EU Settles With Google; The Mobile Ad Choices Icon

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

Trust In Google

The European Union has extracted concessions out of Google as it relates to its anti-trust investigation. The Financial Times reported over the weekend, “The US internet giant will revamp its results page to include prominent links to rival search engines and clearer signposts for its own in-house services.” But, is that a big deal? The FT says it could have been a lot worse for GOOG. Read more (subscription). And, still more analysis from GigaOm’s Jeff Roberts.

Display Yesterday & Today

On Digiday, Brian Morrissey finds that the first display ads were a branding play — not direct response. Joe McCambley, former creative director at Modem Media who worked on the ad for AT&T, said of the experience, “We believed if we could create something useful, we could be successful…” Read the rest. Fast forward to today’s display ads, and Rocket Fuel’s Eric Porres says that programmatic media is delivering “at least” 50% incremental benefit to campaigns over the old way of doing things (presumably the old “bulk buying,” publisher ad networks of yore).

Mobile Ad Choices

Evidon and TRUSTe are attempting to bring the AdChoices icon to mobile display. (Is it going to be really REALLY small?) Ad Age’s Kate Kaye reviews the efforts and sees torpidity, “To exhibit its commitment to its privacy efforts, the industry must move its behavioral data collection privacy program to the phone, where more and more information is gathered every day.” Read more.

Acqui-Apply

The MIT grads who formed the mobile/geo-location activity tracking startup Bahavio have decided to pack up the shop and join Google, Techcrunch’s Frederic Lardinois reports. It’s not an acqui-hire or an acquisition. The guys just decided to take a job with Google and quit their project. Behavio said in a release, “We believe that our digital experiences should be better connected with the way we experience the world, and we couldn’t be happier to be able to continue building out our vision within Google.” Read more.

Cro-mobile Man

Naveen Tewari, CEO at mobile ad network InMobi, tells Clickz’s Matt Kapko how the evolution of the mobile experience will play out: “I would say creative is ahead, tracking is catching up, and targeting is something which the promise is very visible, but because of a few of these infrastructural pieces around common IDs, etc., there is still some distance to go.” Read more.

I Am An Ad Network

Joe Mandese reveals the content of a recent fireside chat with Netmining CEO Chris Hansen on MediaPost. Mandese observes, “[Hansen] was crystal clear and incredibly simple in his description. ‘We’re an ad network,’ he said candidly. That impressed me, because it’s one of those things most ad tech players avoid comparing themselves to. I’m not sure exactly why, but the term ‘ad network’ has become a pejorative.” Read more heresy.

Billions Of Digital Pounds

Digital spend is on the upswing everywhere. The IAB in the UK chimes in on its region in a new report, “Just as digital spend crossed the £5 billion mark in 2012, mobile spend reached its own half billion pound milestone. Fuelled by smartphone ownership hitting almost two-thirds (64%) of the UK population in December 2012, mobile advertising grew like-for-like by 148% to £526.0 million in 2012 from £203.2 million in 2011.” Read the release.

Hiring Now

The U.S. tech industry is increasingly throwing its weight behind the immigration process, observes New York Times reporter Somini Sengupta, “Rarely has the industry been so single-mindedly focused on a national policy issue (…),” Sengupta writes. What companies want, he adds, is “a fast-track green card line for math and science graduates…no matter which country they come from, and a near doubling of the visas for temporary workers.” Read more.

You’re Hired!