Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
RocketFuel Reports
According to a press release, privately-held ad network RocketFuel says that its revenues grew 10x in Q3 in comparison to the same quarter in 2009. In addition, “the company is profitable and has reached a $30 million run rate” with 65 employees – 3x the number of employees compared to last year. Read the release. Meanwhile, InterClick CEO Michael Katz, whose company is publicly-traded, commented on RocketFuel’s announcement in a tweet: “Why is rocketfuel reporting revenues these days? Why rpt revenue if u don’t have to, rpt all your #s if anything. Do it right or don’t do it.”
Specific Media Securing Inventory
Ad network Specific Media announced that it has signed aggreements “with ClassicCars.com, CarDomain.com and Zeroto60times.com to be the only third-party content provider approved to place ads throughout the publishers’ websites.” If you want to differentiate and you’re an ad network, exclusive direct-to-publisher relationships is one way to do it. Read more.
The New Video Boss
After its $65 million acquisition of video content distribution company 5min, Aol has now moved 5mins former CEO, Ran Harnevo, into a new exec role. All Things D’s Peter Kafka reports Harnevo “has now been named senior vice president of AOL Video, a unit that didn’t exist prior to the deal. Harnevo will report to AOL content boss David Eun.” And, all 5min employees are staying. Read more.
The perfect attribution model? The universal cookie? Brand safety? So many “Holy Grails” in advertising, so little time. Still, Andy Atherton of Brand.net claims his company is sipping from the online/offline Grail as he describes a couple of examples where online advertising is influencing offline shopping behavior. Read the Brand.net blog.
Beyond The Dial-Up
Aol’s one-year old venture arm, Aol Ventures, is featured in an article in The Observer as Aol looks to shed its outdated “dial-up” image by networking and providing resources such as meeting space to New York City’s tech community. Technologist Paul Dix tells the Observer that Aol Ventures’ Mike Brown has been instrumental in building a bridge to this valuable community and adds, “At this point, the people who are holding most of the cards as far as early-stage start-ups go are the people who can actually build, so if he knows all the builders beforehand, he can get early deal flow and find out which things he should be investing in for AOL Ventures.” Read more.
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Advertising With Advertisers
So here’s the story of an advertiser as a publisher making way for other advertisers… Yahtzee! According to ClickZ, The Mattel Digital Network is building or re-configuring its network of branded sites with advertisers in mind as it has hired agency Huge to create the plan for advertisers. “Huge’s audience monetization division analyzes sites from the back end to identify the best opportunities for advertiser integration, as well as problem areas. Approaching from the advertiser perspective, the agency will work with them to create brand-specific campaigns.” Read more from ClickZ’s Susan Kuchinskas.
Back Office Rumble
Joe Mandese of MediaPost says that MediaBank may be on the verge of keeping VivaKi’s back office business – or not. Donovan Data Systems is in the mix, too. The decision is expected Monday as Mandese adds, “Both MediaBank and Donovan claim to have developed more state-of-the-art digital data-processing systems, and all eyes will be on VivaKi’s decision to see if it validates one or the other’s claim.” Read more.
Agencies And RFPs
On AdWeek, Zana Tomich argues that agencies have the right to negotiate before they respond to a request-for-proposal (RFP) for a client especially as some “clients” have been notorious about just soliciting to see what ideas they’ll get – but won’t ever hire a particular agency. Read more on agency challenges. She even suggests the agency copyrights ideas in order to protect itself against theft. Insanity!
More Trust & Safety
From Yahoo!’s Right Media blog comes Part II in RMX’s Trust & Safety series called “Seller Protections + Controls.” Nilesh Zacharias, RMX platform policy director, lays out the full suite of controls of what he says the Right Media Exchange offers publishers. Among the tools – The Creative Tester which “simulates an impression, loads the creative, and records the technical attributes detected during the creative load. When Creative Tester detects a violation, it flags the creative with the attributes that triggered the violation” and more.Read it.
JIT Needs RTB
ILA (I Love Acronyms). The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday entitled “The Just-In-Time (JIT) Consumer” as consumers appear to not be hoarding like they used to and instead prefer to buy what they need, when they need it and keeping cash available. From here, real-time targeting becomes even more important to the marketer in order to reach the JIT consumer. Read more from the WSJ.
Stratified Bidding
Following up on last week’s MediaPost article, on ClickZ Turn CTO and one man PR machine Xuhui Shao looks at the pitfalls of “cookie bombing” (spray and pray) as well as the effective use real-time bidding across sub-segments of an audience – or stratified bidding – to achieve an improved ROI. As the Turn company blog reiterates, “quality and content do matter.” Read more.
Too Much Kool-Aid
From the Altos Ventures blog, Anthony Lee warns start-up entrepreneurs to not drink your own kool-aid as “One of the most important and overlooked characteristics of successful entrepreneurs is objectivity: the ability to see and deal with reality in making decisions.” He offers three signs of losing touch with all-important reality include: illusion; hope; and spin. Read about the “signs.”
But, Wait. There’s More!
- Local.com Offers a Game-Changing Way to Shop and Save for the Holidays – press release
- Will Location-Based Services Ever Go Mainstream? – GigaOm
