LinkedIn Acquires Slideshare, Expands B2B Audience; RMX Prepping For Pubs?; Rogue Sites Beware

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Linking-In Presentations

Yesterday, LinkedIn announced the acquisition of SlideShare, a popular, shareable, slide presentation site for nearly $120 million. Linkedin CEO Jeff Weiner says in a release, “These presentations also enable professionals to discover new connections and gain the insights they need to become more productive and successful in their careers, aligning perfectly with LinkedIn’s mission.” That sounds nice. And they also get to extend their B2B audience network into a site with 29 million monthly uniques. And that’s good for B2B audience segments which have inherently limited scale. Read about it. VerticalNet veterans, eat your heart out.

RMX Preps For Pubs?

On its company blog, Right Media Exchange trumpets new seller controls as it seeks to boost supply: “Specifically, we’ve enhanced back-end functions and configurations to make it easier for publishers to onboard real-time bidded inventory onto their sites.” So is Yahoo! ready to partner with more publishers for Right Media a la the Microsoft and Aol deal? Or is the exchange flexing its muscles in preparation for a sale? Read more. And, read more about the big PR push for RMX from Horn Group.

More Showrooming

A new study from Gfk says that more mobile shoppers are visiting the brick-and-mortar in an effort to see a product before they buy it online – a.k.a. “showrooming,” From the study, “Among consumers with a smartphone or tablet, 50% used a mobile device to compare prices while shopping, 44% looked for a coupon, 33% “liked” a retailer on Facebook, and 17% bought a product using an app.” Read about it.

Real-Time M&A

Cisco Systems decided it needs to better analyze real-time streaming data so it has struck a deal to buy Truviso. From the release: “Truviso’s software analytics further strengthens Cisco’s network management platform, Cisco Prime, with the core technology to gather and analyze streaming data.” Read more. You could say there’s nothing ad-related here… but in fact, we’re talking about the efficient transfer of media. Plumbing! eWeek’s Jeffrey Burt does his own real-time analysis, “Cisco executives for more than a year have been talking about the growing amount of traffic that will be flooding networks worldwide (…). A year ago, Cisco officials said that by 2015, there will be almost 15 billion network-connected devices in the world, with global Internet traffic quadrupling to 966 exabytes per year.” Read it.

The Dish Of Display

On iMedia, the LUMA Partners’ display ecosystem slide gets another competitor. ValueClick MediaPlex’s David Yovanno explains, “The ‘Dish on Display’ identifies the services and solutions marketers need to fully capitalize on display. Everything gets categorized into easy-to-understand categories.” See them now.

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Not For Sale!; Johnny On The Spotify

Rogue Sites

Do you know a rogue site? What is a rogue site, anyway? For the Association of National Advertisers and the agency organization the 4A’s a rogue site is one that has content that infringes on intellectual property. They want marketers to make sure their ads don’t appear on the “rogues” and provide them best practices. Read about it.

Adding Video To Contextual

Vibrant Media has added video ad units to their in-text text links. Calling it “Lightbox,” the contextual solution gets Vibrant more into the high CPM world of video advertising. Read about it.

Attribution Upgrade

In the wake of the “viewable impression” wave, Dentsu’s IgnitionOne ad platform has updated its own attribution management capabilities. According to the release, this update to the platform “will allow marketers to set up a secondary attribution profile that runs side-by-side with the primary profile that their media is being optimized against. This secondary profile will offer insights on how an alternate attribution profile would change how different channels are being credited and how that would affect optimization.” Read it.

More On ValueClick

Citi’s Mark Mahaney provides his take on ValueClick’s recent earnings and offers some thoughts on the “Positive” side: “An in-lineish to modest bottom line beat quarter, ‘tho partially benefited by a lower tax rate; 2) Greystripe Mobile business integrated into Valueclick Media as Mobile Revenue expected to double in contribution to roughly $40MM in 2012…” and he offers some “Negatives”: “1) Unchanged 2012 guidance coupled with a top-line miss Q1 and lower Q2 outlook implies a more 2nd half loaded 2012. This increases VCLK’s operational risk profile, especially as the company laps acquisitions; 2) Moderate softness in the Technology segment, only growing 7% Y/Y, despite easier comps..” Rating the company a “Neutral” as he notes “key risks”: “1) Concern that VCLK’s Media segment faces increased competition from Display Ad & Social Networks; 2) VLCK faces integration risk re: recent acquisitions; and 3) Comparison Shopping biz faces greater challenges as Google moves down the purchase funnel. On the other hand, valuation is reasonable and company has generally had a very solid execution track record.”

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