MediaMath Gets Akamai’s Ads; AdRoll's Retargeting Velocity

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

MediaMath Gets Akamai’s Ads

Akamai has sold its ad business, which began with its Acerno purchase in 2008, to MediaMath. The deal provides access to Akamai’s pixel free technology as the release explains, “MediaMath’s clients will gain access to more data for audience (…). Advertisers currently on the Akamai Platform will not have to integrate other pixels for audience and media performance tracking when using MediaMath’s TerminalOne [platform].” Read the release. Ad Age’s Jason Del Rey says the deal was signficantly less that the $95 million Acerno was bought for. Read more. Akamai gets a seat near, but not on, the MediaMath board.

Adding Ads To Graph Search

On Search Engine Watch, Acquisio co-Founder Marc Poirier references a little-discussed Bing blog post and goes over the possibilities of Microsoft Bing paid search ads coming to Facebook. “The ability to use a hybrid of information on searchers from Facebook and Bing combined would mean, perhaps, the most powerful targeting to date. Whether they are anywhere close to enabling something like this remains to be seen, but it would certainly be a game-changer for both advertising networks.” Read it.

Managing For Yield

On the Scout Analytics blog, Scout’s Matt Shanahan looks at revenue management in a subscription world. “Revenue management is common practice in the distribution-centric Transaction Economy. The goal is to maximize revenue and profits by pricing products to match customer demand. Revenue management is pervasive in such industries as airlines, hotel rooms, surgery, advertising, retail, media and rental cars. For example…” Read more.

Addressable? App-solutely

Russian search giant Yandex has created a new “experimental” app called Wonder located in your nearest Apple iTunes store. It recommends stuff using hooks into Facebook, Twitter and the like. Me thinks it could be a nice little grab for creating addressable ad opportunities for Yandex in mobile, too. Read the blog post.

Retargeting Velocity

AdRoll says it tripled revenue and staff in 2012, helped along by its involvement in the Facebook Exchange. Since the launch of FBX, the retargeter has managed “over a thousand retargeting campaigns on FBX for 700+ customers.” It’s now trying to keep the FBX ball rolling with a dynamic ad product, LiquidAds on FBX. AdRoll now employs 120. Press release. And, more in PaidContent.

Vox Goes Video Native

Vox Media, the publisher of online-only sports and techn news sites like SB Nation and The Verge, has shrugged off programmatic (at least for now), and instead, intended to focus on building up its own in-house marketing apparatus. Adweek’s Charlie Warzel focuses on Vox Studios’ pre-roll ads on behalf of Ford. “All those assets that enable us to be in the content business—our recipe for telling stories—we’re seeing that the brands we work with want those same capabilities,” says Vox CEO Jim Bankoff. “They’re turning to us increasingly and asking for it. So the same tools we use for our audience, we want to give to the brands.” Read more.

Big Banner’s Bust

AOL introduced its high-def, interactive Project Devil “premium brand” ad units over two years ago, and even at this late date in the “big banner’s” existence, Digiday’s Josh Sternberg says he’s having trouble finding them. Neither can Jason Krebs, the former chief media officer at Tremor Video, who says, “I look at media and a lot of sites, and I don’t see them. Ever.” Sanjay Jain, the CTO of AOL’s Pictela, creator of the Devil/Portrait units, says it’s tough to find marketers who can fill the 300×1050-pixel banners, so give it time. Separately, one anonymous source told Sternberg that AOL’s frequency caps are to blame for the lack of visibility of the large ads. Read more.

Seller Beware

The legions of digital brokers (vendors, sites, networks, etc) looking for ways to “overcome objections” by agency buyers may be needlessly spinning their wheels, says Doug Weaver in a post on The Drift. “The media agency with whom they’re all pleading their cases is probably between 30 and 40 percent understaffed. And clients are putting pressure on them to consolidate the number of vendors — to shrink the field of consideration, not expand it.” The truth can be painful, Weaver writes, but tackle it head on. If you’ve got a snowball’s chance, wouldn’t you rather know that going in? Read more.

Earnings