The Ad Pirate Attack; Ads API + FBX

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Pirate Attack

We’ve been covering the infiltration of “pirates” and other bad actors using ad networks and open source ad serving to send malware to users, and the Annenberg Innovation Lab Transparency Report (which is a repurposing of Google’s Transparency Report – eMarketer eat your heart out!) has tallied some of the big offending services. Among the two listed by the site for last month are Yahoo’s Right Media and British firm Propellerads.com as a major provider to infringing sites, reports Mediapost’s Laurie Sullivan. Annenberg Lab Director Jonathan Taplin said he “met with both companies to discuss methods and address the issues. Basically, they blocked access from their ad servers, similar to what they do to avoid placement on pornographic sites, he said. Both reduced the number of infringing sites they place ads on.” Read MediaPost. And, get the February report from Annenberg (PDF).

Ads API + FBX

Two great tastes that taste great together? In a single-advertiser impact study, Nanigans analyzes $1.2 million in sales revenue from one mega-retailer and concludes Facebook Ads API and FBX ads work best when combined. “After being retargeted through FBX, customers entering the remarketing pool through native Facebook audience targeting purchased 89% more in sales revenue than those who entered the remarketing pool through non-Facebook channels.“ More.

Yahoo’s Mini Mobile

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has put a premium on making money from mobile. But AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher says the company has a long ways to go to make mobile revenue a reality. Citing unidentified sources inside the company, Swisher says direct mobile revenue hovers only around $125 million annually, mostly from search revenue on mobile devices. “While users are consuming lots of Yahoo Web pages on their phones, which could technically boost the sales numbers higher, rendering most desktop-created ads on mobile is not the same thing as the significant mobile revenue Yahoo needs to generate,” she opines. Read more.

Make My Stack

On Adweek, Tim Peterson examines the ad tech “stack” of Google’s DoubleClick Digital Marketing platoform (DDM). He talks to GroupM media agency Mindshare and asks an exec to compare the Google offering: “…why Google’s ad tech stack over Adobe’s? ‘From our perspective, [DDM’s] strength in ad serving and being able to have more clout with networks and partners to get to work with them was an advantage to us because then we could work with more partners,’ said Danny Huynh, [the agency’s managing director of digital and client leadership].” Read it. And, read Huynh’s Q&A on the DoubleClick For Advertisers blog.

Atomic Ads

In a weekend post on TechCrunch, Sharethrough CEO Dan Greenberg and his VP of strategy James Navin outline how marketers and publishers should approach various flavors of native ads: “What ties these seemingly disparate ad products together is one common theme: The ad’s visual design and user experience are native to the site itself, and these native ad placements are filled with quality brand content of the same atomic unit (videos, posts, images) as is natural to that site.” Go nuclear.

Online/Offline Disconnect

On Harvard Business Review, Marketshare CEO Wes Nichols blames “siloed” thinking when it comes portioning out spending that short-changes the web and continues to fill TV coffers. “[Marketers] mistakenly think they have a handle on how their advertising actually affects behavior and drives revenue,” Nichols says. “But that approach is backward-looking: It largely treats advertising touch points—in-store and online display ads, TV, radio, direct mail, and so on – as if each works in isolation.” Read the rest.

Privacy