The article on Adotas by Gary Angel, President of SEMphonic discussing content matching is a great read about the advantages of content matching over search marketing.

Angel points out that while buying competing product names is verboten in search marketing, it is allowable to match your ads with mentions of competitors in content.

As we all know, it can be equally effective to target those who are interested in your competitor as people who are searching on the category, whether online or offline. Another twist on this could be too watch for mentions of competitors products on news and blog sites through an RSS aggregator, and if you can't get the publisher to write about your product, advertiser in the feed itself. So even if readers don't click through to articles mentioning your competitors, they will still see your ad.

Miller Brewing has canceled its modest ($5 million) TV budget for the Fosters beer brand and will only spend online in what could be the first of a major shift.

Instead of going the banner ad route, Miller will mostly rely on viral videos and a video-heavy contest on Heavy.com to spread the word. Men will be enticed to vote for one of 10 Australian women, and one lucky fella will meet the sheila in Las Vegas, according to Advertising Age.

Fosters will also be promoted through "homemade" viral videos that seek to create word of mouth buzz. TV can't touch the demographic data and interactivity of online advertising.

As advertisers realize that young men spend more time reading about sports, playing games, or looking at women online, they will increasingly use video campaigns. Similarly, married women who play casual games online will also be targeted with video ads.

If AOL is to make a go of its new ad-supported model, the company has to move to the forefront of advertising technology. Being a me-too portal when competing against Google and Yahoo won't cut it.

Per the Baltimore Sun,AOL is betting that its acquisitions of Advertising.com and video advertising company Lightningcast will provide the necessary resources. Video advertising is in its infancy, so the mold has yet to be cast. I expect targeted marketing to be a big part of this since consumers would be willing to fill out some demographic information such as age, income level, home ownership, etc. to get access to free video content, which in general is more valuable than text pages. AOL has to not only deliver a targeted viewership, but also make sure the ads are compelling and interactive.

Video advertising revenue will grow, just not as quickly as display and search advertising, according to Jupiter Research. In these arenas as well AOL must embrace the latest interactive technologies are else become a Trivial Pursuit question. AOL has a sizeable audience (for now) but eyeballs without ROI that is better than your average bear is not sufficient.

Car and Driver is the latest publisher looking to increase its revenue by mining the behaviors of its readers. In partnership with Revenue Science, the company will track which pages readers access in an effort to increase the conversion rate of ads.

As ClickZ points out, basing ad buys on demographic data is no longer sufficient when actions can be analyzed to find the most appropriate viewers for ads.

One of the most powerful aspects of behavioral targeting will be to pinpoint readers who spend time looking at competitors products. Companies that don't "defend their turf" by advertising to people already interested in them will lose out as competitors will be happy to pay for those eyeballs.

Found via Adotas

One of the search engines' biggest ongoing challenges is to weed out the phony pages created not to offer content, but to steal clicks.

From search arbitrage, which generates low-cost results pages only to link to pages which generate more value for the publisher, to splogs (auto generated blogs that snip content from bloggers) to keyword artists who embed popular but unrelated topics on their web pages, there is a lot of phony content out there that is polluting the web.

Google's challenge is double in that AdWords is used by some of the jokers to create money from nothing, and the company needs to cleanse its index of plagiarized content.

In addition to the continual tweaking of algorithms, the company should invite the webizens to flag bogus content so that it is erased from the search results. Tap into the power of the community to identify BS when they see it. If enough people get irritated by meaningless results, then Google deletes the pages.

If a bogus web page isn't indexed anywhere, does it make a sound? No.

Director Kevin Smith has made several successful movies (including Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma), and even more money by building a doggedly loyal online community.

His latest film, Clerks II, didn't have the production budget (a mere $5 million) or marketing budget that usually accompanies a mainstream film, so Smith built interest in the film by mastering the online guerilla marketing tools. Smith frequently vlogged about the making of the film while it was being made, blogged about it on his personal website, created a MySpace website for the film and all of its central characters, participated in his company's community forum, interacted directly with fans.

He promotes the DVDs of his past films and developed a slew of related merchandise to generate income when he doesn't have a film in theaters, which is most of the time. .

