Yahoo To Buy Tumblr; Marketing Automation Windfall

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Yahoo Youth Movement?

Perhaps a chance to capture a younger audience, Yahoo is buying blogging platform Tumblr. The WSJ says the $1.1 billion deal is done (subscription) and so does the NY Times. All Things D broke the story late last week and referenced a quote by CFO Ken Goldman at [JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference] as a driver of the acquisition: “One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic. Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.” Read more. A growing revenue model (advertising, presumably) and management structure need to be worked out at Tumblr. Nevertheless, it’s seeing consistent traffic growth. More from Forbes. A special “product” announcement is scheduled for today by Yahoo. Last but not least, Businessweek explores Tumblr’s porn “challenges.”

Marketing Automation IPO

Marketing automation is on the march as Marketo raised $78 million in its successful initial public offering on Friday. The company now has a market cap of $857 million. This is a similar valuation to Oracle’s purchase price for Eloqua last year. Read the release. And here’s AdExchanger’s Q&A with CEO Phil Fernandez one year ago,when he said, “The market is only fractionally penetrated. Anybody that is marketing online, marketing in social and mobile environments and has any desire to build either a brand relationship needs what we do.” Big data and BI analytics company Tableau also had its IPO on Friday.

Ad Ops Intern

There are apparently a lot of things a Universal McCann ad operations intern should learn and do, in fact UM’s Mitchell Weinstein outlines 17 tips to make the internship successful at his agency. Tip #16: “We do a lot of work with Google, Facebook, Hulu, Twitter, and many other really cool companies. At first this may seem fun and exciting. That probably won’t last, and as you get more into your job, you might find yourself more excited about working with companies most people have never heard of (maybe the next Google?).” Read the full list here.

Publicis: Not Nielsen

Agency holding company Publicis has told the Wall Street Journal it will go with comScore and not Nielsen for online GRP measurement. The WSJ’s Suzanen Vranica writes, “The decision of the Publicis firms to go with comScore’s system is significant, given the scale of the ad budgets they handle. Starcom MediaVest and Zenith spend about $32 billion annually on ads in the US on behalf of companies such as Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, InBev BUD and J.P. Morgan Chase. Several weeks ago, P&G, the world’s largest advertiser and a Starcom MediaVest client, signed up with comScore.” The client is in charge. Read more.

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The Pivot To Ecommerce Hits A Wall; Salesforce Walks Back Its Agentic AI Pitch

Brian Wieser throws some cold water on the notion of a big happy marketplace for integrated video and TV inventory. In a note for Pivotal Research he writes, “As digital advertising becomes increasingly driven by programmatic and real-time buying, online video will increasingly be bought in this manner. But it won’t necessarily follow that traditional TV will be bought either programmatically or in real-time.” PDF download.

GAN Down

Google is shutting down its Affiliate Network product in July, but it doesn’t seem many advertisers are sad to see it go. “Affiliate marketing always seemed to be an out-of-place fit in Google’s line of otherwise automated products. By its very nature, affiliate marketing relies on building relationships at a granular level with marketing partners, which requires a lot of personal attention and correspondence to achieve,” said AvantLink’s Chad Waite on Marketing Land. Read more. ValueClick has been a beneficiary of the GAN shutdown, with its Commission Junction unit receiving some new biz – though there’s a question as to how much, a question raised during the ValueClick earnings call two weeks ago.

YouTube Reach

In a Sunday post on the YouTube blog marking the site’s eighth anniversary, the YouTube blogger notes some milestones: “Today, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s more than four days of video uploaded each minute! Every month, more than 1 billion people come to YouTube to access news, answer questions and have a little fun. That’s almost one out of every two people on the Internet.” This YouTube thing seems like it’s going to be big [sic].

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