One of the biggest events of the year for TV advertising is coming up on Sunday, February 7th 2010. Super Bowl XLIV will be a time when we get to see commercials that push the envelop of creativity. But this year marks a transition as we see a major contributor, Pepsi Co, without a commercial presence.  This breaks a 23-year long tradition.

This opens an interesting question, how will television advertising transition to internet/web advertising? Are big companies like Pepsi beginning to see that consumers are increasingly more receptive to commercial spots on website programming such as Hulu.com?

We’ve really become an internet-based society. If you don’t have Tivo or a similar system and missed a favorite TV show, you can hop on the web to watch it later. Amazing! And major brands are taking notice of this change. But have no fear, there will still be advertising delights on Super Bowl Sunday. It is a cultural tradition with a momentum that doesn’t show signs of slowing down.

I’m sure you’ve seen those Apple commercials showing off iPods that are fun and modern — hip to the bone. Their high energy projects a vibe that reinforces a cultural relationship between Apple and their customers.

Keying in to the power of such a relationship, our client Demandware wanted a similar mood to show off their eCommerce platform. This B2B “ad”  lives right on their home page and lets you rock out to music by “The League”.

Marketing is a crucial component to product and often company success. With so many available possibilities to communicating your message, it is often the simple approach that makes a big impact with your audience.

As I’ve shared with you in a previous post, getting your keywords targeted on your website is important, period. There are several top-level steps that are really considered basics to SEO practice. One of these steps is entering your keywords into the meta keyword tags within your website code. Back in October I shared some insight about Google meta keywords tag and the fact that it is NOT considered important in the Google algorithm. Well, some people have said the same goes for Yahoo, but that’s not necessarily accurate.

In case you are tilting your head in confusion, let me go over why some search engines don’t value the meta keyword tag. Years ago, more like a decade, webmasters did everything they knew about to get their websites found. Search engines were no where near the quality they are now. If you searched for something there was a good probability that the results would have a mix of content – some what you wanted, some completely unrelated. A reason these results were less than accurate was because of the meta keyword tag. Webmasters would enter a slew of keywords in the code hoping that popular searched keywords would get their sites seen…even though the content had NOTHING to do with the keyword.

For instance, if the website was all about customizing computers, the keyword meta tag may/would include ‘cars’, ‘bmw’, and ‘money’ for the sole purpose in simply getting visitors. As the person doing the search, it made finding what you wanted far more painful than it should have been.

So…that’s when Google started developing more sophisticated search algorithyms to provide relevant, quality results. At some point (I doubt it was right away) Google stopped including the keywords meta tag in the search algorithm but not all search engines have followed suit. You can’t assume Yahoo or any other search engine plays by the same rules as Google – they don’t know all the rules Google uses, nor do I unfortunately.

Simple tests have been performed to debunk whether or not Yahoo really looks at the keyword meta tag. Despite what Yahoo announced it seems they DO still look for the keyword tag. To learn how this was determined, read the post at Search Engine Land on why they claim Yahoo still uses the meta keyword tag.

So don’t neglect to include your keywords tag within your website. Just because Google doesn’t look at it isn’t a good enough reason not to include it.

Soon I’ll be reporting on the results of Bing/Live since that’s the other big search engine in the group. Since “Bing” is so new, it might be harder to find similar answers. And, who knows, maybe they too will announce less-than-accurate data.

Stay tuned!

In December of 2009 AOL will be breaking away from Time Warner and thus be adopting a new branding concept which seems a bit “out there”. It’s probably safe to say that the majority of adults have heard of “America Online” (AOL) at some point, especially during the first decade of the internet. For a long time AOL has branded themselves with a triangle-shaped icon/logo which we’ve seen morph a few times over the years of their existence. But that is all about to change, entirely.

It’s time to say good-bye to that oh-so-famous recognizable brand and hello to a branding change that has me slightly surprised. We recognize the normal “AOL” as part of their logo but the new change will be branding “Aol.”…exactly like that, with the important period…and that “Aol.” will sit on top of a graphic that changes from time to time. Yes, that sounds a little strange. You’ve seen the google home page when the logo represents some event in history that happened during the current time, such as the anniversary of Sesame Street. AOL is doing something similar except it will BE part of their new brand.

Thinking this is only a handful of changing logos would be typical, but think again. There are hundreds of these backgrounds ready for this branding idea. Imagine seeing “Aol.” on top of a leaf, friendly monster, camera, etc.. The idea is to open the minds of people to understanding the broad stroke that AOL plays in terms of their content.

The next time you see the AOL brand you may not recognize it, but will this pivotal change really make you aware? The research says this will be a success – time will tell. From a design perspective it’s tough to dramatically change a brand and have people recognize it in a short amount of time. AOL has been falling and they need to make some big changes; this may be what they need.

In the last few weeks Twitter has come out with their latest feature, Lists. The basic function of Lists is to allow users to group people into separate categories based on interests and location, or pretty much anything they can think of. The Lists can be comprised of anyone who is a Twitter user without a protected account. Once a List is created, other people can follow it.

I am still attempting to use Lists and have been monitoring other people’s use of them. One benefit I can see from the new function is that it makes it easier to follow those people you are most interested in. Once a user is following over 500 people, updates from those that are most important to you are easily lost in the stream. By creating a list, those updates and connections can be much easier to keep track of.

Tweetdeck has actually been using their own version of Lists for a while. Users could create their own categories, but can only include people they followed. Twitter takes that prerequisite out of the equation.

How can businesses us Twitter Lists?

Businesses can use Lists in order to organize their contacts and optimize the time they spend on Twitter. One of the arguments against using Twitter for business purposes is that it takes too much time. Lists allow you to organize that time so you can keep updated on the contacts that will deliver the most value.

For example, at CGI we would utilize the Lists by people’s interest in our services, Flash, PowerPoint, video, web. We could then answer people’s questions in those area’s more efficiently and hence decrease the amount of time we are looking around our account to answer specific questions.

Have you used Lists? Do you feel it is one way Twitter is setting themselves up in order to eventually earn revenue?