Smith recognized that he is the brand, and so he puts himself into the middle of all of the marketing efforts. On his blog Smith explains (warning: in profane detail) how he based his marketing strategy on lessons he learned from sex, which boils down to recognize your limitations and focus on the skills that can make you a successful.

We can all learn from Smith that you can make a nice living by identifying a niche audience, spending appropriately, and generating buzz online through direct communications.

While TV networks and advertisers are kvetching about the ability of DVRs to skip commercials, they should look at silver lining. TiVo is tracking how commercials are watched or not, and offers details about viewing patterns.

The data is likely to be more telling and accurate than what services such as Nielsen can provide. Advertisers should learn from the data about which commercials are of interest to certain demographics, and create better marketing pitches to keep user attention.

While undoubtedly their product pitch is diluted by the fast-forward button, relying on the metric of how many people watched a program gives no indication of how many people saw an ad or paid attention to it. Bathroom breaks, distracting conversations, or dashes to the kitchen for munchies cut into the viewing of commercials, so advertisers should be happy to get more accurate numbers to bid against.

DVRs are now part of life, and have changed the way people view TV so the market has no choice but to adjust. News.com also writes about reliability problems with DVRs, which reinforces the argument that storing programming on networks makes much more sense. Network DVRs could also fully exploit the interactive ad features, negate the ability to skip ads, as well as provide even more data about viewing habits.

I've been working with Richard Zwicky and his team for the past several months on a very exciting project. The project is a search metrics application that gives you real time data on what page of the search results a visitor is on when they come to your site... of course that's just a tiny piece of what it does but a huge piece at that.

You see, before Enquisite, in order to see where you ranked in the search results you had to run weekly, monthly, or daily reports using an application like Web Position Gold or something else, but all of those have some major fundamental flaws.

1.) They only get the search results from a single ip address (unless they use the api and then they are looking at a much smaller piece of each search engines' data set).

2.) They are only a single snapshot of one point in time and thus the data is old as soon as it's captured.

Enquisite provides data on real visitors coming to your site from organic and paid search as well as some incredibly powerful drilldown tools so you can optimize and reoptimize your site in real-time. The ability to adjust your online marketing tactics (especially search engine optimization & marketing) in real time is critical if you want to be ahead of your competition. Well, with Enquisite, that's not only possible but incredibly easy and fast. I'll be talking more on this later as will several other people. But this new tool is a fundamental shift in search metrics and the beginning of a very exciting time for me personally.

If this is something you think you might be interested in then I highly recommend you go sign up today as the registration period for this initial beta test is going to be very short and we'll be closing the free signup period shortly in order to ensure we're reacting quickly to all the questions & helping the first round of users on the system in the best manner possible.

The synergy between online music services and social networks is obvious but so far under developed.

MySpace and Facebook are hubs for talking about music and are starting to link to services such as iTunes to sell music, but they don't have full access to a music archive. Services like Napster and RealNetwork's Rhapsody have the music, but don't have the social network capabilities of creating user pages to easily share playlists. Napster enables users to share music on social network sites, but the integration is incomplete.

Merging these services is inevitable if these companies are to survive. Turning the traffic of MySpace into marketing machines that close the commerce cycle enables them to capitalize on their audience. Napster users could allow the company to track the music that they listen to and rate it, creating instant user generated content that could be monetized.

Both sides have continued to lose money, so we should expect some deal making soon. Napster is reporting its income tomorrow, so we'll see if they are able to turn a profit. If not, I'd be giving MySpace a call pronto.

Marketers who pose as real people online are not doing their brands a service and will eventually be discovered and receive negative backlash.

MySpace allows, and in many instances promotes, marketers to push their brands by creating pages and interacting with friends, according to News.com.

Exploiting people's gullibility may work for a short term, but the risk of reprisal isn't worth it. IF companies are up front and clearly indicate that the website is bogus (like giving a character in a movie his own page), and people interact with him, fine, but creating a faux persona to blather on about the wonders of a product is crossing the line.

Similarly, paying bloggers to praise your product without revealing the payments is unethical. Sponsored content must be clearly posted as such.