Apsalar's Mobile DSP; Native Ads And Regulation

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Out Of Beta

Joining the increasingly crowded mobile demand-side platform landscape, mobile analytics startup Apsalar has launched its new DSP platform. The mobile DSP uses first-party behavioral data from approximately 700 million mobile users to let advertisers do lookalike audience targeting. With Apsalar’s help, app developer TinyCo says it saw a nearly 90% game tutorial completion rate. “We’re excited to continue scaling our campaigns with Apsalar in an optimized, cost-efficient way,” said TinyCo growth and user acquisition manager Adam Merber in a statement. Read the press release.

A Native Warning

Native advertising may be hot, but overdoing it could lead to regulation, writes AdWeek’s Katy Bachman. “Certainly, the search engine guidance should serve as an early warning to the industry that at some point in the future, unless the industry self-regulates, the FTC may be knocking on their door,” Linda Goldstein, who handles advertising law for the firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, tells Bachman. Read more.

Badge Of Honor

Ampush (AdExchanger Q&A from Sept. 2012) says it has received the coveted Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer (sPMD) designation from Facebook, which only 14 other companies have received. Read more on the Ampush blog. Laurie Dewan, VP of Monetization at Rdio, provides the client voice in the press release: “By leveraging their [Ampush’s] AMP 2.0 Social Marketing Platform alongside expert insights and a focus on mobile, Ampush helped us optimize our campaigns to keep CPIs (Cost Per Installs) attractive over time, while scaling our paid media on Facebook internationally.”

Video Pipes

Data center Equinix and BrightRoll have teamed to help RocketFuel with RTB video ad targeting, says a release. Equinix is a bit of a black box (perhaps literally) but explains its media offering as follows: “The Equinix Ad-IX ecosystem enables efficiencies in the digital advertising market, which is evolving from traditional ad purchasing to include ad exchanges that help buyers match inventory to viewers in real-time.” Read more. Oh, the pipes.

Facebook Arbitrage

On Business Insider, Jim Edwards reports that Facebook is requiring pricing transparency – or banning arbitrage of its ad inventory. He says the new policy “is buried in Facebook’s ‘platform policies‘ for marketing vendors who plug into Facebook’s Ads API to buy ads within the social network.” Read more.

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iPad Ads Surge

As print ad dollars continue to stall, magazines are seeing gains in their iPad ad sales and units during the first six months of the year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau and WPP’s Kantar Media. A collective look at the 58 titles covered by the PIB’s report, the number iPad ad units was up 7% in the first half of 2013, compared to the same period in 2012. At the same time, iPad ad units jumped 24.5%, while print ad pages showed a slight drop of 1%. Read the release.

Post-PC Days?

The last few years have seen a steady decline in both sales and attention for desktop computers in favor of ever-smarter smartphones and tablets. ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes points out that the mobile marketplace isn’t looking so great either, primarily due to over-saturation. As evidence of this, he points to a downgrade of mobile phone maker Qualcomm. “The high-end is where the money is at, and if some analysts are already saying that this space is saturated, then the potential to pull in profits could be prematurely curtailed,” Kingsley-Hughes writes. Could this situation have negative portents for the growing mobile ad space? Read the rest.

Publicis Goes To China

Uncork the bubbly! Net@lk, a Chinese services provider that orchestrates social influence marketing campaigns on behalf of clients like Coca Cola and Pernod Ricard, has been acquired by Publicis Groupe. With 350 people in over six cities, Net@alk is broken down into four business units spanning social content, monitoring, research, and analytics. Here’s more from MediaPost.

Standardizing Ecommerce Data

Tech companies and ecommerce operators align. Names like IBM, Google, Best Buy, Adobe, and Qubit are rallying together under the auspices of a unified W3C project, a data standard for product and customer information called “Customer Experience Digital Data Acquisition,” writes GigaOM’s David Meyer. The goal? “Simplify the exchange of data between Web services that deal in product and customer information (think tracking) and theoretically cut down on site technology vendor lock-in.” Let freedom ring?

Getting Offline Segments

Mobile DSP Adelphic is plugging into offline segments courtesy of Neustar’s AdAdvisor data arm. The companies say it’s the first time Neustar has done a partnership to push its 12,000 segments into a mobile RTB environment. Press release.

In The Beginning

In a tell-all (or almost) interview on Mixergy, CEO Are Traasdahl of cross-device targeting platform TapAd talks about the creation of his company. Former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt was instrumental in guiding Traasdahl’s early thinking. Traasdahl says, “[David Rosenblatt] is a pretty remarkable guy, so I gave him two options. Should we build a mobile exchange, (…) or should we build this cross-screen ability to re-engage with consumers, and he spent two seconds thinking and said you should build cross-screen.” Read more.

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