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Guidelines On Behavioral Targeting; Omnicom Media Group CEO Spiegel Interviewed by ContextWeb; Lookery Gives SWOT

The New York Times' Stephanie Clifford looks at recent initiatives to overcome privacy regulation efforts in the online ad industry in "Industry Tightens Its Standards for Tracking Web Surfers." The article coincides with a new industry report called “Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising” and sponsored by the following acronyms: IAB, DMA, AAAA, ANA, and BBB.  The 4A's release is here or download the Network Advertising Initiative press release here to learn more about the industry perspective.

Clifford remarks on the new industry guidelines:

"In one big change, the report instructs members to provide notice, either in an ad or on a Web site (rather than hidden in the privacy policy), that behavioral information is being collected."

From the Triggit blog, Zach Coelius chimes in on the implications of the new initiative if it doesn't succeed:

"What this means for the internet is a lot more significant than most people understand. Without the ability to use data about customers to enhance targeting, marketers will not be able to pay as much for ads as we currently do."

ContextWeb has a two-part interview with Omnicom Media Group's CEO Matt Spiegel (part 1 and part 2). This is the first in a series of interviews with panelists from ContextWeb's upcoming, July 14 event "Agency Demand Platforms: Art vs. Science in a Real-Time World" with Wenda Harris Millard.

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Mpire CEO Matt Hulett Says Verification Space Could Change The Ad Industry

Matt Hulett is CEO of Mpire, an online advertising solutions company.

AdExchanger.com: Mpire's AdXpose appears to give advertisers insight on placement and context. Yet, the trend these days seems to put more importance on targeting audience and addressable media. In your opinion, why does AdXpose belong in today's marketplace?

MH: AdXpose belongs in today's marketplace because the industry is rife with huge inefficiencies in media spend. When ads are sold and never seen, or are placed on nefarious, fraudulent or just plain inappropriate sites or channels, no one wins – except the arbitrageurs and C-list networks that profit from 30% of all ad impressions online. Marketers are footing the bill, and until they put their collective feet down by implementing AdXpose and acting on the learnings provided, the wrong behaviors and content will be rewarded and incentivized, and the online advertising ecosystem will continue to suffer.

As for audience targeting, we also recognize that marketers and agencies today care as much about who saw an ad as where or if it was seen. While the beta version of AdXpose does not include audience verification, this insight will be delivered in an upcoming version.

How are brand awareness marketers aided by mPire's AdXpose product?

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Search Engine Land on OPA; NY Times on Mullen; BlueKai CEO Tawakol on Free Media; Skechers on Behavioral; MediaMath Remarketing

Greg Sterling delivers the OPA case on display advertising to search marketers on Search Engine Land. In the process, Greg digs up 2008 data from Tacoda (now AOL's property) regarding clickers. Sterling concludes, "The bottom line is that a CTR is not a good measure of consumer intent, engagement or value as a metric for display advertising." This will be a tough nut to swallow for search marketers initially. But if they can effectively track attribution with display and search campaigns running simultaneously, display's positive impact on overall results (shown in this December study by Comscore, for example) may whet the appetite for SEM's to explore display.

Robin Wauters on TechCrunch has a poll going regarding how users view the new OPA-proposed ads. Early results show "anger" in the lead.

NY Times' columnist Stuart Elliot covers Orbitz decision to look beyond its creative agency of record, Mullen. Media planing remains with Mullen's MediaHub, though. Among Elliott's observations:

"Orbitz’s decision to hand over creative duties to an agency outside the realm of Madison Avenue demonstrates how marketers are seeking to think differently as they cope with changing consumer behavior and the effects of the recession... ...And other marketers have hired agencies that specialize in interactive advertising to create campaigns that appear in traditional media as well as online."

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OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan Says Exchange Showing Traction; OpenX Market Doubles In 2 Months

Tim Cadogan is CEO of OpenX, an online advertising technology company.

AdExchanger.com: When you say (MediaPost 6/29) OpenX Market is more like a search marketplace whereas Right Media is more like a financial market, what do you mean?

