sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

No sooner did I discover that Google allow one to target ads on race & ethnicity (as do MySpace, it seems) than I read that they’re introducing contextual advertising for mobile. Aside from the obvious discussion about whether display advertising works on mobile yet (I don’t think so) it was interesting to see the list of countries they’re piloting with:

US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan (shortly).

Yes, England! So the Scots, Welsh and Irish (northern or otherwise) and I presume the Channel Islanders as well, won’t be getting mobile ads from Google, but the English will.

Or perhaps they meant the United Kingdom…

I was just reading through the Google Adwords help when I came across this screengrab from their targetting application. It seems that you can target Google ads by racial or ethnic background.

I’m very interested in whether other people are surprised by this information. I’ve never heard of advertising being targetted like this, as explicitly as this. Perhaps it’s normal in the US market, but for the advertisers I work with in the UK, I’ve never heard of it.

I assume Google are profiling publisher websites rather than their users for this service.

I’ve been having a conversation with a colleague at Agency.com about whether Facebook has established such a dominant position as the community site to use, that it won’t be knocked off that position. The idea we’re discussing is that so many people now use Facebook, that the hassle of moving would be too great for anyone, and the open application platform they’ve rolled out means that much future innovation will happen inside Facebook in future, rather than on new platforms.

I have a long-standing scepticism about dominant trends. Altavista used to be the top search engine, and IBM used to make all the PCs. I don’t think there are many unassailable positions in business, especially in a space as innovative as the Internet.

Yesterday I was reminded of the reason for my scepticism. I went to an event organised by the British Computer Society, about the next 50 years of technology. All sorts of exciting things are coming (including personal jet-packs, of course) and some of these will make serious impacts on our lives. Some of them, like the super-exponential increase in computing power and Internet bandwidth, will drive incredible innovations that we are only starting to see today. Video, interactivity, mobile, device convergence will all be important drivers for change

This is great if you work in digital business, but what has it got to do with Facebook? The answer is that all this innovation is going to lead to new social ideas, structures, devices that we can’t imagine today. Some of them will come this year or next year. And Facebook has as little chance, or as much, as anyone else of creating those innovations. In fact, because they have an operational business to manage and grow, their chances of innovating might even be lower than those of a couple of kids in a garage somewhere.

So if you’re thinking you’d never be able to survive without Facebook, it’s only a matter of time.

This is a movie of slides plus video from my presentation last Thursday. It was weird spending so much time listening to myself speaking again when I made this: I hope it sounds better to you than it did to me!

I participated in a discussion last night about property and web 2.0, sponsored by my friends at Zoomf.com. I presented a personal view of what we mean by web 2.0, and Mike Carter spoke about how it’s impacting the property business here and in the US. We were joined by Andy Etches from Brightsale and Ben Brandt from Rat & Mouse, the popular London property blog. Annie Turner from GoMoNews hosted the conversation and it was a very enjoyable evening.

I never know what to expect from panel discussions. Last night I felt I was involved in a discussion about a rapidly changing business, which isn’t totally sure where it’s going to end up. Read more »

I’m one of the panelists at tomorrow night’s seminar on Property and Web 2.0, hosted by Zoomf.com. There are a few spaces left, I gather. I’m giving an overview of what web 2.0 is, Mike Carter’s going to apply that to the property market, and the other panellists will be introducing their work as well. Then Annie Turner from GoMoNews will chair a discussion. I’m expecting an interesting debate about how the property business can make the most of all that web 2.0 stuff.

We’ll be recording it all for later podcast.

Not a spelling mistake, I promise…

I’ve had two contrasting experiences over the last few days, that both (weirdly) involve online marketing and gorillas. In the first, we downloaded London Zoo’s Gorilla competition, which involves feeding and interacting with a virtual gorilla on your desktop. It’s quite nicely done creatively, if a bit arduous to play, especially if you’re competitive and have to win at all costs. The problem is, it hasn’t been tested too well, and the whole thing stopped working for 3 days last week when the Zoo’s agency lost its Internet hosting. A really poor experience, and it’s probably put a lot of people off playing the game.

The second is the brilliant, brilliant Gorilla Protection blog. What a simple example of blogging being used by a business, in this case a charity. You send a donation, the next day you can see it making a difference. They put videos, photos and stories online of the work they’re doing almost every day. Why aren’t more charities doing this kind of thing? It’s so effective, and so cheap. Here’s one of their videos.

DSCN0777.jpg, originally uploaded by harkmopwood.

Moneysupermarket “no 1 price comparison site” ad next to the “price comparison sites might not offer the features you need” ad from Direct Line. Marvellous adjacent ad placements at Clapham Junction.

I helped to run a consumer forum for Zoomf.com last week. Poppy’s written it up here. I had a great time, and it’s always incredibly useful to listen to first hand comment. The group was young and skewed toward rented property, which means it’s not 100% representative, but it was terrific to hear the things they liked (simplicity, speed) and the things they wanted (trade secrets, of course!) 2 things that surprised me: the group is hardly using the mobile web at all, saying it’s still too slow and expensive, and how much they were using the web. Hardly any TV, hardly any print, they were all using the Internet for something like 6-10 hours per day.

And of course Facebook was the website none of them could do without.

I’d like to echo Zoomf’s thanks to the participants: I had a really good time and learned a lot.

http://www.wildlifedirect.org/blogAdmin/gorilla

This blog has up to date information from the field about the Wildlife Direct charity’s work to protect gorillas and other wildlife in Africa. It’s a brilliant use of blogging to support fund-raising, and to help people see what their money is buying. There’s video too.

Whenever I’m talking to businesses about blogging, it always has to be authentic, factual and based on something real to the organisation, and all of that’s true here.