Another Acquisition: comScore Buys AdXpose; Nielsen GRPs Coming To A Media Plan Near You

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

More M&A Momentum

Media metrics company comScore announced yesterday the acquisition of AdXpose, one of several ad verification companies in the ad tech ecosystem. Read the release. The acquisition cost of $22 million roughly equals the amount of capital invested in AdXpose, which was formerly Mpire, which owned a product called WidgetBucks. The Seattle Times Brier Dudley talks to AdXpose Founder and CTO Greg Harrison who said that though there were “a couple pivots here and there, (…) The migration from the WidgetBucks world where we were instrumenting and monetizing advertising data led to the core technologies that are now the underpinnings of AdXpose and that is what has taken off.” Read more. And, read about it on TechCrunch. The ecosystem is starting to shrink – just a little.

GRPs – Ready Or Not

Here come Gross Rating Points (GRPs) to your media plans – potentially. In an effort to make the Web more friendly to those TV brand dollars, Nielsen has an initiative underway to tie the Web and TV together through every TV marketer’s favorite system – GRPs. ClickZ’s Christopher Heine reports, “The Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings service, currently under testing by 80 brands, will be available on Aug. 15. The new metrics service is designed to measure online campaigns with data from across the web, Facebook, and TV.” Read more.

Looking For Mr. Bloomberg Terminal

From his Google+ outpost, kbs+p’s Darren Herman is looking for the Bloomberg Terminal for digital ads. He writes, “I play out a scenario in which Advertising Traders have multiple screens on their desk, similar to a Bloomberg Terminal in which software is running showing the market dynamics and pricing. This Bloomberg For Advertising will show specific marketplace pricing (AdX, RMX, Rubicon, etc) indexes, demand volume, specific data asset pricing & demand (3rd party data), and the like.” I can see that as my desktop widget. Read more.

RTB Standards, Please

In the second of his two-part, real-time bidding piece on the Brand.net blog, Madhu Vudali says, among other things, that there remains a need for a standardization of the real-time bidding (RTB) protocol for digital ad auctions. He writes, “For all the talk of RTB and efficiencies, the one thing that gets glossed over is that every RTB source has created its own proprietary RTB protocol. (….) For the agency trading desk or a media buyer that is using ‘manual RTB’ via a DSP or Exchange UI, this may not matter. However, if we want to scale, the lack of a standard RTB protocol creates unnecessary hassles.” Read more.

Adding To The Networks

DoubleVerify says it has a new product for ad networks and demand-side platforms called “Navigator” which “provides insight on publishers that are in the process of being added to a network or a platform’s business.” Sort of an automated whitelist which manages impression delivery against brand safety requirements. Read more.

More ATD Talk

On DIGIDAY, Zach Coelius picks up his thread from a July OMMA AdNets panel on agency trading desks (ATDs). He thinks there’s a conflict of interest with the ATD model and concludes, “At the end of the day, the real question is where we go from here. The answer to that question appears to hinge around the fundamental change that technology is causing to the entire business of advertising.” Read more.

Social Ad Pulse

Adapt.ly CEO Nikhil Sethi (AdExchanger.com Q&A, Aug. 2010) is featured in a Forbes blog article on entrepreneurs who got their start in college and just kept cranking. Sethi’s company, which aggregates social advertising systems into one, is apparently also beginning to crank out the revenues as Forbes says, “He won’t reveal profits but Sethi projects 2011 revenues of at least $10 million, with explosive quarter-over-quarter growth of 70%.” Read more.

Mobile Targeting

TARGUSinfo announced a new deal with Collider Media aimed at the mobile ad sector. According to the release, “The partnership marks the first time a mobile marketing platform will utilize the strength of AdAdvisor verified offline data.” Audience meeting mobility is the goal here. Read more.

But Wait. There’s More!