The most popular video site in the planet has just launched a new ad format, currently available in the U.K., France, Italy, Canada, Germany, Spain and The Netherlands– YouTube Promoted Videos. The new ad format allows for advertisers to choose, through the AdWords interface, a promoted video ad template so that when a YouTube viewer clicks on your promotion, they see your video. You only pay when people click to see your video – not when people see your promotion.

The YouTube Promoted Video ad option consists of a thumbnail on the left and three lines of text on the right. When a user clicks on a video ad, he/she will be taken to the YouTube page or channel with the video. Any user can promote ads on YouTube for just a few dollars a day, though most of the promotions on the site are run by larger organizations.

According to Nielsen, online video streaming is growing slowly but surely. This September, total video streams increased 24.8% compared to 11.2 billion streams in the same period last year. YouTube in particular leads over 50% of all video streams in the U.S., a total of 6.7 billion streams.

Just like sponsored links on Google, advertisers will be able to pay for their Promoted Video when users click on the ad. In addition, advertisers will also be able to add a ‘call-to-action’ clickable overlay on videos to engage people and drive them to their websites.

Watch the YouTube Promoted Video presentation:

Google, the online search giant, is trying to boost the appeal of its graphic ads and is enabling advertisers to better reach internet users in specific geographic areas at specific times, as well as, offer a new interface that’s simple to use.

This new integration is only coming about a year and a half after Google’s $3 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, the auctions site which connects web page owners with advertisers. Even though Google attracts more than 70% of  search ads  in the U.S. market, it still lags behind Yahoo and others in direct revenue from pictorial ads.

On one hand, this new alternative offers Google the opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell to its advertisers, while advertisers have a much better chance to effectively target their audience and precisely craft their advertising message seamlessly across the web. For web users, ads will be more engaging and load much faster.

Google says that in addition, ad space on Google’s third-party AdSense publisher sites, representing over 76% of U.S. online audiences and 73% of global online audiences (according to ComScore), is being made available through the new exchange.

The new exchange is designed for both ad networks and agency networks, which already includes over 40 ad networks across North America and Europe. Also, AdWords advertisers will be able to run ads on sites in the Ad Exchange, using their existing AdWords interface.

Google’s three main objectives for this integration are:

1. To simplify the system for buying and selling display ads

2. To deliver better performance that advertisers can measure

3. To open up the eco system for all users, publishers and advertisers to participate

Watch this video for more information on Google’s Display Advertising Graph:

Geico, LVMH…who’s up next?

Can we say Google is headed into dark waters? I guess we will only find out come June 4th.

After kicking some controversy in the US and Europe, Google has now decided to go global with an advertising strategy that, according to Business Week, will allow advertisers in about 200 countries to purchase rival trademarked keywords to trigger display of sponsored search ads on Google.

On one hand, trademark owners whose brands will be used as keywords will not be too happy with this new policy and will most likely sue the search giant..yeah, googd luck on that. Google’s spokesman Ben Novick has expressed that following a global legal review, [Google has] made the changes in countries whose legal and business practices are consistent with making the change, meaning-  it’s all 100% legit.

In continuation to my previous comment, such move from Google will mostly upset top tier brands who have been established in the market for years who will do anything to prevent any newcomer from piggy-backing on their brand name to send the message across to the consumer.

On the other hand, let’s be honest, if a consumer is looking for brand A and gets information on brand B, it doesn’t necessarily mean the consumer will change his mind about product A. Instead, the consumer will continue searching until he lands on product A’s website.

However, one downside to this new policy could be if the consumer is unsure or confused about his search and any tidy bit of stimulation will get him to switch products.

For example, if the consumer is looking for product A, but gets a discount ad regarding  product B, the outcome is quite obvious. Who doesn’t like discounts? But then again, this could be an easy way for consumers to run product comparisons to help them in their decision.  And is definitely one aspect marketers can take advantage of when working on their Adwords campaigns and deciding on the right message to consumers.

As a marketer, how are you preparing for this new policy? Do you think it’s fairplay? Share your thoughts with us!

No need to hire designers anymore, the new feature enables advertisers to create, design and customize display ads easily and eventually drive traffic into your site. Steps are as follows: select a template, customize the template and in theory, your ad is done and ready for display!

As explained on the Google blog, the ad builder tool allows for ad sizes to be scaled to fit any possible placement across the Google content network including video and in-game ad placement.

The video below shows you how to get started:

Four new features have been added since the launch of the Display Ad Builder thanks to user’s feedback–

The image picker allows you to choose from the selection of previously uploaded images. Real-time editing lets you see text as you’re writing it without having to hit the ‘update preview’ button. Another added feature is that of being able to see the available ad sizes your ad can run in without having to complete the whole ad creation process, which now has new templates to offer for customizing your ad.

Since last March, Google has been offering a new tool to reach the target advertisers want to: I am talking about Demographic Bidding. Thanks to this new feature (available only for content network and for placement-targeted campaigns) advertisers are able to reach a specific audience, based on age and/or gender.

For instance, if you would like to promote your brand new, trendy high-heels, you can target your ads to 18-24 year old women, excluding categories (like 55-64 year old men) or just increasing or decreasing your bid depending on a specific age and/or gender. In order to check if your targeting is doing well, Google offers demographic reports, available at AdWords Report Center.

Obviously this feature is active only on Google networks sites that make a demographic distinction between their users: sites or networks like MySpace or Orkut and many other sites.

If you’re planning the launch of a very specific product, strictly related to a determined gender or age range, you’d better think about AdWords Demographic Bidding, that could help you reach only your potential customers, and avoid spending money for “empty clicks”.