TC: Just to be clear, OpenX Market is an exchange for display advertising. Specifically, the Market is an easy to use, structured exchange in which publishers can maximize revenue for their ad space by selling their ad inventory to a wide array of competing advertisers and advertisers can access targeted, primary ad inventory across a broad array of publishers. The reference to a search marketplace comes from the fact that both sellers and buyers immediately participate in the entire market in a simple, easy way, thereby reducing friction. Buyers also benefit from a second-price auction like search. This means that advertisers can bid their true value, but only pay $0.01 more than the next highest bidder. This compares to a model like Right Media - which is more like a classic stock exchange – where participants first need an “exchange seat”, then need to link to the other players they want to trade with and is predominantly first-price, all of which is more work and friction.

Is there an auction with OpenX Market or is it first-come, first-serve where all the bidder needs to do is beat the publisher's floor price?

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Quantcast Announces Media Program; OPA Big Ads Imminent; PopularMedia Sold; Local News Using Self-Serve

Quantcast is going ahead with its efforts to offer a new opportunity for marketers who wish to leverage the millions of Quantcast pixels all over the Internet that can help provide insight into audience.   Dubbed the  "Media Program" (see release), here are the details from Quantcast:

The Quantcast solution applies marketers' unique customer interaction data from their media campaigns, search activity and brand website visitation to discover the distinctive audience characteristics of their most valuable consumer segments. Lookalike models then identify larger, similar consumer groups across the web. Marketers connect with publisher inventory to purchase these audience definitions, in real time, at scale.

Peter Naylor of NBC Universal and Ed Montes of Havas add some color to the release. AdAge's Michael Learmonth, who takes an ill-advised swipe at DogTime Media, notes that a lot of large publishers use Quantcast in order to effect better sell-through of their inventory including Time, Inc. No doubt integrating Quantcast's cookies with any exchange's cookie set will be important in driving the new product.

The NY Times' Eric Pfanner covers the apparent kumbaya occurring between Internet firms such as Google and Microsoft and ad agencies as users continue to stay online more and offline with traditional media less.

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AdBuyer.com CEO Ogilvie Says Marketers Need Help In Audience, Price, and Messaging

Tim Ogilvie is CEO of AdBuyer.com, an online media buying platform.

AdExchanger.com: What is AdBuyer.com and how did it begin?

TO: AdBuyer.com is a media buying and optimization platform for auction-based media. We provide a full suite of tools to help online marketers understand how their online advertising is performing and what they can do to improve it. We’re integrated with the major search engines and ad exchanges.

We started in 2007 by providing an automated platform for SEM optimization. That includes centralized reporting, bid management and keyword recommendations. We saw display as the next big opportunity to deliver ROI, so we started porting our search algorithms to display about 12 months ago.

Do you consider AdBuyer.com a services business or a technology business?

We’re a technology business. We’re singularly focused on building a platform that delivers the highest ROI for advertisers.

We provide account management and support that helps advertisers become self-sufficient when getting started, but that team is constantly challenged with identifying how we build technology to make our platform easier to use and more automated.

How do you differentiate from other buying platforms and services such as those provided by MediaMath and Invite Media?

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Razorfish Rumors; Google’s Display Dreams; Social Targeting with 33across and Media6Degrees

Following up on last week's news that Microsoft's Admira technology would provide the backbone for Publicis/VivaKi's entrance into the television ad exchange space (Reuters) as advertisers hunt for audience, today finds Microsoft peddling Razorfish to Publicis, supposedly one of the leading candidates to acquire the venerable Seattle-headquartered agency. The rumored acquisition price according to the Financial Times is $700 million - a drop in the bucket to Bernie Madoff perhaps, but sizable nevertheless. Razorfish's strong demand-side position will make it an attractive jewel for any holding company's crown.

The Guardian's Peter Kirwan rallies the display advertising troops in "Display has fallen short but to make money, something must be done." Kirwan provides an interesting series of quotes. Among them, one from a London-based Google employee: "We've proved to advertisers that search works. Now we're going to prove the value of display. Expect us to do a lot of research." A national newspaper exec assesses Google's aspirations simply: "Pipe dream." OpenX's Tim Cadogan adds that industry-wide, display has been under-supported with 5x fewer engineers compared to search and suggests that ad exchanges will increase the number of advertisers who buy display as attribution metrics are improved.

Venrock Partners' Brian Ascher discusses the current state of venture capital with ReadWriteWeb. In the interview, "Brian identified three areas of opportunity. First, better targeting by analyzing social media conversations. Second, ad exchanges. Third, branding via video advertising." For the full discussion, click here.

