White Ops Raised $20M; AOL Doesn't Want To Be A Walled Garden

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In The White

White Ops closed a $20 million Series B round yesterday with plans to build out its supply-side business, Joe Mandese writes for MediaPost. Ad industry verification services have historically been funded by the supply side, but to date White Ops’ bread and butter has been advertiser budgets, according to CEO Michael Tiffany. “Our theory was based on economic reasoning that if we armed buyers with the ability to distinguish real from fake human traffic, then there would be competition from publishers to use it to differentiate themselves,” says Tiffany. More.

Fly On The Wall

There’s been active speculation over whether Verizon + AOL (+ Yahoo) = a walled garden, but AOL CEO Tim Armstrong says Verizon is not following the data-restrictive template set by Google and Facebook. “We’re taking the total opposite approach. We want to be the company without walls: the open company,” Armstrong tells The Drum. “If Facebook is about social and Google is about search, then we want to be about brand.” Of course, “brand” data isn’t what would push Verizon into walled garden mode; it’s the mobile subscribers. More.

Gathering Clouds

For marketers, the key Oracle product enhancements unveiled this week at the annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco include its Adaptive Intelligent Applications, which use Oracle’s vast pools of data to learn about a business’s customers. The Intelligent Applications then use those learnings to better target consumers, boost conversions and deliver more relevant offers. Oracle’s basically getting into AI, just as Salesforce did with its Einstein strategy. Oracle has also beefed up its Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, the latter designed to compete toe-to-toe with Amazon Web Services.

Ad Vigilantes

After shocking the industry and alienating itself from Google and AppNexus when it launched its own SSP last week [AdExchanger coverage], Adblock Plus is having some self-described communications issues. “It’s just that people haven’t quite wrapped their heads around exactly what our value proposition is,” says Ben Williams, director of communications and operations at parent company Eyeo GmbH, to Sapna Maheshwari at The New York Times. That value proposition is to be the moderator of online ad quality… by its own standards. As one Reddit user put it: “Who do you think you are? The internet police?” More.

Political Goals

D2 Media Sales, the joint addressable TV sales division of DirecTV and DISH, partnered with Republican voter-targeting firm Deep Root Analytics on political audience segments pre-matched to the OTT TV ad provider (read the release). Digital tech and media operatives from across the political aisle have said the same thing: Political buyers are pressing TV media for addressable formats, but just can’t get the turnaround speed they need to hit political targets. [More on that here and here.]

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Netflix Ditches MAUs; Streaming Into Trouble

Vacation Brain

Google wants to plan your vacation – and collect the juicy travel data. Google Trips, a trip-planning app the company released Monday, pulls together Google Maps and crowdsourced data to help plan reservations and vacation activities, TechCrunch reports. The app includes a search function, but it also uses data from other travelers to suggest cities and attractions. By way of automation, users can add a pin to Maps and Google will fill in the agenda with popular activities in the area. An integration with Gmail allows Google to pull reservation info from emails and organize them into itineraries. Google Trips is accompanied by the expansion of Destinations, a product that pits Google prices against other travel services on mobile and desktop searches.

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