Online advertisers know how crucial the landing page is in order for a campaign to perform well: the landing page has to catch users attention through strong claims with the help of simple and incisive (clear and not confusing) design. But a good landing page cannot be just good looking: it should have some specific features, especially if you are going to run a campaign on Google AdWords. These features will determine the infamous Quality Score, the AdWords score that, assigned to a specific keyword used for a AdWords campaign, will contribute to set the actual keyword price.

Basically, as explained by Google itself, the Quality Score is influenced by several factors, like keyword’s click-through rate on Google, the relevance of the keyword to its ad group, the landing page quality, account’s historical performance, and other relevant factors. Among these relevant factors, lies Google’s recent feature, landing page load time, intended as the time needed by the landing page to load completely from the moment the ad is clicked on.

The reason behind this decision is driven by the use (often abuse) of redirects or interstitial pages implemented by advertisers: using these methods could be definitely useful for advertisers, but, at the same time, could sort bad effects for Internet surfers: never-ending loading time for landing pages, slow navigation or frustrating awaits in front of a blank screen.

So, starting in June, the landing page loading time will be influencing keywords Quality Score on AdWords. Google hopes that this decision could have concrete benefits for surfer’s online experience and for AdWords campaigns. As usual, Google is already helping advertisers know if its landing page loading time is good or not; this information is available on the keyword analysis page, as suggested by Google itself.

Obviously these are just suggestions: if you do not give a darn about it and you do not want to get rid of your 8 redirects on your AdWords campaign… OK, no problem! Just be ready to pay more for your ads to be displayed.

Google AdSense is probably one of the most revolutionary products in Big G’s history: together with AdWords, it is without a doubt one of the most important Google tools. While AdWords is the perfect technology for advertisers, AdSense is publisher oriented… and in this case we are talking about EVERY publisher. That’s the power of AdSense: its easily used by everyone.

AdSense was originally developed by Acquires Applied, a Santa Monica based company acquired in 2003 by Google. Soon after, Google rolled out AdSense, thus iniciating a new revolution in contextual advertising.

The mechanism behind AdSense is as simple as it is smart; every webmaster can use an advertising space for displaying Google ads (text ads, banners or video ads). The only requirement is inserting a javascript code into the site, choosing a media format for the ads to be displayed on and that’s it!

The webmaster will be paid for every click on the ads displayed: the publisher earns from clicks while the advertiser has the opportunity to find an appropriate space inside Google AdWords network.This network includes the content targeting network, where ads are automatically and contextually placed, and the placement targeting network, where an advertiser can choose the website where his ads are going to be displayed in.

Google’s Network reaches a vast audience, meaning that every advertiser should think about taking advantage of AdSense using the content network and the placement network offered by AdWords.

As for most of Google’s tools, AdSense’s success is also determined by its concept, since it’s easy to understand and easy to use by everyone: it is not necessary to be a geek. To implement AdSense into a website, a user should just sign up for a Google AdSense account and copy the few code lines provided by Google into the website itself. In few minutes everyone can be a publisher and can start to earn from website traffic.

In the future, things are going to be different. As in the US, UK advertisers will be allowed to bid on trademark terms, provided that they will not be authorized to use those keywords inside their AdWords text ads. This is a major change for the Google AdWords policy, maybe a signal of the will to extend the US trademark policy all over the whole geographical AdWords network.

Many advertisers will be delighted by Google’s decision, while others won’t. Actually this policy adjustment will underline an old issue about trademark policy; Is it fair that someone could use my brand to promote his? It seems that for Google it is, at least in the US and the UK.

Without a doubt the new trademark policy will increase the online advertising competition, offering everyone to bid on proprietary terms; meaning that not only Coca Cola will be allowed to use the keyword “coca cola”. On the other hand, is it really fair that an advertiser could capitalize on someone’s elses efforts, name, reputation, even taking the risk to tarnish the trademarked brand?

This issue it is not about the mere advertising market, but it is getting into legal and ethical topics; this means that an advertiser like 77 will be in charge of promoting its clients to their best, while at the same time, preserving client’s brand from being misused.

This could be a new Google advertising slogan: as you can see in the image below, the “Big G” is spreading out its new ad models with videos embedded directly into AdWords search results. Video ads are triggered by searches like “smartphone” or “Intel“.

Our opinion at 77, is that AdWords is becoming more “Ad” and less “Words” everyday. Google is expanding its advertising dimension, offering new possibilities for a publisher to express his creativity through different ways, in order to communicate a stronger “message”.

The introduction of videos inside the mechanism of AdWords could provide new solutions for those who need to reach a broader audience (the search audience) with a vivid message. Simultaneously, this is done with the well-known simplicity of Google tools, efficient, as well as unobtrusive.

77 will get this new advertising opportunity to help its clients reach their goals, knowing how relevant it could be- for an advertising campaign – to be able to express a winning message using a strong medium.

Here’s an example about Walmart search result.

From 77 point of view, the most interesting thing about this new feature is that every search performed from the search-in-search box could return an AdWords text ad, giving the chance to a user to get what he was looking for not in the site he was searching about, but directly from the ads Google is showing through AdWords.

Even though some of these new features could cause some complaints about the opportunity given to a surfer to leave a site for a competitor’s offer, Google is pushing online search beyond its limit, offering another instrument not only to reach easier what we are searching for, but for establishing a new relationship between a specific site and the ads that could be related to the search-in-search processed from the search box of that site.

Here at 77 we reckon that, thanks to the search-in-search option, users will be less induced to click any result, spending more time on Google search result page, so that AdWords ads will have more opportunity to get surfers attention, noticeably emphasizing our effort in order to acquire potential customers or in building a stronger brand awareness.