Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Display Featured At SMX East
An SMX East display/search ad panel featuring representatives from Yahoo!’s Right Media Exchange, Did-It, iProspect and ComScore tried to make the display case for search engine marketers who were not attending the more popular social media panel going on at the same time yesterday.
It’s obvious that there is a HUGE gap between what search marketers know about the display space and the potential of the opportunity ahead. And for starters, they’re going to need to understand the importance of attribution models that take into account display’s demand generation (as in view-through conversions) and its inevitable drive to search’s demand fulfillment. No one in the room seemed to understand this except the panelists. They will someday and, hopefully, this will not preclude SMX from offering a similar panel at their next event. The SEM industry needs education about the complex world of display as they look to scale their business.
It was interesting that the main pitch to search marketers was retargeting not audience buying like it is for the agencies – meaning “Cookie the users who come in to your paid search landing pages or through your client’s website and then retarget them through supply sources such as ad exchanges.” Moderator Greg Sterling was rightly convinced that this was a LOT of info for the group that was gathered to listen to the display/search panel. But, you gotta start somewhere.
AdExchanger.com remains intrigued by the search retargeting (and its performance) that Yahoo! offers for keyword phrases input into its search engine by users. According to Right Media Exchanger, Megan Pagliuca, the Yahoo! media team currently builds custom categories that include relevant keyword phrases for a marketer’s campaign goal. To be clear, the retargeting product is not about retargeting a user’s behavior which could potentially be understood by the search engine through the steady collection of keyword phrases input by any one particular user over time. In the past, AdExchanger.com has pointed out that this is yet another “Holy Grail” that Google likely wants to get into – search retargeting – but has held off likely due to the uproar around privacy.
Read more on the event from Jacob Ross on the Right Media Exchange blog.
Rubicon Project Gets REVVed
Rubicon Project announced its new platform for large publishers aimed at making the most out of their unsold inventory. Called REVV, part of the new technology comes from last month’s acquisition of Others Online according to the Company. Joe Mandese at MediaPost tosses a bouquet with the news saying that Rubicon Project is “The Google Of Online Display.” Read more from Mandese. Read the release here.
New White Paper On Display
The strategic consulting firm affiliated with investment bank Petsky Prunier, Winterberry Group, released a white paper called, “The Data-Driven Web–Targeting & The Evolution of Online Display Advertising.” Bruce Biegel, Managing Director of Winterberry Group, told AdExchanger.com that the impetus for the educational piece was the momentum currently being seen in the ad industry. Biegel said, “As we dove deeper into the display market and how to make it more effective for our clients including marketers, agencies, publishers and data providers, what we saw was a need to make display more “steerable” – similar to the way the offline direct marketing world is used to executing via data and segmentation.” Download the PDF here (registration required).
Media6 Gets Googler for CEO Role
An executive from Google’s search and analytics team, Tom Phillips, has take over the chief executive role at Media6Degrees from Joe Doran after a year. Doran will stay on to serve on the board as well as work on business development. Read more from Brian Morrissey at MediaWeek.
PubMatic Gets Huffington Post
In advance of its Ad Revenue 2009 conference today, PubMatic announced that it has started provided yield optimization services to page-generating machine, The Huffington Post. According to the release, “PubMatic was selected by The Huffington Post as a partner after the site conducted a trial of PubMatic’s technology.” Read more.
Zimbalist On Demand-Side Ad Networks
The New York Times’ VP of R&D, Michael Zimbalist, breaks down the demand-side ad networks for the publisher and concludes that its a good thing for the online publishing community and suggests that it is possible “at long last, audience truly becomes the basis for both planning and buying online.” Zimbalist is one of the few from the media publishing side that seems to understand the demand-side’s shifting landscape and its potential opportunity for pubs. Publishers: get with it and read this post.
WPP Re-Addressing DTV
WPP Group’s GroupM announced that it has expanded its “Advanced Television System” buying platform to include Tidal TV as another competitor in demand-side yield optimization takes a foothold in digital TV. Given that WPP is also an investor in Visible World, it appears that it’s hedging its bets for targeted digital TV advertising with the Tidal TV partnership. Read the release.
More Ad Networks, Not Less: Magazines
Ad networks are the bad boys of advertising – and everyone seems to want to be a bad boy. The magazine publishers are the latest to join the ad network fray according to Nat Ives of Ad Age as uncovers magazine publishers unholy plot to disintermediate the ad networks that are “killing” them. This would seem to be a bad move for any publisher with more valuable audience – from a demand-side audience buying perspective – than other member ad network members. Read more.
On Cross-Channel Promos And Privacy
From the Canadian Business Journal, writer Joe Castaldo looks at the difficulty of understanding effective for each tactic within a cross-channel promotion still presents significant challenges to marketers. When the writer raises about concerns some have regarding privacy online, x+1’s John Nardone responds succinctly, “Whenever I read about these fears that we’re going to infer everything about people I just go, ‘Oh, God. If only it were that easy.'” Read more.
If Your Company Has 5-10 Employees…
… then Google wants you. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at a New York City news conference yesterday regarding “one per month” acquisitions according to All Things D’s Peter Kafka who (impressively) live-blogged the event, “(One acquisition per month) has been our historic pattern. I think we will be buying small companies–five, ten people. That’s where some of our best stuff has been.” Read the entire event’s transcription.
Know Your Incentive Marketing Landscape
Leadscon empresario and blogger, Jay Weintraub, looks at the world of incentive marketing which includes the virtual currency systems that are all the rage in social gaming. It’s a nice overview that covers Loyalty Programs, Promotional Offer / Reg Path, Get Paid to Try (GPT), Micro-payments / Virtual Currency, and Macro-payments / Alternative Payments. Read it.
