[Thomas Yarnell contributed to research and drafting on this post.]

Google’s popular and dominant advertising service, AdWords, allows companies to place auction-style bids on search keywords.  If a company bids the highest amount on a keyword, that company’s ad comes up first when someone searches the keyword.  The company then pays Google on a pay-per-click basis.  In many countries, including the United States, Google lets companies advertise next to search results from use of their competitors’ trademarks.

Let’s say you want to buy a Louis Vuitton bag.  You know it’s expensive, so you might not want to buy it directly from the company’s website.  Instead, you might search “Louis Vuitton bags” on Google and assess other options.  As you can see in a search of “Louis Vuitton bags”, you may find some “Sponsored links” to the right of your search.  Sponsored links such as the “Louis V. Bags Handbags” come from the AdWords service. Continue reading

I will be moderating 2 separate panels on Monday and Tuesday at the 2010 Politics Online conference spectacular here in Washington.

The first will be Monday April 19th at 2pm, and called “Is this Barack Obama’s Real Facebook Page? Domains, Twitter Handles, Online Presence – real or fake? Intellectual Property, Cyber Identity, and More!”.  I will be joined on the panel by Jason Torchinsky of Holtzman-Vogel, Matt Sanderson of Caplin & Drysdale and Neal Seth of Baker Hostetler.

The second will be Tuesday April 20th at 10:30am, and called “Laws Affecting Digital Communications – Copyright, Privacy, Elections/FEC, Advertising, Libel, Contract Law, etc.  Rules, Regs, Fines and Community “Standards” Applicable to Communicating in Digital Media.”  On this panel, I will be joined by Jason Torchinsky of Holtzman-Vogel and John Stewart of Crowell & Moring.

Details at polc2010.com/.

Publishers are worried about cookies, specifically talk of regulatory action on the privacy front.  What’s the story here?

A Privacy Policy might typically say something like this:

“A ‘cookie’ is a small text file on your computer’s hard drive that our Web site uses to collect information about how you use our site.  The cookie transmits this information back to our Web site each time you visit a page on our site, thus allowing us to identify our most popular pages, features and data.”

To someone not working for an ad agency or at a publisher or for, say, Google, reading these terms, what they might read could be summarized like this: “Software … embedded in my computer … I have no choice … it stays there forever and ever … it will watch my every move and report back to its masters and possibly the government … my wife might find out.”

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First, what data?  This comes up in various contexts.  First example: an agency contracts with an ad campaign client for marketing, issue advocacy, corporate branding, what have you.  It used to be that creative was a “work for hire” (or assumed to be) owned by the advertising client.  With some sort of understanding that the client wouldn’t end-run the agency.

In other words, expectations were governed by historical industry practice.  Copyright and contract law didn’t play much a part.

But what about campaign performance?  What about reports and research and metrics and all the “data” compiled by the agency to make its case?  Forrester and Gartner Group and Corporate Executive Board and their ilk have been selling research reports for years on these sorts of things, but agencies typically didn’t bother with industry best practices-type studies or reports.  Work was done for clients, and work product was owned by the clients (or again, was assumed to be).

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If the thinking behind a liberal approach to web content sharing is driving traffic back to your original content source, what happens when the benefits of doing exactly that – i.e. bumping up traffic for potential advertisers – fails to generate the hoped-for commercial return?

Like all advertising, web advertising has always been somewhat more art than science (yet), for better or worse, with accompanying difficulties in translating eyeballs into advertising revenue metrics.  Comes now the collapse of the web advertising market.  What then becomes of the willingness to go along with liberal content “scraping”, excerpting and other copying under “fair use” arguments?

Brian Stelter probed this very question in the NY Times recently.  Stelter interviews, among others, Henry Blodget of Alley Insider and Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post, whose publications are among the most aggressive and overt in the practice of integrating others’ content into their writings.  Ms. Huffington states, honestly, that “we excerpt to add value”, which is probably a fair statement, except that Stelter also notes that these sites “highlight[ ] what they deem to be the most meaningful parts of newspaper articles and TV segments.”

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