FTC Release Ads Privacy Report; Google Spending On Ads; RTB For Video

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FTC Releases Report

Evidon CEO Scott Meyer looks at the new FTC Privacy report (PDF) and offers observations from his company’s blog including, “While calling for baseline privacy legislation, [there is] no specific endorsement on any existing Bill proposed in the Congress to date.” Read more from Wendy Davis on MediaPost. On that note, the IAB’s “first-ever” privacy tweet chat will take place this Friday, March 30, from 12-1pm Eastern Time. The IAB’s Mike Zaneis (@mikezaneis), “who heads the IAB’s Washington, D.C. Public Policy office as Senior Vice President & General Counsel” will be driving the discussion. If you want “in,” just use the hashtag #IABPrivChat on Friday. More info is here.

Google Ad Spend Momentum

The Wall Street Journal looks at the ad spend increasingly pouring out of Google as it looks to promote products, smooth privacy-related feathers and gain market share in various segments – including advertising its ads capability. The WSJ’s Amir Efrati says that Google’s ad spending last year was well over $213 million, but it still has room to grow: “Google’s ad spending last year represented 1.2% of its U.S. revenue of $17.6 billion, compared with 1.5% for both Microsoft and Apple…” Read it (subscription). Just think if Google had bought Groupon – that spending number would have been through the roof. Groupon had spent over $600 million in the first three quarters of last year alone.

RTB For Video, Europe

Adap.tv and BannerConnect announced a new partnership that will give BannerConnect real-time bidding (RTB) access to real-time biddable video ad marketplace. According to the release, “The deal will also allow BannerConnect to help its publisher partners to enter the video RTB ecosystem, which will increase the availability of quality pre-roll inventory available to buyers in Europe.” Read more (PDF).

In Defiant Defense

Former Right Media Exchange CEO Mike Walrath shakes off a few raspberries thrown his way in a follow-up to his original Tumblr post on what Yahoo! should do with Right Media. To detractors who declared he was filled with self-importance, Walrath looks to the heavens with arms extended and states defiantly, “When I was starting Right Media, popular opinion was that ad exchanges had been tried and had failed and that this attempt would fail as well. I, and other like minded people on the Right Media team chose to go ahead anyway, because we thought we knew something everyone else didn’t. We thought our alternative vision of the world was better than what existed. We thought we were right and the naysayers (most people) were wrong. We felt our opinions were more IMPORTANT than the opinions than others. Self importance.” Read more.

No Yielding To Competitors

In an opinion piece on Digiday, Rubicon Project CEO says – unsurprisingly given the competitive set – that the Google-Admeld deal isn’t a good deal for publishers. He claims Google’s Admeld will play favorites, “Google wants to keep 100 percent of the revenue from an ad placed on its own publishing property; therefore, GoogleMeld is naturally motivated to place the best-performing ads on Google properties first.” Read more. And, read another “Case Against Google” on Gizmodo (source: @MellorTime).

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Marketing Yield

PubMatic announced the hiring of Larry Harris (LinkedIn) as Chief Marketing Officer. Harris was the former CEO and co-founder of Ansible Mobile (IPG), which may lend itself well to PubMatic’s recently announced focus on mobile and the acquisition of MobiPrimo. Also, according to the release, “Harris served as Executive Vice President of Integrated Marketing for Draftfcb, where he built and led the global technology team and oversaw the company’s relationship with Interpublic.” His agency experience may also speak to the need to attract buy-side participation through PubMatic’s sell-side platform. Read more.

First-Party Data

Google announced from its DoubleClick For Publisher blog new audience segmentation capabilities from first-party data. If you’re offering first-party, data management capabilities for publishers, well, Google is now in your competitive set – just like they were yesterday. From the blog, “First-party segmentation involves no implementation or integration effort by you. Simply define the criteria you want for your audience segments, in DFP and DoubleClick technology does the work of populating them directly from the ad tag.” Read more. By the way, did you know Google was doing a limited beta of in-stream, video ad inventory in DoubleClick Ad Exchange? Read about it.

Leave Me Alone

Mojiva’s Mocean Mobile ad serving unit has released a new “State of Mobile Ad Serving” study which evidently says that maybe all the data everyone talks about is just a bit too much for the mobile side of the house – at least for now. According to the study, “Few respondents find intra-day reporting (5%) and publisher access for revenue reporting (15%) to be important functions of a mobile ad-server.” Intra-day dashboards make more sense as mobile revenues scale. Read the release. Perhaps, Mocean’s findings explain the heart of Phunware’s Alan Knitowski’s post on The Business Insider when he writes, “Digital and mobile managers are extremely well intentioned for their brands, but they are also extremely overwhelmed right now as the amplitude of the mobile market noise currently far exceeds any discernible underlying signal that is easy for them to see, hear or recognize.” Come on feel the noise.

Offline And Online

BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol’s presentation from the recent OMMA Display conference is summarized on his company’s blog. Among other themes that Tawakol is evidently considering today is where data management platforms (DMPs) need to evolve to. From the blog: “They need to get away from just offering display solutions and become digital in scope. They need to open themselves up to the enterprise where they can merge both online and offline data. It’s vitally important to be ahead of the curve. The more intelligence pumped into a DMP, the better the results.” Read more talking points.

It’s In The Data

Former CEO Judy Gern of dynamic creative optimization firm Adroit Interactive (acquired by MediaMath in 2010) remains enamored with display and its creative opportunities. In a think piece on iMedia Connection, she sees conversation as a central component of a successful display campaign, but adds “how do we jumpstart conversations that are meaningful and relevant to each viewer, scaled across millions of viewers? Well, we need data to do that — or else we’re shooting in the dark.” Read more.

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