Programmatic Indoors And Out; Salesforce Trumps SAP

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Programmatic, Indoors And Out

Automation isn’t just for websites anymore. The WSJ’s Suzanne Vranica focuses on how programmatic tools are being used for radio and out-of-home buying, which are among the oldest traditional media formats. “We are always looking for ways to make it simpler to put together an out-of-home campaign,” said Clear Channel CEO William Eccleshare. Read the rest.

Salesforce.com Trumps SAP

Salesforce.com has grabbed the title of largest worldwide CRM away from SAP, according to a new report from Gartner. The research firm also noted total CRM software revenue rose 12.5% to $18 billion last year. “Competition among CRM software vendors really heated up in 2012, as major players continued to vie for broader market penetration internationally and more widespread adoption within midsize to large enterprises,” said Joanne Correia, vice president at Gartner, in a statement. Read the release.

18,000%

Now, there’s a growth figure your favorite state lottery would be proud of: 18,000%. According to a press release, that’s the amount of revenue growth for publishers that sell-side platform PubMatic has seen in its private marketplace/exchange product line. Read more.

Lean Marketing

Marketers can benefit from testing their campaigns on a smaller scale using real-time bidding (RTB) before allocating huge budgets to them. Ratko Vidakovic, Director of Marketing at SiteScout, outlines four phases to getting the most out of a campaign: building, analyzing, optimizing and scaling. Vidakovic adds, “Knowing the inherent volatility in RTB volumes, approaching publishers for direct buys (after testing, of course) only makes sense.” Read more.

RTB Naysayer Gets Creative

Jim Bankoff, CEO of publisher Vox Media, took the stage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference, reiterating his aversion to real-time bidding as a “race to the bottom” that his company would continue to resist in favor of direct sales. Moreover, the publisher will be adding an in-house marketing shop dubbed Vox Creative, which would create blogs for sponsors. According to TechCrunch, Bankoff said, “You see ugly advertising…but we think there is a great market to be cracked in premium, high-quality ads.” Read the rest.

Hot Ecommerce

Japan-based ecommerce marketplace Rakuten (formerly Buy.com) is breaking into the US market with a focus on shopping experiences rather than just utility. “We come at ecommerce with a very different concept. It is about how to empower small- to medium-sized merchants using the internet rather than competing against them and trying to destroy them,” said CEO and cofounder Hiroshi Mikitani. Read more. Its LinkShare Rakuten division bought retargeter MediaForge in September 2012.

Measuring Viral Bennies

While video analytics specialist Visible Measures doesn’t promise the ability to make a viral video, its partnership with Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi does try to quantify the value of a viral video with Contagion, an earned media measurement tool. “Our agencies can [use Contagion to] change campaign variables like the budget commitment, offline and online channel mix, site list, and more, and determine how these changes will affect overall campaign performance,” said Kate Sirkin, Publicis SMG’s global research director. Read the release.

Maximizing Digital Video Potential

There is a huge opportunity to capture the 45 million viewers of original professional online video by using more interactive and robust ads, says the IAB’s Randall Rothenberg in an Adweek think piece. Rothenberg points out that the most popular digital video ad is a 30-minute video for Invisible Children, which garnered over 97 million views, perhaps proving viewers crave a deeper ad video experience. Read more.

Hyperlocal RTB

Publishers have a potential opportunity to reap the benefits of RTB through local and hyperlocal geo-targeting, according to Dick O’Hare. By representing a very specific location, these publishers have an advantage over the somewhat unreliable method of IP-based geo-targeting. “In this rapidly evolving world, publishers become relegated to a supply of cookies for marketers to target versus an audience targetable through the association of the publisher’s content and audience profiles,” O’Hare says. Read more.

Frequency Capping

The idea of frequency capping is simple enough – make sure users aren’t inundated with the same ad over and over across a series of sites – but agencies and publishers can’t (or, in worst cases, won’t) institute effective caps, according to a whitepaper by Michael Green, Audience Science’s director of research and marketing strategy. In a relatively small study of what the researcher called “six typical campaigns run in Q4 2012 by large national advertisers,” Audience Science found that “out-of-frequency impressions are not only common, they’re the norm. No campaign delivered more than 40% of its impressions within the frequency cap, and one campaign saw over 3/4ths of its impressions exceed the cap.” Download the whitepaper here.

Big Ads! Native, Too

Yahoo announced at its NewFront presentation that it was adding a big old billboard ad on its home page, as well as native advertising called “stream ads,” stories within Yahoo’s stream of content. Anthony Ha at TechCrunch writes, “When I asked how the new ads will affect the consumer experience, [VP of Product and Media Mike Kerns] didn’t say specifically, but he did note that’s something Yahoo will be tracking – specifically how the ads affect the consumer engagement numbers on its properties.” Read more.

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