How Limited Is Mobile Exchange Inventory?

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mobile-devicesMobile advertising grows more enticing as consumers become attached to their smartphones and tablets. Assessing the value of mobile ad inventory against traditional display inventory can be confusing, however. AdExchanger went straight to the experts and asked several demand-side platforms (DSP), supply-side platforms (SSP), ad exchange companies and an ad agency this question:

“How limited are the targeted attributes of mobile exchange inventory in comparison to traditional display inventory?”

Click below or scroll down to read the responses:

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Don't Walk Into Walls: Finding The Real Value Of Mobile Location Data

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krishnasubramanian“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Krishna Subramanian, Chief Marketing Officer at Velti.

When considering location data, marketers – not unreasonably – tend to focus on its ability to tell them where someone is at a given moment. They’re missing the point. The real value of location data lies in the context, what it tells them about who that person is. Instead of trying to deliver offers to the right person at the right place at the right time, which is a hugely challenging proposition of questionable effectiveness, you should be using that data to drive behavioral targeting for every impression you deliver, wherever you deliver it.

Location data has long been seen as the key to increasing mobile advertising spend, which hovered at $4.06 billion in 2012, according to eMarketer. The idea is that we could use the shifting location of a smartphone or tablet to target specific ads to consumers based on their real-time location – for example, showing a consumer a Starbucks ad within their favorite mobile app at the moment they’re walking by a Starbucks store. But how feasible is this concept, really? What kind of scale are we talking about? Even if a handful of consumers fit the ideal profile – people walking past a Starbucks while using the right app (instead of, say, trying not to get hit by a scooter) on a device whose GPS data they’ve shared – how many such impressions would actually be available to Starbucks in a given period of time? And how many of the recipients would be delighted rather than creeped out?

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Elementary, My Dear Watson; Hashtag Exchange

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Elementary, My Dear Watson

From yesterday’s Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, supercomputer “Watson” is apparently coming to marketing in a much bigger way. An IBM release offers, “Watson will serve as an assistant in helping line of business leaders from CMOs, customer service agents and sales leaders transform the customer experience...” What’s that mean, you ask? A big computer is going to help the marketer figure out the “big data” stew. A keyword to all this is improving “engagement” with consumers at-scale. Read more on GigaOm. Will they become an acquirer in the ad tech world to pull in the paid media channel? Seems possible. In the meantime, download IBM’s new 2013 marketing report.

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Mozilla’s 'Underblocking' Cookie Issues; FTC Commissioner Supports Self-Regulation Among Advertisers

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PrivacyMozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, must fix three areas within its third-party-cookie-blocking patch before it can be rolled out to users, according to Stanford graduate student Jonathan Mayer, who developed the patch.

The problematic areas involve “underblocking,” i.e. inadvertently allowing unwanted tracking cookies past Firefox’s cookie blocking patch, Mayer explained in a blog post today. “Cookie policies are inherently imprecise,” Mayer observed. “Some unwanted tracking cookies might slip through, compromising user privacy (underblocking). And some non-tracking cookies might get blocked, breaking the web experience (overblocking). The challenge in designing a cookie policy is calibrating the tradeoff between underblocking and overblocking.”

Overblocking cookies has not been a problem for the patch, according to Mayer.  Last week, Mozilla engineers requested at least six more weeks to measure the cookie-blocking patch’s performance and analyze its impact. As part of the testing, three areas that are being examined are as follows:

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Booyah + Rocket Fuel: How One Agency Makes The Most Of A DSP/Ad Network

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troy-lernerLast week AdExchanger looked at the dynamic between ROI DNA, a performance-driven agency, and its preferred display-trading partner, Run DSP. (Read the story.)

There are many such relationships in ad tech, where a mid-sized agency relies on a key network or platform partner to drive ROI and provide hand-holding to its planners and buyers. You can find another example in the interplay between Denver agency Booyah Advertising and DSP/ad network Rocket Fuel.

Booyah has about 50 clients on behalf of whom it manages roughly $100 million in digital spend annually. Of the half that goes to display, 60% is programmatic. That makes $30 million in exchange-traded media.

Booyah began working with Rocket Fuel three years ago, adding it to media plans alongside traditional ad networks and direct site buys. Booyah President Troy Lerner says, "I didn't even know what I was buying."

As the agency's media buyers got more comfortable with the terminology of DSPs and RTB-focused ad networks, it tried some other similar partners, among them Turn and Invite.

