Attribution Analytics Attracts Investors; NY Times Yields To Flipboard

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Funding Attribution

Remember that famous Tom Hanks line: “There’s no crying in ad tech.” As Visual IQ proves, there’s no crying because the investment keeps flowing. The attribution and analytics solution provider raised another $12 million on top of an initial $3 million raise. The company claims traction in the release, “Visual IQ currently manages over $5 billion in media spend on behalf of its clients, which include two of the top three national advertisers, as well as two of the top three agency holding groups.” Read the release. The quest for the cross-channel attribution Holy Grail continues.

NYT Flips

For the past year, social reader Flipboard has been working with publishers like Condé Nast to not only distribute content from magazines like The New Yorker on its glossy-like tablet pages, it’s been also extending the ads on those titles’ properties as well. The New York Times would seem to have been faced with a choice between open, ad-supported access and protecting its digital paywall when it decided to make all its content – not just stories from its feeds – available on Flipboard. But as AdAge’s Nat Ives reports, the newspaper appears to have found some middle ground, as it will be bringing its pay meter to cover its Flipboard content.

Polymorphic (Display) Ads

This sounds like an ad unit that Dr. Bruce Banner and The Incredible Hulk would like. Microsoft revealed a use case for something called “Polymorphic Ads” at Cannes last week. Microsoft Advertising’s Jennifer Creegan explains on the company blog, “The challenge today is that launching multiscreen campaigns is too difficult and time consuming. Polymorphic ads are designed to streamline this process and help brands to focus on telling their story rather than campaign implementation.” The idea is to make a conversion across multiple platforms easy. Read more (see a video).

Viewable Video

A VideoHub report suggests there’s little problem with video advertising when it comes to viewability. From the release: “Approximately 88 percent of all ads streamed in the first quarter were fully visible to viewers, much stronger than statistics have indicated for display ads. Of the 3.5 billion video streams analyzed, 7 percent were partially obstructed, while viewers never saw the remaining 5 percent.” I wonder what they missed. Read more.

Casale Media Offers SSP

What comes after a world where “everyone’s a publisher”? Maybe a world where everyone’s a publisher platform. Casale Media is getting into the SSP game, dubbed the Index Platform. VP of Strategy Andrew Casale tells AdWeek that when the RTB madness hit several years back Casale Media zagged to serve the supply side while others like Turn and ValueClick zigged to serve advertisers. “There’s a handful of SSPs, but now there’s somewhere around 40 or 50 DSPs. So it’s a good time to innovate and bring a new option to publishers.” Read more.

LBi’s ‘For Sale’ Sign

Amsterdam independent digital agency LBi is looking for some attention from prospective buyers by with a less than subtle press release about “inevitable speculation” that its available for purchase following last week’s WPP acquisition of AKQA. As the board says in the release, it is having “preliminary discussions” with potential suitors, but “there’s no certainty an offer will be made.”

But Wait. There’s More!