The United States Justice Department has stepped in on the Google/Yahoo! ad deal, opening a formal antitrust investigation. According to the Washington Post, “Google and Yahoo officials have said since the deal’s announcement that they would delay its implementation for a voluntary Justice Department review.”

In essence, the deal that the two search engine giants have worked out is that when Yahoo! runs out of ads to serve, Google will supply the rest. This will help Yahoo! to deliver ads for some of the more long tail search queries.

So it looks like there’s going to be some investigation, deliberation, etc., into the antitrust implications, and we of the PPC community will just have to see what happens.

Yahoo! and Google both say that the deal with be good for competition. We’re hoping that the deal turns out to be good for us. In fact, when it all gets sorted out, we kind of hope for the following sort of anti-trusty, merger-ific mistake:

(Click to enlarge)

Oh yeah!

We know that’s probably not going to happen, but here’s to wishful thinking!

Note to people who are inclined to look at screen shots without reading the accompanying posts: The above screenshot is fake. We made it. This did not actually happen on a real Yahoo! search. Also, Ad #2 is very unoptimized, although we are thinking of testing it and see what kind of conversion rate we get…

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The past few weeks I have been pushing 90+ hour work weeks…and the only part that I’m bummed about is the lack of time spent with my family - who are very important to me so I will slow it down because family is, and always will be, an acceptable and enjoyable reason to take it easy. Take it easy means 50-60 hours a week instead of 90+ hours.

Why would anybody put in hours like that?

I don’t know. It’s insane…but it’s inspiring at the same time.

I’m definitely not the first to do it in this industry and I won’t be the last…in fact, I would be willing to bet that a bunch of my competitive colleagues put in more hours than I do every week!

How is working 90+ hour work weeks inspiring?

What inspires me are the executives, founders, individuals, marketers, investors, competitors and others that I get the privilege of working with and for and against - you can tell they didn’t get where they are without a heck of a lot of hard work, some good fortune and determination. They all have a fantastic story to tell and I get to learn from them and I get to participate in their success in some way or another. I feel very lucky to play even a small part in helping others grow and succeed on the web.

I don’t always succeed…and my excuse is that it’s marketing so it’s always a risk. What I’m really doing is cataloging every failure and creating this arsenal of experience, education and knowledge that I can use in the future as a list of what not to do…then again, if a particular situation calls for it, a previous failure can get resurrected and be a huge success! Isn’t the world wide web fantastic that way?

The most inspiring part of the long hours is the opportunity I have to improve the future living situation of my family by helping others secure their future today. Employees, clients and my family have dreams…and I’m here to help in whatever way that I can.

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I hope you enjoy this brief intro to Shane - our new VP of E-commerce! You can expect to see some blog posts from him as he forges onward with our advertising experiments in E-commerce settings that we wouldn’t otherwise try with our clients.

Shane Snow received a bachelors degree in Business Management with an emphasis in Marketing from Brigham Young University-Idaho.

Prior to joining semvironment, Shane was a Small Business Web Marketing intern at ICSERV Inc, a national web design firm. He also interned as a graphic designer at PolicyTech, an international software company. After his various internship experiences, Shane opened up his own website design firm in collaboration with Gregory Hess. The firm, Brave Media LLC, has designed and developed informational and e-commerce websites for more than 25 businesses nationwide in the past year. He also operates a business and flyer printing website and a kissing advice website.

At the same time, Shane has been a columnist for Scroll Newspaper in Rexburg, Idaho, for the past two years.

Shane is excited to bring his varied experience in graphic design, website development, search engine marketing, and copy writing to semvironment as we launch our new E-commerce business unit.

On a personal note, Shane enjoys playing bass guitar in a band, is a master of Doctor Mario for the Nintendo 64, and is in denial that he’s probably too old to keep skateboarding.

Shane is getting married this May. Congrats Shane!

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I get random, trailing thoughts throughout the day that go something like this:

“That would make a good blog post…”

“I should write that down so I don’t forget about it…better yet, I’ll blog it so I have a searchable catalog of it”

“This is interesting, I wonder what others think about this”

“I definitely have an opinion about that, I should post it”

Then, I don’t get a lot of time to expand on those thoughts beyond a few sentences so *drumroll* I decided to start posting my thoughts and opinions between roundups - most of them will be relevant and useful.

These small thoughts will be related to pay per click advertising in a direct or indirect way. I’ll occasionally post something personal or out of touch with the subject but for the most part, you can expect little good snippets from me starting today.

Also, a disclosure - some of the titles of these small thoughts will come from something I read one or two days ago. I’ll try my hardest to give credit where credit is due but if you notice a quote or a sentence that belongs to somebody else, kindly claim it in the comments and I’ll edit the post to give credit where credit is due.

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The old feed (Apollo SEM) is going to be obsolete soon so please remember to subscribe to the new feed found here:

RSS

- or subscribe via email -

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Sorry for not posting as frequently as usual. I have 6 posts in draft that I’m trying to wrap up but in the middle of all that we have several new clients (thankfully!) :), new business development and planning to do, we’re pushing forward and onward with our social initiative (make that 7 posts in draft now…)

You get the picture - it’s crazy here at semvironment!

