The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has revealed plans next spring to extend its regulatory arm to encompass online marketing and online advertising.

From 1 March 2010, the ASA will have what chairman Chris Smith has described as “the most comprehensive approach to the regulation of advertising in website space anywhere in the world.”

Over the past few years, the ASA has received some 4,500 complaints concerning online marketing, yet has been unable to take little or no action.

However, from March next year it will be able to intervene to maintain online advertising’s self-regulatory system – particularly when it comes to protecting the safety of children on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

The ASA website will feature a “rogues’ gallery” of online marketing offenders against its code of practice and warnings will appear in the results of Google and other search engines. There will also be a list of products and brands that defy the code.

The Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP), which wrote and maintains the code of practice decided to extend the ASA’s remit after a formal recommendation from a wide cross-section of British industry.

The advertising and marketing industry has itself agreed to apply a standard 0.1 per cent levy on all paid-for advertising on internet search engines, extending the existing funding mechanism across other media that pays for the ASA. Google is providing the initial seed capital.

Website owners and online advertising agencies are urged to sign up to CAP Services to receive guidance and training so their sites will comply with the new rules before they come into effect.

CAP chairman Andrew Brown said, “Our aim has been to extend further in the online world the principles that are already well established in our system, namely those of effective consumer protection and fair competition.”

Video-hosting site YouTube recently unveiled a set of new features aimed at helping online marketing campaigns better target their potential customers.

The website – owned by search engine giant Google – has implemented new video and channel exclusion options, which YouTube senior product manager Baljeet Singh said would be of great use to online advertising creatives and marketing managers, giving them far more control over where their adverts will show up. Before the new options, online marketing depended on using YouTube’s own marketing services to select which clips should be targeted with a company’s adverts.

Now, however, the new features allow individual companies or brands to decide if particular videos – or even entire channels – should be excluded from the campaign. By doing this, online marketing experts will be able to prevent adverts from appearing next to videos that are at odds with their customer demographic.

Two examples that Mr Singh gave were that of a vegan battery being able to exclude FootNetworkTV videos about meat dishes and beer companies giving the swerve to videos aimed at those too young to enjoy a tipple.

“Alternatively, if your ads are appearing on a video that perhaps isn’t performing in terms of clickthrough rate or conversions, you can optimise your campaign by using this new feature to exclude it,” Mr Singh went on to suggest on the YouTube blog.

He added: “Google has also been investing significantly in ensuring brand safety, transparency and control for advertisers across the Google Display Network. We’re hoping that these added layers of control will make your campaign targeting even more precise.”

Online marketing research company eMarketer has revealed that there will be a 12 per cent increase this year in the amount of money spent on online marketing worldwide.

Analysing international figures on online marketing for the year to date, eMarketer said that it expected the total spend to come to $61.8 million – and to increase to a massive $96.8 billion by 2014.

It said that this would represent a year-on-year increase of 11.9 per cent, in spite of the faltering international economy. In 2009 the internet’s total share of the advertising market was just 11.9 per cent, but by 2014 it will stand at 17.2 per cent, eMarketer added.

Worldwide, there was a 10.5 per cent fall in the amount of advertising spending, to just $465.1 billion last year, but online marketing budgets increased by 2 per cent last year to $55.2 billion.

The company argued that this was down to the excellent value for money and effectiveness of online advertising.

“The recession has propelled online advertising by forcing marketers with limited budgets to make every dollar count,” said eMarketer analyst Jared Jenks.

Internet search giant Google agreed. The company has long insisted that more and more advertisers are opting for online marketing because their impact can be better measured than those in traditional forms of media.

last month, Google said that it was delighted with increased revenue from advertising throughout all commercial sectors, thanks to a growing number of brands embracing SEO advertising and running integrated campaigns across a number of platforms.

Online marketing expert Karin von Abrams has stressed that internet marketing campaigns are increasingly at the heart of companies’ branding strategies.

