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Advertising: Google, Seen as Print’s Nemesis, Is Honored by USA Today for Creativity

January 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The contest, the 2012 USA Today Print Advertising Competition, was announced on Oct. 1, in conjunction with a redesign of USA Today timed to coincide with the newspaper’s 30th anniversary. The winner of the contest is the Google Creative Lab unit of Google, which is known for, among other online innovations, Google News, a free aggregator of the content of newspapers like USA Today.

Executives of USA Today, which is owned by Gannett, are to discuss the results of the contest on Wednesday at a breakfast at the newspaper’s New York office.

The Google Creative Lab entry was one of three finalists in the contest, which attracted about 100 entries that were judged by six advertising and media executives. The winning ad promoted the Google Plus Hangout service as an alternative to meetings in person.

One runner-up was the Advertising Council in New York, for an ad from a campaign for Save the Children, which carried the theme “Every beat matters.” The campaign was created by BBDO New York, part of the BBDO Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group.

The other runner-up was Team Detroit, a WPP agency, for an ad for a new toy, Nanoblock, sold by the Ohio Art Company.

There are those who will applaud the outcome of the contest, which asked the entrants to submit print ads — existing or new — that they deemed their most creative. A company like Google, according to such people, ought to hear an “attaboy” or two when creating ads in print rather than online.

“I love the idea of using print to talk about a technology,” one judge, Tiffany Rolfe, said of the winning ad.

“To me, print is still an interesting medium,” said Ms. Rolfe, who is a partner and chief content officer at Co Collective in New York, an agency that works for USA Today. “We have to work harder now to use it effectively.”

However, others who hear how the contest turned out may wonder whether the winner will react — to paraphrase the old joke about dubious victories — by asking whether the second prize was $2 million worth of full-page newspaper ad space.

Larry Kramer, president and publisher at USA Today in McLean, Va., said he could see how people may consider it “hysterical” that Google has won a competition for creative print advertising.

But when Mr. Kramer saw the ad during the preliminary stages of the contest, he recalled, “I said, ‘That’s a winner,’ ” because the creators of the ad “understood the palette” that print offers to marketers and took advantage of the medium’s strengths.

As for the japes about Google as a destroyer of print media rather than a supporter, Mr. Kramer said, “Everything we say about Google, the nice thing is that they have to search something.”

The root of the contest was “a conversation I had with Michael Wolff when we were hiring him,” Mr. Kramer said, referring to the author and editor who became the media columnist for USA Today and also served as a judge of the competition, about how many “great, creative” print ads appeared during the Summer Olympics.

“I was upset that agencies weren’t doing enough print creative and putting their best and brightest people on digital platforms,” Mr. Kramer said. “I’m worried the skill set is atrophying and wanted to do something to remind the world that print creative matters.”

Another judge, Chuck Porter — chairman at Crispin Porter Bogusky in Miami and chief strategist at MDC Partners, which owns Crispin Porter — said: “It’s not that kids have totally given up on print. That’s kind of baloney. But I think people don’t pay as much attention to the craft of print as they used to.”

The winning ad, which ran in October, was simple. It reprinted a paragraph from a newspaper article reporting that the Dalai Lama had “scrapped plans” to attend the 80th birthday celebration of a fellow Nobel laureate, Desmond M. Tutu of South Africa, because his visa request was not granted.

The ad updated the article by crossing out words like “scrapped plans” and replacing them with “joined” and “via Hangout.”

Robert Wong, chief creative officer at the Google Creative Lab in New York, said he was “happily surprised to hear we’re a finalist.” (He and the other two finalists were interviewed last week, before they learned the winner.)

“Every medium has its strengths,” Mr. Wong said, and for print, they include immediacy, in that “a newspaper is good for news.” He added: “A full-page ad in a newspaper says the ad is important.”

The decision to enter the contest came after positive responses to the ad, which ran in The New York Times. “We were proud of the ad and said let’s send it in,” Mr. Wong said. “A million dollars is nothing to laugh at.”

Mr. Wong said the company would donate the $1 million worth of ad space to “people who need it,” adding, “Right now, the Sandy relief effort could probably use some help.”