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[x+1] CEO Nardone Says Predictive Algorithms More Relevant Than Ever With Real-Time Bidding

John Nardone is CEO of [x+1], an online buying platform and data company.

AdExchanger.com: What trends is [x+1] seeing from its clients in 2009? Can you describe momentum for [x+1] this year? Revenues, deal size, vertical strengths, product interests, etc.?

JN: [x+1] has been extremely fortunate in 2009 to see its client list, revenue and average deal size all grow quarter on quarter from 2008. After the first quarter, we announced 81% year over year growth. We’ll be in the same ballpark for Q2.

Results have been based on the strong performance and critical insights we’ve been able to deliver to clients. The insights pay major dividends in terms of client retention and our ability to win additional share of budget. As our clients respond to the global economic recession, we’re seeing them move more money online and specifically into accountable, performance based campaigns. This has been great for us and our outlook for the remainder of 2009 looks very strong.

What third-party platform and data providers is [x+1] using today and why? What is the ultimate goal as you aggregate partners?

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Omnicom Media Surfaces Platform Strategy; DoubleClick Brand Ads White Paper; VivaKi Leading With Analytics

Omnicom Media Group CEO Matt Spiegel let another crumb drop regarding what's going on with OMG's media buying platform strategy in an interview with MediaPost's Laurie Sullivan. Apparently, (no surprise) behavioral targeting is in the middle of it. With the exchange model swimming in data with - potentially - real-time bidding's help, behavioral targeting and matching audience with campaign goals gets more efficient. Spiegel tells Sullivan "about the need to make display advertising more accountable, while adding transparency into the process. Clients know an audience exists, but questions continue around finding the correct balance between ads, sponsorships and campaigns in social networks." Sounds like display is a hard sell to clients in its current form at OMG.

Nielsen Online has provided an interesting breakdown of advertising placements by industry for May 2009. See it here.

DoubleClick released a new study it made with Dynamic Logic's help called, "The Brand Value of Rich Media and Video Ads." (Download it here.) According to the DoubleClick blog post, the study intends to show "how each of these formats impacts aided brand awareness, online ad awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent."

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Comscore’s Josh Chasin Says Panel Important For Accurate Measurement and Overcoming Cookie Deletion

Josh Chasin is Chief Research Officer of Comscore, a marketing research company.

AdExchanger.com: Of the three silos of metrics - audience measurement, campaign analysis tools and web analytics - in your opinion, which one is the toughest to grasp for the end client?

JC: One the one hand, I think the most vexing thing for the client is that the three don't match. In network TV, for example, all metric streams come from the Nielsen ratings-- there is no analog to web analytic data (maybe Set Top Box data will get there) and ad campaign data is run off the ratings data. So the advertiser raised on TV is flustered by the fact of multiple metric streams.

On the other hand, there continues to be an issue with both ad server and web analytic data, in that they talk about "Unique Visitors," but unlike audience measurement they base these measures on cookies. At this point, we all know empirically that cookies are not unique at all, and they can dramatically overstate and thus misrepresent reach. And this isn't just coming from the audience measurement side of the divide anymore; web analytics guru Eric Peterson summarized the issue nicely right here.

I would refer all prospective Internet advertisers interested in parsing the definitional differences and limitations of the different ways to calculate Unique Visitors to the IAB Audience Reach Definition Guidelines.

How is Comscore quantifying the Long Tail?

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AdExchanger.com In News; AdMeld In VC Pockets; PubMatic Pushes RTB, Releases White Paper; Quantcast Converges

The world of media optimization and ad exchanges is taking off. Need proof? Even AdExchanger.com is getting in the news.

From Cynopsis Digital, an industry newsletter that informs readers about the latest and greatest in the digital media world, comes the following:

"Media buyers, planners and advertisers interested in the growing online ad exchange model should bookmark AdExchanger.com, a thorough news site/blog that delves into trends and happenings in the space."

AdMeld announced another round of financing today. According to Tech Crunch, the NYC-based firm has raised another $8 million dollars in Series B financing bringing their grand total for investment to $15 million.

