The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) asks the question — and offers a potentially fiery debate — at its upcoming World Newspaper Congress in Hyderabad India (December 1-3).

Should we, asks WAN:

Applaud our gains in web site traffic? Develop closer partnerships with Google and their competitors? Launch our own search engines and collective news portals? Lobby to change or enforce copyright laws online? Sue – or encourage anti-trust cases? What DO we do about Google?

The Great Debate at the 62nd World Newspaper Congress will examine these and other such questions as news publishers world-wide examine and discuss their options and strategies for getting a bigger slice of the internet advertising revenues which are today being massively reaped by Google.

FOR GOOGLE:

David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Council of Google, will be on stage to give the search giant’s perspectives.

Mr Drummond leads Google’s global teams for legal, government relations, corporate development and new business development, including strategic partnerships. Before joining Google in 2002, he served as its first outside counsel and worked with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to incorporate the company and secure its initial round of financing.

FOR THE NEWSPAPERS:

Gavin O’Reilly, CEO of Independent News & Media and President of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), will debate on behalf of the newspaper iindustry.

Gavin O’Reilly was probably the first major news industry personality to publicly criticise Google, when he called them `kleptomaniacs’ in a 2006 speech where he said they were “increasingly aiming their strategic efforts at traditional content originators and aggregators like newspaper publishers. The irony is that these search engines exist, largely, because of the traditional news and content aggregators and profit at their expense’’.

ON THE SIDELINE, HECKLING:

Since then, others have joined in the chorus of opposition, most notably Rupert Murdoch, who said last month: “The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. If we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators Š who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.’’ Mr Murdoch just this week threatened to block Google News from taking any content from News Corp web sites.

AND THEN THERE’S US:

Marketers everywhere would love to see a Win-Win resolution. None of us will benefit if newspapers fall over. But we’ll also be the poorer if the internet devolves into a collection of islands hidden behind paywalls.

There are no easy answers. But we look forward to the Debate and its outcome.

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Yay! We just received our invitation to Google Wave and have (of course) activated it.

HOT OFFER! We now have 20 [UPDATED: NOW 16 9 DOWN TO OUR LAST 3! ALL GONE, SORRY] Google Wave nominations to share, so we’ll invite (FREE) that number of new subscribers to our Marketing Rag newsletter. If you want to be a Google Wave early adopter, subscribe today.

So what exactly is Google Wave?

If you’re like most people, you may not know much about Google Wave. The video below (clocking in at 1 hour 20 minutes) is from the launch of the product back in May. It’s a very comprehensive overview (if you can spare the time and have a real interest in a new product offering that has real game-changing potential).

We’ll be talking about the marketing implications of Google Wave in our next newsletter. We think it’s a must-read.

GOOGLE WAVE APPS FOR THE IPHONE

It was always inevitable that the hottest technologies on the planet would converge. We just weren’t expecting it quite so soon.

The UK’s Revolution Magazine tells us that the race is on to be the first Google Wave app approved for the iPhone, with at least two contenders currently being reviewed by the Apple AppStore.

One of them, Waveboard, serves as client software for Google Wave for both Mac OS X 10.5+ and iPhone OS 3.0+; the Mac version is already operational.

Here’s a (rather basic) video demonstrating Waveboard functionality:

The other potential candidate is an Adobe AIR application called Waver, which has been developed as “your tiny Google Wave client”.

Google Wave is going to be big. Better learn about it as soon as you can.

PS One way to do so is by signing up for our newsletter (and if you’re one of the first few to sign up while this offer is still valid you’ll receive a free invitation as well).

PPS We’ll update this blog entry as the numbers decrease. Of course, if this was posted via Google Wave, you’d see the numbers dropping, in real time. Anyway, more on that in the newsletter.

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Being only slightly tech-obsessed (though our wives might agree to differ), we haven’t paid too much attention so far to Google’s Android mobile phone offering. To be honest, we hadn’t even felt compelled to invest in the ubiquitous iPhone. Our excuse: a stated preference for style over substance. Actually, we probably weren’t cool enough.

