Zenith Sees Display Ads Momentum; Virtual Red-Lining

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

Display Ads Hoppin’

Video and social will be among the driving forces behind 20% annual growth in online display spending through 2015, according to a new ZenithOptimedia forecast. Next year digital ads will grow 14.6% compared with 1.7% for traditional media, the agency believes. Expenditures in emerging economies will offset droopy European countries. “Developing markets, social media and online video are all growing rapidly, supporting continued expansion in global ad expenditure despite stagnation in the eurozone,” says CEO Steve King. Read more, including region by region analysis.

‘The Long Click’

In a lengthy NYT magazine piece, law professor and New Republic legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen reviews online ad personalization. Among others, he talks to BlueKai founder Omar Tawakol about a world of “virtual red-lining,” where some consumers get bigger travel discounts based on whether they use a PC or a Mac and where it will be impossible to shield your medical condition or specific porn predilections. The gist from Rosen: “The long click raises obvious privacy concerns. But the privacy threats go beyond troublesome ads. BlueKai’s business model stands or falls on the idea that our digital profiles are anonymous at the time they’re auctioned off.” Read more.

More Views On Viewability

Digiday’s Josh Sternberg gathered some opinions from the publishing side, which, naturally enough, show a great deal of encouragement about the possibilities. But there’s also the resignation that the problems will take a while to be sorted out. “For ad viewability to succeed, the industry needs to sort out the question of monitoring,” says Julie Hansen, Business Insider’s president and COO. “Advertisers and publishers must agree on a standard counting methodology. If not, significant friction will result from use of multiple standards. Read the rest.

Analyzing ‘The Marketplace’

On TechCrunch over the weekend, Spark Capital VC David Haber looks at the explosion of marketplace businesses fueled by $2 billion in venture capital. He doesn’t bucket in the ad versions, but Haber sees three ways that marketplaces succeed which could also be relevant to ads: “Size of the Market, Excess Capacity, Friction/Opacity, Fragmentation, Customer Experience.” Read the deets.

Reviewing ‘The Wreck’

In Adweek, Varick Media’s Jeremy Hlavacek responds to a recent Adweek article and reviews the ad tech ecosystem and real-time bidding (RTB), in particular, to reveal the opportunity it’s unlocking – or not. After doing some math, he sees a couple of scenarios: “There is a real imbalance in supply and demand of digital display and that RTB is exacerbating an already challenging issue for digital publishers. Another could be that publishers and tech partners are working with too many partners and creating lots of duplication, which leads to the question of, how is RTB bringing buying efficiency to the market?” t Read it.

Zynga Zinged

It looks like the end for Zynga’s sweetheart Facebook deal, as Facebook takes steps to “level the playing field” with other game developers. Reuters reports, “Both Internet players have been trying to reduce their inter-dependence, with Zynga starting up its own Zynga.com platform… Among the myriad terms of their new agreement, Zynga could elect not to use Facebook’s payments mechanism to collect revenue or display Facebook’s ads.” Fair enough, but Zynga is clearly the worse off for this change. Its shares dropped 13 percent in late trading. More.

CBS’ Digital Challenge

CBS has been the TV ratings leader for years. But as TV viewing continues its slow decline, the sheen on being the king of broadcast will diminish as digital becomes more crucial to the media company. CBS head Les Moonves talks digital video’s future with the Wall Street Journal and says, “It’s early and interesting. With more video on demand and DVR and live television going down, you have to be patient.” Read more.

Twitter Ad Ramp

Twitter has partnered with Komli Media, a worldwide ad network/platform based in India, as Twitter looks to ramp ad sales. ClickZ’s Melanie White writes, “Komli will manage all Southeast Asia sales for Twitter advertising products. With the aim of increasing the understanding of how Twitter’s products such as promoted tweets, promoted accounts and promoted trends can be of benefit to brands, it will roll out education and training programs for agencies and large advertisers in the region.” Read it.

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