Out with the old...

Just when you started to figure out those migraine-inducing squares called QR Codes, they will be obsoleted by a new technology called SnapTags.

Powered by a marketing outfit called SpyderLynk, SnapTags are not only cleaner and easier to read, but they sport your logo. Here’s what their website has to say about it:

“Imagine you had something that worked like a QR Code. Only instead of using an indecipherable Rorschach blot, it used your logo. And instead of just taking people to a link, it opened up whole new lines of interactive communication. Ones that you could track and use to build relationships.

“You’d have a better way to build your mobile marketing. You’d have a SnapTag.

“Consumers with either a standard or smart camera phone get instant access offers, content, promotions and information by snapping and sending a picture of the SnapTag to a designated short code. Or by scanning the SnapTag using a SnapTag Reader App.

...In with the new

It’s more accessible, more sophisticated, and completely branded. Because it’s your logo.”

In a Publishers Weekly report, Gabe Habash describes magazine and book applications that create instant opportunities for readers to participate in contests, sample giveaways and other branding, advertising and social media opportunities. They’re both codes that deliver content to your phone when you access their technology. “We are excited about collaborating with more publishers to see how SnapTags can impact the publishing model to bring more interactivity to books,” said a SpyderLink executive.

Details in SnapTags Push Scanning Technology Forward

Richard Curtis

It is a truism that what is absurd today will become commonplace tomorrow. In the past it has taken years, decades, even generations for the world to embrace something that was once seen as preposterous. But this is the Digital Age, so why should we be surprised that it took just two weeks for something offered as parody to come true?

What occasioned the spoof was Amazon’s announcement that the new version of its Kindle would carry advertising. We began riffing on the notion of product placement embedded in novels and offered this ridiculous scenario:

Donna applied one last dab of lipstick and critically appraised her makeup in the magnifying mirror on her vanity table. She frowned as the image revealed the merest hint of a wrinkle on her brow. Tonight she had to be perfect: she’d been casually dating Todd for three weeks but she knew that tonight he was going to make his move. For the third time in five minutes she peered out of her bedroom window searching the street for his familiar car with the dented right fender. From the moment she’s set eyes on his face she’d wondered what it would be like to kiss that sensuous mouth…

That was on April 12th. On April 26th we read in the Wall Street Journal that author Harry Hurt III will release an e-book that is “the first to feature both advertising accompanying each chapter and significant product placement woven throughout its narrative.”

WSJ reporter Erica Orden describes Hurt’s account of a road trip as “populated with an elite cast of characters, including former President George H.W. Bush and Mr. Hurt’s late friend, George Plimpton. But first, a reader has to elbow past an army of other names: energy-drink company PureSport, Maine cruise line Captain Jack Lobster Boat Tours and Hollywood Stunts NYC, a stunt training center, to name just a few.”

Slipstreaming on Morgan Spurlock’s The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Hurt lined up almost two dozen businesses to promote his book in exchange for display ads.

Okay, but is it an honest book? “I don’t think that these particular things compromise the editorial integrity of what you’re reading,” Hurt said. “I guess I’m asking readers to trust my judgment and trust my integrity on the basis of a career that stretches back almost 40 years. The stuff that is product placement is stuff that I use myself.”

We’ve never used “advertising” and “integrity” in the same sentence, and after reading  This Book Brought to You by… you may not either.  But if you think there’s a first time for everything and are willing to shell out $7.00 to see if Hurt’s book is the exception to the rule, pay a visit to his website and have your credit card ready.

Richard Curtis

“The ultimate effect of Google eBooks, if Google knows what’s good for it, will be the creation of an ad-supported publishing model,” says blogger James McQuivey of Forrester, the prestigious technology and market research company. That’s a pretty unequivocal statement, but McQuivey is as certain about it as he is that there are two O’s in Google.

He knows he’s playing with fire, too, because if there is one article of faith that authors swear by it’s NO ADS IN MY BOOK! But he’s done his homework, and it looks like authors may have to start swearing by the next article of faith on their list, because McQuivey has marshaled some pretty persuasive arguments:

First, books are the only medium left not significantly sponsored by advertising. From the Android Angry Birds game app to Pandora music streams to Hulu.com to the venerable NYT.com, advertising is essential to the success of nearly all media — analog and digital. The only reason book advertising has not happened is that the economics of distributing books have required that people pay for them — in a way they have never paid for the newspaper, magazines, or even music, where a majority of listening has always been radio-based. If you make people pay the full price of a book’s creation and distribution, you can hardly expect them to endure advertising. Plus, books last for such a long time that an ad placed twenty five years ago in my copy of The Hunt For Red October would be laughably irrelevant today.

