Vice To Go On Deal Spree; GroupM Takes Steps Toward Programmatic TV

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What Vice’s $500M Will Buy

Speaking to the Financial Times, Vice chief Shane Smith said his company is gearing up for a “deal spree” in 2015, in the wake of its $500 million monster round led by A&E Networks. “Theoretically, if we’re doing $1bn of top line revenue and thirty to thirty five per cent margins … what media offering has there been like that in the last decade?” he said. Vice recently beefed up its senior management team, bringing James Schwab on board as co-president to manage mergers and acquisitions of content, technology and distribution companies. “We would be stupid not to think about an IPO,” added Smith. Read more.

Rabbit Ears Adjustment

GroupM’s newly launched TV unit Modi is working with Videology to deliver addressable TV ads programmatically. Speaking to Beet.TV at the TV of Tomorrow Show, Modi senior partner Jamie Power says addressable TV has arrived. “We’re in 42 million households this year. That number’s going to grow to about 60 million households next year,” she said, adding that “there are definitely advertisers that are better suited for addressability. It relays on the data that’s available,” pointing to the auto and entertainment industries as strong players. More.

Native Ads

Former AppNexus CTO and co-founder Mike Nolet reprises his days of writing for his eponymous Mike On Ads blog with a post on LinkedIn titled “Native advertising is killing the net.” He sees spam-ridden content and concludes, “I strongly urge both native advertising companies and content producers to reconsider what sort of links they allow before consumer trust in editorial content disappears.” Read more.

Publisher Rx

Writing for The Drum, AOL Platforms Global CEO Bob Lord advises publishers to embrace programmatic. “Used on the sell side, programmatic technologies will continue to transition from being used as an ‘efficiency/savings’ assist to a dominant means of driving more effectiveness and better outcomes,” Lord predicts. “Smart publishers will employ techniques like audience extension, retargeting and more to augment their offerings.” Lord names eBay as an example of a forward-thinking, programmatically inclined publisher as the e-tailer gears up to make mobile ads available programmatically in 2015.

Betting On The IOT

China’s largest smartphone vendor, Xiaomi, is investing a whopping $203.7 million in home appliances firm Midea Group, in a play to deepen its dealings in the connected device space. But Reuters reports that the company’s revenues are on thin ice. “They’re growing so fast and so lean, I wouldn’t be surprised even if they were losing money,” says Forrester Research analyst Bryan Wang. “The current market is so competitive that I don’t think it’s sustainable without consolidation.” In any case, Xiaomi seems determined to challenge US companies’ lead in connected devices – and their associated data. The WSJ has more.

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Total Self Serve

Mobile ad network Todacell rolled out a self-serve product, dubbed Todaself. The company claims to reach 250 million users globally and works with some heavyweights like eBay and Samsung. Todacell’s platform leverages the usual data points (location, time and device info), along with some non-mobile data sources such as sociogeographic and economic intel. Todacell CEO Amir Goldstein claims Todaself is the “first self-service mobile ad solution to integrate advanced mobile campaign optimization.” Inside Mobile Apps has more.

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