TV Distro Deals; Inside Yahoo!'s CEO Search; DG May Spin-Off MediaMind

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

Online TV Ads

In the wake of the DirecTV agreement regarding Viacom carriage fees, free online TV proponents may have suffered a setback as network providers don’t want to carry (and pay fees for) something that subscribers may be able to get online for free. Likewise, content providers need to make the big dollars associated with carriage fees. It would appear online video ads aren’t an option. The NY Times’ Brian Stetler adds, “Viacom is moving toward a sign-in model for streaming, replicating the subscription model of traditional television on the Web. It was moving in that direction well before the spat with DirecTV started.” Read more. Whoa..”login” alert! The sign-on model could have huge, positive implications for online and offline advertisers as they look to sync messaging from offline to on, and back again – let alone attribution benefits. And, don’t look now but Amazon is doing its own distro deals for the Kindle – read Internet Retailer.

Inside Yahoo!’s CEO Search

Michael Learmonth and Jason Del Rey recount the hiring of incoming Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer on Ad Age. They provide an inside look such as, “By all accounts, Ms. Mayer wowed the board in interviews. While Mr. Levinsohn made a case for maximizing what Yahoo is today, Ms. Mayer represented what Yahoo could become, a company that builds products instead of chasing search — as it did for nearly a decade — and social, which is now sapping the company of its once-formidable engagement with users.” Read more. How much did the interclick shortfall in Q2 expressed on last week’s earning call by CFO Tim Morse play into Levinsohn losing the CEO race? Ad network interclick was a Levinsohn-driven acquisition. Yet, the Ad Age “sources” make it sound like the Yahoo! board was going in a product (not media) direction no matter what.

MediaMind Spin-Off?

DG has enlisted the help of Goldman Sachs to find strategic alternatives and this may include splitting the company in two, according to Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s Alex Barinka quotes a Janney Montgomery Wall Street analyst, “‘The easiest, most straightforward way of increasing the value’ of the company is jettisoning the Internet business.’ That segment ‘consists of the acquisition of MediaMind, which is a really established, really well-recognized online ad delivery, campaign management and ad delivery service.'” Read more.

#Winning Mobile Ads

A new report from Opera looks at the mobile ad standings in Q2 2012: “The iPhone leads the smartphone OS pack with an average eCPM of $2.85. Though it is closely followed by Android devices (at $2.10).” In mobile ad network news from the study: “The ad networks with the highest fill rates tend to have lower eCPM payout rates, while those with high payout rates tend to have low fill rates.” – likely due to advertisers paying more for better targeting. Read more. Meanwhile, Adfonic said last week that Android was the big winner on its platform. Read that one.

Publisher Control

A team-up between The Rubcon Project and Smart AdServer gives their common customers more visibility and pricing control. Think price floors for premium space. Says a release, “Rubicon technology can assess more precisely at which price the connectied buyers are likely to monetize the impressions put up for auction by the participating publishers. The latter can therefore program within Smart AdServer User-Interface their Rubicon Project campaigns with different levels of priority set and with strict floor price rules.” Read it.

AdExchanger Daily

Get our editors’ roundup delivered to your inbox every weekday.

Daily Roundup

Daily News Roundup

Not For Sale!; Johnny On The Spotify

Search Is Display

The Rimm-Kaufmann Group blog notices that Bing search engine ads are echoing recent AdWords changes that puts graphics in the search ad formats for ecommerce-related product listings. From RKG: “While many of these changes have been technical, behind-the-scenes tweaks to make their product easier to use for advertisers already comfortable working with AdWords, there have been some that were more noticeable to the average consumer, including seller reviews in ads and a new take on Rich Ads that includes sitelink formatting similar to Google’s.” Read more. A search results page ad already was a display ad… now it’s getting increasingly graphical or “rich.”

Managing The Tags

On MediaPost, Laurie Sullivan writes that tag management firm TagMan is on the verge of releasing a new mobile tag management product. In the meantime, TagMan CRO Nancy Marzouk shares results of a new Forrester study that says tag management benefits ROI: “For one commercial airline, Forrester that found data from tags generated 128% ROI. The airline runs 16 Web sites with a variety of digital technologies. The insights gained from digital advertising and marketing, rather than looking at each individually, would support attribution modeling.” Read it.

Local Ads Pot ‘O Coal

On his Location Awhere blog, local-mobile consultant Ben Allen picks apart Aol’s Patch strategies and the vagaries of online, local advertising. He sees significant challenges beginning with a lack of interest from advertisers: “Buying audiences purely by where they live is a commodity readily available to anyone for free, so Patch needs to hope that the local contextual adjacency is worthy of a premium. But given their $1.11 ARPU (average revenue per user) it seems that the market doesn’t see it this way and instead sees it as just more low value news content.” Read it.

Facebook Exchange Fever

Auteur and BlinQ CEO Dave Williams reviews the benefits of post view-through conversion analysis – and more – to Facebook advertisers with the opening of its Exchange. He writes in Ad Age, “These new advancements are reminiscent of when online display advertising introduced time spent on site, ad engagement metrics, view-through attribution, and other metrics to evaluate the performance of ads that did not immediately convert.” Read it.

Earnings