Internet Trends Report; TV Continues Growing

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

Meeker’s Internet Trends

2014’s Internet Trends report was released on Wednesday. Among the key findings was mobile growth, which is rising at 25% of total Web usage vs. 14% YoY. Tablet use is growing faster than PCs ever did, and Internet advertising is up 16% from last year. Advertising on mobile is up 47% YoY, to 11% of total Internet advertising, and mobile app revenue still beats mobile ad revenue. Cyber threats are rising rapidly, and Meeker suggests that directed attacks will continue to rise as mobile platforms grow. Re/code dissects the report here or get the PDF.

TV Disruption From Within

Everyone agrees change is coming to linear TV, but the medium is still growing (faster than online video, in fact) and its business models have “strong walls” around them. So says LUMA Partners’ Terry Kawaja in a Digital Media Summit presentation on boob-tube disruption.Watch the video. Tidbit: The death of the remote control could have surprising implications for advertising. “Software-based discovery will fundamentally change the economics, because 40% of ad budgets go to tune-in,” Kawaja said.

Magnetic Acquires Cognitive Match

In an AdExchanger column in February, Cognitive Match CEO Alex Kelleher wrote about SaaS and called it “the future of ad tech.” It would appear the industry’s taking note. Display ad and onsite predictive-targeting platform Cognitive Match was acquired by Magnetic on Wednesday, TechCrunch reports. Cognitive Match’s platform will be integrated into Magnetic. James Green, Magnetic’s CEO, said, “The addition of Cognitive Match means marketers can now build an ad in real time by assembling thousands of individual elements based on product feeds, keywords, audience intent or just the weather or location. Green also said there were “very few companies like Cognitive Match that do as stand alone retargeting service in the same way.” Read more.

Stuck With Stock

Business Insider says the former employees of ad tech platform Adchemy have been surprised that their stock or stock options didn’t pay out after Walmart’s Walmart Labs digital marketing unit acquired the company earlier this year for a reported $30 million-$40 million. According to the article, only a few executives were able to make a tidy sum. Read it. Adchemy had taken more than $100 million in investment in 10 years, says BI.

The Programmatic Marketer

Thomas O’Donnell, head of ad strategy for UK-based Gumtree, talks about programmatic media in an interview by Forbes. He says that one of programmatic’s misconceptions is that “you can acquire the same media for cheaper. [Yet,] the mantra ‘you get what you pay for’ has never been more apt. If you are paying £2 for an impression/user or 10p, there is often a very good reason. It may be that competition for that particular user/impression is very high as they are just about to complete a purchase on a new phone or perhaps it might be someone’s teenage daughter on the 512th page on a blog about kittens.” Read more.

Agency Tech

DigitasLBI struck a digital media partnership with technology company SocialFlow on Wednesday that aims to create new ad vehicles that combine owned, earned and paid content. DigitasLBI will use SocialFlow’s algorithm-based technology, which claims to deliver content to consumers at the moment audiences will be most responsive. Read the press release.

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