AdBrite Inside Intel; Advertisers And Fraud Responsibilities

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AdBrite Inside

Five engineers from recently shuttered ad network/exchange AdBrite have re-emerged at Intel Media, reports All Things D’s Peter Kafka. Intel reportedly scooped up AdBrite’s former CTO and four other employees to work on its TV-over-the-Web project. “I’m told they will work on data and analytics projects, which will include everything from ad systems to content recommendations,” Kafka writes. Read more.

Fraud Is The Advertiser’s Problem

On Venture Beat over the weekend, Adometry CEO Paul Pellman delivered an op-ed on what needs to be done ASAP with ad fraud. Pellman writes, “Among our clients, which include large and small advertisers, agencies and ad networks, approximately 16 percent of monthly clicks are invalid…aided by sophisticated blocking lists that have been assembled to weed out known offenders over several years.” Read more. Ultimately, Pellman thinks fraud is the marketer’s problem: “Instead of solely relying on ad networks catching a higher percentage of fraudulent activity, advertisers change the game by developing new measures that only reward good behavior.” AdExchanger has seen opinions supporting the buy and the sell arguments.

IPG Reports Earnings

Interpublic Group enjoyed slight organic revenue growth in Q1, citing strength in emerging markets among the factors. Read the Q1 details. Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser reiterated “BUY” and wrote in a research note, “The potential of being acquired continues to provide additional support to our target.” BMO Capital analyst Dan Salmon tells investors in a note, “All of the black clouds have cleared [at IPG], another key debt retirement is on the horizon (the 10% 2017 notes in August) and consistent share repurchase is increasingly the norm.” Read it (PDF). Also read the earnings call transcript.

Yahoo Clears The Decks

Yahoo is shuttering a number of products you probably never heard of – Upcoming, Yahoo Deals, Yahoo SMS Alerts and Yahoo Kids – as the portal whittles its products down to what it thinks people will use. In a Yahoo blog post, EVP of Platforms Jay Rossiter writes, “We realize that change is hard, but by making tough decisions like these we can focus our energy on building beautiful products for you like the two we introduced this week – Yahoo! Mail for iPad and Android tablets and Yahoo! Weather for iPhone.” Read more.

IBM Moving To SaaS?

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As The Economy Goes, So Does Ad Spend; Microsoft AI Plays Nice With Pubs

IBM may be moving faster toward a SaaS future. After disappointing earnings, the Wall Street Journal reports that IBM may sell its x86 server business to Lenovo, as the margins aren’t what they used to be in hardware. Read more (subscription). It will be interesting to see if there are larger implications for IBM strategy – as in, do they press harder on serving the CMO/CIO with a big data marketing “dashboard?” Is the IBM DSP at hand? Time for some risk-taking!

Mobile Ad Spend Share

A new report from mobile ad server MoPub says that “75 percent of spending on mobile advertising during the first quarter of 2013 was on devices running iOS,” according to GigaOm’s Erica Ogg. Read it. Overall, MoPub says it’s seeing more demand for mobile ads at the end of Q1 2013 than at the end of the previous quarter. Get the report (Pay with PII).

More Ecosystem Funding

Ad targeting platform Nanigans (AdExchanger 2012 Q&A) has secured nearly $6 million in new funding, say the financial data diggers over at Xconomy. Read it. Here’s the SEC filing. The company’s transformation from Facebook Ad API buyer to Facebook Exchange (FBX) buyer has likely helped its case with investors. FBX is sexy and marketers want in.

Levinsohn Explores Vevo

Guggenheim Digital, publisher of Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter and Adweek, is considering purchasing a stake in online music video joint venture Vevo, the WSJ’s Keach Hagey reports. Run by ex-Yahoo ad sales head Ross Levinsohn, Guggenheim Digital is looking beyond the stable of trade titles to become a bigger entertainment and media player. To do so, Levinsohn has been handed “hundreds of millions” of dollars to go shopping, according to an unnamed source. Read the rest (subscription).

YouTube & Copyright

Like a court scene on repeat, Viacom again lost its copyright infringement case against YouTube. The US District Judge who first threw out the suit in 2010 “repeated his earlier ruling that YouTube’s posting of…clips from Viacom series like The Daily Show fell under the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” writes AdWeek’s Sam Thielman. Viacom vows to appeal the ruling for a second time. Read more.

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