Hotel Brands Take Back Their Data; User Data Ecosystem Map; Video Getting More And More Funding

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Hotels And Ad Networks

It’s another case echoing today’s tug-of-war in media with the online ad network model. Looking to cut out intermediaries such as Priceline.com, major hotels have banded together to create Roomkey.com. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Intermediaries usually retain 15% to 30% of the cost of rooms booked on their websites—money the hotel brands figure is coming out of their pockets. In addition, if the third-party sites control relationships with customers, it can limit the brands’ ability to cultivate customer loyalty.” Channel conflict! Read more. (subscription) The next question for Roomkey.com is what’s their data strategy a la a company like Sojern (AdExchanger Q&A) which has been working with the airlines to help them take back their channel.

The User Data Ecosystem Map

Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Goldman Sachs and BlueKai have banded together to produce a collection of articles on the online ad data ecosystem. BCG’s Ed Busby, who presented at last year’s BlueKai Summit, briefly discussed his thoughts on the data ecosystem in June here on AdExchanger.com. The first article of the collection published on BCG’s site includes a “User Data Ecosystem Map” which breaks down all the eco player capabilities (semantic, DMP, brand protection, etc.) according to BCG, GS and BlueKai. Read more (pay with some PII).

Eyeview Gets Funds For Video

Video ad tech company Eyeview announced on TechCrunch earlier this week that they’ve received $5.2 million in funding. Google’s Eric Schmidt invested in an early round. Read more and see an example. Last May, CEO Oren Harnevo (who is brother to Aol-acquired 5min’s Ran Harnevo) explained the differentiation of the company’s tech to AdExchanger.com in three parts: “We enable the customization of actual commercials, our technology is a post-production, server side technology, and we can scale – we must have our ads run everywhere, with no integration, and that means no flash.”

SSP: Classic Vs. New

On AdMonsters, editor Gavin Dunaway pokes at the recent Forrester Research report on Sell-Side platforms (SSPs) and dissects the SSP delineation between “classic” and “new.” Rubicon Project CEO Frank Addante chimes in, “We believe the ‘classic’ vs. ‘new’ SSP does not have a clear distinction because all the vendors provide programmatic buying. Programmatic buying means there are business rules for how inventory is allocated to bidders and what price bidders are willing to pay on what inventory. This is not new for some of the ‘classic’ SSPs.” Read more.

Retargeting December

It appears that ecommerce retargeting company TellApart experienced good results in December unless an anonymous TellApart blogger is on the loose. From the company’s blog: “We handled 9.5 billion web requests (at peak traffic, over 10,000 requests per second). Our products reached 23 million unique users (that’s about 2 million users per TellApart engineer). A full 9 out of every 100 users who saw TellApart ads, clicked — an order of magnitude better than the industry standard for display ads.” UPE = Users Per Engineer. Read more.

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Exchange Data

Digiday’s Brian Morrissey looks at some exchange data from Trust Metrics and writes, “Thanks to exchanges, U.S. advertisers are showing up on tons of non-English language websites. Trust Metrics pegs non-English sites making up about 10 percent of exchanges.” Read more. I can feel you down-and-dirty, direct response types out there… you’re thinking, “I wonder if an English-language ad stands out more on a non-English language site -and therefore performs better.” You’re so dirty.

Video Context

More video financing. Affine which offers a contextual video tech, says that it has raised $5 million. It also has brought former YuMe CEO Michael Mathieu (LinkedIn) in as its CEO. According to the release, co-founder Mike Sullivan will be moving into a new role as CTO and remain on the company’s board. Read more.

You’re Hired!