Professional rally driver Ken Block, founder of DC Shoes, knows the power of the 700 YouTube videos shared every minute on Twitter, and that’s the social, connected power behind advertising on YouTube. Now, the Google-owned video portal is pitching advertisers on its targeted original channels during the digital upfront disruption to the TV upfront presentations now underway.

"Play Means Business" is YouTube’s call-to-action, “a single destination for all of YouTube’s brand building resources," including 100+ YouTube "brand channels" that amount to more than “compelling, on-demand entertainment, however. It’s also about precision, generating word-of-mouth, and business impact," adds Google in a blog post.Continue reading...

Video production is getting cheaper and Google, via YouTube, is developing tools to encourage brands of all sizes to ste up video advertising. One key step: AdWords for Video, which soft launched last September for a select group and is now available for everybody.Continue reading...

They say size doesn’t matter, but the Internet Advertising Bureau disagrees. New research from the UK-based IAB (there's a US body too) shows that consumers pay a lot more attention to brands that don’t stick to the basics of online advertising.

The IAB UK just released a global study indicating that larger formats are “twice as effective at raising brand awareness” than the forms of advertising that have long ruled the Internet: banners, skyscrapers, and mid-page units.

The group checked out how well three larger formats – billboard, wallpaper, and half pagers – did compared to the old paradigm. Five key metrics were measured: ad awareness, brand awareness, brand favorability, message awareness, and purchase intent. Guess who won the fight?Continue reading...

Infolinks launches the first and only self-service In-Text Advertising Marketplace today, enabling brands to create targeted campaigns in minutes, and delivering them across 250 billion web pages to reach over 350 million unique visitors monthly.

In-Text Advertising, the next iteration of Google Adwords which displays contextually relevant ads in a bubble when double-underlined links are moused-over, has a higher average CTR than traditional search advertising, the company says. They claim real-time contextual targeting matches advertisements to website content at the moment the reader is most engaged and receptive, and revealed only when the consumer opts-in.

We spoke with Tomer Treves, CMO of Infolinks.Continue reading...

Back in February, we noted how the "advertising option icon" at right, a logo to warn web surfers about targeted marketing, would be enforced by the Direct Marketing Association.

Now comes word that Quantcast, a leading provider of audience measurement and media targeting solutions, has signed on to the program, spearheaded by the US Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), in a move that expands adoption of the icon for millions of small and medium-size website publishers.

While larger web publishers and advertisers including MSNBC.com, Google, Time Inc., General Motors and Kraft Foods, have adopted the program, smaller companies have been slower to sign up.Continue reading...

The latest twist in the evolving dispute over the use of keywords in Europe involves a battle of advertisers.

A lawsuit has been filed by the UK-based flower delivery network, Interflora, against British retail giant Marks & Spencer for using the word "Interflora" on Google's search engine. Interflora claims it has an exclusive right to that word since it is a trademark — but that Google searches for "Interflora" results on sponsored ads not just for Interflora, but for Marks & Spencer. A thorny issue, to be sure.Continue reading...

With the launch of its latest ad unit, “Sponsored Stories,” Facebook is turning users' in-network activities — status updates, Places check-ins, Likes, app activity — into advertisements. 

Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest challenge remains how to monetize advertising in a non-intrusive way. “Sponsored Stories” is a euphemism for a digital transformation from information-based to social-based advertising.

“We’re moving from the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to the ‘wisdom of friends,’” says Facebook executive Dan Rose of the new ad format.Continue reading...

In-text advertising can be a balm to brands. So says Vibrant, a US-based specialist in premium contextual advertising solutions, that shared with us the results from a recent campaign with Vaseline.

The firm's recent online campaign for Unilever's Vaseline Intensive Rescue brand scored in five key metrics, according to Vibrant: brand awareness and favorability; message recall; purchase consideration and share of mind against other brands.

Creating interactive custom content where the target audience (women, in particular moms) would be browsing online (such as iVillage.com), Vibrant employed in-text advertising used a scrolling section below a Vaseline-sponsored video player, encouraging users to explore the full product range.Continue reading...