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Taking Issue With Viewable Impressions

"Data-Driven Thinking" is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today's column is written by Mark Hughes, CEO of C3 Metrics.

At the worst possible time, the digital marketing measurement business is again showing inconsistencies. The issue this time is the matter of "viewable impressions," and I'm taking issue with the information released last week by comScore. Whether we like it or not, Internet users are not seeing all served ads, and we need to find the most accurate way of painting this picture, which admittedly is not pretty.

Here's the quick background. One of the key findings delivered last week by a comScore study of 12 big brands is that 31% of the 1.7 billion ad impressions sampled recently in its study were never in view. The issue is that comScore is taking 12 big brands with huge budgets, and then sampling them on premium sites only. It would be nice if real companies could buy, plan and measure media that way. But it's not reality. It's like calling Palo Alto, CA and Greenwich, CT a true representation of America. Not accurate, and  not projectable for the large majority of advertisers.

And Nielsen?  Nielsen just told Adexchanger in response to comScore’s data that visibility of ads only makes up 10-15% of the importance in digital advertising.  Come again?  If ads didn’t show on TV, but advertisers were charged for those ads--don’t you think there would be some immediate fire and brimstone meetings?

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AdExchanger: The Algos

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...

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Visual Revenue Gets Funds For Pub Tools; The New Google Privacy Policy; Sucking

Here's today's AdExchanger.com news round-up... Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Predicting Content Gets Funds

Dennis Mortensen's Visual Revenue has received $1.7 million in new funding to continue to grow the business and work on the tech which optimizes the publisher's front page. Managing yield starts with the content from Visual Revenue's perspective. According to the release, "[Visual Revenue's] solution can predict the performance of a piece of content about 15 minutes into the future and provides editors with real-time recommendations on what content to place in which position on a Front Page and for how long." Read the release. $1.7 million feels like a bridge loan - not a whole heckuva lot. Could there be a "liquidity event" imminent? Or is the publisher market different than the marketers'? Read last year's AdExchanger Q&A with Visual Revenue.

The Google Policy

Google privacy policies are unifying under a single umbrella policy as Big G is getting closer to the world of an online service provider. As announced on Tuesday, if you want to live in the Google web, you're going to need to ante-up with some PII that allows the company to target you with some sweet ad love. The Google Pubic Policy blog says there are exceptions. But, Google is leveraging the need which the consumer has for its tools (search, email, Google docs, now G+) against the consumer's ability to do without. Facebook is the other company with an essential login, of course. Read the policy. And, read more in The Washington Post.

DSPs In India

Demand-side platforms are infiltrating the media business in India says RP Singh in ClickZ Asia. Singh writes, "The India market is clearly getting divided into brand and performance advertisers. Looking at how SEM is being used in India by advertisers, most performance advertisers have in-house teams to optimize SEM campaigns in real time. These advertisers will continue to handle DSP interface too, in house." Read more.

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OwnerIQ On Expanding Its Shopper Marketing Capabilities With DiJiPOP

Earlier this week, OwnerIQ announced the acquisiton of "on-demand shopper marketing technology platform DiJiPOP in an all-stock deal." (Also, read DiJiPOP Q&A on AdExchanger from March 2011) Shopper marketing online is increasingly an attractive opportunity to explore for retailers. According to the press release, "The deal enables OwnerIQ to increase the value and revenue potential for the online retailer and manufacturer partners that power their unique Ownership Targeting capability." Read the release.

CEO Jay Habegger answered questions on the acquisition and its impact on OwnerIQ.

AdExchanger.com: What was the trigger for the transaction? Is this about tech or clients?

In the ad tech marketplace OwnerIQ is known for ownership targeting, an advertising solution that enables marketers to target online consumers based on the products and brands they own or intend to buy. This capability is powered by OwnerIQ’s Media Solutions, or OMS, which has relationships with online retailers, manufacturers and publishers for whom we enable marketing capabilities, such as co-operative audience sharing, and provide ad revenue in exchange for consumer browsing and purchasing data. The acquisition of DiJiPOP, an on-demand shopper marketing technology platform, will add even more value to our OMS relationships and enable our partners to generate new revenue through on-site display advertising and product placements.

Is shopper marketing becoming more of a focus for OwnerIQ?

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Nielsen EVP McKinley On The Gross Rating Point: We Need Digital To Speak Brand

For marketers, the ease of using a single buying metric - The Gross Rating Point (GRP) - across traditional and digital channels remains attractive, but whether it can be effectively extended to digital remains to be seen as this survey of industry executives indicated last year on AdExchanger.

Last week, comScore stirred the GRP pot and introduced its solution to unlocking digital for marketers and calling it the "vGRP." Read the interview with comScore exec Kirby Winfield here.

AdExchanger reached out to Scott McKinley, EVP of Advertising Effectiveness at Nielsen, to understand how his company approaches the GRP and differentiates.

