You mean you want my money and my passwords?

When faced with online advertisers, the day-to-day web surfer has more to worry about than seedy products and scams. Online advertising itself has opened the backdoor for bad guys to get into your computer.

As with anything on the Internet, most people know that you have to be careful. Every click has consequences, even links as seemingly harmless as a Google AdWords campaign.

As you can see in the video below, a tracking system for weeding out your passwords and information is secretly embedded in an ad for the Better Business Bureau. As you’re taken to the BBB homepage, you’re given a slew of secret programs designed to hack your machine.

Sharks in the water…

Today, a search for the Better Business Bureau turns up no AdWords – Google is responsible enough to put the kibosh on such activity soon after it’s caught.

But how many other online advertising scams do they have yet to catch? How many people have been victims of fraud, and will continue to be, by technical masterminds with malicious motives?

Further research didn’t turn up a solid number, likely because it’s changing as fast as the dynamics of online advertising itself.

In fact, computer hackers are likely ahead of the curve, meeting and exploiting innocent hosts – like your average online advertiser – whenever they catch up. By the time any such scams reach your computer, they are so well-embedded in the system that they can be hard to catch with the untrained eye.

Swimming Safely Through Online Advertising

Fortunately, programs like Link Scanner, a free service mentioned in the video above, inspects each Web site for exploit codes – that is, in essence, those which might sabotage your computer.

With minimal regulation of the World Wide Web, the onus of fraud prevention lies on the individual, who must look for trouble around every corner and behind every click, even when it’s as elusive as an online ad.

The Internet can still be a place of exploration and discovery, as long as we’re aware of the sharks in the water.

If you or someone you know has been bitten, so to speak, by these lurking predators, please tell me your story in the comment box below. Thanks again for reading!

The new age of advertising affords many opportunities for advertisers to grab our attention that could never have been explored in the past.

With online video, advertising fills the screen around the video, before the video, after the video and even on the video, attracting prospective customers and annoying everyone else.

Pre-roll ads – or the 10-30 second segments that must be viewed before the video – are among the most controversial, simultaneously representing some of the most irritating and the most effective ads on the net.

Listen in to this week’s podcast on the good, bad and ugly of pre-roll advertising!

Here are a few of the reports mentioned in the audio:

• The Wall Street Journal reports on Google’s pressuring of YouTube to include pre-roll ads.
• YouTube fans report back that the pre-roll platform doesn’t float their boat.
• Podcasting News breaks down the love-hate relationship of these controversial online ads.

What are your thoughts? Give me a comment below if you’ve ever clicked through a pre-roll ad or clicked out of that web page all-together.

A new kind of target marketing...

My girlfriend and I broke up earlier this year, and though it may have been a difficult crossroads in my little college life, I was cheered on by none other than the advertisements of Facebook.

Almost every time I’ve logged in, after changing my relationship status from taken to single, a new pair of “Singles” ads pop up to greet me with some pretty girl and a hyperlink.

While I don’t take them up on the offer, I do take note of how targeted advertising has become. The “demographic” is no longer a trait or two you might possess. It’s you, down to the last detail they can squeeze out of you.

Facebook and other social networking sites are well primed and well aware of this kind of marketing, and the door is open. I’m a straight, single, 21-year-old college male, with a full list of my studies, my interests, and what I like to do with my spare time.

The Pros and Cons of Showing Your Cards…

On the one hand, I can’t complain. Deleting my account is a matter of a few mouse-clicks, and I volunteer all of the information that I put up.

But on the other hand, it’s just kind of creepy. If nothing else, it’s a wake-up call to the consequences of displaying your personal information online. The Internet has taken the blindfold off advertisers, shooting darts at the prospective public.

According to Facebook:

The core of the Facebook brand is our user experience, and this experience is continually reinforced by our product’s distinct look & feel, functionality, personality, and utility.

This also pressures the products of advertising to become more and more specific and compelling, which may serve the consumer with better options that better provide exactly what they’re looking for.

In conclusion…

While the benefits of highly targeted online ads may be a benefit to consumers and advertisers alike, our priority for privacy should come before that of shopping opportunities.

