Shoppable Images; Omnicom Tech

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

Shoppable Images

Online tag management company Stipple is going after the ecommerce market with its new tool, Stipple Shopping, which enables shoppers to purchase by clicking on an image without being redirected to another page or website. “We don’t want to just provide information; we believe images are a platform for commerce,” said Stipple CEO Ray Fleming. With Stipple Shopping, he added, brands will be able to “reach untapped audiences who were just looking at an image and are now buying it.” Read the release.

Omnicom Tech

Yesterday, Omnicom reported earnings of $200 million or so for Q1 2013 on revenue of $3.4 billion, showing “organic” growth of 2.9% year over year, says Pivotal’s Brian Wieser. Read the earnings press release (PDF) and the investor prez (PDF). From the earnings call transcript, Omnicom CEO addresses his company’s “media tech” strategy (owning it vs. licensing it): “Because we’re as big as we are, everyone comes knocking on our door and oftentimes ask[s] us to do 1 or 2 things: either partner with to make sure that what we believe the individual company will, in fact, turn out to be successful; or we have the ability to make an investment in it. We’ve elected to deal with quite a number of different platforms, not make a judgment as to whether or not it was a good financial investment because our primary interest is to service our clients.” Read the transcript.

Privacy Polls

With polls, it all depends on who is asking the questions. A new Digital Advertising Alliance study – the DAA supports industry self-regulation in privacy matters – finds that consumers want to be targeted! Adweek’s Katy Bachmann covers the thousand-person poll: “Consumers actually prefer targeted ads with nearly 70 percent responding that they’d like at least some ads tailored directly to their interests, compared to only 16 percent that preferred to see randomly selected ads for products and services.” Read more.

The Reprice Is Right

Kristopher Kubicki describes the shift to real-time price competition in a piece for AdAge. He notes that Amazon was among the first to start repricing products throughout the day, but others have quickly followed suit: “During the last holiday season, we at Dynamite Data detected up to a three-fold increase in the relative quantity of price changes over 2011 across major retailers.” To protect ROI going forward, ad bidding systems will have to match those quick changes. More.

Microsoft Online Services Revs Rise

Despite some continued challenges with its PC and tablet product fronts, Microsoft had a pretty solid quarter overall, beating analysts’ profit projections but missing on revenues, according to Tech Trader Daily’s Tiernan Ray. Read it. As for the Redmond Company’s Online Services division, which includes MSN, Bing and its IE browser, revenues were up 17%. Specifically, online advertising revenue grew 22%, which outgoing CFO Peter Klein said was “driven by an increase in revenue per search.” Read the earnings release.

LinkedIn Adds Smartphone Ads

LinkedIn’s overhaul of its mobile apps will, for the first time, allow the company to show ads to smartphone users, Reuters’ Alexei Oreskovic reports. More than a quarter of LinkedIn’s usage now comes from its mobile app, up from 15% one year ago, highlighting the value and the necessity of connecting marketers with consumers via phones. LinkedIn will begin showing ads within the mobile app’s news stream as part of a “small test,” LinkedIn rep Julie Inouye told Reuters. Read more.

…And More Earnings

IBM also reported its Q1 – and missed expectations. “Despite a solid start and good client demand we did not close a number of software and mainframe transactions that have moved into the second quarter,” CEO Ginni Rometty said. The business analytics, containing what used to be Omniture and Unica, grew revenue by 7%. Press release.

You’re Hired!