Nisenholtz Retires From NY Times; In-App Inventory On Doubleclick Ad Exchange; Adobe Validates The Creative

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Nisenholtz Exits NY Times

NY Times Company digital ops chief Martin Nisenholtz announced he is retiring after leading the publisher into the digital age beginning in 1995. According to paidContent’s Staci Kramer, Nisenholtz will not be replaced and his duties will be absorbed by CEO Janet Robinson. Read more. Kramer writes, “Nisenholtz’s acceptance of RSS from the content side showed the kind of open mind and willingness to experiment that led to a variety of forward-thinking digital moves by the Times, including the Times Reader, early Kindle subscriptions….” And, read the NY Times’ announcement about Nisenholtz’s retirement. Let the offers begin!

Exchanging Mobile Ads

Google announced that Google Admob’s mobile in-app inventory has come to “pre-qualified buyers” on the Doubleclick Ad Exchange. Read the Doubleclick blog post. In a brief interview with AdExchanger.com, Doubleclick’s Director, Buyer Development and former Teracent exec, Chip Hall, said that buyers will be able to use real-time bidding to buy in-app display which today consists of 320×50 ad units. As for frequency capping – a challenge in mobile with restrictions around the use of cookies for privacy reasons – Hall promises that even though you won’t be able to frequency cap in-app ads today, “that feature will be coming soon.”

Verifying, Wait, Validating

The creative side of the house at Adobe (not Omniture) is getting busy with some data-driven “plumbing” solutions as the company unveiled a free, hosted service that it says will improve online ad workflows. Focused on making sure ad creative is up to snuff, “Project Adthenticate” provides for “ad validation and optimization that enables publishers and agencies to test and certify ads against a repository of specifications.” Test your ad units and tags here.
We now have ad validation, ad verification, audience verification, privacy verification – I’m sure I’m missing a few-ations. One interesting piece here is a larger player’s attempt at giving away a service that other players may be charging for. The free tool feeds Adobe’s need to enhance its tools for the creative.

Come Play With Us

Digiday’s Mike Shields says Yahoo! execs have come to NYC during “ad:tech week” in order to convince comScore 50 publishers to join there Yahoo!-Microsoft-Aol cabal and create a tasty, scalable, display ad inventory “treat” for advertisers that they can’t find through Google and its Doubleclick Ad Exchange. Shields says that, so far, publishers aren’t ready to ante up inventory. Read it. Maybe Yahoo! execs need vuvuzelas? Also, Right Media Open is this week as Yahoo! looks to reassure partners about ongoing RMX development.

Hello CMO

DataXu announced its going to target the CMO with its latest upgrade of its display media buying platform – DX3. From the release, DataXu’s pitch echoes IBM’s “big data” pitch to the marketer as the company claims, “DX3 provides marketers with a simple console that enables continuous testing and learning to improve key business decisions.” Read more. The tension between agencies and ad networks/DSPs continues to increase as each group looks to create a relationship with the marketer with varying degrees of service and tech capabilities. Does the marketer have “the chops” to talk tech? And could the publisher do an end-around both? Hearst and Meredith have added in-house agency solutions. And, Viacom lurks behind a Microsoft deal that will end one of these days unless Redmond decides to throw a ton more cash in Viacom’s direction.

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What’s The Endgame For Gaming Ads?; Panning Gold From Sludge

IPO Market At-Risk

Tolman Geffs, co-President of boutique investment bank Jordan, Edmiston Group, shared his own views on the recent Groupon IPO with AdExchanger.com yesterday. Unlike the potential rosy outlook outlined by AdExchanger.com on Monday, he sees storm clouds ahead: “I see a flip side – by getting Groupon into the market too early, when there is still plenty of business model risk left, and at an inflated valuation, the IPO market for more established models is now more at risk. I think it is highly likely that Groupon will – within a quarter or two – trade back below its offering price once a few elements of reality catch up. For example, neither Groupon nor anyone else knows what its real rate of consumer subscriber churn will be once the novelty wears off, nor the cost to replace that churn, which is a major expense for all consumer subscription businesses. That plus growing margin pressure on the merchant side from many, many competitors will lower the water level and swing the market toward a view of Groupon as a nifty but low margin, ‘ADVO-like’ business that cannot grow earnings at a rate to justify this valuation. And once this more sober view of Groupon sets in, and the stock trades down appropriately, it will be more difficult for other ad/tech cos with better tested business economics to go public.” Portfolio.com rounds up the investors who stand to benefit in the near term – at least on paper – from the IPO here.

Privacy Cash

Kate Kaye reviews the privacy icon delivery business in an article on ClickZ. She offers up some math and the growing dollars at-stake, “Fees associated with icon serving and compliance by the three firms are typically priced at $0.01 to $0.02 per CPM, with exact cost often dependent on volume and other factors. At that rate, the three DAA certified firms – which are serving around 50 billion impressions per month – rake in somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million in total each month from icon serving and compliance fees.” Read it.

Adding Social To The Arsenal

Ad networks/demand-side/buying platforms continue to announce their social (a.k.a. Facebook) solutions as RocketFuel said yesterday that it has launched “Social Booster” which looks to offer optimization on creative and more to reach target audiences. Read it. As has been said before, the ability to globally frequency cap remains a challenge for data-driven, Facebook buyers who would ideally love to track audiences between Facebook and “the outer Facebook” and better understand a campaign’s ROI. But, Facebook’s own ability to find audiences and scale (and perform) on behalf of advertisers remains hugely compelling. Read more on MediaPost.

The Fan Audience

“Understanding the nature of loyalty, would obviously allow a publisher to nurture and grow the audience.” And so begins a dive into the “Fan” by Scout Analytics’ Matt Shanahan whose data shows that though some audiences are a “fan” of a publisher’s overall content, most audience are divided among sections of specific content. Read the analysis.

But Wait. There’s More!