Microsoft Re-Orgs; Arbitrage Explained

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

Microsoft Differently

Microsoft has decided to re-organize itself, according to a press release. On ZDnet, Mary Jo Foley breaks down the news: “The new Microsoft is not going to be cleaved cleanly along devices and services lines, as some had thought and heard. The new org is a little more complicated than that.” Read about it. And read Marketing Land reporter Danny Sullivan’s take here. Sullivan offers, “Microsoft is all about engineering, whereas Google is more product-focused, it seems. And unlike Microsoft, Google has top management positions to cover its ads and social efforts, plus ‘Knowledge,’ Google’s fancy name for search.”

Explaining Arb

On iMedia Connection, Rare Crowds CEO Eric Picard takes to the keyboard with an “explainer” on arbitrage in advertising. He begins with ad networks: “Back in the day, ad networks would go to large publishers and negotiate low price remnant buys (wholesale buys) where they’d buy raw impressions for pennies on the dollar, with the rule being that the network could only resell those impressions without identifying the publisher (blind inventory resale).” Read it.

The Mobile POS

As the lines continue to blur between in-store and online retail, 61% of large merchants have reportedly deployed “mPOS” — mobile point-of-sale technologies — or have plans to do so over the next year, according to this Mobile Commerce Daily piece with statistics from research firm Yankee Group. One sporting-goods merchant, Moosejaw, has seen 70% of in-store transactions occurring through mPOS. This can only mean one thing – the data explosion is no longer limited to the couch-commerce set. It’s now reached the ranks of the store floor.

Guidelines For Mobile

Despite faster and faster growth for mobile advertising, the space is still plagued by issues of scale, attribution, transparency and targeting. Trying to keep pace with the mobile ad market’s demands, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Mobile Marketing Association and the Media Ratings Council have completed joint guidelines for mobile-Web and app-ad metrics. The mobile-Web ad standards haven’t changed much since the last comment period, but there were five basic additions to the app measurements, including a warning that “HTML5 may impact how and when ads are counted and bears close examination by auditors.” Read the release.

The FBX Case

According to an article in Adweek, Palms Casino Resort is using Quantcast’s FBX buying capabilities. Adweek’s Chris Heine reviews the results: “Compared to other display platforms during the test, the look-alike-targeting ads accounted for half of all bookings, and cost per acquisition was 33 percent lower than usual.” Read more.

Who We Are

On the Upstream Group blog, Doug Weaver says that ad-tech consolidation is coming and he gives a few tips to ad tech-ers to survive it. Weaver addresses ad-tech company sellers: “Throw out all those ‘who we are’ slides left over from your VC pitch deck. On slide one, tell the customer what you know about them. On slide two, identify a problem you think they might have. You may think you have to first introduce your company and give them context but, again, you’d be wrong.” Read more.

It’s Raining Content

Weather.com, the flagship digital outlet of The Weather Company (fka “The Weather Channel”) isn’t waiting around for the next “superstorm” to get a flurry of traffic to its site and mobile apps. The company is building out more specific content extensions, something Weather executives previewed at the upfront and NewFront presentations this past spring. “Turns out, our audience is hungry for science, nature, animals, discovery, gorgeous photography and video,” Neil Katz, VP of digital content for Weather.com, tells Digiday’s Josh Sternberg. Read the rest.

But Wait, There’s More!