Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
We Advertise Therefore We Regulate
Given the recent moves by the EU, it would appear that Google is taking the stance that it needs to become more involved in regulation. The Guardian notes that Google is stepping up its relationship with the UK regulatory body, Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), by investing in ASA’s digital initiative. Matt Brittin (not making that up), Google’s UK managing director, told the Guardian: “We support the ASA’s aims of providing consumer protection and are happy to help get this up and running for the benefit of UK consumers and businesses.” Read more.
New VC Fund
Chris Dixon announced on his blog about a new venture capital fund known as “Founder Collective” (see the site) which will be funded with $40 million of seed capital and focused on regional investments in New York City and Cambridge, MA. “New York is a hotbed for online media and advertising startups,” says Dixon. The fund is run by founders, but of course, including Eric Paley, Dave Frankel , Mark Gerson (founder of Gerson Lehrman Group), Zach Klein (co-founder of Vimeo/Connected Ventures), Bill Trenchard (co-founder of LiveOps), and Micah Rosenbloom (co-founder of Brontes). Read more.
OpenX CEO On Microsoft Deal
OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan has offered more information on the recent OpenX partnership with Microsoft that likely gave some of its rabid, open source customers a scare. Cadogan argues that the new relationship will mean more customers for OpenX’s advertising technology and that’s good for everyone interested in a robust OpenX platform. Also, by integrating Microsoft’s “Content Ads into the OpenX Market, it will become another buyer competing for your inventory,” according to Cadogan. Read more.
Bringing The Data
In a release, TARGUSinfo AdAdvisor data will now become a part of the AdMeld offering as the two companies made a joint announcement focused on increasing revenue for large online publishers while enabling advertisers who bid on their inventory with better insight on users – i.e., the TARGUSinfo datasets. Read the release.
Performance Marketing Rocket
Cyberplex, a performance marketing company that tried to buy Burst Media earlier in the year, reported its third quarter earnings for 2009 yesterday – and if you’re in online performance marketing, you likely already know the result. The company said it recorded revenue of $28.2 million in Q3 which is an increase of 156% in comparison to the same quarter in the previous year and 10% sequential growth quarter-over-quarter. Read the release.
Presenting The PPT
Brent Halliburton gives his two cents… actually much more than two cents… on how to create effective PowerPoint presentations in a trilogy of blog posts on “Deliverables”, “Sales Presentations” and “Conferences.” For his “Conference” post, Halliburton suggests presentation slides should not have more than 6 words on them and should be dominated by an image that explains the point. Read it.
Agency Death Match
Is this the future for agencies? Wrigley has dropped its existing agencies (Tribal DDB, Digitas and Agency.com) in favor a future competition of ideas between new agencies Big Spaceship, Firstborn and EVB. How is an agency going to deal with this sort of opportunity? With business never secure, it would appear many creative agencies – if not media, too – will need to become even more barebones to compete. Will the agency office become entirely virtual, for example? Read more.
What’s Your Damage?
SVP of CRM at Barkley, Chris Dickey, takes an analytical approach on how businesses can come back after taking a recessionary pounding in an article on Ad Age. Dickey is a big proponent of testing new strategies but believes you need to assess the damage before you do anything. Read more.
Jeeves, Get Me My Display Ad
Brian Massey looks at service-oriented banner ads in his column on ClickZ. “The Banner Ad as Concierge” identifies different ways ad technology creative is evolving including the ad as a landing page similar to what Adgregate Markets has done with their ShopAds technology by providing the whole transaction in a banner. Read more.
More AppNexus coverage
Brian Morrissey of AdWeek interviews AppNexus president, Michael Rubenstein, here where he discusses the move toward audience-based buying and a perceived threat to mid-tier publishers’ “premium” inventory. Over on PaidContent.org, Rubenstein talks to David Kaplan and says, “I’m very bullish on ad networks and I don’t see exchanges as an evolution of that kind of service offering.” Read more from the PaidContent.org interview.
The Treasure Of Social Media
Joe Marchese, President of socialvibe, unlocks the true value of social media and the reason the social media wars are so critical to advertising: the data. Marchese writes, “There is a race going on that a lot of people don’t fully understand — but the outcome will change the way we see the Internet.” Mwa ha ha ha. Read more.
Sticky Sites
MediaPost’s Gavin O’Malley looks at who’s stick among the largest online properties – and a bit of good news for Microsoft and their online initiatives – Microsoft sites have the sticky lead as they accounted for 14.5% of time spent in September. Google is next with 9.3%. The key drivers for Microsoft and Google were MSN Messenger and YouTube, respectively. Read the article.
Post More, Drive Traffic
In a recent article in Mediaweek, MTV says that it attributes recent audience increases in its MTV audience to a decision to break down news into shorter snippets. Evidently, people want their Jay-Z in pieces. Read about it.
Botnet Autopsy
From his blog, Greg Linden points to a recent paper on botnets that discusses how one of the most favored fraud vehicles was dissected by researchers who discovered more on its diabolical inner-workings. Linden notes the paper’s findings that “data collected by this sophisticated piece of malware to be between $3M – $300M/year on the black market.” Read more. Or, see a Google Tech Talk from one of the paper’s authors.