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Creative Optimization In Demand as Teracent Revenues Double Each Quarter Says SVP Hall

Chip Hall is SVP of Sales and Marketing at Teracent, an advertising creative solutions provider.

AdExchanger.com: What trends have you seen at Teracent in 2009?  Can you characterize trends in revenue momentum, deal size, client verticals, consumer audience targets, etc.?

CH: Teracent has seen very positive growth and revenue in 2009 and so far has been more than doubling revenue growth quarter over quarter. The demand for optimized display advertising is immense as the market has fully realized that only a data-driven, algorithmic approach will meet the ROI goals necessary to make display “work.” Our growth is leading us to prepare to announce that we have expanded our sales team in two key markets – New York and Chicago – in response to growing demand for Teracent’s intelligent display ad platform.  We have also been running campaigns in Europe since last year and see growing interest in that market as well as Asia Pacific.

In 2009, we began an exclusive partnership with Yahoo to power their “SmartAds” across mobile platforms (in addition to the Web ads we have been powering for them for more than a year), opening up the intelligent display marketplace to new players.  This Yahoo! partnership makes Teracent the ONLY media delivery platform that is able to optimize and analyze media delivery to both Web and mobile campaigns from the same set of audience.

In regards to new clients, we have experienced growth in the retail, automotive and travel verticals.  Deal dynamics see clients testing the platform first on a small portion of their available inventory and then scaling programs when they see that Teracent exceeds their goals.

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Future Ad Network: Arbitrage Model Dies And Ad Network Lives To Talk About It

"Give us back our lunch money!"

At times, the loathing is over the top. Certain members of the advertising ecosystem (even ad networks) have little respect for the ad network model. It's as if someone stole the complainers' lunch money each and every day of the year.

All ad networks have ever done is provide a service which matches a buyer's need with a seller's and fill a market opportunity. If you don't want to participate, you don't have to.

As real-time, impression-level bidding comes online, no doubt many will see the end of the ad network on the horizon as the advertisers buy only what they want according to data feeds assessing the impression and ROI metrics through the exchange model. No waste. No more ad network buys where a part of the inventory is high performing enough to overcome ineffective, backfilled inventory that maximizes ad net profits while still meeting the advertiser client's goals.

From the supply-side perspective, pricing and control will move back into the publisher's hands with RTB as liquidity improves. No more ad networks re-selling their site by taking advantage of market inefficiencies and oversupply which drive down pricing. Even better for publishers, if they have a valuable brand, they can leverage this in the open auction as it becomes a key data point especially for brand marketers.

It's the beginning of the end of the ad network as we know it... but just as we know it.

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CSO Schanzer of Undertone Networks Says Online Metrics Today Don’t Support Long Term Needs Of A Brand

Alan Schanzer is Chief Strategy Officer, Undertone Networks, an online advertising network.

AdExchanger.com: Of the four ad solutions you provide according to your website (Display Ads, Synched Ads, Undertone Video and Full Page Ads), which is the fastest growing and why? Any surprises or trends that you've seen in 2009?

AS: We are seeing growth in most of our higher impact units including all forms of video, rich media and a new product which allows a user to connect an ad or offer directly to a mobile device, Web based calendar, Twitter stream or social media environment. This growth is being driven by brand and direct response marketers who seek both impact and performance and are interested in experimenting online beyond the basic banners with units that have TV characteristics (site, sound, motion) but aren’t necessarily a replication of TV creative.

In a recent Advertising Age article, it was noted that Undertone will refund a campaign as much as $50,000 if impression quality slips. How do you determine quality? Please provide an example. Have you made any refunds yet?

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ClearSaleing Reports Robust Growth; AdReady Powers New Yahoo! Self-Service Display; VideoEgg and Six Apart; and Sorrell Sullen

This past week, the Internet Retailer Conference took place in Boston, and several hot start-ups showed their wares including attribution analytics provider, ClearSaleing, who launched their attribution management platform at the show. The good news doesn't stop there for ClearSaleing whose co-founder and chief innovation officer, Adam Goldberg, told The Wall Street Journal that revenue growth is easily moving in the right direction: "ClearSaleing has seen its revenue grow every month and has increased its marketing budget ten-fold this year."

