There was an article in Washington Post that talked about "Product Placement". How the traditional, subtle product placement in TV shows and movies is making a leap into the scripts. Forget about fast forwarding using your Tivo's skip button, it is all part of story-telling. There has not been a huge cry from actors yet, but it will at some point. You can read about different aspects and implications including FCC's regulation regarding disclosures here. The other extreme of this new br  read more »

SpiceWorks introduced a free IT monitoring application for small to mid-size businesses. Did I say "free"? This is not your off-the-shelf open-source monitoring application but rather a fully commercial version (may be they use open source SW to build it but I digress). How do they make money? Well, you guessed it right. Advertising. You have to tolerate Google ads on the management console. Once you get to managing more than 250 devices, you buy a paid license. Interesting approach. If they can find a good distribution channel for this product  read more »

Response to our Search Widget has been phenomenal. Thanks to everyone who is giving it a try. We are still in the first inning, there are lot of improvements needed and yes, this can evolve into something bigger. But this is a start! I particularly liked this post from Nitin Karandikar outlining pluses and minuses of our Search Widget. One question that has come up repeatedly is mone  read more »

Yes, we all know how big the search advertising market is. Just look at the results announced by Google last week. We also know that online is still only 6%-7% of total advertising spend in the US. So, what's going to drive the growth in online advertising? Will advertisers keep pouring more money into text-ads displayed right next to search results at the expense of print, radio, television, billboards etc? I think not! There are some really interesting things (call them experiments  read more »

A public apology and $2M settlement with local authorities is what TBS had to pay for their guerrilla marketing. Of course theygot the publicity that they wanted for their show in any case :-).Here is the link for more details.

Jim Samples, the head of Cartoon Network resigned according to NY Times. Samples, who had been with the network for 13 years felt compelled to step down amidst all the public scruitny and bad press TBS got for the guerrilla marketing around''Aqua Teen Hunger Force''. Of course no uplift in viewership week to week despite the publicitydidn't help the cause. It underscores theresponsibili  read more »

I have been fascinated by all the debate around the inefficacy of Cost-Per-Click (CPC) model prevalent with search engines and shopping comparison sites. In his December 4 article in the New York Times, Bob Tedeschi highlighted some of the online shopping newcomers who are attempting to differentiate themselves from the three leading, multi-million dollar shopping sites,  read more »

I recently talked about verticalization at an event. What verticalization means, why it happens, where it succeeds, where it fails and what's it's intersection with search. Here is a synopsis of the talk. And I will focus on verticalization (of needs), not segmentation (of users) even though there is some cross-over there.

Verticalization

If we look around us, we see examples of verticalization everywhere. From the cars we drive to sneakers we buy to television channels we watch. We used to drive a  read more »