Facebook's Ad Choice; Teeing Up Guaranteed

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Native Ads. Standard Disclosure.

Facebook has caught some flack from agencies for opting out of the industry-wide privacy compliance program. Well now it’s yielding to their requests to accept the blue “AdChoices” icon on retargeting ads served through Facebook Exchange. But there’s a key difference. According to the release, the icon appears on-mousover: “Upon request of a DSP (demand-side platform), Facebook has agreed to add the AdChoices Icon to the ‘About this ad’ link available through the drop down menu, which appears when a user clicks on the grey ‘x.’ In addition, Facebook will replace the current hover text message, ‘Report this ad,‘ with a more explanatory phrase, such as ‘Learn about Facebook Ads.‘” Read the release on the Better Business Bureau’s site – someone loves acronyms.

Teeing Up Guaranteed

PubMatic takes another step toward “programmatic reserved” with new deal management features for its private exchange product. CEO Rajeev Goel tells AdExchanger that over 10% of PubMatic bids are $10 and higher, creating incentives for sellers to let RTB demand sources compete with potentially less lucrative direct sold campaigns. But it also wants to support negotiated transactions. “We need to deliver with [clients] the opportunity to manage their business on a holistic basis.” PubMatic into more direct competition with AppNexus, which is preparing its own plans around guaranteed. Press release. Watch for the full Q&A later this week.

Yahoo: No Joke

After a well-received Q4 earnings report — thanks in part, to lower expectations from analysts and investors — Yahoo appears to be on the right track these days. In a Marketwatch opinion piece, Jon D. Markman, an investment adviser, says that the Microsoft Bing search partnership which resulted in higher revenues and less cost for Yahoo is having the effect of “freeing up resources to further grow its display advertising segment,” which represents 42% of its total revenue. “There may still be some near term hurdles to overcome, but for the first time in a long time, Yahoo is on the right path,” Markman says. “It finally deserves its exclamation point again.” Read the rest.

Gannett’s Digital Revs Rise

Gannett is still mostly known as newspaper and broadcast company. But digital is starting to contribute a significant portion of its total revenues. Its digital-only revenues — which includes the rich media provider PointRoll — were up a mere 3%,but company-wide, interactive dollars jumped 27% in Q4. Read the earnings release. Meanwhile, Gannett completed the rollout of metered paywalls across its U.S. Community Publishing unit and said the initiative will reach its target of contributing $100 million to operating income in 2013, said Bob Dickey, the unit’s president, News & Tech’s Chuck Moozakis reported. As CEO Gracia Martore told analysts, “Extending this reach for new digital-only subscribers will continue to be a focus in 2013 as we accelerate our marketing efforts to drive growth in the digital-only customer base to 5x to 7x current levels by the end of this year.” Read the Seeking Alpha transcript. (reg. req.)

Agency Trading What?

Only 77% of ad agency executives claim to be very or somewhat familiar with agency trading desks, according to Advertiser Perceptions Inc., which surveyed 345 ad execs. While that’s a pretty solid majority, it does suggest that there is a significant pocket of agency professionals who aren’t aware of how media buying is changing. For example, just 64% of respondents say they were very or somewhat familiar with supply side platforms. Among agency executives, awareness of SSPs fell to 58%, ironically trailing the awareness of marketers (63%) by five points. “There’s so much noise in the ad tech marketplace that its creating a lot of confusion,” Randy Cohen, a partner at API, tells Mediapost’s Joe Mandese. Read more.

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How Long Viewability?

Havas Media ad ops guru Chris Swarbrick tackles the ever-popular topic of viewability on AdMonsters. He discusses the nuances, “Even the definition of a viewed ad is debatable. The IAB set it as at least 50% of the ad seen for 1 second or more but their own display advertising guidelines also allow up to 15 seconds maximum run time – so, for many, one second may be far too low a threshold.” Read it.

The Lotus Position

How long until U.S. talk show host David Letterman has a top 10 on programmatic buying? Not soon enough for buying platform Rocket Fuel as they’ve created created answers to a series of questions marketers might raise when considering buying programmatically – such as “Which channels support programmatic buying?” Download the whitepaper (pay with some PII) – includes photo of CEO George John in the lotus position.

But Wait. There’s More!