Online marketing

The Economist provides an overview of developments in online marketing.

Rishad Tobaccowala, the “chief innovation officer” of Publicis, one of the world's biggest advertising groups, and boss of Denuo, a Chicago-based unit within Publicis with the job of probing the limits of new advertising models, likens traditional Wanamaker-era advertising to “an atom bomb dropped on a big city.”

The guy also has a knack for horrible similies. Apparently Segmentation is not much better than traditional advertising

Instead of atom bombs on cities, says Mr Tobaccowala, segmentation is at best “dropping conventional bombs on villages”.

As for Online advertising,

Instead of bombs, says Mr Tobaccowala, advertisers now “make lots of spearheads and then get people to impale themselves.”

However, the rest of the article is quite good. Besides the "paid search" that Bill Gross pioneered with GoTo.com, and which, along with contextual advertising, keeps Google's cash register ringing, there is "pay-per-print", when an advertiser pays only when someone prints out an online coupon, and "pay-per-call", when an advertiser pays only when someone calls a toll-free number on a search page.And Bill Gross is now working on "pay-per-sale", which Google is also trying out with Google Checkout. There is also a section on Branding (Tadaa!)in an Online world, and it seems games are going to be big in this.

Companies such as Massive and Double Fusion are already placing two-dimensional brand advertisements into games. A player moving through the streets of New York to kill something or other might see a DHL truck or a billboard. “But the future is intelligent three-dimensional ads” and “ads with behaviour,” says Jonathan Epstein, Double Fusion's boss. For instance, his technology will soon allow Coca-Cola to place a Coke can into a game, where it fizzes when a player walks by and might give him certain powers if he picks it up. If a character uses a mobile phone inside a game, the technology can swap the brand and model of the phone depending on which country the player is in. But the most important aspect of the technology, says Mr Epstein, is that it will track exactly how long the player uses the phone, thus leaving no doubt about whether an “impression” had indeed been made.

Ends with some faff about the "long tail".