Turner Adds Sports Site Bleacher Report; Nexage Gets Funds From Hearst

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Publishing Rules

Turner has closed the deal with the Bleacher Report as the 10-mllion-uniques-a-month site has been sold for $175 million. The Wall Street Journal’s John Jannarone covers it: “The deal will allow Turner to incorporate sports footage and other content it already owns into Bleacher Report’s Web site, according to David Levy, Turner’s president of sales, distribution and sports, [who added,] “There will be tons of opportunity for brand crossover.” Sports – think about the local-mobile connection here. Sweet. Read more (subscription).

CEOs Love CMOs

On ClickZ, DataXu CEO Mike Baker returns to his quill and authors a think piece on the CMO. Baker sees CMO powers expanding with advent of “big data” and writes, “Beyond optimizing media investments, many of the best use cases for using big data to improve enterprise productivity are in marketing, giving CMOs a great opportunity to become strategic leaders running key CEO agenda items. Applications include site personalization, product recommendation engines, forecasting customer churn, and dynamic pricing and promotion management. Imagine your CEO turning to you, the CMO, to lead the firm’s big data strategy.” Imagine more.

5 Mil More For Mobile

Mobile ad exchange Nexage has received $5 million in investment from Hearst Interactive Media as it adds to its just-announced $10 million raise led by telecom SingTel’s investment arm Innov8. Hearst Interactive Media vp Darcy Frisch will join Nexage’s board of directors as big media takes a seat at the mobile audience buying dinner table. Read the release. In July, Nexage CEO Ernie Cormier discussed with AdExchanger what he plans to do with his company’s venture cash: “We’ve always looked at Asia and, frankly, Europe as the next two candidates for expansion and you want to do it with partners on the ground.” Read that one.

Rajaram Advises

Gokul Rajaram’s star continues to rise, as the ads product director for Facebook is named advisor to data startup Sociocast. Says GigaOm: “Sociocast’s predictive analytics platform helps companies in advertising and media, gaming and retail analyze large and fast-moving streams of data to better understand and act on consumer behavior insights.” Read it.

Paid Models for Brand Content

Writing for AdAge, Jason Del Rey profiles Forbes’ ongoing efforts to create a paid model around brand content. Twenty-two months in, the publisher’s AdVoice program has drawn more than a dozen advertisers. “AdVoice posts have generated 3.3 million page views over that time, or about 150,000 a month on average. Sixty percent of that traffic has come from SAP, the business-software maker that has been an AdVoice partner since day one and whose posts have garnered a total of 2 million page views.” Next up: a licensing model. Read more.

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Attribution Contribution

On iMedia Connection, Kevin Geraghty of 360i gives some attribution modeling tips. He gets specific, too, “To figure out your attribution model, you should again look at your last quarter of data. Your attribution model should result in all of your channels having the same ROI. This balances economic costs on all your resources and keeps your media managers focused on maximizing revenues by hitting the same peak ROI as a team (not just looking at independent targets for their channel).” Read more.

Native Yahoo!

On TechCrunch, Sharethrough’s Dan Greeberg says it’s time to rid of what he says is poor performing display media on Yahoo!’s home page. He does a complete redesign – courtesy of Photoshop – and suggests to Yahoo!, “You have the opportunity at Yahoo to do for content-driven advertising what Google did for search-based advertising – make the ads native to the user experience. Native search ads don’t try to distract you from what you came to Google to do; they actually help you find things (when done well).” Read more.

More ValueClick Talk

Citi analyst Mark Mahaney reviewed ValueClick’s Q2 2012 earnings in a note to investors. He remained “neutral” when it comes to valuing the company’s stock price and wrote, “Key risks remain: 1) Concern that VCLK’s Media segment faces increased competition from Display Ad & Social Networks; 2) VLCK faces integration risk re: recent acquisitions; and 3) Comparison Shopping biz faces greater challenges as Google moves down the purchase funnel. On the other hand, VCLK has generally had a very solid execution track record.”

Data Drives Kool-Aid

On Marketing Land, Search retargeting firm Magnetic CEO James Green writes a think piece on data-driven branding campaigns. Green serves the Kool-aid, “To extend the scale beyond what a single publisher can offer, brands should consider purchasing access to audiences through ad exchanges in real-time. Doing so allows brands to reach and target consumers throughout their experiences across a multitude of publisher channels, and at a lower price.” Mmm, so good.

You’re Hired!