Accordant Adds Real World Bidding To RTB; Yahoo! Earnings Imminent; Social Self-Serve For ThoughtLeadr

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

Real World Bidding

Trading desk Accordant Media says that on behalf of marketers it’s taking its real-time bidding for display offering to new heights by adding “real world bidding” capabilities to its platform. The release explains, “Accordant can set specific creative messages and bidding models to any available data source: live weather conditions, pollen counts, traffic data or even television programming and sporting events in target markets.” When it rains in Topeka, geo-target with umbrella ads – ok, that’s my example, but you get it. Read more. Event-based targeting as a core offering is becoming increasingly popular in the audience buying space – it asks the question of platform vendors: “Can you effectively target customers at-scale who are viewing or participating in a particular event?”

Yahoo! To Report

Tomorrow, Yahoo! will release its Q1 earnings for 2012 as the company shares the results of its first days under new CEO Scott Thompson’s rule. Visit Yahoo! IR. Zacks Equity Research predicts, “We are unlikely to see very strong revenue numbers due to weakness in the display and search businesses. However, gross margin figures could come above expectations due to cost control measures taken by management. Continued investment in the business (particularly product development and sales), could be a drag on operating margins.” Read more. Meanwhile, All Things D’s Kara Swisher shares a video interview with Yahoo! Right Media’s Brian Silver prior to the recent Right Media forum at ad:tech San Francisco. Silver discusses the new RM logo and its meaning. See it. Who knew?

My Strategy Has Fallen And It Won’t Get Up

Loyalty 360 – an association for loyalty marketers – has partnered with Acxiom on a new whitepaper called “How Customer Intelligence Drives Customer Loyalty.” Reviewing the survey data from 129 marketers, the paper’s authors offer the highlights: “The vast majority (84.5%) [of marketers] use customer retention marketing strategies. Barely half (48.8%) believe their strategies are working; Less than half (49.6%) know their best, most loyal customers; 70% admit less than 20% of their employees focus on retention while a similar 60% spend less than 20% of their marketing budget on retention.” Wanamaker would love this whitepaper. Get the whitepaper (pay with some PII).

Close Vs Open

Beginning a “seven-day investigation into the future of the open internet,” the UK’s The Guardian publishes a new interview with Google co-founder Sergey Brin who says he’s more worried than ever that an “open” web will be overcome by various, “closed,” external forces. The Guardian’s Ian Katz paraphrases Brin as saying, “The threat to the freedom of the internet comes (…) from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of ‘restrictive’ walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.” Some might say this is ironic in that the log-in-driven Google world consisting of a network of increasingly essential products could also be considered “closed.” As Brin’s responses reiterate, though, Google is positioning to be on the “open” side of the conversation. Read more.

Wrangling Data

On his personal blog, without using the phrase “big data,” angel investor and Hunch founder (bought by eBay) Chris Dixon explains the keys to dealing with data. Specifically, he says, “One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that there are only two ways to make useful products out of large data sets. Algorithms that deal with large data sets tend to be accurate at best 80%-90% of the time (an old ‘joke’ about machine learning is that it’s really good at partially solving any problem). Consequently, you either need to accept you’ll have some errors but deploy the system in a fault-tolerant context, or you need to figure out how to get the remaining accuracy through manual labor.” And then he elaborates. Read it.

The Direct Seller

On TechCrunch, Lightspeed Venture Partners’ VC Jeremy Liew explains why he thinks direct selling is making a comeback via startup commerce companies. Liew shares his reasoning: “The first is the economy. In this slow economy, people are more willing to supplement their income (and seek alternative career paths) than they have been over the last few decades. Direct sales is one of the most attractive and accessible ways for people to supplement their income.” Social media and tablets/the internet are the other two. Read the deets.

What Is Mobile Display?

On iMedia Connection, Doremus’ media planning director Andrew Ettinger offers his view on the mobile display landscape for marketers. He begins, “Mobile web browsing is slightly different than the traditional, ‘desktop’ internet. Whereas the desktop web is served via an internet browser, there are many ways of serving mobile websites and advertising.” Read more. Michael Nevins, now with Undertone, wrote a detailed piece on AdExchanger on “what is mobile display” in 2010. It remains a favorite. Read that one, too.

Self-Serve Social

Targeting the self-service social ad market, VentureBeat’s Jennifer Van Grove covers the unveiling of San Francisco-based ThoughtLeadr which says it’s delivering a social ad platform for smaller sites in the style of Twitter’s and Facebook’s offerings. They’ve signed a deal with image hosting company, Imgur, too. ThoughtLeadr founder and CEO Todd Cullen tells VentureBeat, “[Companies] give us access to their firehose of data. We break it down and we understand what all the users are interested in, and then they … treat us like a traditional display ad.” Make my data. And, visit ThoughtLeadr.

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