A study released this week (Oct 2008) by JupiterResearch–commissioned by Marin Software, San Francisco–suggests that paid search advertising will become a $26.8 billion business by 2009. The data reveals that 92% of large search marketers would increase their pay-per-click (PPC) spend an average of 22% if technology and management impediments were resolved.

Further, today Google reported that their revenue grew 31% to $5.5 billion, compared with the same quarter last year. Google’s income would have been $1.56 billion, or $4.92 a share, excluding certain items.

Google.com grew 34% to 2.7 billion, driven by steady traffic growth. AdSense rose 15% to 1.7 billion. Global aggregate paid clicks climbed 18%, compared with the prior year’s quarter.

Seems PPC is alive and well.

BEIJING, CHINA 14th October 2008- SinoTech Group announced today that they have signed a strategic agreement with Publicitas Asia Holdings (Publicitas).  This partnership creates a powerful digital partnership in China where SinoTech Group will provide Publicitas a range of digital marketing services and products along with both companies working together to form one of China’s important advertising sales teams representing leading sites in China and abroad.
Specifically, under the terms of the agreement, the SinoTech Group will become the preferred supplier for digital marketing services, ad serving technology for Publicitas in China and extend each others Digital Sales force in China.
“This partnership with SinoTech Group will allow Publicitas the opportunity to further monetize our existing publishers advertising inventories as well as give us new media, products and services we can offer in China said Moritz Wuttke, Chief Executive Officer for Publicitas China.
“We’re immensely excited to work with Publicitas on this deal with such potential,” said Dr Mathew McDougall, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman of SinoTech Group. “Along with SinoTech Group’s groups own site representation publishers, we will have much more collective advertising inventory as well as a strong partner to attract advertisers who want to run ads across a number of leading site in China and abroad.
Publicitas will sell into Sinotech’s Digital Media assets in and adopt SinoTech Group’s own technologies such as SinoXpress (ad serving) and SinoAnalytics (web analytics), to be used on some of their existing Chinese publisher sites.

Dr Mathew McDougall, Group CEO & Executive Chairman for SInoTech Group is attending the iMedia Agency summit in Bali.

This is the inaugural Southeast Asian iMedia Agency Summit that will allow us to have the opportunity to rub shoulders with other interactive agency leaders and explore, challenge and build the future of online interactive and digital media, and marketing in the region. The role of the agency in the ever-evolving interactive media space is changing. The notion of iMedia Summits are not new and have been running since 2001. Borne out of the U.S., iMedia has invited agency senior management to these exclusive summits, and within these few days, usually in an intimate resort setting, the senior level executives get to re-examine strategies for their clients and their own businesses, gain a fresh vision of industry trends, and network with peers, senior personnel from publishers and technology service providers.

I am very much looking forward to catching up with a few of my  friends, Gareth Mulryan, David Temple, Cameron Yuil, Robbie Hills to name a few…. also looking forward to meeting new people working in the area of digital advertising.

Cheers

Matt

The China market, although large, still has low penetration rates and this is an excellent indicator for future growth. According to the Survey Report on Online Shopping in China 2008 that released by China Internet Network Information Center, stated the total amount of online shopping in 19 big cities in China had reached CNY16.2 billion in the first half of 2008.

*These cities are Chongqing, Tianjin, Harbin, Changchun, Shenyang, Dalian, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Xiamen, Jinan, Qingdao, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu and Xi’an

Source: CNNIC June 2008 online shopping research report

BEIJING, China September 16, 2008—Dr Mathew McDougall, chief executive officer and executive chairman of SinoTech Group, today announced the appointment of Tim Haynes, as chief digital officer for SinoTech Group. Prior to this role, Haynes had held positions at various agencies including the Tomorrow Group, a Hong Kong based agency where he lead the interactive practice and has previously worked in Australia and the UK.

“Tim is a visionary and an innovator, as well as a smart businessman – as his success growing SinoTech Group in Shanghai demonstrates,” said Dr Mathew McDougall. “Tim brings to SinoTech Group those essential qualities, plus a keen marketing sense and a strong reputation in the digital universe. He will use his talent and ability to further extend the SinoTech Group as a digital powerhouse.”

