Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Cadreon Turning Into TAP
In a press release, IPG’s Mediabrands announced a strategy shift as Mediabrands will realign its operating units formerly under Mediabrands Ventures. In addition, Mediabrands announced the development of the next phase of Cadreon called “TAP,” which is described as “The Audience Platform (TAP), the next stage in the development of the Cadreon advertising exchange, which will further enable its technologies and services to unlock new value across Mediabrands and IPG.” (exchange???) Read the release. Matt Freeman is also leaving Mediabrands and will go to IPG’s McCann Erickson and report to Chairman and CEO Nick Brien of McCann Worldgroup.
El-Uh-Vay-Shun! MarketShare Gets $32 Mil
Analytics and attribution company MarketShare announced a $32 million follow-on investment by Elevation Partners. The company says the funds will be used for acquisitions and to expand in the Asia-Pacific and EMEA regions among other initiatives. Elevation’s Adam Hopkins will join fellow Elevation-er Ted Meisel on MarketShare’s board. Read more.
Video, Video, Video
Peter Kafka covers the latest round of funding in the online video business as VideoSurf has raised $16 million from Pitango Venture Capital in Israel. Kafka says “VideoSurf’s specific pitch is that its software can identify images within the video it scans, instead of relying on metadata.” Read more. And, read the release.
Simulmedia’s Dave Morgan turns to “creative” and offers his thoughts on why creative has suffered so much in the ad business. He thinks advertising and marketing agencies may be partially to blame and says, “The helter-skelter, financially driven portfolio management approaches that many of them take to running major families of consumer brands generate little or no regard to how they relate to consumers.” And, the creative suffers. Read more.
CAPTCHA Battle
Adotas’ Gavin Dunaway says that Solve Media and Nucaptcha are spoiling for a CAPTCHA ad battle and writes, “While both companies swear that their technology improves CAPTCHA security, Solve might have a leg up by using brand slogans to solve CAPTCHAs, bumping up user recall.” Read more.
Addressable TV Gets $49 Mil
Addressable TV tech company INVIDI announced a new $49 million investment from DirecTV. This brings total investment to around $139 million which includes previous investors Google, Experian and WPP’s GroupM. PaidContent’s David Kaplan notes that DirecTV set-top boxes will be rolled out shortly with INVIDI “Advatar” targeting software. Read it. According to Multichannel News, DirecTV has said that the impact of the partnership with INVIDI and integration of its software will result in “the ability to sell local advertising (and) generate up to $400 million in additional revenue.” Read more.
Ad Sales Strategy
PaidContent’s David Kaplan says Aol “is refining its ad sales approach in the hopes of developing stronger focus on specific ad categories, including CPG/Health, Travel, Automotive, Finance and Entertainment. ” Kaplan says the channel ad sales unit will be led by John Burke. Read more.
DNT And Legislation
The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Wingfield reports, “Apple Inc. has added a do-not-track privacy tool to a test version of its latest Web browser for keeping customers’ online activities from being monitored by marketers.” Read more. Meanwhile, ClickZ’s Kate Kaye reports that more privacy legislation has been presented – this time by Congressmen Cliff Stearns and Jim Matheson. It’s called “Consumer Privacy Protection Act of 2011” and Kaye says it resembles legislation from 2005 that would require disclosure in privacy policies. Read more about “industry friendly” legislation.
Predicting The Next Google
In an MIT Technology review article titled, “Can an Algorithm Spot the Next Google?,” Jim Giles looks at a new startup called Quid whose software’s sole purpose is to “make good guesses about what the next big thing will be. It does this by analyzing a store of data on existing companies, ideas, and research.” The VCs are chomping at the bit. Read more. Everything is getting so predictable.