Anyway now, courtesy AdMob, we’ve come across some fascinating/frightening statistics that suggest:

1. Android is becoming a serious contender
2. Smartphones are taking off faster than earlier data had led us to believe
3. Mobile apps are ‘the next big thing’ on the very small screen

First, take a look at this chart, comparing mobile data usage worldwide for the various operating systems.

Clearly Android has a long way to go to pick off Apple — but look at the tripling in Android’s worldwide operating system usage in just six months.

Secondly, some mobile application download numbers from a month earlier:

AdMob surveyed over 1,000 iPhone, iPod touch and Android users to find out more about their interaction and download behavior with apps.  Some highlights:

• Android and iPhone users download approximately 10 new apps a month, while iPod touch owners download an average of 18 per month
• More than 90 percent of Android and iPhone OS users browse and search for apps directly on their mobile device instead of their computer
• Upgrading from the lite version was the top reason given when users were asked what drives them to purchase a paid app
• iPhone and iPod touch users are twice as likely to purchase paid apps than Android users.
• Users who regularly download paid apps spend approximately $9 on an average of five paid downloads per month

In a separate post at BrandRepublic, AdMob’s Russell Buckley notes that:

We serve about 10 billion ads every month to mobile web publishers and app developers globally. This means that we can’t measure market share, but we can track handsets that are used more than they should be, to view mobile web pages and download and use apps.  We noticed very early on that iPhone was getting a disproportionate amount of share when measured like this and history is being repeated with Android.

What’s also great for mobile advertisers is that Android and iPhone both offer much more creative advertising formats and that their ease of use generally mean more interaction and higher click-through-rates. Consumers are engaging with marketers via the mobile channel in very large numbers and that trend is going to speed up with more Android handsets in the market.

Even allowing for the fact that Russell is in the mobile marketing business, the enthusiasm is contagious.

Which leads us to ask the question: how prepared are you for mobile marketing? [Forecaster/analyst Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley has already outed the Mobile Internet as one of The Big Trends of the next twelve months!]

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Has geekdom come down to this — that we’re defined (or demeaned) by the presence or absence of an invite to participate in a software release?

Thus has it always been with Google.

Were you one of The Chosen Ones who received an early GMail invitation? No? Allow us to sneer, from our privileged position as one of those special GMailites (or cringe in shame when we reveal we were also amongst the unworthy back in the day).

Now it’s all happening again.

From a marketing perspective, we note, with a tiny gleam in our eyes, that consumers are frantically tweeting up favors, burning off their friends, in a desperate effort to receive a Google Wave invite. The going rate on eBay, as the Early Adopted cash in on their Most-Favored-By-Google status, seems to be around $80 to $100. And still the demand persists. With not an ad campaign in sight.

Meanwhile, Microsoft encourages its employees to invite their friends home to share the delights of Windows 7. With, it must be admitted, a bit of resistance and a certain amount of criticism along the way.

Guess it’s all in the brand image.

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Reuters is reporting that “Google Inc is partnering with major music labels to launch a new feature to make it easier to discover, sample and buy songs on the search engine”.

The notion, according to the usual suspects “people familiar with the plan”, is that under this new scheme music will be streamed directly onto Google pages.

Of particular concern is the proposal that alongside the songs you’ll find a handy “buy” button, taking you to “a variety of different sites, including Amazon.com and Apple Inc’s iTunes Music Store”. This will, Reuters reports, “help reduce the number of steps fans need to purchase their favorite songs or albums.”

It’ll also potentially reduce the revenues of music resellers other than the favored few in partnership with Google.

We don’t want to be alarmist, but what happens next if this new “buy” feature turns out to be highly profitable for Google and its preferred partners?

Will we see a hazardous new direction for Google, where the corporate titan turns its search pages into ecommerce BUY NOW displays, in direct competition with advertisers and with anyone else who allows/encourages Google to index their site?

