"Is there a more appropriate symbol for how the holiday shopping season
is shaping up than an advertisement for the Tse clothing store, which
appears in The New York Observer, that is composed of the name of the shop, its address and telephone number and the words “on sale” repeated 128 times?" muses Stuart Elliott in The New York Times.

There are 19 other questions, if you're interested. But I like this one. It gets to the heart of the matter of advertising during a recession. Is "On Sale" all you really need to say? Can you imagine: A bunch of Creatives sitting around a table, spouting their brilliant ideas. Enter Account Exec. "Scrap everything, just tell 'em its cheap and let's call it a day."

Value-driven messages. Everyone's doing it – and not just for Black Friday. Food manufacturers, grocery stores. Pay-as-you-go telecom services. Wal-Mart, Target, Macy's – heck, every department store has to if they don't want to join Mervyn's in bankruptcy court. But have you seen any really clever ones? Chime in.

At Apple Insider: Apple plans to cut costs by shuffling the staff in its retail unit, making its part-time workers clock fewer hours and its full-time "Geniuses" pick up the slack by getting out from behind their service desk, err, "bar," to greet customers and answer basic questions. Apparently this will reduce human resource costs without having to actually fire anyone. But from my experience, part-time workers usually want more hours, and full-timers want less. Okay, Apple, you try this and see how your Geniuses handle it.

On Valleywag: The rumors circulating the tech world that "10,000 Google jobs are on the chopping block" are not true. It's more like 2,000, sources are now saying. And most of them are technically "temporary workers" so Google doesn't even report them to the SEC – though insiders note that many of these employees have been with the company for 5+ years, but keep getting shuffled around so that their status remains temporary and they don't have to get health benefits, insurance, stock options, or an offer for a permanent position.

On the Wired blog: Six Apart – the maker of TypePad, the blogging platform that this little baby is running on – is offering laid off bloggers a "bailout package" that includes a free TypePad Pro account (allowing multiple authors and blogs as well as more storage and control over the design), a spot in the Six Apart Media
advertising program, promotion on Blogs.com and other information and
advice in how to succeed in online journalism.

Last week there was a "spirited private private debate about the death of banners and display advertising." Brad Waller wrote on ReveNews, "With CTRs around 0.35% and eCPM rates dropping like a rock, what are publishers to do?"

Here's how some weighed in on the discussion:

Dave Morgan (MediaPost): He's "fond of the banner," but says its just "not as good at driving pure ROI as
search, or at driving pure advertising impact as video or sponsorships
or other rich media." So, banner will lose, and search, video ads, and integrated sponsorships will win. Checkmate.

Mike Shields (Mediaweek): They're not impactful enough, and will be the first to go in this recession. "The greatest handicap of display
ads is their long-held reputation as bland," he writes. "Whether traditional
banner ads, skyscrapers or 350×200 rich media units, web ads are
eminently ignorable, and rarely move one to laugh or cry." (I'm crying just reading this.) Conclusion? Performance-based and direct-response are the hyphenated ads of the future.

Jaffer Ali (guest post on JackMyers.com): Reading this three-page post will change your reading glasses prescription by at least a .25, but do it anyway. He stands up for those noble concepts of Relationships and Creativity and says that we are going to far in letting technology (i.e., analytics) rule the day. "When the weight of our effort eschews creativity for algorithmic
reduction, we have indeed lost our center of gravity; our focus of
intent; our schwerpunkt." Now that's punk'd.

Quick, get your Facebook Fan Page up – Google is now going to show users' fan pages as part of their public listing, writes allfacebook. It's a passive form of endorsement, but endorsement nonetheless – so get as many (cool, important) people as you can to "fan" your page and you'll have instant positive brand association. (Note that Facebook "Groups" is something different altogether – read the explanation.)

But that's not what I came here to tell you about. I came to talk about ads on social networks.

Here's the thing: they're either the most awesomest thing EVA', but we can't tell, because tracking sucks and measurement firms like comScore can't figure out how to measure newly developed types of ads – Facebook's Engagement ads, for example.

OR   They really are no good. Well, good except for one thing: They're horrible.