AdExchanger.com: Can you discuss at a high-level your ideas - and Nielsen’s - on the GRP and the need for it?

Scott McKinley:  The problem of measurement for digital is an old problem. It started shortly after the Internet achieved commercial scale in the mid 90's, and it has persisted until today. In fact, in November, I was at two different CMO conferences and can say that the CMOs of November 2011 aren't that much different in terms of their sophistication around an understanding of how to use digital in their mix than the CMOs of 1998. It's such a big problem and it's been attacked from so many different directions. And, the industry has not been successful at coming up with a solution to offer a true understanding of how to measure digital in the context of all the media opportunities that an advertiser has.

And that has been part of the problem, too - as digital has gotten more and more sophisticated and “sharpened” its set of tools for measurement, it's done it myopically, and in a way that's alienated the brand advertiser, which is of course the opposite of what was intended.

As a result, you get these digital advertising systems that are so complex and interwoven with each other and they're all answering questions that have nothing to do with brand advertising.

They're answering measurement questions that have to do with direct response. That's the irony: the smarter online gets about direct response, all they're doing is improving a language that the brand advertiser doesn't speak.

We as an industry, as a research industry, and from the medium's perspective as well, we've got to get digital to speak brand. For years, it was digital trying to teach brand advertisers how to speak its language, and the brand advertiser basically rejected it. To a brand advertiser - to Tide or Pampers or Clorox, or any of these brands - a click really doesn't mean anything. What means something is changing attitudes and reaching audiences.

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Yahoo! Display Revenues Continue To Wobble; Mohan On Google Display, Closed Systems; Getting Netezza’d

Here's today's AdExchanger.com news round-up... Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Yahoo! Earnings Revealed

The song remains the same - for now.  From Yahoo!'s Q4 earnings release, "Revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs (ex-TAC) was $1,169 million for the fourth quarter of 2011, a 3 percent decrease from the fourth quarter of 2010." And then, the display details: "Display revenue ex-TAC was $546 million, a 4 percent decrease compared to $567 million for the fourth quarter of 2010." Data-driven display is not coming to the rescue here - likely due to a slide in revenue on the "premium"/guaranteed/Class 1 side in "the Americas" where Yahoo! display revenue has been a traditional sweet spot. Read the release. And, read Jason Del Rey on Ad Age. In his first appearance on an earnings call, new Yahoo! CEO Scott Thomson was enthusiastic about the company's prospects but said in his intro, "The company has been growing users and launching products at a faster rate, but we need better execution to accelerate time-to-market and to better monetize the engagement we have." Read the transcript on Seeking Alpha. Interesting to note that Yahoo! claims interclick benefits/revenues are not readily apparent because now that interclick is internal, it can't record revenue like it used to when it did things such as buying and selling of Yahoo! inventory. At least that was my interpretation of a CFO Tim Morse answer. In general, like his CEO introduction, Thompson was still punting on most strategy questions with only two weeks of experience under his belt. Hear a replay of the call. Citi analyst Mark Mahaney told investors about Yahoo!, "Its core Display Ad biz seems like a Deteriorating Asset – a possibly perpetual market share loser – while its Asia Investment Portfolio would seem to contain significant Shareholder Value creation opportunities. We applaud YHOO’s significant share repo activity and would encourage the consideration of a dividend."

About Closed Systems

Google VP of Product Neal Mohan answers questions from Brian Morrissey on Digiday.  Mohan takes exception to the idea that Google is building a closed ecosystem for display just like search: "Anybody who says that and has an understanding of how our industry works knows that is ridiculous. The best way is to give some examples. First of all, when we started in the display business, Google operated a display ad network. Yet we chose to build an ad exchange that was open to all the competitive networks." Read more.

More Private Exchanges

In an article on New Media Age, Tim Gentry, Guardian News & Media's commercial effectiveness manager, adds some fuel to the private exchange fire and says that, hey, it works! Rubicon Project's private exchange offering is highlighted as Gentry says, "Ensuring that we're capturing more of the spend in the market from trading desks like Vivaki’s Audience on Demand & Group M's Xaxis, our share of the Rubicon [Project] UK News Channel grew from 11% to 18%, growing our effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM)." Read more.

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33across Acquires Tynt And Signal From The Sell-Side

Today, social analytics company and ad network 33across announced the acquisition of Tynt, a sell-side analytics tools company that aggregates data to tell publishers about their audience, protect their content and even leverage search engine optimization to drive traffic.  Read the release.

In addition to the new sell-side technology - it's getting a boatload of "signal", i.e. pixels, in the process.  And that's nothing to scoff at.

Tynt had raised nearly $12 million in venture funding (Crunchbase) up through a Series B round. 33across has raised $11 million. Tynt didn't have a significant, revenue-generating business model, but the sense is, and 33across no doubt hopes, that the solution Tynt has created could be valuable to a company looking to leverage website user data.

