The ‘Ad Exchange News’ Category
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Google Testing, Gathering
New "Nielsen-like" panel efforts are being made by Google as the company introduced Screenwise which will be run by GfK's Knowledge Networks. Google may be taking a deeper dive into attribution modeling and/or media mix modeling as, according to ClickZ's Kate Kaye, "The system, which offers people Amazon gift cards in exchange for allowing the company to collect data on their browsing habits, will help Google get a better grasp on time spent on certain websites, which times of day people are online, and other information." What would panels do without gift cards?? Read more. Meanwhile, more Google data mining is detailed by Digiday's Jack Marshall: "Yesterday Google launched a version of its Chrome Web browser for Android devices, which could provide it with a goldmine of extremely granular user data." Read about the motherlode. Need more Google? Read about the latest AdMob "auction enhancements" for mobile on the company's mobile blog as minimums appear to be disappearing.
Time For Brokers, Not Bookers
In Australia's B&T, CEO David Gaines of Maxus pens a think piece on the changing media buying landscape. He's hooked into data-driven I.V. with both arms as he writes: "The biggest catalyst for change is a simple real-time buying platform that allows us to radically change the face of media buying. Buy 80% of all inventory like we buy search. Have brokers, not bookers, plugged into data exchanges and ad exchanges, trading anything except the cream inventory. This will free up a world of time, talent and pressure for everyone." Read it.
Attribution Nation
Clearsaleing says that when clients use its attribution capabilities to understand effects of ad spend - social and display are #winning. Findings from a new company whitepaper: "The presence of social media in a Purchase Path drives higher value orders, in terms of revenue per order ($280), than natural search and paid search combined ($230.07), although it is not the highest traffic channel. When display is included in a conversion path, the average revenue per order increases to more than $206, almost 65 percent more revenue than the overall average order size of $135.37." Read the release. Download, too (PDF - pay with some PII).
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Given that "food" is one of the top ad spending categories in the lifestyle space, it makes sense that the largely female-focused blog network Glam Media would build out a vertical devoted to that subject.
But unlike the other recent expansions of Glam’s content and related ad offerings around health and wellness, the Foodie channel is also launching today the first real demonstration why Glam paid roughly $150 million for social networking platform, Ning.
Glam is looking to distance its food channel away from crowd-sourced restaurant picks and aggregating recipes. In Foodie, Glam is working to assemble noted food critics, well-respected bloggers, star chefs, restaurateurs and other “food influentials” as part of its content offerings. And it plans to do so by creating feeds that users can view as they would Facebook statuses or Twitter streams.
“People recognize that not everything social has to be done exclusively through Facebook and Twitter,” said Glam founder and CEO Samir Arora in an interview with Adexchanger. “Foodie is not just a content experience; it’s a social network.”
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Akamai Reports; CFO Leaves For HubSpot
Akamai announced its Q4 2011 performance and, though there was no mention of Akamai Advertising Solutions in the release, the company reported net income of $45 million on $324 million in revenues. Read more. Wall Street had expected $311 million and $40 million, respectively, according to Boston Business Journal. If Akamai wants to add to its ad tech stash, there's plenty of cash laying around. From the release: "Full-year cash from operations of $453 million: year-end cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities of over $1.2 billion." Meanwhile, CFO J.D. Sherman is leaving for the COO role at marketing automation company HubSpot. Don't worry CFO-lovers, Akamai had a new one waiting in the wings.
Accordant Adds CRO
And speaking of Akamai, Accordant Media announced that it has a new CRO, Garrett Vreeland. Read the release. Vreeland was "Sr. Director, Advertising Sales and Account Management at Akamai following media sales leadership roles at Right Media / Yahoo! and 24/7 Real Media." The startup world appears to be playing its siren song at mature tech companies. Meanwhile, Accordant said that it ran it's 3,000th RTB campaign in Q4 and claimed "bake-off" supremacy. Fighting words!
Large Pub Love
Mediamind said that it's going to turn its rich media Unicast unit to full-time publisher development, known as "MediaMind Global Publisher Unit." Former Unicast GM James Dillon will head the group as its SVP. The company says Unicast was always 100% focused on publishers and that, going forward, the client target for the publisher unit will be large publishers. Read the release. For buy-side tech providers and agencies, key, large publisher relationships again appear to be important to both. Large publishers are the new "Belle of the Ball."
