Search engine giant Google said Thursday that it is exiting from the radio advertising business, putting an end into the firm's attempt to leverage its online advertising success into other media. Google--which pulled the plug on its newspaper advertising efforts on January 20th--said the move came because the radio advertising efforts did not have "the impact we hoped for." Google entered the radio advertising market with the buy of Newport Beach-based dMarc Broadcasting in January of 2006. That deal--which was worth $102M in cash plus

Google's new Ad Manager technology will soon enable premium ad banners to be sold directly to advertisers by publishers and when the clicks are used up on the premium ads it will revert automatically to use Google Adsense. have always felt that quality advertisers will find quality content and now there is one single platform to consummate these relationships. This is a brilliant move and will further accelerate the gap between premium content and generic publishers who don't provide any unique content value. I

When I started investing the US advertising market was $300 billion with only 10% of it ($30 billion) of it being online and measurable.  One One recession later and the US advertising market is about $245 billion – but still only 10-12% is online and measurable. At at time where nearly all advertising was purchased on a CPM (cost per thousand) basis and not very measurable this was a huge innovation that should be credited to One of the investment themes I’ve been focused on in the past 3 years has been Performance-Based Marketing.  When By now we all know that

Repost of SMCLA's Going Goo Goo Over Google Analytics The Google Analytics panel was a big success with a great turnout of over 150 people at the  Mahalo office in Santa Monica. It takes 5 minutes: Google Analytics is about as easy to setup as setting your alarm clock. Set aside 5 minutes, get your cut and paste Below is a highlight video of the evening.  To To view the entire talk click here .  

The topic of whether in-stream advertising has heated up.  Let me lay out my defense of In-Stream Advertising because I believe the topic is really important. People feel angst about advertising in any form – I feel the same feeling about advertising as most consumers.  I know that advertising is important to inform consumers I just read well written pieces on the topic by Ross Kimbarovsky , Robert Scoble , Paul Carr and the NY Times .  I myself recently covered the topic when I spoke about why GRP Partners invested in Ad.ly .

Companies also use social networking sites in the hiring process, and increasingly, to do innovative advertising (such as the recent Jack in the Box campaign). Does advertising work in the social networking world? Top officers of some of the leading social media websites and tools (including Facebook, MySpace and Yammer) will be on the Panel, and there will be panelists from the worlds of media sharing platforms Just a quick note that I'll be moderating a Technology Council Event : Social Networking as a Business Strategy May 19, 2009 - Culver City Social networking media are used on a daily basis to grow businesses and expand career opportunities.

Los Angeles-based magnify360, a provider of web page optimization tools, has lauched a new product for optimizing Google AdWords advertising, the firm announced today. magnify360 said its new Google Cost Optimizer automatically synchronizes with AdWords accounts, and provides campaign performance metrics to users about return on investment in individual keywords, cost per click, conversion rates, and other information. Among features of the new tool are the ability to tie specific individual leads and customers to the keywords that generated their clicks, and ways to optimize landing pages for specific keywords and profiles.

JiWire has morphed into a location based advertising platform built upon its worldwide registry of over 281,963 free and pay Wi-Fi locations in 140 countries. If Skype and Google Voice had their way with the FCC consumers would be happily making phone calls via VoIP in common cellular dead zone areas. Tags: mobile phones Investing advertising monetization Crowdsourcing publishin Crowdsourcing has become a hot VC entrepreneur topic lately based on new companies forming and demonstrations I have seen at TechCrunch50 and Demo. This has inspired me to begin building a fluid list

In what might be some new competition for Santa Monica-based Rubicon Project , the high profile ad optimization firm headed by Frank Addante, search engine giant Google told its advertisers late Wednesday that it will begin to offer similar capabilities in its AdSense program. Google said it will open its door to third party advertising networks, allowing the ads in those networks to compete with AdWords advertisers for ad space on publishers. Google said it will be certifying those networks, and will be rolling out the new service over the next few weeks.

Google's foray into the radio automation market has finally ended this morning, as San Francisco-based WideOrbit said it has acquired Google Radio Automation and related products. The sale ends Google's ill-fated foray into radio ads, which it began in January of 2006 with the acquisition of Newport Beach-based dMarc Broadcasting . At that time, Google paid $102M in cash--with No financial details of the asset sale were disclosed. billion in contingent payments--for dMarc's radio advertising automation technology, which allowed radio advertisers to buy airtime