Campbell-Mithun's Trading Desk; Automating Sponsorships

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The Trading Desk Evolution

Companies like Interpublic’s Campbell-Mithun are cutting out what they see as middlemen – agency trading desks – and building their own digital trading operations, reports Ad Age’s Alexandra Bruell. Bringing the trading desks in-house is “about an evolution from a lot of third-party data to really deep integration with first-party data,” Chris Wexler, director of media strategy and interactive for Compass Point Media (Campbell-Mithun’s media buying and planning group), tells Bruell. “This is the way media buying and selling is going. Offloading this capability long-term isn’t the right strategy.” Read the rest.

Pre-Acquisition Spree

Singtel, which acquired mobile ad firm Amobee in March, 2012, is gearing up for an acquisition spree. ZDnet’s Ryan Huang writes, “Amid rising pressure on its growth, SingTel has outlined a transformation strategy which includes allocating up to S$2 billion (US$1.6 billion) over the next three years to pursue strategic acquisitions in the digital space.” Read more.

Walmart Goes Shopping

Not to be left out of the acqui-hire race, @WalmartLabs (Walmart’s technology arm) is ramping up its cloud and software services through two new acquisitions: OneOps and Tasty Labs. The startup OneOps comes with a Platform-as-a-Service capability that will enable the company to “significantly accelerate our PaaS and Private Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service strategies,” writes WalmartLabs CTO Jeremy King in a blog post. Tasty Labs, which develops social media platforms, was founded by an ex-Googler, a former Mozillian, and the founder of the social bookmarking site Delicious. Read more.

Addressing The Grad

PubMatic’s Kirk McDonald has inspired a range of reactions to his Wall Street Journal op-ed last week (subscription) which challenged college grads to get with the “programming.” From his Upstream Group blog, Doug Weaver agrees with McDonald: “Code is the core staple of today’s digital food supply. It’s time we all got a lot closer to what we’re eating every day.” Read more. On Digiday, Yieldbot’s Jonathan Mendez says “no” to programming and suggests grads “learn about where this industry came from, where it is headed and how success is measured for all its constituents. If you can articulate that well in your first job interviews…” Read more

Automating Sponsorships

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Can I Help You Find Something?; The Streaming Fortress Prison

Maker Studios has secret plans to automate the monetization of original YouTube programming, or that’s how it sounds from this quote CEO Ynon Kreiz shared with AdWeek: “We want to create…tools that will [offer] reliable data, the ability to optimize the way we commercialize our content. I don’t want to say too much but we have new products coming that complement what YouTube is doing.” Can you RTB-enable a video show sponsorship? Read it.

ChartBeat For Ads

Betaworks spin-off ChartBeat has made a name for itself measuring user engagement with publisher content, as expressed through mouse gestures, typing and scrolling. It’s now porting those tools from editorial over to sales. Pando Daily reports, “The dashboard suggests sales opportunities to users in real-time based on the size of the engaged audience.” More.

Inner Life Of Banners

Ahead of its CM Summit next week, Federated Media is touting its “Behind the Banner” project. The company has created a data visualization tool that aims to provide a clearer understanding of how the ad tech space works in real-time. An interactive demo walks viewers through the process of an ad being served on websites like NYTimes.com. “I’m a fan of Terry Kawaja and his LUMAscapes – Terry was an advisor to us as we iterated this project,” said FM CEO John Battelle in a blog post. “But I’ve always been a bit mystified by those diagrams…My goal with Behind the Banner was to demystify the 200 or so milliseconds driving each ad impression…” Read the release.

Grounded Air

Google’s efforts to expand its streaming music ambitions and challenge Spotify appears ready to take off, reports the NYT’s Ben Sisario (Read it). But elsewhere Google is pulling back, namely on its nearly decade-old plan to enter the data-rich, airline reservations business. Skift’s Dennis Schaal reports that Google is “discontinuing the Passenger Services System (PSS) for airlines” in order to free up resources to focus on other travel solutions for users and partners such as Google Flight Search and Hotel Finder, and ITA’s QPX software suite, the company said in a statement. Read more.

But Wait, There’s More!