Bing Commercial: Too Hot for TV?

Speaking of Bing and its passion for porn, I've got a great idea for a new Bing commercial...

As I preached in my Search Insider column about the many flavors of search, Bing should cut the crap about Google causing the recession and do away with the cute but overpromising search overload spots.

Instead, Bing should showcase what it does well, travel, shopping, health... and porn!

Here's how my TV ad for Bing would play out...

Setting: 3 men lying on crowded beach with cocktails in hand doing a little "people-watching."

Attractive bikini-clad female walks by.

Man #1 (good looking, buff guy): "I'd Bing that."

Another attractive bikini gal strolls by.

Man #2 (also good looking dude): "I'd Bing that."

Big pink gorilla on unicycle rolls by.

Man #3 (nerdy, pasty guy with taped-up glasses and suntan lotion not rubbed in): "I'd Bing that!"

Cut to screenshot of computer showing Bing search for "Pink Gorillas on Unicycles."

Cue announcer voiceover: "Whatever you're into, you can Bing it."

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(Yes, I really found this on Bing!)

Bing is Serious About its Porn

So I'm working on my next Search Insider column -- picking up where I left off with "Everything I Need to Know About Marketing, I Learned from Google" -- and one of the lessons I'm including is that "sex sells." I'll elaborate on that point in my column but suffice it to say I'm focused more on the value of strong brand positioning than the prevalence of porn in search results.

Now it's been widely reported that Bing trumps Google when it comes to porn search, largely because of its "robust" (my word, not any reporter's) video search results and auto-play feature.

Nonetheless, I didn't realize how serious Bing was about its porn until I searched "Google porn searches" -- note to my wife: I was just looking for research to cite in my column about the percentage of queries on Google that are porn-related -- on Google and saw this sponsored listing for Bing.

Seems like they sure know their audience. "Making Key Decisions?" Online porn sure ain't cheap. (So I've heard.) Need to "Cut through the Clutter?" Umm, check.

Bada Bing, indeed!

Update: check out my suggested TV commercial for Bing catering to all the porn-seekers out there!

Testing Google Alerts: If/When You Get This, Please Let Me Know

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During my ad:tech keynote session last week, I disclosed that I'm not only a vanity searcher but a vanity alerter. Yes, I have Google Alerts set for my name so that anytime the words "Aaron Goldman" or "AaronGoldman" appear anywhere on the web, I'm notified by Google "as-it-happens."

During the panel, I also commented on how quickly Google is indexing tweets these days. Often times, I get a Google alert in mere minutes after someone @replies me (thus, including my name). I speculated that this may be part of the reason Google doesn't want/need to buy Twitter to become a player in "real-time search." Why spend the billions when you can index the content for free? (Hmm, does that argument sound familiar, Rupert Murdoch?)

At any rate, I'm curious how many other vanity alerters there are out there and how quickly they "index" and react to their own alerts. So I'm going to do a little experiment. Google seems to pull out the snippet of text around your keyword in the alerts so I'll embed a call to action right after each person's name.

Let's start with the current Search Insiders...

Gord Hotchkiss, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Janel Landis, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Rob Griffin, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Steve Baldwin, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Todd Friesen, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Todd Freisen, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert. (Wonder if he has the misspelling on alert too?)

Rob Garner, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Chris Copeland, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Matt Greitzer, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Kaila Colbin, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Now let's test this on some of the most active tweeps I follow and other fellow digital marketing nerds...

David Berkowitz, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert. (Poor David probably gets alerted every time a new theory emerges on the Son of Sam.)

Jeff Marshall, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Scott Shamberg, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Lee Odden, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Jenn Matthews, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Chris Miller, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Brian Morrissey, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Len Kendall, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Max Kalehoff, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Gian Fulgoni, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert. (Surely, someone from comScore is tracking his alerts.)

David Szetela, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Blagica Stefanovski, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Lance Neuhauser, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Matt Spiegel, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Jeff Campbell, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert. (My money's on Jeff to be the first to respond!)

David Dalka, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Bryson Meunier, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert. (Guarantee he responds even though he's busy with his little boy. Between the fact that he has a most unique name and is a leading SEO, there's no way he's not monitoring his personal brand reputation online.)

Matt McGowan, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Guy Kawasaki, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert. (If Guy's tracking his name, he's probably inundated with thousands of alerts a day.)

Jen Brady, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Saneel Radia, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert. (I know he's traveling the world right now but curious to see if he'll make time to check in on himself.)

Eytan Seidman, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Dan Perry, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

And finally, I know it's a longshot but let's try my brothers and see if the vanity alert gene runs in the family...

David Goldman, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Noah Goldman, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

Josh Goldman, please comment on my post if/when you get this alert.

