Aol Reshuffles Marketing; Google Ads Display To Its Text

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

AOL CMO Shuffle

Reshuffle… – go! Five months after bringing in former Thomson Reuters marketing exec Jolie Hunt as its CMO, AOL has had a change of heart and will be eliminating the position. AOL says it will instead decentralize its marketing efforts to create a sharper sense of individuality among its brands, which include Advertising.com and Techcrunch. “We had never aggregated the micro and macro [marketing] budgets together,” CEO Tim Armstrong told AdAge’s Jason Del Rey. “When we kicked off the planning in September, [we realized] we were spending more marketing than we were getting credit for from an AOL brand perspective.” Read more.

Agency As Consultant

It’s not about just creating TV spots anymore for the traditional ad agency. With so many different parts assembled within the big agency holding companies, Madison Ave. is sensing that in order to thrive, it needs to take business away from the McKinseys and Accentures, writes Adweek’s Noreen O’Leary. “I hear from clients: ‘We’ve been focused around brands; how do we organize around a more consumer-centric model?’” says Carla Hendra, global chairman of WPP consultancy OgilvyRED. “This model is new, but the ability to provide strategic services at Ogilvy is not.” Read more.

Data Oligopolies – That Can’t Be Good

On Digiday, Brian Morrissey reviews GroupM’s “Interaction” report spearheaded by GroupM’s Rob Norman. GroupM sees a “Specter of Data Oligopolies” as Morrissey quotes, “If opt-in becomes the only explicit articulation of positive consumer choice it may be that three classes of data users are created. The first is a class which are unlikely to achieve an opt-in including most brands and agencies…” Read the other two.

Text Ads Get Display

In a post on the Google AdSense blog, Google announced the addition of icons to its text ads – the backbone of Google’s Display – or Content – Network for years. Google’s Johan Land and Stephen Yuan say that this is part of a cross-device initiative and add, “These enhancements are among the largest that we have made to text ads, and our experiments indicate an uplift in clicks across publishers on the Google Display Network.” Engagement (mouseovers) with the little buttons is likely up, too, in comparison to text URLs. Read more.

Humans Vs RTB

Centro EVP of Media Services and former RBM CEO, Scott Neslund, speaks to his agency roots in an opinion piece titled “Why automation can make agencies more human” on iMedia Connection. He writes, “In truth, some of the advancements in digital media actually make it impossible for human solutions. For instance, automation is the only reasonable solution for tasks such as real time bidding, search retargeting, and data management.” But other solutions can only be offered by humans. Read about them.

Programmatic “Premium” Reviewed

On AdMonsters, Gavin Dunway reviews the “premium” programmatic landscape across a selection of industry voices in the past year. QuadrantOne’s Mario Diez offers one viewpoint, “Programmatic premium channels are new automated access points to publisher inventory where the pub is getting paid more because the advertiser is getting more value – viewability, preferential treatment or ‘premium placement.’” There are other viewpoints not as rosy. Read it.

For “The View-Through”

On Marketing Land, Simpli.fi CRO James Moore argues “for” view-through conversions and metrics as leery media buyers hang on to “last click.” He says better attribution is at stake: “If the data support that optimizing to clicks will drive more conversions, then I will be first in line on the click bandwagon. The solution, however, is that direct response display buys should be about incremental conversions with or without the click.” Read more.

But Wait. There’s More!