Home Ad Exchange News Razorfish CEO On Publicis and VivaKi; Teracent Enters Video; ClearSaleing Announces Attribution Index; Spitzer and Blodget

Razorfish CEO On Publicis and VivaKi; Teracent Enters Video; ClearSaleing Announces Attribution Index; Spitzer and Blodget

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

Razorfish CEO On AcquisitionRazorfish CEO On Acquisition

CEO Bob Lord of Razorfish tells David Kaplan of PaidContent.org that he expects to fill a clear niche within VivaKi and believes that collaboration between Razorfish, Starcom MediaVest Group and ZenithOptimedia is logical. But, he expects to maintain a wall between the Fish and Digitas and that they will likely compete for business from time to time. Still, Lord added that Razorfish will be pursuing “clients that would be in conflict with Digitas’ roster,” too. Read more.

Monster Moves Its Media Budget

Monster Worldwide, the jobs site, announced that it has moved its planning and buying from WPP’s Mediaedge:cia to Omnicom’s OMD.  With $200 million in billings, this is a nice win for Omnicom. Monster CMO Ted Gilvar told Ad Age regarding OMD, “After meeting them I felt they could provide exactly what I was looking for, which was a more innovative approach to media and the changing media landscape.” This brings all of Monster’s agency duties under one Omnicom umbrella as BBDO does the PR and Ketchum handles creative.

Teracent Enters Video Optimization

Creative optimization firm, Teracent (AdExchanger.com Q&A), announced that it is entering the video space with its multi-variate technology.  With the new video ad optimization line, Teracent CEO Vikas Jha said in a release, “By reducing costs and boosting direct response and brand performance, we are opening up the video channel to new advertisers and providing a range of new marketing solutions.” (Read the release.)

New Targeting for Ad Networks and Advertisers


MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan reports
on OpenAmplify, a new, semantic targeting technology for ad networks and advertisers. OpenAmplify’s CEO Mark Redgrave tells Sullivan that they have signed a deal with social media marketing company, Lotame (AdExchanger.com Q&A), as the OpenAmplify’s tech can assist with unlocking social networks through its ability to discover intent. InfoWorld’s Mark Gibbs goes into the technology here.

Delivering Flash Cookies Piping Hot

Wired’s Ryan Singel delivers more cookie business with his story on Flash cookies and how users may not be deleting those cookies when they try to delete cookies in their browser. Singel suggests that most privacy policies do not include notification on the use of Flash cookies and that some companies reinstate cookies. CEO Hooman Radfar of Clearspring tells Wired.com at the end of the article regarding their cookie-carrying, “AddThis” widget, “We have the president, the pope and the queen of England using us. If they can trust us, then you can.”

Australia Changes Orgs

In a move toward self-regulation, according to a release on B&T, Australian ad networks are creating their own association to represent their interests. Called “IASH” (Internet Advertising Sales House of Australia), the membership will include AD2ONE Group, Valued Interactive Media, Digital Network Sales, 3D interactive, Gorilla Nation Media, MaX Interactive, Multi Channel Network (MCN), PostClick, Response Directive, Full Circle, Tribal Fusion and Adconion Media Group. The release says that members will be “subjected to a ‘rigorous’ audit, to maintain the code of conduct, which includes rules on the types of inventory which can and can’t be used when fulfilling an ad insertion order.

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Music Ads Don’t Work

On Cnet, Greg Sandoval takes a look at the online music business and what he believes is the failure of the ad model to support it. He notes that advertisers are not willing to spend top dollar on music site inventory because they know that users are there to listen to music versus look at visuals, let alone an ad. Former CEO of music site, SpiralFrog, Mel Schrieberg told Sandoval that he struggled with providing enough scale for advertiers and said that, “SpiralFrog couldn’t get in the ‘tier 1’ advertising door with fewer than 5 million users.”  Read more.

AdSense Showing More Than It Should?

Otilia Otlacan of AdOperationsOnline.com details the new capabilities of Google AdSense as a result of updates made over this past weekend. Among the updates, publishers now have control on what category of ads they want shown on sites associated with their Adsense account.

Among the deficiencies is an inability to segment by site according to Otlacan, who is also not happy that some ads currently shown are, contextually, way off base: “This new feature candidly shows how completely inappropriate, mistargeted ads served on your unsuspecting site(s). I was really thrown off to find out that 1% of my recent ad impressions were assigned by Google AdSense to sexually suggestive or sexual health ads. I assure you, none of the sites in my portfolio warrant the presence of such ads.”