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ValueClick Grows
Ad network (affiliate marketing, technology and media company) ValueClick reported a better-than-expected Q4 2011 as the ad network model transitions to audience buying. The company's acquisition of Dotomi last year appears to be positively impacting the top and bottom line, too. Q4 2011 results included "revenue of $182.6 million, up 42 percent from the fourth quarter of 2010 (Q4 2010)." Estimates for revenue had been at $175 million. Read the release. More highlights: 20% organic growth in display advertising comparables and Dotomi will start cross-selling Commission Junction clients (direct marketers) this quarter. If ValueClick can unlock direct marketer dollars and then move on to the brand dollars, that could be big. It's certainly what ValueClick is gunning for.
Also from the call, regarding retargeters - including Dotomi - getting booted from buying Yahoo inventory on Right Media Exchange, the company said on the call that "they did not feel significant impact which is reflected in the [positive] numbers they showed in Q4." Zarley said that he'd still like his company to buy remnant inventory from Yahoo! especially as it relates to Dotomi's needs but didn't expect a lack of access to hurt his company going forward. Of note, Wall Street analysts picked on the Yahoo! inventory topic several times. Each time, Valueclick's response was essentially that they're inventory needs are still being met without Yahoo!.
Regarding ad exchange impact on 40-50% ad network margins, Dotomi, which is an exchange and sell-side platform buyer, positively impacted margins, so the public company claims their margins are actually going up. CEO Zarley said that they're a "big player in exchanges but a lot of traffic still comes from their [ad] network and even properties such as Valueclick-owned Investopedia." Zarley said that the impact of social networks (Facebook!) has NOT been lower CPMs. In fact, he said margins are better with audience targeting. Greystripe, the mobile ad network, now has 19 salespeople (used to be three) as they look to grow that business which sounds as if it's behind initial, internal expectations. BMO's Dan Salmon (AdExchanger Q&A) asked about ValueClick's relationship with Agency Trading Desks (ATDs) and how that'll work. Zarley said that in spite of initial concerns, their still isn't the expertise across ATDs. He said that agencies will still be part of ValueClick's client list in the future, some will go away, but others will be replaced by direct-to-marketer relationships.
Spongecell Takes $10 Mil
Rich media ad technology vendor Spongecell is upping the ante with a $10 million round of financing led by Safeguard Scientifics. According to the release, "proceeds will be used to fund Spongecell’s continued expansion including product development, sales and marketing, executive and staff recruitment, and other working capital needs." Read it. Safeguard Scientifics has also invested in a couple of financing rounds with demand-side platform MediaMath as the venture group appears to be all-in when it comes to ad tech and audience buying. Due to regulatory requirements, future Safeguard Scientific financial releases will likely reveal more about Spongecell's valuation at the time of investment. Read the Inc 500 results revealed last year. This marks one of the larger investments in recent months as consolidation for some and stasis for many more has taken over ad tech.
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Amazon To Build Store
Amazon is "taking it to the streets" and launching a retail store of the brick-and-mortar variety beginning in Seattle. Blogger Michael Kozlowski reports, "This project is a test to gauge the market and see if a chain of stores would be profitable. They intend on going with the small boutique route with the main emphasis on books from their growing line of Amazon Exclusives and selling their e-readers and tablets." Read it. Or is it a test on how online-offline attribution models work? This test has bigger implications than an offline e-book depot.
IASH Adds Trading Guidelines
In the UK, industry trade organization IASH has set-up a new self-regulating unit called The Digital Trading Standards Group (DTSG). The industry organization hopes to create standards (and police) what it sees an important and unique, digital media silo developing in and around exchanges, demand-side platforms and sell-side platforms. Pete Robins of agenda21 tells New Media Age, "This is a complex global market operating at scale. The industry needs straightforward principles that make compliant trading possible while providing advertisers with the transparency they need." Read it.
Aegis Adds Innovation
In Australia, Aegis Media Pacific CEO Luke Littlefield announces the creation of a new "innovation" unit called Jumptank which includes the hiring of MPG/Media Contacts and Google executives. In MuMbrella, Littlefield is quoted as saying: “With Jumptank we are bringing together a team of people with a diverse array of skills and experience, with the common goal of applying innovative thinking to media and marketing solutions for our clients. Jumptank will be a catalyst for innovation." Innovation (digital), FTW.
