Ecommerce Hits $50 Billion, Says comScore; Walker Jacobs Leaves Turner

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Ecommerce Hits $50 Billion

Measurement and analytics firm comScore says that digital commerce transactions crossed the $50 billion threshold in Q1. The company adds in the press release that its “new m-commerce spending estimates revealed that Apparel & Accessories was the highest grossing mobile (i.e. smartphone & tablet) product category with nearly $1 billion in Q1 sales.” Read more. Mobile targeters take note.

Turner Digital Chief Walks

Walker Jacobs, EVP of Turner Digital Sales, is leaving the Time Warner cable network following a reorg, reports AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka. Read it. Jacobs’ position won’t be directly filled. It’s not clear if this signals a change in Turner’s aversion to audience buying tools like ad networks and exchanges. As Jacobs told us last fall, “We believe the downside of RTB and private exchanges is that it fragments audiences.”

Yahoo Acqui-Attributes

Commenting on Yahoo’s acquisition spree under Marissa Mayer, PandoDaily’s Erin Griffith looks at common attributes for the acqui-hires: “All are consumer-facing. None had experienced any truly notable traction before the deal. (Astrid seems to have been the biggest with 4 million users.) Only one or two had a clear path to revenue. All were well-designed by talented teams of fewer than 10 employees. None of their products were particularly revolutionary or even unique in their categories. All of them were shut down and folded into Yahoo’s offerings upon acquisition with hardly a peep of outrage from their users.” Read more.

Twitter’s Brazil Plans

Twitter is obsessing about Brazil in the run up to the World Cup and 2016 Olympics. Reuters describes a recent trip by revenue boss Adam Bain, who said, “”Brazil is the largest opportunity we see in Latin America and frankly across all of the other markets.” Read it. And check out AdExchanger’s special report on Brazil.

Programmatic Agency

On Jack Meyer’s MediaBizBloggers, Robert Brill and former MediaMath-er Steve Kaufman of KSL Media deliver their agency’s view on the opportunity ahead with programmatic media. They don’t hold back as they herald a bright future: “Agencies will buy digital media with lower overhead. Offline media will take on digital buying principals. Indeed the line between digital advertising and advertising may soon be erased.” Read more.

Real-Time Latency

On the MetaMarkets blog, Eric Tschetter shares a summary of a presentation made with Netflix at the recent Strata Conference. He ponders what “real-time” really means and states, “I will limit our discussion of the term to its usage in the data space as it takes on different meanings in other arenas. In the data space, it is now commonly used to refer to one of two kinds of latency: query latency and data ingestion latency.” Read more.

Relationships Trump Fraud

Doug Conely of Exponential, owner of Tribal Fusion, Appsnack and Firefly Video, says that whether the buy or the sell side is to blame for online ad fraud (i.e. bots, etc.), solid relationships between buyers and sellers trump all. He continues, “Fraud is now a clear issue for programmatic buys. The industry has continuously shown an ability to raise its game to meet such challenges. If not hubris, there is at least a little bit of irony that the result of a heightened awareness on fraud will mean many platforms looking a lot more like the ad networks they have tried so hard to replace.” Read more.

Data Is King, Content Is Queen

Data, not content, is king these days for publishers, Liz Schimel, Meredith’s EVP & chief digital officer, tells Audience Development’s TJ Raphael (she had a similar discussion with us at the start of the year). “Our company is about content for women,” Schimel says. “So for us content is queen, but the data we derive really underpins our strategy…Both the king and queen are extremely important, but we feel like we can’t be great at our core business of creating great content and amassing scaled audiences without depth of expertise on the data side.” Read the rest.

Privacy Logout

Over the weekend, details emerged regarding a Bloomberg terminal privacy breach. It’s not ads-related but certainly echoes some of the worst fears: a network personally identifies its users without their consent or knowledge. In this case, the alleged perpetrators are some journalists working for Bloomberg News, and the cookie is the terminal’s login feature. Read more: The New York Times, Buzzfeed and Quartz.

Data As A Weapon

Jay Fulcher, CEO of video ad platform Ooyala, responds to the collective agency letter that appeared in Adweek, calling on Aol, Yahoo and the other NewFront participants to match the improved creative they showcased with deeper data. In a blog post, he tells the agency execs what sort of data he feels is the key weapon in marketers’ video ad arsenal. “Knowing how people are watching, sharing, and discussing content is critical. But we should also be asking where they’re watching, for how long, and what programs they will want to watch next,” he says. Read the rest.

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