Sarah Sikowitz

Last week, Tumblr decided to throw their hat in the ring and start selling ads on their platform. Perhaps because they’ve had a chance to observe Facebook as they have publicly iterated on the core value proposition of their advertising products, Tumblr has skipped those steps and come out with a very clear stance on what they’re selling and who can buy it.

Image via CNETAt fMC, Facebook launched new ad products that enabled marketers to easily port the content they were already publishing on Facebook into advertising units. Facebook had already been selling advertising for quite some time though. The announcements at fMC were an effort to align marketers with Facebook’s vision for their platform and encourage them to focus on the content they were creating for their fans first and foremost.

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This week, Facebook announced that its Sponsored Stories ad product will begin appearing in the news ticker on the homepage. Sponsored Stories debuted in January, allowing brands to leverage organic user activities (e.g. page Likes, page posts, apps used) as advertising within Facebook.  Sponsored Stories run in both premium ad placements and in Facebook’s self-service Marketplace. 

Integrating Sponsored Stories into the news ticker marks another move by Facebook to blur the lines between paid and earned media. These types of ad placements have proven successful for advertisers like 360i client USA Network, which has seen Sponsored Stories drive higher response rates at a lower CPC than other advertising efforts focused on engaging fans.  These results are not surprising, as adding the ‘personal’ element of a friend’s activity into an ad increases the likelihood of response.

Sponsored Stories running in the ticker will be priced and targeted the same way as Sponsored Stories running in Marketplace.  Advertisers will not be able to target Sponsored Stories to or exclude Sponsored Stories from the ticker.  For those buying Sponsored Stories on a CPC, the click is counted when the user clicks through to the brand content.  Facebook counts an impression when a Sponsored Story appears at the top of the ticker.  Sponsored Stories do not run lower in the ticker and impressions are only counted once – despite the fact that a user may see the Sponsored Story multiple times. 

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Image via TechCrunch

YouTube launched the TrueView ad format this week.  The product, which had previously been in beta, gives users the option to skip ads after five seconds.  Currently only available to advertisers with managed YouTube accounts, TrueView is not widespread across the site.  Advertisers can choose whether to activate the option — and they only pay for the impression if the user chooses not to skip the ad.

User control during TV or video viewing is nothing new.  Nielsen reports that over a third of US homes now have a DVR (source: Nielsen Three Screen Report, Q1 2010), up 51% from two years ago.  As online viewing becomes more commonplace, providers, like YouTube, may be seeking to replicate the experience that viewers are used to in their offline viewing.  Hulu, one of YouTube’s top competitors, offers viewers the opportunity to choose their ad delivery method – e.g. watch a longer advertisement at the start of the program in exchange for no ads throughout  or to pick the ad they view from a choice of three.  In September, Vivaki made public the ASq unit, which allows viewers to choose which ad to watch before their chosen piece of video content.  YouTube, along with Hulu, AOL and Yahoo! all signed up as partners.

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I took a trip to D.C. this past weekend and was looking for some ice cream in Dupont Circle. Instead of doing a mobile search on Google, I turned to ChaCha. Who’s ChaCha? No – it’s not my crazy aunt who lives in D.C. ChaCha is a human-powered mobile search service. Employing more than 55,000 human guides, ChaCha fields millions of questions each month. The service is built on the belief that phones are for conversations and that mobile search is no different.

The service is built on the belief that phones are for conversations and that mobile search is no different. People want questions answered and they turn to ChaCha to get a human answer — not one generated by a search engine. When a user texts a question, they get a text answer in response. Speed varies depending on the question. For instance, my ice cream question took a couple minutes. If I text, “What time is it in Tokyo?” the answer comes back a lot faster.

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