Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
The CEO Role
PaidContent’s Staci Kramer covers the latest machinations at Yahoo! as Interim CEO Tim Morse (who had been, and still is, the company’s CFO) issued an email meant to rally the Yahoo! troops. Kramer writes, “Probably the most striking aspect of Morse’s e-mail is it never mentions the executive leadership council formed to help him run Yahoo while the board goes through the corporate version of a midlife crisis: EVPs Michael Callahan, Blake Irving and Ross Levinsohn; and SVPs Rich Riley and Rose Tsou. Instead, he talks of the “CEO Staff” – the people who report to Morse, which includes that group and several others.” Read the latest about Yahoo!. The upshot is that Yahoo!’s strategic review could last months.
Crossing To The Social Channel
Demand-side platform MediaMath announced its storming the Facebook ad platform with a new, standalone, addition to its buy-side toolkit – MediaMath Social. MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki emphasized the cross-channel opportunity with Ad Age, “The ability to see spend and performance across both display and social is really interesting. (…) You can do market-mix modeling effectively, figure out how to spend in one channel vs. another and the impact across the two.” Read more.
Hey People, Ebay Is An Agency
It’s an ecommerce company, an intent data machine, an agency – do I hear floor wax? ClickZ’s Joan Voight explains how the GSI Commerce acquisition lets Ebay the offer agency services through its now-owned True Action Network and SilverLign agencies. No small deal either as Voight quotes an Ebay exec, “Together the agencies now have 400 employees with the bulk working for True Action. Its major clients are Toy ‘R’ Us, GNC, Aeropostale and Dollar General.” The agency model has yet another competitor – the Ecommerce publisher. Read more.
ABC, NBC, HBO, Google… The Wall Street Journal reports that YouTube is going to start looking a bit more like your favorite television station as it will begin scheduling programming – time shifting be damned! The WSJ Jesscia Vascellaro writes, “The video giant is finalizing contracts for its first of more than a dozen “channels” featuring regularly scheduled content on big broad themes such as fashion and sports…” Read it (subscription).
Mobile M&A – Actually Just “A”
Velti continues acquiring as the Mobclix mobile ad exchange owner announced it has added mobile CRM firm Air2Web to its stable of mobile products and services. Bena Robers of GoMoWeb comments, “Targeting, precision, analytics, personalisation, local intelligence are similar characteristics of every purchase. Velti is making itself a guru in the local market and for personalised ads.” Read more. And, read the release.
Parting Of The Digital Sea
VivaKi soothsayer Rishadt Tobaccowala aggregates recent digital biz milestones in a post on his personal blog. -Are you a Google + or Facebook Timeline superstar? I didn’t think so. Tobaccowala wonders what the blizzard of new innovationis all mean from the enterprise perspective saying, “The world might be digital but people are analog: Silicon based technologies continuously improve and are emotion free. Carbon-based life form’s (ie humans) ability to process and adjust is not scaling at the rate of digital change. This divide will be one that will be addressed by successful companies.” Go forth and fill the gap! Read more musings.
Ad Server Futurama
In a post on the Universal-McCann blog, UM ad ops maven Mitchell Weinstein draws out the future of third-party ad serving from his agency viewpoint. Before he dives in with predictions, he sets the table with today’s predicament: “The fact that I have to use 4 different ad servers to run a single campaign is absolutely ridiculous. There has to be a better way.” Read about his “way.”
Mastering Incrementality
On his personal blog, “Goog” digital marketing evanglist Avinash Kaushik drives himself to near insanity with a series of questions around the challenges of online marketing including “the killer question… if you invest in multiple channels, how much incrementality does each channel bring to your bottom-line?” Yes, Marketer, you know the feeling -and Kaushik provides the answers! Read it.
AppNexus IPO
Suggesting a potential IPO late in 2012, AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley tells Bloomberg that the company hit profitability for the first-time even in August. Bloomberg’s Sarah Frier writes, “O’Kelley said he prefers an IPO to a sale as the management team wants to be in charge of building AppNexus into a global company. ‘It would be hard to see a sale as the right outcome,’ O’Kelley said. ‘I feel immense loyalty to the team we’ve built. As a public company we can control our destiny.'” Read more. But, if the right price came along…
But Wait. There’s More!
- Here’s the Real Reason Business Insider Is Doing So Well – CNBC
- Facebook Changes Upend Advertiser and Agency Models – Harvard Business Review
- Data as Art, as Science, as a Reason for Being – The New York Times
- A look at how display drives performance for marketers today – AdWords Agency blog
- Part One: The Media Agency / Client Relationship – The Brand’s Take Control – Dax Hamman
- Amazon Has High Hopes for Its iPad Competitor – The New York Times
- Walk the Talk: On the Combination of Implicit and Explicit Feedback – technocalifornia blog
- Facebook ‘Likes’ Small Business – The Wall Street Journal
- AOL’s Project Devil launches in-ad e-commerce function – Ad Week
