Amazon's Display Ads; Salesforce.com's Second Quarter Earnings

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

Extending Amazon’s Data

As part of a test, Amazon has been placing display ads on some affiliate sites and paying on an impression (not conversion) basis. Blogger David Zatz takes the feature for a test drive and is pleasantly surprised despite minor bugs. “Amazon didn’t appear to honor my target CPM ($2), ” Zatz wrote on Friday. “But implementation and accessibility is dead simple. And, unlike Google Adsense [sic] which is primarily pay-per-click, Amazon CPM Ads are impression-based – an approach that hasn’t always been readily available to smaller sites.” Legions of publisher sites are part of the Amazon Associates affiliate program, creating an opportunity to extend the Amazon data set through more display placements in a way that the company can tightly control.

Cumulonimbus

Cloud software giant Salesforce.com reported total revenue of $1.3 billion for Q2 late last week, a big jump. “I don’t think there’s ever been a software that has grown at 38% at the $5 billion revenue line,” chirped CEO Marc Benioff. “We also had just phenomenal execution of our ExactTarget acquisition. … We’ve deeply integrated that into our enterprise.” Earnings release. ExactTarget, which cost the company a pretty penny ($2.5 billion) last year, bid farewell to CEO Scott Dorsey in May following the exit of Salesforce.com’s social ads offering VP, Peter Goodman.

Cookie Canvas

Writing for VentureBeat, Semcasting CEO Ray Kingman says a new cookie-free tracking method, known in some corners as Canvas Fingerprinting, is “playing with fire.” What’s more, according to Kingman, it might not work. Kingman suggests that everyone “step away from the JAVA code for a moment and get back to basics. Ad tech companies need to start thinking like marketing companies and focus on methods that improve the scale and quality of their reach. They need to recognize that they already have the ability to accurately serve audiences at scale without using cookies, universal IDs, or (especially) canvas fingerprinting.” Read on. Or, learn more about Canvas Fingerprinting, via researchers at Princeton and KU Leuven, a Belgian university.

Programmatic And APAC

PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel spoke to Campaign Asia-Pacific about why automated ad buying has been slow to grow in APAC. According to Goel, the fragmentation of markets across Southeast Asia, Japan, China and Australia has hindered publishers from adopting programmatic strategies in earnest. But as PubMatic ramps up in the region, Goel doesn’t anticipate a tough sell.

Data-Driven DC

Extreme partisanship reigns in the capitol, but Dems and Republicans have found common cause in data-driven politicking on TV screens. The Washington Post reports DirecTV and Dish Network viewers can expect to encounter super personalized ads this election season, orchestrated through a DirecTV and Dish Network partnership dubbed “D2.” The ads will know in advance whether viewers are likely to vote absentee, if they’re undecided or if their loyalties lie with a specific party. More.