Nexage Beefs Up Transparency Features For Publishers And Advertisers

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NexageMobile ad exchange Nexage has rolled out three new tools designed to inject more transparency into its Nexage Exchange for buyers and sellers, the company said today. The tools include aggregate reporting, session depth indicators and advertiser-level reporting.

US advertisers are expected to spend nearly $3.4 billion this year on digital display ads (including mobile) purchased through real-time bidding platforms, according to eMarketer. Transparency questions, e.g., where did the ad appear and how many people saw it, continue to be major obstacles in mobile advertising, however. And as more brands enter programmatic ad markets, the pressure is rising to make sure “the technology is working the way it should be working,” said Nexage CMO Victor Milligan.

“Being able to manage different brand relationships and provide brand safety is very important, particularly for the premium market,” Milligan noted. “The premium market is saying they reject this sense of a black box [in mobile advertising] and in order to capitalize on this technology, a level of transparency has to be in place.”

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Facebook Talks Ad Simplification, Custom Audiences And Privacy At Cannes

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boz-facebook-csannesFacebook has made so many embellishments to its ad monetization machine in the past year that communicating it all to clients has become a big chore. This week in Cannes, the company participated in a "Creativity at Scale" panel and convened its 18-member Client Council to discuss its embrace of hashtags, its recent decision to simplify ads, and other aspects of its ad strategy.

It later updated the press on sales strategy and ad products. Among the revelations there: Facebook's Custom Audiences database matching program has become a key driver of ad demand.

Much has changed in the two years since Facebook set up its Client Council. For one, it seems to have embraced a more inclusive definition of what it means to sell "direct."

"The nomenclature of direct sales versus self-serve is a false delineation," VP of Global Marketing Solutions Carolyn Everson said. "Even for the marketers that are moving more toward programmatic buying, more toward self-serve … that has not changed the role of our sales and marketing organization."

In other words, Facebook wants to support whatever pipes its ad customers prefer to use, be it high-touch deals, managed services, or a license fee paid to one of the 250 partners in its Preferred Marketing Developer program. Director of Engineering Andrew Bosworth ("Boz") said the window an advertiser uses to buy media on Facebook comes down to preference, and often the channel doesn't correlate with sophistication or size.

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Video Ad Firm YuMe Sees Lasting Future For The Classic CPM Buy

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Ed Haslam, YuMeThe moment for "convergence" between TV and online video is starting to seem more real, but video ad tech firm YuMe believes that programmatic sales methods won't be a substantial part of the conversation around television-style branding campaigns for many years to come.

"We do have a small amount of ad sales coming to us through programmatic channels," Ed Haslam, YuMe's SVP of marketing told AdExchanger. "Buyers have been conditioned to buy premium through a rep, like they do with TV, and to get direct response inventory through platforms and programmatic. A buyer doesn't know what you are when you do both."

Often mentioned as a likely IPO candidate, along with Adap.tv, especially since last month's S-1 filing by Tremor Video, YuMe is among the few video ad tech companies to continue to look askance at programmatic sales methods. But as Haslam tells it, the stance helps YuMe tell an easy to understand story to TV buyers who are more comfortable dealing with comparatively uncomplicated CPM-based formats.

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Cannes Lions: Shell Lacks Faith In Display Ad Creative

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americo-shellTalking about data feels a bit transgressive in Cannes, where creativity is literally center stage. But with data driving so much change at agencies – including at creative shops – it seems an unavoidable topic.

It came up frequently in a conversation on Tuesday with Americo Campos Silva, Shell's Global Media Manager, and Sasha Savic, CEO of its agency, MediaCom USA.

"There's much more of it," Silva told AdExchanger. "The difficult piece is to prioritize what you really need to know, what is nice to know, and what you didn't want to know – but it came to your desk anyway."

Shell has worked with MediaCom since 2005, and the ratio of its digital spend is now about 20%. It varies by product type, with corporate-level media spend reflecting the highest share of digital investment at 35 to 40%, and local market spending hovering at 15 to 20%.