The prize, Mr. Kramer of USA Today said, equals “roughly half a dozen pages” in the paper. USA Today may sponsor a similar contest this year, he added.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/business/media/google-seen-as-prints-nemesis-is-honored-by-usa-today-for-creativity.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Mobile Apps Drive Rapid Changes in Search Technology

January 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Google has repeatedly made the argument — and the commission agreed — that the speed of change in the technology industry made it impossible for regulators to impose restrictions without stalling future innovations.

Exhibit A is the mobile device. Nowhere has technology changed as rapidly and consumer behavior as broadly. As people abandon desktop computers for mobile ones, existing tech companies’ business models are being upended and new companies are blooming.

“Mobile is very much a moving target,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor of antitrust law at the University of Iowa who has been a paid adviser to Google. “This is a market in which new competitors come in a week’s time.”

When the commission began its investigation 19 months ago, for instance, the iPhone did not have the Siri voice search, Apple did not have its own mapping service and Yelp’s mobile apps had no ads. By the time the inquiry concluded, all of that had changed. Google had new competitors on all sides trying to chip away at its hold on the mobile search and advertising market.

Still, Google is even more dominant on mobile phones than on desktop computers. It has 96 percent of the world’s mobile search market, according to StatCounter, which tracks Web use. It collects 57 percent of mobile ad revenue in the United States, while Facebook, its nearest competitor, gets just 9 percent, according to eMarketer.

But, analysts say, as people change their search habits on mobile devices — bypassing Google to go straight to apps like Yelp’s, for example — that dominance could wane, or a competitor could swoop in and knock Google off its perch.

“It’s important to recognize that many mobile apps are really vertical search engines,” said Rebecca Lieb, a digital media analyst at the Altimeter Group. “It is impossible to really say anyone dominates a section of mobile in a secure way right now.”

On cellphones or tablets, for instance, people increasingly skip Google altogether in favor of apps like Flixster for movie times or Kayak for flights.

Apple is taking on mobile search with Siri on the iPhone, which can answer questions about the weather or search for nearby restaurants. With its new mapping service, Apple has also entered local search.

On Friday, Blekko, a search start-up, introduced an app called Izik for Apple and Android devices. It tries to make searching more tablet-friendly by showing images instead of just links, and making it easier to swipe through many pages of results with a finger.

On mobile devices, said Rich Skrenta, chief executive of Blekko, “the user experience is so different that we think it opens things up. On your desktop, if it doesn’t look like Google, you think that’s not a search engine. On a tablet, it’s just vastly different.”

Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the F.T.C., said at a news conference Thursday that the speed of change in the tech industry meant that “you want to be careful before you apply sanctions.”

The commission also considered Google’s partnerships with cellphone makers like Samsung and HTC that license Google search on phones, so that a search box shows up on the home screen. In the end it decided not to take action against Google.

Some Google critics said that even though the competitive landscape is different on mobile devices, it should not have influenced the government’s analysis of Google’s behavior on the desktop Web.

“There’s no doubt that mobile applications, including Yelp’s, give consumers the ability to bypass the major search engines and go directly to the best provider of the service they’re looking for,” said Vince Sollitto, vice president for government relations at Yelp. Still, he added, “I don’t see how that impacts how someone is acting anticompetitively on the desktop.”

(One of Google’s concessions to the federal agency, that it would allow other Web companies to ask Google not to show their content in its own vertical search products — a chief complaint of Yelp’s — applies to mobile as well.)

But others said antitrust enforcement in the 21st century needs to be more agile.

Nick Wingfield contributed reporting from Seattle.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/business/mobile-apps-drive-rapid-changes-in-search-technology.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Google’s Rivals Say F.T.C. Antitrust Ruling Missed the Point

January 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

But some critics of the inquiry now contend that the commission found no harm in Google’s actions because it was looking at the wrong thing.

Instead of considering harm to people who come to Google to search for information, Google’s competitors and their supporters say that the government should have been looking at whether Google’s actions harmed its real customers — the companies that pay billions of dollars each year to advertise on Google’s site.

In its reports, the F.T.C. did not detail how it defined harm or what quantitative measures it had used to determine that Google users were better off.

But interviews with people on all sides of the investigation — government officials, Google supporters, advocates for Microsoft and other competitors, and antitrust experts and economists — show that many of the yardsticks the commission used to measure its outcomes were remarkably similar to Google’s own. Not surprisingly, they cast Google in a favorable light.