Ms von Abrams, a senior analyst at the eMarketer organisation, said that nowadays virtually every brand has included online marketing within their overall marketing operations. At the same time, ad agencies are becoming ever more skilled at creating the perfect integrated internet advertising campaigns.

Although some sectors of the business world have taken longer than others to realise the full potential of online marketing – with one example being the fast-paced consumer goods sector – many companies within these sectors are now pioneering internet advertising and setting the standards for the rest of their sectors to follow.

This can be seen by the innovative ways in which many brands are using social networking or micro-blogging sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and in the strategies adopted to rise to the top of the search ratings in Google.

Ms von Abrams said: “It is now clear that every brand or business can benefit in some way from building awareness online, or from rethinking its business processes to make full use of digital channels.”

The rise of internet advertising was underscored recently when market analysts the Nielsen Company, which showed that worldwide spending on advertising increased by an eighth in the second quarter of this year – and spending on online marketing alone increased by 12 per cent.

At the end of the first quarter of 2010, the total global spend on advertising stood at a massive £65.4 billion.

With search engine giant Google preparing a move into Britain’s travel market, online marketing experts are warning travel portals such as Travelsupermarket and Expedia to beef up their business models and face the “threat” head on.

SEO marketing expert Andreas Pouros specialises in helping companies to maximise their online advertising and marketing operations. He recently told Travelmole that Google’s recent acquisition of travel technology firm ITA Software meant that it now posed a clear and present danger to holiday price comparison sites based in the UK.

Mr Pouros said that the ITA data included such essential information as minute-by-minute flight availability and the cheapest fares, which would enable Google to point potential holidaymakers to the best deals without the need for other companies to be involved.

“Travel intermediaries should be very concerned as Google moves towards becoming central to consumers’ travel purchasing behaviour,” he insisted.

“It is only a little over seven months ago since Google made a similar move with property intermediaries.”

Google now shows houses that are for sale or available for rent on Google Maps, thanks to a facility that allows property portals to download their listings free. With ITA it will also now be able to point users towards the cheapest flights or hotel deals.

It is believed that at first the search engine will only use the new software to direct web traffic to dedicated travel websites, but there is also the likelihood that it will ultimately start selling plane tickets directly to travellers.

Mr Pouros said that “travel intermediaries should at the very least be determining how they should operate in the next few years.”

Global goods colossus Unilever’s senior vice-president Laura Klauberg stressed the importance of social networking sites such as Facebook in online marketing and advertising last week at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.

Delegates from all over the world gathered in the south of France to discuss the changes and challenges facing the industry and were all singing from the same hymn-sheet when it came to the pivotal role of social media over the next decade and beyond.

In previous years, special guests have included the bosses of the Microsoft corporation and search engine giant Google, but this year’s online marketing focus was well and truly on Facebook, with a special appearance for its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Ms Klauberg, who is Unilever’s senior VP for global media, insisted that “social media isn’t just another channel. It’s not just about Facebook, it’s much bigger as it changes the relationship with the consumer, forcing us to change the whole mindset of our business.”

She revealed that her company is increasing its budget for digital advertising by at least 50 this year and said that it is increasingly reliant on online marketing to complement its advertising in more traditional media such as television or print.

Procter & Gamble is another company that is beefing up its social media role. The firm’s chief marketing officer Marc Pritchard told delegates that “the moment I realized the huge potential of social media was when I joined Facebook two years ago.”

With its ability to generate “instant feedback” on brands, services and products, Facebook – along with Twitter – are increasingly being targeted by forward-thinking companies for their unique contribution to advertising and marketing.

Some internet analysts have suggested that the growing popularity of Microsoft search engine Bing could change the way that online marketing operates, as it muscles in on the domination of the search market by Google.

With Bing just over a month old, research by comScore found that, along with the Yahoo! search engine, it was gaining ground on the market leader, with implications for anyone involved in SEO marketing.

Across the USA in May, an incredible 15 billion searches took place. Of these, Google remained at the top, with 63.7 per cent of all searches conducted using its engine. Nevertheless, this was still a smaller percentage than in April – and both Bing and Yahoo! were the ones making up the ground.

