Salesforce.com Has A New Buddy?; Yahoo 'Premium' Display; The 'Bad' In Ads

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

Salesforce.com Has A New Buddy?

Social marketing software is the new DSP. Last week Vitrue was acquired by Oracle. This week, Peter Kafka says on All Things D that Buddy Media and its $90 million of venture funding is about to get rolled up into Salesforce.com for $800 million+. (Kudos to Optim.al’s Rob Leathern for pretty much predicting it on AdExchanger last week.) Kafka explains, “… it appears that Salesforce intends to use Buddy Media to extend its core customer relationship management offering. The presumable logic: Acquiring Buddy Media will help Salesforce’s clients reach their customers and leads where they are spending lots of online time…” Read more. Kafka says Google is lurking. If true, and extending CRM functionality is a focus, are B2B marketing software companies like Marketo, Hubspot or Eloqua next? Facebook’s perceived IPO challenges might be playing into acquisitions right now, too. Also, check out this interview with AdExchanger in February with Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow about the reasons behind his company’s purchase of social ads firm Brighter Option: “From our perspective, we are making a bet that advertising is moving from the front end of the campaign, where you’re trying to get people to do stuff they don’t want to do for the most part – usually in places they don’t want to do it – to the middle and end of the campaign, meaning you put out content through all the channels you already own, and then you figure out what people are telling you with their comments, clicks, likes, tweets and retweets and everything else.” Salesforce may be getting into ads.

Targeting The UDID

Mobile app promotion platform Fiksu said that the mothballing of the UDID by Apple is having its effect as free iPhone app downloads decreased in the month of April by 5% according to the company’s statistics. Presumably, developers who had been using the UDID for targeting are either moving to other platforms or looking for other non-UDID solutions which enable targeting. Read it.

Yahoo! ‘Premium’ Display

Macquarie Securities has been busy refreshing the Yahoo! home page for the past few months and, according to Macquarie’s first-half 2012 data as reported in MediaPost, “Sales of oversized and custom ad units on Yahoo’s main page rose slightly on a sequential basis, but were up substantially year-over-year.” Read more on MediaPost. That’s potentially good news for the rebuilt (or still rebuilding) premium display sales team. Last year at this time, Yahoo! executives (see Wayne Powers July 2011 AdExchanger Q&A) pointed to the acute need to grow its salesforce as some Yahoo! sellers had moved on to new opportunities. Regarding its latest data, Macquarie cautions that it’s hard to tell if premium display rates are being cut to improve Yahoo! home page sell-through.

Porn Isn’t The Prob

In Adweek, editor Mike Shields explores bad content and how it plays a part in advertising strategies whether some advertisers know it or not. We’re not talking about porn here, this is plain ‘ol bad content. Shields explains, “To be sure, these sites don’t seem to attract heavy user engagement. So why the surge in traffic? Media buyers suspect these companies are somehow paying for clicks or duping lost searchers. Still, they can command a decent premium via SSPs, since they can be easily labeled as delivering valued audiences such as auto buyers. Meanwhile, the content—since it’s not racy, merely lousy—doesn’t raise alarms with verification software from companies such as DoubleVerify.” Read it.

Getting The Bad Out Of Ads

In an Official Google blog post titled “The fight against scam ads—by the numbers,” David Baker, Director of Engineering, Advertising, says that his company has cut the amount of “bad ads” – think malware or anything against Google’s TOS – by 50%. Interestingly, humans, not tech, are the key as Baker explains, “One method we use to test the success of our efforts is to ask human raters to tell us how we’re doing. These human raters review a set of sites that are advertised on Google. )…) By using human raters, we can calibrate our automated systems and ensure that we’re improving our efforts over time.” ClickZ’s Daniel Mickens notes that a $500 million fine by the U.S. Justice Department for banned pharma ads may also have provided inspiration.

Network TV Dead By 2020

MediaPost’s Bob Garfield follows up a prediction he says he made in 2005 to say things are on track and network TV should be out of business by 2020. He even shares some helpful stats, “Back in 2005, the major networks’ audience had been shrinking for a decade to a mere 16.5% of TV households in prime time. That’s for all five of the nets put together. Seven years later the aggregate rating is down to an optimistic 13.5% — optimistic because that number includes DVR time-shifters, who skip past commercials. For advertisers, those viewers may as well not exist. Removing them from the ratings, only 11.5% of households are watching network shows live in prime time. The other 88.5% are doing something else.” Read more about the trend to “something else”.

But Wait. There’s More!