July 2009

Official Microsoft-Yahoo Partnership Site Launches

Posted on July 31, 2009 by PM Digital

microsoft-yahooMicrosoft and Yahoo have created a joint website with details on the Bing/Yahoo partnership from each company’s perspective.  The new website is at www.choicevalueinnovation.com/thedeal.

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The Microsoft-Yahoo Deal: Chris & Suzy Square Off

Posted on July 30, 2009 by PM Digital

PM Digital’s CEO Chris Paradysz and President Suzy Sandberg tackle five questions surrounding the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership:

  • Will Microsoft-Yahoo be competition for Google?
  • Will this be a positive deal for advertisers?
  • Will this be a positive deal for consumers?
  • What does the combination bring that’s unique?
  • What are the challenges of the Microsoft-Yahoo combination?

Below is a lively discussion – with occasional disagreement — regarding this groundbreaking news.

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The (Still Small) State of Retail Mobile Apps

Posted on July 29, 2009 by Glenn Lalich

retailappsApple celebrated 1.5 billion app downloads last week, but that heady number doesn’t tell the whole story of the one-year old App Store. It took Apple nine months to reach 1 billion app downloads. It took only three months to add another 500 million. That’s remarkable.

Take it as a given that most apps are faddish and have a short shelf life (think cowbells, lighters, “1,001 Pick Up Lines”). There are also apps that have expanded our perception of what is possible, like identifying a song almost anywhere using Shazam, or distinguishing a color on-the-fly using Benjamin Moore’s ben Color Capture. These are potent, uniquely mobile experiences. Apps in one form or another are here to stay.

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Buy or Build?

Posted on July 28, 2009 by Jeffrey Cohen

As we often hear from our clients and see in our own business, eventually, during the normal lifecycle of a company in today’s world, the need for customized software will arise.  Whether the need is to manage mountains of data or simply to automate a manual process, the question will come up whether to build your own system or buy a solution and customize it.  There are three main options to address this issue:  Buy, In-House Development and Outsourced Development.

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Marketers Unite!

Posted on July 24, 2009 by Chris Paradysz

My déjà vu senses are tingling again. There’s an intriguing confluence of events going on that reminds me of an earlier and painful dot.com era. While the need for greater sophistication in search marketing is accelerating, and consumer demand for non-essentials has become more fickle, search-related technology and the number of companies supplying it, is rapidly increasing. The skills of the players in the channel, including those with in-house capabilities, are becoming commoditized by this same technology.

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Search Sushi

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Tim Kilroy

We love sushi. Delicious, delectable, delightful…I could go on all day. But we are faced with a new challenge in the search world: search sushi. During Google’s Spring Searchology event, Google unleashed a bunch of new search options, allowing users to filter searches by media (video, forum, review, etc) and by time (all time, recently, past week, etc.) So this opens up all kinds of opportunities for search dominance. By leveraging time-sensitive content with tradition al well-linked content, you can really position yourself to cover all of the bases for search.

But as Marissa Mayer was introducing the 2009 version of Google’s Universal Search, she mentioned that it was like a “Bento Box” of search results.

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Breaking Through on Google’s Page 1

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Suzy Sandberg

Most advertisers aspire to be number 1 on paid search and number 1 on natural search with a particular focus on Google since it typically drives 80% of search-sourced sales.  Retailers in particular, though, may have noticed that for a wide array of products, Page 1 is actually dominated by Google Product Search listings and the CSEs, which push retailer-specific keywords down in the rankings, primarily affecting natural search listings.

Despite good intentions, there may be technical limitations, branding priorities and business rules that have prevented a retailer from optimizing their site well enough to jump over these sources.  You may have also recently noticed that Twitter, YouTube, blogs and Facebook are all bumping down traditional, retailer-specific natural search listings even further.

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