More Facebook Exchange Love; Demandbase Conquests Tech

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

FBX Results (Continued)

In a lengthy Q&A with Inside Facebook’s Brittany Darwell, Facebook measurement guy Sean Bruich talks ads. Facebook Exchange (FBX) is one of many subjects as he comments, “(Direct-response) advertising on Facebook is a lot like DR advertising in the rest of online. We’ve seen this with FBX. People thought, ‘no way Facebook works as a direct response channel, people aren’t looking for anything while they’re there.’ That was totally the meme, and we launched FBX and turns out it works great.” Read more. Adobe apparently agrees and said yesterday in a blog post that FBX conversion rates were significantly above the average for the eight most popular supply sources (including FBX): “After only one month in beta, FBX delivered a conversion rate (leads/clicks) that is approximately 70% higher, and a cost per lead that is over 50% lower, than the average for all eight ad supply sources.” But it was only the second best performing source. Read more.

Direct to Client

Are agencies in jeopardy? Or are they – as Rishad Tobaccowala says – infinitely adaptable cockroaches that will always find a niche? In a piece taking the former point of view, Digiday offers a litany of agency painpoints including the rising tendency of marketers to bring marketing functions in-house. Social and programmatic media are both mentioned. Jack Daniels global marketing director Carmen D’Ascendis says, “I don’t believe you have to be a digital native to get digital. How does Fisher Price figure out toys? They don’t have kids doing their marketing, that’s for sure.” More.

Conquest Now

Demandbase cuts right to the chase with a new feature set for its targeting platform – “Come target your competitor’s audience according to its tech attributes.” From the release: “For example, a brand that sells technology complementary to Salesforce.com’s CRM software can now run a campaign targeting ads only to ‘Fortune 1000 companies that use Salesforce CRM.’” Read it. Not an ad network -an attribute network.

‘We’ve Been Approached By Yahoo”

PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel discusses his sell-side platform in an interview on Bloomberg and admits Yahoo has discussed possibly acquiring Pubmatic. See it. Goel strikes all the right notes – even including “art & science” in his narrative. PubMatic also released some data about its platform yesterday including, “By Q4 2012, Real-Time Bidding (RTB) had come to represent nearly 31% of all paid impressions — nearly doubling its share year-over-year — and 48% of all revenue.” Read it all.

Search And Display, Together At Last

Perhaps it’s the Valentine’s Day vibe in the air, but Bill Dinan, president of analytics provider Telmetrics, says that mobile has brought display and search closer together. Writing on MarketingLand, Dinan says that display was driven into search’s arms because mobile marketing demands the key tenets of successful search ads, such as “establishing secondary action strategies” to drive user engagement and local targeting. “These components will help mobile display become a true source of mobile monetization — and, when paired with mobile search, the sky will then be the limit for monetizing the overall mobile ad industry,” Dinan contends. Read more.

Networks’ Low Quality Reach

Aggregate Knowledge, which claims to be a media intelligence versus a data management platform, reveals in a release that over $100 million was spent through its systems in 2012’s Q4. Also, its Global Media Intelligence report says the company looked at 35 billion impressions in Q4, it found that “networks and exchanges perform 35 to 69 percent below the indexed average in reaching high-quality users that can consistently be marketed to.” When looking at which channels are seen most in the upper part of the attribution funnel, social and portal influences are the most undervalued. Read the release.

Counting Ads

An average of 3 in 10 ads are never rendered in-view says new comScore research – comScore’s 2011 AdXpose purchase is likely defining the numbers. “Through the continued adoption of a viewable impressions standard, the market is beginning to embrace a digital scarcity model that better aligns monetization with the value created by the inventory,” comScore says in its Digital Future in Focus. Download it or just read the release.

Curious Sales

In a post on his company’s blog, Upstream Group’s Doug Weaver dares to unearth “Curious George” from the depths of his readers’ childhood memories. [primal scream here] Counseling the sales leader, he writes, “Focus (…) on fostering one simple quality within your sales team: curiosity. While almost no one can ‘present a customer into buying,’ virtually everyone can improve sales outcomes through genuine curiosity.” It is written.

Publicis Earnings

You’re Hired!