Reviewing The Incentivized App Model; Epsilon Adds Agencies

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

No Joy In AppVille

Is Tapjoy’s “incentivized” mobile app world crashing down? While Apple has practically kicked out apps that offer users incentives such as virtual currency in exchange for downloading a marketplace for games, Tapjoy and its brethren have largely moved to HTML5. But not being a part of Apple’s iOS has cut into revenues of Tapjoy and its partners, writes Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington, who slashes and burns through the company’s business model. “I can’t wait to see what Tapjoy does next in this ever-escalating arms race,” says Arrington. “One thing’s for sure – it’ll be very profitable. And very shady.” Read more.

Anti-Trust Decision Nears

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) may be close to giving Google an “ultimatum” in regards to the FTC’s anti-trust investigation of the company. Bloomberg’s Sara Forden writes, “For almost 20 months, the FTC has been probing whether Mountain View, California-based Google is abusing its dominance of the Internet, and it’s prepared to sue if the operator of the world’s largest search engine fails to make an acceptable proposal.” Read more.

Buying Into Marketing Services

In Ad Age, Kate Kaye reports on last week’s Epsilon acquisition of Hyper Marketing’s brand agency Ryan Partnership, its social agency SolutionSet and its retail agency Catapult . Kaye writes, “The idea here is to marry Epsilon’s consumer data insights and data management and analysis capabilities with HMI’s marketing services.” Read it. Experian and Acxiom also offer various flavors of marketing services among other data-focused players in the marketing space.

Agency Ups and Down

We recently noted September was a surprisingly dismal month for agency holding companies. Turns out October was a little brighter for at least one of them as Publicis saw 7% organic growth led by the U.S. “At this point in time, we cannot yet confirm that growth and confidence are back,” CEO Maurice Levy told Reuters in a statement. “Europe and analog media are still at worrying levels.” Read a little more.

Adblock, the Dongle

Can the ad blocking micro-industry make the jump from browser plugins to hardware? A new device (in development) called AdTrap promises to remove ads from websites, audio streams, video and mobile apps. So far it’s raised about half its $150,000 goal, and all signs point to “go.” “We have parts on hand to build 25 AdTrap’s right now… Everything should be shipped by February 2013.” Read more and see pics.

Thumbs On Display

Q&A site maker Stack Exchange announced that it’s embedding a widget in its standard display media – courtesy of ad serving system AdZerk – that provides for a thumbs up or down on ads. Stack Exchange’s Kourneel Boman writes, “We want you to only see ads you want to see, which in turn means that our advertisers will only advertise to people who are actually interested in what they have to sell (which is sort of the holy grail of display advertising).” Read it.

Channel Changer

TV ratings may be the least precise form of measurement in the entire media landscape. But television advertising is still where the money is. And while the model isn’t broken, that doesn’t mean that the industry is as solid as it once was. Rho Ventures partner Doug McCormick, writing in GigaOm, says that the industry doesn’t have to wait for a long slide to employ “smarter, online-style tech” to better target ads will benefit both networks’ and marketers’ bottom line. “Agencies must start managing media spends to develop specific sales forecasts for items or services that their clients are marketing, while ensuring that they deliver the target users at the most efficient price,” McCormick says. “The agency/media equation should not stop with the delivery of tonnage audiences. It needs to take the next step.” Read more.

Programmatic Brand

On Forbes, Kellogg’s digital marketer, Bob Arnold, talks about programmatic buying and the brand. He says, “We’ve seen tremendous results when using programmatic buying. Depending on the brand, the digital media ROIs have increased as much as six times, according to our 3rd party market mix models. Compared to two years ago, we’re aggressively leveraging it today.” Read more.

Future TV Network

In Ad Age, Michael Learmonth does not report that Google remains fully committed to producing its own content and putting the television networks out of business. But, he does say that Google is starting to compete for TV budget and continuing to invest in content on YouTube. Is this the Connected TV network of the future? Learmonth quotes Google/YouTube’s Global Head of Content Strategy Jamie Byrne, “Our biggest objective was to kick-start the [YouTube] ecosystem, to bring in great creators, to deepen our relationships with advertisers and to grow viewership.” Read more.

But Wait. There’s More!