Andrew Frank

Apple’s recent patent application to incorporate advertising into an OS as a potential subsidy is creating quite a stir:

“Apple Prepares to Rock the Market with Hardware Subsidizing Program”
“Apple applies for patent on OS with embedded advertising”
“Apple Patents Ad-Supported, Subsidized Mac OS”
“Gimme a minute — just two more ads before it lets me use the Finder [...]

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I want to thank all of the social media monitoring and analytics vendors who responded to last week’s challenge.
First, the highlights.
This year’s challenge listed 61 company names, of which 15 responded, a nearly 25% response rate.  An additional 4 who were not mentioned also responded. Last year, 34 company names were listed, of which [...]

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About a year ago I issued a challenge to the social media monitoring and analysis vendor community to determine which of these vendors “ate their own dogfood.” In other words, who was able, using their own product, to spot mention of their own brand names in the blogosphere and rapidly reply. The results were impressive: [...]

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FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s announcement of the Commission’s intention to formalize and implement net neutrality regulations has elicited all of the predictable responses, from free-market political and telecom industry opposition to applause from advocacy groups and companies like Skype. (The cable industry alone straddled the fence and offered lukewarm support while warning against excessive regulation: [...]

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For a long time, web publishers and advertisers have been caught in the crossfire between web analytics and media metrics vendors producing starkly different numbers for their sites. Now, by joining forces, ComScore and Omniture have potentially eliminated this maddening issue…at least for their common customers. (To be precise, Omniture customers can opt-in to see [...]

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Google’s long-awaited relaunch of DoubleClick’s Ad Exchange (see Official Google blog) marks its most visible attempt to-date to leverage its DoubleClick acquisition to take it out of its lucrative search niche and into the sketchy world of display. (More on the DoubleClick blog, The New York Times and paidContent.)
Launched just before the Google acquisition, DoubleClick’s [...]

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“I warn you against believing that advertising is science.” So said Bill Bernbach, one of advertising’s great legends who holds the number one rank in Advertising Age’s honor roll of most influential people. So what would Bill Bernbach think of Adobe’s idea, as expressed in its $1.8B acquisition of Omniture, that analytics (e.g., SiteCatalyst) can [...]

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July 29, NYC: The author discusses Microsoft/Yahoo! deal on Bloomberg TV
 
After walking halfway down the aisle with Google in 2008 in a proposed (and then scrapped) search-advertising pact, Yahoo! has inked a 10 year deal in which Microsoft will power Yahoo! search and sell self-service keywords through AdCenter while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide [...]

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It’s safe to say that, of all the disruptive technologies to assault the media industry lately, DVR-enabled ad-skipping is one of the most potentially destructive. There are plenty of debates about how rapid or pervasive the problem is, but it’s clearly eating away at the staple of the TV business, the 30-second spot.
The reason the [...]

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The race to claim the future of television continued to play out at the National Association of Broadcasters annual event in Las Vegas.

This year much of the focus moved upstream, away from last-mile issues and toward services for content providers looking to simplify management multiplatform distribution, as many vendors focused on cloud service solutions [...]

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