AdSafe Adds Funds For Ad Verification; Marketo Adds Social For Marketing Automation

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Ad Verification Funds

AdSafe Media announced yesterday it has taken a new round of funding to the tune of $10 million. That brings the company’s total raise to $17.25 million according to Crunchbase. The release states that “the funding will be used to further expand its data science team and existing suite of solutions across RTB, mobile, video and viewability. AdSafe also has plans for global growth in 2012 with new offices and enhanced services to international partners.” Read more. Looking at the competitive set, DoubleVerify has raised $46.5 million to-date while comScore-owned AdXpose had raised over $20 million and changed business models to ad verification. Investors have liked the story about ad verifiers being the independent watchdog for ad spend. But the pressure is on to evolve the business model and its unique view on campaign performance could lead to new attribution or media mix modeling solutions, for example.

Cooperative Data

Echoing the strategy of Akamai’s Acerno – now Akamai’s Advertising Decision Systems – where a co-op of ecommerce retailers share each other’s data to target and retarget in-market shoppers, OwnerIQ says it will do something similar with Crutchfield and Chicago-area retailer Abt Electronics. According to the release, “The two retailers and a select number of their key manufacturer partners put their online data on the CoEx platform (OwnerIQ’s coop ad platform). The retailers then ran co-branded display ads targeted to consumers that had visited each of these manufacturers’ websites.” Read the release. And, Internet Retailer tells the story here.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation firm Marketo announced that it is taking its B2B CPA business and adding a social marketing module with its acquisition of Crowd Factory yesterday. “Now, marketers have a (…) solution that unifies Marketo’s broad platform for marketing automation, sales effectiveness, and analytical reporting with Crowd Factory’s platform for rapidly creating and deploying social campaigns like customer referrals or sweepstakes.” Cross-channel automation trend – check. Read it.

AdECN CEO’s Social Idea

According to GeekWire’s John Cook, former AdECN (the ad exchange bought by Microsoft in 2007) CEO William Urschel is gearing up for the launch later this year of a new social anayltics company. He hints at his Seattle-area company’s raison d’etre: “I can tell you that our goal with SocialForce is industrial-strength influencer marketing on a grand scale – way deeper than the social network scrapers like Klout and PeerIndex, or the link trackers like ShareThis and ClearSpring, or the influencer ad networks like RadiumOne or NetShelter, although we encompass elements of all of them.” Read more.

Searching The Display Funnel

On Marketing Land, Chango’s Dax Hamman follows several recent articles on search retargeting with his own take on the space, in particular “the four things you need to know about search retargeting.” Hamman writes, “Every form of display has its place, and search retargeting is no different. Many marketers get excited about the high ROIs they see and want to treat it as a direct response tool. Search retargeting is actually an effective way to fill the top of the funnel too and keep the awareness growing as each individual moves through the consideration process.” Read it.

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SSP Joins With Ad Servers

PubMatic says it’s letting other publisher-side ad servers tap its buy-side liquidity via its app marketplace known as PubLink. From the press release, “Through PubLink open APIs, PubMatic’s platform services are now available to several ad servers such as AdJuggler, Adzerk and Zedo. These companies can now extend PubMatic’s real-time bidding technology to the ad servers’ publisher clients.” Likewise, Adzerk discusses adding PubMatic to its adOS Marketplace on its company blog. Read it.

TV, Video Study

Video ad marketplace Adap.tv shares results from a recently-released Digiday study that it sponsored. The study asked respondents what they thought “video” should be more aligned with – “TV” or “Display”. TV was the winner 49% to 40% as online video in 2012 is increasingly thought of as a compliment to TV in comparison to the previous year. Read about it. And, then download the study.

About That Facebook Ad Network

With “Like” data pulsing from web publishers and through its own platform, Facebook’s data treasure trove awaits the key in the form of the Facebook ad network. Someday it will appear. But for now, Facebook head of ad products David Fishcher is saying “No” as he was asked yet again yesterday about the ad network’s potential arrival. Read more from his appearance at Ad Age Digital Conference.

You’re Appointed!