That has all changed now. Since Google intends to provide its books from the cloud, it can deliver ads that are timely and targeted. And the economics of publishing are swiftly moving away from an analog production model…which means that soon, we will no longer need to force the entire cost of a book on the buyer of the book, but instead can extract value from the reader of the book, in direct proportion to the value they get from it. In other words, the more pages they read (the more value they get), the more ads they see and the more value the publisher and author receive.

And that’s just his openers. “I have a hundred more justifications for why this is the next logical step for the industry, why Google is perfectly poised to do it,” he declares.

Are ads in e-books one of those laws of unexpected consequences? If you believe that you also believe there is only one O in Google.

Read Google eBooks Paves The Way For Ad-Supported Publishing, then start sketching the ad campaign for your Google eBook.

Richard Curtis

Why don’t books carry advertising?

Maybe a better question is, When will books start carrying advertising?

A discomfiting scenario of what the world would look like with ads in books, or embedded in e-books, was painted in the Wall Street Journal by Ron Adner, a professor of business, and William Vincent, a former book editor. “With e-reader prices dropping like a stone and major tech players jumping into the book retail business,” they write, “what room is left for publishers’ profits? The surprising answer: ads. They’re coming soon to a book near you.”

Barbarians at the Gate?

For those of us who who regard books as cultural temples whose thresholds will never be muddied by the boots of barbarian admen, this prognostication is like a dagger to the throat.  Books are an immersive medium; we lose ourselves in them expressly to escape from the ambient blare of ads and commercials assaulting us in the real world. Isn’t that why even the ad-pushers have hesitated to tread on our precious books?

Adner and Vincent don’t think so. “Historically, the lack of advertising in books has had less to do with the sanctity of the product and more to do with the fact that books are a lousy medium for ads. Ads depend on volume and timeliness to work, and books don’t provide an opportunity for either.”

Warning: Paperbacks May be Harmful to Your Health

Actually that isn’t completely true. The capability for placing ads in books has existed for decades, but thanks to a populist revolt against them staged by authors in the 1970s the practice was ended. John R. Douglas, a former science fiction editor (and now acquisitions editor for E-Reads), remembers The Great Cigarette Ad Rebellion. It happens that some paperback publishers started inserting cigarette ads into books just around the time researchers were starting to uncover the health risks of smoking and Surgeon General warnings began appearing on cigarette boxes. Horrified authors and their agents begin pressing publishers to discontinue the ads.  “As a result,” writes Douglas, “many paperback book contracts now include clauses forbidding any advertising other than the back-of-the-book ads for other books and authors from the same publisher.”

That seemed to settle the matter – until now.  Until the E-book Era.  But now all bets are off. Ads on, in and around e-books are on the way and this time no opposition by authors short of a Constitutional amendment is going to reverse the juggernaut, say Adner and Vincent.  “Physical books can’t compete with other print media for advertisers. Digital books can. With an integrated system, an advertiser or publisher can place ads across multiple titles to generate a sufficient volume. Timeliness is also possible, since digital readers require users to log in to a central system periodically.”

The scenario reaches nightmare velocity when the writers talk about the effects on authors. “Authors are likely to be concerned [!!!!!] not only with the idea of ads, but with what particular ads are placed in their books. Imagine the value—and controversy—of placing pharmaceutical ads in healthy-living guides, or partisan attacks in political memoirs.”

The I-Word to the Rescue

But wait, authors – belay those cyanide capsules. It’s Paul Carr to the rescue.  Blogging in TechCrunch, Carr declares Adner’s and Vincent’s prophecies “bullshit” and invokes the I-word: “A book is a fully immersive experience in which the readers expects to be transported completely to another world.” He draws a parallel between watching a movie and reading a book: “People go to the cinema, or slip in a DVD, to escape from the commercially saturated real world; much the same reason as they crack open a good book. Putting an ad in the middle of a book is a great way to kill a reader’s enjoyment of the product, and ensure they won’t buy another one.”