Adsense Category

ClearSaleing Announces AAI

ClearSaleing‘s Adam Goldberg (AdExchanger.com Q&A) tells MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan in an article that their new American Attribution Index (AAI) created with marketing analytics firm, Vetra Analytics, is intended “to help marketers and advertisers measure the effectiveness of each online ad in the purchase funnel.” Very basically, ClearSaleing’s client-approved data is married to Vetra’s analytics model which results in the new index. According to the release, the index will be published on a quarterly basis and made available to the public at that time. Subscribers can have ongoing access to the AAI – learn more on the AAI site.

Forrester Eyeballs Agencies

Forrester has released a new report that includes findings on the interactive, strategic capabilities of Digitas, Razorfish, AKQA, R/GA, Draftfcb, OgilvyInteractive, Sapient Interactive, Rapp, Wunderman (ZAAZ), Organic, VML and Rosetta among others. Among overall recommendations, Forrester’s Sean Corcoran suggests the following to marketers who are managing agency relationships:

  • “Get your ship in order first” – Make sure you know what you want out of your digital strategy.
  • “Know the agency’s heritage” – Match what they do best with what you need.
  • “Set clear roles” – With multiple agencies, clearly define each agency’s unique role.

The trouble with this list is that it makes interactive sound like its a separate world. In fact, it needs to be considered as an important, integrated part of the marketing mix.

Dapper’s CPA Calculator

Paul Knegten, VP of Marketing, shared his CPA calculator with ClickZ. Learn more about it on the Dapper blog. You can calculate CPA Using CPM or calculate CPA Using CPC.


Top 5 Reasons Ad Networks Exist

Jay Weintraub breaks out his top five reasons that run of network plays continue to thrive. Among his points, Weintraub stresses the need for a Google Quality Score-type system but admits that “the factors impacting quality are fuzzier in display, especially because context plays less of a role. Recency and frequency aren’t factors in search.”

The Halo Effect of Ad Networks

After lamenting them in his first article, Michael Estrin lists the benefits of ad networks in his latest iMedia Connection article. Among his findings – the reason that the ad agency platform strategy has gained prominence this year: “Champagne at beer prices.”

Operating Outside of the Advertising Cloud

For many years now, Google’s most important revenue stream has been advertising. Technology Review’s G. Pascal Zachary looks at why Google is building an operating system, a potentially costly move that could drain profits and focus away from its ad business. Zachary says, “Technology is now moving away from the individualistic and toward the communal–toward the “cloud.” This seems like a very similar to the ethos shared by the ad exchange model: whether its publisher, advertiser or ad technology company – you will add value to your advertising partner to create value for you and your client. Perhaps we should consider the ad exchange model as the OS of a large part of advertising in the digital future?

Your Ads Maybe Selling Something Else

Adam Goldberg of ClearSaleing (AdExchanger.com Q&A) looks at creative in his opinion piece on Search Engine land and discovers “upwards of 48.38% percent of the time people end up buying a product different than the the one featured on ad they clicked on, and upwards of 11.28% of the time they bought a similar product, but not exactly the same product as the ad they clicked on.” Read more.

Arbitraging Life

Ben Casanocha notes that arbitrage isn’t just for ad networks – you can do it with your life, too. Wall Street financiers are flocking to Buenos Aires in order to maintain with their party lifestyle needs at half the price according to Casanocha.

Noting important recent events connected with consumer digital businesses such as the Microsoft/Yahoo! search deal, Jorge Espinel, former head of AOL Corporate Strategy and M&A, says on his SpectatorBytes blog that there are two ways to develop a long-term strategy in digital media:

  1. Create mechanisms to continuously assess the implications of disruptive innovation
  2. Adopt a flexible but clear “set of beliefs” to guide decision-making across the organization

Read more.

Blodget And Spitzer Together Again

Crazy. But, here they are in an interview created recently as former, New York state governor, Eliot Spitzer, slowly steps back into the public spotlight in an interview with Henry Blodget, a former Wall Street analyst whose career Spitzer ended as the Internet tech stock bubble of 2000/2001 burst. Click below to listen to the interview.

Spitzer and Blodget

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