Have you recently been Google Slapped?

If the term isn’t familiar, odds are you haven’t been trying to get your product across the cost per click lines known as Google AdWords.

Though most people have only nice things to say about the friendly neighborhood search engine, Google is well-known among merchants for keeping advertisers on their toes – what seems to be a natural consequence of advertising online without old-fashioned standard rates.

It’s called the Google slap and it works like this…

1. I create a web site to sell you my product or service.

2. Because I want to get your commitment right away, the first thing I want to do is get you to sign up or sign in – maybe I’ll even give you some free stuff as incentive.

3. I create what’s called a “namesqueeze” page – it’s a homepage that asks for your name and email before offering you anything else – or create affiliate links – for people who want to sell my product for me.

4. I sign up for Google AdWords, and agree to pay pennies per click for viewers to be taken to the namesqueeze or affiliate.

5. Google takes a look at my page, sees there a lack of relevance in the content, and jacks up the price per click to dollars, not pennies, and often in double digits.

Then I wake up one day, check my account on Google, and realize that I’m out hundreds of dollars. I’ve officially been GOOGLE SLAPPED!

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Is this really a fair deal? It doesn’t seem to be. But on the other hand, are advertisers asking for it by advertising irrelevant, manipulative content? They seem to be.

And the money train doesn’t stop there… a whole new batch of products have emerged to help advertisers avoid the Google Slap, the validity of which is up in the air. With names like Ad Words Mad Scientist and Get Your Goggles, you have to wonder.

But if all of these shenanigans prove no other point, we know this much for sure: online advertising is a dog-eat-dog world, especially between advertisers and their hosts.

But perhaps you can smile inside, knowing that whatever spam mail comes to you because you – in a moment of foolishness – signed up at an opt-in page, it’s probably costing the sender a great deal of money for your frustration.

A NEW MODEL OF ADVERTISING

In the ancient times, when TV and radio and newspapers were the public’s main source of inspiration and information, getting your product and service into the eyes and ears of the public was a pretty simple matter…

I’m a merchant; I’ll invest in the popularity of the media.

I’m the media; I’ll return on the investment by giving the merchant a little bit of my time or space.

But in the digital age, things are changing. People are interacting. Advertisers are thinking. Space and time are less important. And popularity is more relative than even before.

THE POWER OF C

Not only have advertisements taken on drastically new and different forms, but the one-way model of investment is out the window.

To distill the variety of exchanges, new acronyms have emerged, most beginning with the most important element: COST (or C):

• CPM – Cost per impression: The ad is displayed a thousand times (thus the Roman numeral M), though not necessarily in the most visible places. The advertiser takes all the risk. This is the worst rate to pay, the best rate to charge.
• CPA – Cost per action: The ad is only paid for when a purchase or subscription is made. The host takes all the risk, especially in it’s purest form: affiliates. This is the best rate to pay, the worst rate to charge.

And then the list goes on with a large batch of acronyms to fill up the space in between with moderate exchanges of risk.

• CPA – Cost per click
• CPV – Cost per visitor
• CPV (2) – Cost per view
• CPC – Cost per conversion
• CPE – Cost per engagement.

Some are fairer than others. All are of some risk to the advertiser as well as to the publisher. And no matter what method is used, one thing is for sure…

THE GAME HAS CHANGED

The simple, standard rates of a two-column newspaper ad or a 30-second radio bit have the complexity of checkers compared to the chess game played by digital advertisers.

Where do you come in? Why should you care about the advertisers and publishers in their nit-picky battle to better-deal one another? Because the new model is not just about money.

Advertisers can no longer count of you wandering into their store after seeing a billboard 200 times on your morning commute.

The objective has expanded beyond just standing out, catching your eye, and sparking some emotion.

Advertisers must now accelerate the process of a conversion from prospect to lead to customer… often with only a small image or a few lines of text amidst a page full of other content.

The game has changed for you to, as the customer, to approach advertising with the same degree of common sense and caution when it’s only a click away online, as you do when it’s nestled distantly between segments of your favorite sitcom.