Green Eggs and Oscar Mayer Honey Ham Cold Cuts

Relieved?  Not so fast…

Carr sees a more insidious plot to take over your brain. It’s called product placement, which he defines as “bribing filmmakers to ensure that their heroes and heroines are seen drinking a particular brand of beer or getting married wearing a particular designer’s dress.” Carr cites a number of instances of products subtly placed in the pages of recent fiction, particularly novels aimed at young readers – “presumably because it’s easier to slip Pepsi into a book about modern teenagers than it is to wedge Burger King into Oryx and Crake,” a literary novel by Margaret Atwood.

So, Carr rescues us from the frying pan only to deposit us in the fire, and if you think Adner and Vincent painted an apocalyptic picture, read  Forget Ads In Books, Lit-Lovers Face An Even More Hideous Prospect.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Wall Street Journal.

Remember why Tivo was invented? Looks like we’ll now need the equivalent of a Tivo to skip embedded advertising popups that simply will not go away until you acknowledge them with a click. Certainly that’s an Apple App waiting to be invented, yes?

Don’t count on it. The evil feature was created by Apple CEO Steve Jobs himself. Of the five inventors listed on the patent application, his name comes first. The application would post popups on anything that has a screen: phones, TVs, games, media players – if it has a screen the ads will appear, and they will not go away until you actively do something about them.

Randall Stross, writing in the Digital Domain column of the New York Times, describes the technology: “Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad — it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.”

In other words, you are now utterly at the mercy of the advertiser.

As Stross explains it, “What the application calls the “enforcement routine” entails administering periodic tests, like displaying on top of an ad a pop-up box with a response button that must be pressed within five seconds before disappearing to confirm that the user is paying attention.”

Or, to put it crudely, Apple holds you down while the advertiser inserts its ad. And there’s no app to prevent it.

Stross wonders aloud if the invention could be a big turnoff even for fanatically loyal Apple lovers: “Would anyone have guessed that Apple, so widely revered, would seek patent protection of a gimmick not unlike one used to sell vacation timeshares?”

For details, read Apple Wouldn’t Risk Its Cool Over a Gimmick, Would It?

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

When I was a young man apprenticing at a literary agency, our boss sent me and several fellow staffers on a confidential mission to the offices of a prominent and flamboyant publisher. His company had just published a novel represented by our agency. The publisher handed us envelopes containing cash and instructed us to visit one of several large New York City bookstores and buy a copy of the book. We were then to bring our copy back to his offices, go to another store and do the same. And again and again until we had spent all the cash. The object, he explained, was to inflate sales figures and put the book on the bestseller list. The ploy succeeded.

This little piece of chicanery came to mind when I read a New York Times story by Stephanie Clifford that Microsoft had brought a civil lawsuit in the United States District Court in Seattle against a number of individuals and corporations that Microsoft alleged had manipulated clicks on an Internet ad. The corporation is seeking at least $750,000 in damages. What exactly did these folks purportedly do to incur MS’s wrath?

The offense is called click fraud. Fraud is broadly defined as deliberate deception committed either for personal gain or to damage someone else. It’s a serious tort (violation of civil law) for which one can be sued, or a serious crime for which one can go to jail, or both.

The Microsoft case has to do with the way companies measure their ads’ exposure to viewers who are potential buyers of the advertised products and services. The effectiveness is gauged in cost her click. Clifford cites an outfit called Click Forensics as asserting that “about one in every seven clicks on an advertisement is estimated to be fraudulent.” If the dodge is so commonplace, why would anyone spend a lot of money suing? “Microsoft is trying to make that kind of deception more expensive for perpetrators,” says Clifford. Making an example of click fraudsters, in other words.

Here’s how the reporter explains what happened.

“Advertisers bid on what they will pay to appear in the paid-search results for certain key words. The more an advertiser pays, the higher they are on the list, and advertisers usually pay for each click on their ad.

“In March 2008 several audo insurance advertisers began complaining to Microsoft that traffic to their ads was spiking suspiciously…And clicks to the advertisers appearing at the top of the paid-search results listings for those terms were high. Although traffic appeared to come from different computers, it was actually coming from two proxy servers, which mask the original address of a click.”

