Yogi Land

Technology and free speech; Yahoo’s behavioral targeting patent; your brand butler, optimize display with search, and more

Exporting values
“As companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter push their technologies around the world,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle’s Benny Evangelista. “Recent events show that they’re not just exporting the latest in online tools, but a basic tenet of the American way of life—freedom of speech.”

Behavioral ads raking in the dough
According to a recent survey by the Network Advertising Initiative, says Forbes’ Laurie Burkitt, behaviorally targeted ads have a conversion rate of 6.8 percent, compared to 2.8 percent for the non-targeted ads. “Behavioral targeting may keep advertisers front and center with their target audiences,” says Burkitt. “It may also keep some publishers in business.”

Yahoo! wins patent for behavioral ad targeting
Speaking of behavioral targeting, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently issued a patent to Yahoo! for “optimization of targeted advertisements based on user profile information.” Read the actual patent here. Yahoo!: Putting the science in “science, art and scale.”

Everyone needs a butler
What self-respecting Wooster wouldn’t want his very own Jeeves? But not everyone can afford to have a gentleman’s gentleman to do the butlering. But almost everyone can have their own brand butler. Brand butlers, says an article in Marketing Charts, are “brands that focus on assisting consumers to make the most of their lives, as opposed to the traditional branding model of selling consumers a lifestyle or identity.” Find out the eight categories of brand butlers and see if your brand can butler.

10 Steps to optimize your content marketing strategy
Writing from the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York last week, Lee Odden of TopRank sits in on a Digital Asset Optimization panel and offers a step-by-step program for optimizing your content marketing. “What can be searched on can be optimized,” says Odden.

Sketch-a-Search and Mobile Search: What the critics are saying
Since we launched Sketch-a-Search last week at the CTIA conference in Las Vegas last week, it’s generated a lot of buzz. Here’s what the folks at CNET are saying. (It’s the first time we’ve heard an app called “eccentric.”)

Putting display in search terms
Writing in AdExhanger.com’s “Displaying Search” column, Justin Merickel, Vice President of New Product Development and Marketing at Efficient Frontier, explains how you can utilize search data to benefit your display campaigns by mapping audience segments to search term types.

More news from Yahoo!
In this New York Times article, Miguel Helft—who was once the author of this post’s next-door neighbor—tells how Yahoo! News has recruited almost a dozen journalists to beef up its news offering. “In February,” writes Helft. “Yahoo! News had over 43 million visitors, more than any other news site, according to comScore.” High-profile journos being welcomed to the Yahoo! News team include Michael Calderone (Politico), Jane Sasseen (BusinessWeek) and Anna Robertson, an Emmy-winning producer from ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

— Michael Mattis

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Did You Know.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.