Stick around and you’ll see some great posts coming up including another NUDE series post - we debated the NUDE series with some of the problems that come from sharing secrets until it hurts…and we decided to press forward with it no matter what happens!

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A couple weeks ago I received a letter from semvironment Interactive, Inc. - a website design company from LA. (www.semvironmentinteractive.com)

This is their letter to me:

Dear James C. Zolman,

semvironment Interactive, Inc. is a Los Angeles-based interactive agency with 12 years service to the online advertising industry. semvironment owns the subject Trademark Registrations Nos. 2,411,996 and 2,411,997 for online advertising services including designing, implementing, creating, and maintaining Web sites.

This letter will serve as formal written notice that semvironment considers your use of the name semvironment is a trademark violation.

We ask that you please take notice and the appropriate actions to avoid a Trademark Infiringement case filed on our behalf by counsel. That would require a name change away from the trademarked “semvironment” as you were prior to August 2007. We will afford you 30 calendar days to cooperate with this request prior to us taking legal action.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Justin Woo, CEO and Owner/Founder of semvironment Interactive at 310-836-9777.

Back to me here…I found their Trademarks here.

I think it is funny that the trademarks do not even mention advertising or marketing…like their letter implies.

And I like to think I’m a reasonable person to deal with. Here is how I would have handled the perceived situation -

Pick up the dang phone and call the CEO of the company and simply state that I’m genuinely interested in helping a business succeed so I wanted to notify them about trademarks and I would ask them to simply review a couple trademarks and ask them for their opinion. Eventually, if we did not agree on something, I would politely tell them that we are at a point where it might be best to use legal communications from this point forward…etc.

To be quite frank, I am pissed that people feel like they have to immediately turn to (fake?) self-authored legal letters…I mean, if I were to send a “legal” letter I would have my attorney sign it with their credentials instead of my own. Yes, the letter was signed by the “President” of semvironment Interactive, Inc.

What happened to having the balls to actually SPEAK to somebody about a problem - even if it’s through a phone!?!

On another note - it is quite flattering that a California company feels like an Idaho company is a threat to their trademark/customer base.

What do you think?

Do you think I am infringing on their trademark or are our business names fair game?

Is there really a “likelihood of confusion” between our company names and services?

How would you act if you thought somebody was infringing on your trademark? Am I out of line here?

Here is the flip side -

Perhaps, and I will give them credit for this, they believe a semi-personal “official” communication (which probably is legal and could hold in court) was the most appropriate action to take first. Maybe it was the right thing for them to do…and I’ll admit I’m a handshake “man of my word” kind of a guy so this type of communication simply rubbed me the wrong way…just thought I would let you know that I AM striving to see things from their perspective and I have consulted with and I am communicating with 3 attorneys regarding this subject.

Thoughts?

Update Friday 1/25 3:45 PM: Justin just gave me a call - and I’m glad he did. He clarified that the letter was meant to be a semi-formal notice that legal means will probably be pursued so it was not authored by his attorneys. He also mentioned that they have been doing SEO and PPC for a long time. I mentioned that we’re in a completely different league and we aren’t targeting the same customers but he said that he really felt we were infringing on the mark still and he would pursue legal action if we didn’t change the name. He wasn’t very negotiable and didn’t want to explain much so it was a short phone call…I don’t blame him - I can kind of understand and see where he’s coming from and I told him so.

I guess we’ll see what happens.

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I started reviewing some of my hand written notes over the past few days to make sure I haven’t missed anything super important and I realized that I started to write notes like this:

I Need To Check Analytics For This Client Three Times This Week

Write Test Ads For Another Client

Check On Affiliate Programs

Send Email To Acquaintance

And Many Many More…

I’m attributing the First Letter Capitalization to the way I write advertisements…I have been revamping and revitalizing some ad tests we are conducting and decided to dump almost 2000 unique ads out to Google over the past several days.

I would almost be willing to bet that my longer notes are precisely 70 characters in length!

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There were a few book recommendations on SEOmoz/YOUmoz last year and I finally jumped in and bought 4 of them based on additional recommendations by others in the industry. These are the books I recently received:

1. Web Analytics An Hour A Day by Avinash Kasuhik

2. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini, Ph. B.

3. Call To Action by Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg

4. The AdWeek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman

I’ll be diving into these for the next couple months. Naturally, I tend to write about what I read so I thought I would let you know where some of our upcoming posts are going to originate from. We’ll try to give credit where credit is due each time we author a post from our reading.

And, if you haven’t had a chance to check out the books listed - they are highly recommended among SEM professionals all over…I feel like a late adopter by FINALLY buckling down to reading books related to our industry.

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Our last official post of the year…wow, so much to do TOMORROW because it’s a NEW YEAR!!! Yes!!!

We are so grateful to our customers, family, subscribers and friends for such an amazing year. We have the best customers, we grew 1000% and we have very supportive and loving families…life really couldn’t have been better in 2007.

2008 is going to bring so much more for everybody - we hope it’s the best year ever for you!

HAPPY NEW YEAR to everybody from your friends at semvironment!

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