Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Mobile Ad Exchange Sells Itself
Mobile remains red hot as mobile ad exchange Mobclix (AdExchanger.com Q&A) has sold itself to a UK mobile marketing agency Velti for an estimated at $50 million by TechCrunch’s MG Siegler who writes, “Velti, which is a public company on the London Stock Exchange, offers a SaaS technology platform that allows agencies and brands to plan, manage, and optimize mobile advertising and marketing campaigns in real time.” Mobclix was originally founded in 2008 and has more than 25 employees and contractors according to the release.Read it. According to their 2009, year-end financial statement, in addition to nearly $90 million in 2009 revenues, Velti execs include “former Ogilvy chief Mike Walsh, Dakota Sullivan, (…) VP of Global Marketing from BlueLithium, ex-DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt and Jack Plating joins Velti as a member of the company’s Advisory Board. He most recently served as EVP and COO of Verizon Wireless.”
The Aol Advertising Start-up
Scott Dance writes in a feature article on Portfolio.com that Aol ad strategy is going back to its Advertising.com start-up roots to find success. Later in the piece, ad.com founder Scott Ferber (who now runs TidalTV) says the company’s new focus on display is smart but more will be needed. He tells Portfolio.com, “From a business perspective, it’s appropriate, meaning they have to invest because the industry is moving fast. They can’t just stand there where they are and expect everything to be fine. But you’ve got to innovate on top of innovation. All the easy things have been done.” Read more.
Wolff Taking Over AdWeek
PaidContent’s David Kaplan write that the ad trade publication world may be getting a new exec as, according to Kaplan, “Several more sources have confirmed that Michael Wolff will be joining E5 Global Media as the editorial director of the Adweek Group of magazines.” Wolff is a Vanity Fair columnist, glory-days digital entrepreneur who wrote the book Burn Rate among others, and sits on the board of news aggregation site Newser (which he started). Read more.
TechCrunch reports that yet another executive (Jeff Kinder, the svp of media products and solutions) is leaving the Yahoo! building and a re-org of the exec ranks may be announced as early as Tuesday at Yahoo! TC adds that this may be a signal regarding a new regime at Yahoo! led by Chief Product Officer Blake Irving: “Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving may be the big winner of this re-org, as he’s been seen as the rising star in the company. Word is that he’ll be bringing some of his old Microsoft chums in to join him in high-up positions at this new-look Yahoo.” Read more.
Taking A Look At Leakage
Steve Smith, an OMMA exec and Digital Media Editor at minOnline, writes about BrightTag and its solution to the “leakage” of publisher data in online ads. Smith quotes BrightTag’s Marc Kiven about the core issue in “leakage”: “The ad nets found it as a way to piggy-back other ad networks onto a site through (…) campaigns to resell inventory through real-time bidding. You now have a tremendous number of parties shoved into the creative via the ad networks or someone managing campaigns as a way to target users and build audience. That definitely is an area of leakage for site owners and it is a critical concern for the industry.” Read more.
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iAd Platform Controlling Creative
The Business Insider’s Dan Frommer says that his sources are telling him Adidas pulled it’s $10 million+ mobile advertising campaign across the iAd network when their third attempt at offering a creative concept for the campaign was turned down by Apple. Apple has previously been known to assume the role of the creative agency for iAd as it tries to sync advertiser creative with its own platform goals around creative and messaging. Read more. Maybe it’s working – Apple is gaining market share against Microsoft and Google says MocoNews.
HP Acquiring Software? Ad Tech?
The Financial Times looks at HP’s hiring of Leo Apotheker, a former SAP CEO, and writes, “The choice of a software veteran could foretell more aggressive moves by HP both into that higher-margin sector and overseas. Mr Apotheker, 57, told the Financial Times that software would be a high priority and that he saw no reason to alter HP’s aggressive acquisition strategy, which has continued since Mr Hurd’s departure.” Read more.
Lijit Gets Creative
John Winsor, CEO of Victors & Spoils (V+S), a company which positions itself as “the world’s first” creative ad agency built on crowdsourcing was recently appointed to custom search and ad network Lijit’s (AdExchanger.com Q&A) board of directors. Both V+S and Lijit are headquartered in Boulder, Colorado’s vibrant advertising and technology community. Winsor was an executive at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky prior to starting his current business. Read the release.
Bring Back Facebook Tracking
From his personal blog, MediaMath’s Mark Mannino makes his case for why Facebook should NOT have removed off-site conversion tracking (setting a pixel off of Facebook) from its advertising platform. He writes, “With conversion tracking in Facebook, we actually had the opportunity to learn if this social stuff really worked. Some of the comments I’ve seen say that since we can track click-based conversions from Facebook using site-based web analytics, that it was redundant in Facebook. But this misses the point. First, it’s not just the click, especially in social(!), it is consumers’ interacting with your brand and building a relationship. Second, by measuring on the site you lose all the granular data about what actually happened on Facebook and in the social graph.” Read more.
More Facebook Ad Network Stuff
As the Facebook ad network looms, the industry scuttlebutt continues. Adotas’ Gavin Dunaway notes recent Google efforts to combat the social giant’s ad network: “Google knows it’s coming, part of the reason it has been on an acquisition spree (23 in 2010) of mostly companies that will socialize its core offerings. That’s pretty much admitting the company has to play catchup in collecting data that can be hypertargeted for advertising like Facebook’s.” Read more.
Google Instant And Brand Dollars
Efficient Frontier’s Siddarth Shah plays around with Google search and its new “instant” feature which predicts what you’re going to put in the search box before you finishing typing. His findings are enlightening, to say the least. Shah writes, “If we are to accept Google’s statement about the logic behind Google Instant’s suggestions, most of us are searching for brands all the time.” Read more
The Internet Brands Deal
On his Bronte Media blog, Niki Scevak takes a look at the recent purchase of vertical site network Internet Brands by private equity firm Hellman and Friedman which he says will be using “$190m in debt financing ($165m of which is committed) to acquire Internet Brands. Historically low interest rates means the firm only needs to pay 6.25-7% interest on the loans, which is an absolute bargain…” Read more of his eye-opening findings.
Enabling Consumers For Audience Buying
Turn CTO Xuhui Shao takes his monthly column on ClickZ to the confluence of consumer and audience buying: “… perhaps yet another evolution on this theme will put consumers directly in the control seat of smart marketing and advertising tools. Stanford University’s cryptology group is experimenting with a browser plug-in that is already moving in that direction – albeit for a different motivation.” Read more. And, see the Stanford plug-in info.
P&G Guy To Ponder Engagement
Ted McConnell, who was the former gm of interactive marketing at Procter & Gamble is joining the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) in the newly-created post of evp of Digital. ARF CEO Bob Barocci tells Ad Age that McConnell is “a cornerstone of the industry’s unfinished effort to create an engagement metric.” Another online GRP idea? Read more.