At issue were changes that Google made in recent years to its popular search page. Google makes frequent adjustments to the formulas that determine what results are generated when a user enters a search. Currently, it makes more than 500 changes a year, or more than one each day.

Users rarely notice the changes in the formulas, or algorithms, that generate search results, but businesses do. If a change in the formulas causes a business to rank lower in the order of results generated by a search, it is likely to miss potential customers.

What customers are now seeing reflects changes in the format of Google results. For certain categories of searches — travel information, shopping comparisons and financial data, for example — Google has begun presenting links to its own related services.

People close to the investigation said that Google had presented the F.T.C. with the results of tests with focus groups hired by an outside firm to review different versions of a Google search results page. After Google acquired ITA, a travel search business, in 2011, it began testing a new way to display flight results.

The company asked test users to compare side-by-side examples of a results page with just the familiar 10 blue links to specialty travel sites with a page that had at the top a box containing direct links to airlines and fares.

People who reviewed the Google data said tests with hundreds of people showed that fewer than one in five users preferred the page with links only. Users said they liked the box of flight results, so Google reasoned that making the change was better for the consumer.

“There is a deep science to search evaluation,” Amit Singhal, a senior vice president who oversees Google’s search operation, said in an interview on Friday. “A lot of work goes into every change we make.”

But the changes were not better for companies or alternative travel sites that were pushed off the first page of results by Google’s flight box and associated links. By pushing links to competing sites lower, Google might be making things easier for people who come to it for free search. But it also is having a negative effect on competitors, shutting off traffic for those sites.

Drawing fewer customers as a result of Google’s free links, those competitors are forced to advertise more to draw traffic. And advertisers who aren’t competitors have fewer places to go to reach consumers, meaning Google can use its market power to raise advertising prices.

“There might be no consumer harm if Google eliminates Yelp,” said one Microsoft advocate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the likelihood of further interactions with the F.T.C. “But advertisers certainly are harmed.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/technology/googles-rivals-say-ftc-antitrust-ruling-missed-the-point.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Europe Likely to Be Harder on Google Over Search

January 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Few expect the European antitrust watchdog to be as lenient.

The Federal Trade Commission ruled Thursday that Google had not broken antitrust laws, after a 19-month inquiry into how it operates its search engine. But the European Commission, which is pursuing assertions that the company rigs results to favor its own businesses, operates according to a different standard.

The agreement with the American authorities, analysts and competition lawyers say, is unlikely to alter the demands of European regulators, led by the E.U. competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia.

“We have taken note of the F.T.C. decision, but we don’t see that it has any direct implications for our investigation, for our discussions with Google, which are ongoing,” said Michael Jennings, a spokesman for the European Commission in Brussels.

Faced with nearly $4 billion in possible penalties and restrictions on its business in Europe, Google in July submitted proposals to remedy the concerns of the European Commission, which covered four areas. In its deal with the F.T.C., Google made concessions in two of those areas but was not required to do so in the rest.

A Google spokesman, Al Verney, declined to comment on the content of the company’s proposals to Mr. Almunia but said it would “continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission.”

The Google case underscores a basic difference between the European and U.S. approaches to monopoly power. American antitrust regulators tend to focus on whether a company’s dominance is harmful to consumers; the European system seeks to maintain competitors in the market. Mr. Almunia has vowed to restore competition to the Internet search business in Europe.

“History shows that competition law is applied to monopoly power more stringently in the E.U. than in the U.S.,” said Jacques Lafitte, head of the competition practice at Avisa Partners, a consultancy in Brussels, who brought one of the original complaints against Google. “Whether the E.U. is right or not is a different question.”

Mr. Lafitte has some expertise in the matter. He is the former head of corporate affairs at Microsoft Europe and watched as that company did battle with regulators over its dominant computer operating system. Microsoft won a lenient settlement with the U.S. Justice Department in October 2001, he noted, only to be slapped with nearly €1.6 billion, or $2.1 billion, in E.U. fines and penalties from 2004 to 2008.

Google learned from Microsoft’s mistakes, engaging in discussions with both the U.S. and European authorities to reach a deal rather than fighting a desperate legal action. That approach appears to have paid off: Last month, after a meeting with Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, Mr. Almunia said that the sides had “substantially reduced our differences.”

In its deal with the F.T.C., Google agreed to make concessions in two areas that concern European regulators. In one, it will allow rivals to opt out of allowing Google to “scrape,” or copy, text from their sites. It is probable that Google will offer the same concession to European authorities.

