Marketo Buys Insightera; UK Seeing New News

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

Custom Buy

Marketo purchased Israel-based Insightera for $20 million, according to GigaOM, giving Marketo a website customization platform. Insightera uses visitor data to tailor a website experience for each individual in the hopes of making them more receptive to ads. The company is a competitor of Demandbase, with which Marketo has a partnership. Read more. Ohh, it’s a tangled web the ecosystem weaves.

New News Publishers

Last Friday, the FT reviewed UK news “upstarts” and the advertising challenges that may lie ahead. Trinity Mirror has launched UsVsTh3m in attempt to do battle with Daily Mail’s MailOnline. So far, UsVsTh3m has no advertising, but 7 million users per month after launching earlier this year. Carla Buzasi, editor in chief of the Huffington Post UK, tells the FT, “You can go from a standing start to being an established player in the British media scene.” Read it (subscription).

Email Changes

Google’s changes to Gmail that will automatically display images have some people wondering whether the move will be bad for marketers. The ReadWrite has collected a few cons, which include the inability to use images for tracking multiple email opens and breakdown of geolocation data. However, with images automatically displayed, users may be more receptive to marketing messages. Read more.

Fraud Uncovered

According to Business Insider, a Telemetry document reveals that a large British packaged-goods company lost $488,000 of its video ad budget to fraud. After the traffic data was decrypted, Telemetry discovered that a lot of it was coming from Asian porn sites and no-name search engines. The unidentified ad network was subsequently dropped, but it isn’t the only advertiser to fall victim to fraud. Read more.

Facebook On Video

Facebook has better reach the TV, better targeting capabilities than YouTube – and potent video ad measurement tools coming out in Q1 2014 which could give it the definitive edge. So says a “leaked” document for buy-side partners, obtained by TechCrunch’s Joshua Constine. Constine opines, “It may not be the platform with the biggest reach, targeting or engagement that captures the ad dollars fleeing television in print, but the one that can best prove its ads actually work.” Read more.

Speaking Of Measurement

Facebook is bringing offline data to its Custom Audience product – marketers won’t have to go to Facebook-approved vendors to make this happen anymore. Part of the process is explained thusly: “Marketers upload hashed data, including emails, phone numbers and addresses, as well as encrypted transaction information; Facebook matches the retailer’s hashed data to hashed data from our own databases…” And then, and then… Read the post.

You’re Hired!