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Tetra Threat Framework

The Tetra Threat Model was proposed by Ghemawat. It tries to identify what factors are significant in each threat category and how their impact can be reduced. This model was selected to identify what are the threats to the business as it grows and tries to sustain itself among the other forms of advertising media. It is valuable to analyse internet advertising using this model to look into what impact each threat category has on the business.

Threat of Imitation

This occurs due to the possibility of copying of the competitive advantage sources by the rival firm. The business model for online advertising is susceptible to imitation. Similar architectures can be used by competitors for their advantage. The resources required to imitate is blocked by the resource and knowledge investment required to be made. The economies of scale forces can also deter imitation as the mechanism becomes more efficient and profitable when used for large repository of websites and per website effort goes down. Due to the expertise in various areas like server technology, cloud offerings etc., the scope economies also deter the imitation of web advertising efforts

Threat of Substitution

The substitution of the anti-malware practices at Google and Microsoft is lowering in importance as the audience gets more receptive about online protection. The supply side volumes keep on increasing as more and more websites are put for review. It has a direct correlation to the popularity of the platform. There is a strong demand side pressure from publishers and other ad networks which want to display ads serviced by the publishers. There is a broad focus on catching all kinds of malware attacks through the online advertisement vector. Also the offering is for all kinds of customer groups.

Threat of Slack

The threat of slack appears when the resources of the web advertising system are left idle and not used to their full capacity. This may happen due to the bottlenecks in the system e.g. the system waits for user intervention, manual reviews, publisher to make changes to the website, waiting for the publisher to respond to a system generated request etc. Slack may also occur if the hardware committed to the system is not utilized to its full potential. Slack can be blocked by increasing the frequency in which the scans are run, increasing the depth of scanning of websites, integration of scoring from automated systems, allowing to factor in the finding of independent malware protection sites, reducing dependency in manual review by automation, SLA for publisher or advertiser responses after which some default action can be initiated etc.

Threat of Holdup

This threat can occur when the key resources of the system can be held up by other stakeholders without adding to the productivity and possibly in a loss for the whole system.  The threat is low at the supply side as all the ads created in the system are candidates for an automated review process. In the demand side, holdup can occur when the primary consumers of ads i.e. the publishers and other ad networks prefer competitor offerings compared to Ad Center and apply pressure to control prices, influence policies etc. This can be blocked by signaling research initiatives and significant online protection advantage by building strategic partnerships by industry leaders in malware protection, alliance with online malware clearing houses, gathering public trust by publicizing these initiatives etc.

Microsoft’s AdCenter (or AdQuality) is a competitor to the Google Advertising programs like AdSense. After the integration of the Yahoo-Microsoft search allinace and the advertising framework, it is still a distant No. 2 behind the Google offerings. It makes sense to study the Microsoft offering from the perspective of the 4P Marketing Mix. It would help in determining the unique selling point of the product or offering.

Product

For the Microsoft Ad Quality group, the anti-malware product would interact with the customers who include the advertisers, publishers and end users or customers. They are important to the sustenance of the AdCenter business.

Advertisers:

The UI displayed to the advertisers should be simple to use and navigate. It should have a feedback mechanism built in to guide the user in case of any errors. The system should have a online tool that checks for

a)                          Prohibited Items (guns, marijuana) and alert the advertiser if the ad text matches any of these.

b)                         Check for landing page URL against a blacklist. If the page is found to be malicious, the system should alert the user and prohibit further ad creation. The system may have an option to have an online ticket to be raise from the advertiser account so that a manual review be scheduled

c)                          The system should display a policy guideline to the advertiser. This would include what can be advertised and what are the action steps if an ad is found which does not comply to these guidelines

Publishers:

a)                 The product should provide guidelines to the publisher to guard against malwares

b)                 An option to filter out ads that so not match the publisher preference in the UI

c)                 The publisher can be provided about the summary statistics including malware scan   reports for the ads displayed on their sites

End Users:

a)                An option to report ads shown to the user. The user can click on an option next to the ad and fill up a report. Based on the report elements, the automated scanning can run to flag issues.

b)              Option to hide ads that the user does not wish to see. This can be displayed in the case of bounce backs as well as in a management page.

c)               To increase the credibility, it adds value to have a PR campaign around the malware protection available in Bing ads. A secure batch in collaboration with the partners can be displayed in Bing results page. Such partnerships can be looked into (esp. Symantec AdVantage etc.)

d)             The ads should not be displayed to the users unless they are scanned by the automated system.