It’s not difficult to imagine a scenario where a search on Google (the sherlock of choice for most of us) for, say, “PlayStation 4″ delivers a prominently displayed “Buy” button in conjunction with Wal-Mart or Best Buys, leaving other consumer electronics outlets competing for the crumbs on pages 2 through infinity.

We’ve already heard, via the Frankfurt Book Fair, that Google is gearing up to launch its own online bookstore, “Editions”. Once that facility is up and running, Google’s shareholders would have every reason to expect that any book title available for sale via Editions would be prominently displayed (perhaps with that dreaded “Buy” button) in response to relevant Google searches. That’s hardly going to endear the Googleplex to Amazon, Barnes & Noble or about a trillion other booksellers around the world.

We could even see a whole new tier of Google advertisers/partners emerge — those who are willing to bid for access to the Buy button for their choice of keywords. It would certainly make a rich new revenue stream for Google (whilst somewhat devaluing AdWords as an advertising currency).

We are heartened by the Google corporate mantra, “do no evil”. But we also remember the words of Google co-founder Larry Page: “The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.”

That could mean giving a big fat BUY button to those consumers who can articulate exactly what they want (by brand name, rank and serial number).

Should we be afraid?

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It was the talk of the town: in late February, ToysRUs bought Toys.com at auction for $5.1 million. Most bidders dropped out of the auction at $3 million, leaving ToysRUs and domain holding company National A-1 to battle it out for hours until one emerged victorious.

In the words of the Washington Post, “ToysRUs really didn’t have much choice. If it wants to be the first thing people associate with toys it really couldn’t afford to allow anyone else to own that domain, even in this economy.”

As a result of their $5.1 million investment, ToysRUs could be found at spots #1, #2 and #4 on Google (if you searched for the keyword TOYS).

A mere three weeks later, that’s no longer the case (clearly $5.1 million doesn’t last as long as it once did).

DomainNameWire is reporting (and a Google.com search for TOYS confirms) that Toys.com has been de-indexed by Google.

Why? What heinous crime did ToysRUs commit?

Simple — and sad really. Type in Toys.com and you’ll be forwarded to ToysRUs.com.

Makes perfect sense from a traditional marketing perspective: “they’re looking for toys, we’ll take them straight to us.”

Unfortunately, direct forwarding is a No No in the land of the search engines. Google and its cousins are looking to deliver search results that meet their customers’ needs — and that means site content that’s of significant merit, not merely acting as a pointer to another site.

As DomainNameWire noted, “the value of Toys ‘R’ Us’ $5.1M purchase of Toys.com has [now] been relegated to type-in traffic and potentially some of the inbound links to Toys.com.” That’s probably not exactly what the ToysRUs execs who okayed the $5.1 million bid had in mind.

Still, we probably shouldn’t be too surprised. Big companies, it turns out, aren’t too good at this Search Engine Optimisation stuff. In fact, the most recent study of the search skills of the Fortune 500 (”Natural Search Trends of the Fortune 500“, Q4 2008) by Conductor Inc. revealed that the 500 spend ten times as much every day as ToysRUs spent on its Toys.com acquisition — and with similar results.

The research reveals that:

• In Q4 2008 the Fortune 500 as a group spent approximately $51 million / day on 88,792 keywords – yet only 20.82% of these keywords rank in the top 100 natural search results.
• Only 1.41% of the domains (not companies) surveyed showed significant number of their terms in the top results. All of these positive domain scores were offset by other owned domains with significant visibility issues.
• 46.76% of Fortune 500 companies have very low or non-existent visibility for their most advertised keywords.

Not so good. Clearly a little more education is required on the subject of “Ye Ancient And Honorable Art Of The Search Engine”.

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According to AdAge.com, Google is turning to Behavioral Targeting to beef up its display advertising business.

Here’s the scoop:

[On March 11 Google] announced it will launch a beta test of “interest-based targeting,” which lets advertisers target web users based on where they’ve been surfing across the internet. If a user is reading sports articles on NYTimes.com and also visiting CBSSports.com, for example, it could get lumped into a sports audience bucket, which advertisers can target.