Take this eMarketer data, for instance. Top 10 Online Display Advertising Publishers? Okay, Facebook is relatively new compared to the dinosaurs in the top 5, but still. One point one percent? (Yes I can call Google a dinosaur. It's enormous, scaly, and cold-blooded. Ohhh. Ouchie.)

So even though "display ads" are only counted if they follow IAB standards – which some social networking sites do not, clearly – we're not really sure how far we've come since this ad:tech panel discussion of yester-yesteryear.

Sure, spending is "exploding," with 2009 numbers expected to reach $1.81 billion and $2.5 billion by 2011, but blogs are still more influential on consumers, apparently. Viewers trust ads on blogs more than they do on social networks – and certainly more than sponsored search results, BuzzLogic found (via RetailerDaily).

Is this the voice of an impassioned leader of a multimillion dollar company?

"From founding this company to guiding its growth into a trusted global
brand that is indispensible to millions of people, I have always sought
to do what is best for our franchise."

Doesn't sound like it, does it. No, sounds more like the plead of someone on the chopping block trying to keep their head. It's Jerry Yang, NOW EX-CEO of Yahoo. His resignation is rocking the tech – and investor – world today, mostly because of the impact we see this having on Yahoo's future.

A lot of people blamed Yang for the slow sinking of the Yahoo ship in 2008 – particularly for refusing Microsoft's $33/share bid back in February. The slow sinking of share value down to today's paltry $12. Botched attempts to improve its search advertising platform so that it would at least make the company a competitor in the market. Then, the failed liaison with Google and weak call for a renegotiation with Microsoft.

The question is not "Why did this happen?" Many industry bloggers – including Arrington at TechCrunch – feel perfectly comfortable with blaming Yang for much of it. It's easy to see his lack of power, energy, motivation: "When the Board
asked me to become CEO and lead the transformation of the Company, I
did so because it was important to re-envision the business for a
different era to drive more effective growth." I'm sorry, but you don't take the job of CEO because you think you should, because someone asks you to. You do it because you're a fighter, because you have a vision for the company that you'll stop at nothing to achieve.

"Having set Yahoo! on a
new, more open path, the time is right for me to transition the CEO
role and our global talent to a new leader." Darn straight, buddy. (All except that first part.) Now the challenge – left up to executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles and Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock – will be to find a replacement. No, more than a "replacement" – a leader.

Some proposed names (via BusinessWeek):

• AOL CEO Jonathan Miller
• Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman
• former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig
• News Corp. COO Peter Chernin
• Google executives Tim Armstrong and Jonathan Rosenberg
• Former
  Efficient Frontier CEO (and former Yahoo exec) Ellen Siminoff and two
  new Yahoo board members who joined with Icahn
• Former Nextel CEO John
  Chapple and former Viacom CEO Frank Biondi
• And maybe, just maybe, former Microsoft executive Kevin Johnson

Note the lack of anyone internal, though President Sue Decker was suggested for some rather weak reasons: "She’s still well-liked by Wall Street for her ability to make effective
presentations on the company. And she knows her way around a board room." Uh, next!

Love it or hate it, email marketing is here to stay – even if people stop reading it.

Email open rates have been steadily falling, hitting 13.2% in the first half of 2008, compared with 16.1% in the
first half of 2007 and about 14% in the second half of the year. Click rates sunk to 2.73% from 3.18% in 1H07, according to a November study from MailerMailer (via eMarketer).

Banking/finance,
religious/spiritual, government, and telecommunications have more success than other verticals, according to the study. 

A tip to get a better open rate: Use a short subject header. A subject of less than 35 characters
yielded a higher average open rate (19.6%) and click rate (3.1%) vs. 14.8% and 1.9% for those with 35+ characters.

Still, marketers in all industries – particularly retail – tend to value email marketing over most channels in terms of driving the highest volume of sales, second only to paid search.

Okay, this is weird. Google is using its search keyword tracking technology to find out which regions of the US are hotspots for "flu activity."

From the The New York Times:

Tests
of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit,
suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a
week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Of course, the CSC doesn't agree, saying that they don't have any evidence that the system is more timely than the emergency room data of individual health departments.)