The system has to undergo vigorous testing for UI and backend functionality. Integrating statistical updates and reports in a smartphone friendly format can also add value to the customers. Addition of graphic elements like charts depicting revenue information depending upon CPC rates, expected customer volumes, keyword rates  etc. can help the customers make better decisions while making the application easy to use.

Price

The product pricing has to be competitive. This has to factor in various elements like competitor pricing, market share, customer demographics, publishers etc. If a premium is to be charged, it has to be backed by logical reasons like – publisher repute, exposure required, level of anti-malware protection that Microsoft offers compared to competitors, type of display etc. Differential pricing approach can be employed. This would include difference in pricing for a corporate user vs. a personal user, location of the user, past transactions with Microsoft Advertising, reputation score of the user, targeted customer group for the user etc.

Place

The place for utilizing the anti-malware solution of the Ad Quality group is the tool for advertisers and publishers. The features of the solution can integrate seamlessly in the ad creation experience. The anti-malware solution can act when the ad is created and served and the originator is offline as well. The tool is exposed to the end user as well in form of an interface to report spam, scam or malware ads.

Promotion

The promotional events for anti-malware offering should be integrated with the Bing promotions. The objective is to showcase Bing as one of the safest ad platforms for its customers. The promotion events may include option to reward users who report malware ads, find security holes in the advertising UI. Sponsorship of hacking events, secure computing forums, multimedia advertising consisting of online, in print and TV media focusing on the security features etc. can help in building brand credibility about the protection features of Bing Advertising.

This policy was developed by Google to help protect users from ads, websites, and businesses that appear to be generally deceptive or misleading, and/or violate its terms and conditions. Under this initiative, Google has the following policy:

• Does not allow illegal products – e.g. counterfeit goods
• Does not allow harmful products – e.g. cigarettes, guns
• Does not allow misleading claims – lose weight guaranteed
• Does not allow work from home scams

Google AdWords requires that advertisers provide transparency into the business/product that’s being promoted. Google also requires that advertisers set realistic expectations about what their products and services can do for their users. Therefore, Google requires that all its advertisers adhere to the following:

• They should use it to promote products together with credible, realistic, and reasonable claims
• Make sure that disclaimers and announcements as required by local legislation are included as a part of the landing page content – In several cases, certain service providers are mandated by government regulations to include specific texts in their ads. For example, advertising related to alcohol
• To provide accurate information to the users regarding the risks associated with their offering – for example, if large financial gains are claimed by a website, it should be clear to the user what kind of money and time needs to be invested to get these results
• Third party verification content should be linked to the website. It is also advised to include relevant and easy to find disclaimers when testimonials and endorsements imply that results are typical
• Include links to third-party accreditation/endorsement where affiliation is implied – for example, if a website claims to be affiliated with a governmental agency, a link to verification of this affiliation should be included. Use of “gov” or “government” in display URLs and/or use of government emblems may imply affiliation with a government agency and should be verified.
• Google AdWords doesn’t allow the sale of items that are otherwise available for free. It also doesn’t allow the sale of government forms or services that are free or available for a lower price on the government site.
• It also doesn’t allow the promotion of websites that are suspected to use phishing techniques. “Phishing” is an attempt to obtain users’ personal information by disguising their website to look like another website.

If a website collects sensitive personal information, it must be hosted on a secure server that uses SSL (https). The following information is considered to be sensitive personal information:

• Credit and debit card numbers
• Bank and investment account numbers
• Checking account numbers
• Wire transfer numbers
• National identity, pension, social security, or health care numbers

Google has come up with various tools that are handy for the e-marketer to protect their websites from malicious attackers. They help to detect whether the online ad refers to a page that can insert malicious content to the user’s machine and compromise its security. It is imperative that the website for a brand shows ads that are clean from any malicious elements.

Google Safe Browsing API

The Safe Browsing API is an initiative by Google to maintain a blacklist of malicious websites. It can be downloaded locally to the user browser or may be connected to the list online. Google downloads a list of information to the user browser about sites that may contain malicious software or engage in phishing. To save space and to avoid giving out URLs to malware and phishing websites, the lists contain enough information in most cases to verify that if a site is phishing or malware, but does not contain enough information to definitively say if the site is phishing or malware. If the URL of the site the user is on matches anything in the list, the browser will contact Google’s servers for more information to make a decision. When user’s computer contacts Google to get more details about the specific URL fragment or update the list, it stores information from the computer including IP address, referrer header and a cookie. Google protects against targeted spear phishing attacks from unknown sources by analyzing the content on the site.

