Pinterest Raises $200M; GroupM's Programmatic Future

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Search For Tomorrow

Pinterest confirmed on Friday that it had raised $200 million, bringing its valuation to $5 billion. The funding comes in the wake of Pinterest testing Promoted Pins on its platform. Beyond that, ReadWrite’s Lauren Orsini speculates on Pinterest’s long-term strategy: “Rather than attempting to copy traditional Web search engines like Google, Pinterest could leapfrog search as we know it, and become the search engine of tomorrow. At a recent event, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann introduced a tool called Guided Search, which works by predicting the information users want before they fully type it in, based on its understanding of the images users pin to boards.” Read more.

Destination Is Certain

In case you missed it, GroupM global chief digital officer Rob Norman penned an op-ed on LinkedIn last week explaining his holding company’s vision of a trading desk and – more broadly – the future of the agency. He sees a turning point occurring: “The road to the programmatic future is rocky but the destination is certain. That certain destination is one in which all inventory that can be traded programmatically will be, except for exceptional assets which will, as they do today, represent a discrete marketplace of the highest value.” It’s not all black and white how the agent should respond, says Norman. Read it.

L’Oréal Talks Digital

EMarketer reports success in digital response efforts for the health and beauty sector. Roxanne Barretto, assistant vice president for L’Oréal, says that CPG is still branding-focused rather than direct-response, but the goal is to even out the two strategies. Mobile spend is increasing industrywide, and Barretto says, “Today, we have 40% to 50% of traffic coming from mobile to all of our site platforms. Mobile spending has surpassed even our projections of where we thought we’d be. It’s nearly a strategy all on its own.” Go here for the interview.

The Industry Reacts To Congress

During the recent Senate panel focused on combating malvertising and protecting consumers, industry reps took issue with a congressional report titled “Online advertising and hidden hazards to consumer security and data privacy.” Mike Zaneis, EVP and general counsel of the IAB, called the report a “missed opportunity” for the ad industry to collaborate with Congress to combat cybercriminals. “Instead the report conflates security and consumer privacy, and we get in a decades-old debate about cookies of all things,” he said. Read more at Adweek.

Programmatic Rising In TV Ad Spend

MediaPost reports that programmatic will comprise 20% of TV ad spend by 2018. The findings are based on a recent report by Strategy Analytics, and the summary states that the future of television ad buying is “poised for a significant transformation in the coming years as various stakeholders in the television advertising ecosystem eye the cost-saving opportunities of programmatic buying.” Read more.

Pitching Adobe

Adobe business analyst Benjamin Vigneron spreads some marketing cloud gospel in a piece on targeting tactics in Marketing Land. Vigneron says, “Some technologies such as the one we use at my company do just that: predict based on both end revenue and upper-funnel metrics, verify predictions, and fine-tune models accordingly.” Read more. It’s the Adobe full-funnel pitch.

Magazine Display

Google’s text ads got a little prettier last week with “Magazine Ads.” Google’s Yuheng Kuang explains to publishers on the Inside AdSense blog, “If a text advertiser is the winning bidder for your ad unit, their ad will appear in the magazine ad format. This format has been designed with print magazine ads in mind, putting a big emphasis on space and typography and displaying a new look distinctive from our regular text ads.” These aren’t necessarily BIG ADS, they’re just better looking text ads in current IAB standard formats. Read about it.

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