I love that people still try to argue that Google and Facebook aren’t at war. They’re absolutely at war. And I predict it will quickly get much more ugly than the Google/Apple war.

Apple doesn’t have an easy way to threaten Google’s core business. I guess if they go with Bing across all their products by default that could hurt, but that’s not an Apple product. (Plus, I think the reason they haven’t done that yet is because they simply believe Google is better at search — Apple won’t make a call that hurts their product.) You’d think Android threatens Apple’s core business, but that’s not really happening (see: Apple’s results quarter after quarter).

But Facebook and Google could easily threaten each other’s core businesses. Google has already started going after Facebook with Google+. Expect Facebook to go more seriously after search — and more importantly, contextual advertising across the web — probably with some help from Microsoft.

New research from Nielsen suggests that, while some individual websites perform very well at reaching an ad campaign’s intended audience, nearly all campaigns are delivered to consumers who are not valued by the brand advertiser. 

Let’s never speak of CPMs again, shall we? Geez. 

Advertisers looking to build their brands online will need to look beyond traditional web metrics to determine if their investments are paying off, according to a recent study by Nielsen.

YES YES YES