Polk Brings Offline Auto Data To Online Ad Targeting

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John McBride PolkAutomotive data company Polk collects and analyzes data related to registration and title information, new vehicle transactions from all the major manufacturers, and even vehicle financing data. Working with companies like Datalogix, with whom Polk has a years-long partnership, the company is able to bring this offline data into the online world.

"Polk has some model vehicle behaviors on what is likely owned today and what is likely going to be their purchasing behavior," explained John McBride, digital practice leader at Polk. "Datalogix has created basically a cookie pool where they can help us assign those likely vehicle behaviors to an Internet cookie. We bring the automotive buying behaviors. Datalogix brings in the ability to enable those behaviors...for digital ad targeting."

McBride spoke with AdExchanger recently about ways manufacturers leverage Polk's data, the value of automotive data, and Polk's challenges and goals when it comes to measurement.

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Salesforce.com Reports Q1 Earnings, Reaffirms Marketing Ambitions

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SalesforceSalesforce.com wants to be “number one” in marketing, said CEO Marc Benioff during the company's Q1 earnings call Thursday. “We’ve acquired our way into marketing, first by purchasing Radian6, then by buying Buddy Media,” Benioff said. “And we don’t want to just be number one in listening, publishing, or social advertising, but a number of other areas as well.”

The San Francisco-based company reported quarterly earnings of $893 million for the quarter ended April 30, a 28% growth from the same quarter last year. Analysts had estimated revenues of $887 million for the quarter.

Salesforce.com added more than 480 new employees in the first quarter, bringing its headcount to 10,300 employees, up 23% over Q1 last year.

Based on market share, revenue and other criteria, research firm Gartner named Salesforce.com the largest CRM company in the world earlier this quarter. To hold on to its title, it will have to be “number one” in three main areas: sales, customer service and marketing, according to Benioff, who claimed that the company had already achieved that title in the first two areas.

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FTC Probes Google Display Biz; Tremor Files For IPO

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FTC Probes Google Display Biz

The Federal Trade Commission is prepping a new antitrust probe into Google’s display ad dominance, just four months after ending its last investigation of the company (which found no wrongdoing). Bloomberg sources say, “FTC investigators are examining whether Google is using its position in U.S. display ads...to push companies to use more of its other services.” Read it. It’s been six years since the FTC approved Google’s DoubleClick merger, calling the display space “dynamic.”

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Video Ad Rivals Collaborate On Open-Source Viewability

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Brett Wilson TubeMogulYou know viewability is a big deal when rivals in a given space band together to promote a new open source standard around it.

That's what's happening in online video as TubeMogul organizes a group of fellow video ad tech vendors including BrightRoll, Innovid, LiveRail and SpotXchange to support OpenVV (or Open VideoView), a viewability solution for in-stream video ads. (A demo of the metric is available here.)

The group is hoping to add to its roster major publishers and ad agencies to build momentum around OpenVV. While the elephant in the viewability room, Google, is at the moment not a part of the OpenVV consortium, TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson said that talks with the search giant, which just received Media Ratings Council accreditation for its general display viewability metric this month, began last week and are expected to continue.

"There's no sustainable completive advantage in who 'does viewability best,'" said Tim Avila, BrightRoll's VP of product marketing, in a conference call with Wilson and LiveRail CEO Mark Trefgarne. "We think this gets solved…by sharing code, as an industry."

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NAI Unveils Revised Mobile Privacy Code

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mobile-rulesThe self-regulatory group Network Advertising Initiative, whose members include Google, Yahoo and Aol Advertising, has released a revised code of conduct regarding information collected from mobile apps. The updated code introduces new requirements regarding interest-based data collection and advertising.

The proposed draft rules address types of information unique to mobile, such as geolocation data and “personal directory data,” e.g. calendar, address book, phone calls, text messages, photos or videos that are stored on devices and logs. The NAI requires its members to obtain opt-in consent before collecting either geolocation data or personal directory data.

“I was pleased to see the NAI release an updated code of conduct that addresses the use of data for mobile apps for the first time. Hopefully this will raise the bar in privacy protection,” said Maureen Ohlhausen, commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, at the NAI’s annual summit meeting in New York City earlier this week.