Clearly, if the charges stick they will show that this was not a bunch of students in a dorm room earning beer money for repeatedly stroking “Enter” on their keyboards, but rather powerful robot servers that MS investigators tracked to various accounts registered to the defendants. The complaint stated that one of them “directed traffic to competitors’ Web sites so [Microsoft}] would pay for those clicks and exhaust their advertising budgets quickly, which let the lower-ranking sites that he sponsored move up in the paid-search results,” writes Cliffor. You can read more about the investigation and lawsuit here.
Click fraud is as old as the Internet, according to Stefanie Olsen, writing in 2004 for CNET News. “The practice…began in the early days of the Internet’s mainstream popularity with programs that automatically surfed Web sites to increase traffic figures. This led companies to develop policing technololgies touted as antidotes to the problem.”

Nor is Microsoft the first company to take action over click fraud. “In one recent example of the problem,” Olsen wrote in 2004, “law enforcement officials say a California man created a software program that he claimed could let spammers bilk Google out of millions of dollars in fraudulent clicks. Authorities said he was arrested while trying to blackmail Google for $150,000 to hand over the program.” Considering that advertising is the foundation for Google’s fortunes, it will come as no surprise that the firm has taken the most stringent actions to protect itself. Olsen quotes a statement issued by Google that it has been “the target of individuals and entities using some of the most advanced spam techniques for years. We have applied what we have learned with search to the click fraud problem and employ a dedicated team and proprietary technology to analyze clicks.” Olsen called it the “Google Fraud Squad.”

Though click fraudsters are fiendishly clever and possess powerful tools and weapons, the good guys are well armed to combat them. You can visit the website of the Click Fraud Network, “a community of online advertisers, agencies and search providers working together to develop an industry solution to the click fraud problem. Network members that provide data to the network receive free access to online campaign and risk assessment reports.” Among other services the Network offers are a “Click Fraud Index™” tracking click fraud rates by quarter and even a “Click Fraud Heatmap.”

Though the commercial reasons for such aggressive warfare are plain, there’s another less obvious but extremely important one. As newspapers and magazines desperately fight for their lives, they are turning to online advertising as a possible key to salvation. If the metrics are unreliable, however, that door will be closed to those industries. Says Tom Cuthbert, president and CEO of Click Forensics, the company sponsoring the Click Fraud Network, “Click fraud activity continues to grow especially on made for ad sites, parked domains and on the content networks. Advertisers, publishers and search engines need to take notice because content networks are becoming the fastest growing source of click fraud. Ensuring their quality is essential for the pay per click advertising market to continue its growth.”

Looking back at that bit of skullduggery committed by the publisher years ago, I wonder if, today, we would have been asked to perpetrate some variety of click fraud to boost his book’s fortunes. Knowing what I’ve just learned about the consequences, I’m certain I’d think long and hard before I started clicking.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

If you’re worried that visiting our website will reveal preferences and predilections you’d prefer to keep private, be aware that soon Google will be watching you and you may find yourself the target of Google-sponsored ads. Unfortunately, you may not find refuge at other websites – they too will be monitoring you. Behavioral targeting is coming to the Web.

What this means is that every time you visit a website that carries Google ads you will be creating a cookie that serves as a kind of spoor enabling Google to analyze and categorize your tastes. Whereupon, as described by the New York Times‘s Miguel Helft in Google to Offer Ads Based on Interests, “Google will then use that information to show people ads that are relevant to their interests, regardless of what sites they are visiting.” Google has blocked out some 600 categories of interest in 20 broad groups, and if you’re not sure what categories you fall into, you’ll find out soon enough when ads start popping up that appeal to your preferences. Or at least to what Google infers inferred to be your preferences. Golf? Furs? Sports cars? Triple ply toilet paper? Google is recording your clicks and preparing pop-up pitches.

In its announced initiative Google reassures us that it will not drill too deep into such highly sensitive areas as our sexual orientation or health issues, but just where the line of sensitivity is drawn will be interesting to discover. Users who feel their privacy has been breached will be able to review the information Google has harvested and edit it. Which raises a host of interesting questions, for what’s to prevent users from inventing preferences just to throw Google off track?

Website operators will be free to opt out of the Google program. Publisher sites displaying Google’ AdSense service will have to post a Cookie and Privacy Policy, such as this one sugested by Google:

• Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on your site.
• Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet.
• Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

By way of disclosure, E-Reads does not at this time harvest information about its visitors. However, because we do use AdSense we are obliged to post a cookie and privacy policy in the very near future. Do you have an opinions either way? Let us know in the comments of this post.

RC