How do they do this? Well, say you're coming down with something, but you're not quite sure what it is. Are you likely to Google "flu symptoms" or something more specific like "muscle ache" or "congestion?" Yeah you are. What they do is figure out where the people who are typing in these terms are geographically located and voila: Flu tracking.

Here's an interesting marketing take on the tool, from Rich Godwin of Industry CPG West. "Consumer packaged goods brands that are helpful to someone suffering from the flu can geographically target to regions that are likely seeing a sharp rise in flu suffers." Bam.

Though the online ad market is still growing, with the IAB reporting the first half of '08 growing 15.2% over the same period last year, it's not growing in the "widely awesome" way that it did before, Adotas reports.

It's a good time to be a focused premium vertical ad network with a relatively variable cost structure and a reliable infrastructure that scales up or down, depending on how sales go every month. The overall climate will not likely cool off the launching of new networks, despite a more difficult fund-raising environment.

Yes, funding is limited, and layoffs are pending. Last week the Sequoia-backed AdBrite – in a move to make the ad network cash flow positive and profitable – laid off 40 employees (40% of its total staff) TechCrunch reported.

But wait, what's this here? Mobile ad network AdMob just nabbed $15.7 million in third round funding from – you guessed it – Sequoia's Capital Growth Fund (plus Accel Partners). The two-year old network served 4.5 billion ads across 6,000 mobile sites in November, writes MarketingVOX.

Apparently, it's all about your name. Next time you're thinking, hmm, what can I add on to the word "Ad" that will create a wildly successfull company? Pick abbreviation over trendy mispellings. You won't regret it.

You'd think that with retail sales plummeting and the Donnie Darko economy rearing its ugly head that the retail sector would be the first to embrace search engine marketing – outside of paid search, that is.

But according to a study by Conductor (which is, however, an SEM company, so take some salt) the vast majority of retailers and consumer facing brands in the Fortune 500 have little to non-existent visibility in natural search results for their most advertised keywords.

I did a little search for "smartphone" and found the only mention of a retailer, or manufacturer for that matter – outside of Shopping results – on the first page was from Microsoft Windows Mobile, and Palm. What is wrong with this picture? I know it's complicated, and it takes a little bit more time to get your product in natural search, but really kids – Microsoft? Palm?

A few more tidbits that Retailer Daily picked up from Internet Retailer's coverage:

• Within the retail category, accommodation and food service companies had the highest
  score; mining and oil exploration companies had the lowest score.
• Gap Inc., which focuses its paid search campaign fairly on about
  3,000 terms, was the highest scoring company. Office Depot, which bids
  on about 33,000 terms, trailed closely.
• Retailers generally bid on far more paid search keywords than other
  companies, averaging of 24,700 versus 5,100 for all companies in the
  study.
• A few online-only retail companies (e.g., Amazon, eBay) bid
  regularly on 250,000 to 750,000 terms.

Though the television networks were likely the main source of news about the election yesterday, some went to the internet to find the score: Below, the top 15 most searched terms at 2pm Central Time on Nov. 4 (via Mediapost):

1. exit polls 2008
2. black panthers
3. election results 2008
4. irina shayk
5. early voting exit polls
6. voting results
7. election update
8. who s winning the election
9. poll results
10. election polls
11. poll results obama vs mccain
12. election news
13. election returns
14. election coverage
15. chick fil a

Stretching out the data to encompass the three months leading up to Election Day, we can see that popular political personas were, as expected Obama, Palin, and McCain – in that order. Coming in at No. 4 and 6, however, were non-candidates but totally kickass people, Tina Fey and Chuck Norris. Respectively.

Among the top poltiical topics, according to Google: the presidential debate, Social Security, polls, voter registration, gas and oil prices, FDIC, electoral college, and – my favorite – "Socialism." What exactly are you saying, America?

As far as sources are concerned, we are still turning towards classics like Gallup, CNN Politics, Daily Kos, and the Drudge Report (No. 1). The Huffington Post came in second, Real Clear Politics fourth. Good ol' Rush Limbaugh is still on that list, curmudgeoning himself to the No. 6 spot. (I don't really know if it makes sense as a verb, but it sounds good, yah?)