Ned Brody Talks About Yahoo Ads; Nielsen Faces Ratings Competition

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

Ned Brody Speaks On Yahoo

Ad Age’s Tim Peterson gets Yahoo’s Ned Brody to talk ads in a Q&A on Ad Age. About the ups and downs of display results at his company, he says, “I believe a third of the company is new, over the last 12 months in terms of people. You’ve seen the launches of all these things from the weather app to the food and tech channels to stream ads. All of those are brand-new products. And they’ve actually resulted in the metrics for Yahoo going way up.” Read more on Ad Age. Brody also hopes to monetize video in a bigger way as the company gathers more users.

The Ratings Battle

Nielsen is facing some stiff competition from other ratings services, especially comScore, now that advertisers are looking at performance both on TV and digitally. Then there’s Rentrak, which is doling out TV ratings from set-top boxes. With shifting viewer habits comes a need for networks to accurately measure the full, albeit fragmented, audience in order to get the most ad dollars. “We welcome competition if someone wants to come and challenge us on these things,” Megan Clarken, Nielsen’s EVP of global product leadership, told The Wall Street Journal. Read on (subscription).

Ad Tech Portfolio

In her post on Medium, Nexage’s Jayne Pimentel talks about technology: “How many of us have all three of these: MacBook Air, iPad, and iPhone? We practice portfolio management to mitigate risk in other facets of our lives and businesses, but when it comes to technology and devices we do the opposite thanks to the ease of use and user experience of having one operating system, one platform, one experience. So why are we so nervous to use this for adtech(?)” Read the rest.

Marketing Automation Takes Hold

New research from Frost & Sullivan delves into the growing marketing automation industry, and finds that it is fast becoming a necessary tool for digital advertising. More than 80% of marketing automation usage is concentrated in the US, and the three largest players – Marketo, Eloqua and Silverpop – dominate almost half of the industry. “Establishing a repository of successful case studies with vertical specific use cases will help vendors accelerate the deployment of MAS globally,” advised Frost & Sullivan digital media industry analyst Hiral Jasani. Read the release.

Millions And Millions

Mobile ad network InMobi reaches 759 million monthly active users, at least that’s what it told TechCircle, putting it second behind Facebook for mobile reach. The company says the majority of its reach is to users in the US, with China and India coming in at second and third. The company also says it has been experimenting with different formats including native and interactive ads – presumably beyond your standard mobile display ad. Read more.