Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Twitter Ad Model Is Here
At long last, we can all rest easy as Twitter has announced it’s new ad-supported, revenue model. (And, I thought it was going to be all about merch.) According to Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times, “The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to link to their ads. Later, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user.” Read more. Twitter gets 50 million tweets a day. It will be interesting to see what that translates into. Does Twitter provide significant scale for segmentation or is it better for spray and pray?
Display Metrics From Google
On Monday, Google’s Ari Paparo launched the third of four posts on Google’s display advertising plans from the company’s official blog. Titled “New frontiers in display advertising planning and measurement,” Paparo intimates that new performance metrics for performance and brand awareness campaigns are in the works. He writes, “We’re developing new measurement products designed to gauge the impact of ads on brand awareness or on user interest in the product being advertised.” Read it.
State Of Search In Q1
Efficient Frontier launched its “Q1 2010 State of Search Report” into the P-R-oshpere on Tuesday. According to the report, year-over-year growth in Q1 was up a whopping 20%. In comparison to Q4, Q1 2010 dropped 8% which was less than half the previous year’s drop. Read the release. Then, download it here (sign-up required).
TagMan And Subaru
According to a company release, TagMan announced that Subaru and its agency, Carmichael Lynch, had signed a deal to use the company’s ad tag management system which tracks “activity from display campaigns and paid and natural search and to see the entire path to conversion that any user follows when taking action on its main brand
website.” GM Jon Baron told AdExchanger.com that among its current clients, certain verticals show particular strength saying, “Travel, retail and etail clients have picked up on TagMan the fastest. Other sectors include auto and CPG. Interestingly we’ve found that procurement specialist get just as excited by TagMan as marketing and IT.” Read more.
The Yahoo! Firehose
A new data feed called “The Updates Firehose” is available through Yahoo! which will surely provide optimizers and targeters something new to play with. The Yahoo! Dev blog explains, “The Updates Firehose is a web service for accessing and searching the full, real-time index of Yahoo! Updates.” So, if you were measuring sentiment about a product or service, you might take a look at this feed and optimize your campaign accordingly. Sure, I’m over-simplifying a bit at this point, but down the road, done deal. Read more. (source: @patmccarthy)
Looking At CPA And View-Throughs
Dapper CMO Paul Knegten dissects the CPA for a travel campaign in MediaPost. Knegten writes, “While retargeting is a great tactic to get lost leads back to your site, what the vendors won’t tell you is that it’s greatly biased to overemphasize conversions if evaluated on a post-impression (a/k/a view-through) attribution model.” Read more.
Make More Landing Pages
Joshua Porter, co-Founder of Performable, looks at a use case for landing page optimization for financial info aggregator, Mint. Mint wanted to address audience segments according to search terms and “ended up creating separate landing pages for specific keywords.” Read more.
Adobe Updates, So Does Creative Ad Tech
If you haven’t heard, Adobe is ringing the software licensing register with an update to its powerhouse creative suite, Adobe CS5, which includes stalwarts Flash, Photoshop and Illustrator. In response, creative ad tech companies are coming with updates such as EyeWonder, which announced an update to its Flash ad unit known as AdWonder with – potentially – a key feature for marketers: The “ability to view a list of all custom tracking metrics within an ad, including shared third-party metrics.” Read the release.
The Importance Of Founders
Fred Wilson says on his A VC blog that keeping founders around at a company can potentially be critical in driving any company’s long term success. He points to Yahoo! as an example of a company that was able to transition from “1.0 to 2.0” due to founder’s helping to drive the vision. Read more.
Entrepreneurs Are Liars?
Daniel Eisenberg of the Harvard Business Review asks “Should Entrepreneurs Lie?” and quotes an unnamed VC who says, “If a person does not know how to seriously twist the truth from time to time, he (she) cannot be an entrepreneur.” He then lists five ways or reasons that entrepreneurs lie and suggests that it may be time for a study on the topic from academia. No lie.
Reviewing Your Process
Chris Marriott, vp and managing director for Acxiom Digital, takes out his quill and produces a think piece on a key Acxiom opportunity – email marketing – on iMedia Connection. He urges what he calls “process review.” Why? “because as marketing departments evolve, the work of getting campaigns out the door often stagnates.” Read more.
YuMe And Silverlight
YuMe announced that it will integrate Microsoft’s Silverlight (the MSFT answer to Flash) into its online video ad delivery platform known as ACE. Microsoft is fighting several hard-to-win wars it would seem with Silverlight vs. Flash and Bing vs. Google search. Read more on the YuMe deal in MediaPost.
The Earnings Calendar
It’s earnings season again and that means insight, or lack thereof, on how some public companies are faring when it comes to digital advertising and technology. Among the Big 3 ad tech companies, Google reports April 15 (webcast here), Yahoo! reports April 20 (webcast here) and Microsoft reports April 22 (more here).