Yahoo! announced a new self-service display ad product which is powered by Seattle-based AdReady (CEO Aaron Finn's AdExchanger.com Q&A from last month is here and read today's release). AdAge's Michael Learmonth reports that the new product dubbed, "My Display Ads [is] a bid to win over local advertisers and convert search advertisers to display." We're not sure that this is to "convert." From here, this is another tool in the smaller budget marketers toolkit. To abandon search's prime, intender position in the purchase funnel would be foolhardy.

There was no mention in the AdAge story of how attribution is being solved as understanding how display is assisting search will be critical in making this product work.

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Reducing Friction For The End User in Online Display Advertising

As the technology mashup evolves in digital advertising, the effective management of data is bringing increasing transparency and control for buyers and sellers of online media.

ROI, CPA, CPM, KPI, CTR - a rapper's dream! - and other acronyms abound as we quantify the ongoing optimization of media.

But, where is the user in all this? Are we just living off the poor bastard? Will future privacy restrictions be the user's revenge?

There's a great thread on optimization which begins with a post by Varick's Darren Herman. Improving overall media performance these days remains relatively manual, all things considered. There is no magic dial for optimizing display across the three different silos of creative, contextual/semantic and behavioral/demographic framed succinctly here by Greg Hills. To a degree, "the struggle" continues on the buy side to manually find just the right settings for client campaigns.

And, though the goal of the right settings leads to profits and happy clients, does it lead to a happy user? As it stands right now in an open auction of the display ad exchange, yes and no.

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OPA Study Supports Display Ad Exchanges; Right Media Exchange Lives; Nardone on iMedia; Adgregate Gets Gydget; VivaKi on Video; More

A new Comscore study sponsored by the OPA promotes the use of ad exchanges.

No, we're not joking.

Of course, we're pretty sure that wasn't the OPA's intention, but the new study says that display advertising drives interaction and conversion for brand campaigns. Thank you, OPA.

Clearly, the OPA wants to promote the use of CPM campaigns on large publisher sites and how it's not always about "the click," which is thought particularly powerful in search, less so in display inventory - until now! You can view the presentation on Business Insider which also covers the details. The OPA lists a selection of the good news for brand advertisers who use display advertising (exchanges) in its release:

* One in five conduct related searches and one in three visit the brands’ sites
* Users spent over 50% more time than the average visitor to these sites and consumed more pages
* Users spent about 10% more money online overall, and significantly more on product categories related to the advertised brands
* Higher income audiences visited the advertisers sites

Yahoo!'s Right Media Exchange lives! During the recent OMMA Publish conference, RMX announced two, new service offerings which are "designed to help publishers, agencies and ad networks navigate changes across the industry." With one product called "Performance Sales Enablement," RMX is looking to turn publishers into DR advertisers. With "Display Extension," Yahoo!'s Right Media is targeting SEM agencies who have yet to dabble in the display space. Read more on the Right Media blog.

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Havas’ Ed Montes Discusses Communication With Ad Agencies at OMMA Publish

Agencies took to the stage to tell their side of the online advertising story during yesterday's OMMA Publish conference in New York City.

Moderated by Break Media's Andrew Budkofsky, the panelists included Jonathan Chin from MediaVest, Erin Matts from OMD, Kristine Munsen from Universal McCann, Donnie Williams at Horizon Media and Havas Digital's Ed Montes.

During the Q&A portion of the session, an audience member from an ad network suggested that agencies are having trouble communicating with their partners by not returning phone calls, providing feedback, etc. He wondered aloud if this was due to planners and buyers being overwhelmed or if it was a training issue that agencies should tackle.

Havas' Montes quickly went on the offensive:

There probably is a lack of training and as a group we have invested a lot of money and training on both a platform basis, people basis and what not. I think that there's a generational issue too - I don't know how old you are, but it's pretty well documented that there's a different attitude among millenials as far as how an X or boomer would work.

I'd say the last thing is I actually think your organizations are doing a poor job of building relationships if people aren't getting back to them. At the end of the day it's a relationship-based business and people who are successful that I can see when I see what publishers are doing well in my portfolio of business, I'm sometimes surprised that it's not the larger publishers, the bigger brands.

When you dig deep into that it's because a particular salesperson or sales group has done a very good job of building a relationship with those day-to-day people and I think that goes a long way.

