vinyarb

Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, gave a commencement speech at the University of Michigan where he graduated, and it’s a mixed bag of wisdom, wit and encouragement.

He started off by tweeting a photo from his vantage point, and then went into his experiences, first with improv, and then with Twitter, citing some of the impact and milestones Twitter had over the years.

Commencement @umich My view twitter.com/dickc/status/3…

— dick costolo (@dickc) May 4, 2013

He talks about living for the now, and how we should not plan too much, because “Not only can you not plan the impact you’re going to have, you often won’t recognize it even while you’re having it.”

He talks instead, about making bold choices, particularly with finding your passion, and working toward that.

In a nutshell, it’s really an awesome speech. Watch.

So you just spent a lot of money producing a funny, high production value video for your company, and want, no, need it to go viral. What do you do? Most people say you can only make a good video, and hope the world turns in such a way that people will take note of it, and spread it virally. Maybe seed it to a few big influencers.

Nope.

You go to Buyral, and spend more money to guarantee it goes viral!

Watch:

OK OK, so it’s not real. Just a very clever self promotional tool by Toronto ad agency John St.

Or is it….

Techcrunch recently reported a network of bots that are costing advertisers up to $6 million dollars a month. An estimated 9 billion ad views a month, are not real views! Wrap your head around that!

Now that video doesn’t seem that funny, does it?

Marissa Mayer, employee #20 of Google, and now CEO of Yahoo, is looking back at Google to help Yahoo with their contextual ad relevancy in a bid to optimise Yahoo’s display ad revenues. From Yahoo’s corporate blog:

Every day, people turn to Yahoo! for their daily habits — like search, weather, news or more. At Yahoo!, we’re focused on doing everything we can to make the user experience inspiring and engaging. One way we do that is by providing relevant and well-targeted content — whether that be editorial or advertising content.

Say you’ve been shopping for boots. If you see an ad for boots, that’s instantly going to pique your attention more than an ad for, say, a car battery. That’s better for users. This is why contextual advertising is such a powerful tool.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we recently signed a global, non-exclusive agreement with Google to display ads on various Yahoo! properties and certain co-branded sites using Google’s AdSense for Content and Google’s AdMob services.

By adding Google to our list of world-class contextual ads partners, we’ll be able to expand our network, which means we can serve users with ads that are even more meaningful.

For our users, there won’t be a noticeable difference in how or where ads appear. More options simply mean greater flexibility. We look forward to working with all of our contextual ads partners to ensure we’re delivering the right ad to the right user at the right time.

This means that the next time you run a campaign via Google Display Network, your ads could very well appear on Yahoo’s network of sites.

All in all, I’d say this is a nice result for advertisers, while also improving the lots of both Yahoo and Google.

interesting to see if this will lead to more partnerships between the 2 giants (yeah, Yahoo is still considered a giant in my eyes).

Since Marissa joined Yahoo in July 2012, Yahoo’s share prices have risen 30%, going above $20 for the first time since 2009. She must be doing something right!