Possibility of legal bid against Google policy

A number of organisations are reportedly discussing making a legal challenge to Google's pay-per-click policy change.The portal recently made it possible for firms to place paid adverts on the results pages of searches for their competitors' trademarks.Organisations must now bid against each other if more than one firm intends to advertise itself alongside such results.However, Marketing Week reports that a "heavyweight consortium" of firms are now planning to make a legal challenge to the policy.The Association of British Travel Agents told the news source that it had taken part in a meeting to discuss the possibility of a legal confrontation.Furthermore, the publication believes Saga and Lastminute.com attended the discussion.When the policy changes came into play, Tesco called upon its competitors to join it in refusing to bid on others' trademarks, noting that if the sector stood firm then the cost of such advertising would not rise.However, the Birmingham Post recently suggested that while this may work among large businesses, it is likely to be "dog eat dog" among small and medium-sized enterprises.

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Are you suffering from arthritis? How about arthritus? Arthuritis?
When Arthritis Care, a charity, piloted an online fundraising campaign it wanted to register for pay-per-click advertising, Professional Fundraising (May) reports. Unable to afford to sponsor the 200 different types of arthritis, it decided to hedge its bets on a hunch that most people wouldn't be able to spell the name of the condition properly. The gamble paid off - the misspelling “arthritus” was registered at a cheaper rate and attracted more clicks than rheumatoid or osteoarthritis.
Charities are usually justified in penny-pinching, but medical students are feeling so poor that they have taken to sleeping in tents, says Student BMA News (May). Oh put down the violins - they're simply protesting at the fact that accommodation for junior doctors is no longer free. Hospitals are due to start charging doctors for rooms from August. Matthew Forbes, a final year-student at Sheffield, branded the news that he would have to pay £600 a month to live on site “disgraceful”.
Living under canvas isn't the most luxurious, but spare a thought for children at a PFI school in Exeter plagued by over-heating problems. Devon County Council and its private partner Carillion have tried to cool down the classrooms - without success, Public Private Finance (May) reports. A study looking into the problem has been commissioned and school governors are waiting for a further consultation with the local council. Meanwhile, is it really too much for students to hope that their classrooms will be cool come winter?
Hot or not, it might be in students' interests to put up with classroom conditions - if they want to understand football, that is. Getting to grips with the rules of the beautiful game requires graduate-level skills, while cricket requires “a mere GCSE”, Times Higher Education (May 15) reports. David Beckham, not just a pretty face? Public Agenda remains unconvinced.
It doesn't take an academic degree to work out the meaning of “zero”. Except, perhaps, in the case of zero-carbon homes, where zero may not mean zero after all, Regeneration & Renewal (May 16) reports. Developers say that a new, more “flexible” definition is required if the Government is to meet its ambitious house building target for all new homes to be zero-carbon by 2016, a report from the UK Green Building Council says. “This is not about dumbing down or abandoning the concept of zero carbon,” says Paul King, chief executive, of the UK Green Building Council.
Transport tales of the week
Being stuck in a car for hours may be part of the job for many police officers. But they should beware of alleviating boredom by taking their hands off the wheel - or putting their fingers up their noses. Particularly, it might be improper to release the steering wheel to make a thumbs-up gesture to a speed camera while on an emergency call. Sadly this information didn't reach David Mayes, an officer in South Yorkshire. He's been given an undisclosed fine for the offence, reports The Times (May 16).
And nose-picking is strictly off limits for the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, reports Police Review (May 16). “If you're sitting in a car with your finger up your nose, staring off into the distance with your mind in neutral, you are going to miss something and you are not going to be prepared,” says Richard Thompson, the force's chief.
But perhaps long hours in traffic are increasingly likely, given the drubbing that congestion charging took in recent elections. Local Transport Today (May 16) says that a proposed scheme in Manchester hangs in the balance after an anti-congestion charge party unseated its key champion. London's new Mayor, Boris Johnson, also vowed to scrap plans for emissions-based charging.
Foreign Ways
Schoolchildren in Sydney have been threatened with a “yellow card”, meaning a week's suspension, if they don't stop petitioning to get their favourite teacher back, The Daily Telegraph (May 17) in Australia reports. The pint-sized activists at Narraweena Primary School joined their parents to protest for the reinstatement of a popular teacher, Lynne Tziolas, who was suspended by the NSW Department of Education after nude photos of her and husband were published in a magazine section under the title: “Buck naked couples talk about their sex lives.”
Hero ...
When you think of a born leader, does it conjure up images of a tall, handsome and charismatic figure? Well, think again. When it comes to leadership, height isn't everything. Take Napoleon Bonaparte: many historians recount that the great military leader stood just 5ft 2in. And the reality, according to Stephen Taylor, chief executive of the Leadership Centre for Local Government, is that “good leaders are often short, fat people with zero charisma and perhaps even a hygiene problem”, Local Government Chronicle (May 15) reports. We wonder whether the so-called short man syndrome is just a tall story.
... and Villain
James Bond films may not appear to have much impact on everyday life at town halls, but councils are struggling to come to terms with parkour, the free-running craze popularised by Casino Royale. Children & Young People Now (May 14) reports that local authorities want to set up parkour sessions, but youth workers lack qualifications and guidance on leaping over walls or railings. They are also concerned about insurance and that not every street-smart kid wants councils involved. “The whole point is that parkour is slightly anarchic,” says Harry Fowler, joint acting head of youth service at Birmingham City Council.
Other views
“We have now in England an enormous, oppressive and contradictory edifice for school accountability which stifles initiative and creativity in schools.” Christine Blower, acting general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, gives her views on national testing, in Public Finance (May 16)
“We have got more people counting than we have got doing.” The police service is wasting money on bureaucracy and target culture, says Jan Berry, retiring chairman of the Police Federation, in Police Review (May 16)
“If I were a policewoman or a nurse I wouldn't be expected to put up with this treatment.” Teachers draw the short straw when it comes to bullying from service users, says Jennifer Drew, a humanities teacher, in TES Magazine (May 16)
“There is no option of a quick fix.” Alan Johnson MP, the Health Secretary, admits a £6 billion “black hole” in funding for adult social care, reports Community Care (May 15)
“It is clear [that] the Government has bowed to political pressure and chosen a criminal justice rather than a health-focused path.” The reclassification of cannabis will not stop people from taking it, argues Paul Corry, director of public affairs at the mental health charity Rethink, in Community Care (May 15)
“Only fools predict events with certainty.” Barry Quirk, chief executive of the London Borough of Lewisham, says foresight is a science, in The MJ (May 15)