Take a step back and think of the perspective of an assistant buyer or buyer, they're probably underpaid, they're probably overworked and you're harassing them. Think of it from that perspective. I'm not disputing training needs to improve at the agency level. I agree with you on that. But, it's not always them. Think of their day-to-day demands and think of where they are from a lifestyle standpoint.

Millenial attitudes or overworked buyers? Please feel free to comment.

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From OMMA Publish: Turner’s Walker Jacobs Says Ad Networks Are Not Like Outlet Malls

Yesterday's OMMA Publish conference in New York City was at full capacity as publishers came to swap stories and look for solutions in a down economy. One panel, ably moderated by MediaPost's Joe Mandese, struck at one of the core bones of contention: how to deal with ad networks.

The panel, with the linkbait title, "Fire Your Network: The Great Debate," showed how publishers still see ad networks as the enemy for effectively causing conflict with their direct sales channel as well as making incremental revenue from data generated, in part, by publishers. Joining Mandese was Richard Frankel of Rocket Fuel, David Koretz of Adventive and BlueTie, David Roter of ESPN, Alan Schanzer of Undertone Networks and Walker Jacobs of Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

Jacobs crystallized the large publisher's thinking for the crowd. And surprisingly for some, he thinks ad networks aren't all bad:

There is most definitely a valuable place in the ecosystem for ad networks. Particularly those that are helping small and mid-size publisehers save costs and [its an easy way] to put together sales organizations, easy way to gather valuable audiences whether its sports or any other category. I see great value in that.

It's interesting. You just take a look at the business model, though. The question is: should we perpetuate our own demise? - [particularly] when you look at the business model and how most of these ad networks have made a lot of their money.

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CPA Is The Only Meaningful Metric To Our Clients Says Dapper COO Aizen

Jon Aizen is COO of Dapper, an online ad network.

Please share what trends Dapper is seeing on the client-side in 2009. Any vertical strengths, typical campaigns, deal size, etc.?

Trends are toward performance-only metrics. We're seeing eCPA as the meaningful metric for our customers, and we're embracing that by offering it as a pricing option right off the bat. Verticals we're growing in are travel, where the emphasis on real-time pricing and inventory is obviously there, and now, Financial Services.

How does Dapper target the purchase funnel for its clients? Are you in the business of generating interest (top of the funnel), or fulfilling intent (bottom - similar to search)?

Definitely more down-funnel, especially when we retarget with our remessaging product. We're able to actually show the exact products the consumer was looking at before he/she abandoned the advertiser's website. Beyond that, when we do a RON campaign with our ImpressionDNA technology that infers intent from every page load, we're matching that intent with an offer from the search engine of offers we've created. So it works a lot like search.

Dapper appears to be offering automated behavioral, geo, creative and contextual optimization simultaneously with ImpressionDNA. Where is the behavioral information stored? It would appear that you use a combination of cookie data and semantic/contextual scanning to optimize. What is real-time in the process?

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Anchor Intelligence CEO Miller Sees More Fraud Occurring In Clicks Than Impressions

Ken Miller is CEO of Anchor Intelligence, a traffic quality solutions provider.

AdExchanger.com: You have an impressive list of client testimonials on your site. Can you discuss recent momentum at Anchor Intelligence? Any impact from the economy?

KM: In the past two quarters, we’ve seen the number of inbound inquiries into Anchor Intelligence increase by more than 400%. Market conditions are forcing advertisers to scrutinize spend more than ever before; as a result, they are no longer willing to accept traffic that doesn’t convert, or comes from undocumented, questionable sources. Secondly, the growth of ad syndication and exchanges has led to a strong demand for transparency and accountability. Ad sellers who can’t identify where their best and worst traffic quality is coming from are being squeezed out as advertisers are going elsewhere. As a result, many ad networks and search companies are turning to Anchor Intelligence to proactively manage and optimize their traffic quality.

Regarding customer wins, we recently announced our partnership with Ask.com, through which ClearMark scores every ad click across the globe for Ask.com and its partners. The public commitment by a top 4 ad provider to deliver the highest-quality traffic to its advertisers represents a major victory for advertisers.

A great advantage of our solution is that satisfied customers benefit further from having their partners and affiliates also use ClearMark. As a result, we have a several additional partner announcements coming up very soon.

What are the challenges that ad networks and agencies face regarding ad event quality?

