Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Lead Gen IPO
QuinStreet will be taking the Street by storm as they announced plans for a $250 initial public offering according to alarm:clock. The company is already profitable having logged $17 million in profits through the first half of the year on gross revenues of $260 million. Read more.
Marketing Manifesto
IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg goes deep with another manifesto on his blog called “Is Marketing a Strategic Resource or a Procured Commodity?” And the answer? Rothenberg writes, “Agencies and media alike must focus on the development of strategic resources that can drive growth – their customers’, and their own.” Read it.
Video Ads In Social
Eyeblaster has come out with a new study which says that though video ads perform well next to editorial content, they’re not looking so good within a social or gaming environment. According to the release, “The study also confirms that video advertising boosts engagement–doubling Dwell Time and increasing Dwell Rate by 20%. As a result, video yields double the ROI of non-video Rich Media.” Read the release. Or, download the report.
Confidence Injection
Jon Bischke comes up with a list of sources for entrepreneurs who are looking to live through the thick and the thin of the start-up world. Among the tips is one from the Pmarca Guide To Startups: “Some days things will go really well and some things will go really poorly. And the level of stress that you’re under generally will magnify those transient data points into incredible highs and unbelievable lows at whiplash speed and huge magnitude.” Get more whiplash here.
Loving Twitter Ads
In an interview with Steve Gilmor and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Twitter COO Dick Costello said (basically) yes, Tiny Tim, there will be an advertising strategy for Twitter, but not this year. Costello added, “We want to do something that’s organic, like the way it happened with Google. It will work with the tweets. People will love the ads when they see it.” Read the entire interview with TechCrunch.
Branding It AOL
AOL had been on a naming spree using its company name on every product – such as AOL Advertising and AOL Health. Those days may be over as the brand team has decided to take a break on using the trusty acronym by changing AOL News to Sphere.com according to Silicon Alley Insider which follows changing AOL Sports to Fanhouse. PaidContent’s David Kaplan looks at AOL’s struggle with use of its brand name – read it.
Advertising The Inventory
On his Stream of Consciousness blog, Pete Kim looks at an idea he attributes to Yahoo!’s Dave Zinman about how inventory levels should track and trigger advertising campaigns. Summarizing his example, what if an overstock of Poptarts at Wal Mart could trigger local digital ads for a sale on Pop Tarts? Read more.
Bringing Back The Gavel
In a step-forward (auction) and backward (using a gavel), the company Brand In Entertainment will auction off opportunities for media buyers to buy product placements and the like across media platforms. The auction is to take place January 20 at Christie’s. No technology allowed! For more information, read the Brand In Entertainment blog.
Retargeting Paradigm
When retargeting consumers through exchanges, aggregators and publisher supply sources, how many display ads do you need to show the consumer before they convert? There’s no easy answer says FetchBack which ran a recent study showing “a premier clothing brand typically needs to display four to five ads to create a conversion, whereas a home goods retailer sees most prospects convert after only two to three retargeted ads.” Read the release.
O’Kelley Speaks
AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley will give up the goods on his Right Media success as well as the three-failures-you-never-heard-of, which evidently preceded the Right Media big bang, during a December 9 chat at his alma mater, Princeton University. Read more on the event. The “Princeton Mafia” is thick throughout the world of ad technology – including AppNexus, Aggregate Knowledge, Invite Media and others – with O’Kelley as its unspoken Godfather. Cue the music.
More On Right Media Re-Brand
And speaking of Right Media, Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson drew out AppNexus’ CEO Brian O’Kelley after Carlson suggest that the re-branding of the Right Media exchange to a more premium environment will mean that some of the “tier two and three” ad networks will be booted to, perhaps, AppNexus which he termed a “quasi-exchange”. O’Kelley (at least it seems like him in the comments) denied Carlson’s assertion that AppNexus was a “quasi-exchange.” Read more.
Facebook Currency And Ad Network
With social gaming continuing its popularity in spite of recent controversy around shady offers that gamers fill out to earn virtual currency, Business Insider reports that virtual currency is “coming soon” along with a Facebook Ad Network to be built “on the back of Facebook Connect.” What that means exactly is not clear. From here, at the very least, it would seem Facebook Connect allows Facebook to track users just like any third party pixel. Read more.
Adconion Extends
Adconion entered into an agreement with Goldbach Media Group which will increase Adconion’s european “reach by more than 25 percent to nearly 400 million unique users, taking it up to 20 billion impressions per month in 10 new markets.” Read the release.
CPG In 2010
From the Brand.net blog, COO Andy Atherton says that 2010 may be the year for CPG spending to come online in a big way. Atherton notes Brand.net’s own case studies highlighting CPG clients with minimum $250k budgets running campaigns across many dozens of websites. Read the post. Or, view the studies.