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Are You An Exec With 'Digital' In Your Title? Good Luck

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adamheimlich“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Adam Heimlich, Consultant & Former Razorfish Client Partner.

Big business first started to take digital seriously when, about five years ago, companies hired their first directors of digital marketing. Now there’s a trend toward hiring VPs of digital marketing or of digital strategy. These new hires deserve our sympathy, because the skills that got them where they are – and their focus on achievement – won’t serve them as VP. Mission failure is written into their job description.

Why digital can’t succeed in a silo is not a philosophical question. Turf war is a reality at every corporation, and the stuff of digital marketing is every other department’s turf. Sales. Technology. Customer service. Creative. Strategic partnerships. Financial forecasting. The counter-incentives to intramural VP collaboration aren’t going away by themselves. And consumer expectation for service and experience obviously can’t be met by a siloed organization.

Therefore, now would be a good time to abolish digital departments and distribute know-how at every communications touch point. Instead, those at the C level are mainly choosing to elevate the digital silo rather than to reorganize around the consumer – a choice that, to my mind, reflects a bit of cynicism. Intended or not, this amounts to a classic set-up-to-fail scenario.

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Digital Media Summit Ends With Mozilla And IAB On-Stage Debate

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dmsToday, LUMA Partners gathered together ad tech executives from near and far for its annual Digital Media Summit during New York City's Internet Week.  The agenda featured a content-rich day of discussions on the corporate development and strategy side of ad tech, as opposed to the client side.

Among the highlights was a keynote by Google's Neal Mohan announcing a "real-time" update to their benchmarking tool and foray into engagement metrics. Also, Twitter's Director of Product for Revenue Kevin Weill made an appearance along with Facebook's agency biz chief Blake Chandlee in a high-level fireside chat featuring LUMA's master of ceremonies and founder Terence Kawaja.

At the end of the day-long event, there was time for one last "fireside" chat as Kawaja interviewed (and prodded) IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg. As the IAB chief finished explaining that Mozilla's recent cookie-blocking moves were anything but consumer friendly, Kawaja "surprised" the crowd – and seemingly Rothenberg, too – by inviting Mozilla SVP of Business and Legal Affairs Harvey Anderson to the stage to debate and discuss Mozilla's recent moves.

The transcript follows (MP3 here):

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How To Transcend 'Above-The-Line' And 'Below-The-Line' Thinking

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greg-corso-ddt“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Greg Corso, Vice President of Media Solutions at dunnhumbyUSA. 

In Dr. Seuss’ The Butter Battle Book, the Yooks are separated from the Zooks by a wall, an arbitrarily drawn line that defines their respective boundaries. They wage a battle suggestive of Cold War escalation, each side topping the other with a more sophisticated and powerful weapon until they both reach the same inevitable conclusion – an indefensible weapon called the Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo. All this because they fundamentally disagree on which side of their bread should be buttered, top or bottom.

We love to draw lines and take sides, and there are all kinds of famous lines in the world – the 38th parallel, the Mendoza Line, the “line in the sand,” to name a few. In the world of advertising, a once-descriptive line is becoming less and less relevant – that which separates above-the-line (ATL) media from below-the-line (BTL) media.

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Programmatic Out-Of-Home; Twitter Lead Gen

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Programmatic Out-Of-Home

Signs on sticks – can you buy them programmatically? Xaxis thinks so. The WPP trading desk is adding out-of-home buys courtesy of sister company Spafax and its geo-based audience segments (with Vistar Media’s help – Digiday). The venues: “taxis, shopping malls, doctor’s offices, stadiums, gas stations, office buildings and hotels.” Press release. Volume is about 1.4 billion monthly impressions across 100,000 screens. At a glance, this appears to be a data enhancement more than an addressability shift. WSJ recently covered Xaxis and Spafax’s moves in radio and OOH (out-of-home). Read that. Meanwhile, in other OOH news, OOH buying platform AdStruc has integrated into agency workflow system Mediaocean.

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