Chasing The Revenue; Global Viewability

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Chasing The Revenue

Millennial Media’s Q4 revenue leaped an initially impressive 68%, but compared to previous quarter’s 88% surge, investors and observers are feeling a little disappointed at the growth prospects for the mobile ad network now that it appears to be facing stronger competition. Chief Executive Paul Palmieri pinned the revenue stall on a decision to avoid business that pays out regardless of whether consumers end up using an app, which he described as a short term strategy for competitors: “Ultimately, the receiver of that download, of that incremental download, isn’t really getting anything. This is fool’s gold, and there are a few companies that are pursuing this strategy, mostly smaller companies.” Read the earnings transcript from Seeking Alpha for details. In the meantime, Millennial made it official and put out a press release regarding its acquisition of mobile media buying and RTB targeting platform Metaresolver. Read the release.

Global Viewability

Matt Drury, head of interaction for global solutions at MEC Singapore, tells Campaign Asia-Pacific that viewability of ads can differ by region. He says, “The size of the problem varies from market to market, but it’s usually worse where digital is less developed and there are fewer guidelines on publishing.” Read more. Viewability goes global.

A Newish Yahoo

Portals may be considered dinosaurs to media industry professionals in the age of Facebook and Twitter, but millions of people still visit Yahoo and AOL every month. Give it up to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who has written a blog post touting the “new Yahoo” aimed at mobile and tablet users and the advertisers who covet them. Apart from that, Mayer was short on specifics: “Over the coming months, we’ll continue to make changes and improvements, so today is just the beginning.” Read the rest.

Programmatic’s ‘Premium’ Problem

Talk of “programmatic premium” is getting louder these days, but it’s not necessarily becoming clearer. At least for publishers, says Undertone co-founder Eric Franchi in a series of blog posts. Writing on Digiday, he says, “The reality is that advertisers want to target audiences, optimize for performance, ensure viewability rates, pause campaigns and shift budgets to different channels for many reasons that don’t reveal themselves until a campaign goes live. To date, the champions of programmatic guaranteed have failed to address this fundamental issue, which, at the end of the day, leaves publishers with little progress toward their end goals of higher revenue and CPMs.” Read more. Elsewhere, on his own blog, he suggests thinking “about time (and units of time) as a native digital concept.” Read it.

Mobile Ad Alignment

Sprint is partnering with Telefónica to create a mobile advertising alliance intended to reach more than 370 million mobile customers across the United States, Europe and Latin America with targeted advertising. The effort is centered on Telefónica Digital, the interactive arm of Telefónica, and Sprint’s Pinsight Media+. Read the release. On that note, Rubicon Project’s Jay Sears says there are seven steps to making mobile display successful. Read ‘em.

Imagine More Data

DMPs and DSPs still leak data, writes Dax Hamman in a piece on Search Engine Land. Not only that, they “force buying decisions to be made on data that is out of date.” The solution? Even more data, and better cross-referencing of datapoints. “Imagine as a marketer, being able to know when one of your customers is in a taxicab, and whether they opened your latest email before they got in it, whether they have bought from you recently and whether they are due to go on vacation soon.” More.

Tracking Spend

On loyalty marketing news site Loyalty 360, Phillip Britt offers a profile of Caesar’s Entertainment and how they’re unlocking “big data.” From the article: “The company has gone from being able to trace 58 percent of money spent with the company down to the customer level in 2004 to being able to trace 85 percent of the money spent today. That provides Caesars with unique insights into customer behavior.” And then they can personalize messaging. Read more.

Reserve Price

The Right Media blog has been running full-tilt (relatively) lately. Yesterday’s subject was setting a reserve price for the sale of display ad inventory. It’s not so easy says the author: “Like many other disciplines, setting the optimal reserve prices at different levels is both an art and a science, so you shouldn’t expect to have all of the nuances nailed right from the start.” Read more. Art and science FTW.

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