Thursday, August 31, 2017

The new ad war is coming!

A new on line ad war is brewing and the good thing is it will give us all more abilities to market products. here is a hint:

As an early sales exec at Google, Tim Armstrong was well paid, but itchy for a bigger challenge, so he left to run AOL. Now, as the chief of both AOL and Yahoo under Verizon, he has the challenge of a lifetime: Making an ad business work when Google and Facebook are taking all the ad dollars.
“I think the worst thing we could do is — Facebook and Google are Olympic athletes with gold medal performances,” Armstrong said on the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka. “We have a differentiated strategy to partner with Google and Facebook, but not directly compete with them.”
Instead, AOL and Yahoo — which are collectively known as Oath — will find ways to give advertisers things the big steamrollers can’t. But Armstrong isn’t revealing much about his unique solutions, yet.
“I’m not going to go deeply into our strategy, but we have a different distribution model, different measurement model and different data model than they’re building,” Armstrong said. “I think you will see us, over the course of the next 12 months, roll out a series of products that are differentiated from Google and Facebook.”
“This is also not a winner-take-all market,” he added. “As big as those guys are, and they are big and they are ferocious from a competitive standpoint, there is so much opportunity left in the world.”
You can listen to the new podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.


Some new things happening:

At a technology event in June, Amazon exec David Limp said he hoped there would be a day when the company’s virtual assistant, Alexa, worked with competing digital assistants like Cortana.
Turns out he knew that that day was coming.
Amazon and Microsoft announced on Wednesday that they’ve been working on a partnership to allow their respective voice assistants, Alexa and Cortana, to speak to one another.
Starting later this year, owners of Amazon Echos and other Alexa-powered devices will be able to say: “Alexa, open Cortana” to start querying Microsoft’s voice assistant. Owners of devices running Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system will be able to summon Alexa via Cortana in a similar manner.

Cyber security:

In 2012, the New York Times’s David Sanger broke a bombshell story detailing a joint US-Israel cyber attack on Iran that undermined its nuclear enrichment facilities. The computer virus, dubbed “Stuxnet,” disabled 1,000 of Iran’s 5,000 centrifuges at the time.
In 2014, a Chinese hacking group, known as Unit 61398, penetrated the computer networks of major US companies like Westinghouse and US Steel in order to loot trade secrets. This was one of numerous such attacks by Unit 61398.
In 2016, Russian government hackers gained access to Democratic National Committee computer networks, stole sensitive information, and systematically leaked it in an effort to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
And just a week ago, the Washington Post reported that the United Arab Emirates had hacked various Qatari government social media accounts, sparking one of the most dangerous diplomatic crises in the Middle East in decades.
A new book, The Darkening Web, argues that stories like these are going to become more and more common as countries seek to project power in cyberspace. The author is Alexander Klimburg, a program director at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and an adviser to several governments and international organizations on cybersecurity strategy and internet governance.
Klimburg games out a few possible futures for the internet. One of them is apocalyptic: Imagine the world’s major powers unleashing malicious code on one another, irreparably destroying vital infrastructure. Another is an Orwellian world in which the internet has become a tool of subjugation, monitored and restricted by state powers. Still another possibility is that the internet remains free, controlled by non-state actors, and a wondrous instrument of global connection.
It’s hard to say which of these scenarios is most likely. For Klimburg, it’s a matter of mobilizing concern now before it’s too late. “Ultimately,” he told me, “it will take the attention of the free society that built the internet to save it.”

More to come soon!

Joe Rossini

Monday, August 28, 2017

What is happening in retail e commerce

In case you missed it: On the heels of Walmart announcing a partnership with Google that will allow shoppers to order products through Google Assistant, Walmart head of e-commerce Marc Lore will discuss the company's approach to innovation at Shop.org, to be held Sept. 25-27 in Los Angeles.

Retail is not dead! There are more than 1 million retail establishments across the US, and retail sales have been growing at almost 4% annually since 2010. Source: Census Bureau and NRF via NRF on Instagram.

Target has completed a $10 million makeover of its downtown Minneapolis store, and the new look reflects the retailer's focus on the shopping experience in the digital age. Specialty lighting replaces fluorescent bulbs, beacons let shoppers open in-app maps to navigate the store, and the grocery department sports a new upgraded design ( Look at the use of in store apps).


Casey's General Store is set to build new stores, increase acquisitions, expand its digital platform, improve price optimization and cut back on expenses, according to Wells Fargo Securities' Bonnie Herzog. The retailer is hoping to increase its footprint in small communities in new and existing markets, especially in Illinois and Wisconsin, Herzog said. (Again look at the potential use digital platform)


Amazon will take control of Whole Foods Market on Monday with a plan to immediately cut prices on a slew of organic items and ultimately meld in-store and online retail. The e-commerce giant will sell Whole Foods' private labels online and install Amazon lockers for the pickup and return of online orders in some stores.

