Turmoil is all around us, old assumptions no longer valid. Richard Florida deftly lays out the scenario for the current economic and spatial Great Reset . Bob Garfield outlines the Chaos Scenario in traditional media and advertising )upon which I comment favorably here (. Friendly, iron-fist in a velvet glove American liberalism- cum -imperialism is laid to waste in Chris Hedges' Death of the Liberal Class . Seth Godin refers to a " forever recession ,

Google's recent financial results weren't nearly as bad as the markets seemed to think. By any rational standard, once again they turned in a strong Q4 and strong YOY growth. Earnings were very solid. All they did was miss Wall Street expectations slightly. If revenues and profits were up sharply " but below expectations " were there any red flags at all? It appears so. While total paid clicks were up 34% year over year,

The latest debates over Google Search results, search quality, antitrust, and other drama are only the latest in a long period of rapid change for Google in the search arena. That period, pretty much the past seven years,

You've been through it. Everyone you know has probably been through it, at some point. Your website and the platform is built on are now five )or, aaaghh! seven or eight!( years old, and your website redesign and relaunch are long overdue. But what pain are you going to endure, and how much money will you spend )lose?( before you come out the "other side"? That was the premise of our session at SES Chicago last November,

Facebook is free, essentially for three reasons: People pay for apps and games, and Facebook's cut of that subsidizes the platform You view and/or click on ads, and that also subsidizes the platform 9-figure investments have allowed Facebook to "undermonetize" its huge investment in creating and supporting the user experience A fourth reason: you, the consumer, refuse to pay. This dynamic applies to most of the rest of the Internet, too.

Legendary. Epic. etc. You may have noticed a lot of adjectives like this strangely appearing in TV ads. Even for products like aluminum siding and arthritis medication. Why? Because somewhere between Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the 40-Year-Old Virgin, a great idea got lost. The idea that ads are for the people viewing them. Not the people who write them. So that simple people doing simple searches simply to search for the things they would like to buy' can find them.

Have you ever read a comments section for a major news source? )I know you have.( Yikes! The problem seems to be particularly bad in Canada. There are a handful of companies/players that seem to be the "official" and authoritative sources of news for the nation. So the volume of comments major stories attract is high. And 90% of the comments are angry.

Back when Overture )previously GoTo.com, later became Yahoo Search Marketing( was preparing its prospectus for an initial public offering, the company spoke often of the paid clicks )to which by now we've become so accustomed( as "paid introductions." It was a good choice of language. With the recent growth in and precision of the remarketing technique,

In a recent column , I explained that ad formats and copy can send meta messages beyond what is literally conveyed in the text. You aren't just trying to "convince" a pre-digested subset of willing buyers, but rather, you're engaged in a sorting exercise whereby users measure you for "fit" as their eyes flit across a number of listings on a SERP page in rapid succession. If you play your cards right,

I just came across a recent story outlining how, in a certain Canadian jurisdiction, a dozen energy companies were fined for deceptive sales practices. A dozen companies. That's, like, nearly all of 'em. On the list was one of the two largest firms. Also on the list, several green energy firms with otherwise stellar reputations. The fines ranged from $15,000 to $50,000. Such low fines are about the lightest possible slap on the wrist,

Like many of you, I'm a pretty active user of Twitter. I understand its value in that it reaches a great many people every day. It's raised a great deal of money by now " enough to keep it going for as long as it wants. Recently, CEO Dick Costolo made some remarks to the Wall Street Journal about the company's future in the context of its current lofty secondary market valuation of approximately $8 billion. As much as we might be curious about technology,

You can say this a thousand times and it's never as interesting to people as it should be )until they see the financial result and it affects them directly(: changing a single, unassuming word in an ad headline can have major repercussions on response and ROI. Here's today's micro case study. I'm working on some ads that promote a giveaway for free tickets to a popular local event. This promotion is generally popular, but in the end, the campaign is a marketing cost.

What was Steve Yegge thinking? I'm sure that was what Steve Yegge himself was thinking after he inadvertently posted his already-famous internal rant that ranged from his former employer, Amazon's, massive shortcomings, to the current failure of his current employer, Google, to stop being great at product and to start getting platform.

Following up on the news that Google is incorporating landing page relevance more directly into Quality Score as it affects position and thus CPC's as well as eligibility in the keyword auction' As a few of us try to digest Google's high-level announcement, it's still unclear what exactly Google is measuring now, or plans to measure in the future, when it comes to relevance and scent in the keyword, ad, and post-click user journey. Ruling out major policy violations,

Word is out that Google has gone through another round of algorithmic tweaks to address content quality in the organic search results. These updates have collectively become known by the nickname Project Panda. Not to be outdone, the Ads Quality team at Google has been pondering adjustments to the Quality Score formula with pilot projects in smaller markets like Portugal. As a result of these tests, Google is announcing today that landing page quality,

In some parts of the world, lengthy conversations are still being held on the subject of persuading clients to devote enough budget to digital. In light of past battles nearly won, it's particularly maddening that some paid search campaign managers seem so bent on handcuffing their own accounts, that they are limiting their upside through a process of excessive filtering. To be clear,

Relevance in search means a lot of things to a lot of people. Information retrieval scientists right down to the average user of a search engine might think there is quite a lot to determining what is "relevant" to any given user on any given query. There is. Although by no means scientific, SEOmoz's annual review of what experts think are factors determining search ranking So when organic search principles seemed to be seeping into paid search programs,

While search marketing has often been lauded for its killer ROI and - especially on the paid search side - its incredible capacity for fine-tuning and testing, its cousin on the display side hasn't always attained the same standard. Perhaps because of past miserable failures, some advocates for the display side simply issued it a different rulebook. Why should it be expected to "perform," when it clearly can't? But what if it can?

Groupon is addicted to money, spending half a billion dollars a year to acquire new subscribers. Yet it now claims that it will kick the habit in 2013, reducing that spend to zero. There is approximately one way they can effectively do this. That is: be acquired by Google. Another approach might have been to think of some other way to grow than to indiscriminately acquire spambox signups in the hundreds of millions without pausing to assess profitability.

In today's post, Seth Godin argues that we can be lulled into settling for blah layouts and fonts because )after all( companies like Google, eBay, and Craigslist have treated them as an afterthought, and they've been wildly successful. There's no question he's right. Trying to strip every element of marketing down to the bone is a kind of purists' mentality. And in a world of profit margins, finite consumer mindshare, )or selling B2B "connections and comfort"(,