Google Safe Browsing Diagnostic Tool

The safe browsing diagnostic tool is an online implementation of the API. It is used to check if the website the user is trying to visit is known to host malware or carry out phishing attacks. The information returned includes:

a) The current listing status of a site and also information on how often a site or parts of it were listed in the past.

b) The last time Google analyzed the page, when it was last malicious, what kind of malware Google encountered etc.

c) Did the site facilitate the distribution of malicious software in the past?

d) Also, has the site has hosted malicious software in the past?

The user needs to enter the address of the site to get an analysis. For example for the user may enter the following URL in the browser:

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=<addr> to get the response as in the screenshot.

SYNOPSIS:

The marketers feel a need for a book that helps them build on their capability to integrate with the internet paradigm. The learning points can act as gap fillers to help them better understand the internet medium and to devise strategies for tapping it. There are many books available which address this subject. I would like to review once such book that is available freely online. The Essential Step By Step Guide to Internet Marketing is a good read written by Internet evangelist Pamela Vaughan and published by HubSpot. HubSpot is a marketing software company located in Massachusetts, US.

The author assumes that the reader has a basic understanding of the marketing field. This includes understanding the marketing mix. The purpose of the book is to give an introduction to how business can integrate the internet into their marketing efforts.

The book begins with discussing the keyword strategy for web advertisers. Keywords are very important for advertisements as they are used by search engines to find whether a particular website is relevant. Advertisers try to match the keywords with the phrases that they assume the potential customers to enter in a search engine like Google and Bing.

A proper keyword strategy is very important for the marketer. If the keyword is relevant to what the customer is searching for, the page containing the advertiser’s item details or the advertisement will be displayed. It is important to note that the advertiser may want the customer to see a particular page when a search query is entered or he may want a certain advertisement to be displayed that matches the search query. The second case is about paid search advertising while the first is the organic search results. The keyword strategy in both the cases is similar.

There are several key things that need to be considered why drafting the keyword strategy. The book also highlights these points. First, the keyword should be relevant to the product being sought for, the theme of the site, the core elements of the company, or the solution that the company or advertiser perceives to provide to the customer. Irrelevant keywords result in high bounce rates, customer dissatisfaction, loss of credibility and anxiety. The marketer should make sure that the keyword policy is taken care of. Keyword research is often employed to find the most relevant keywords. The competitiveness of the keywords chosen by the marketer can be assessed by online tools like Google Keyword Tool or HubSpot.

Secondly, it is important to design the web experience around these keywords and place them in locations that make it easier for web search engines to find them. By using a process called search engine optimization or SEO, the marketers can provide clues to the web designers to put the keywords in specific portions of the web page.  Examples can be including the keywords in portions of the webpage like Meta, Head etc. The keywords should small, optimally less than 70 characters long. This helps in readability in web search results, and also is easier for the system to match with user queries. Tools like MarketingGrader assign a score to the website and help to find if it is optimized in the keyword strategy.

It sometimes gives a false belief that having keyword stuffing may help the website to get a higher rank in organic search results or in paid search listings. Web marketers should avoid keyword stuffing, which is having the keywords repeated all over the web page. The search engines are optimized to detect these and they disregard them. Also it is a bad user experience.

The SEO can be improved by having inbound links. Links that are inbound refer to other pages in the same website. Also if several other websites can point to the advertiser’s website, its page rank significantly improves. For example, if a company has a portfolio of products each of which have a website, they can point to each other internally and their page rank improves. Also including the keywords in the website URLs improves its rank significantly.

Business blogging is one area which the web marketers can harness to promote their brands. The blog can be a component of the business website. It adds dynamicity to the web content. The added fresh content can promote higher ranking to the websites. This higher ranking promotes more visitors that can transform into more potential for sale. The blogs can be hosted in popular blogging platforms like WordPress, Drupal etc. The blog post can be linked to the main website via a hyperlink.

Successful blogs have a strong and compelling title linked to the business or the brand. It is well written and formatted. Adding multimedia content like images, video, voice and graphics makes the user experience more enriching and the interaction more fun. Having links in text add authenticity to the web content and also provide a reference point to the reader if they choose to explore more. A call to action button that redirects them to a form or a purchase page is also handy in the blog.

The purpose of blogging in the business world is all about generating leads. These leads can be traced by the sales departments and converted into a sale if possible. To convert website traffic into leads, the following four steps are very important – 1. Selecting what to offer like free materials like eBooks, webinar etc.; 2. Creating call to action buttons. The calls to action buttons are those buttons that provide user some incentives to click them. The incentive can be a free downloadable eBook, a webinar, option to receive newsletter to gain further information or a form for further follow-up. The content of the blog should create interest in the user so that they are more willing to click on the call to action button. 3. Creating the landing pages. This page is where the user lands after click on the call to action button and it should be relevant to it; 4. The final step is to test, measure and iterate the entire process.

