Taboola And Aol On Video; The King Of Ad Tech

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

Video (Ad) Rush

AOL has lots of videos and the company wants them everywhere. According to AllThingsD, video-recommendation firm — or do you say content-marketing firm? — Taboola and AOL have partnered to disseminate video content (and, ultimately, ads) on publisher sites, through a recommended-videos “matrix” at the bottom of stories. Half of the videos will be from AOL and the other half will be links that have traffic referral deals with Taboola. Ch-ching. Read more.

Diving At Mobile

Sell-side platform Rubicon Project is climbing aboard the mobile freight train, announcing on Wednesday that it has launched its own private marketplace/exchange solution for the mobile channel known as Connect. Read the release. The company said the automated direct-deals business that Connect is enabling has grown on a percentage basis recently. The announcement follows recent news from PubMatic about its mobile products and marketplace. The SSP is diving at mobile. AppNexus has positioned similarly.

Bow To The King

Brian O’Kelley is heralded as the king of ad tech, at least by Forbes. In a profile of the successful co-founder and CEO of AppNexus, Alex Konrad paints the picture of a man who is difficult, but effective. “We are talking about leaving a real legacy here, not just on a small part of the industry, but on all the Internet. We are what pays for the Internet,” O’Kelley said. Read more.

Sponsor Apps

App search engine Quixey is adding sponsored results to its platform in an effort to begin monetizing. “This is our first foray into advertising,” Tomer Kagan, Quixey’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. “But we are experimenting with everything.” The algorithm for sponsored results is similar to the one used for regular results, but it will also take into consideration things like app reviews and sentiment. The company has no plans to charge for its API. Read more.

New Programmatic Mobile Player

Gradient X, which says it’s a real-time bidding mobile ad platform, is officially out of beta, according to a press release. Read the release. TheNextWeb is reporting that Gradient X has raised $3.75 million so far, and worked with brands such as Western Union, Jeep and Microsoft. According to the company, it is “the most advanced programmatic marketing platform for mobile available today.” Read more.

Doing Programmatic

ChoiceStream’s Bill Guild offers some tips on iMediaConnection for programmatic buying, and flexibility is the name of the game when it comes to targeting. Targeting should be refined and, in cases where the audience is unknown, test pixels or polls should be used. Guild writes, “As with all aspects of technically driven advertising, targeting is something that works best in a real partnership. Trust what you know, trust your partners and work together.” Kum-bay-yah. Read more.

FTC Gets Search

The FTC has updated its guidelines for ad disclosure in search results, according to ClickZ. Among the most notable differences are social searching, such as Facebook’s Graph search, and audio results from Apple’s Siri product. In all cases there must be a clear distinction that a search result was paid for. The FTC also pointed out that traditional search engines that have relied on shading to differentiate results must continue to do so and to make sure it’s clearly visible on all monitors and screen sizes. Read more.

Banner Bad. Native Good?

Banner ads are bad, but native advertising isn’t always much better, according to Traction CEO Adam Kleinberg. In a column for Ad Age, Kleinberg writes, “Native advertising has been heralded as the latest white knight of digital advertising, here to save us from ineffectual banners. But this brings up a new question: Who is holding native advertisers accountable for quality?” Among the major problems with native advertising are relevancy and disclosure, he says. Read more.

TV Style Targeting

Should video advertising be modeled after the traditional TV standard? Google thinks so, and it’s launched a new tool called Affinity Segments, which allows brands to target ads on YouTube based on interests and demographics. According to a blog post, Mazda Canada tested the new tool and experienced “overwhelming success.” Read more.

Email Providers Retargeting

Like Responsys and others, email services provider StrongMail announced yesterday that it’s adding display-advertising capabilities to its email services — with the help of an unnamed partner, confirms a company spokesperson. The release claims, “StrongMail also makes it easy to insert email display retargeting into any cross-channel campaign, whether triggered, batch or a multistep lifecycle marketing program.” Read more.

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