Forbes Yields For Ad Pitch; Valuing Personal Data; Rocket Fuel Gets $50 Mil

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Forbes’ Homepage Pitch

The corporate and wealth news magazine’s latest homepage revamp is focused, in part, on raising the profile of marketers in its AdVoice program, which integrates advertiser posts with user and staff content. As Lewis DVorkin, Forbes Media’s chief product officer writes in a blog post, marketers are content producers too, right? So they now have a cleaner canvas to “publish — not pitch,” says DVorkin, and reach consumers amenable to a message that mixes both.

Valuing Personal Data

Angel investor Jerry Neumann’s latest blog post title says it all from his perspective: “Your personal data is not worth anywhere near what you think it’s worth.” He reviews his Root Markets business days and concludes, “I spent several years of my life trying to build a business that lets people take control of their own data while still leaving a way for marketers to find them. I believe in privacy. And I believe that marketers finding customers is key to economic efficiency. I would love to see someone square this circle, but the Root model is not the way to do it.” Read what he means.

The EU Cookie Compliance

The wave of European Union regulation over how publishers and advertisers employ user data nevertheless allowed sites a great degree of discretion in how they let individuals opt out of being targeted. Either that, or as Econsultancy’s David Moth explains, the regulators don’t have a clue about how to inform consumers. To give readers a clue about how the policy is being adopted, EConsultancy has helpfully posted some 20-odd examples of how publishers are muddling through. Scroll through here.

Tagging And Attributing

Tag manager BrightTag announced new biz dev partnerships yesterday as it looks to analytics consultancies to help leverage the data capture enabled through the BrightTag One platform. Companies include Blast Advanced Media, Cardinal Path, The Encima Group, Keystone Solutions, Semphonic and WebHue. Read more. Likewise, Adometry has reached out to media agency Empower to push out its toolkit. The release states, “Under the terms of the agreement, Empower will offer the Adometry ad analytics suite to clients as part of the agency’s Decision Sciences service, including LasikPlus Vision Centers, Marzetti and U.S. Bank.” Read more.

Counting The Spend

Q1 2012 showed a continued increase in global ad spend according to Nielsen. Looking cross-borders: “Emerging markets like the Middle East and Africa saw double-digit increases while North America and Asia Pacific saw modest more gains of 2.1 and 1.7 percent, respectively. Overall global ad spend in Q1 2012 was $128 billion USD.” Read more.

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Rocket Funds

All Things D’s Peter Kafka brings news of the latest ad tech fundraising event as Rocket Fuel has captured $50 million (that’s $76 mil total). Kafka writes, “Rocket Fuel says it generated gross revenue of $45 million last year, but bear in mind that the company’s net revenue, after factoring in the cost of the ad inventory it buys for its clients, will be much less than that. Still, John says that in the last couple months his company has hit a $100 million annual run rate, so he has a growth story to tell.” Read more. And, read the release.

Mobilizing The SSP

In a continuing effort to execute on the mobile front, sell-side platform PubMatic has hired former Ringleader Digital CEO Bob Walczak. The release says that in addition to his CEO experience, “at Ringleader, Walczak was responsible for all business development and closed pioneering contracts with AOL, Microsoft, AccuWeather, Fox News, ESPN and Collective Media.” Read more.

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