Ad News and Views from Around the Web

Social meets search; the death of corporate blogging (maybe); social media will reach middle age; Yahoo! Tower of Babel  and more

Social and search, together at last
The world is indeed getting smaller and smaller. The worlds of social media advertising and search advertising are merging, and fast. Luckily, there are tools you can use to measure your performance in both worlds at once, says Laurie Sullivan on MediaPost’s SearchBlog.

Is social media corporate blogging’s death knell?
True, we’ve had a few positive things to say about corporate blogging now and then. We’re doing it right now, after all. But we may be dinosaurs before we know it. Simon Mainwaring, who, not incidentally, has been featured on our blog recently, says on his blog that they are going out of style and offers eight teasers on how “the online presence of a brand will increasingly become the sum of its social exchanges across the Web.” Dude, this is all so self-reflexive.

Millenials grow up on social media
Millenials. Gen-Y. Generation Next. “The kids these days.” Call ‘em what you will. Fact is, the young folk born in the 1980s and ‘90s are leading the charge in social media and, moreover, are unlikely to get sick of Facebook and Twitter—and whatever it is that will come two years down the pike to replace ’em—well into middle age, according to a recent Pew study. Agencies take note.

Yahoo! Tower of Babel
Ever wonder how Yahoo!—with many sites in many languages around the globe—gets to know its users? Yahoo! Web Analytics, which recently celebrated its second birthday, has the answers—answers that smart advertisers can benefit from.

Wise guy
Speaking of analytics, in his new role as CEO of MediaBank, former Yahoo! GM, Bill Wise, opines on AdExchanger.com on how technology and analytics can help manage your media efforts. We love our analytics here at Yahoo!, as Bill well knows. Kudos to our old friend, Bill, and best of luck with the new venture. We’re sure to be working together in the future.

Is your agency in a media tizzy?
Writing in Adotas, film director, Ernie Mosteller talks about the frenzy in the market today, what with all the different kinds of media customers have to choose from. “Media and creative are now a maze of micro-strategies and mini-tactics that each work differently for different types of people, depending, of course, on time of day and whether the sun is shining,” he writes. “The fact is, there are just too many different types of media out there to focus a crystal ball on what will work for a given brand, and how.” The key to success? Good content—which is still king.

— Michael Mattis

(Marble image by seeks2dream via Flickr, CC 2.0)