P&G Drops Underperforming Brands; Targeting Krill Oil

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

P&G Targeting

On Friday, P&G said it’s letting go of more than half of its brands that it sees as underperforming. Read more. This announcement came as the company reported an $11.6 billion (that’s “b” as in “billion”) profit for the fiscal year, slightly ahead of analyst expectations. CEO A.G. Lafley did not identify P&G’s oft-mentioned move to programmatic buying, but said on the earnings call, “We are maintaining or increasing our investment in marketing that works and we are driving for savings and frankly non-working dollars or other efficiencies that you get from the move to more digital, mobile, social…” Read the transcript on Seeking Alpha.

Targeting Krill Oil

In a feature article in The New York Times, a breathless description of a Reckitt Benckiser display ad campaign for krill oil on Facebook is followed from its creation to the analytics on ROI months later. Datalogix’ online/offline targeting through Facebook’s platform gets a shout out and we learn that Reckitt Benckiser (RB) will announce a partnership on Monday in which RB will spend at least $100 million on Facebook over the next few years. Read it. Central to the story is “Facebook’s publishing garage” – i.e., agency services.

Twitter Buys Mitro

Twitter quietly acquired Mitro late last week, a NYC-based startup that specializes in password security. Mitro, which has raised $1.2 million to date, will become an open-source project and released all of its server and client codes under the GPL license on Github. The start-up’s core product lets multiple users share and control passwords for a single account (think colleagues juggling the same login info and user accounts). In a blog post announcing the acquisition, Mitro said it will focus on “a variety of geo-related projects” for Twitter. TechCrunch has the story. Perhaps this acquisition will be a substitute for cookie targeting in the future.

Keyword “Programmatic”

Meredith Corp. National Media Group said last Thursday that it saw a decline in digital revenue due to real-time bidding and automated auctions in the latest fiscal quarter. The company’s latest earnings report and call with Wall Street analysts was rife with programmatic talking points. Though the company saw a negative effective from programmatic, it was explained how it had ramped up programmatic efforts internally including a two-year effort to create an effective data set for ad targeting. Meredith President Thomas Hardy said, “We’re excited about the new offering, being able to have the advertisers target individual consumers related to our proprietary data. … When we look at pacings, we are optimistic about our digital business being better in the next quarter.” Viewability makes an appearance on the call, too. Access the earnings call transcript via Seeking Alpha. And more on Ad Age.

Swarming Location Data

Foursquare is no stranger to reinvention, having spun off its check-in feature into a standalone app earlier this year (Swarm) and debuting a sassy new logo last week. Now, the company is making over its ad strategy by diving deeper into location-based targeting. But mobile users have been slow to engage with Swarm, and Foursquare is itching to monetize the app. The solution, as they see it, is to sell marketers on ad spots tied to a mobile user’s location in real time. “People who walk into different types of stores, they’re self-identifying through Foursquare,” said COO Jeff Glueck. “That’s a really valuable connection between audience and commerce. Of course, the engine of all that is being useful to consumers.” Read more via Bloomberg.

Systematically Fighting Fraud

On Friday, the Media Rating Council (MRC) unveiled a new undertaking to contemporize industry standards around fraudulent digital traffic. The aim of the endeavor, according to the MRC, is to surface new guidelines that modernize existing traffic measurement practices, expand traffic filtration requirements, reinforce fraudulent traffic detection, oblige more transparency from publishers and enhance site filtration consistency. Read the release.

Broadcast Forecast

This year’s broadcast TV upfront was weaker than most, but the jury is hung on whether web video stole the show. The real factor stymieing TV ad buys, according to some, is a lack of marketer commitment to television. As many in the industry speculate about what’s taking the majority of TV ad budgets, Assembly CIO Catherine Warburton says branded entertainment is rising in popularity. “We do know that broadcast was down,” Warburton told the WSJ. “And cable didn’t get it. Where did the money go? It could so many different places. Some brands may be just putting this money toward the bottom line.”Read on (subscription).

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