Is this a sustainable model?

After hearing about services like MyScreen and Sugar Mama, I wondered how this model was sustainable. After all, you don’t see many outlets where end users get paid to view advertisements. As with anything this new, I tended to view it through a lens of skepticism. But then I came up with an analogy.
Think about Google’s AdSense program. If you publish on the Internet, you can sign up through them and have them serve ads to your site. When visitors to your site click on those ads, you get paid. Google does the legwork in signing up advertisers and ensuring that their ads are served appropriately.
In the incentive-based model, it seems that the end user replaces the publisher. Instead of serving an ad to a website and paying based on the number of clicks, ads are served right to the mobile user, who are paid just for viewing. MyScreen and Sugar Mama, then act as middlemen, like Google.
Of course, the sting here is that advertisers gain more from the pay per click model. They pay for only people who click the ads, but their message is shown to everyone who visits that publication. So their reach extends further than their payout. Whereas when ads are being served to a mobile user, it is them, and only them, who see the ads.
So I’m still skeptical as to its sustainability, but not as much as I was initially. Really, I’m far more concerned about the privacy issues than the lifespan of the business model.
It sounds good, but beware
It’s easy to get roped into a deal that seems too good to be true. Yes, being paid to view advertising sounds like a great deal, but when it’s at the cost of having your information sold to other advertisers, well, it doesn’t sound so sweet. Now does it?
Still, incentive-based advertising is a young model, and could prove viable as advertisers and network operators search for the best way to deliver advertising over mobile phones. Our cell phones are personal, and we simply won’t tolerate the kind of advertising we see in print and broadcast media.
But if mobile advertising is going to hit us either way, we might as well get something from it. Right?
Posted By : Joe

Google Looks to Conquer Mobile Phone Ad Market

Google, a champion of internet advertising, seeks to test its hand at cell phone adsWith more and more cell phones supporting capable browsers, a logical area of expansions is the advertising market for cell phone browsers. Most ads have trouble with cell phone browsers resolutions and are not conducive for the environment. This is troublesome as the cell phone internet industry today is what the internet of yesterday was -- financially unfueled.
In the early days of the internet in the 1990s, large companies sprang up promoting websites which reached massive values by only providing amorphous content and limited services. These sites made billionaires of people like Mark Cuban, but inevitably the bubble burst and the market fell apart.Today much of the modern internet is driven heavily by advertising, similar to the offline news industry. If the internet is a vehicle, advertising is the fuel that drives much of it. And these days, cell phone internet connections provide little "fuel" to the internet. Google seeks to change that.Google on Wednesday announced that it will be deploying small brand-image advertisements, which it is custom making. When the site detects a cell-phone browser, it will switch to displaying these ads. This, Google hopes, will help it conquer the vast new emerging market.Google feels that its fate is inextricably tied to cell phones and other mobile devices as the industry continues to shift toward mobile sales and development. The company has heavily invested in developing an OS named Android, which it hopes will help standardize the mobile phone industry. And like most Google products, the OS will likely find a way to tie in ads for revenue.The new system Google will be rolling out for mobile browser advertising will display images similar to those seen on PC browsers. The images will be scaled optimally to look appropriate on the small screen. Advertisers will pay on a per click basis, and are only allowed to link to pages optimized for mobile phones.One key difference between Google ads on the cell phone and its PC cousin is that the cell phone variety will only display one ad per page. Google understands that on a small display, clutter becomes an increasing issue, so it hopes that this policy will make the system friendlier and interfere with host pages less.Alexandra Kenin, a product marketing manager, for Google Mobile Ads stated in a Google blog post that, "For advertisers, mobile image ads serve as a branding tool and have shown to have good click-through rates."Google announced that the following countries will be receiving the special current ads, at the time of roll out: Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, the UK, and the United States.

Google Sued for Ad Fraud

Legal firm Kabateck Brown Kellner filed a class action lawsuit against Google on Tuesday. The suit, filed on behalf of one David Almeida, accuses Google of deceiving its customers into paying for ads they didn’t expressly request. Elinor Mills at CNET gives the details:
“When participating in Google’s online auction-based advertising system, customers specify what they would be willing to pay for pay per-click for words or phrases that will trigger ads displayed on Google’s search site, as part of Google AdWords. They are also given the option of bidding for ads that appear on third-party Web sites, also called Google’s ‘content network’, which is part of Google AdSense.
On the system, customers see two blank boxes, one for typing in a bid for ads on Google.com, and another one, marked ‘optional’, for putting ads on content network sites. Sophisticated search engine marketers know to put a ‘0’ in the box for the content network AdSense sites if they don’t want ads there…
Google does not inform its advertisers that if they leave the box next to the content bid blank, Google will use the advertiser’s bid for clicks occurring on the content network, the lawsuit says.”