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Balancing Like And Revenue
A Wall Street Journal article points to the balance Facebook must strike to extract revenue from advertisers while keeping consumers happy. Until recently, brand owners have been able to create their Facebook pages and get in their "Like-ers" daily news feeds whenever the brands post new stories to their pages. But, steadily, brands ability to get in the streams has been diminished algorithmically by Facebook as it looks to make marketers pay for the news feed "pleasure" with "Sponsored Stories" instead. In some ways, this is similar to Google paid ad listings in Google search. The difference is that there are no organic (unpaid) listings "stream" in Facebook which a brand can be the best result (according to Google's rules) for a particular keyword or phrase. This is an individual's curated Facebook experience after all. Yet, it would seem logical that if a user chooses a brand through a "like", it should appear in the news feed - "I'd like to hear from my brand." The reality of Facebook's revenue needs and what the user wants may be diverging slightly, especially as Facebook edges towards an IPO. Given the gyst of the article, Facebook seems to be increasingly telling its users, "You can see your friends, but you can't see your favorite brands unless they pay for it. We have to make money." Users could be OK with that, too. It's a balance.
Acxiom Adds CRO, Pitching Brand Safety
MTV and Myspace sales exec Nada Stirratt has jumped ship for data provider Acxiom where she'll take on the role of Chief Revenue Officer. Read the release. Stirratt tells Ad Age's Michael Learmonth that in regards to today's concerns around data and privacy online - "That's why I'm here so we can be a part of those conversations about the use of data and what marketers should be doing with their data." Leveraging data in the face of the privacy discussion has become part of the sales pitch for the big data providers to marketers who ask, "Are you brand-safe?" Read more.
Display Standards
In New Media Age, Lucy Tesseras explores the standardization of display ad file sizes in the UK. AIS creative director Geoff Gower says don't bother, "It would be nice if it was easier for us to work with one set of standards, but that by its very nature means we'll continue to deliver the same type of ads. Sensible, forward-thinking brands should be looking at bigger, more flexible sponsorship and partnership models, rather than just buying more space and shouting at people." Read more.
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The Yahoo!-Aol-Microsoft deal, which lets each of the partners sell the other's remnant display ad inventory has born its first fruit. Read the release.
New Right Media Exchange North America chief Brian Silver explained to AdExchanger yesterday that Aol now has a seat on the exchange in order to sell it's "Class II" remnant ad inventory. It was a deal originally finalized in December as Silver said that no date had been set for the roll-out of Aol inventory on RMX - "It's entirely up to them along with our guidance."
Regarding on who gets to buy Aol inventory, Silver played the role of agnostic exchange owner and said the publisher is in complete control: "As a seat holder, they control their inventory of who they choose to do business with. So whether or not they decide to link with Yahoo!, or Demand partner B, C or D, it's completely up to them. Or even if they decide to monetize it themselves. They could find some yield in their own ads running across their inventory that's sitting there, which a lot of our partners do as well. So, they just use our tools and mechanisms around that."
Aol appears to have made a choice of Yahoo!'s RMX instead of AppNexus and the Microsoft Ad Exchange. But, it's likely not that cut and dry in terms of deciding which was the best tech or service for Aol inventory. Yahoo! has always seemed to be driving the bus in this still-strategizing, triumverate.
Of interest to Aol's ad network is the ability to continue to buy Yahoo! O&O through Right Media as ad networks and demand-side platforms are rejected by the Yahoo! mothership on RMX. What's unclear is how much Ad.com, the buyer, has to expose in terms of its advertisers on RMX who buy Yahoo! inventory. If it wants to keep buying the high-performing Yahoo! inventory, perhaps it needed to have Aol ante up with some Aol inventory for the exchange.
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Banging On The Paywall
The New York Times reported its Q4 2011 earnings yesterday and the subscriber numbers were at 390,000 - that's 20% higher that Q3. A nice quarter-over-quarter increase it would seem. Did you get/give a subscription as a holiday gift? Ken Doctor of Newsonomics points out, that the subscriber level may sound low when you compare it to the Times' 33 million U.S. uniques, "but it's 34% of its print circulation." Doctor offers his view on the results, "It’s not the [the proof for] saving the newspaper industry, or even the Times, but it’s a strong indication that some readers will indeed pay for digital news access — and that paying for subscriptions opens other doors as well." Read his detailed summary - including a compelling breakdown of digital revs. And, read the NYT's earnings press release. Last but not least, read the earnings call transcript where NYT CFO Jim Folio comments on About.com fortunes in Q4: "Total revenues declined 26% to $26 million in the fourth quarter, with decreases in cost-per-click and display advertising contributed almost equally to the decline. About faced a variety of challenges in 2011, but we believe we are on the right path."
