Tribble Ad Agency

It looks like MSN has dumped 1/4 of a Billion dollars into an Ad Agency to promote MSN Search, loses market share.

We wanted to point this out because as search engine marketers and optimizers we have to address some issues in our own back yard rather than just making fun of traditional Media.

We have a serious problem that has to be addressed, its the issue of click fraud. The Lions share of revenue that Google makes for example is from Adwords.

In fact just today they announced a record quarter, Google’s revenue for 3 months hit $2.46 Billion dollars.

But let’s start really looking at these numbers, we already addressed that vast majority of this came from the pay per click system, but let’s be really look at the numbers, Click Fraud (depending on who you ask) ranges from 10% (low) to 30% or greater for the high end. Being Conservative, we will look at the figures at the very low end. 10% of $2.46 billion revenue is nearly a quarter billion dollars ($250,000,000).. in 3 months. Even at the low figure, you are looking at roughly 1 billion a year in fraud.. and that is at only a click fraud rate of 10%.

Warner Bros. owns up to the $75 million budget for “Lady,” which probably means $100 million, with another $50 million for prints and advertising. That’s a $150 million write-off if they can’t convince audiences that early reviews are wrong.

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Literally a disaster of epic proportions.. it appears that someone allocated 50 million of the costs to print and TV ads, bypassing (by at least 50 million) the far more lucrative SEM and SEO aspects of the marketing campaign, other aspects such as creating a valid blog with RSS marketing and other marketing online aspects were missed as well… by at least a margin of 50 million.

Earlier we praised Wikipedia for their discription of Advertising Agency however the more we think about it, the more we feel that the page should be rewritten.

We feel that there should be two sections to the discription, Agencies that specialize in New Media and Agencies that specialize in Old Media.

Yes, you heard right, old media is how we feel it should be discribed.

In this area we want sunset industries such as Newspapers, Magazines, TV and Radio. For New Media we want Blogs, Online Videos, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing as well as other venues of online marketing.

These Ad Agencies are not even in comparable in skillset or growth.

The New Media Agencies such as Search Engine Optimization firms are growing in the double Digits per month while the old media firms are declining at almost the same rate.

It looks like because of the online threats and damage to the print media business, the Wall Street Journal is forced to place ads on page 1 … But of course… the Internet and Search Engine Marketing and Optimization are just a fad.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times Co. plans to narrow the size of its flagship newspaper and close a printing plant, resulting in the loss of 250 jobs, the company said in a story posted on its Web site late on Monday.

The changes, set to take place in April 2008, include the closure of a printing plant in Edison, New Jersey. The company will sublet the plant and consolidate its regional printing facilities at a plant in Queens, the paper said.

The newspaper will be narrower by 1 1/2 inches. The redesign will result in the loss of 250 production jobs, the company said.

The Times will join a list of several other papers from The Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times that have reduced their size as they cut newsprint and other production costs and try to stem a loss of readers and advertising to the Internet and other media.

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I guess News.Google.Com and News.Yahoo.Com are taking them out? As well as Drudgereport, Sqlspace and a host of other online news outlets…

It’s online people.. it’s online… linkie winkie

It seems that the conflict has passed finger pointing and has reached the level threats.

An Ad Agency threatened to build a viral campaign against SEO’s … the SEO’s threatened to rank the ad agency for the keyword ‘ineffective’… story developing…..

It appears from the posts on Adrants that the normal quiet war has spilled out into the streets with a barrage of finger-pointing being seen from both sides.

One Ad Agency Excutive stated:

“What happens after the user lands on the site?”

The SEO Executive replied:

“What happens when no one lands on the site?”

Should Ad Agencies be concerned?

The company in question had a fairly robust marketing plan and had a marketing budget over 3 million a year. The problem the company was facing was that it did not exist in Google, Yahoo or MSN and viewed that as a serious problem to their online marketing campaign.

Now overall, SEO firms are not creative in terms of flashy ads, in fact most SEO firms build pretty plain sites, flled with content rich text and very discriptive of the client, but still not really that ‘flashy’.

So comparing SEO’s to Ad Agencies could be akin to comparing applies to oranges, but the problem is that these Ad Agencies site designs were so search unfriendly that many potential clients where never finding them in Google, Yahoo or MSN.

But the problem is that this company really viewed it’s search engine rankings as a major problem, in the end, an Ad Agency won the bid, but the SEO firm won as well. The contract with the Ad Agency specified that they must hire the SEO firm for consulting on the site design.

Intresting to say the least.

It appears that Intel is shopping for a new Ad Agency.

Now the strawman argument before is ‘Safeway doesn’t need any SEO’ … well how about Intel?