Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
That Google Looks Lovely On You
Google announced a do-it-yourself, eCommerce website platform called Boutiques.com. The New York Times’ Cathy Horyn writes, “In a deliberate collision between nerds and fashion mavens, Google has created a new e-commerce site that significantly improves how fashion is presented and sold online.” Ker-pow! Even the algos make an appearance as Horyn explains the unique matching capabilities of the platform: “In simple terms, what the style experts did was come up with about 500 words for color, shape and pattern – robin’s egg blue, for instance, and gingham — and then the engineers trained the algorithm to know what each was.” The Google-ship expands! By the way, when is Google going to buy Ebay? Finally, Ghostery shows no pixels being fired on the Boutiques.com home page or the subsequent store home pages.. but, once you get to the branded store URLs, the pixels are present presumably for retargeting purposes and analytics. Google may not need pixels..it’s on their servers. This is great learning about the ecommerce space for them at the very least.
Yahoo!’s Bartz On Mergers And Moms
Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz had “no comment” on recent reports of an Aol and Yahoo! merger or private equity play at the recent Web 2.0 Summit. But, according to Mediaweek’s Mike Shields, “Bartz also hinted that Yahoo may be looking to make an acquisition in the mom/parenting space to better cater to advertisers such a Procter & Gamble (the company has been rumored to be kicking the tires on Café Mom).” -essentially, advertisers looking for their own publishing property. This theme continues to reverberate. Read more.
Ad Revs And Value Of Display
The IAB and PriceWaterhouse Coopers have announced their latest figures for Q3 and the news is good as the press release’s title exclaims, “$6.4 Billion in Q3 2010 Sets New Record for Internet Advertising Revenues.” Read more. PaidContent’s David Kaplan looks at the numbers and observes, “There was a lot of hand-wringing about the value of display advertising during the last two years of the recession. But it mainly showed that turning difficult times, branding campaign dollars are pulled back as marketers concentrate more on advertising that will yield direct sales. So it would seem that the recession merely interrupted the momentum of ad dollars from traditional to online. As long as the economy doesn’t worsen, those trends will almost certainly continue.” Read more.
Where Is The New Digital Agency Talent?
Edward Boches shares his recent observations regarding presentations he saw from up-and-coming digital creative stars at the Boulder Digital Works competition, which has been partially funded by MDC partners -owners of the Crispin, Porter + Bogusky creative shop. Boches writes, “When they were done, we asked the group of 20 how many wanted to go into advertising or work in an agency when they finished their stint at BDW. Answer? Not many. Virtually every one of them wanted to start their own company so that they could build something and reap the rewards. Repeat. They want to build something and reap the financial rewards.” Reap more here.
New CEO At QuadrantONE
QuadrantONE, which aggregates “ad inventory on more than 500 premium local news and information sites across the nation’s top markets” according to a release, said that it has hired Mario Diez as its CEO. Diez was the former vp of Aperture Sales at Datran Media. Read the release.
Visualizing Investment
Angel investor Jerry Neumann takes a boatload of investment data from TechCrunch’s Crunchbase and turns it into his very own co-investor infographic for the digital technology space. He writes, “To make it manageable, I took out any investors with fewer than five investments. Ran it through Fruchterman-Reingold. Colored venture firms red, people green and others (corporates, incubators) blue. Made node size proportional to number of investments.” Yes, Fruchterman-Reingold. See it now!
The Data-Driven Melody
On the company blog, [x+1]’s Eric Simon wrote a short thought piece earlier this week as he prepared to attend a data-driven marketing event in Minneapolis. Simon extols the virtues of data and music, “Being a really smart marketer, the client knows that the customer experience does not start and end at the doors of their website. The data is portable, and so the relevancy of the message can be managed and delivered across the digital landscape. This gets to your harmony.” Yeah, baby. Makin’ music.
Google Extending Data Grab To Music?
Much was made earlier in the year about Google entering the online games space as time spent and data generated by users provides significant opportunity for ad targeting among other things. But, Google has yet to enter the music space – less of a data opportunity perhaps? (Maybe Boutiques.com will be the first step.) According to All Things D’s Peter Kafka, on the Warner Music earnings call CEO Edgar “Bronfman said he’s hoping that Google and other services “‘will come online in calendar 2011,’ and that they’ll create ‘very significant opportunity both for consumers and the music industry.'” Keep hoping, Edgar – as Kafka notes digital is only 25% of revenues for the predominantly, offline music publishing house. Read more.
More Google, I Say!
The Inside AdWords blog announced that in addition to Image Search ads that include the ability to embed a thumbnail (presumably of a product) next to text in an ad, there are now – wait for it – graphical “rich media” leaderboards (728×90). Read about “the trial.”
Froth (In Ad Tech?)
On his blog, Foundry Group’s Brad Feld aggregates recent seed money investor fears that they all are in the middle of major froth and the bubble is about to burst. (Metaphors! Don’t you love them?) Feld thinks most startups being funded in the seed stage these days will go out of business and writes, “The optimist would have a different view (e.g. that they would be quickly acquired or they would never need additional capital), but anyone that has been investing for a while knows this isn’t the likely outcome for any but a small number of these companies.” Read his post.
ROV Vs. ROI
Speaking to the digital selling crew, Upstream Group’s Doug Weaver offers four ways that “sellers can return value to their clients every day.” Making the list is predictability. Weaver explains, “The dirty little secret of the web is that stuff breaks every day, and the whole system is somewhat out of control. You can return value by bringing a predictably excellent level of service to your customers (…). In our world, ‘no surprises’ is an incredible luxury.” Be predictable and more.
Supah-stah
iMedia Connection has released its annual list of superstar digital types and this year it includes “the data-driven” such as – at #7 Fox Interactive Media’s Liberty Carras, at #14 kbs+p (Varick Media) Chief Digital Media Officer Darren Herman, and at #23 Invite Media’s CEO Nat Turner. See the complete list.
