Sandy’s Ad Industry Toll; Google PLAs Promising

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Sandy’s Ad Industry Toll

In addition to unfathomable personal suffering, destruction and death, the devastating hurricane that tore through the northeast this week may have cost the already weak advertising industry $500 million in revenues, estimates Pivotal Research’s Brian Wieser. The loss is primarily due to local TV and radio disruption. “The first signs of a stormy second half of the year for advertising had become clear once the agency holding companies reported, and then Superstorm Sandy arrived, making us certain that 2012 will prove to be a year without growth for the U.S. advertising economy,” Wieser tells AdAge. Read it.

Ad Network Evolution

Chartboost’s cooperative ad network with over 8,000 games is cutting out “traditional” mobile ad networks says VentureBeat in a profile of the company. “Chartboost lets those developers advertise games within each other’s games through a Direct Deals Marketplace, bypassing a traditional ad network like Tapjoy, which takes part of the cut.” Read more. And, read AdExchanger’s February ‘12 interview with CEO Maria Alegre.

Brands Advise

For a startup, what would it be like to have a global marketer on staff? That’s more or less the reality enjoyed by ShopKick. P&G’s Silicon Valley ambassador, Sonny Jandial, is “embedded” with the shopping app company and spends a lot of time at its offices, AdAge’s Cotton Delo reports. CEO Cyriac Roeding tells her, “This partnership has fundamentally changed how our product developed. It was interesting to think about brands, but much better to turn around and say, ‘Hey Sonny, what does P&G think about this?'” Read it.

Google PLA Boost

It’s been barely two months since Google merged its paid Product Listing Ads and its “free” shopping-related results into a single paid format. So consider Kenshoo’s claim that retailers who work with it through the Google PLA platform have seen a return on advertising rise 89 percent as preliminary, but promising. “Marketers should consider these metrics when determining their campaign goals, especially since site traffic and sales will only continue to increase as the holiday season nears and they seek to engage consumers and expand visibility for their products,” says Will Martin-Gill, General Manager of Kenshoo Enterprise and Kenshoo Local. Read the release. And, see the infographic.

Analytics By Any Other Name

A big part of figuring out online media these days is focused on nomenclature. What do we call this or that activity? (See our recent “Viewpoints” piece on the term “ad tech”). iJento’s Neil Mason, writing in ClickZ, feels that “intelligence,” which suggests understanding over isolated facts, should trump “analytics.” He contends, “If by ‘web analytics’ we mean aggregated reporting of activity across different digital channels with that data sitting in siloes, then I think it increasingly has a limited shelf life. If by ‘web analytics” we mean the collection of data on interactions across different digital channels and devices and having that in an accessible format, then it’s going to be a fundamental component of your digital customer intelligence capability going forward.” Read more.

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Windows 8 ‘Ads in Apps’

With its Windows 8 OS launch, Microsoft is aiming for a more “consistent and connected” ad experience across its mobile, Xbox, and PC platforms (AdExchanger story). To back that up it’s announcing 25 advertisers have committed dollars to Windows 8 Ads in Apps campaigns. Of the brands named, 20th Century Fox and Nissan are running globally. Blog post.

Sourcing FB Vendors

On Inside Facebook, Brittany Darwell covers the evolution of Facebook’s marketing partner programs. She writes, “One issue that’s been identified is how brands and agencies find vendors. Facebook is looking to replace the current PMD directory this month with a PMD Center including more information, case studies and options to contact companies and submit RFPs through the system.” Read more.

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