Fiksu Funds For Mobile App Marketing; FTC On Frequency Caps; GM And Facebook Talking

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Mo’ Money Mobile

It’s a ‘funding-a-day’ in ad tech! On Tuesday, mobile app marketing platform Fiksu announced it has added $10 million ($17.8 mil total) in new funds to its coffers. Read the release – which gives a pretty good sense of how Fiksu plans to differentiate itself as it heads off into European and APAC markets. Also of note: mobile device company Qualcomm is putting its venture arm’s funds to work in Fiksu. The lines are blurring between devices, telecom and ad tech products and services. Read the Feb. ’12 AdExchanger Q&A with Fiksu CEO Micah Adler.

Airtight Frequency Caps

In a post on the FTC’s tech blog, the agency’s CTO Ed Felton suggests methods of frequency capping that are more privacy-friendly than storing ad and website data linked to third party cookies. One of these pitches server-side cryptography to mask userIDs. “Rather than using the pseudonymous userID as a key for storing and retrieving the frequency counts, the ad network can hash the userID together with the advertiser’s campaignID and use the resulting value as the storage key.” Read more.

Google-Verified Ads

Is Google trying to drink the ad verification milkshake? A birdie tells AdWeek’s Tim Peterson that the company is baking the capability into the DFA suite and may roll it out by end of summer. DoubleVerify CEO Oren Netzer offers this positive spin: “It’s our belief that every impression is going to be verified in the near future, whether it’s two or three years down the road. Google releasing a product is a big testament to that.” Read more.

GM’s Facebook Ads

The Wall Street Journal reports (subscription) that General Motors is “in talks” to have GM advertise through Facebook paid ads again after GM famously said that it would not do so just as Facebook’s IPO was underway. Reuters adds, “Although the two companies remain far from reaching an agreement, Facebook executives have assiduously courted the world’s largest carmaker. One source said Facebook was not pushing for GM’s immediate return, but offered to provide data showing the effectiveness of [Facebook’s] paid ads.” Read more.

Buy Or Hold?

Interpublic Group was one of the earliest marketing services companies to recognize the potential of Facebook, investing a relatively small $5 million in the social network in 2006. There appears to be a dispute over how much the ad holding company has benefited from that stake. Mediapost’s Joe Mandese reports that IPG is denying a claim made in former executive’s suit that it sold the remainder of its shares in Facebook following the social network’s initial public offering in May. The executive, Ray Volpe, says he deserves about $381 million from IPG helping steer the company to make the 2006 investment.

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Always On Display And Facebook

On ExchangeWire, Wayne Blodwell of Universal McCann argues that display is an Always On channel, “We’re at the point now where everyone understands that in the world where display needs to perform on a last-click basis that retargeting is the most successful strategy (rightly or wrongly). If an advertiser were to remain ‘Always On’ through the year, they would be able to grow the retargeting cookie pool consistently by finding new users with their prospecting strategies, and retarget them…” Read more. Meanwhile on AdMonsters, Adaptly CEO Nikhil Sethi argues Facebook should be “always on,” too: “The overarching power of Facebook lies not just in the pure ability to serve a highly targeted impression to an individual, but also to retain that person within a social environment and communicate with them on a consistent, ‘Always On’ basis via rich, compelling content.” Read that one.

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