YuMe's New Strategic Investor; Big Ads! - The Network

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Getting Strategic With Video

YuMe has received a cool, strategic $12 million investment from a group that includes Samsung Ventures among others as YuMe appears to be clearly warming to the role of solutions provider for the connected TV future – in addition to its PC-based, online ad network capabilties. Read the release. It’s an interesting conundrum for video ad networks – you don’t want to be positioning too early to the connected TV party. And of course you don’t want to be too late. For example, in discussing a what you might call a subset of connected TV – addressable TV – TidalTV’s Scott Ferber told AdExchanger.com earlier this year, “Strangely enough, we built our capabilities for [addressable TV] first. So, actually, in a weird way, it’s the greatest application of our technology, the addressable television. It’s the least volume part of our business. How’s that for an ironic statement?” Part of what’s driving this move to connected TV appears to be device manufacturers getting in the game such as LG which announced a partnership with YuMe a couple of weeks ago (TVexchanger.com Q&A) and, of course, YuMe’s new strategic Samsung among others.

Garlinghouse To Exit

The Business Insider reports that Brad Garlinghouse will be leaving Aol where he has been “President of the Applications and Commerce Group and head of AOL’s Silicon Valley operations.” Sources tell TBI that Garlinghouse “was frustrated that AOL has been reduced to playing defense and is not paying attention to some of the great product work his team was doing out on the West Coast, particularly its mobile products.” Read more. It’s not the first time Garlinghouse has been frustrated with management. He wrote the 2006 classic email “The Peanut Butter Manifesto” while at Yahoo!. Read about the good ole days.

“Big Ad” Network

Martini Media has reached out to 1,000 or so niche lifestyle and business websites with new rich media ad units. (Is AdExchanger.com a lifestyle site? Think about it.) Folio covers the announcement and says, “The program kicks off with the threefold Portrait (a 300 x 1050 unit that permits advertisers use high quality ads) introduced by Internet Advertising Bureau and Pictela.” Read a bit more about the “big ads” ad network.

Discovery Intent

On the Yieldbot blog, Jonathan Mendez takes issue with comments in a Wired article involving Twitter’s Jack Dorsey where Dorsey suggested that, among other things, following users through Twitter is equivalent to showing intent. Mendez instead sees Twitter’s strength in what he calls “discovery intent” and explains, “Discovering more about what you’re interested in has always been Twitter’s greatest strength. It leverages both user-defined inputs and the rich content streams where context and realtime matching can occur. Just like Search.” Read more.

Video Uniques

Nielsen says that video minutes viewed online are still increasing rapidly but the number of viewers aren’t. Why? Nielsen’s Joe Holz explains, “The greater increase in time spent viewing compared to the number of unique viewers is likely due to an increase in the amount of video content available for viewers to watch, especially long-form content like movies and TV shows on sites like Netflix and Hulu.” See the pretty graphs.

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From Creators To Haters; BidSwitch Says ‘No More Free Scrapes’

Tracking Exchanges

As part of its Digital Strategy Supplement, UK-based trade mag Marketing Week looks at, well, digital strategy including one of the most popular opinion piece subjects of all time – the last click – which leads to a discussion of attribution -which lead to French Connection digital marketer Jennifer Roebuck saying, “Large companies with massive budgets are probably leveraging their attribution model for ad exchanges, but most retailers in our space are just starting out with it.” It’s still early days. Read it.

Managing Privacy Settings

BrightTag has a new solution which enables a web publisher’s visitors to control the cookie profiles that ad networks use for targeting. On The New York Times’ Media Decoder blog, Tanzina Vega adds, “BrightTag says it will offer businesses the option to stop data collection not only by third parties but first parties, that is, themselves, but a spokeswoman for BrightTag said that such a use was not currently being contemplated.” Read it.

Rankings, Rankings, Rankings

It’s time once again for an ad network and agency favorite: the comScore, pay-for-play, U.S. ad network rankings – this one’s for October 2011. No meaningful changes among the big guys up top. Ad network Rocket Fuel is now added to comScore’s list. Download it (PDF). And, see September’s ranking for comparison (PDF). I wonder what kind of monthly unique reach you’d get if you frequency capped 1 impression per month for each unique user available across both Right Media, Doubleclick and the SSPs? It would have to be the top ranking, no?

Look At You, Mobile Ad Server

Mojiva has received a coveted seal of approval from Microsoft Advertising. Microsoft Ads’ Kashif Ali explains that his company “will integrate Mojiva’s Mocean Mobile platform into our existing suite of digital advertising technologies–such as AdExpert, pubCenter and adCenter–to serve mobile display ads across our global network of mobile apps and websites (…) In addition, the Mojiva network will integrate into the Microsoft Advertising Exchange for Mobile, bringing additional demand into the system by the first half of 2012.” Read more.

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