TubeMogul Video DSP Adds Ad Verification; Brands Looking To Platforms In Cannes; The Google DMP

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

DSP Offering Ad Verification For Video

Video analytics and demand-side platform (DSP) TubeMogul is offering its own ad verification point solution in the video ad arena called “PlaySafe”. According to the release, the “new ad verification feature ensures that media buyers can differentiate between legitimate pre-roll video ads and imitation pre-roll ads which auto-play on web pages where the viewer did not intend to watch a video.” Read the release. Traditionally, ad verification solution have been around graphical display. Agencies, who are big buyers of ad verification tools as an insurance policy for their key marketer relationships, will likely eat up similar products for the video market.

Google Defending

Responding to notice from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that the company’s business practices would be reviewed – as anti-trust and anti-competition concerns bubble – Google responded on its “Official Google blog.” Google “Fellow” Amit Singhal wrote, ” It’s still unclear exactly what the FTC’s concerns are, but we’re clear about where we stand. Since the beginning, we have been guided by the idea that, if we focus on the user, all else will follow.” Read more. ZDnet’s Larry Dignan sees the potential for too much government involvement as Silicon Valley gains momentum and innovates. Read it.

Marketers Corralling Spend

ClickZ’s Zach Rodgers reports on the closing days of last week’s Cannes ad festival and finds marketers thinking “platform.” He writes, “As always, clients are pushing agencies to better integrate. To make technology better serve Diageo brands like Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, and Guinness, Fennell wants centralized management of an increasingly fractured network of agencies, technology platforms, and other partners.” Read more. Centralized management should breed a better understanding of how spend is performing and the interplay of channel spend – ah yes, the marketer is building his/her own platform to understand better attribution models, better marketing mix models especially as it relates to digital.

Video Wants Audience Buying

AudienceScience President Jeff Hirsch sees audience buying taking over the online video ad space. Sure, the theme fits well with his company’s goals, but Hirsch thinks better targeting in video will be increasingly demanded as he writes on MediaPost, “Online video is at that same tipping point that display was at two years ago. And undoubtedly, mobile advertising will be, too, once the heated debates about inventory availability, i.e. scalability have been settled. The argument worth pursuing right now is about numbers.” Read more.

Intent, Display Driving Bankrate IPO

The Wall Street Journal reports that Bankrate is going to return to public status after being taken private by private equity firm APAX Partners a couple of years ago. With display advertising a core part of its revenue, APAX’s Mitch Truwit told the WSJ, “[Bankrate] has been able to keep the advertising dollars flowing from battered financial services firms because “we have very high quality customers who are looking for financial products, and they have very high purchase intent.” Read more (subscription).

The Venture Pulse

Angel investor Jerry Neumann has created a “VC Portfolio Page Changes” pulse machine via his very own bot/scraper. It allows you to see, potentially, what the latest investments are that venture capitalists are making in the tech space. See it. Neumann says in a blog post, “The website is the API: I wrote a script to look at the portfolio pages of VC websites every night and tweet and post new companies that seem to have been added. It’s pretty useful in a way, but has some severe limitations.” Read more. It would be great if Neumann also included a DEFCON levels rating for the VC industry as it moves to or from a bubble bursting. Just a thought.

The Google DMP

Last Thursday, Google announced that it was making available its interest-based categories to all AdWords advertisers – not just certain Google Display Network buyers. Essentially this is – in part – a data management platform (DMP) that lets advertisers target users according to the “types of pages a user visits, taking into account how recently and frequently those pages have been visited, and then associates their browser with relevant interest categories.” The browser has the cookie which makes it all happen, of course. Google claims to have over 500 million users categorized across 1,000 interest categories. Read more on the Inside AdWords blog.

But Wait. There’s More!