Google And Admeld Get DOJ Love; Tracking Engagement; More Yahoo! Machinations

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

Googlemeld

On Friday, Google announced that its acquisition of Admeld had finally received approval from the U.S. Department of Justice and that now the closing of the deal can proceed. Google’s Neal Mohan noted the two companies’ share vision in a company blog post, “We envisage a much simpler system that enables publishers to manage and sell their ad space—across desktop, video, mobile, tablets and more.” Read it. For Google, its display offering – whether sell- or demand-side – is a cross-channel solution. And, to be sure, “Display” is not just a 728×90 banner ad or something similar. It’s a web of ad units across devices and formats, and tied together by streams of data. Over on the Admeld blog, CEO Michael Barrett talks about the DOJ approval and adds, “In the coming weeks and months, our products and Google’s will largely remain separate, but we’ll begin to talk about opportunities for integration and simplification.” Read it. And, more from the NY Times. Tighter integration into the DoubleClick For Publisher ad server will be one priority for Admeld along with the continued build out of tools to help understand how to optimize between guaranteed and non-guaranteed media. Yieldex’s predictive analytics on the guaranteed side could be next for Google given its acquisitive ways.

Tracking Engagement

On Scout Analytics’ blog, Matt Shanahan pours through the publisher data once again and finds the gap in engagement between online and offline is quite large – and this has implications for advertising. Shanahan writes, “To get to the same revenue assuming digital and print CPM consistency, the digital team has to sell 6.7 times more advertising and produce 2 times more content. This is the advertising profit margin squeeze.” Is digital really more efficient? Shanahan stresses knowing your site’s engagement rates.

A Piece Of The Action

The Wall Street Journal’s Heard It On The Street column says the Silver Lake consortium is considering taking a 20%, minority stake in Yahoo!. And then the WSJ’s Rolfe Winkler offers his thoughts, “Yahoo doesn’t need Silver Lake’s cash. What it needs is a house-cleaning. Yahoo has grown its work force 20% to 13,700 since 2006, though net revenue is flat. Meanwhile, by eMarketer estimates, Facebook generates roughly the same revenue with a quarter as many employees.” Read more (subscription). In The Guardian, Charles Arthur says Yahoo! hasn’t done anything new in 10 years so it might as well sell. Read it.

More Content, More Better For Ads

Freewheel has released its latest video monetization report and its good news for long form content lovers online (and their advertisers). From the report: “The number of video ads per video correlates to the content length, as do completion rates: long-form content (20+ minutes) has the highest numbers of video ads per video (an average of 5 as of Q3 2011) and the highest completion rates (82% of all video ads initiated are completed) which attests to the high levels of consumer engagement with episodic content.” Get it here (Pay with some PII). And, All Things D’s Peter Kafka breaks the report down here.

About The Keep

Digiday’s Jack Marshall looks at AdKeeper – who’s tech allows the users to “keep” an ad for later (for better deals, and so on) – through the eyes of several digital experts. Marshall finds skepticism at the agency as he quotes MEC Adam Shlachter, who apparently had tested AdKeeper with several clients, “I don’t necessarily see the benefit. I haven’t seen any evidence that there’s demand for this type of functionality or that it’s really adding anything for advertisers.” Read more. Marshall wonders if a pivot is imminent and points to AdKeeper’s new Keep.com site.

No More “Digital”

Omnicom Digital’s Jonathan Nelson (who started Organic) talks about strategy in South Asia as well as digital strategy as a whole in an article from India’s LiveMint. Nelson says, “Omnicom has a three-stage strategy for building our digital offering across India. First is to drive digital into every corner of our business. We don’t see digital as a separate communications channel. I believe that in the next four-five years, no one will be talking about ‘digital’ technology, just as no one talks about ‘the digital iPhone’ or the ‘digital notebook computer’ today.” Read about the other stages.

Now Pricing Mobile

Metamarkets is taking its predictive capabilities for the digital ad marketplace to mobile as it announced its latest platform update on TechCrunch. TC’s Leena Rao writes that MoPub Marketplace’s RTB platform is a client and that the tech can also be used to “monetize event streams in video RTB, in-game event sets, and social networks.” Read more. And, read last week’s Metamarkets Q&A where CEO David Soloff discusses the event stream.

But Wait. There’s More!