But in a second area of European concern — whether Google deliberately favors its own content in search results — the F.T.C. did not require changes.

Mr. Almunia has also demanded that Google put fewer restrictions on advertising distribution deals, an area that his U.S. counterparts did not explore.

The company will make a detailed set of proposed remedies in January, after which the European Commission will allow the complainants to review them in a period of what is known as “market testing.” Antitrust lawyers say a final denouement could arrive by spring, depending on how hostile Google’s rivals are to the proposed remedies.

FairSearch, an alliance of Google rivals, accused the U.S. trade commission of rushing its decision. It said in a statement that closing the F.T.C. investigation “with only voluntary commitments from Google is disappointing and premature.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/05/technology/europe-likely-to-be-harder-on-google-over-search.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Tech Giants, Learning the Ways of Washington, Brace for More Scrutiny

January 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment

In 2012, among other victories, the industry staved off calls for federal consumer privacy legislation and successfully pushed for a revamp of an obscure law that had placed strict privacy protections on Americans’ video rental records. It also helped achieve a stalemate on a proposed global effort to let Web users limit behavioral tracking online, using Do Not Track browser settings.

But this year is likely to put that issue in the spotlight again, and bring intense negotiations between industry and consumer rights groups over whether and how to allow consumers to limit tracking.

Congress is likely to revisit online security legislation — meant to safeguard critical infrastructure from attack — that failed last year. And a looming question for Web giants will be who takes the reins of the Federal Trade Commission, the industry’s main regulator, this year. David C. Vladeck, the director of the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, has resigned, and there have been suggestions that its chairman, Jon Leibowitz, would step down.

The agency is investigating Google over possible antitrust violations and will subject Facebook to audits of its privacy policy for the next 20 years. Its next steps could serve as a bellwether of how aggressively the commission will take on Web companies in the second Obama administration.

“Now that the election is over, Silicon Valley companies each are thinking through their strategy for the second Obama administration,” said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University and a former White House privacy official. “The F.T.C. will have a new Democratic chairman. A priority for tech companies will be to discern the new chair’s own priorities.”

In early 2012, an unusual burst of lobbying by tech companies helped defeat antipiracy bills, which had been backed by the entertainment industry. Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google feared that the bills would force them to police the Internet.

At the end of the year, Silicon Valley also got its way when the Obama administration stood up against a proposed global treaty that would have given government authorities greater control over the Web.

The key to the industry’s successes in 2012 was simple: it expanded its footprint in Washington just as Washington began to pay closer attention to how technology companies affect consumers. “Privacy and security became top-tier important policy issues in Washington in 2012,” said David A. Hoffman, director of security policy and global privacy officer at Intel.

“Industry has realized it is important to be engaged,” he continued, “to make sure government stakeholders are fully informed and educated about the role that new technology plays and to make sure any action taken doesn’t unnecessarily burden the innovation economy while still protecting individual trust in new technology.”

At the end of 2012, tech companies were on track to have spent record amounts on lobbying for the year. In the first three quarters, they spent close to $100 million, which meant that they were likely to surpass the $127 million they spent on lobbying in 2011, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based nonpartisan group that tracks corporate spending. Even the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz hired a lobbyist in Washington: Adrian Fenty, a former mayor of the city.

Technology executives and investors also made generous contributions in the 2012 presidential race, luring both President Obama and Mitt Romney to Northern California for fund-raisers and nudging them to speak out on issues like immigration overhaul and lower tax rates.

In a blog post in November, the center said Silicon Valley’s lobbying expenditures have ballooned in recent years, even as spending by other industries has fallen.

Facebook more than doubled its lobbying outlay in the year, reporting close to $2.6 million through the third quarter of 2012. Google spent more than any other company in the industry, doling out more than $13 million in the same period and more than double its nearest competitor, Microsoft, which spent just over $5.6 million in the same period.

Among Google’s advocates on Capitol Hill is a former Republican congresswoman, Susan Molinari, who heads Google’s office in Washington.

Google has particular reason to be engaged. It faces a wide-reaching antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, just as Microsoft did a decade ago. At issue is whether Google’s search engine results favor Google products over its rivals’.

