AOL Europe Targets Google for Advertising
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AOL (NYSE: AOL) Europe broadened its partnership with Google, announcing a multiyear agreement under which Google will provide outsourced targeted advertising services in addition to its search-engine offerings.
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Google Inc expanded its widely  used AdSense online advertising service on Monday to allow  affiliated Web site publishers to target ads at Internet users  on cellphones as well as computers.
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(InfoWorld) - A European consumer group has complained that Google's proposed acquisition of online ad broker DoubleClick could hurt privacy rights due to the massive amount of data the companies would hold. In a letter, the Bureau EuropÃ©en des Unions de Consommateurs (BEUC) has asked the European Commission and other authorities to investigate how the deal would affect consumers. Google, whichÂ bought DoubleClickÂ in April for $3.1 billion, refuted the assertion that the deal will harm privacy. "Not surprisingly, we don't agree," said Rachel Whetstone, Google's director of European corporate communications, on Thursday. The company thinks the deal will lead to lower priced ad services for both publishers and advertisers, and the delivery of more relevant ads to users, she said. Google's deal with DoubleClick also prompted scrutiny. The U.S. TheÂ Federal Trade Commission is investigatingÂ the deal following a complaint filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Digital Democracy, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. The groups are concerned how Google will protect its data and users' privacy, including how it will handle cookies and other data that could potentially be used to identify Internet users. The European Commission has not yet been formally notified of the deal by Google or DoubleClick, a Commission spokeswoman said. Acquisitions can fall under the purview of national competition authorities or the European Commission, depending on where the companies do business, their turnover and other factors, the spokeswoman said. Â
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Google Inc. is ramping up its efforts to help specific vertical markets create more effective online advertising, using its technology to help clients highlight as many of their assets as possible to drive not only online, but also offline sales.
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InfoWorld - European consumer groups warned the European Commission Thursday thatÂ Google's plan to take over the online advertising company DoubleClick, currentlyÂ under investigation, wouldÂ erode consumers' privacyÂ and would push up prices for online goods and services.
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AOL plans to strengthen its online advertising business by acquiring Tacoda, a company that specializes in delivering ads based on users' online activities.
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European consumer groups warned the European Commission Thursday that&#160;Google&#39;s plan to take over the online advertising company DoubleClick, currently&#160;under investigation, would&#160;erode consumers&#39; privacy&#160;and would push up prices for online goods and services.In a letter to competition commissioner Neelie Kroes, BEUC, the pan-European Union consumer group, together with three national associations, urged the Commission to use its powers to block the deal in its current form.&quot;Consumers&#39; privacy could be at risk; it is crucial that the Commission integrates privacy concerns into the&#160;Google/DoubleClick merger&#160;review process,&quot; said Monique Goyens, BEUC&#39;s director general in a statement.In addition to privacy concerns, the letter also argued that combined strength of the two Internet firms would harm consumers &quot;with respect to the price, degree of innovation, quality, and selection of online products and services that would likely be available to consumers following the merger.&quot;Neither Google nor the Commission were available to comment.Meanwhile, also on Thursday, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission&#160;cleared Google&#39;s acquisition of DoubleClick&#160;on a 4-1 vote after an eight-month investigation. The FTC concluded that acquisition &quot;is unlikely to substantially lessen competition&quot; and downplayed concerns brought by some privacy groups, saying those concerns are &quot;not unique to Google and DoubleClick,&quot; and &quot;extend to the entire online advertising marketplace.&quot;The Commission&#39;s competition department has until April 2 to decide to permit the deal, approve it on the condition it is changed or prohibit it outright.Competition reviews normally focus on the economic impact of mergers and takeovers, rather than their potential impact on privacy.Consumer groups wrote to Kroes in June, shortly after the planned deal was announced, warning about its impact on privacy. Thursday&#39;s follow-up letter focused on the economic effects of the deal on consumers, as well as reiterating the groups&#39; concerns about privacy.Acknowledging that privacy falls beyond the scope of merger reviews, they nevertheless tried to persuade the Commission to bear it in mind.&quot;Privacy issues raised in our 27 June letter are detrimental to consumers&#39; welfare and ought to be taken into account in the merger review process,&quot; the consumer groups said.Economic harm to consumers would result from the deal because it would strengthen what the groups describe as the super-dominant position of Google in the online advertising industry.&quot;The online advertising market will be placed in jeopardy if the Google/DoubleClick merger is allowed to proceed, because the combined company will dominate both major &#39;pipelines&#39; for online advertising - both the pipeline for search ads and the pipeline for non-search ads,&quot; they wrote to Kroes.&quot;If allowed to proceed, the transaction will enable the world&#39;s largest network for the sale of non-search online advertising (Google) to capture and use to its own benefit the dominant provider of stand-alone ad-serving tools (DoubleClick) used by web publishers to connect other networks to the non-search inventory which they need to survive and which is not already committed to Google,&quot; the letter said.By eliminating competition between the two companies for both stand-alone ad serving tools and integrated ad networks, the deal will ultimately &quot;reinforce Google&#39;s super-dominant position in the market for search ads,&quot; they said.In addition to the possibility of higher prices for consumers, the deal could undermine the common business model for online publishing, which relies on advertising revenue. This could force content providers to switch to a model based around revenue from subscriptions, forcing consumers to pay for what they get free now.&quot;Higher online advertising prices may result in part of the advertising budgets shifting to other media, resulting in less revenue than initially forecasted for web publishers. Such publishers might then be forced to charge users to access content in circumstances where they do not do so today,&quot; the consumer groups warned.&#160;
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By RACHEL KONRAD SAN FRANCISCO - After a spat between two of the world's largest Internet companies, online auctioneer eBay Inc. resumed running advertising through Google Inc. on Friday.
