Turn Announces Audience Platform; Private Exchanges Are The Rage; AdMeld/Google Reaction Already Bubbling

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

Turn Rolls Out DMP

Swarmed over by the Google/AdMeld rumor last Thursday, Turn announced its “Turn Audience Platform” as the company positions its data management platform, or DMP, as a major part of its strategy targeting direct advertisers and agencies. Don’t worry media/DSP lovers, Turn still has the Turn Media Platform for media buying, too. The company claims in a release that Turn Audience Platform is processing 500 billion audience data events every month and has even integrated companies which might be seen as competitive some of its competitors: “Once an audience segment has been identified, marketers can purchase precisely targeted video, display and mobile advertising inventory via compatible media providers including Adap.tv, Jumptap, Martini Media, MediaMath, Media6Degrees, OneRiot and quadrantONE.” Read more. The platform will become widely available in mid-July.

Private Exchanges Are The Rage

Are they prepping for the rumored AdMeld acquisition? Google has sponsored a new Digiday study which shows that “20 percent of digital marketers surveyed say they’ll see the largest increase in ad buying from private exchanges.” (AdMeld has a private exchange capability being used by Weather Channel (AdExchanger.com Q&A) and IDG TechNetwork (AdExchanger.com Q&A) among others.) According to the article which quotes DoubleClick Ad Exchange’s Scott Spencer, “Within the next couple of weeks, Google will be beta testing the ability of publishers to make available fixed price inventory. Such prices may carry preferential conditions for certain preferred buyers or….” Read more. And, download the Google slides of the study.

Diminishing RTB Pools?

CONTEXTWEB exec Jay Sears – whose company provides RTB’d inventory to buyers – thinks the AdMeld deal is as good as done and offers analysis on his personal blog. He sees a potential display advertising monopoly developing with Google and urges others to get in the real-time bidding game where it’s all about the number of queries an inventory pool can make available per second – known as QPS. With AdMeld, Sears writes, “Google bought QPS (Queries Per Second) volume, period. [QPS is queries per second, a measure of liquidity or volume of display ads being offered via real time bidding or RTB.]” Read more.

90 Days Of Free Service

Adotas’ Gavin Dunaway looks at the AdMeld/Google rumor and reports that one AdMeld competitor is already positioning for the possible acquisition. Dunaway writes, “Admeld competitors PubMatic and Rubicon Project are hoping publishers will be suspect of Google’s intentions and choose to work with an independent revenue optimizer instead. True to form, Rubicon CEO Frank Addante sent out a statement offering existing AdMeld customers 90 days of free service.” Read more.

Leveraging The Cookie

Leveraging the cookie data captured for sharing as well as ad targeting purposes, Clearspring CEO Hooman Radfar announced that his company is launching a publisher analytics platform dashboard for AddThis which it says not only “enables a publisher to track all sharing activity, but also to do it real-time.” Read the release.

The Gov’t Loves Targeted Ads

Wait a second… where did this come from? U.S. Congressional news site The Hill reports that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission thinks that local news needs help and that online ads may be the answer. The Hill’s Sara Jerome writes, “The FCC report weighed in on that debate by saying policymakers should consider the “positive benefits of ad targeting” to promote sustainable business models for local news operations.” Read more. And, get the report (PDF).

RapLeaf Adds Instant Data

Online data provider RapLeaf has announced on its blog a new product called Instant Data where uploaded “Email addresses are instantly linked to deep demographic consumer information such as age, gender, location and more, simply by uploading a CSV or text file format.” And RapLeaf CEO Auren Hoffman says, “The big breakthrough is that marketers can retain this information without waiting to secure any technical resources; with Rapleaf’s InstantData, you don’t have to be a developer to know how to access our API.” Read more.

More Events

It seems like just last week that it was Internet Week in New York City. In fact it was. And now the ad world shifts its gaze across the Atlantic to Cannes, France for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity which starts June 19. Among the headliners according to The Wall Street Journal’s Emily Steel, “Author Malcolm Gladwell will discuss the paradoxes of innovation with a marketing executive from Kraft Foods, and actor Robert Redford will riff on the changing nature of storytelling amid the rise of digital with a Yahoo executive.” Read more.

Make Your Ad Better

TRAFFIQ’s Eric Picard returns to iMedia Connection and offers a think piece titled, “3 ways to increase ad engagement, conversions, and ROI.” He focuses on improving creative and begins, “I’ve written tons of articles saying what we should do as an industry to improve advertising from a policy, approach, and technology perspective. But today, I have a nice little article about how to improve your results as an advertiser.” Read more.

It’s All About Data