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The loss of a father is always overwhelming. Fathers serve as mentors, role models, and true friends. When writing a eulogy for your father, you want to be able to get this message across. Doing so wi…
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writing an effective eulogy for a father by studying sample eulogies

Some SEOs aren’t getting the message about Google’s personalization of search results. Many are not seeing the writing on the wall: 2009 will likely see the end of the ranking report in SEO. In today’s organic search engine optimization column, “The Future of Google’s Search Personalization,” Mark Jackson advises SEOs to acknowledge traffic, conversions, and ROI as the important metrics for any form of marketing or business.

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AOL’s ad network, Platform-A, is going on tour. The 5-city event begins in New York City on November 17th at the American Museum of Natural History. The next stop will be Atlanta on November 20.

The tour will break for the holidays before hitting Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in 2009.

“AOL has one of the largest, most diverse and most engaged audiences on the Web, and combined with Platform-A’s industry-leading technologies, we can offer advertisers a unique combination of scale, integrated branding, and advanced targeting capabilities to enable them to deliver their branding messages in an effective, engaging and highly efficient way,” said Platform-A President Lynda Clarizio. “At a time when companies make sure that every penny spent on advertising counts, AOL delivers quality content and engaged consumers and Platform-A connects marketers to this audience to drive superior results.”

Related Reading:
AOL’s Platform-A Collaborates with T-mobile for 2 Day, Billion Impression Ad Blitz
AOL’s Platform-A Unveils Plans for Self-Service Ad Marketplace Exchange
AOL’s Platform-A Launches iPhone Advertising Solution

AOL’s Platform-A has collaborated with T-mobile for a two day ad blitz. The campaign will have the mobile carrier buying 1 billion impressions over the two day time frame, which is expected to reach 81.5 million consumers. Platform-A currently reaches 90% of the U.S. internet audience.

What will be advertised? The new Android-powered G1, of course!

“The T-Mobile G1 offers a rich, accessible mobile Web experience for the masses, so we want to drive that message to the broadest range of U.S. consumers possible,” said Brett Dennis, director, branded entertainment and media management, T-Mobile USA. “The groundbreaking experience of the T-Mobile G1 is really what motivated us to pursue this exceptional online advertising program.”

Clearly, both AOL and T-mobile are gunning for the upcoming holiday season:

“The innovation behind the T-Mobile Billion Block clearly demonstrates the value marketers place on the combination of reach, impact and innovation that only Platform-A can offer,” said Lynda Clarizio, President of Platform-A. “It also spotlights the role online media will play in the upcoming buying season, with strategic marketers like T-Mobile relying on the near-universal reach of Platform-A to connect with United States consumers in an effective, efficient and engaging way.”

Today, there are more updates to Google products than you can shake a stick at. So intead of writing a bunch of short, little posts, I have consolidated them into one for you, faithful SEW reader.

Both my awesome husband and my awesome 11 year old son have pointed out to me the new changes to iGoogle. I personally don’t use my iGoogle page all that much (Keepin’ it real [simple]), but I did browse over to it and found some cosmetic changes (The Foo Fighters theme was already there.)

Notice the tab on the left hand side. It includes links to the widgets on your iGoogle page. When you click on one of the links, it switches to a screen with that widget. Some take up the whole page. Others present a list of similar widgets as suggestions. Still others make use of Google reader to present a feed.

Moving on to other Google properties….

Webmaster Tools now testing a Message Center warning that alerts webmasters to possible vulnerabilities with their Content Management Systems (CMS).

Google TV ads has announced new partnerships with COREMedia Systems and Harris Corporation. The COREMedia partnership allows CoreDirect customers to view their Google TV ads right along with their CoreDirect data. The Harris Corp. one adds more inventory for Google TV advertisers.

AdWords has separated the metrics for Google and search partners such as Ask, AOL, etc. This is probably in preparation for the implementation of the Yahoo search advertising partnership.

Last but most important is the changes to the Google algorithm regarding Adobe Flash. Brian Ussery has a writeup about it on his extremely minimalistic-looking blog. Basically, he finds that indexing of Flash still isn’t ready for prime time. I know there may have been some hope with recent news of Adobe working with Google to provide better indexing, but we’re just not there yet, folks.

And that concludes the flurry of Google updates for Friday, October 17, 2008. Leave your thoughts, impressions, etc in the comments!

