After four years of English at University, I ended up concluding that at the end of the day a good novel was one you like, and a bad novel was one you don’t. 

Subjectivity wins every time.

And I feel the same about the current crop of car insurance ads being inflicted on us.  I love Iggy Pop, but I find the Swiftcover commercials frankly disturbing. 

Yet weirder still is the Compare the Meerkat campaign for – of course – Compare the Market.  The latest TV slot shows that this is a campaign with legs, albeit slightly short, stubby ones.  I think the ads are genuinely funny and a brave step forward for an insurance aggregator.

What’s the difference?  Meerkat is charming.  Iggy is a sweaty, drug-induced nightmare.  But at the end of the day, like literature, I think it might be simply down to personal taste.

Much as I love advertising, there is something to this…

Great post by Mike Butcher on TechCrunch arguing that AOL may be contemplating a sale of Bebo.

One strategic issue I can see with Bebo as a media property is that it is very very strong with kids of school age – but as kids get older, they seem to gravitate to Facebook.

If Facebook can hold its audience from the teen years into their twenties and thirties, clearly that’s going to be more valuable to many advertisers.

Whilst I don’t doubt that AOL is probably looking at some disappointing numbers from Bebo right now, I’d be surprised if they decided to sell at what (I hope) is close to the bottom of the market.

That’s especially because Bebo has delivered some great innovation around ad properties, particularly around online soaps like Kate Modern. It’s easy to pigeon-hole Bebo as a social networking site – but it is also an important delivery channel for video.  And video, as bandwidth increases, will be the channel of the future.

We had quite a chunky piece of research written up in Marketing Week last week looking at the ongoing impact of Google’s decision last year to allow competitive brand bidding.

In a nutshell, we found that aggressive brand bidding is only really happening in two sectors – travel and finance.  And in the case of finance, aggregators like Money Supermarket are doing most of the competitive bidding.

Aggregators are particularly well placed to benefit from brand bidding because they often have very relevant content on their sites.  And the word ‘competitive’ is a bit of a misnomer here – aggregators are an important partner for many brands, especially in the insurance sector.

Of course, it’s ironic to find a company like Direct Line, which has had a very public anti-aggregator stance, being targeted by aggregator advertising.

One thing we did spot is that companies like Tesco Insurance seem to be using affiliates to dominate the vital first page of search results.  By contrast, Norwich Union seem to restrict affiliates from bidding on their brand terms – and as a result, their first page of search results features seven or eight direct competitors.

Conventional wisdom used to be that affiliates shouldn’t be allowed to bid on brand terms – but in the light of competitive brand bidding, that’s a strategy that should be reconsidered.

 There's an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal (flagged up in Internet Retailing) on some new research showing the growing importance of the 'info shopper'.

Basically this is someone who is reluctant to make a purchase offline without thoroughly researching it online.

The research suggests that this 'research-first' mentality is creeping into an ever-broader range of goods - from cars to electrical goods to white goods.

There's a remarkable statistic that 92% of respondents trust the information they get online more than the information they get on the high street or anywhere else.  Advertising gets a bit of a battering as well, with 78% of people saying that ads no longer contain the information they need.

Bricks and mortar retailers have of course had a dismal Christmas - but this research suggests that the recession is only partly to blame.  A more deep seated problem is the failure to give this new breed of shopper what they need.

Google's results for the fourth quarter of 2008 came out yesterday and look typically impressive overall.  

I saw this 2 weeks ago on the side of a bus… Wondered when ASA would get involved… http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jan/21/asa-clears-atheist-bus-ad-campaign

I saw this 2 weeks ago on the side of a bus… Wondered when ASA would get involved… http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jan/21/asa-clears-atheist-bus-ad-campaign

"Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

"While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2.  Boiling a kettle generates about 15g."