What's the next move for 33across?  For now, 33across CEO Eric Wheeler says it's about continuing to build analytics tools for publishers to help them sell direct - especially the top tier, where direct sales is critical to maximizing yield. And, data drives the media for 33across, as Wheeler told AdExchanger.com:

"So I think there are two sides to this. One is to be more on a private exchange basis for the top tier guys. Everything we purchase today is dynamic - via private exchange, RTB and exchanges. That's how we source today and those are the vehicles [through which] the mid- and long tail are sourcing today. We don't have a desire or need to be a new exchange. I think we'll create a lot of value for those premium publishers with those combined services. For the mid- to long-tail, we're going to be making them smarter. We're going to be giving them the tools, access and insights that think like that. That's incredibly powerful."

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Apple Makes $13 Billion In Q4; OwnerIQ Buys DiJiPOP For Shopper Marketing

Here's today's AdExchanger.com news round-up... Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Apple Teller Machine

Apple made enough money in the fourth quarter to buy the startup ad tech ecosystem and ad holding company or two. From the release, "The Company posted record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and record quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share." Analysts had thought Apple would make $10.06 per share on revenue of $39 billion according to CNET. iPhone was Apple's Q4 killer app.

Another Acquisition

More ad tech company acquisitions! - or mergers to be exact. Shopper marketing company DiJiPOP (AdExchanger.com Q&A) has been acquired by ownership targeting company OwnerIQ. Also, OwnerIQ let a few details go in the press release as it says its "revenue has nearly quadrupled in the past year, as agencies have made increasing use of the company's ability to reach consumers based on ownership signals." Read more.

Looking At LUMA

On the Perfect Market blog, and in Powerpoint format, CEO Julie Schoenfeld offers "a simplified version of the LUMAscape (online ad ecosystem map) by focusing on the 6 major functions involved in the display ad value chain." And there are no logos! See it. Schoenfeld sees "drastic" changes ahead for the ecosystem.

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New Weather Channel CEO Kenny Discusses His New Role And The Opportunity Ahead

Today, The Weather Channel Companies announced that David Kenny, former President of Akamai and CEO of Publicis agency Digitas, would become its Chairman and CEO and succeed Mike Kelly who will remain as a special adviser to Kenny and the Board. According to a press release, the owners of The Weather Channel Companies (Bain Capital, The Blackstone Group, and NBC Universal) said: "David brings a strong leadership background having served as chief executive at global companies across different aspects of the media industry. This experience gives him a deep understanding of the TV and digital business, and he has the leadership experience and vision to drive global initiatives across all platforms." Read more.

Kenny discussed his new role and the marketing and advertising opportunity ahead.

AdExchanger.com: Why move to The Weather Channel and the sell-side?

DK:  Listen, I love brands. I love to create a product. I love convergence. This has a foundation in all of that. To me, it's just a great place to use my creative muscles as well as my analytic muscles because we've got both science and programming here. So it's a very rare, cool opportunity that fits me quite well.

I would say advertisers need new solutions and need media to evolve. They need platforms to work across all screens. And I'd like to continue being a pioneer.

Considering your background in the agency world, can you see bringing agency services in-house to The Weather Channel?

I think we need to keep building out the content side and engaging the audience and making it a deeper relationship. So I'm going to focus on that. Advertisers and their agencies will find ways to work with us to act as our platform. But I don't think we have to disintermediate anybody. I don't think we need growth out of somebody else's backyard.

I'm a believer in agencies. We work well with them and will continue to do so, as opposed to compete with them.

Even though we’re early into your tenure there, what would you say marketers need these days in terms of an advertising opportunity with a partner like Weather Channel?

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Vibrant Media CEO Irvine Discusses Ad Network Acquisition Image Space Media

Last week, Vibrant Media announced the acquisition of in-image ad network Image Space Media (ISM). From the release: "The acquisition of ISM will enhance the delivery of Vibrant Image, a product that identifies static images within brand-safe content across the Web and embeds small overlays within them at the bottom of the image." Read the release. Terms were not disclosed.

Vibrant Media CEO Cella Irvine discussed the acquisition and some of its implications.

AdExchanger.com: In that you have Vibrant Image already, is the acquisition of ISM more about publishers or technology?

CELLA IRVINE: Both, really.

Think about this: There are billions of quality images on the Web and approximately 25%-30% of website “real estate” is made up of images. Until now, this content has been unmonetizable for publishers – and for some publishers this unmonetized image content makes up a good portion of page views. We see that every page viewed on Vibrant’s network has, on average, 1.5 images. This is a tremendous opportunity for publishers to add value to their content in an innovative, user-initiated, and effective way.

Of course, this deal also gives a boost to our technology. We looked at this space rigorously and saw that Image Space Media’s technology platform and skills were best-in-market. We can now bring together their technology with our contextual data and algorithms to provide brands with innovative and effective ways to reach consumers, publishers with ways to monetize valuable assets, and users with ways to interact with a relevant ad where and when they choose.

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