Advertising through Google AdWords continues to grow, and to be one of the main ways businesses try to reach new customers.  Understanding how AdWords auctions work is one of the biggest areas of confusion for people who aren’t sure how much, if any, of their marketing budget should be spent on AdWords.

With Google’s $32.2 billion in advertising revenue being 97 percent of Google’s total revenue, this is a pie that is worth figuring out, especially if you invest hard earned revenue into this ad platform. For instance, have you ever wondered how Google determines what advertisers pay, or how Google determines which ads are shown where?

Well, the infographic below can help you understand and make more sense of this world. Is this how you thought Google AdWords worked or have your experiences given you a different impression?

Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission took the first steps towards creating a Do Not Track feature to allow internet users to opt-out of having companies obtain data on their online surfing habits. This mechanism is being designed in the spirit of the Do Not Call registry that regulates the activities of telemarketers.

On the surface this sounds great. You would be hard pressed to find anyone, besides a telemarketer, who preferred life before the Do Not Call list eliminated those annoying sales calls that interrupted your dinner. But online advertising and telemarketing are very different animals, so let’s look a little deeper into what the reality of a Do Not Track bill would look like.

In theory implementing a Do Not track mechanism will allow consumers to have more control over their personal information that is shared online. Internet privacy has been a hot topic for awhile now, so it’s easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to supporting anything that will protect online privacy. The more prudent way to analyze the implications of a Do Not Track bill is to look at what it will actually accomplish.

Eliminating or decreasing the frequency of internet users receiving targeted advertising while they surf websites is the result that the Do Not Track bill. Building individual profiles of how we search, surf and interact online for the use of targeted advertising, based on behavioral targeting and contextual advertising, is assumed to be a problem that needs solving. …but is it?

Common wisdom tells us that people hate advertising. Is this true, or is this is a myth when it is thrown out as a blanket statement?

People don’t hate advertising; they hate advertising for stuff they don’t want.

People love advertising that tells them about a new cool product they will use. We are psychologically wired to connect with other people and seek their validation. Therefore we love to be the first one to tell our friends about something that we think is cool, and that we think they will think is cool.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With this in mind, why wouldn’t you want to see targeted advertising when you’re online? You’re going to see advertising anyway, so what’s bad about it being for products and services that are aligned with your historical online profile of interests?

Why should anyone be afraid of marketers using this data to offer you more things that you want? This isn’t the same as someone using your private information for identity theft. This is a way for you to find out about things you’ll probably be interested in rather than finding out about things you don’t care about.

The word ‘privacy’ is a trigger word. No one wants to give up their privacy. If the Do Not Track bill goes into effect you can choose to keep a little bit of your privacy in exchange for continuing to receive nonspecific advertising instead of targeted advertising online.

Either way, this issue is not anywhere near the problem it’s made out to be and your life as an American consumer will continue on. You just may have to wait longer to discover cool new products and be stuck with seeing diaper advertisements when you don’t have any toddlers or ads for singles websites even though you’ve been married for 10 years.

This article was originally posted in the Huffington Post.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.  Influencer Marketing is the ‘new black’ in advertising because it meshes the trust that Influencers have built over time with ad dollars from brands who don’t have that level of trust with their audience.

The following photos are from QuickSprout.

Tonight is the night of the second presidential debate.  This seems like as good a day as any to launch a blog on how you are marketed to by advertisers, politicians, experts, media, and sometimes even your friends. If you think you might hear at least one lie, fabrication or stretching of the truth by Barack Obama or John McCain tonight raise your hand.  (Wow!  That’s a lot of hands!)

Even better, we’ll sometimes cover ways you influence, sell to and market to your friends and sometimes even to yourself.

You are blindly influenced many times a day and you blindly influence others at least a few times a day.  Have you been told an interesting “fact” from a friend today that fit into your beliefs?  Maybe it was about Barack Obama, or John McCain, or Wall Street or any number of newsworthy topics.  Chances are that the “facts” you heard were somewhat truthful and somewhat dubious.

This isn’t a slam on you or your friends.  It’s simply a result of how the human brain works and how our marketing-saturated culture operates in 2008.

Blind patrotism is an obvious example of this.  The first few years after 9/11 we witnessed blind patriotism on steroids.  Emotions ran high which concurrently made critical thinking run low.  This resulted in Americans swallowing gallons of lies that fortunately became obvious in only a few years instead of a few decades.

Again, this is nothing personal, it’s how the human brain operates. Why do you think Tony Robbins and others using NLP (Neurolinguistic programming) have done so well?

As this blog grows we’ll explore how our minds deceive us and how others can use this against us.  By realizing how this happens you’ll be one of the few who isn’t going to fall for the B.S. – well, at least not as much of it as your neighbors.

So as you watch the debate tonight, and politicians speaking on any night, keep your critical thinking hat on and put on your glasses to see through the blind influence.