The bottom line is that retail and business is continuing to move to e commerce and making their brick and mortar link even closer to the web! Review your SEO and e-commerce if you use it to sell more! We can help you, call us.

Joe Rossini

Friday, August 25, 2017

A little this and a little that..........

From Google:

Bad landing pages, especially on mobile devices, can kill conversions. There are high bounce rates if users can’t find desired information or the user experience is too cumbersome or slow.
To help advertisers improve mobile performance, Google announced a new Landing Pages tool at Google Marketing Next earlier this year. It’s designed to help marketers assess the mobile-friendliness of various URLs on their sites (as opposed to their entire sites). It is being rolled out in the next few weeks as a tab in the new AdWords experience.

Determining a marketing budget can be frustrating. Are you investing enough? Are your marketing dollars being applied in the most efficient way? How do you know if what you’re doing is working?

At Rossini.com we do not just pick one way to market we use multiple ways such as social media, blogging, submits to the search engines, PR releases and much more. I believe as the saying use to be "it takes a village" the more the better!

Do keywords really matter anymore? I say yes they do and at the very least it gets you thinking of what you do and how people should search for you. Short keywords are not good but longer more specific ones are. Make sure you have keywords in your programming.

From Facebook...

Facebook is curtailing the types of organic posts that Pages can convert into ads as it looks to make the purpose of its ads more precise, the company announced on Thursday.
Up until now, brands have been able to take any post published to their Pages and amplify its reach by paying Facebook to run it as an ad in people’s news feeds. That won’t be the case for much longer as Facebook continues to orient its ad product around delivering actual business results, as opposed to simple social engagement, which was something that COO Sheryl Sandberg emphasized repeatedly during the company’s most recent earnings call.
“We want businesses to utilize Facebook ad products that give them the best opportunity to achieve their business goals, and removing these inessential boosting options will reduce complexity and help them find the right products to get the best results,” said Facebook product manager Jyotika Prasad in an emailed statement.

Under what works....l

The popular narrative around the rise of the mobile web and smartphone apps has been one of increasing audience fragmentation. But the opposite may actually be happening — concentration and consolidation.
More digital media time is concentrated in smartphone apps than on the mobile web or PC. And most of that time is spent in a small number of apps, led by Facebook. Users are also downloading fewer new apps, so it’s getting harder to break through. Earlier today, comScore published its 2017 US Mobile App Report detailing these trends.
Digital media time spent with the desktop stands at 34 percent, with smartphone apps at 50 percent. Tablet and mobile web represent the remaining 16 percent. And though it sees dramatically lower engagement, the mobile web has roughly 2x the reach of mobile apps.

OK some of these tidbits comes from me and from Search Engine Land

Talk soon

Joe Rossini

Monday, August 14, 2017

Fake News, Terrorist propaganda! Google is moving to fight this!

Google is preparing to release new filters which would give advertisers greater control over the content they appear against.
According to the Times – which ran a front-page exposé earlier this year into how advertisers like M&S were appearing next to extremist content – Google is planning to grade videos and other online content under new parameters which include violence, nudity and political satire.
Offering an example, the Times said it “would hand advertisers the power to block their adverts appearing alongside a bawdy comedy sketch, for example, or risqué music video.”.
The additional safeguards are expected to come into force by the end of the year.
It comes after Google revealed that it would invest heavily in artificial intelligence in an effort to better identify extremist and terrorism-related content, specifically on YouTube.
YouTube claimed that during the past month of testing AI-powered detection and removal tools that over 75% of the videos it has removed for violent extremism were purged before receiving a single human flag. The platform has said it believes the accuracy of its systems have improved “dramatically” due to machine learning.
It’s part of an a four-pronged strategy to appease the industry after major advertisers, in wake of the Times investigation, pulled ad spend from YouTube and the Google Display Network.


This article from Google and By

I believe we must fight this on Facebook and other modes of social media. I believe our last election was interfered with on both sides and this needs to change and perhaps this is a nice first step.

Joe Rossini

Friday, August 11, 2017

It has been a while

Sorry I have not written in a while, I have been very busy. I guess I have learned the hard way again that working hard is not as good as working smart. I have made tons of calls and put out lots of quotes only to get rejected because the people I am quoting to have no intention of buying or spending the incredibly small amount of money for my products they want evwen cheaper. I guess the moral to the story is dont spend time if there is really no reason to spend time. If someone says they dont have enough money or they have been taken before and the owner really is afraid of being taken again either sell harder as to why you should move forward or just say thank  you, give them yur information and move on. I am ready to take this philosphy now. Bottom line is most people want everything but they cant afford ther big car or huge house so you downsize a bit. I can downsize my products but at what price? I am just going to ask up front do yu you have $1200 to $5000 for a great fancy shiny web site and if they hesiotate enough I thank them and move on. So I move on.