John Battelle Quotes

The Internet and Yahoo are firmly established as 'must buys' for brand advertising.

Traditional local advertising is not what retailers want. They want not just for you to see an ad - they want you to come into the store, to be a repeat customer and to spread the word.

I think video advertising is a hugely compelling medium.

Advertising has moved online, with the rise of the 'advergame.' These are compelling online games, often aimed at the under-15s, designed to promote a high-fat or high-sugar food or drink. Advergames are advertising disguised as entertainment. If they didn't work, the food and drink industry wouldn't be investing in them.

Realtime ads are the perfect way for an advertiser to connect with users in a social environment.

On the advertising side, view count is not the most important thing. It's engagement.

Online advertising may not be much more successful than an old double-barrel, but - like a good spray of buckshot - it makes up for its lack of accuracy with sheer volume. There are 10 unique ads listed with every Gmail message in your queue, each tied to the message content. And a paying sponsor.

The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.

Online advertising is display plus search.

Great designers seldom make great advertising men, because they get overcome by the beauty of the picture - and forget that merchandise must be sold.

You can't test great advertising. You can only test the mediocre. Not that I don't care about demographics. You have to understand who you're going after.

Critics say Internet advertising suffers from limitless inventory, which depresses prices. These exclusive front-page sponsorships are not limitless. If HBO doesn't move quickly enough, Showtime can buy out Gawker and Jezebel for the key fall TV season. On any individual day, there isn't room for both of them; and that's healthy.

I won't say I'm not fascinated by the way advertising works. I like the sleekness. But a picture in advertising doesn't last too long. They have to work for 30 seconds. And I'd like to reach at least two minutes. This is my goal: to break that two-minute record.

If you game Facebook and Google in the right way, then you can achieve a mass audience.

Word of mouth and the Internet are the only press we have left.

Yahoo! is the only company with both scale and leadership in branded and search advertising.

Articles themselves are condensed to narrow columns of text across 5, 6, 7 pages, and ads that are really distracting for the reader, so it's not a pleasant experience to 'curl up' with a good website.

I never really enjoyed getting a portfolio together then sending it out; whereas, putting up the website is quite an enjoyable experience. The net's just a much faster and more modern way to distribute things, and you have to embrace it.

Blog-based businesses have lower cost structures and are more 'authentic,' and as a result are drawing larger shares of ad budgets.

I think daily deals are a good idea. Any ad people view as content is a good ad, and that's true for daily-deal ads too.

My view is that, just as in many businesses, brands really matter. There will always be a role for destination sites. Eighty million users come to our destination. I think that will be the vast majority of our future business.

I think the adoption rate with respect to social media and how companies leverage that varies by the company. Cisco is probably a leader in the space. A lot of times, we actually use virtual ways to communicate our brand and do some of our advertising, first on the social space, then we do on physical advertising.

Our focus is to continue to pioneer branded entertainment online and consider opportunities as they come. We're smart enough to know that we can't bite the hand that feeds us and neglect our Internet presence.

Generally, our approach with products at Google is to first develop the right user base and then to figure out what's the right experience for the ads.

I think we have to recognize as an industry that users have a lot more choices and can click away to a lot more media. As a result, the advertising we create really needs to be something users want to see.