Last year Nintendo amazed us with their WarioLand Ad on YouTube featuring their clever WII console. This year one of my favorite brands (recently), HONDA, is doing something similar on the more and more popular VIMEO.

Please sit back and enjoy the HONDA INSIGHT COMMERCIAL!

The first 4 months on the Romanian online advertising industry showed that more and more advertisers are willing to use large advertising formats for displaying rich-media ads. This is the new trend and the main reasons for this are:

- increased exposure on the visuals and also better click rates
- large formats proved to be more cost effective than the standard formats (which are well known, with the click rates decreasing every year)
- more space available for product/service description (a big plus on creativity)
- the NEW! factor involved (most of the Romanian websites not using very often these formats, although some publishers are including large ad spaces into their sales offer)

The preferred large formats to be used are:
- 300×600 (half page ad – examples above again GSP.RO being a trendsetter in this area)
- 728×180 (double-leaderboard)
- 336×280 (large-box)
- 950×100 sticky (sticky stripe)

The No. 1 sports website in Romania, GSP.RO is becoming from today more usable, offering advanced customization to the users. Gusti, Mirel and the team, they’ve made a statement through these changes; the statement is that it’s not only about how BIG you are (in terms of traffic), but also how much added-value you bring to your users.

Shortly, the changes made are the following:

• A new HEADER, now containing the search box and advanced filtering criteria
• Content Customization – the user can choose its own interest area and the content will match this option (e.g.: if I’m only interested in Tenis and all related, I can choose Tenis in the customization box and every time I will enter GSP.RO the news that I will find on homepage will feature TENIS).
• When a user reads some news these will be marked as such, meaning that when the user comes back to the homepage he will not see those news and he can determine much faster whether there are new titles on the page or not
• New comments layout, including a picture of each user favorite team, choice of reporting comments, direct messaging between users, etc.

Congrats to the GSP team of developers for the efforts in increasing usability and content quality for the users!

The announcement can be found on Gazeta Online’s blog and also on Gusti Roman’s blog.

THAT’S A MUST HEAR/SEE!!! Thanks Manafu for the info (via Twitter)

Remember all those Geocities! websites full of info and personal pages, some 6-7 years ago? Yeah, me too! I’ve found lyrics, recipes, (sometimes) links to illegal software and very often personal pages.

Now, it seems that Yahoo! decided to let go of this service, probably as a response to the economic crisis and probably also for the failure in positioning correctly this great (at that time) service. Yahoo! decided this week that the service will no longer accept new customers and that will close somewhere at the end of this year. Of course, as any company with client service, Yahoo! stated that it will provide a strategy for the users to retrieve their content from the pages (just as they did when they shut down Yahoo! Photos and offered the option to move them to Flickr, service that I’m not using any more – Picasa rullz!)

What hurts indeed in this closure of Geocities is the fact that Yahoo! payed 4.6 billion (!!!) USD in ‘99, when they acquired the service. Of course, the transaction was made mostrly with stock options, but… 4.6 billion is still 4.6 billion.

Anyway, as an exercise for the mind: just imagine how will the social networking market would look like if the 3.5 million hosted websites (in the ’90s!!!) should have been integrated/updated with the actual social tools (profiles, blogs, comments, etc etc)..

(source:REUTERS)