Microsoft Digital Advertising Lab Public Launch
I just came back from our local recycling dump after dropping off thousands of Tech and Developer magazines, most of them I never read, but that's OK because the subscription is FREE. They all have the same ads, you've all seen them and each publisher counts me as a valuable subscriber and charges Microsoft, Sun, IBM and Intel a premium price to reach an influential technology professional like ME!
I've had to fight with our local newspaper because we didn't want to receive the Sunday edition as we already get the Sunday NYTimes. They sent it to us anyway for FREE, but I have to recycle the paper and it's heavy. Yet they still count me as a loyal customer and they are charging their advertisers according.
adCenterBlog
For too long websites have been making exaggerated claims about page views without ever admitting most of them were by 14 to 16 year old males. So for all the PR slimes who claim to be in Marketing but never mention the science of demographics here's a tool that may teach your clients something:
Demographics Prediction tool.
Digital advertising is going to be huge, it's big already....but it's just beginning. Soon we will be seeing contextual ads everywhere. You may have noticed my pioneering effort at placing contextual ads in each blog post I publish. My blog gets syndicated by more websites then I can count, but they never ask me permission or acknowledge what they do....they just take my feed and slap ads by Gooooooooooooogle on the side.
Most bloggers get mad when their feed is republished, but I used to work in Radio and see this as a way of boosting my siginal - my voice ....and when people click on the links at the end of this post my ROI increases exponentially.
Microsoft's Digital Advertising Lab is a tool that will help us learn more about our audience as we tailer our message accordingly in this brave new world of internet communications.