Although the agency was ready to settle that case before the holidays, without harsh remedies, late last month it shelved the inquiry and put stronger penalties back in play. A resolution is expected in January.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/technology/tech-giants-learning-the-ways-of-washington-brace-for-more-scrutiny.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Google Apps Moving Onto Microsoft’s Business Turf

December 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Google’s software for businesses, Google Apps, consists of applications for document writing, collaboration, and text and video communications — all cloud-based, so that none of the software is on an office worker’s computer. Google has been promoting the idea for more than six years, and it seemed that it was going to appeal mostly to small businesses and tech start-ups.

But the notion is catching on with larger enterprises. In the last year Google has scored an impressive string of wins, including at the Swiss drug maker Hoffmann-La Roche, where over 80,000 employees use the package, and at the Interior Department, where 90,000 use it.

One big reason is price. Google charges $50 a year for each person using its product, a price that has not changed since it made its commercial debut, even though Google has added features. In 2012, for example, Google added the ability to work on a computer not connected to the Internet, as well as security and data management that comply with more stringent European standards. That made it much easier to sell the product to multinationals and companies in Europe.

Many companies that sell software over the cloud add features without raising prices, but also break from traditional industry practice by rarely offering discounts from the list price.

Microsoft’s Office suite of software, which does not include e-mail, is installed on a desktop PC or laptop. In 2013, the list price for businesses will be $400 per computer, but many companies pay half that after negotiating a volume deal.

At the same time, Microsoft has built its business on raising prices for extra features and services. The 2013 version of Office, for example, costs up to $50 more than its predecessor.

“Google is getting traction” on Microsoft, said Melissa Webster, an analyst with IDC. “Its ‘good enough’ product has become pretty good. It looks like 2013 is going to be the year for content and collaboration in the cloud.”

Microsoft has also jumped on the office-in-the-cloud trend. In June 2011, it released Office 365, and now offers its software in both a cloud version and a hybrid version that uses cloud computing and conventional servers. Office 365 starts at a list price of $72 a year, per person, and can cost as much as $240 a person annually, in versions that offer many more features and software development capabilities. Microsoft says it offers more than Google for the money, but the product has not won many converts from Google.

In a recent report, Gartner, the information technology research company, called Google “the only strong competitor” to Microsoft in cloud-based business productivity software, though it warned that “enterprise concerns may not be of paramount importance to the search giant.”

Google is tight-lipped about how many people use Google Apps, saying only that in June more than five million businesses were using it, up from four million in late 2011. Almost all these companies are tiny, but in early December Google announced that even companies with fewer than 10 employees, which used to get Google Apps free, would have to pay.

Google’s revenue from Apps, according to a former executive who asked not to be named in order to maintain good relations with Google, amounted to perhaps $1 billion of the $37.9 billion Google earned in 2011.

Shaw Industries, a carpet maker in Dalton, Ga., with about 30,000 employees, switched to Google Apps this year for communication tools like e-mail and videoconferencing. Jim Nielsen, the company’s manager of enterprise technology, calculated that using Google instead of similar Microsoft products would cost, over seven years, about one-thirteenth Microsoft’s price.

Shaw is a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, run by Warren E. Buffett, but the close friendship of Mr. Buffett and Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates, did not sway Mr. Nielsen. “When you add it up, the numbers are pretty compelling,” he said.

In addition to the lower price, Google has simplicity in pricing. Mr. Nielsen said he had to sort through 11 pricing models to figure out what he would pay Microsoft.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/technology/google-apps-moving-onto-microsofts-business-turf.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Bits Blog: Google Antitrust Case Is Said to Be Nearing End

December 17, 2012 by Leave a Comment

10:08 p.m. | Updated Adding that Google and the F.T.C. declined to comment.

In the talks between the Federal Trade Commission and Google to negotiate the terms for ending the agency’s antitrust investigation, things seem to be going Google’s way, two people who have been briefed on the discussions said Sunday.

A key issue in the talks, accusations that Google biases its search results to favor its own services, has been taken off the table, said the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are continuing.

As the negotiations now stand, Google would make a set of voluntary commitments. In addition, it would be sued and sign a consent decree, agreeing to license patents deemed essential for wireless communications on reasonable terms.

But the patent issue is a late entrant to the case. Subpoenas that the F.T.C. staff began sending to Internet companies last year laid out a wide-ranging investigation focusing on Google’s conduct in the search business.

