"So i'm getting Scroogled?!" Er, probably not...

I think it's fair to say that i'm very happy using my Google products (Mail, Calendar, Docs, Blogger, etc) and they all work rather well. But, I also realise that Google specialise in paid for advertising and that the compromise for having free tools to use is that some may carry some ads, which are usually discrete and I always ignore. So, it was quite amusing to see that Microsoft has started a fairly low level smear campaign to bolster the take up of outlook.com... 

Only problem is, the below video really just looks like something a bored student has put together, or is that the point?

Negative marketing may be the new approach for Microsoft, but as Marketing Land point out this may not be having the effect they were hoping for:

"To date, the Microsoft-backed petition against Gmail’s practices has gained about over 6,000 signatures — equal to about 0.002% of Gmail’s user base."

 Could this be a case of Microsoft telling us what we already know? "Hey, Google does advertising..."

Targeting trial complete!

Three weeks ago I started a trial using the Google DFP system for targeting the banners on our homepage for our internal audience, something of a try it an dsee approach.

Well, the good news is that it has worked rather well! Using the IP check with DFP we targeted anyone within the beds.ac.uk domain. This has reaped some interesting results:

 

Up to a 1.1% CTR on internal banners which has been great for promotion of our internal services!

Below is a screenshot of the external site as seen by an internal viewer:

 

If you compare this to the live external site (beds.ac.uk) then you can see that the messaging is very different!

The only outstanding question now is how much more can we do with the system, text snippets that are changed on IP or country details would work or maybe looking at the idea of selling some spare impressions off...?

Clearing, Spotify and sponsored tweets

So, we are just coming out of the Clearing period at the University and it's time to start looking back at how everything went, what went well and what didn't! So, two new lines of advertising that we have been trialling this year are Spotify advertising and Sponsored Tweets.

Spotify was a last minute booking for the University and has performed extremely well. You can run a very targeted campaign with us focusing on Herts, Beds and Bucks listeners aged between 18 and 24. Due to the way Spotify works you can buy 'listens' on a CPM basis and at a very competitive rate as well, this can also include banner advertising to run alongside the advert. We recorded a 30 second advert in-house and booked in for a week. The response has been great, we had hundreds of click throughs on the banner advert and a handful of mentions on Twitter from people who had heard it. A success all round and we now have anither advert running for our Part Time campaign!

The other new line of advertising was Sponsored Tweets. Again, a great success with hundreds of click throughs on the link we provided to them and with a number of re-tweets as well. These start from $0.20 US per posting all the way up to thousands of dollars for a single tweet from the likes of Kim Kardashian! I purchased 50 tweets for the Clearing campaign and an additional 20 for the Part Time campaign and the whole lot came in for under $100 US. Very cost effective and good for raising Buzz about campaigns.

So, two new avenues for advertising campaigns in the future with both of them being very quick to turn around so ideal for late advertising!

Facebook Location launching next week?

A rumour seems to be going round that Facebook is about to launch their long awaited location service. Initially slated for earlier in the year and delayed due to the on-going saga of privacy settings it now looks as though we may be ready to try out this new service.

Details are pretty shady at the moment about what exactly Facebook's new location service will be like, but it's likely the main way you'd share your location would be through your mobile device. This would obviously put it in direct (if not commercially competitive) competition with Google Latitude, Foursquare and Gowalla.

The real question people will be asking is how the service will be used to display advertising? Will the location service allow us to deliver adverts in a more targeted way by geo-location? Could be rather interesting if it can...

Twitter advertising is here!

As mentioned back in July 2009 Twitter has finally conceded to having advertising on the Twitter platform. Now, this isn't a huge surprise, Twitter is still the buzz word of the moment and they will no doubt be able to pull in a vast amount f money through the sale of "Promoted Tweets".

But will they damage their model by allowing paid for tweets to appear within listings? Co-founder Biz Stone said they would not be traditional adverts but must be Tweets that "resonate with users" and be a part of the conversation. This sounds like a soft approach to rolling out some revenue generating idea but how long will it be before the idea of more traditional advertising kicks in?

Facebook managed to roll out PPC adverts with limited impact on the user experience so it's not out of the question for Twitter as well.

Read the full story on the BBC website.