Tumblr Getting Into Ads; Twitter's Mobile Mojo

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Tumbling Into Ads

AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes reports that Tumblr, whose CEO has said not-nice things about advertising, has hired an ad man. Lee Brown, who hails from Groupon, will help sell big brands on native ad experiences. “Tumblr has experimented with brands like Adidas and Coke to create their own Tumblr blogs that are featured within the user dashboard — similar to how Twitter distributes advertising.” Read it.

Adobe’s Social Granularity

Several months after Adobe acquired media buying services and platform company Efficient Frontier (and AdParlor, the Facebook ad optimizer it arrived with), the company is ready to unveil its full slate of ad analytics for earned media. Introducing Adobe Social, VP of Marketing Aseem Chandra tells TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha, “[Marketers] have point solutions that solve specific problems, but they’re not really connecting you back to the business issues.” Adobe Social promises to track every campaign and determine whether the blog mentions, commenting and other social interactions resulted in product orders and revenue. Read the release.

Twitter’s Mobile Mojo

In a look at the mobile revenues of some big ad sellers, eMarketer homes in on the monetization race between Twitter and Facebook. Twitter wins, for now. “As users increasingly access Twitter via mobile devices, eMarketer believes that the tight integration between the company’s ad products—particularly Promoted Tweets—and core user experience has made the subsequent shift toward displaying mobile advertisements relatively simple.” Next year Facebook’s mobile ad revenue will reach $387 million — that’s $113 million more than Twitter’s. Both pale in comparison to Google. Ogle the charts.

The Algo Rules

Julia Angwin and Dana Mattioli look at the importance of the algorithm in pricing of today’s consumer goods in The Wall Street Journal. Ecommerce platform provider Mercent is profiled: “[Mercent] changes the price of two million products an hour. Mercent says it makes price decision based on a variety of factors such as competitors’ prices, competitors’ shipping prices, manufacturer price restrictions and seasonal sales.” Everything is becoming biddable. Read it (subscription).

Sellers And Q4

Upstream Group’s Doug Weaver returns from his summer meditations with thoughts on Q4 and strategy for the itchy, twitchy digital seller. Weaver advises, “Shorten Your Stroke. Volume is not your friend right now. Rather than getting a lot of plates spinning all at once, make a conscious decision about which 4 or 5 accounts offer the biggest gettable yield.” Read more from the maestro.

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Extending The Pub Audience

Rocket Fuel announced a new reach extension service for publishers who want to sell audice that scales beyond what they can offer on their own owned-and-operated properties. TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha reports, “There are other audience extension services out there, but [VP of Business Development Paul] Wenz says they’re ‘complicated and fall short.’ Rocket Fuel claims to offer a full-service solution, with tools like RFP (request for proposal) response, sales training, and marketing materials…” Read more.

Not Enough Video Inventory

On MediaPost, OneScreen’s Biff Burns sees a dearth of video inventory on political news websites this election season, “Voting audiences are watching online and advertising dollars are waiting in the wings; there are just not enough video streams at these publisher sites to match to political campaigns. He offers a few solutions. Read it.

Prognostication

An investment column writer on Forbes claims the acquisition of ValueClick by Facebook is a good idea. Clem Chambers writes, “ValueClick demonstrably can do advertising. They monetise a broad range of what most people would class as ‘low quality’ inventory, the kind of inventory Facebook has. Facebook thinks it is ‘high quality,’ but the advertising jury who might buy it is still out.” That would be an “interesting” merger of cultures. Read it.

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