Native Scale; Standardizing Mobile

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Native Scale

The native advertising buzz continues to vibrate. In Ad Age, Alex Kantrowitz identifies six top native ad networks and outlines their attributes in a feature piece. The list includes BuzzFeed, Nativo and more. The Media Kitchen’s chief digital officer and venture maven, Darren Herman, offers, “To be completely native, you must match the user experience of each individual publisher deploying the technology, so in essence, native advertising does not scale.” Read it.

Standardizing Mobile

Mobile advertising is still fairly new, but it’s quickly moving toward standardization. The IAB’s Joe Laszlo gives a quick overview on ClickZ of three ways the industry is defragmenting, including creative standards, MRAID (Mobile Rich-Media Ad Interface Definitions) and HTML5. The common thread is that marketers need to be educated on what the labels mean and when each should be used. Read more.

VCs As Agencies And Publishers

Marketers are becoming publishers and vice versa. On PandoDaily, Erin Griffith extends the theme and covers the evolution of venture capital and how much cheaper it is to start a company these days than it used to be. Consider that there are many more potential investors in startups — both seed stage and VC. How are investors differentiating? They’re becoming publishers and agencies. “Good founders can get capital anywhere. So they’re choosing the firms that will help them the most. That’s why some VC firms, like Andreessen Horowitz, have adopted agency-like models, where they provide in-house PR, marketing and recruiting. Others, like First Round, are building a community-driven platform that allow its portfolio companies to share knowledge and help each other.” Read more.

Privacy International

GigaOM’s David Meyer sat down with Dr. Alexander Dix, Berlin Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, Germany, to discuss the way privacy is handled in the U.S. and Europe. There is a tension between seemingly looser privacy regulation in the U.S. and the strict data-collection policies of Europe, especially Germany. There is hope for a compromise, though, says Businessweek.

Shopify Everything

Shopify introduced a new system to marry its online storefront service with a brick-and-mortar POS system, TechCrunch reported. The company is stepping firmly into both ecommerce and physical retail by offering payment processing at competitive pricing as well as this new iPad-driven point-of-sale service. “Overwhelmingly, what people needed was something that allowed them to run their physical store, and run their online store, and allowed them to accept payments, and we thought, ‘Well, we can do all these things, ’” said Shopify VP of Product Adam McNamara. As retailers embrace showrooming, and with Shopify sitting comfortably between online and offline, there could be an opportunity for retailers to collect enough data to reach the cross-channel holy grail. Read more.

Extending Identity

Facebook announced to game developers that it was modifying its SDK so that “core” and “mid-core” gamers (think 3D games) on Facebook get a more “social” experience using the Unity game engine – whether accessing through the Web or mobile. In other words, gaming audiences could get even more addressable. According to Facebook’s developer blog, the “new cross-platform SDK (…) makes it faster and easier to integrate your Unity game with Facebook. Whether you’re building on iOS, Android, Web or all three, the SDK lets you continue to write in C# and provide social game experiences to all your players, regardless of the platform they play on.” Read more.

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