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America Online Inc., seeking to boost traffic to its free Web site and generate more advertising dollars as its paid subscriber base declines, said Thursday it is enhancing its search functions.
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Last week, listeners in Boston and Sacramento heard a commercial for Floorone.com, a small Internet company that aired its first radio ad with the help of Google Inc.
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AOL yesterday said it is buying its fourth online advertising company of the year, part of an ongoing effort to transform itself into an Internet advertising concern.
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Google &#038; eBay Partner for &#8216;Click to Call&#8217; The WSJ (sub req&#8217;d) and NY Times (reg. req&#8217;d) are reporting this morning on a deal in which Google will distribute ads on eBay&#8217;s pages outside the US. eBay has a similar deal with Yahoo! domestically. This is something of a surprise given that eBay aggressively courted Google [...]
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The $3.1 billion merger between Web search king Google and online ad giant DoubleClick approved by U.S. regulators yesterday may create an advertising powerhouse of unrivaled reach and knowledge of Internet users' lives, desires and interests.
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(InfoWorld) - AOL plans to strengthen its online advertising business by acquiring Tacoda, a company that specializes in delivering ads based on users' online activities. AOL entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Tacoda, whose "behavioral targeting" technology will complement AOL's online advertising services, the companies announced Tuesday. AOL and Tacoda didn't disclose details of the transaction, which will close after customary approvals are obtained. AOL, which is owned by Time Warner, is in a so far successful, years-longÂ transition from a subscription-fee based business to an advertising-based business. Like Google, Yahoo, and other major Internet players, AOL is busy boosting its capabilities to provide a variety of online advertising services, including search, video, syndicated, mobile, and graphical ads. In order to capitalize on theÂ fast-growing online ad market, AOL, Yahoo, Google and others have resorted to purchasing online ad services companies. For example,Â Google is in the process of buying DoubleClickÂ for $3.1 billion, whileÂ Yahoo recently closed its acquisition of Right Media. In May, Microsoft announced its intention toÂ buy digital marketing services provider aQuantiveÂ for $6 billion. Meanwhile,Â AOL acquired Third Screen MediaÂ and AdTechÂ this year, and Lightningcast last year. The U.S. online advertising market grew 35 percent in 2006 over 2005, the fourth straight year of expansion for this market, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Marketers spent almost $17 billion advertising on U.S. Web sites in 2006, according to the IAB. Tacoda, founded in 2001, is based in New York and will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL. It has about 100 employees and more than 4,000 Web sites in its ad network. Its publishing clients include The New York Times Co. and NBC Universal.
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At the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago, Webmaster Radio&#8217;s Jim Hedger is currently holding a press conference which is making public the investigative report that Google is serving Adwords and Adsense advertisements on Google properties and the sites of Google AdSense members who are connected with Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups which [...]
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(InfoWorld) - Google is ramping up its efforts to help specific vertical markets create more effective online advertising using its technology to help clients highlight as many of their assets as possible to drive not only online but also offline sales. At its New York office Thursday, the directors of Google's vertical industry practices discussed some of the ways Google is changing its advertising strategies to be more industry-specific, something that the company hasn't traditionally done, said Tim Armstrong, president of advertising and commerce, North America, for Google. Armstrong said Google wants its advertising practices to be so vertical-specific that in the future, the specialists in those markets will be driving the company's advertising strategy --Â so much so that he joked the he would be out of a job. "The vertical people will be running Google," Armstrong said. "I'll be the least useful person in the room.... If you were to come into Google for a day, you'd actually see the industry groups have become the most specific connection point with customer." Most companies don't have a quantitative view of all of the assets they have for sale, and part of what Google is helping vertical industry customers do is take stock of all of their offerings so they create better ways to constantly reach customers, he said. As part of this strategy, Google's retail advertising practice is working on new technology that will help companies in that space assess all of the resources on their Web sites so they can more carefully choose keywords for targeted advertising. Currently, Google is working internally with customers to help them do this, but the company is still handing hard-copy results to customers, said John McAteer, director of Google's retail practice. In the future, however, Google wants to provide an automated way to crawl and index an entire Web site so companies can electronically compile all of its assets and generate keywords on their own, he said. Eventually, Google will offer the technology as a public tool, similar to one it already includes in its AdWords platform that helps customers crawl their Web sites to come up with relevant keywords for ads, said Brett Goffin, industry sales manager at Google. Neither McAteer nor Goffin could provide a time frame for when this tool would be made available. As part of a presentation Thursday, McAteer and Goffin outlined a case study in which Google teamed up with Rooms to Go Furniture, a company whose top executive was skeptical that online advertising could drive offline sales. Google worked with the furniture company to place online banner ads in local markets, targeting several U.S. metropolitan areas to drive customers to local stores. When the campaign was over, Rooms to Go saw a return of more than seven times its investment, and customer average order size 20 percent larger than the retailer's average sale. Moreover, retail stores accounted for 86 percent of sales, while only 14 percent came from e-commerce sales, McAteer said. In addition to its retail work, Google also has been doing market research to help other verticals, such as the automotive industry. The company's automotive market team plans to hold a Webinar on Oct. 11 to reveal the results of a study it conducted with Compete Inc. to discover buying habits of customers in the automotive space. Bonita Coleman Stewart, Google's industry director for automotive, said the two companies found that the time to market for automotive shoppers has shortened to one month, reducing the amount of time companies in this market have to reach customers with campaigns. She said that Google has not identified how it will use this information to serve its advertising customers but that will be part of the discussion on next month's Webinar.
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AOL will move its headquarters from Dulles, Va., next spring as tries to retool itself as an advertising company that competes with the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.