Google’s rivals are considering teaming up to better challenge its supremacy. Recently, Microsoft senior vice-president Yusuf Medhi said that his company hopes to have integrated Bing’s search technology into Yahoo’s applications by the end of 2010.

Mr Medhi tolf the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle: “Right now, Yahoo engineers are joining Microsoft and they’re sharing ideas. We will power the algorithm results and the paid search results – Yahoo has flexibility to add things on top.”

Although online marketing companies should not rush to shift their Google-based strategies towards Bing or Yahoo! just yet, it makes sense for anyone involved in SEO to keep an eye on their direction of travel and take Google’s rivals into account.

With the prospect of closer working between Bing and Yahoo! by the end of the year, it would be foolish to discount the chances of a more formal partnership between the two in the near future.

Search engine giant Google has begun offering independent financial advisors (IFAs) free training and support services to help them brush up their online marketing skills and make themselves more visible on the internet.

With online commerce becoming increasingly vital to the success of businesses, Google has pledged to help IFAs make the most of the burgeoning demand for online financial advice.

From the beginning of next month, Google will also host a downloadable online seminar complete with demonstrations showing IFAs how to use Google’s free online resources.

Recently it published a White Paper entitled “IFAs in the Digital Space,” which stressed that many such advisors and their companies are failing to take advantage of this growing market.

The paper is available to members of the social networking website IFA Life and looks at online searches for financial advice services. Google revealed that in February this year, the search term “unbiased financial advice” was used 84 per cent more frequently than at the same period in 2009.

Despite this surging interest, Google warned that IFAs are not throwing themselves into the online marketing and SEO campaigning necessary to tap into this growing market for financial help. Most IFAs either do not have a website at all, or are lax when it comes to keeping it up to date and promoting their business.

Google UK head of finance Ian Morgan told Money Marketing magazine: “We want to offer more support to IFAs looking to grow their business through effective use of search marketing.

“Our aim is to offer an educational starting point to these financial advisers. Consumers are looking for guidance in their wealth management and we believe that the internet can play an important role in helping them find the appropriate support.”

A leading online marketing organisation has urged companies to harness the instant feedback possibilities of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

A recent poll found that nearly half of all online consumers demonstrate their support or dislike for certain brands on Twitter or Facebook.

Referring to the study by market analysts ExactTarget, search engine optimisation company SEO Junkies argued that even negative feedback from such social media was very useful when it comes to formulating online marketing strategies.

SEO Junkies director Di Forster insisted that any companies that experience negative feedback online are well place to “turn it around and spin it to a positive.”

“You’re finding out how people are talking about you, whether it’s good or bad. It might be bad, but you need to know about it, then you can change it,” she added.

With the recent introduction by Google addition of an improved real-time search algorithm, which updates the search engine’s databases more swiftly and accurately than ever before, social media such as Twitter has become more important as a marketing device than ever before, Ms Forster insisted.

However, the benefits for companies intent on incorporating Twitter into their marketing strategies will not come without effort. Writing for Official Wire, SEO expert and social media businessman Leon Hill stressed that for social media to be at its most effective, brands have to put work into building up a strong and loyal following.

A company needs to consider what sort of fans it wishes to attract and then concentrate its online marketing efforts into enticing them.

The Google Pac Man logo helps celebrate the 30th anniversary of the arcade classic

Google is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the arcade game classic Pac-Man with a new twist on its logo. You can actually play pac man on the google homepage your yellow little friend dodges the ghosts around the letters of google.

The google logo is often changed to celebrate birthdays of famous people, special events and holiday seasons. Google and twitter search trends has gone through the roof with the word pac man.

To play, Pac-Man on the Google home page, click ”Insert Coin” and when the work “Ready!” appears, use the arrow keys to control your Pac-Man.

If you add Ms. Pac-Man to the mix - The second player uses the “W-A-S-D” keys as controllers.