Google will also let advertisers “re-market” web users across its content network, so if a person visits an advertiser’s site or abandons some products in an online shopping cart, that advertiser can find that consumer again on the web and serve him or her ads. In its beta version the targeting measures will be sold through Google’s direct-sales team, with a select group of advertisers taking part; later it will be available in the self-serve AdSense auction marketplace. The targeted ads, which can be either text or display, will run on AdSense partner sites and YouTube.com.

AdAge goes on to note that this is ”the first big sign Google is integrating into its large AdSense network some of the technologies it picked up with its acquisition of [advertising network provider] DoubleClick.”

Unfortunately, it’s also the time that, as reported by MediaPost, consumers remain concerned about online privacy issues. According to MediaPost’s Behavioral Insider newsletter:

Publishers and advertisers by now have internally devoted enormous investments in money, time and intellectual capital to behavioral targeting platforms. Yet when it comes to consumers themselves, most brands still like to pretend that behavioral targeting doesn’t exist, treating it like a secret vice to be locked away, hidden from the public that simply “can’t handle the truth.”

A recent study by Trust(e), an independent nonprofit online privacy advocacy organization, documents why that is precisely the wrong message for brands to be communicating.

The Trust(e) Behavioral Advertising Survey, conducted by TNS, surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,008 individuals aged 18 and over on their attitudes about behavioral targeting. The survey found that, although consumers remain suspicious of and conflicted toward behavioral targeting, an increasing percentage of the online public are growing somewhat less uncomfortable about behavioral targeting, if (and it clearly remains a BIG if) brands radically step up their efforts to be more open, honest and transparent about where, when and how behavioral targeting is used.

Contrary to the assumption of some in the industry, behavioral targeting as a term is no longer esoteric. In fact, according to the survey, 43.2% of respondents said they’re familiar with the term, and 68.6% knew that their browsing information may be collected by a third party for advertising purposes. Over a third, 34.9%, felt their privacy has been invaded or violated in the last year due to information they provided on the Internet.

The survey found that consumers were not only very sensitive to any perceived intrusions into privacy, but also acted on that feeling by managing their privacy through activities like deleting cookies. Over 36% of respondents said they do at least one of the following in order to surf the Internet anonymously: use proxy surfing software; give fake names and contact info when requested by certain Web sites; and use a Web browser with privacy settings that delete cookies and don’t record a history of visited sites.

Here’s a sneak peek at a little of what our own Marketing Rag has to say about behavioral targeting:

“It creeps consumers out to think they’re being watched. George Orwell did such a great job of introducing the concept of Big Brother in ‘1984′ so now people worry about the misuse of their personal, private data for nefarious purposes. Thankfully, most marketers really only want to know what consumers are up to so that they can sell stuff. Behavioral targeting enables marketers like us to promote products that we’ve learned are likely to be of interest to specific segments, rather than try to flog everything to everyone. We’re so over one-size-fits-all. For those consumers who (for example) don’t have pets, they would find it a great pleasure and a very useful side-effect of behavioral targeting NOT to be shown petfood ads.

“To send consumers the right messages, we marketers need to:

• acknowledge that, thanks to modern technologies, we’re better able to understand consumers’ needs and wants without having to constantly ask about them;
• propose that, as a result, we can offer products and services that are more likely to be relevant and of interest to individual consumers;
• enter into dialog with consumers to refine and personalize those offerings even further.

“The other main challenge for marketers, when considering Behavioral or Interest-Based Targeting, is to ensure we have a really good understanding of the processes by which consumers have been sliced and diced by the publishers — in other words, how they have been evaluated and clustered into segments deemed suitably alike (and presumed to be potential targets).  If we use Google’s ’sports audience bucket’ as an example, are those within the bucket any more or less likely to be potential purchasers of our products? How will we know? Holy segmentation Batman, this sounds like a job for split-run testing!!

“There’s another issue to consider as well. If all the hottest prospects have been identified behaviorally and sold off in segments to interested marketers, at what point do we rule out advertising to the rest, because they are (by exclusion) NOT hot prospects?”

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