Digital And Advertising; Trada Gets $9 Mil While You Sipped Nog; Ads And CES

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

Digital, Please -Wait, I Mean Advertising

In a feature article, The Chicago Tribune’s Robert Channick covers momentum in the online advertising space in the Chicago area. Leo Burnett’s North American President says about digital, “We need to lead in this space, we need to push creativity in this space. This is perhaps the most interesting paint box we’ve ever had to play with.” There is a continuing paradox in the agency/client relationship. Everybody wants better digital offerings, but at the same time, the end goal is that digital advertising is just advertising in the end. It’s all connected – the holistic approach! Steadily improved attribution capabilities along with a shift to more trackable, digital tactics makes it happen in the long run. Read more.

Funding The Crowd

The crowdsourced PPC marketplace machine, Trada, announced via a regulatory filing that it has received $9 million in fresh funding for the Boulder, Colorado-based company. Read a bit more. Having added Facebook to its PPC marketplace capabilities, how long until Trada adds display ad experts who can facilitate display retargeting campaigns at the very least? (Trada CEO Niel Robertson on AdExchanger.com in 2010.) One challenge is that creative for display will need to move beyond the text of search, or the text and image of Facebook.

Akamai Decides To Grow

Amidst all the rumors that the company is for sale, Akamai bought app delivery network Cotendo on December 22 for $268 million in cash. Read more in VentureBeat. StreamingMedia’s Dan Rayburn says Cotendo clients aren’t happy about the deal and fear the erosion of competition in the CDN business will be bad for pricing, innovation and so on. Read more. Perhaps that’s why Cotendo has yet to even mention the acquisition on their site. So, what’s it mean for ads and Akamai’s e-commerce data co-operative for advertising (was Acerno, now Akamai Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS))? Potentially, Cotendo clients buying display media through ADS. It would be interesting to see Akamai overcome mobile cookie challenges and offer a better retargeting solution for mobile which could then be applied across digital channels it touches.

Tech Meets Ads

Ad Age’s Michael Learmonth says that Cannes may not be the top destination of choice for advertising luminaries as the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) cranks up in Las Vegas next week. The agency holding company CEOs will all be attending along with thousands of exhibitors and attendees. Learmonth adds, CES has “stealthily become one of the most important dates on the calendar for marketers” as technology and advertising collide. Read more. TVexchanger.com‘s David Kaplan will join the throngs and be reporting from there all week next week. Follow David on Twitter here and here.

YieldBuild Goes RTB

Look at you, YieldBuild. In a company blog post that follows its last post nearly one year to the date, YieldBuild’s Marina Lazarevic said on December 22 that the sell-side, yield optimizer is pruning the number of ad networks it uses to fill placements for publishers. Is this the effect of the demand-side platform world? Lazarevic says this is a move toward higher CPMs for publishers. And she adds that in 2012 “We’ll focus on incorporating Real-Time Bidding (RTB) into our ad serving as well as factoring in the placement of individual ad units when determining how impressions get allocated to our networks.” Read about the changes.

Pixel Research

From his personal blog, MDC Partners/kbs+p’s Darren Herman begins, “Ever wonder who is the marketing technology behind the $35 billion dollars in e-commerce sales this holiday season? If you are an agency, wall street analyst, marketer, optimizer or any other player in the digital media ecosystem, you probably want to read below.” Read “below” and discover who’s dropping pixels. Herman admits it’s not perfect, but the results are at least directional.

Display Metrics

Microsoftie Ian Thomas continues his personal blogging resurgence with “Building the Perfect Display Ad Performance Dashboard, Part II – metrics.” He explains how Volume, Rate and Revenue are the three cornerstones of the triangle for display ad dashboard metrics and that “different parts of an ad business can be driven by different corners of the triangle, depending on the dynamics of how each part is transacted.” Get metrics.

Free Messaging Economics

Creative – this is the year! Greg Linden points to a Geekwire story about video game company Valve and what it is discovering about its users and advertising. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said at an industry event that “Free” messaging drives lift in conversions, but “Free to play” drives through-the-roof (TTR) lift. Newell ruminates, “Why is free and free to play so different? Well then you have to start thinking about how value creation actually occurs, and what it is that people are valuing, and what the statement that something is free to play implies about the future value of the experience that they’re going to have.” Who knew? Read more.

Lists And Predictions