Adobe Reports Earnings, Efficient Frontier Results; Yandex RTB's Display - And Search; Ecommerce Picking Up

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Adobe Reports

Adobe reported its fiscal first quarter earnings for 2012 (ended March 2, 2012) yesterday. The results met analyst expectations as the release stated: “Revenue in Q1 FY2012 was $1.045 billion, which included $9.6 million of revenue from the acquisition of Efficient Frontier which closed in January 2012.” Read more. The company said digital marketing solutions revenue was up 30% year-over-year. Among the highlights of the earnings conference call presentation, late Q2 will bring launch of the next rev of its Creative Suite which will further propel HTML5 development according to CEO Shantanu Narayen. Also, Narayen said this week’s Adobe Digital Marketing Summit will also include a slew of new product announcements – and double the attendees (4,000) of last year. The Q1 2012 earnings transcript should be available here on Seeking Alpha.

RTB For Search

Russian search and digital media giant Yandex announced that it was adding real-time bidding (RTB) capabilities to the inventory of certain owned and operated properties. But here’s the kicker – ads are being RTB-enabled for search, not just display -so says the release: “The new technology has been implemented to serve search and display ads on websites in the Yandex Advertising Network (YAN). The first clients to explore the benefits of Real-Time Bidding are Yandex’s partners in the YAN – travel.ru, forumhouse.ru, newsru.com, and klerk.ru.” Read more. This could be, potentially, an enviable next step for Google and Microsoft’s search products, too, as they could show ads that are related to the user “audience” rather than keywords. Certain advertisers would love to get at the high-value, bottom-of-the-funnel audience by using a cookie pool. Search ads are display ads in the end. Bring on the auction?

Consumers Heart Online Retail

In a note to investors, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney takes a look at comScore’s latest eCommerce brief figures and sees an upside surprise. In Wall Street speak, Mahaney writes, “Online Retail Spend Up 19% Y/Y in February (16% in Q1TD vs. 14% in Q4) – Excluding Travel and Event Tickets, Online Retail spending was up 19% Y/Y in February, a material acceleration vs. the 14% growth reported in January and 10% Y/Y increase in December. We’d note that this 5-point acceleration came against a 1-point tougher comp. A positive trend in our opinion. All in, we’d note that February results were ahead of Q4, which reported a modest 1-point acceleration to 14% Y/Y growth despite a 2-point tougher comp – a positive trend, in our opinion.” He also says online has been the beneficiary of a “share shift” during the recession – in other words, versus traditional channels. He sees the potential for 20% growth ahead. That’s a lotta retargeting.

Gifts & RTB Black Boxes

Jack Marshall pens a Digiday feature article that says a robust “Gift Economy” is used to influence vendor choices at agencies. He writes, “In some organizations, sales teams are less concerned with building relationships than they are simply buying attention and favors from agency staff.” On iMedia Connection, Tom Hespos of agency Underscore Marketing offers a retort and points the finger at ad tech: “My team and I have vetted hundreds, if not thousands, of ad products from companies that operate within the RTB landscape. The vast majority of them will not permit a peek inside the black box that constitutes their pricing model. Many of them don’t want to disclose how much they’re paying for media and how that compares to what they would charge my clients. Anyone who takes their duty to their clients seriously understands how appalling that is.” Read more.

On RMX Sale

On ClickZ, Zach Rodgers explores the possible sale of Yahoo!’s Right Media Exchange with industry insiders from the agency world. VivaKi’s Sean Kegelman tells Rodgers: “It’s about the inventory. We’re not using the tools of Right Media Exchange to access the inventory. We’ll be able to access inventory no matter what. (…) Right Media is a great piece of technology, but it’s old. The normal feeling is that anything over three or four years old is generally due for a massive…overhaul.” Read it.

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Daily News Roundup

What’s The Endgame For Gaming Ads?; Panning Gold From Sludge

Digital Life Raft

Yet another Pew Research study shows challenges for the newspaper industry (previous news). Pew aggregates a bunch of data for “The State Of The News Media 2012” and notes the Paywall as the last wall of defense: “Perhaps as many as 100 more papers are expected in coming months to join the roughly 150 publications that have already moved to some kind of digital subscription model. The move, long anticipated and long delayed, is only partly influenced by the success of The New York Times ‘metered model,’ which now has some 390,000 subscribers and resulted in almost no loss in more casual online traffic. The timing of this also reflects a starker reality. Many newspapers have lost so much of their ad revenue — more than half since 2006 industry-wide — that without an infusion of digital subscription revenue, some may not survive.” Read about The State. Bloomberg’s Edmund Lee notes that news is losing $10 in print for each $1 it makes in digital. Read it.

Brand Safety Nightmare

Adweek’s Mike Shields finds a site called Dumage.com which is inflicting plenty of brand-safe damage on innocent digital marketers. Shields goes begins, “On Friday, a post called ‘Hot Girls in Demotivational Posters’ served as a showcase for nearly everything that ills online advertising. For one, there were between 11 and 13 different ads appearing on the page at once, mostly for blue-chip brands ranging from Marriott to JetBlue to Progressive to Lacoste.” Was it on your white or black list? Read all about it.

Discovering Loud Audience

Former General Mills UK research chief and, now, Microsoft ads researcher, Natash Hritzuk, shares the segmentation gleaned from recent research of Microsoft products’ consumers on her company’s ads blog. Hritzuk and her team founds four groups of consumers which she explains in detail: Productives, Media Centrics, Connectors and Mavens. For mavens, she writes, “Mavens are super-charged tech users. They are fully switched-on to the latest trends and they are eager to share their discoveries. These are your advocates and influencers— passionate, loud and opinionated.” I LOVE THOSE PEOPLE! Read more.

Amazon Automating

Yesterday, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems for $775 million – all cash – to help automate its fulfillment warehouses. From the release: “Amazon has long used automation in its fulfillment centers, and Kiva’s technology is another way to improve productivity by bringing the products directly to employees to pick, pack and stow,” said Amazon’s vp of global customer fulfillment Dave Clark. Read more. Next stop – the automation of media people! OK, OK.. maybe just the automation of display advertising at-scale…

Ecommerce Media & QR Codes

Triad Retail Media (AdExchanger Q&A 2011) is adding QR codes to its eCommerce media site representation business. According to a release, the company will partner with ScanBuy: “… the solution includes a ‘Scan and Send’ feature that enables brands to engage consumers with non-app–enabled mobile phones, making their barcodes accessible to more than 190 million U.S. camera phones. The feature allows access to content by snapping a picture of a standard barcode, then sending it to the ScanLife system…” Read more.

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