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Lotame’s New Target
Demographic ad targeter Lotame is starting a new business that involves providing ad agencies and brands with greater insight on how their online ad campaigns are performing. Given the industry’s insatiable thirst for analytics the creation of the Lotame Media Group is a good bet. But there’s only so much gambling an established company like Lotame can afford in this rapidly evolving ad economy. Lotame Sales VP Bryan Seltzer, who will head the new group, makes sure to drive the point home to Mediapost’s Laurie Sullivan that the company’s main job of collecting consumers’ social media data and then creating profiles to deliver media campaigns will not change. Read more.
Get A Sponsor Or Die
Targeting is considered the holy grail of online advertising, mainly because of the (hopefully) higher CPMs and greater ROI it commands. But publishers know all too well that the revenue for behavioral targeting mainly goes to ad networks and other third parties. So Underscore’s Tom Hespos has some advice for publishers and the producers who rely on them: get a sponsor or you’re “you’re doomed to be evaluated solely by the traffic-driving ability of your content.” Read Hespos’ Column on AdAge.
More On Exchanges, Networks, Publishers
For the most part, publishers have resisted ad exchanges for fears that it would drive down CPMs and further the move among advertisers toward buying audiences, not content brands. Still, the major ones know which way the wind is blowing. So publishers such as NBC Universal, Time Inc. and IDG, are setting up their own private exchanges with select buyers that are intended to preserve, in the words of Mediaweek’s Mike Shields, a semblance of control over pricing and quality, and avoid channel conflicts with their sales staffs. Read more.
The Huffington Post continues to exceed expectations, doubling revenue and reaching profitability. Greg Coleman, the site’s president and chief revenue officer tells ClickZ’s Kate Kaye that HuffPost is on track to generate a six-fold increase in ad dollars within the next two, thanks to its reliance on social media marketing. To make good on that pledge, he has hired a dozen new ad sales, operations, and marketing staff away from Yahoo, MySpace, and The New York Times. Read more.
Blumberg’s Big Fund
Maybe bankers are having more confidence in the economy. Or maybe it’s just that online media is just unstoppable. Perhaps it’s both. In any case, Blumberg Capital (currently invested in isocket, Legolas, DoubleVerify and many more), an early stage venture capital firm, has expanded the total of its Blumberg Capital II, LP Fund to $90 million. The add-on represents an increase of 37 percent of the initial capital raised. Read the release.
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Cyberplex Q4 Decline
Warning to investors in publisher network Cyberplex: in the last quarter, the company has seen average revenue-per-click drop. Attempts to reverse the declines were not as effective as they sometimes have been, said CEO Geoffrey Rotstein. Cyberplex is still trying to assess the reasons for the declines, but the problems mostly stem from the slowness of the Yahoo-Bing integration that Cyberplex has relied on. Read the release.
iPhones And Email
About 20 percent of marketers’ email messages are opened on a mobile phone, marketing firm Knotice says. And 12 percent of marketing emails that are opened are by someone with an iPhone, more than on any other device. The recent addition of Verizon as a carrier alongside AT&T should mean good things to email marketers as a result. Read more about the report here.
More Parody
Maybe it’s the influence of Terence Kawaja’s hilarious videos, but everyone seems to be getting into the act. The latest pop culture parody is attribution system operator TagMan – though with references to the ‘80s Asteroids video game and Star Wars, it leans a little too heavily on nostalgia than an ad tech firm should. (Note to other ad tech videographers: it’s not too late to parody Tron: Legacy. But the clock is ticking…) See it.
On Ad Verification
In response to our take on the rise of ad verification, Doubleverify’s Oren Netzer offered his own thoughts on the value of this kind of the business. He writes, “Verification is more than just post-campaign reactions to brand safety and IO issues. It includes both proactive blocking and overall reporting.” Read it here.