“Digital was viewed more as a channel in the past, where the creative process, the ideation process, started at the beginning more with the traditional side of the business, and digital would be one way you can execute,” Haynes says. “Now, both the agency and clients realize that digital is not just a channel. It’s really changed the whole marketing process. I will use SinoTech Group’s extensive digital offerings to bring full interactive solutions to our clients and partners.”

Beijing, China— 27th August 2008: Chinese leading interactive technology and digital marketing company SinoTech Media (www.sinotechmedia.com.cn) announced today that they have signed a partnership agreement with IT168 (www.it168.com), one of the largest information platform for IT products in China. SinoTech Media will act as the exclusive ad agency for the unsold advertising space and international traffic in the website of www.it168.com.

IT168.com is one leading website providing individual netizens and enterprisers with mainstream information on the IT products and IT business.

This new agreement will provide SinoTech Media with the rights to promote and sell targeted advertising for the website www.it168.com. Further, IT168 will license their Ad Technology from SinoTech Media for ad serving and web analytics. This ad technology, known as SinoAnalytics will serve all the advertising needs under the agreement.

Ms. Wang Xiaojie, VIP Account Director of IT168 said, “We are excited to have SinoTech Media help us drive our international advertising revenue. I also believe their Advertising technology will help us manage these advertising campaigns more efficiently.”

Moreover, Dr. Mathew McDougall; the Group CEO and Executive Chairman for SinoTech Group said, “I am pleased that SinoTech media has this opportunity to provide advertising site representation to the largest IT information website in China. This deal will help our publishing partners more effectively monetize traffic and provide our advertisers to the right audience in Chinese IT industry.”

BEIJING, CHINA 20th August 2008- SinoTech Group (www.sinotechgroup.com.cn) announced today that they have signed a strategic partnership with US based Advantix Media.

Texas based, Advantix Media provides Search Marketing services to well known customers in verticals markets such as automotive, education and travel. “This is an exciting strategic partnership.” said Dr. Mathew McDougall, the Group CEO and Executive Chairman for SinoTech Group, “SinoTech will benefit by providing products and services into the US through this partnership. We will provide Advantix’s clients with access to the Asian markets and will conduct Agency Services, Search Marketing and creative services.”

“Asia is a rapidly developing online market, particularly China, so this partnership will extend our online marketing and advertising solutions offering into Asia Pacific; however, China will be the first market we will focus on and we expect to gain quick wins” continued John Phillips, co-founder and Principal.

SinoTech Group is attending the Search Engine Strategies event in San Jose, US this week. Both Dr Mathew McDougall and Laker Chen will attend the conference as well as meet with prospective partners.

Search Engine Strategies (SES) is the leading global conference & expo series that educates delegates on search engine marketing (SEM), including optimization (SEO) and advertising strategies, tactics and best practices.

Over the course of this week, this blog will track the sessions and highlight some of the speakers.

Its time for Yahoo! to launch a new product on the http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/.

Its Yahoo! Fire Eagle (Beta)
Yahoo released its Fire Eagle location-based social networking platform from beta, opening the technology to developers and the public. Fire Eagle allows users to update their various social networking profiles with information about where they are.

What is Fire Eagle?

According to Yahoo! The tool is of great use if you ( developer) Want to make your website or mobile application more relevant or responsive to a user’s location? Or maybe you’ve found a way to capture user location and want to find cool uses for this info? By doing the heavy lifting for you and connecting you to a community of geo-developers, Fire Eagle makes it easier to build location-aware services.

The Open API tool (Fire Eagle) is of great help to the developers or publishers to gain location information about the end user.
Fire Eagle and the Fire Eagle Developer APIs:

Fire Eagle is a new service designed to make it safe and easy to build and use location-aware applications and services. It’s a place where users can store and manage information about their current location that trusted apps and sites can update or access.

Fire Eagle exposes a rich set of web services that allow developers to write location-aware applications.

Update anywhere:
- Send updates from your phone
- Update from your favorite sites
- Do it automatically or manually

Choose what to share:
- You control your data
- You choose who to share with

Have fun on the web:
- Show your location on your blog
- Share it with your friends
- Discover cool stuff around you
- You choose how much to share

Fire Eagle is a mobile search application in the making and its up to the creativity of the developers to make a good use of it!