Invite Media 2.0 Leaves Beta; Facebook Exchange Reviewed

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DoubleClick Bid Manager Leaves Beta

Google is taking the wraps off the next rev of its demand side platform. DoubleClick Bid Manager, formerly Invite Media, has come out of beta and is now available globally in over 40 countries. Internal usability studies “show that it takes 18% less time to carry out common tasks in DoubleClick Bid Manager, as compared to Invite Media.” See the blog post – with a video from the product crew. On the PR front, once again, Google is making an effort to highlight their product team members and have them tell the story, rather than just Neal Mohan (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Tag Manager, Ad Verification and now Bid Manager PR efforts all highlight the teams. The message is being sent to current and potential clients, “We gotta lotta product guns here. Innovation here we come.”

FBX In Review

In a note to investors, BMO Capital Markets Internet analyst Dan Salmon lists the takeaways from a roundtable discussion last Friday (and prior to this week’s FB earnings) on Facebook Exchange (FBX) with Rocket Fuel’s Eric Porres and Peter Bardwick and x+1’s Ted Shergalis. Salmon’s key takeaways from the discussion: “1) FBX revenue is unlikely to be material in 3Q12 and 4Q12 2) … panelists thought that FBX should eventually overtake Premium and Marketplace as the dominant sales channel; 3) although they were clear they are privy to no imminent changes, the panelists suggested that cookie matching is a possible next step for FBX … 4) low prices, guaranteed viewability and brand appropriateness were cited as key advantages of FBX; and 5) … advertisers are no longer buying ads to drive the number of ‘likes’ for their brand pages, but instead focusing on ROI metrics.”

Video Links

In addition to developing its mobile marketing, LinkedIn is now expanding its video ad serving offerings. Video ads will appear in standard 300×250 ad units across LinkedIn’s pages and will compete for impressions similar to how traditional text and image ad formats do, says LinkedIn marketing solutions exec Will Hambly on the professional social network’s blog. Read it. “With LinkedIn Ads you can control your costs, pay per view or click, and stop your campaign at any time,” Hambly adds, noting that the videos are also seamlessly linked to YouTube as well.

The List

If you haven’t seen comScore’s list of top ad networks (pay for play), things have gotten more creative as now there’s a new section titled “Syndicated Ad Focus Entities” for players like ShareThis, Outbrain, Glam and Federated Media which shows their reach as measured by comScore. See the rankings for September (PDF).

The Big Data Economy

With unemployment rates hovering just below 8 percent, there is at least one bright spot in these dismal times, and Mediapost’s Laurie Sullivan cites a Gartner study that says there’s plenty of work in Big Data. By 2015, Big Data will have generated 1.9 million tech jobs in the U.S. Read more. Meanwhile, Gurbaksh Chahal, a high school dropout and founder of ad net Blue Lithium and social marketer RadiumOne, advises young people to skip education and just start a business. “There’s an art to entrepreneurship,” Chahal tells CNBC. “You don’t necessarily need an education for it. You just have to be able to learn and apply the creative juices that come to you.”

Ad Tech Industrial Complex

Upstream’s Doug Weaver is warning of a menace to publishers: the Ad Tech Industrial Complex. Lulled by the promise of greater efficiency, publishers have given up control of their sales to ad tech firms who do nothing more than reduce friction and cost, Weaver says in his company’s blog, “No company or industry ever saved its way into massive growth.” He adds, “So the publisher and sales leader are still scratching their heads and asking, ‘Is that all there is?’” Read more.

Facebook’s 5X Rule

Question: What does advertising on Facebook get you, versus purely organic content distribution? Answer: Five times the reach, according to comScore. The researcher finds, “In a selection of the 100 top brand Pages on Facebook (selected for having large fan bases and high levels of organic reach), those Pages using paid media reached 5.4 times more people on average than those who did not use paid media.” Read more.

But Wait. There’s More!