Bada-Bing, Microsoft Bumps up the Fight Against Click Fraud

What does suing two brothers and their mom in Vancouver for $750k have to do with taking on Google?  
More than you’d think.
As reported in the WSJ,  Microsoft recently “filed a lawsuit against three people that it alleges committed a form of “click fraud” (…)  in which automated computer scripts or large groups of people click on (pay-per-click) online advertisements [...]

Don’t Cut Your Budget to Spite Your Health

Looks like we have the making of theme here. 
Two ads, two days in a row, both of which position a seemingly “non-essential” product against the recession, using the linkage of health (see, How to Market Premium Beverages in a Recession ).
This photo, taken yesterday in front of the Equinox health club near Grand Central Terminal, NYC, shows [...]

How to Market Premium Beverages in a Recession

I’ve always been a big fan of that biblical fruit — symbol of fertility, righteousness, and shrapnel-bearing anti-personnel weapons — the pomegranate. Kudos to POM for “owning the Pomegranate Story” and all that… and their Pop Art-inspired ad campaign is wonderful (POM Wonderful! )… though I’m not exactly sure how ironic this ad is meant [...]

Google vs Microsoft : M&A slugfest (right hook with aQuantive, left hook with Salesforce)

Not wanting to be left behind the ever-growing Google AdWords / YouTube /  DoubleClick / etc. / etc. empire , Microsoft just revealed on Friday that it will buy aQuantive for $6 *BILLION* dollars.  How quickly did MSFT scramble that deal together?  
Well, don’t blink, cause Google’s hitting back today, with a strange,vaporware-esque leak to the WSJ about doing [...]

comScore / Nielsen NetRatings audit saga, pt.2

Two new articles just came out regarding the IAB’s pressuring of comScore / NetRating to have their panel methodologies audited.  
1)  “The Travails of Tracking Web Traffic” by Catherine Holahan (BusinessWeek, April 30, 2007)
2) “IAB Call for Audits: Transparency or Conspiracy?” by Kate Kaye (ClickZ News, April 20, 2007)
Both articles mention one of the more nimble competitors [...]

comScore and Nielsen NetRatings to be audited!

The Wall Street Journal reported today that…
The Interactive Advertising Bureau asked the two major Web-traffic-measurement companies, comScore Inc. and Nielsen//NetRatings, to submit to an outside audit to find out why the two companies report different audience sizes for the same Web sites.
Ok, it’s 2007. The Internet has existed for over a decade. During that time, [...]