Google has acquired DoubleClick

DoubleClick belongs to Google after the ‘green light’ given by the European Union for that ‘purchase’. A great deal that Microsoft was obviously opposed to as Google would become even stronger than before in the search advertising domain. Eric Schmidt announced that after DoubleClick’s purchase, Google offers a greater advertising platform, which provides the market with tools that will improve effectiveness and clues for the performance of digital media for editors, advertisers and sponsors.

Global digital strategy by Cadbury

In an effort to achieve personal relations with its customers, Cadbury adopted a global strategy in order to promote its brands. In agreement with MassMedia Studios it got access to a multi-channel digital platform combining e-mail, online communications, mobile phone and TV.

A smart move from Cadbury as that will most possibly allow the company to combine and analyze the performance of its brands in all digital channels both nationally and internationally. The inner goal ofcourse, is to communicate better with its publics and in a rather personal level by improving a digital approach for that purpose. Time will tell whether Cadbury meets its target…

Viral communications’ fever

There’s at least one viral element in everyone’s inbox, isn’t it? The term viral marketing or even viral advertising is all about marketing techniques used by existing social networks in order to gain reputation through the viral process. Same as a virus infecting a computer.

Viral can be a video clip, an online game, sms, books, and so on. According to B. Winterton, of the Barbarian Group, there’s a tension for emotional approach. Timeliness has given us examples of both successful viral campaigns and failing ones. Failing comes from copying and imitating existing campaigns’ concepts believing the ourcomes will be similar.

A key to success is being original and use fresh and creative ideas. It’s also important not only creating something entertaining but also giving the users reasons to promote our ideas further. Another part of a viral campaigner’s strategy is hiding some fundamental pieces of history in order to challenge the public to fill the gaps and make an effort to put them into place because of their curiosity to know more.

But how ‘high’ or ‘low’ can viral marketing be on a list of so many other communication methods? It is a fact that viral communications is a recent tool.I wouldn’t want to give an evaluation by placing it either high or low on a list, simply because it’s a necessity. Personally, I feel it’s a unique method of establishing a brand directly, combining humour, the public’s participation, the media and the word of mouth process.

One of the most successful virals of last year is the following video of Wilkinson called ‘fight for kisses’, distributed in France and became very popular in Europe in a short time.

Yahoo vs Google

 Google  is so easy to use- I’m using it myself - so popular among various publics and as far as I’m concerned, it has been attracting more and more people to its web. I think it absolutely deserves to be among the best search engines. I came across a research by Hitwise indicating differences of different publics, using different websites for the same purpose. Hitwise revealed there are socio-economic differences between those who use Yahoo and those who use Google. Yahoo holds the second place among online search sites, with great difference from Google, which hold the first. Hitwise’s research also revealed that Yahoo users include mostly young publics whereas Google’s are more mature people, older than 55 years old, and tend to spend money online. What do you think about that? I find it reasonable for quite young users to be more attracted by Yahoo’s images and plethora of links as it’s easy for them to surf online even if they don’t know what to look for. On the other hand, Google’s users know what they’re looking for and find this search engine very helpful.

Big Brother is watching us…

As long as trade exists, the desire for running further research on consumers’ preferences won’t stop. That’s exactly how social networks make profit; by taking advantage of that desire. Social networking sites offer their services and at the same time ‘build’ consumers’ profiles, violating their private life and most of the time without their knowledge.

For instance, Facebook’s users reacted against Beacon application when they realized that everyone could watch their online activities as they were all available in their profile - e.g what they bought for whom, how much it cost them, buying a ticket, booking flights, events attended, and so on. Some of them were really upset, even deleted their facebook accounts in order to get their privacy back.

One of the creators of Facebook, Mark Zuckenberg, apologized and supported that their initiative goal was to share selective activities of the users’ choice, not all of them. Unfortunately, they didn’t manage to do it straight away, they needed more time to achieve this.

Lets be honest…facebook is fun and it’s a very interesting way of communication between friends and family. Somehow we are partly responsible for that violation of privacy as we never get to read the ‘fine print’ on anything, therefore how can we be sure we enhance security of our data at all times?