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Month: May 2006

MSN AdCenter Exits Beta, Becomes Microsoft AdCenter

Published May 7, 2006

Microsoft AdCenter Log-in
Microsoft surprised everyone on Friday by releasing their “AdCenter”:https://adcenter.msn.com/default.aspx product to the general advertising public. While the birth of a third important provider of paid search results is exciting, the overall experience at this early stage is somewhat disappointing. Many advertisers are reporting bugs with keyword selection, among other things, and some users are experiencing abnormally long delays and hang times.
h3. Targeting Canadians
The interface clearly allows users to target Canada. However it seems as though the geo-targeting feature does not display the ads only to Canadians, like “Google AdWords”:https://adwords.google.com/select/ does. Rather it allows advertisers to bid higher for canadian clicks than for other clicks. I’m not too sure how well this form of geo-targeting will be received by Canadian advertisers trying to reach a Canadian audience.

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Making "Get A Mac" Viral

Published May 7, 2006

I get the whole “new marketing”:http://www.jaffejuice.com/ thing that “Joseph Jaffe”:http://www.getthejuice.com/ talks about in his “Life After The 30-Second Spot”:http://www.lifeafter30.com/. TV just isn’t what it used to be. But that doesn’t mean that _all_ TV ads are a waste of money.
If you are “Apple”:http://www.apple.com/ and you want to take another shot at convincing people to *Get A Mac* then TV might be the right place to do it.
Tell me the ads in the “Get A Mac”:http://www.apple.com/getamac campaign aren’t brilliant and compelling.

Still, Apple could have done a much better job of making the online part of Get A Mac more viral. Here are *seven things I would have done to make this spread faster:*
# Add them to “YouTube”:http://www.youtube.com and “Google Video”:http://video.google.com/. Who cares where people see the ads. Getting them on these highly viral networks in “official versions” (not the fan-uploaded ones you find now) would be a great step forward.
# Make each video linkable. Right now while there is a unique URL for each video at each resolution these don’t seem to be visible to the user. All the ads regardless of content or size seem to come from the same URL (http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/?restarting_medium). This makes it hard to naturally link to something or to bookmark favourites.
# Make them easy to download. Yes you can download the .mov files if you know what you are doing, but adding a “download this ad” link wouldn’t hurt.
# Copy YouTube and GoogleVideo and make it *very* easy to share the video online by including a “Share this Ad” to e-mail a link, a “Link to this Ad” with a short URL to get to the specific ad, and an “Add this Ad to your Site” link to an embedded player (like the one I used above from YouTube).
# Create a feed people can subscribe to if they want to get new Apple ads sent directly to them via iTunes or a Feedreader. Apple’s ads are so entertaining that I’m sure many people – even non-Mac users would sign-up for amusement sake.
# Archive older ads so that people can always look back at how far we’ve come.
# Bribe people with “link love” by cribbing YouTube’s pseudo trackback for video plays. Called “links to this video”, the feature shows how many people have clicked through to the page from other sites (with live links to the URLs).

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