But Silva doesn't think much of display ad effectiveness. "Ads are served in the wrong geographies, or below the fold. Sometimes there are technical mistakes," he said. "Video is more attractive, if it works and has sound."

To combat these issues, Silva said, Shell started using ad verification software last year. It's "not perfect, but it helps us with control of campaigns. And it helps us understand some issues with publishers that allow us to make very objective complaints."

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GE Gets Predictive; Growth Numbers

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

GE Gets Predictive

“Predictivity” -- the name says it all. GE, in partnership with Amazon Web Services, Accenture, and others, are getting into the “big data” and analytics game with a cloud services offering. There’s nothing said about ads in the press release, but...listen to the quote from Amazon CTO Werner Vogels in the release: “GE’s domain knowledge and R&D capabilities combined with the strength of AWS’s global infrastructure, breadth of services and big data expertise will help enable customers to solve problems in ways we haven’t even imagined yet, such as improved accuracy in healthcare treatments or extreme levels of energy efficiency.” Sounds like good targeting. Read the release. And, more on All Things D.

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Google Ad Chief Susan Wojcicki Promises New Ad Formats, More Optimization For AdSense

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susanwojcickiWeb publishers using Google’s AdSense program will get new ad formats and better tools for optimizing ads on their sites in coming months and years, Google’s ad chief promised Monday.

Susan Wojcicki, Google’s senior vice president of advertising and commerce, hinted at the improvements during a live video Google Hangout on Tuesday celebrating the official 10th anniversary of AdSense, which launched under that name on June 18, 2003. The self-service program, which runs ads matching the content of a Web page, actually began a few months earlier as “Content-Targeted Advertising,” but when Google bought Applied Semantics in April 2003, it renamed the contextual ad service using that firm’s AdSense moniker for a similar service.

AdSense has since become a prime means of support for many Web sites, and it even supplements ads on large sites such as the New York Times and, more recently, Yahoo. The program paid out $7 billion to some 2 million publishers last year, about two-thirds of the total ad revenues AdSense brings in. Wojcicki said Google issues about 100,000 AdSense checks a month, “probably more than most Fortune 500 companies.”

Not surprisingly, given Google’s penchant for keeping future plans close to the vest, Wojcicki didn’t make specific product announcements. But she outlined a couple of general directions for AdSense.

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SAP’s Big Mobile Monetization Plan

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SAPAs the mobile landscape expands, so does the trove of consumer data mobile carriers are sitting on. Enter SAP AG, which is hammering out deals to crunch carriers’ mobile user data and sell it to marketers.

AdExchanger talked to Kevin Outcalt, CTO of mobile services at SAP and Guy Rolfe, global mobile practice leader at Kantar Mobile, about consumer privacy and the new service, SAP Consumer Insight 365.

AdExchanger: How did Consumer Insight 365 come about?

KEVIN OUTCALT: SAP mobile services is a division of SAP that’s a little different. We don’t sell software licenses like virtually all of SAP does. We sell services to the mobile network operators and enterprise customers and primarily those services are messaging services. So if you’re sending a text message from your home to London and it goes through a local operator and has to be transferred to say, Vodafone in the UK, it goes through us. That way the thousand or so other mobile network operators don’t have to have agreements with the other operators.

As we developed, we started to understand that the enterprise customers are in the dark about what mobile user behavior is and where to reach them and with what kind of message. On the other side, we’re aware that mobile network operators have a tremendous amount of data about mobile user behavior. And so the service we developed, which we call SAP Consumer Insights 365, puts those two pieces together.

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Kepler Group Has Doubled Clients One Year After Spinoff From MediaMath

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greenberg-keplerIt's been a little more than a year since Kepler Group was spun off (see AdExchanger's Q&A) from MediaMath, where it had previously been the direct-to-client professional services group. So how's it going for the world's first independent agency to be incubated within a demand-side platform?

