Month: February 2012

On The State of Google’s Advertising Business: Neal Mohan at Signal SF

If you’ve been reading Searchblog, you know I’ve been writing quite a bit about Google, privacy, and the advertising business. All of those topics are going to be coming together in my interview with Neal Mohan, VP Product at Google, on the Signal SF stage next month.

Neal oversees display and mobile advertising for Google, and works directly with the company’s entire advertising stack, a formidable lineup of products that include the Doubleclick ad server and exchange businesses, AdSense, the Invite Media demand side platform, the pending AdMeld supply side platform, AdMob, and much more. Given the tempests over Google’s integration of its privacy policies, the integration of Google+ into Google search, and Google’s circumvention of Apple’s Safari browser, it’s bound to be quite a conversation.

Register for Signal:SF here (we’re closing in on a sell out), and please leave any questions or comments you might have for Neal below. I’ll be listening and integrating your input. Also, below are a few more links for you to peruse on the topic of Google and its advertising business (as well as that of its main competitor now, Facebook).

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Facebook News (Livestream): The Brand Spaces Are Bigger, Bolder, More…Ad Like

Facebook is holding it’s first ever “fMC” today – that’s Facebook Marketing Conference, and it’s announcing widely expected new ad formats. From the release just sent to me:

Today, Facebook announced a new design for Pages, giving brands and businesses more ways to tell their story. The redesigned Pages are more personalized and complementary to the look and feel of individual profiles. Now, when you visit a Page, you can see your friends’ interactions with that Page as friend activity, making the experience more dynamic and relevant for Facebook users.

Highlights of other new features include:
· Pinned posts keep important stories at the top of a Page timeline for up to seven days.
· The new admin panel makes it easy for Page administrators to track their performance and to respond to private messages from people.
· Larger stories, milestones, and Page Timeline. The new Page design allows Page owners to tell richer stories through bigger photos and milestones that can include a date and other content.

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A Funny Thing Happened As I Was “Tracked”

I’m still in recovery mode after the wave of Apple-defenders inundated me with privacy-related comments over this past weekend, and I promise to continue the dialog – and admit where I may be wrong – once I feel I’ve properly grokked the story. The issue of privacy as it relates to the Intenet is rather a long piece of yarn, and I’m only a small part of the way toward unraveling this particular sweater. (And yes, I know there are plenty of privacy absolutists rolling their eyes at me right now, but if you don’t want to hear my views after some real reporting and thinking on the subject, just move along….). lf you want to peruse some of the recent stories on the subject I’ve been reading, you can start with the Signal post I just finished.

Meanwhile, I want to tell you a little story about advertising and tracking, which is at the heart of much of the current tempest.

While skiing last week at my home mountain of Mammoth (the only place in California with a decent snowpack), my family and I stayed at a Westin property. It’s a relatively new place, and pretty nice for Mammoth – which is more of  a “throw the kids in the station wagon and drive up” kind of resort. It’s not exactly Vail or Aspen – save for the skiing, which I dare say rivals any mountain in the US.

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Obama’s Framework for “Consumer Data Privacy” And My “Data Bill of Rights”

It sort of feels like “wayback week” for me here at Searchblog, as I get caught up on the week’s news after my vacation. Late last week the Obama administration announced “Consumer Data Privacy In A Networked World: A Framework for Protecting Privacy and Promoting Innovation in the Global Digital Economy.”

The document runs nearly 50 pages, but turns on a “Privacy Bill of Rights” – and when I read that phrase, it reminded me of a post I did four years ago: The Data Bill of Rights.

I thought I’d compare what I wrote with what the Obama administration is proposing.

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Apple Gets Into (App) Search

It took longer than I thought it would, but it’s finally happened. Apple’s admitted that it needs real search to bring it’s tangled app universe to heel, and purchased Chomp, a leading third-party app review and search service.

Nearly two years ago I wrote this piece:  Apple Won’t Build a (Web) Search Engine. From it:

…but it will build the equivalent of an app search engine. It’s crazy not to. In fact, it has to. It already has app discovery via the iTunes store, but it’s terrible, with no signal that gives reliable results based on accrued intent.

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WTF’s With the Silence, Battelle?

As you grow older, you learn a few things. One of them is to actually take the time you’ve alloted for vacation. So while the whole Google/Microsoft/Apple privacy who-haa is going down this week, as are any number of other noteworthy news stories, I’m going to stay on the sidelines and focus on skiing with my family. Back at it, to the extent I can be at it while attending TED, next week.

There’s much to be said, for sure. But time only makes the saying of it that much better, I believe.

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A Sad State of Internet Affairs: The Journal on Google, Apple, and “Privacy”

The news alert from the Wall St. Journal hit my phone about an hour ago, pulling me away from tasting “Texas Bourbon” in San Antonio to sit down and grok this headline: Google’s iPhone Tracking.

Now, the headline certainly is attention-grabbing, but the news alert email had a more sinister headline: “Google Circumvented Web-Privacy Safeguards.”

Wow! What’s going on here?

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San Francisco In The Spring: Come To Signal

Over at the FM blog, I just posted the draft agenda for the first of five conferences I’ll be chairing as part of my day job at Federated Media. Signal San Francisco is a one-day event (March 21) focused on the theme of  integrating digital marketing across large platforms (what I’ve called “dependent web” properties) and the Independent Web. The two are deeply connected, as I’ve written here. As we explore that “interdependency,” we’ll also be talking about some of the most heated topics in media today: the role of mobile, the rise of brand-driven content, the impact of real-time bidded exchanges, and more.

Signal builds on the format I spent almost a decade crafting at the Web 2 Summit – the “high order bit,” or short, impactful presentation, as well as case studies and deeper-dive one-on-one interviews with industry leaders. Those include Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, Adam Bain, President of Revenue at Twitter, Neal Mohan, who leads Google’s ad products, and Ross Levinsohn, who runs Yahoo! Americas, among others.

Others represented include Instagram, AKQA, Babycenter, Intel, Tumblr, WordPress, ShareThis, Facebook, and many more. I hope you’ll consider registering (the earlybird expires next week), and joining me for what’s certain to be a great conversation.

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The Ecstasy of Telegraphy

My research manager turned up this gem in the course of answering a question I had about the popular response to the introduction of the telegraph in the US (a moment that informs the working title of my next book). What I find fascinating is how the invention incited an innate religious response (this editorial from a local Albany, NY newspaper is in no way unique). The logic goes something like this: Mankind has invented something that pushes the boundaries of our comprehension – we are now doing something that once was understood to be the provenance only of God. Therefore, we must remind ourselves that this invention, while seeming to contradict the supreme powers of God, in fact only reinforces His position in our world. 

The logic may feel a bit tortured, but it’s consistent with a point I make every time I explain one of the core ideas of the book – that in the 200 years between the introduction of the telegraph (early 1840s) and when my children have kids of their own (roughly 30 years from now, or  early 2040s), mankind will have completed something of a pivot when it comes to our shared understanding of the relationship between technology and God. When Morse couldn’t decide what the first telegraph message should be, he settled on a Biblical quote quite consistent with the Albany Atlas and Argus’ editorial: What Hath God Wrought? The telegraph was such a massive shift in the possible, it was best to ascribe its power to God. Humans can’t handle this power.*

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China Hacking: Here We Go

(image) Waaaay back in January of this year, in my annual predictions, I offered a conjecture that seemed pretty orthogonal to my usual focus:

“China will be caught spying on US corporations, especially tech and commodity companies. Somewhat oddly, no one will (seem to) care.”

Well, I just got this WSJ news alert, which reports:

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