Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
UK’s Mobile Ad Rocket
Mobile ad spend is hitting warp speed in the UK as a new report reveals triple digit growth. The Guardian reports, “Breakneck growth is continuing in the second half – fuelled by the popularity of Apple and Google’s app stores as smartphone ownership nears 60% of the UK’s adult population – with forecasts putting UK mobile spend at as much as £511m for the full year. In 2011, the IAB put mobile ad spend at £203m.” Read more.
More on Facebook Verticals
Facebook has added sales & marketing staff in a number of vertical categories. Brittany Darwell of InsideFacebook observes job postings have included retail, e-commerce, automotive, CPG/beverage, entertainment, travel, mobile/finance, tech/socialcom and gaming over the past year. “Facebook aspires to play an advisory role for brands and other advertisers so it needs to understand the objectives in each market.” Read more.
Client Goes Direct
Client and agency roles continue their shift. On Digiday, Kellogg’s Aaron Fetters talks about how they go right to the vendor with their requirements for analytics. No agency here. Fetters: “We will do our best to give requirements like what our business objectives are from an analytics standpoint. Then, we will reach out to the industry and understand what we can get out of a partnership. That’s how we treat it, as a partnership, and not just a vendor. We’d like to work with someone we can learn from, someone who can let us influence the direction of their product. We want a two-way commitment.” Read more.
Dynamic FBX Creative
Adweek covers the increasing use of dynamic creative on Facebook Exchange. “Starting last month, AdRoll has been trialing dynamic creative with a handful of clients and alternating the dynamic creative equally with static ads. Since then, AdRoll has seen, on average, a 102 percent higher clickthrough rate (CTR) than the static ads, said Berke. Since FBX ads are bought on a cost-per-thousand-impressions basis, the dynamic ads cut advertisers’ cost per click in half, he said.” Read more.
Trading Standards
VivaKi Nerve Center’s Marco Bertozzi wonders aloud on his personal blog regarding who’s responsible for making sure ads run in the right places. He writes, “So bearing in mind that the Police think the advertiser should take responsibility, the advertiser thinks the agency should, the agency thinks the Trading Desk should and the Trading Desk thinks the suppliers of inventory should we have a beautiful example of sequential liability (without all the legal jumbo jumbo!) – I took a decision.” Read it.
Planet Of The Ad Tech
On his Upstream Group blog, Doug Weaver wades in with a “premium” point-of-view on ad tech while impressively tieing in a reference to Planet of The Apes. Weaver chides towards the close, “In the end, who is really served by an industry built on infinite cheap impressions and endless levels of commodity management, optimization and targeting? It’s not the marketers, agencies or publishers. It’s really just the speculators. And when the air finally comes out of the ad-tech bubble, how many of those speculators will still be engaged in the hard work of building an industry with us?” Thousands! Read more.
Datalogix Scrutiny
In the wake of Datalogix’s PR-tastic pairing with Facebook (AdExchanger summary), the two companies are getting some unwanted attention from U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller. As ClickZ’s Kate Kaye reports, Rockefeller wants to know what data they collect and how it’s used. The letter also went to Acxiom, Epsilon, Equifax, Experian, Rapleaf, and others. absent from the list are firms doing essentially the same thing Datalogix is enabling for voter files that support political campaigns. Read more.
Backup GIF, Please
On AdMonsters, Maria Tucker explores the backup GIF. Rememeber those pesky little backups to the flash units? Well, there still in play, in fact they’re growing in use. She writes, “This uptick in backup .gifs can be directly attributed to the explosion of mobile device use. According to Marcus Pratt, Director of Insights and Technology at Mediasmith, because of this increase in mobile and tablet browsing, ‘impressions served to devices without flash can be 10% or higher for some campaigns.'” Read more.
But Wait. There’s More!
- What’s a Facebook Follower Worth? (subscription) – The Wall Street Journal
- Convertro Releases Attribution Solution to Encompass Paid, Owned and Earned Media – press release
- Experian Marketing Services Announces Expanded Facebook Advertising Integration – press release
- Digital grabs greater share after global ad spending passes half-trillion mark – eMarketer
- Search Retargeting Adoption To Accelerate Among Brands And Agencies – Marketing Land
- Widening Scrutiny of Google’s Smartphone Patents – The New York Times
- Report: Google Seeks To Avoid EU’s Antitrust Wrath By “Labeling” Its Own Services – Search Engine Land
- 8 Ways Marketers Can Profit From Big Data Investments – Information Week
- Turn Partners With Audience Service and Simple Agency to Grow in Italy – press releases