And let the record show I'm posting this at 12:03pm cst on Sun. 9/6. Away we goooooo.....

Update 12:32pm: ok, my alert came through 7 minutes ago, clocking in at 12:25pm -- a mere 19 minutes following my post. Now, I'm sure it helps that my blog is on Google's Blogger platform in terms of quick indexing but it also helps that I am the kind of Type-F dork that is home on a beautiful Labor Day weekend blogging and checking Google alerts. Who else is with me?!? And, no, Pedro Garcia Millan, you don't count with your spammy comment, although your 5 minute response time is impressive.










Update 9/7: Apparently, I failed to recognize a totally different use for Google Alerts on names. Believe it or not folks, the first person to respond to this post was not a vanity alerter but a stalker alerter! Indeed, at 6:08pm yesterday, the fiance of one of the people named in this post replied via email saying that the alert was received!

Vintage Rishad

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Rishad Tobaccowala is a tough act to follow. The man generates more sound bytes per second than Bill Maher touring the Vatican. Or Al Gore at a Hummer plant. Or Rush Limbaugh at the gay pride parade. OK, you get the point.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of moderating the ad:tech Chicago keynote panel immediately following Rishad's keynote conversation with Drew Ianni. As you can imagine, the crowd was plenty warmed up.

Unfortunately, I missed the last 20 minutes of his session while they got my panel situated and mic'ed up backstage but I was still able to fill 4 pages of notes with classic Rishad quips. Below are the ones I caught. To sample the entire vintage, run a search on Twitter for "#adtechchi + rishad."

• You can't get good word-of-mouth without good products
• Before social media, there was no amplifier for WOM
• When clients ask for a Facebook strategy, inquire why they never asked for an NBC strategy
• The future doesn't fit in the containers of the past
• Marketers spend 50% of their time demanding resources for what they spend 10% of their budgets on
• The future will be about marketing, not advertising
• Marketing is understanding and meeting customer requirements
• 4 things that build brands are performance, desire, culture, and intrigue -- only 1 of which has anything to do with math/data
• Most important thing with earned media is to de-fang detractors
• TV works
• If you are going to build digital without TV, you have no imagination
• Working media will decline from 85-90% of budgets to 65%
• The world may be digital but people are analog. Analog = feelings.
• Ideas scale much faster than math
• Creative and media must be at the same table but don't need to work for the same company
• Clients want best-of-breed (resources) with minimum drama. The only way to ensure zero drama is to hire 1 agency and get a pool of mediocrity.
  

ad:tech State of the Industry: It's Getting Better All the Time

Yesterday, I had the honor of moderating the keynote panel at ad:tech Chicago. Below is a copy of the presentation I used to kick things off and give the panelists something to react to. It should be pretty self-explanatory without my voiceover.

One thing I'll point out is that on slide 9 I asked the crowd to weigh in via show of hands and some 80-90% voted for social media as the fastest growing area of digital marketing. But, as I mentioned in my post recapping my ad:tech webinar, "growth" can be widely interpreted.

I should also mention that @LenKendall makes a good point when he says, er... tweets, "When determining growth of ANYTHING. Factor in growth of population. That ratio will show you true growth vs. stagnation."

Overall, I thought the dialogue on the panel was great. Sean Finnegan of SMG was a great sport about slide 19, especially considering his kids were in the audience. Jeff Levick of AOL Advertising shared some interesting nuggets about the direction his company is heading -- specifically, around creation of original content. (Off-stage he told me that they have some 1,000+ writers in NYC cranking stuff out.) John Cantarella of Time.com had a great soundbyte as he lamented "parasitic aggregators" of content -- although he refused to name any, I chimed in with a Huff-Po cough. And Jeff Bell represented DOmedia well by calling attention to the need for better attribution management -- although that buzzword seems to have caused some confusion.

It definitely seems like the consensus is the volume of planning (and actual spending) activity is picking up. Both AOL and Time.com reported heavy increases in RFPs -- interesting, John pointed out that almost 100% of the requests are for custom packages, not straight ad units. And Sean and Jeff both said they've seen client budgets open up a bit headed into the holidays.

Unfortunately, we ran out of time before I could get to the SMS Q&A but we were able to squeeze in 2 live audience questions that called attention to trends in video and corporate social responsibility.

I'd like to thank Drew Ianni, ad:tech programming chair, for the opportunity to participate and CIMA, for nominating me to represent the organization. And, of course, my fellow panelists for engaging in the conversation and opening their kimonos a bit.

Looking forward to next year. Hopefully by then, WAY up will be the new up. Hey, we can imagine, can't we? (Sorry, had to close with another Beatles reference.)

State Of The Industry: ad:tech Chicago Keynote Panel Presented by CIMA

View more presentations from Aaron Goldman.