WPP Investing; VivaKi Partnering

agency-deals Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Agency Investment

WPP has invested in Fullscreen, a network of YouTube channels, as part of a reported 8-figure venture capital round. The LA Times quotes Fullscreen CEO George Strompolos, “We feel that the media company of the future ultimately won’t be built on a satellite in the sky, it’ll be built on software. There’s so much we can do to empower this next generation of creators.” Read more.

Agency Partnership

Publicis’ VivaKi continues to crank out the partnerships. Its latest is with Mass Relevance (AdExchanger Q&A from May) to “create and integrate social media experiences on client-maintained properties across any digital device and surface,” according to a press release. Read more. On Ad Age, editor Michael Learmonth explores VivaKi’s evolution and asks, “What is the role of a specialty unit created to inject digital into traditional agencies when digital savvy has trickled down into nearly every shop?” Read more.

Click Love

Yesterday, Facebook announced that it is making its ads even more click-friendly. From the Facebook Studio blog, “Facebook Page post link ads are optimized to drive off-site conversions and sales. Over the past several months, aligned with updates to News Feed, we’ve enlarged images and the clickable area for Page post link ads on both desktop and mobile.” Read more.

Get Rewards

A study conducted by Millward Brown revealed consumers engage more with ads that provide rewards. “Schwa!?” Also in the study, consumers prefer to have control over the incentives rather than being surprised. “Schwa!? Schwa!?” “Mobile advertising experiences that create a more balanced consumer experience — ones that respect time and provide a useful outcome — open the door of receptivity and have a positive impact on the brand,” said Jayne Dow, a researcher at Firefly, Millward Brown’s global qualitative practice. Get the full reward: p.r. here, blog post here, and slideshow here (PDF).

Apple And The NSA

Apple wants you to know your information is mostly safe with them, according to a post on its site. “Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each [U.S. government] request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities.” The company says information from iMessage, FaceTime, Map searches and Siri searches are never collected and therefore can’t be disclosed to law enforcement or the government. Read more.

What Brian Believes

AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley believes in the future of journalism, maybe not in print form, but definitely digitally and funded by ads, according to The Guardian. “The amount of quality supply [of content] online isn’t growing, while I think that advertising interest in it is going to grow significantly, and we’ll see CPMs [cost per 1,000 impressions] increase rapidly over the next few years,” O’Kelley said. Read more.

The Irony Of Ecommerce

Online retailer Gilt has announced that it, too, will expand its ecommerce offering to include the offline world with a month-long physical presence in a shopping center in Louisville, Kentucky. Internet Retailer says the opening follows Bonobos and Warby Parker who’ve added offline to online. Read more. It will be interesting to see if any of these companies expand their media spend and leverage effective, cross-channel attribution models. Given their digital backgrounds, why wouldn’t they?

You’re Hired!