The commission’s decision on the Google investigation is expected within days. If the government scrutiny concludes without addressing the accusation that Google’s search engine favors its own commerce services like shopping and local listings over rivals, it would represent a considerable narrowing of the ambitions of the original inquiry.

Politico reported on Saturday that the talks had moved away from search, adding details to reports that Google was resisting a consent decree in that area.

Google, according to the two people, has agreed to voluntarily refrain from copying summaries of product and restaurant reviews from other Web sites and including them in Google search results, a practice known as “screen scraping.”

The company would also agree to make it easier for advertisers to transfer their product, pricing and bidding data to competing ad networks, including Microsoft’s Bing search-and-ad service, the two people said.

Google, they said, would also refrain from striking exclusive deals with Web sites to use and feature Google’s search service.

Google declined to comment on the details of a settlement Sunday. It has said it was continuing to cooperate with regulators. A representative for the F.T.C. also declined to comment.

Google is also under investigation by the European Commission, which this year listed accusations of search bias as the first of four areas of Google’s conduct that it was investigating.

A version of this article appeared in print on 12/17/2012, on page A18 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Google Antitrust Case Nearing End.

Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/google-antitrust-case-is-said-to-be-nearing-end/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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E.U. and Google to Discuss Antitrust Issues

December 17, 2012 by Leave a Comment

BRUSSELS — The European Union’s top antitrust regulator is expected to meet with Google executives early this week as settlement talks between the search giant and the U.S. authorities gain momentum.

The Europeans have been seeking a settlement with Google since May, and Joaquín Almunia, the Union’s competition commissioner, and Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, have met on previous occasions trying to reach an accord.

But the Europeans have been pressing Google harder than their U.S counterparts to address accusations that the company biases its search results to favor its own services like mapping and online shopping. That makes the expected talks between Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Almunia particularly delicate.

The two men could meet as soon as Tuesday, according to a person with knowledge of the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity as the meeting was to be private.

While Google is the dominant search engine in the United States, it holds even greater sway in Europe, accounting for more than 90 percent of searches in a number of major markets. That could leave rivals like Microsoft scope to try to set some rules — at least in the European Union, where regulators often rely more on complaints by competitors than in the United States — for how Google ranks competing services.

After a two-year inquiry, Mr. Almunia said in May that Google might have abused its dominance in Internet search and advertising, giving its own products an advantage over those of rivals.

“Google displays links to its own vertical search services differently than it does for links to competitors,” Mr. Almunia said in a statement then. “We are concerned that this may result in preferential treatment compared to those of competing services, which may be hurt as a consequence.”

The accusation that Google biases its search results to favor its own services, which originally was a main issue in the U.S. talks, has been taken off the table there, two people who have been briefed on those discussions said Sunday. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations were continuing.

Google has consistently maintained that it offers a neutral, best-for-the-customer result.

Mr. Almunia said in May that Google would need to propose a plan within weeks for changes to various practices, including how it links to competitors’ services. Google made its first formal settlement proposal in July, but the talks have dragged on since.

In September, Mr. Almunia signaled that there were limits to how much longer his office would try to negotiate. But early this month, Mr. Almunia appeared to take a softer tone, saying that time was needed to conclude “conversations” with Google that were going on “quite intensively.”

If Mr. Almunia ultimately accepts a settlement offer, Google would avoid a possible fine of as much as 10 percent of its annual global revenue, about $37.9 billion last year. It would also avoid a guilty finding that could restrict its business activities in Europe.

A settlement would offer advantages for Mr. Almunia, too. He has sought to speed up resolution of antitrust cases to prevent them from dragging out, particularly in the fast-changing technology marketplace, where proposed remedies often rapidly lose their relevance.

As negotiations stand in the U.S. case, Google would make a set of voluntary commitments, the two people briefed on those discussions said.

Google, according to the people, has agreed to refrain from copying summaries of product and restaurant reviews from other Web sites and including them in Google search results, a practice known as screen scraping.

The company would also agree to make it easier for advertisers to transfer data on products, pricing and bidding to Google’s competitors, including Bing from Microsoft, the two people said. Google, they said, would also refrain from striking exclusive deals with Web sites to use Google’s search service.