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In Ziff Davis Acquisition Of NetShelter, Proof That 'Publisher Networks' Still Have Believers

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Ziff Davis and NetShelterZiff Davis' acquisition of tech blog network NetShelter is part of a continuing strategy to expand its vertical content for IT pros and young men.

Ziff Davis has been a serial acquirer since former Time Inc. digital chief Vivek Shah took over the company as CEO nearly three years ago, with investment assistance from PE firm Great Hill Partners. The purchase of NetShelter from former parent inPowered Media is being supported by ZD's parent, J2 Global, which bought ZD last November.

For inPowered, the sale of NetShelter – terms of which weren't disclosed – represents a decision to remove itself from display ad sales and content management and delve deeper into being an earned media ad platform, CEO Peyman Nilforoush told AdExchanger. For Shah, the addition of NetShelter is something he's been eyeing since he began plotting ZD's turnaround into a display and ad targeting platform business.

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Is Efficiency Bad For Digital Display?

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ohara-ddt-nextmark-usethis“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Chris O'Hara, Chief Revenue Officer at NextMark.

I’ve always loved the notion of programmatic RTB. As a data hound and an early adopter of AppNexus, the idea that advertisers can achieve highly granular levels of targeting and utilize algorithms to impact performance is right in my wheelhouse. Today’s ad tech, replete with 300 companies that enable data-driven audience segmentation, targeting and analytics, is a testament to the efficiency of buying ads one impression at a time.

But what if driving efficiency in display actually does more harm than good?

Today’s RTB practitioners have become extremely relentless in pursuit of the perfect audience. It starts with retargeting, which uses first-party data to serve ads only to people who are already deeply within the customer funnel. No waste there. The next tactic is to target behavioral “intenders” who, according to their cookies, have done everything but purchase something. Guess what? If I searched four times in the last three hours for a flight from JFK to SFO, anyone who serves me enough ads is likely to eventually get last-view attribution for my ticket purchase. Next? Finding “lookalike” audiences that closely resemble past purchasers. Data companies, each of whom sell a variety of segments that can be mixed to create the profile of a 35-year-old suburban woman, do a great job of delivering audiences with a predilection to purchase.

But what if we’re serving ads to people who are already going to buy? Is efficiency really driving new sales, or are we just helping marketers save money on marketing?

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Tumblr Is Yahoo's Instagram – Or Is it?

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Yahoo Tumblr InstagramFor the most part, internet analysts and ad industry observers are applauding Yahoo's $1.1 billion acquisition of microblog Tumblr. The timing appears to be right for both companies. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, fresh from a series of acqui-hires, saw an opportunity to bring a new media network with a young, socially engaged, and logged in audience.

In turn, Tumblr has been turning heads with some proof that the six-year-old company could actually start to generate meaningful ad revenues with the launch of mobile ads on Tumblr’s iOS and Android apps – a year after the PC version of Tumblr rolled out “Radar” sponsored ad units.

AdExchanger asked a number of Yahoo and Tumblr watchers for their take on the  acquisition news and what it means for the two from an advertising perspective.

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Google Open Source's RTB Tech; Pahade Returns To Ad Tech

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Open Sourcing RTB

Google is offering its RTB technology in a roll-your-own format. Developers can access the company’s customizable toolkit for real-time bidding applications using tech from DoubleClick and Google Cloud Platform. A Google developer blog post says, “With Open Bidder buyers can significantly lower the latency of their bidders by leveraging Google Compute Engine’s scale, speed, and proximity to DoubleClick Ad Exchange.” Read more.

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What Yahoo Sees In Tumblr: A Logged-In, Cross-Channel Audience

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mayer-tumblrThere were two adjectives Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer used repeatedly when discussing the advertising opportunity with Tumblr, which her company agreed to buy for $1.1 billion. Those words: "native" and "aspirational."

It's what you would expect. In its short history of monetization, Tumblr has focused on organic ad formats, tentatively rolling out tools to promote organic posts. Yahoo execs, eager to demonstrate the huge price it is paying for Tumblr, are telling investors to expect ad revenue to go big-time in 2014.

But there's an additional opportunity around ad addressability of the constantly logged-in Tumblr audience – across both web and mobile – that is increasingly valuable in this era of decaying cookies. Mayer hinted at this opportunity.

"I don't want to pre-announce anything today," she said. "It is quite clear that the psychographic profiles on Tumblr are different than we have on Yahoo, which enriches the user base."

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