Not bad at all.

Kepler is hiring up and winning accounts. At its founding in May 2012, it had six staff, all former MediaMath employees, who serviced nine clients. It now employs 16, and has doubled its customer base to 18 accounts.

That growth is possible because traditional media agencies are moving too slowly on the audience-buying trend, according to CEO Rick Greenberg. "You've got this confluence of forces everyone's aware of," he said. "The agency/advertiser model hasn't evolved quickly enough, particularly at the traditional agencies."

MediaMath is, of course, Kepler's DSP of choice for bidding and optimization of display, as well as its pixeling hub / data management platform. Kepler also supports channels outside display through partnerships with ad buying platforms (Marin Software for search, TubeMogul for video, Salesforce/Buddy for social). And it's also buying direct, non-biddable ads. In other words, it's a full-service digital agency.

"If you're not going multi-channel, you're a point solution," said Greenberg.

Kepler is going after consulting budgets too, helping customers create integrated media plans rooted in data – think attribution and media mix modeling -- with media execution thrown into the bargain. Its revenue model is a hybrid of percentage of media spend (for media clients) and professional services fees (for consulting clients).

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Nativo And VivaKi Hope To Prove 'Programmatic Native' Can Be Done

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Justin Choi, nativoOne of the reasons that digital publishers like to talk about native is obvious: it resembles the age-old practice of high-priced "advertorials" and the natural customization of the placement dictates that marketers must deal directly with the site's sales team.

At the same time, those reasons have left agencies feeling frozen out by native ads, since, by definition, these one-off deals can't be scaled across other publishers' properties. But Nativo, a three-year-old native ad software provider to the sell-side, recently has been working with VivaKi to make this form of marketing more palatable to the buy-side by focusing on building a layer of automation into the deals.

"When we started, we weren't thinking of 'native ads' per se," said Justin Choi, Nativo's CEO. "We were interested in building technology to make it easy to automate the distribution of brand-generated content  -- which you could call a form of 'programmatic native.' VivaKi understood this was part of an emerging trend within online advertising and decided to work with us."

Nativo starts out with a publisher deal – it has about 1,500 such deals in place right now, but Choi is clear that he is not pursuing an ad network model, where the same native placement would be placed across multiple sites. Instead, through the use of some source code that conforms to a publisher's content management system, the advertiser and its agency can start plugging in once a buy has been made. Nativo charges based on the use of its software to create a template for native ads and then takes a cut from the impressions that are generated from the spot.

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Monetate Addressing 'Conveyor Belt' Of Data Says CEO Brussin

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monetateAs he intimated back in 2011, Monetate isn’t just servicing the e-commerce industry with its website optimization technology and analytics, says CEO David Brussin. It’s addressing the individual consumer as well.

And yet, in spite of expanding into travel, financial services, and publishing, among other areas, Brussin thinks e-commerce giant Amazon is one of his company’s chief competitors. “Everybody's focused on Amazon, but they don't want to compete [with Amazon]. We do.”  He claims that, at peak, a quarter of all U.S. online retail spend is running through Monetate’s platform and has resulted in a doubling of revenue year-over-year, though he declines to provide exact figures.

Brussin doesn’t pull any punches when discussing where he and his 170-person company can potentially compete: “As good as Amazon is at testing and making decisions on data - and at least having a willingness to invest in getting the right experience in front of a given customer - it's ultimately not just about the SKU that a customer can find in one place or another.”

Brussin spoke to AdExchanger recently about his company’s momentum and industry trends.

Adexchanger: Do you think of Monetate as being in the marketing automation space?

DAVID BRUSSIN: One could certainly think of us as being in that universe.  What Monetate is fundamentally about is helping marketers know their customer and take action. It's the combination of those two that's very unique to our business. That kind of defies trying to put it in an analytics space, which could be more on the customer side or a marketing automation space, which would be more on the “take action” side.

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