Benefiting From The Botnet; Tumbling For Ads

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Bots And Ghouls, Cont.

On Adweek, Mike Shields wades again in the bot muck, outing properties and networks that appear to benefit from fraudulent traffic. Media6Degrees and RadiumOne alerted him to sites with large amounts of audience overlap – suggestive of bots. Mevio.com, Forward Health and 2Blue Media Group all make the list. Since February, “M6d has noticed 500-plus dicey new sites popping up on various exchanges—and collectively, 40.5 million bid requests.” Read it. You know it’s getting real when the IAB sets up a task force.

Tumbling For Ads

The six-year-old microblog network is taking the latest in a small series of bows to the pressures of revenue generation with the launch of mobile ads on Tumblr’s Apple iOS and Google Android apps. The move comes a year after the PC version of Tumblr rolled out “Radar” sponsored ad units. In an official blog post, Lee Brown, VP of sales for Tumblr, says of the mobile ads, “It works very simply: Every now and then you’ll see posts from our partners as you scroll through your mobile Dashboard.” Read it. AdAge’s Cotton Delo has a few more details, noting that users will see up to four ads per day. Read more.

MarketShare’s Predictive Funding

MarketShare, the predictive analytics player, raised a huge $38 million round to help promote the expansion of its existing technology. No word on whether that means acquiring outside companies or simply shoring up what it has in-house. LUMA Partners’ Terence Kawaja and Brian Andersen served as advisors on the funding. Adam Hopkins, Managing Director at Elevation Partners, said in a statement, “We increased our investment because we think the team has nailed it, enabling marketing to be accountable for business results and manifesting itself in the form of rapid growth at the company.” Read the release.

Out-Of-Beta Retargeting

Google announced that its previously-announced search retargeting product is “out of beta” as of yesterday. The DoubleClick Advertiser blog explains that the feature “allows advertisers to use insights from paid search clicks to remarket to audiences across ad exchanges via DoubleClick Bid Manager, or the Google Display Network (GDN) — all with a seamless, tagless workflow.” Read more. So, you can take that paid search click cookie via your Invite Media (now Bid Manager) seat and target audience on Right Media.

Eyeballing Ads

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TikTok (Still) Wants To Make Social Shopping Happen; Robots Disobeying Rules

Eye-tracking vendor Sticky is taking the question of whether or not consumers have seen an ad to a new level, reports MediaPost’s Joe Mandese. Eye-tracking technology is not new, but what makes Sticky’s approach compelling, Mandese notes, “is that it doesn’t apply it in a laboratory or a resting facility, but in the real world, in real-time, while people are exposed to ads online.” Find out more.

Twitter’s Big Ad Deal

Emily Steel breaks Twitter’s new ad deal with Publicis in The FT. She writes, “The arrangement grants [Publicis’ Starcom Media Group]’s clients, which include Procter & Gamble, Walmart, Microsoft and Coca-Cola, access to preferred advertising slots on Twitter, research and data, and new products, such as an ‘In-tweet mobile survey’ programme that will allow companies to poll consumers for real-time opinions.” Read more (subscription).

Pivot of Yore

Fred Wilson on AV C writes an “angel’s view” blog post about a bygone ad tech pivot, when behavioral ad pioneer Tacoda switched from a publisher to a network model: “TACODA closed a few big deals early on and got validation of the product and the market from that. But it got harder and harder” to close these $10,000-$20,000 per month deals. Three years later, Tacoda had crossed $50 million in revenues and Aol was writing a check for $275 million. Read it.

Algos As Editors

Roger Wood, founder of the (Art+Data) Institute, and Evelyn Robbrecht, a content design fellow at the Institute, co-authored a piece on paidContent, pointing to a recently developed algorithm at MIT “that can predict topics that will be trending on Twitter hours in advance. Similarly, startups such as Content Fleet and Parse.ly use algorithms to identify emerging popular topics on search engines. This way, a publisher will be able to create content with almost a certain return on investment.” Read more.

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