Payment Data Getting Attention; DAA Icon Vs Cookie Settings

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Taking Back The Data

Wired looks at the recently-announced Merchant Customer Exchange (see release) that brings together major retailers to create a payment solution of their own and “hoovers” all that valuable customer payment data in the process. Wired’s Marcus Wohlsen writes, “[The Merchant Customer Exchange] creates the curious scenario of chain stores taking on major credit card companies themselves, which joined with mobile carriers last week to announce their own committee to guide the future of the mobile payments industry. If retailers really do end up creating their own payment network, the strange new world of mobile payments starts to look a lot more like the past. Before all-purpose credit cards started to go mainstream in the 1960s, stores extended their own credit to customers. Credit cards came along as a way for retailers to outsource their lending operations.” Retailers want to take back their first party data. Read more. TrialPay’s Alex Rampell says payment data is more valuable than payment fees on TechCrunch.

PLAs – Display for Ecommerce

The Rimm-Kaufmann blog takes a detailed look at client results using Google’s new Product Listing Ads (PLAs!!) and away from the “previously free Google Product Search (GPS) listings.” Results are a mixed bag in terms of overall traffic being driven -though the impact for Google’s top line looks good: “The actual increase in paid clicks Google will see is probably closer to 2%. Still, that would translate to new annual revenues in the neighborhood of $500M to $1B in 2013, depending on whether the average cost-per-click rises for PLAs as more competition enters the market. To date, we have not seen any upward pressure on CPCs though. Surprisingly, CPCs for Product Listing Ads actually seem to be trending lower since the transition and they were already between 10-20% lower than CPCs for comparable text ads.” Read more.

Icon Keepin’ On

With the noise around Do-Not-Track, it’s almost possible to forget the Digital Advertising Alliance is still pushing forward with ad tracking self-regulation. AdAge’s Jason Del Rey interviews new DAA boss Lou Mastria about the behavioral ad icon and the future of the program. Mastria says, “One of the fundamental things not being talked about is that the icon program provides consumers with choice in real time, not some setting made on my browser two years ago that I’ve subsequently forgotten about.” Read it.

Pricing In-App Ads

Need price benchmarks for in-app ads? MoPub has a report that may interest you. Among the findings: “Social networking demonstrates the most pointed growth in Auction Volume. Music and lifestyle apps also showed steady demand growth through Q2, and demonstrated eCPMs of 78 and 79 cents, respectively. Business apps yield the greatest eCPM at 84 cents.” Download it (pay with some PII).

Politics = HD + Online

Former Peer39 CEO and MediaMind head sales exec Andy Ellenthal takes time to pen a piece on political ads and what appears to be MediaMind’s integrated HD and online video ad business on iMedia Connection. He says, “Nothing could be more essential for political campaigns than the speed of the ad delivery. Candidate A says one thing, and candidate B responds. Advanced ad tech providers can guarantee delivery of political ad spots on TV within an hour, and a campaign can be online with that same video within hours of delivery of creative assets.” Read more.

CRM Retargeting

On Business 2 Community, Eric Wittlake discusses CRM Retargeting. He explains the concept starting with display, “Advertising is targeted to individual people and may appear on a broad range of sites. But unlike traditional retargeting, where people are identified when they visit your site (and they immediately realize why they are being targeted), CRM retargeting identifies people based on an email address, even if they have never been to your site.” Read more. Think Salesforce retargeting with email addresses. Will Buddy Media help here?

Boardroom Lookie Lous

VC Mark Suster reviews the use of “board observers” in the startup board room… Suster warns the CEO who likes to add these lookie-lous, “Even though you might not be voting on anything in a given board meeting you might end up burning 45 minutes of a 3 hour meeting responding to comments that are on inconsequential topics from the ‘over talker.’ And the people driving your meeting off course are as likely to be your board observer as it is to be your legal board member.” Suster seems to think “silence is the golden observer”.

Admeld Appears

A rare post on the Admeld blog appeared late last week. Unsurprisingly, the Admeld unit has created a version of its ad ops plugin, Firemeld, for Google’s Chrome browser. Google Admeld’s Jarid Maged explains, “We’ve continued to move Firemeld forward by adding deeper insights into how each ad is auctioned, the advertiser behind it, and more.” Read it. Google acquired Admeld beginning June 2011 – the transaction was U.S. gov’t approved in December 2011.

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