Ramaswamy Talks; Medialets' Mobile Findings

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Quizzing Ramaswamy

Ever since Google’s former ad boss, Susan Wojcicki, took the reins at YouTube, Sridhar Ramaswamy has been running the company’s sprawling ad strategy. He shares some thoughts on display, video and mobile in a truncated chat with Ad Age. Addressing native, he seems to acknowledge fragmentation of ad formats is the future. The question is: “What do we need to do to work with publishers to produce ad units that are very complementary to what they want to do on their app or site?” Read it.

Mobile Exchange Limits

A Medialets analysis finds programmatically traded mobile ads grew 500% from 2014’s first quarter to its second quarter. But! Rob Hof writes for Forbes that ”ads run by exchanges and DSPs aren’t always the most effective. Click-through rates on ads placed directly by publishers and ad networks are 0.47% and 0.6% respectively, while DSP ads only get 0.3% and exchanges just 0.11%.” And Hof notes another problem: The study ignores native. Read more.

Twitchy Data

NYT’s data visualization team tackles Twitch, finding peak daily traffic on the future Amazon property rivals some cable networks during prime time. “But compared with online video giants, Twitch is small.” The charts reveal that Twitch users are adept at both building audiences and holding attention. For in-stream video boosters (and for Amazon), that’s good news. Read more.

Cost-Plus Fuss

Dated billing models the biggest threat to progress in the ad industry, according to Skip Brand, CEO of Branding Big Data, who writes for MediaBizBloggers that “The current time and materials or cost-plus model does not work well anymore. Costs and technology investments are much higher in the new high tech platform era of media buying and selling. The technology and platforms have changed with the times as we automate, but the brands and agency procurement offices have not.” Read more.

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