Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Blodget, Calacanis Take On ComScore
Henry Blodget and Jason Calacanis are on a war path! In a diatribe he published in his newsletter and then personal blog, entrepreneur Jason Calacanis is calling for a boycott of ComScore saying the audience measurement firm is a “big bully.” He says, “I’m asking startup companies to not support their new and widely-reported on ‘$10,000 to get your stats correct’ extortion ring.” Read more. Meanwhile, Silicon Alley Insider publisher Henry Blodget says, “Comscore is effectively waving the threat of relatively poor traffic metrics in the face of every company that chooses not to pay. We see that as blackmail.” Read more. The ComScore marketing team was working the weekend as CMO Linda Abraham came back with a lengthy response on the ComScore blog and added what looks to be a veiled shot at Quantcast, “we have observed instances where some Web sites were surprised and dismayed to discover that the ‘free’ services they were using were, in fact, off selling their audience cookies on the online ad exchanges without their knowledge.” Read it. What will Monday hold? Only time will tell!
Intel Working On Its Attribution
Ad Age talks to Nancy Bhagat, Intel VP of sales and marketing, who has developed a point system to assist with its attribution modeling when trying to understand return-on-ad-spend. From Ad Age: “The system, developed with its media agency, OMD, assigns a pre-determined number of points for every action consumers do online with Intel.” Bhagat intimates they’re getting a 10% cost savings from the “Value Point System.” Read it.
Big Data, Big Infrastructure
Facebook has finally said “uncle” to its data management requirements and is building its own data warehousing facility in Prineville, Oregon, says VP Jonathan Heiliger on The Facebook blog. Now with more than 350 million people worldwide and our service and business continuing to grow, we must constantly scale our technical infrastructure to meet the demand and deliver you a fast, reliable experience” – So, we’re building in Prineville!! Woohoo! Read it.
They’re data mining over on the OK Cupid blog as “Christian” of OK Cupid says the team “cataloged over 7,000 photographs from profiles on OkCupid.com and correlated it with the number of responses that each profile receives. Lots of fun findings – some you’ll expect. Some you won’t. It’s an interesting test of how images can effect engagement rates.
Read more.
Baker Back With RTB
DataXu CEO Mike Baker is back with more RTB gospel in a ClickZ piece called, “How to Power Your 2010 Media Plan with Real-Time Bidding.” In the article, Baker says that planners can get their feet wet with RTB and “lower funnel” opportunities such as retargeting through ad exchanges. Brand awareness marketers are included in the discussion, too, as Baker talks RTB and the benefits of a demand-side platform which can buy across multiple supply sources. Read about it.
Apple Is An Ad Network
The Hill Holliday media and creative teams provide viewpoints on the recent acquisition of Quattro Wireless, a mobile ad network, by Apple. HH’s Brian Yoder says, “If the ad network is intended to monetize not only the traditional third-party content but also the iPhone device itself, where is Apple going to put a dedicated ad space on the tiny iPhone screen?” And then he answers the question here.
500 Billion And Counting
The Rubicon Project announced 500 billion ads “optimized” through its technology as of the evenign of January 21st. Need more, the Rubicon Project blogger writes, “To give you a sense of scale, hitting our 500 billionth ad impression means that we are optimizing about 1.6 billion ads a day, breaking down to about 18,519 ads per second.” Read still more.
Going Digital At The Agency
José Villa, president of Sensis, an ad agency, looks at the multi-cultural agency model on Ad Age. Given the move to a digital world, he wonders whether these agencies that are accustomed to providing traditional services be able to keep up with digitally-inclined advertisers saying, “Will the need be met by some of the established full-service multicultural agencies [in the future] or new digital shops?” Read it.
Spending On Lawmakers
Don’t worry. The IAB is doing its share in an effort to influence lawmakers. Kate Kaye writes on ClickZ that the industry org has a little-known political action committee that “gave thousands of dollars to key U.S. lawmakers last year and is sitting on thousands more it could use to influence them in the future.” Washington D.C. baby! Read about it.
The Cloud Exchange
Now there are “cloud exchanges” apparently. CNET’s Gordon Haff says that cloud providers would put their unused infrastructure up for sales in a spot market, auction environment just like any exchange. But, he doesn’t see this working out as limitations will be presented by a lack of interoperability, security issues and the fact that “Cloud computing isn’t really a commodity the way power from the grid is.” Read about it.
The Young And The Newspaper
Not only are are young people not reading old school newsprint these days, they’re less inclined to read them online now, too. That’s what a new survey from IBM’s Media and Entertainment group says which notes a decline of 10% from 2008 to 2009. The good news is that people over 55 are reading newspapers online more. Perhaps the newspaper industry should consider funding the geriatrics care industry. Read more from Poynter Online.
More Mobile Ad Net Chatter
Mobile Entertainment News says that Ubiyoo has put together its “blind” and “premium” blind mobile ad networks to create a Ubiyoo Marketplace. The company claims it has already served 1 billion impressions to users in Europe, North and South America, Australia, Asia and South Africa. Read more.
What’s A Business Model?
Mark Johnson attempts to redefine what “business model” means on Harvard Business Review’s Conversation blog. It’s not just about makin’ money, says Johnson, “It also needs to include some information about why a customer would ever want to give the company any money.” Read more.
