This is one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in a while: Google is setting up an Adwords-like system to be able to place and track radio ads. It’s called Google Audio Ads.
No, this isn’t online advertising – these are ads placed on terrestrial AM and FM radio stations. Ads are tracked by a callback phone number in the ads itself.
Why would Google undertake something so far outside their core area of expertise? Either it’s incredibly stupid, or really smart.
Perhaps Google thinks it can take over another advertising area, duplicating the success of Adwords and Adsense. Adsense works well for the hosting sites, but in our experience it doesn’t do nearly as well as targeted keyword advertising. Radio ads are usually expensive to run and ineffective unless you have a huge budget.
The other possibility is that they are setting up infrastructure for local advertising of all kinds. Location-based ads are hot in the investment community, and show a lot of promise, so perhaps this is Google’s way of trying to dominate the sector before the other location-based technologies take hold.
Google Audio Ads an interesting development, but don’t be surprised to see it become a total flop.
The Applian Advantage Club: A while back I asked some of you for your opinion about a “Members Only Club” – a club for Suite owners that would offer certain benefits to its members. Well we still plan on starting the club – it’s just taken a bit longer than we thought. We are redoing our website in the next month and once it’s done we will start the club. Please watch for an invitation. We are really excited to get this going.
Replay AV 8.2 – This latest version of Replay AV will include Applian Media Courier powered by YouSendIt: -a new feature that enables Replay AV customers to retrieve their recorded files anywhere they can access e-mail . Imagine being at work and getting an e-mail with a link to your favorite daily recording? Or being on vacation and listening to all your favorite shows?
Replay Converter with DVD Burning Capabilty: We are about to release a whole new version of Replay Converter with a brand new look and a great new feature – DVD burning! Replay Converter with DVD burning should be available early to mid summer. Thanks to this new feature you will be able to go from download to DVD in one easy step.
<Replay Media Catcher 2.10: This first-ever streaming Flash Video Recorder was released in February and we have already improved it. Replay Media Catcher now includes automatic naming of captured videos, and can record, recognize and tag streaming MP3 files too. Version 2.10 will have the ability to capture more MP3 streams, as well as extract MP3 tracks from Shoutcast radio stations. If you haven’t tried this super easy recorder yet – you should. Just remember the secret to using Replay Media Catcher is that you need to open the program and hit “start recording” BEFORE even going to the website that you want to record.
<Replay Music Fans: With the release of Windows Vista, the current recording method that Replay Music employs doesn’t work anymore. We understand this is frustrating. But we are very excited about a new technology under development that will restore audio recording capabilities to Vista.