Facebook Users Get Carded; 'Big Data' Acqui-hire

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

Facebook Users Get Carded

Aside from building up search and ad targeting, Facebook is also deeply focused on e-commerce. The social network introduced its Gifts shop in time for the holiday season and to keep the momentum going, it’s rolling out Facebook Cards to U.S. users. “[Facebook] could even theoretically track which ads influenced purchases, where and when they ran, what else they might have purchased, and what offline stores they visited,” observes Adweek’s Tim Peterson. Read more.

‘Big Data’ Acqui-hire

Media intelligence platform/data management platform Aggregate Knowledge (AK) announced the acquisition of 7-person firm Quantivo as AK looks to an “acqui-hire” to grow. From the release, “The addition of Quantivo’s data science and engineering team will enable accelerated platform innovation …” Read more. Quantivo had positioned itself as “big data analytics for everyone.”

Get Me Influencers

Among the audience attributes advertisers will pay a premium for are reach, affluence, outcomes, and influence, writes GroupM Chief Digital Officer Rob Norman in a piece on MediaBizBloggers. Regarding the latter, Norman says that 10 years ago, “no mechanism existed…that allowed us to buy JUST the influencers.” Now, he says, we can, by bringing “Klout-like” data with online inventory and other methods. Read more.

Audi Wins Super Bowl… And Loses

Experian runs the numbers on which advertisers stand to gain the most from their $4 million Super Bowl spots, and decides… it depends. If purchase motivation is the goal, Audi wins. According to its methodology, “There is a hypothetical 67% lift in likelihood to purchase the brand when targeting the Super Bowl audience.” But the ad value shifts if you look at the $4 million price tag relative to the number of potential buyers. In that framework, Audi falls to near the bottom. Read the blog post.

Cross-Measuring

As Wall Street earnings roll in, Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser reviews media conglomerate Viacom’s outlook and sees a rosy future after it reported fiscal Q1 results. He paraphrases from the earnings call with Viacom execs, “Management expects that emerging cross-platform measurement standards will eventually lead to monetization of multi-platform viewing that will disproportionately benefit Viacom.” Read about Viacom in the NY Post.

Viewability Future

Integral Ad Science’s (was AdSafe Media) David Hahn takes a turn at the subject of viewability in an iMedia Connection post. Given his company’s past history around ad verification, the viewpoint is well-honed as he concudes: “The future of viewability is in the industry’s move towards programmatic buying — in other words, using viewability as a predictive metric to target and optimize the media that marketers bid on in an RTB setting.” Read more.

Disrupting Video

Considering the many players in the video ad technology and services space, it’s interesting to see Google roll-out is low-end, free video ad serving in an effort to disrupt the market. And now, there’s enhanced video reporting through Google AdWords for Video. See it. It all sounds so easy according to YouTube product manager David Tattersall in a Google Inside AdWords blog post: “Want to build brand awareness? Select the Branding objective in the ‘Columns’ drop down to see how broadly your video ad was viewed. We’ll automatically show unique viewers, average view frequency and average impression frequency.”

Microsoft In Graph Search

Gannett owned BlinQ Media CEO Dave Williams returns to the Ad Age pulpit and addresses the Facebook Graph Search topic. He notes Microsoft’s involvement: “I had originally forecast that Facebook could develop a deep ad-targeting program by incorporating Microsoft search data into its ad-targeting tools. The integration is deeper than I’d thought: Facebook and Microsoft collaborated on a new search tool, enabling Facebook to use its own data to sell search ads, and Microsoft (which invested in Facebook six years ago) to enrich its search data with access to Facebook’s social data..” Read more. Microsoft’s obsession with search continues. Will they ever beat the GOOG?

Infographic Friday

Have you been looking for an infographic on a mobile app ad install checklist from Ampush? You have? No way! Way here.

But Wait. There’s More!