14 DAY TRIAL // The Digital Media Owners Image Survey that was conveyed by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) turned back some ugly numbers for Google regarding the overall experience of UK agencies dealing with digital media owners, numbers that were better kept hidden from the Mountain View giant.
Much to its surprise, only 17% of the respondents mentioned that dealing with YouTube was a beneficial experience for them, leading to an immediate response from a Google spokesman that strongly claimed that further investing in YouTube's ad offering is imminent and necessary. The only hope I have is that they'll think of other ways to go about it than the "strength in numbers" idea that it once had.
The advertising on YouTube is an attempt to get back some of the 1.65 billion dollars that Google paid for the online video sharing service and so far, it looks like it isn't in the hot spot of bringing nearly as close a revenue as that. Nigel Gwilliam, head of the digital at the IPA said about YouTube that "It has offered appalling service and has finished behind a rival, Facebook, that doesn't even have a UK office and has faced industry scandal regarding BNP ads." Nevertheless, he acknowledged that "it is still very early days for the YouTube advertising platform", he said. "And contact with agencies will increase as we build a dedicated infrastructure to meet the needs of the market."
Fortunately it was not all bad for Google, some of the numbers returned showed its biggest search rival, Yahoo!, plummeted from 44.7% to 25.7%, huge drop probably caused by the numerous clashes over the product launch of the paid search platform Panama and its launch handling.
Gwilliam concludes that "The only story in search is that Yahoo! has fallen off a cliff. MSN is improving but Yahoo! is clearly going the wrong way. Service to agencies is suffering because of internal changes there and it has become a real problem for them."