marketing and advertising

Two days after Google flub, Unruly raises $25 million

Unruly Media, a video-promotion start-up that just botched a Google Chrome ad campaign, has raised $25 million in first-round funding.

Among investors in the London-based company are Amadeus Capital Partners, Van den Ende & Deitmers, and the British Growth Fund. The money will be used "to accelerate international growth and cement Unruly's position as the global leader in this fast-growing area," the company said today.

Unruly helps its clients promote video advertisements that, if all goes according to plan, spread virally. Among those it's been involved in are Evian's roller babies and Old Spice's "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" … Read more

What hump? Personal's private database faces challenges

We're all drowning in our own data. There are countless things we need to remember or have easy access to, and these little factlets are never where we want them. That's why we have list managers, grocery list apps, and general-purpose synchronized notebooks.

And now there's Personal, which has a new Android app (iPhone version to follow). Personal is an online data storage system for the little dregs of data that you accumulate: Your spouse's shoe size. The alarm code for your house. You kid's best friend's food allergies. Your passport number.

The idea … Read more

Parsing Facebook's new lexicon (Q&A)

Facebook is expanding its vocabulary.

Recently at f8, Facebook's developer conference, the company introduced a series of action verbs into its social platform. "Read," "Watch," and "Listen," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained, were added to help build a "language for how people connect."

The one missing word, of course, was "Buy." That's really why Facebook and its army of content partners from news, publishing, music, and film and TV are rushing to set up shop on the famous platform with 750 million users. The overriding idea is that … Read more

FliteHub at crux of programmable cloud, advertising

This week, cloud-based advertising company Flite will be launching FliteHub, an ad component marketplace allowing brands and agencies to include applications directly in advertisements.

According to Flite CEO Will Price, advertisers can use FliteHub to "program" their ads via application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable deeper integration and dynamic updates based on metrics, location, or other criteria. For example, if a movie studio wants to push an ad that includes showtimes, theater information, and ticket purchasing, it can easily adjust it to better target customers in real time.

Display advertising remains one of most profitable Internet businesses, with … Read more

Intuitive SEO tool

Keyword Expert is a versatile research tool that allows users to choose and implement the right keywords for search engine optimization. The program's intuitive interface and multiple features make it both easy to use and effective.

The program's interface is sleek and well-organized, with its major features organized in five separate, intuitive screens. The built-in Help file is not going to explain the SEO process to a complete beginner, but it does give a good overview of how the program works and is illustrated with helpful screenshots. The program brings together five different SEO utilities, all of which … Read more

Toilet paper blogger stunt should get flushed

Look what just landed in the department of bad social media campaigns! Toilet paper brand Charmin has put out a casting call for five bloggers who will spend five weeks working as "Charmin Ambassadors" in a pop-up bathroom in New York's Times Square.

I'm going to say it right now: The Procter & Gamble-owned brand has creeped me out for a while with those commercials that feature cartoon bears gallivanting in a forest with rolls of soft and fluffy toilet paper and then sneaking behind trees to do their business. I don't want to think … Read more

Can the Twitterati help sell your soda pop?

NEW YORK--On a Monday night earlier this month, the projection screen hanging on the wall of a bowling alley in Brooklyn's bar-heavy Williamsburg neighborhood was displaying neither strikes nor scores, but columns of the Twitter client TweetDeck.

More specifically, they were streams of Twitter search queries for a number of terms that would make little sense without context, like replies to the account @mtn_dew and occurrences of the hashtag #newdietdew. That's because PepsiCo, parent company of the Mountain Dew soda brand, had rented out the bowling alley to throw a "taste test" party for its new &… Read more

Twitter may charge companies that 'tweet'

Update at 4:30 p.m. PST with an excerpt from Twitter's afternoon blog posting clarifying that it doesn't plan to charge for "existing services."

It seems that Twitter may have figured out a way to make money.

Biz Stone, co-founder of the microblogging site, told Marketing magazine that his company is considering charging companies that use the service to market their brands.

"We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them," Stone said. "We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts." … Read more

Marketing: Social media's hidden bubble

As the recession rapidly sucks the momentum out of Web 2.0's heyday, with it may go one of the era's most defining terms: the job title "social media expert."

For the past few years, people who identify with that title--as well as social media consultants, social media strategists, and social media marketers, depending on what they want to call it--have been unavoidable in the Web 2.0 social scene. You'd meet them at the endless litany of industry cocktail parties, at Tech Meetup events on both coasts, and at the likes of the Web … Read more