Social Spend Trend
SEM platforms - now cross-channel buying platforms - continue to crank out the trend reports leveraging their customers data. Kenshoo reported yesterday that its social ad spend "customers spent 109 percent more on Facebook in Q4 of 2011 than they did in Q3. While some of this growth can be attributed to seasonality, the increase in global Facebook ad budgets compares favourably to search channels like Google, Bing, and Yahoo which, in aggregate, saw paid search ad budget growth of 27 percent globally on a quarter-over-quarter basis." Read more.
Ad Network Apps
The ad-network-formerly-known-as-Travel-Ad-Network, Travora, is getting into the city guide business among other things. CEO Nan Forte (AdExchanger Q&A) says in the press release, "Through our partnerships with existing and new brands, we are supporting the creation, development, monetization and distribution of travel information products for mobile web and apps." Read more. More evidence of ad networks moving into the content biz and using their "digital native" (love that phrase!) monetization skills. Others doing the same are Valueclick and Specific Media, for example.
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IPO Opens Facebook Kimono
To the media's relief, Facebook has finally filed its regulatory papers in preparation for an Initial Public Offering and it appears that just about the entire advertising market is in the company's crosshairs. From the S-1 filing: "According to an industry source, total worldwide advertising spending in 2010 was $588 billion. Our addressable market opportunity includes portions of many existing advertising markets, including the traditional offline branded advertising, online display advertising, online performance-based advertising, and mobile advertising markets." So of the $588 billion 2010 global ad nut, Facebook captured $3.7 billion (actually 85% of that is ads) and $1 billion in income -albeit in 2011. For reference, Google made 10x the revs with $37 billion in revenue and $9 billion in net income in 2011. Do I hear $50 billion in Facebook revenues in 2015? Where'd I get that number? The seat of my data-driven pants! The big blue machine is about to get unleashed and pending how much data they let advertisers use, it could get much bigger, very quickly. Read Facebook's S-1 statement. All Things D's Tricia Duryee notes that Zynga is 12% of revenue for Facebook. Read it. Will Zynga get acquired by Facebook soon? Duryee counts 24 Zynga mentions in the S-1. Meanwhile, AdExchanger notes 8 mentions for un-sexy "display advertising." The S-1 states, "Display advertisers run impression-based campaigns on Facebook in order to reach our large user base and because of the amount of time that users spend with us." Technically, they're usually click-based, CPC campaigns. But every CPC has a CPM metric standing close-by. More on the S-1 deets from Bloomberg.
Search Privacy Policy
David Strader looks at the recent Google privacy policy changes on the iCrossing blog. He writes, "Although the policy change means Google will produce more relevant ads you see on Gmail and other Google products, the impact on natural search is still yet to be seen. I believe a lot of this data collection for more relevant search results is already being done and that this announcement is merely Google finally telling its users what Google have been doing for a while now. In other words, Google is making its privacy policy easier for users to read and understand." Read more. Meanwhile, Danny Sullivan says that Microsoft is taking Google to task in newspaper advertisements questioning the recent privacy policy changes. Read it.
Programmatic Challenges
VivaKi Nerve Center CEO Curt Hecht discusses challenges with programmatic buying with Digiday's Brian Morrisey. Hecht says, "Believe it or not, one big challenge is simply getting people to accept it. The pipelines are in place, and technology features are getting more refined to enable customized bidding and buying. But programmatic buying is a dramatic shift that challenges long established business practices." Read more.
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AOL's advertising is mostly known for its ad network and targeting tools, but in contrast to rivals Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, it has not been deeply immersed in the ad exchange space. During the company's Q4 earnings call, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong told investors that AOL plans to roll out several products around audience buying and data this year, while keeping its focus on partnerships with the major ad holding companies.
Armstrong didn't provide specifics during a follow-up call with the press. "We have a series of products around the ad exchange space coming out this year," he said. "In fact one is being beta tested right now with a partner. It is designed to help the ad exchanges and players in that space, as well as offer another version of non-reserved inventory for them. We’ll go into more detail this quarter."
Armstrong also pointed to some other longer-term products that will be released within the next six months and through the latter part of the year. "All I can say right now is that I’ve been reviewing them and they will serve as good augments to what’s currently in the market," he said.
For the most part, the closest thing AOL has done in terms of working with third parties in the ad exchange and demand-side platform space has been with Publicis Group's digital hub, VivaKi. That work mostly revolves around video, Armstrong said, though he plans to expand that partnership with that agency unit.
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