Links & News – 25. April

  • Webmonkey has an interview aboutSearch Engine Optimization: „Bryan Zilar recently sat down with strategy consultant and SEO guru Jason McQueen to talk about all things search“.
  • Yahoo! now offers an online video meshup tool, writes business 2.0 blog.
  • Futurelab calls the Gnarls Barkley Nr. 1 hit video a casestudy in word-of-mouth.
  • Marketing.fm points me to the Technology Evangelist, who examines the differences between Online and Offline Advertising. Some interesting points he’s making.
  • Wired writes about an interesting survey: „Some 45 percent of internet users, or an estimated 60 million Americans, said the internet helped them make big decisions or face a major moment in their life during the previous two years“

Links & News – 20th April

  • Adverblog points us to two adver-podcasts (or whatever they’re called) by Amazon and Bacardi.
  • Nike has developed JogaTV, a desktop application that downloads latest soccer videos and related footage to a desktop near you.
  • Gareth Kay links to a new ad for VW by their new ad agency CP&B. Nice idea, great execution!
  • Google integrates real estate and auto search into its general search, writes Charlene Li. Making Google Base more relevant then ever.

Google Maps and Heineken hooked up in a new advergame

Another campaign utilizing Google Maps: Heineken hooks up with Google Maps for Tapvat World Tour 2006.

In this microsite visitors are supposed to search the world for gigs from Dutch live band Voicst using Google’s satellite images. All within a certain timeframe while a radio signal leads you to the right spot.

The game is intuitive enough, which is good as I don’t speak any dutch. At the end I found the spot (why would the want to have a gig there?), but I didn’t understand what they wanted my address details for – surely it was for some kind of sweepstake, but who knows what else I might have signed up for?

Try it out, it’s interesting and kept me busy for quite a few minutes (I had to try twice to find the spot – and it’s of course in a different place every time).

New iPod Ad visible from outerspace? Or just a normal thing first seen on Google?

boakes.org apparently broke the news: Steve Jobs, the incredible Steve, won an abandoned mineral mine in remote western Australia during a poker game – and has nothing better to do than to build a giant iPod ad on it.
An ad that can be seen from outer space, as even adrants reports (err, quotes). If you look on technorati, you can find lots of posts on this matter – it’s the new Apple story, apparently. OK, it’s for the 30th birthday of Apple, fair enough. They might as well go big.

Yet, according to all the blogs I read sofar, I was probably the only one not zooming in on to the iPod, but zooming out to check out the area around it.

And while I like this story a lot, I couldn’t help myself noticing, that Steve Jobs is indeed building two iPod ads rather close to each other!! I suppose one is for the iPod video while the other one is for, well, any of the other iPods. It’s not finished yet, so it’s difficult to tell.

See for yourself:

You can find it here on Google Local.

(On second throught – what if these square areas are just something unusual that australian miners … no, let the story continue.)

Sponsored Link Impressions Up 16 Percent

Sponsored link impressions are up 16 percent writes Clickz.

At the moment, Online Advertising is projected to grow at 19%, but search engine advertising is supposed to grow at 26% according to the same source.

This shows, how important search advertising is growing to be. It is important enough, obviously, for some companies to seriously think about how to incentivise the user for using their search engines. MSN even put up a microsite with a sweepstake for using their search, called search and win.
Or even pay Dell $10 for every computer shipped that has their desktop search function pre-installed, as this German website says.

The search war ain’t over yet. Expect more, evermore interesting battles, of which, hopefully, mainly the user will benefit.

Better than Google Earth or Maps?

Google Earth is a brilliant tool, no doubt. And the only one I have seen even web-agnostics use. Clearly, Google wants to sell location-relevant advertising. But it doesn’t do that in Germany, yet. So another company came along – one that originates from the yellow pages industry:
GoYellow.de now created a map of Germany that includes satellite images, which are at least as good quality as at Google. And, most importantly, GoYellow put all their yellow pages entries on the map, including a function to contact the location. You enter your phone number, and GoYellow will call you back to connect you with that retailer, restaurant or whatever it is you were searching for.

Another add-on: you can enter where you currently are, and German Rail will tell you how you can get from your location to the location your were searching for.

This is great stuff, whenever I find tools like these on the net, I am more than ever convinced, that in a few years there will be only little added-value left that traditional media can provide compared to these kind of things. Something like being „accessible“ even during a power-outage (when all batteries happen to be flat at the same time), for example.

It doesn’t happen often, that web-related news from Germany make it abroad (except for the recent and utterly stupid „Klowand“ debate, mabye). But this one apparently even fascinated Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine