Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
AdReady Raises $5.3 Million
According to a regulatory filing, online display advertising technology company, AdReady, has raised $5.3 million. Read a bit more on Northwest Innovation. The filing is here.
Turning The AOL Ship
Mediaweek’s Mike Shields reviews industry sentiment on AOL in light of its recently revealed Q1 business performance, its premium inventory and whether AOL can return to the glory days. Overall, the industry seems hopeful in regards to a turnaround in Shields’ survey and attributes difficulties to a reorg. But, Mediavest managing director Amanda Richman adds at the end of the piece, “If we are seeing these results in year two, that’s a different story.” Read it.
Apple Vs. Adobe
Ever since Steve Jobs issued his thoughts on why Flash has never been apart of the iPhone/iPad mix, and then Adobe responded, the blogosphere has been abuzz about “Apple said/Adobe said.” The Wired Gadget blog offers new evidence that a couple of years ago, there were some at Adobe who thought Adobe needed to find a way to get on board the iPhone freight train. Quoting a former Adobe engineer, “You have this white elephant that everybody ignored. Half the [Adobe] mobile business unit was carrying iPhones, and yet the management team wasn’t doing anything about it.” Read more.
In Australia, YAHOO!7, the online joint venture between Seven Media Group and Yahoo, has reported a strong first quarter for 2010 as more anecdotal evidence points to online display advertising global growth, “Yahoo!7 chief executive Rohan Lund tells The Australian, “This year the market, for display advertising in particular, is going from strength to strength.” Read more.
Privacy And Facebook
Ad Age’s Michael Learmonth writes that Facebook has a big privacy issue given its new open graph platform announced at its recent developer forum. The company has already attracted the attention of several U.S. senators including NY senator Chuck Schumer who wants the FTC to look at Facebook’s policies. Read more about Facebook’s pain.
Behavioral And Privacy In NY Times
Natasha Singer wrote a feature in the business section of The New York Times entitled “Shoppers Who Can’t Have Secrets.” The piece looks at behavioral advertising and concludes that privacy protections are being outstripped by data collection techniques. Jessica Rich of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission says that “By early fall, the F.T.C. plans to propose comprehensive new privacy guidelines intended to provide greater tools for transparency and better consumer control of personal information.” Read more.
Ghostery Updates
If you aren’t using Ghostery due to compatibility issues, well now you may have no excuses left. The popular plugin which elegantly shows you cookies being delivered on every page you visit as well as a host of other data points and more, has been updated to include Ghostery for Chrome and for Internet Explorer. If you’re working in display, this is a “must-have” plugin in order to understand the data-driven world and its competitive set at the very least. Download Ghostery now. (source: @dcancel)
Online Ad Revs Point North
If the big guys are any indication, online ad revenues are up strongly year-over-year. Of course, that might be not be saying much considering comparables were low a year ago. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld crunches the numbers of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL. See graphs on 15% ad revenue growth.
Dapper On Display
Dapper’s Jon Aizen recently participated in a webcast with ClickZ’s Mike Grehan that looks at display advertising and Dapper’s sweet spot, the creative. From the intro: “‘The last mile’ of creative has gotten nothing more than a reshuffle of colors, product images, and calls-to-action by creative optimization vendors” – hear Dapper’s views on what the next steps in creative are. The on-demand version of last Wednesday’s live webcast is available here (Registration required).
The Best Ad Size
What is the best ad size? AdRoll “rolls up” its recent data and determines that by looking at clickthrough-rates (CTRs) for retargeting, the best performing ad size by the CTR standard is… (drum roll)… a 300×250. See the stock-market-like graphic which makes the case on the AdRoll blog.
On Google PPC Sales Strategies
Tom Hespos of Underscore Marketing pens an article on how Google’s search advertising rewards search marketers who create campaigns relevant to the keywords they target, but at the same time according to Hespos, some Google sales reps are suggesting less inefficient strategies to achieve scale. Hespos writes, “trying to push irrelevant advertising on experienced search advertisers doesn’t make sense. If I were directing sales at Google, I’d place more importance on making sure that the top advertising spenders in the country were adequately educated about how search works, and less importance on getting experienced advertisers to spend more.” Read it.
Interpublic Group Losses Narrow
IPG appears to be experiencing a small turnaround as losses are narrowing and the stock is up nearly 30% on the year. According to Seeking Alpha, CEO Michael Roth stated on the earning’s call, looking at their creative agencies, “Our digital specialty agencies are off to a strong start this year. MRM has started to see the benefit of new business wins. R/GA and HUGE posted double-digit revenue increases.” Roth also noted that client wins also have their challenges, “there’s no question that the talent issues concerning digital puts pressure on salaries. And we know that it’s very competitive.” Read the transcript from Seeking Alpha. Read the investor relations press release, too.
Turn On Delivery, Performance
Goutham Kurra, director of technology at demand-side platform Turn, preaches the real-time bidding gospel and looks at the natural tension between delivery and performance and how the marketer solves the challenges around scale. Kurra concludes, “We may still not be able to have our cake and eat it too, but with rapid innovations in display technology, we’re getting a lot better at making every single impression count.” Read the article on Adotas.
The CEO 360 Degree Review
Omar Hamoui, CEO of mobile ad network AdMob, is profiled in a recent Q&A in The New York Times and shares tidbits of his CEO experience including the most common feedback from his “360” reviews: “I needed to be more positive and praise people more when things are going well. It’s fine to make people comfortable with talking about what’s negative, but if you yourself aren’t really acknowledging the good things, that tends to eventually wear on people.” Read more.
AdWords For Mobile: It’s A-LIVE!
Need to track your favorite client’s ad network spend through the Google Ad Words interface? Now you can do it through your mobile phone. Miles Johnson announces the new mobile feature is “live” on the Inside AdWords blog. Read more.
