a share, higher than the $4.79 a share forecast by analysts.
The company also said that the number of times users clicked on its ads grew 18 percent from a year earlier, roughly the same rate as in the previous quarter.
In the conference call, Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, said advertisers appeared to be willing to keep buying search ads because they were effective.
“Our experience is that advertisers are willing to take all the clicks they can get,” said Mr. Varian. “Even in tough times that continues to be true. No one wants to turn away a customer.”
Ahead of Google’s report, several companies that sell services and tools to search marketers said that they had seen little evidence of a slowdown. “We are not seeing any weakness in our business,” said Christopher Lien, the chief executive of Marin Software, whose technology helps marketers manage search advertising campaigns. For example, Mr. Lien said, a large apparel retailer had recently promised to double the amount of money it would spend on search ads.
Still, many analysts cut their revenue and profit expectations for Google in recent weeks, amid signs that the slowing economy would affect advertising budgets both online and offline. And some analysts say they believe that Google’s strong results in the third quarter are not necessarily indicative of future performance.
“Everything is getting worse in real time,” said Ross Sandler, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. Because Google provides no financial forecasts, its results are “like looking in the rearview mirror,” he said.
But investors appeared heartened by Google’s focus on the bottom line. The company added approximately 500 employees in the quarter and reined in expenses across the board. In the year-ago quarter, it added 2,100 employees. “They are operating well in a tough environment,” said Douglas Anmuth, an analyst with Barclays Capital. “The key to the quarter is that they showed a real focus on cost controls and that’s what Wall Street needed to see.”
On Thursday, Google said that David Rosenblatt, the former chief executive of DoubleClick, was named president of global display advertising, a new position. Google bought DoubleClick last year for $3.1 billion in an effort to quickly expand its fledgling display advertising business. The appointment suggests that Google is getting ready to accelerate its push into that market.
In an interview, Mr. Schmidt said that he expected the display advertising business on YouTube and on partner sites to become the first sizable new business for Google beyond its traditional text ads.
“It looks to us that the sum of YouTube plus display is going to get there in terms of scale,” Mr. Schmidt said.
Posted in Online Marketing- International | No Comments »