Andrew Frank

On July 29, 2009, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced that “Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.” They also announced that “Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction [...]

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It must be a slow news day because I’ve received an inordinate number of calls about Google’s purchase of video compression provider On2 Technologies for about $106.5M, a relatively small sum in the heady world of Internet valuations, for a company that’s been steadily losing money on less than $20M in annual revenue. But the [...]

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Two web traffic quality monitoring firms, Anchor Intelligence and  Click Forensics, released click fraud reports yesterday and the results were pretty shocking: according to Anchor’s Traffic Quality Report, in Q2 2009 the incidence of attempted click fraud rose from 21.7% to 22.9% of all clicks. When you include “innocuous invalid” clicks – that is, clicks [...]

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The past few weeks have revealed a sharp acceleration in the disruption of the TV business by new technology. Forces set into motion will play out over the next six months with far-reaching consequences for the medium that, more than any other, has shaped our culture for the last half century.
So far the Internet has [...]

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The Green Room was closed for renovations, so I waited in a make-shift area outside the control room of the Fox Business News studio in New York while Dave Asman went one-on-one with Monica Crowley over the latest outrages issuing from the White House. Fox Tonight had invited me, about an hour earlier, to come [...]

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May 21, 2009, NYC – Bluewolf, a SaaS-oriented consultancy with a specialty in helping media companies, hosted an event at the Bryant Park Screening Room yesterday evening. With no free WiFi or 3G penetration in the room, the two-hour session held the attention of its audience, which consisted mostly of media company IT and business [...]

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Google’s 1Q09 earnings presentation left little doubt about where the company’s headed for the next year or so, and it’s in the direction of optimizing its role as the world’s most efficient marketing and sales channel. Google executives repeated the mantra that a key reason Google was able to outperform most advertising-supported businesses was that [...]

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While much of the punditry surrounding Tim Armstrong’s appointment to the CEO post at AOL has focused on what it might mean for the beleaguered Time Warner unit, at least as big a question is what it means for Google. Tim Armstrong was Google’s main link with the advertising world, a Madison Ave guy in [...]

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The tension and speculation over Google’s anticipated entry into the hazardous world of behavioral targeting has been growing since its acquisition of DoubleClick, much of whose value lies in its visibility of consumer activity across a vast array of websites. Now, the curtain has been lifted, in characteristic Google style, in a blog post not-so-subtly [...]

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Folks, it’s been over five weeks since I lambasted the big Superbowl ad spenders at companies like – oh, let’s see, what was the name of that advertiser’s brand? Oh, yeah, – E*Trade, for failing (or letting its agency fail) to support its very clever, and very costly, Golf Baby commercial with even a single [...]

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