In addition, Google would sign a consent decree, agreeing to license patents deemed essential for wireless communications on reasonable terms, the two people said. The patent issue is a late entrant to the case. Subpoenas that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission started sending to Internet companies last year laid out a wide-ranging investigation focusing on Google’s conduct in the search business. The Web site Politico reported Saturday that the talks had moved away from search, adding details to reports that Google was resisting a consent decree in that area.

Steve Lohr reported from New York.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/technology/eu-and-google-to-discuss-antitrust-issues.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: The Breakfast Meeting: Debating Torture in ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ and a Food Blogger Breaks Out

December 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

“Zero Dark Thirty,” about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, won’t open in movie theaters until Wednesday, but it is already dividing screening audiences for its depiction of torture by the United States, and its suggestion that brutal treatment may have produced useful early clues to catching Bin Laden, Scott Shane reports. A new Senate report on C.I.A. interrogations, which has been criticized by the Republican minority, has found that brutal treatment was not “a central component” in finding Bin Laden; the film’s screenwriter, Mark Boal, explained that he was “to compress a program that lasted for years into a few short scenes.” Those scenes, he said, attempted “to reflect a very complex debate about torture that is still going on” and showed that brutal treatment produced both true and false information.

After enduring Apple’s own flawed map service, iPhone users on Thursday were able to download an app for Google Maps, which used to come installed on iPhones. The rare stumble by Apple as it attempted to supplant Google in an area it excels at offered both companies a chance to play for an advantage, Nick Wingfield writes. Would Google purposely withhold its app in order to weaken the iPhone and thus help smartphones that work on its own Android operating system? Would Apple delay the introduction of Google Maps in order to keep a hold on a critical, and potentially lucrative, feature of its phone? In the end, both sides saw the advantage in making the user’s experience better, Mr. Wingfield writes.

  • In his review of the new app, David Pogue calls it a “home run” and is blown away by the many new features that have been incorporated into the app, including Street View, which lets you see a picture of an address. He also praises its emphasis on walking directions and public transportation options, in addition to driving:

It’s a lot of features. The big question: How well did Google cram them in without sinking the app with featuritis? This, it turns out, is the best news of all. The brand-new, completely rethought design is slick, simple and coherent. Google admits that it’s even better than Google Maps for Android phones, which has accommodated its evolving feature set mainly by piling on menus.

There was more news from Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper holdings, Amy Chozick reports, including the decision of the editor of The Times of London, James Harding, to step down to clear the way for a new editor. Under the leadership of Mr. Harding, who is considered a golden boy of British journalism, the newspaper took a relatively unstinting stance against its parent company’s handling of the hacking scandal, and speculation arose that this decision may have lead to his ouster.

  • Also on Wednesday, it was revealed that Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of Mr. Murdoch’s News International who has been charged in the phone-hacking scandal, had received a $17.6 million severance package.

The French actor Gérard Depardieu was criticized by his country’s government for moving to nearby Belgium, apparently seeking the warmth of a lower tax rate, Scott Sayare writes from Paris. The recently elected Socialist government has imposed a 75 percent marginal tax rate for incomes above 1 million euros, or $1.3 million. Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault linked Mr. Depardieu’s move to the tax rate, saying in a TV interview that the decision was “rather pathetic,” adding “He’s a great star, everyone loves him as an artist,” but that “to pay a tax is an act of solidarity, a patriotic act.”

Joe L. Allbritton, who built Allbritton Communications, which owns TV stations in Washington and a half-dozen other cities, died in Houston on Tuesday, Robert D. Hershey Jr. reports. His son, Robert, now heads the company and in 2007 founded Politico, the news Web site and newspaper devoted to politics.

In nine years of running a food blog, SmittenKitchen.com, Deb Perelman has built up a devoted following, Leslie Kaufman writes. They appreciate her conversational, self-deprecating writing style, and her coping with a cramped, urban kitchen, all of which can resonate with  young women learning to cook. In October, she took the next step, releasing a cookbook — and though she never trained as a chef or even worked in a restaurant, her “The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook” debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times’s best-seller list for hardcover advice and miscellaneous. She has stayed in the Top 5 ever since, where she is accompanied by Ina Garten of “Barefoot Contessa” fame and the chef Thomas Keller.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/the-breakfast-meeting-debating-torture-in-zero-dark-thirty-and-a-food-blogger-breaks-out/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: Four Old Spice Ads Make YouTube’s List of Most Popular Ads of 2012

December 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Billions of times during 2012, Americans did something voluntarily that they dislike doing when they don’t have the choice: watch a commercial.

