Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
NBCU Ad Network And Audience
NBC Universal is creating an ad network called “Universal Audience Platform,” according to ClickZ’s Douglas Quenqua who writes that the network is to include “21 NBCU properties, including Bravotv.com, NBC.com, Oxygen.com and Syfy.com” and will enable marketers to buy packages according to audience segments rather than by site. It’s all about audience – even for publishers, increasingly. Read more.
Creative Agencies Getting Tech
Given the success of recent digital campaigns such as one for Old Spice by Wieden + Kennedy, AdWeek’s Brian Morrisey says some old line creative shops are starting to understand the importance of tech and integrating it into their strategies, “It is now common for traditional shops to have developers sitting among creatives. Wieden now has developers, designers and coders on staff. They are also bringing on well-known talent from digital shops to help translate their strengths in storytelling and brand building into the digital world.” Read more.
MediaMind Closes In On IPO
MediaMind released plans for its upcoming IPO and it seems that the market for its shares may be less than originally planned. The company will now sell around $80 million worth of stock as opposed to the $115 million it planned to sell in its March IPO announcement. $80 million is the same dollar figure that Invite Media sold for to Google. With MediaMind’s positioning as a DSP, perhaps another bar is being set for the media buying model. Read more from Dow Jones Newswires.
On eConsultancy, they’re talking demand-side platforms, as Innovation Interctive/Search Ignite’s Andy Betts addresses SEMs, “Google’s purchase of Invite Media shows how serious this opportunity is. Yahoo has the technology, and many companies in the USA and in the UK are launching, testing and building DSPs as you read.” Feel the fever!
RTB For SEMs
Marc Poirier of Acquisio addresses the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) crowd on Search Engine Watch and delivers a piece on real-time bidding. He writes, “For price discovery to work, every single ad impression must be sold individually — one impression at a time. This is what makes RTB so interesting.” Read more.
Second Price Auctions
Cogmap’s Brent Halliburton writes about the second-price auction and its “chaos.” He writes, “One of the challenges in second price auctions is that a bid could theoretically be very high, yet the payout actually be very low if the gap between a bid and the second bid is significant.” Halliburton thinks this may not be good for publishers. Read why.
Local Ads Research
With the launch of its local ad exchange, Chitika, is cranking out the local online advertising research – especially relating mobile. One new data nugget offered by Chitika research director Dan Ruby: “When you compare queries that our system thinks are local to the general pool of search queries, the local searches click on ads 38% more often.” Read more.
The Trouble With Attribution Modeling
Abhishek Pani, Efficient Frontier research and marketing maven discussed a new attribution framework in his presentation titled “Evaluating the Marginal Value of Display” at OMMA Behavioral last week. The EF blog summarizes Pani, “Current attribution offerings in the industry ignore important variables such as the effect of time and cross channel demand elasticity (change in demand in channel A that results from a small change in spend in channel B).” Read more and get the presentation.
Customer Acquisition Costs
Charlie O’Donnell, Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) at First Round Capital, shares what he sees as an important pieces of information every startup should discover that start with answering three questions: “What do you think an average customer is worth to you? Which channels will be most effective in acquiring customers? (…)” Read about the third question and more insights here.
More Page Views, Ad Dollars
In an all-stock transaction, CrowdGather, which bought creative optimizer ADISN a couple of months ago, has now bought a company called Lefora “to consolidate CrowdGather’s market leadership in the hosted forum market.” CrowdGather will now offer a base of 90 million page views per month as it adds the 100,000 community forums which Lefora technology provides. Read more.
Tracking Mobile
The Inside AdWords blog announced that mobile campaign clicks can now be tracked separately when coming from its network using Mobile ValueTrack. Inside AdWords team member Miles Johnson writes, “Mobile ValueTrack works the same way it does for search and content: by automatically adding a tag to your website URL.” Read more.
Segmenting The Subconscious
On the Nielsen Wire blog, NeuroFocus CEO Dr. A. K. Pradeep, who is the author of “The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind” shares excerpts of his book which will may resonate with data companies looking for the next segment – the subconscious! He writes, “There are 44 million baby boomers in the U.S. who control 77% of all financial assets. After age 50, the brain becomes less able to screen out distractions, presenting a huge implication and a great opportunity for marketers.” Target now!
