Google has now launched its Internet / television hybrid service using Sony and Logitech technology, enabling customers to combine Internet use with watching TV.

The new televisions will provide a Google-style search box enabling users to navigate between TV programmes, movies, websites and applications.  If it catches on this could ultimately lead to Google’s domination of television – currently the main competition for online media.

Google is also working closely Adobe and Intel to provide the technology which will underpin launch the service.  It is inviting Internet and Android applications developers to begin developing applications specifically for combined Internet and Television.

Google product manager Rishi Chandra said Google TV will provide instant access to YouTube, Netflix and other online video services, plus photo sites like Flickr, Panoramia, and the rest of the Internet and claimed his employers had developed the most comprehensive, most personalised entertainment experience on the planet.

The products aren’t available just yet though.  The first sets featuring the technology will be available in the United States during the Autumn of 2010.

This follows Yahoo!’s announcement of its own web-enabled TV service in January last year which is believed to have been built into three million televisions 3m TVs worldwide and is distributed via partners including HiSense, LG, Samsung, Sony and Vizio.

This technology could ultimately make it the norm to use social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Ning and others through your television – so you can laugh with your friends at the latest Britain’s Got Talent entrants, without even reaching for your iPhone.

Such a development would re-establish the television as the World’s most important advertising medium, while extending Google’s stranglehold on the global advertising market.

AdStorm Advertising Agency

The 4.6% growth covers Pay Per Click advertising, Banner Advertising and Online Classified advertising but is set against a backdrop of a 17% drop in overall advertising.

According to Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the IAB, the recession has led advertisers to look for certainty, accelerating the move in favour of Internet advertising, in turn causing the Internet to overtake TV around 6 months sooner than previously expected.

The greater measurability of Internet advertising, more individual targeting, and greater divisibility of ad impressions has made it easier for small advertisers to enter the advertising market online than with other media.  Consequently, the more targeted of the conventional ad sectors were hit the hardest with print media such as classified ads, printed directories and printed display ads suffering falls between 20 and 35%.

However these figures conceal the fact that print advertising is still the largest sector with around 29% market share.   Classified and display advertising are counted separately in the figures – unlike online, where classified advertising and display advertising are all chunked together.

The next big question is – when will mobile devices outstrip pc’s?  We are seeing significant growth rates in mobile device traffic to all the websites we manage – which will presumably be reflected in future advertising trends.

Yahoo! has today announced a major advertising campaign to coincide with the launch of its redesigned home page.  According to Yahoo!’s executive VP and chief marketing officer, Elisa Steele, Yahoo! wants to be the place there an individual’s world meets the larger World.  But Yahoo!’s vision of providing an all-encompassing  wide range of interactive content has already been superceded by rivals Google and Facebook, Twitter and a range of emerging sites.

In theory Yahoo! is the most popular website in The World, but this does not seem to be reflected on the ground.  Does anybody in the UK actually use Yahoo!?  We manage Pay Per Click Advertising on Google, Yahoo! and Facebook among others and the volume of traffic available – and, in our judgement the quality – is way lower on Yahoo! than on Google.  The only saving grace is that the volume of traffic is so low that many advertisers overlook Yahoo! altogether, reducing the competition for keywords. 

In a key move, Yahoo! has now opened up its home page to rivals like Facebook and Hotmail – essentially admitting that these third party offerings for social media are in more demand than its own.  This may yet bring a strategic advantage over Google, which allows users to customize their iGoogle home page but doesn’t provide any external links on the core home page until they are searched for.

We tried the service for one of our customers and sure enough, within a few weeks of our order, those little text ads started appearing on forums all over the place, advertising our customers’ service to the users of all of the forums.

We used to participate manually in forums for our customers as a way of advertising and attracting web traffic for them, but this may well become a more efficient way for us to do it.

I think they place about 3 links per forum, and packages start at around 100 forums.  Prices are currently $1.40 per text ad.  These are permanent links, so when you compare to Google AdWords, where your ad is only displayed once and you can pay well over that per single click, it certainly appears to be good value.

This follows the prior introduction by the UK government of a ban on gambling websites from outside of the European Economic Area advertising to Internet users in the UK.

Google AdWords ads will not however be displayed to Internet surfers in Northern Ireland who will have to search further on the Internet, or enter mis-spellings, in order to seek out opportunities to fritter away their money.  Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK not included in Google’s recent change in online advertising policy.

However you may have noticed a problem with the site.  On a search for “Advertising Agency”, which on Google, Yahoo anad MSN will usually show an advertisement for AdStorm, the Lichfield-based advertising agency.  Except on the Cuil search engine you will see the AdStorm logo, alongside an advertisement for a completely different and unrelated advertising agency.  See the attached image.  Apparently this is a problem across the entire search engine, and not just on “advertising agency” searches.

I have seen written that Cuil is displaying the wrong images.  I beg to differ.  In this case they are publishing the right image and the wrong listing!

The gloves have been off for some time now in the contest to own the ability to bombard consumers with information, and ultimately to exercise some control over their minds and therefore their behaviour.   To this end, Microsoft is flexing its financial muscles, having recently acquired rights to third party advertising on Facebook and also recently signing a deal to manage advertising on the Wall Street Journal.

The question now, is how important will online marketing ultimately be?  Is Yahoo! really worth nearly half of the value of News Corporation, the biggest media company in the World?

Media Buying - from Wagdog Promotions.