The YouTube division of Google has released its annual list of the Top 20 commercials watched on YouTube. As usual, the list, which came out Thursday morning, is an eclectic mix of spots, many from so-called event TV programs like the Super Bowl and others that began as online video clips.

Whatever the origin of the commercials, once again consumers demonstrated that they will gladly watch a commercial if it is their choice to do so.

The list, called the YouTube 2012 Ads Leaderboard, underscores that point with the subheading, “Ads People Choose.”

The list was compiled, according to YouTube, using a combination of factors that signaled viewer choice, including number of views and the view rate, how much of the spot the viewers decided to watch.

Of the 20 commercials, Old Spice, sold by Procter Gamble, had the most, four, followed by Nike and Volkswagen, with two apiece.

The automotive category dominated the Top 20, taking eight slots — nine if you count the Hot Wheels miniature cars sold by Mattel.

Among the commercials on the list that were first broadcast in February, during Super Bowl XLVI, were one of the two Volkswagen ads, along with spots for Honda, Audi, Toyota and Chevrolet. The much-discussed Chrysler commercial featuring Clint Eastwood, which appeared during halftime of the game, also made the list. (The other Volkswagen spot on the list was Super Bowl-related, serving as a teaser for the brand’s Super Bowl commercial.)

“My Time Is Now,” a Nike soccer commercial for the 2012 European Football Championship, known as Euro 2012, was tops on the leader board, with almost 20.9 million views.

A Pepsi Max spot that began online, with the basketball star Kyrie Irving as an elderly “Uncle Drew,” was No. 2, with 17.8 million, followed by a Volkswagen Super Bowl teaser spot, with 17.7 million; a spot for the Samsung Galaxy S III sold by Samsung Mobile USA, with 16.9 million; and the Honda Super Bowl commercial, paying tribute to “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” with 16.3 million.

Of the 20 commercials, the agency with the most creative work on the list was Wieden Kennedy, with seven, for Nike, Chrysler and Old Spice.

Wieden Kennedy tied with Starcom for the most media work; each had four spots on the list. (One of Starcom’s four commercials, for Hot Wheels, was a shared media assignment with 360i.)

The YouTube list is one of several coming out this week as part of the usual end-of-year reckoning for marketing, media and advertising.

The TiVo Research and Analytics subsidiary of TiVo issued a report on Thursday that sought to measure the effectiveness of six weeks’ worth of commercials on broadcast television promoting the new series that the networks added to their lineups for the 2012-13 season.

The most effective promotional spots, according to TiVo, were for “Elementary,” an hourlong drama at 10 p.m. Eastern time Thursdays on CBS.

Based on data from the TiVo PowerWatch ratings service, gathered from a panel of 45,000 TiVo subscribers, “Elementary” achieved a promotion conversion score of 26.2 percent — that is, viewers watched three on-air spots and then tuned in for the premiere episode of the series.

Of the top five new series in terms of the TiVo promotion conversion rates, three — “Elementary”; No. 2, “Revolution,” on NBC; and No. 3, “Arrow,” on CW — have received orders for the full season.

No. 4 on the list, “The Mindy Project” on Fox, is awaiting word about whether it will be renewed. However, No. 5, “666 Park Avenue,” on ABC, has been canceled.

And two experts in the realm of what is known as viral video are releasing a list of the top 10 branded or sponsored viral videos of 2012. The list is subjective, based on what they consider qualities like authenticity, brevity and “humanity.”

The experts, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, are behind Eepybird, an early viral phenomenon that was centered on videos showing the explosive results of mixing Diet Coke and Mentos. The list is in conjunction with a new book they wrote, “The Viral Video Manifesto: Why Everything You Know Is Wrong and How to Do What Really Works.”

The top video on the Grobe-Voltz list promoted the TNT cable channel in Belgium with surprise staging of dramatic events on city streets, based on the channel’s theme, “Add more drama.”

No. 2 on their list was the now-familiar video sponsored by Red Bull that chronicled the supersonic free fall of Felix Baumgartner. The video is also a highlight of another look back at 2012 that came out this week, the Google Zeitgeist report.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/four-old-spice-ads-make-youtubes-list-of-most-popular-ads-of-2012/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,
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