Bogdan Gavrila – Core Target | Business Blog

Gabriel Boaca, Sales Director at Intact Interactive, presenting the large banner format as a new trend for Romanian online advertising during the financial crisis:

- 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)

details here…

I liked this particular comment on YouTube:

More like the “big brother” network. I don’t want a phone company that knows what I’m doing every second I’m on their network – I just want good coverage, good bandwidth and no dropped calls. Guess I’ll stick with AT&T.

Then again, maybe this is why I’m still a big fan of T Mobile

Quick notes:

- 20:18:48 – earthquake starts;

- Hotnews is the only website to publish the undocumented news – 20:21 (~2,3 minutes after the earthquake, title “Cutremur in Bucuresti”);

- 20:25 -20:28 – no news on Antena3.ro/Realitatea.net – both websites receive heavy traffic;

- Antena3.ro – 20:29, first documented news;

- Realitatea.net 20:32, first news about the earthquake, heavy traffic, website is down;

- 20:33 – Panic hits Bucharest – main phone lines are down;

Conclusions:

- Hotnews was the first to mention the earthquake while Antena3 is the first channel to provide the official intel in less than 10 minutes. Realitatea.net copied the info 3 minutes after was published on Antena3 and now it looks that Hotnews copied the info from Antena3;

- the competition between the first 3 players is very hard and every minute can make a difference;

- Antena3 had the fastest reaction and broadcasted the first news but Hotnews had the fastest online presence announcing the event in a very short time;

- StirileProTv.ro is the only website without a reaction in the first 30 minutes after the earthquake mainly because they don’t have dedicated online editors and they depend on Mediafax and PROTV;

- Mediafax had its first release on 20:59;

- It seems that people, instead of going outside their buildings, they went online;

- 100 blog posts in the first 50 minutes after the earthquake (Google Blog Search/tag: cutremur);

- more reactions (compared to blogs blogs) on twitter #cutremur;

- I recall an early study made by Romanian government – during a crisis, Romanians switch to official state channels (TVR, Radio Romania) to find out more about what is happening. I think that we can notice a switch in this behavior since many people try to go online and find out more;

Congratulations:

- Gandul.info – they published the news at 21:20 but on Google it shows that it was published 19 hours ago – nice Google trick but I don’t think they’re going to rank very high.

Amelie.ro launched its mobile version in beta one month ago and was one of the first websites targeted on women (in Romania) to have a mobile version.

Today I see over 10.000 mobile readers but the best thing is that it’s the 5th mobile website in portfolio @ Intact Interactive.

Karsten Wildberger, Chief Commercial Officer, Consumer Business Unit, Vodafone Romania said that their mobile traffic registered right now is 15 times higher than the one they had last year when they first launched “Vodafone Internet on Mobile”.

Vodafone mobile users can now access premium websites like m.gsp.ro or m.antena3.ro on their mobile phones and Intact Interactive is the first online sales house able to deliver targeted ads in its mobile portfolio (includes Vodafone Live!, no1. mobile portal in Romania).