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WPP Digital Growing, B3 To Get RTB; Digital Agencies Re-Born; Andreesen On Burning Newspapers For Digital

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Digital Revs Rising In WPP

PaidContent's Ingrid Lunden looks at WPP Group's Q4 2009 and full-year earnings which were reported late last week. In addition to an uptick in overall revenue, WPP divulged, "New media sales accounted for 27 percent of the advertising and marketing group’s revenues, or $3.6 billion." The company says its digital revenues will reach 2/3 of total revs in three or four years. On the earnings call, the company said, "B3, the division’s proprietary trading network, will be launching a real-time bidding service on B3 in the next three to six months." Read more.

NYC Startup Tech

The New York Times' Jenna Wortham looks at the local NYC startup scene and makes the inevitable comparison to Silicon Valley. Citing a recent New York Tech Meet-Up which drew 700 tech enthusiasts, Wortham paints a picture of a vibrant tech scene that is only slowed by the occasional snowstorm. Read it.

Digital Agency Re-birth

AdWeek's Brian Morrissey says that the digital agency is making a comeback after rocketing to fame in the bubble years around 2000 - and then crashing. Razorfish CEO Bob Lord told Morrissey, "The question we're hearing is, how can digital help me change my business?" Read more.

4As Conference Less Than Transformative

Ad Age reports that last week's 4As conference which aimed to bring together all sides of the agency world - media, creative, executive - fell short of its "Transformation" moniker. Regarding the event, Ad Age writes, "Many of those pressing matters for an agency community struggling to emerge from the economic storm -- like dealing with procurement, agency-review processes and grasping emerging marketing channels like mobile -- went untouched." Read more.

News and Mags Should Be Burned

Quoting 16th-century Spanish explorer, Hernan Cortes, Marc Andreesen thinks big media needs to "burn the boats" as the digital age swarms traditional models. Specifically, he sees newspapers and magazines print days numbered in an interview with TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld. Read it.

AOL Bigger Than Yahoo!?

Niki Scevak makes the argument that in spite of the fact Yahoo! has a market cap 9x that of AOL, he expects AOL be bigger than Yahoo! in 5 years saying, "My main reason for thinking this is that AOL has a management team that is in tune with the reality of the Internet." Read more.

E-Tailers Turn To Advertising

AdAge's Natalie Zmuda reports that as E-tailers have faced tough times, they've turned to adding advertising on their own sites, which often can contains ads from the competition. Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester, adds, "Ninety-seven percent of visitors to any given site don't convert, so this is a way to get money from that 97%." Read about it.

Ad Means 400,000 Friends

Christopher Heine of ClickZ writes about the power of one, well-placed ad on social game Farmville's home page which became enormously successful in under 24 hours. In exchange for having Facebook users "friend" MSN search engine, Bing, users received Farmville's virtual cash. Facebook friendship can definitely be bought as nearly 400,000 people clicked through in less than a day. Read more.

BlueKai And YuMe

Data exchange, BlueKai, is beginning to make its intender data story in video as it announced a partnership with video ad technology company, YuMe. In addition, Grant Ries, CRO of BlueKai, recently gave a video interview to Beet.tv about BlueKai and the YuMe implementation. Ries was the former VP of Biz Dev at YuMe. Read more.

YouTube Revenue Guess

All Things D's Peter Kafka looks at a recent estimate by Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney who estimates that YouTube "will generate over $1.1 billion in revenue by 2011, and Google will keep about $700 million of that."
Read more.

TechCrunch Announces Conference

TechCrunch plans to launch a new tech and media conference in New York City, May 24-26. Called "TechCrunch Disrupt," the show is offer an opportunity "to debate what’s really changing in media and technology right now, what’s causing disruption and what we need to do about it to survive and thrive in real-time." Real-time baby! Read about it.

Twitter Data Feed Shows Improvement

Jennifer Merritt of The Wall Street Journal says that recent search trend data as well as feedback from Twitter are starting to show patterns that may reveal future hiring patterns. Among the findings, Twitter "shows a gradual decline in the number of people tweeting about being unemployed and looking for work over the six months ending Feb. 16." Read more.

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