At the OMMA Conference in New York this week, Axciom is unveiling their new online advertising targeting tool. Dubbed Relevance-X™ LifeStage, the tool was designed to help interactive marketers identify audiences based on life stage. Once the identification has taken place, advertisers can make a single media buy to reach publishers with a message coordinated with offline efforts.

“The consumer targeting capabilities available in Relevance-X LifeStage enable marketers to increase the performance of their online marketing investment,” said Tim Suther, Acxiom’s senior vice president for digital marketing services. “Today, our clients see improvements in click-through rates, greater clarity in their brand message, and fewer wasted ad impressions.”

What do you think of this tool? Leave your impression in the comments.

Social sites FriendFeed and Twitter have (separately) updated the designs of their interfaces. You won’t notice much by going to the homepage not logged in.

But once you’re passed the wall, you’ll notice a few changes.
Twitter’s are largely cosmetic in nature, with the biggest change being moving the tabs for Replies, Direct Messages, etc. to the sidebar. They’ve also slapped some Ajax on there to just refresh Home or @Replies when you click on them. Thank goodness.

FriendFeed’s new design incorporates a much needed feature: friend lists. Kind of like buddy lists on AOL’s Instant Messenger, you can sort the people you’ve subscribed to Friends, Professional, etc. You can also create your own lists. Another new feature is adding photos directly to FriendFeed.

But the biggest awesomeness of the day is DUPLICATE DETECTION! This makes Friday end on a happy note after such a crappy week on Wall Street. Ok, it doesn’t bring your money back or prevent all those financial companies from failing, but it does make FriendFeed that much nicer!

What do you think of the updates? Let it fly in the comments.

Online advertising firm Turn, Inc. is introducing dynamic pricing models into its behavioral targeting offering. The model will take factors such as recency and relevancy of message and combine it with a retargeting method that allows advertisers to monitor real-time behavior and adjust their campaign within seconds.

So, does this dynamic pricing work? Turn offers three examples of its success:

• A telecommunications client in Turn’s market saw a 28 percent lift in click-through-rate and a 423 percent jump in conversion rate when adding retargeting to their buy.
• A Fortune 500 financial services client had an increase of over 200 percent in both click-through and conversion rates after starting their retargeting campaign.
• A major auto insurance company saw a 2x lift in ROI when they included behavioral into their campaign targeting auto-intenders.

“Our dynamic pricing model is an alternative to how advertisers are purchasing behavioral inventory today. In this world, offerings aggregate all users in the behavioral segment and every impression is assumed to have equal value to the advertiser. In reality, all users are not equal and pricing should reflect that,” comments Dominic Bennett, vice president of engineering at Turn.

LinkedIn is today launching the LinkedIn Audience Network, a new advertising option that allows highly targeted ads to reach the professional social network’s members. The great advantage to this ad network is the ability to target Executives or IT professionals. LinkedIn gathers so much information from user profiles, and this information makes it easier for advertisers to target who they truly want to reach. And users will get more relevant ads as well.

“The message we hear from advertisers is simple: they want mass reach against specific segments of decision-making professionals, and they want their ads to appear in quality environments,” said Steve Patrizi, LinkedIn’s Director of Advertising Sales. “The LinkedIn Audience Network offers advertisers one of the most accurate audience data sets available on the web along with the confidence of knowing that their brands will only appear on sites with high editorial standards.”

Related Reading:
NYTimes.com and LinkedIn Pair for Targeted Ads and Content
Yahoo Sets Yelp, LinkedIn, and Yahoo Local SearchMonkey Apps to ‘Default On’
Small Business Owners Need Twitter and LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s New Company Profiles: Will They Rank in the SERPs?

Incentives can help mobile users overcome their initial negative reactions to mobile advertising, according to survey data released by ABI Research.

37% said incentives would increase their response to a text-based ad

11% said incentives would have no impact

“We think that in general, advertisers and operators must tread carefully when delivering marketing messages to a consumer’s mobile handset, especially given that many subscribers believe they are paying a significant amount of money for their mobile services,” says research director Michael Wolf. “However, we believe that marketing and advertising messaging that is properly crafted and that utilizes incentives could enjoy more acceptance on the part of the consumer.”

This is in line with recent data we’ve seen showing that online couponing is on the rise.