Rubicon And Merkle Team Up; NBCUniversal Hackathon

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

CRMing The Exchange

On Friday, Rubicon Project and CRM agency Merkle announced a new capability within programmatic ad buying and selling. The development rolls together Rubicon Project’s Advertising Automation Cloud and Merkle’s suite of marketing tools, and claims to help advertisers run campaigns that achieve 100% of share-of-voice on any given page. The development couples together branding media and ad automation technology, explained client Business Insider’s COO, Julie Hansen, in the release. Read it.

Traditional Hacking

Comcast’s NBCUniversal Media Labs announced results of its first hackathon. [record scratch] Hackathon at “the peacock?” Times are changing. Multichannel News reports, “The event was organized by AngelHack and brought together about 150 people. They formed about 23 teams that created 26 prototypes designed to address business and technology challenges developed by various NBCUniversal and Comcast division[s].” Read it.

Going Up

In an interview with eMarketer, 360i group media director Jessica Sanfilippo sees data driving CPMs and says, “Audience data is definitely … driving prices up. We’ll see CPM upticks as much as three times the amount of the base media. So in some cases, the data is being valued at higher levels than the media itself – that has a pretty profound effect on CPMs.” Read more.

May Mobile App Install Data

On Friday, Fiksu released May’s data for app install costs. The index helps mobile marketers navigate the space based on measurable metrics. The App Store Competitive Index increased 24% month over month, reaching 6.6 million over April’s 5.34 million. Year over year, the index increased 12%. Marketers are looking to lock in user loyalty, leading to a rise in the cost per loyal user in May’s index. Access the data at Fiksu.

Automating The Home Page

Home page takeover has long been one of advertisers’ most powerful and premium ploys. The home page takeover strategy offers marketers a chance to commandeer publishers’ home pages for a limited time. Now, some of the top publishers are moving to take the home page takeover offering into programmatic channels, says The Wall Street Journal’s Suzanne Vranica. Time Inc., Hearst Corp. and Business Insider are already on board. Read more (subscription).

Swarming The Data

Foursquare will start charging developers for access to its location data, the company announced Friday. The decision could affect marketing apps that rely on Foursquare’s map data, such as Google, AggData, Navteq and Open Street Map. Tens of thousands of developers access the tech company’s network daily, but Foursquare says it will only charge those that pass a certain data usage threshold. Originally a free app that spun off its check-in function into the standalone app Swarm, Foursquare’s move might help the company monetize its offerings. Read more at Adweek.

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