Microsoft Makes $5 Billion+ In Fiscal Q3; Auction Prices Going Up; Facebook's Preferred Marketing Developer Program

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Microsoft Makes Bank

Microsoft reported its fiscal third quarter 2012 financial results as the company had quarterly revenue of $17.41 billion with net income of $5.11 billion or 60 cents a share. That was 3 cents per share better than Wall Street expected according to ZDNet. From MSFT’s press release, “the Online Services Division reported revenue of $707 million, a 6% increase from the prior year period, and operating loss improvement of approximately $300 million.” Read more. With Windows and Office releases in the offing, not much about ads as usual. Read the earnings call transcript.

Publisher Adds Ad Network Sales Team

In the UK, broadcaster BSkyB announced that it would sell European inventory outside of the UK and Ireland through Orange Advertising Network’s sales team. Audience seekers, here is your spec from the press release: “The Sky international portfolio will enable Orange Advertising Network to offer advertisers a unique platform to target a core AB, aged +35, with a split of 57% male to 43% female audience. Additionally, Sky Sports offers advertisers an opportunity to reach a core AB audience, predominantly male and aged between 25 and 48.” Read the release. Perhaps Orange’s relationship with OpenX mean that BSkyB inventory being sold through the Orange Ad Market ad exchange.

Auction Prices Going Up

A new GroupM Next whitepaper looks at the revenue and advertising potential of Twitter and finds much better than expected revenue totals for the social platform. But, according to Adweek’s Ki Mae Heussner, the company’s self-serve ad product may end up driving up Twitter’s ad prices. Heussner writes, “Essentially, as more players enter Twitter’s still nascent auction environment without knowing what to bid, the chances that they’ll bid too much and raise the costs per follower and cost per engages increases.” So, you can’t target with your own data or cookies – you have to use Twitter’s. Thus, audience buying is constrained around silos of Twitter-segmented audience. Read more. Heussner says the point of the paper is to show the importance of a data strategy in auction environments. Get the study.

Program Premium

Adotas’ Brian LaRue reports from AdMonsters OPS conference as programmatic buying of premium inventory was a key storyline. LaRue quotes isocket CEO John Ramey, “‘It made sense that [programmatic buying] started with remnant inventory,’ he said. Selling premium programmatically is ‘the logical next step. It’s still a direct buy. Humans are still involved,’ he said — the technology simply makes the process more efficient, ideally.” Is progammatic buying here for premium? Read more.

Reviewing ATDs

Jack Marshall reviews the agency trading desk model on Digiday with Triggit’s Zach Coelius and Forrester Research’s Joanna O’Connell. Marshall paraphrases O’Connell, “The trading desk model is good in theory, but the way it’s being implemented is creating a situation in which they’re essentially internal ad networks. That approach is only going to alienate clients in the long run, she said. ‘The long-term outlook for that model doesn’t look bright. At a holding company level, I don’t think agency trading desks are a long-term solution.'” Read it.

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Not For Sale!; Johnny On The Spotify

UDID Targeting Update

Mobile app marketing platform Fiksu’s Craig Palli says the Apple UDID is alive and well, for the most part, but it’s time for developers to start planning for the end to that popular targeting parameter which helps identify audience. Palli, a vp of biz dev, identifies on his company’s blog the options for app developers and marketers. The first of four options includes: “HTML5 1st Party Cookie Tracking: This technique tracks ad performance by setting the Safari equivalent of a first party cookie. This results in accurate ad attribution with no room for ambiguity. Cookies are not device identifiers and cannot be shared with other apps.” Read about them all.

Preferred Marketing Developer

Facebook has merged two consultant groups into the Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer program. Read more on Facebook’s Developer blog. Facebook-er John Yi writes, “The Preferred Developer Consultant (PDC) program and Marketing API Program (MAP) have connected brands with developers to help them build apps on Facebook Platform, optimize social plugins, manage ad campaigns, and develop strategies for Facebook Pages. The new Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program [will] bring developers to the right clients and make it possible for any brand or company to find consultants who can work with them to build comprehensive Facebook campaigns and presences.” Thereafter, a myriad of press releases showered the ecosystem yesterday as companies announced their inclusion. BLiNQ Media CEO Dave Williams said in a release, “We have been in development with the Facebook Ads API since its inception back in mid-2009, and we’re honored to receive this recognition for our focus on the integration of social engagement ads and analytics in one platform that can sit independently on top of any page management or application development platform.”

Agency Sees Digital Benefit

With expectations of a faster growing second half of 2012, “Publicis (…) reported a 13 percent rise in first-quarter sales to 1.45 billion euros ($1.90 billion), driven by the U.S. and fast-growing emerging markets as well as digital advertising,” according to Reuters. Read more. The earnings press release noted growth of 15.6% in digital for Q1 2012. Read it.
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