Promoting content through social media is also a very lucrative option. Social websites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn provide tremendous opportunities for web marketers to showcase their offerings. For example in Facebook, a company can register to create a profile. A good strategy is to register the profile-name same as the brand name and to upload a profile photo that is the brand logo or a winning product. The company then can use this page to announce new product launches, new promotional campaigns, competitions to involve the users as well as a media to get feedback from the users. This needs to be monitored to avoid any hate comments being spread. The company can allocate resources part time to answer any customer query or concern that comes up on the website.

Monitoring social media is also very important. Google alerts for the products, brand or industry can be delivered directly to the web marketer’s mailbox. HootSuite can help marketers save keywords to find out what is being said about their brands. Social media monitoring tool by HubSpot can create filters so that conversations relevant to the industry be tracked.

Lead nurturing is an important concept where the marketer needs to be constantly in touch with the lead to eventually convert them into customers. They may use a system to pre qualify them as potential customers. Once pre qualified, more targeted emails can be sent to them giving more information about the offering. As the customer lists loose 75% of their entrants in a year, it is very important to update this list periodically with qualified leads. The users that come to the landing page should have an option to enroll themselves to receive further promotional information.

Optimizing promotion for mobile marketing is also often integrated with e-marketing. With the increasing usage of Smartphone, marketers should try to develop mobile friendly versions of the websites. The website can use simple code to determine the medium by which they are being access and then it can choose to display a version of it optimized to the screen size for the device.

This book provides the introductory material for the marketers who aspire to integrate e-marketing into their portfolio. Besides providing the basic knowledge about various avenues for e-marketing exercise, it also provides practical examples and samples from real world implementations. I would highly recommend this material to marketing community.

Internet is an information source that is accessed by 2.45 billion people worldwide. This amounts to 35% of the world population of 7 billion (2011). It is a platform to search for information, connect with people, carry out business activities or just to express oneself. The million dollar homepage started a revolution in display ads and showed the immense monetization capabilities in the online medium. Advertising on this platform provides an immense opportunity to advertisers to target their offerings to people. They can showcase their products that match the information the users are looking for in the internet. This increases the chances to getting business and also increases the popularity of their brands. Website owners may use their online real estate to host these ads and earn revenue.

With several billions of unique URLs detected by search engines daily, the information source is definitely vast. If the site witness traffic and users are exposed to relevant ads, the probability of the users to be influenced by it increases. The financial dynamics of online advertising are hence greatly influenced by the site reputation, traffic witnessed, relevancy etc.

Cumulative Annual Growth Rate of online ads is about 24%. US reported an online ad spending of about $31.3 billion in 2011 up from $26 billion in 2010. Advertisers invested about 7.5% in 2008 of their budget in online ads, which is poised to increase to 15-18% in 2012 (Yankee Group Research Report).

The key players in the online advertising market are highlighted below:

• Advertisers – They have a product or service to offer and put up an advertisement to showcase it. Advertisers can be the actual producer of the good or service or they may be a third party representing the actual producer.
• Publishers – Website owners who offer online real estate to host the advertisements are the publishers. They include search engines, news sites, blogs etc. The more popular the website, the more is the demand for an ad space and hence translates into a higher cut of the ad revenue for the publisher
• Ad Agencies – Ad agencies are involved in generating the creative (the actual ad). They are hired on behalf of the advertisers or their representatives. With the advent of rich media ads, the agencies are delivering ads that are complex, visually diverse and immersive to the customers.
• Ad Networks – To bring together the advertisers and publishers into a common platform where multiple publishers offer their real estate and multiple advertisers bring forward their ads, ad networks play an important role. It increases the market size and offers variety for both these parties. Both publishers and advertisers communicate with the network using a UI that tries to make their transaction seamless and smooth.
• Ad Exchanges – Multiple ad networks are integrated using Ad exchanges. They act as a clearing house for ads. If an advertiser which belongs to ad network A wants to display an ad in an empty frame offered by a publisher in ad network B, the ad exchange facilitates it. The exchange puts up a markup on the cost to the advertiser for the service. It aids in market expansion and increasing the reach for both advertisers and publishers.
• Users – They are the target of the advertisers. Users utilize the internet for their needs and are exposed to the advertisement. They may eventually buy the product or services offered by the advertiser and hence generate revenues for them. The objective of the advertisers is to maximize the conversion of the users into buyers of their offerings.