Google All-In For Digital Ads; Facebook Likeage Leakage

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

Google Can’t Unseat Nielsen

A Google TV Ads blog post explains that the company is abandoning its efforts to disrupt traditional buying models and will go after digital alone. Google’s Shishir Mehrotra says, “We’ll be doubling down on video solutions for our clients (like YouTube, AdWords for Video, and ad serving tools for web video publishers).” Read more. On ClickZ, Matt Kapko reads the tea leaves courtesty of industry expersts and says this means Google’s battle to unseat Nielsen as a TV demo data “master” is over in spite of the valuable set-top box data which still remains unused. Read that one. Dave Morgan, whose Simulmedia uses set top box data, tweeted, “Google TV Ads exit helps @Simulmedia & satellite ad sellers…”

Connected TV

Speaking of Dave Morgan, he pitches Ad Age’s readership -and Yahoo! – on the possibilities of selling a connected TV. He points to “what happened in China last week, when that country’s largest internet company, Tencent, launched the Ice Screen, a branded multimedia TV set for the Chinese market.” Morgan thinks this is where the consumer-electronics world may be headed. Read it.

Policing Page “Like-age”

Late last Friday, a Facebook company blog post by “Facebook Security” said it was going to crack down on fake “Likes”. So you better mean it the next time you click the “LIke” button or you could be going to Facebook Jail! Ok, maybe not. But, the post explains, “To be clear, we do not and have never permitted the purchase or sale of Facebook Likes as we only want people connecting to the Pages and brands with whom they have chosen to connect.” Facebook expects this will delete less than 1% of page “like-age” from its system. Read more.

Remarketing Thru Email

Not a day goes by that there isn’t yet another wrinkle to Facebook ads strategy rippling through the ecosystem. Inside Facebook’s Brittany Darwell says targeting-by-email according to its sources and even has a screenshot. Darwell writes, “If this test rolls out to all Power Editor users and the Ads API, companies will be able to remarket to people through News Feed and other Facebook ad units.” Read it.

Buying Audience, Leaving It Alone

U.S. President Barack Obama’s sudden appearance on Reddit last week shined a light once again on the Conde Nast subsidiary. Reaching nearly 20 million uniques monthly, The NY Times David Carr notes that Reddit is still looking for a way to scale revenue. But Conde Nast (owned by Advance) president and Reddit board member Bob Sauerberg isn’t worried as he tells Carr, “There will be ample opportunity to monetize what they have built as it grows, and it will be a very big business.” Read more. Reddit co-founder and board member Alexis Ohanian will speak at AdExchanger’s Human Centered Automation conference in two weeks.

Right Audience And So On

On his personal blog, marketing pundit Seth Godin appears to be 100% in support of audience buying. After explaining web advertising shortfalls, including “the click” obsession, he writes, “Until advertisers start to value the focused, memorable, impactful opportunity they have in buying the right ads in the right place for the right audience, web users are going to be stuck seeing irrelevant ads on sites that don’t respect their time and attention as much as they should.” Read it.

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