Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Bain Leaves FAN, Joins Twitter
Former Fox Audience Network CEO Adam Bain will now be the one who gets to answer, “How is Twitter going to make money?” in that he’ll be in charge of driving all revenue at microblogging company Twitter. TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington writes that Bain “will be President, Revenue and he’ll be reporting to COO Dick Costolo.” Read more. Thus far, no tweets from Bain through his Twitter account.
Hanlon Hired By Mediabrands
IPG Mediabrands has hired Tim Hanlon, who recently left Catalyst S+F, according to Brian Morrissey of Adweek. Morrissey reports that Hanlon will be IPG’s “point person for bridging the gap between Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley (and) will work in Mediabrands Ventures, the unit set up in January under Matt Freeman to house 16 specialty digital marketing companies like search firm Reprise Media, digital ad trading desk Cadreon and mobile shop Ansible.” Read more on Adweek.
Block And Tackling
MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki discusses the data-driven ad world in a Forbes.com feature called “Advertising: More Science Than Art” by Victoria Taylor. Zawadzki says, “I do think that we’re in a time when marketing moves from art and interactive marketing moves from process into plot and into sort of automation. The basic blocking and tackling is now automatable and it’s allowed people to think again.” Read more.
DataXu’s Mike Baker interviews his new client Dax Hamman on ClickZ about how about display advertising is beginning to feed bottom-of-the-funnel search marketing. Hamman begins, “SEM is very click based and an action is easily tied to a result. Display conversely relies more on post-impression data, a continuing hot topic amongst marketers in general.” Read more.
What RTB Can Do For You
On iMedia Connection, Philip Smolin of demand-side platform Turn offers four reasons why real-time bidding “enables all advertisers to more efficiently and effectively achieve (…) common campaign objectives.” At #1, Smolin says it’s a great way to find custom, audience segments. Read more.
Guaranteeing Audience OOH
CNN is guaranteeing that Starcom and its member agencies will get certain audience segments and scale in out-of-home (OOH) markets as part of their upfront deal with the agency for 2010-11. Anthony Cupri of Mediaweek writes, “The pact marks the first time a network has written business based on its deliveries in bars, restaurants, hotels and third-party residences.” As for verifying the audience, “Arbitron data, which is drawn from a sample of 30,242 respondents in 11 major markets,” will be used. Read more.
Mobile M&A
Last Friday, Nokia agreed to acquire 8-person mobile analytics firm, Motally, a “mobile analytics service offers in-application tracking and reporting, and is designed to enable developers and publishers to optimize the development of their mobile applications through increased understanding of how users engage.” Read the Nokia release. Is Millennial Media the next mobile acquisition (by RIM)?
Paid Or Free: Publisher Conversion Rates
Social community creator Ning is about to switch from paid and free to paid-only as the company discovered earlier in the year that their “free” business was a drain on resources: “Ning was at low end of the generally accepted 5% to 10% conversion rate needed to support a freemium business model. It converted just under 5% of its total user base into paying customers.” Read more on Forbes.
Bowling For Dollars
Angel investor and Hunch CEO Chris Dixon looks at what he calls the bowling pin strategy used by user-generated content sites and points to Facebook, Foursquare and Quora as among the examples of the pins falling the right direction. He begins, “Facebook executed the bowling pin strategy brilliantly by starting at Harvard and then spreading out to other colleges and eventually the general public.” Read more.
AdReady & Partners Event
AdReady is holding its first-ever Partner Summit on September 22-23, 2010 in Seattle, Washington. Clark Kokich, Chairman of agency Razorfish, and CEO Omar Tawakol of BlueKai are scheduled to present as part of a growing agenda. Read more and register here.
