NY Times On Yahoo's Native Ads; German News Sites Take On Google

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

Native Yahoo

Yahoo’s digital magazines and, consequently, native advertising strategy are under review in a Sunday NY Times article. Nothing too earth-shattering is learned about Yahoo ads and its new Tumblr solutions other than the usual: The banner is dead (or in decline) at Yahoo; native formats have a better (10x higher) CTR than standard display; there is no mention of brand lift or awareness metrics; and the ability for Yahoo to scale native is unclear. Read more. Yahoo – and the industry as a whole – needs data-driven proof native works beyond the click, and at scale. In Yahoo speak, bringing more science to the “native” art might be a great opportunity to differentiate.

Searching For Yield

German news sites are attempting to extract an “11% fee” from Google for aggregating links to its articles. Industry pundit Jeff Jarvis takes a look and begins, “[The German publishers’] demands are as absurd as they are cynical and dangerous. First, of course, Google is sending the publishers plenty of value as well. That is, Google is sending the publishers us: readers, customers, the public these news organizations allegedly want to serve. So what are we, chopped liver?” Read it. And Danny Sullivan offers his thoughts here.

Super RTM

Building on their programmatic partnership, AOL and agency Universal McCann (UM) say they are rethinking how to serve ads, and their plan claims to take a macro approach to real-time marketing. “Rather than relying on traditional planning paradigms, where we’re hoping to take advantage of time frame or predictions in the market, we’re actually reacting in real-time and then we have creative set up to run against that,” said UM COO Gregg Colvin. This is in line with how The Weather Company serves ads, but the trigger data will come from sports scores, market indices, local gas piracies and life events like birthdays and anniversaries, among others. Read more at Ad Age. And read the release.

Offline-Online Data

Beacons and Wi-Fi-sensing technology may be working to track in-store behaviors, but new tech could take targeting to the next level. Perch Interactive is one company coupling sensing technology with projectors to track and log in-store consumer behavior, and is trialing the tech in NY Kate Spade stores. “We equate this to browser cookies in the real world,” said IPG Media Lab’s Jack Pollock. “We can now record if someone’s interacted or picked up a product off the shelf; time spent with that product; all of these metrics that we have online, brought offline.” Marketers could leverage the data for tailor-made messages based on consumer-product interactions. Read more at Digiday.

Adding To Ecommerce

OwnerIQ, which helps retailers and manufactures monetize their online customers, even when ecommerce browsers don’t purchase a thing, has completed an $11 million round of funding, according to a press release Friday, and said it plans to grow its revenue by 70% this year. In addition to owning product-oriented community websites, OwnerIQ has an ad tech platform that lets manufacturers and retailers exchange first-party data for the purpose of targeted digital advertising. “Audience monetization is incremental revenue for e-commerce players,” Fortune’s Erin Griffith reports. “A retailer selling $100 million worth of products might make $10 million in profit. They’re already paying to attract the audience, so if they sell $10 million worth of media (in addition to selling products), they make [an additional] $10 million in profit.” HookLogic and Bazaarvoice also get a mention. Read more via Fortune.

For Your Back-To-School Package

Online is the No. 1 channel for back-to-school and back-to-college shopping, according to a study released Friday by HookLogic and polling company Qriously. Findings show that 35% of back-to-school shoppers buy online, with 69% of shoppers planning to spend the same in 2014 as they did in 2013 (while 19% say they’ll spend more and 5% will spend less). Read more at Chain Store Age.

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