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CEO Wright Says Endemic and Non-Endemic Advertisers Coming To DogTime Media

Trevor Wright is CEO of DogTime Media.

AdExchanger.com: Does Adify still provide the technology "backbone" of Dogtime? How has that relationship evolved?

DogTime leveraged Adify's technology backbone to launch our vertical community, but quickly evolved beyond their capabilities and have been independent of Adify for more than a year.

Are advertisers buying from DogTime Media to target the "dog lovers" vertical, if you will, or are advertisers targeting audience with other, less endemic objectives, too?

DogTime has been successful in attracting not just endemic advertisers that want to reach passionate pet enthusiasts, but also with non-endemic advertisers who are targeting highly engaged women between the ages of 25-54, such as 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Toyota, Chronicle Books, Bissell, Eureka, Harper Collins, Dyson, etc.

Describe the revenue share. Does it vary according to publisher and advertiser format (widget vs. standard display)?

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Collective Says Increased Display Spend in Autos Targets In-Market; Microsoft Sues On Click Fraud; Hot Entrepreneurs Become VC

Collective Media hired former Yahoo! automotive category director, Brian Elliott, to lead its Detroit office. Which got us thinking... Isn't the domestic U.S. auto industry on life support? Haven't they had their marketing budgets reduced dramatically? What is Collective Media thinking?

In response, Joe Apprendi, Collective CEO told AdExchanger.com, "Yes, the auto industry in aggregate, and in the US in particular, is undergoing massive changes across the board, including ad spending. While overall spending will likely be down dramatically for this year and likely next, automotive advertisers are spending a greater percentage online. More importantly, their spending on display media is shifting towards a more targeted segment of the in-market automotive buyer. To reach them, display spending is going towards in-market automotive sites and in-market automotive behavioral marketing."

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Mediasmith CEO David Smith Says Brand Safety Remains Top Concern With Ad Exchanges

David Smith is CEO of Mediasmith, a digital advertising media agency.

AdExchanger.com: What trends can you share with us regarding the media buying you're doing on behalf of clients today?

DS: There is a lot of change happening in the area of digital media strategy, planning and message distribution. Please notice that we've walked away from the term buying as we are increasingly in the message distribution business. That includes media buys, but also includes "owned media", a client's own assets, including their web sites, blogs, newsletters, etc. and earned media. What used to be PR but is increasingly in the hands of media as it is digital and measureable.

The incursion of social media into the messaging that goes on to consumers, among consumers and is also driven by consumers back to the companies they do business with represents a whole different world than the world of push media.

See my Fastcompany.com blog Media Tech for a look at this visually.

Social messaging is rapidly becoming the majority of impressions that consumers take in. So we must not only be involved in using social media for paid messaging, we must figure out how to become part of the conversation with the customers of our clients, as well as monitor the discussion in the blogosphere, twitter, social sites, etc. There are a number of new tools that are being used to do everything from deploy media (third party content servers) to measure media deployed and also to measure the consumer conversation. As such, the world of metrics is getting much more complex.

Are ad exchanges changing the digital media plan? Does brand safety remain a concern?

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New NYC Vertical Ad Network; Q3 Looking Good; Traditional Media Not So Much; WSJ Worries About Web Ads

Vertical ad network mania has reached into the Village of New York City as AdWeek's Mike Shields details the new Village Voice vertical ad network titled, "Voice Local Network." Within the NYC-branded network is Lockhart Steele's triumvirate of local blogs - Curbed, Eater and Racked - with its young, influential consumer audience as well as checkoutmyink.com, a rad tattoo site. Speaking of which, AdExchanger.com tattoo, anyone? We're buying. Note: all tattoos must be "above the fold." WAH-wah.

Mark Walsh reports that the buzz from the recent RBC Capital Markets conference was relatively, all-things-being-equal, apocalypse-postponed, bullish for Q3 of this year. Walsh paraphrases a research note by saying, "most online ad industry executives expect the third quarter to mark a turning point in the industry's rebound from recessionary trends." Walsh adds that RBC hedged their bets regarding display due to regulatory concerns around behavioral ads (yawn), but RBC offered an estimate that behavioral accounts for $1.8 billion of the $9 billion online display marketplace. Always handy to have estimates, don't you think?

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