Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Turn Climbs Aboard AdECN
It’s ALIVE! AdECN is evidently humming with the RTB-infused Federated system as the Turn blog sheds light on the remarkably stealthy proceedings at Microsoft. (It’s hard for big Microsoft to be stealthy, right?) According to Turn Senior Director of Engineering and blogger, Emile Litvak, “The AdECN dev team has delivered exactly what they promised, and the RTB implementation is working flawlessly and has great features. Kudos to the development team at AdECN.” Read more about the results here.
YuMe Gets $25 Million
Video ad network YuMe announced that it has pocketed $25 million in – by my calculations – Series D venture financing in a round led by Menlo Ventures and joined by a host of other previous VC funders including ccel Partners, Khosla Ventures, BV Capital and DAG Ventures. According to Crunchbase, this brings the total to $46 million in capital raises. Also, ClickZ’s Zach Rodgers gets the company to cough up the following: “Revenue in 2009 was approximately six times higher than the previous year, and YuMe trafficked campaigns from 110 advertisers represented by 80 ad agencies. The average insertion order was worth around $60,000.” Read more from Brad Stone of The New York Times’ Bits blog.
Media Contacts Selects Adify
In a release, Adify announced that it has been selected by Havas’ media agency, Media Contacts, as “a preferred advertising network.” Ed Montes, Managing Director at Havas Digital, adds in the release the importance of the transparency offered by the Adify ad network. Read it.
Rubicon Project’s Frank Addante has written a piece on SoCalTech urging people to “Get Out Of The Office” as Addante has shifted responsibilities in his CEO role so he can get in the field more. All “internal responsibility and day-to-day management” is now the purview of co-founder and COO, Craig Roah. Sales is managed by J.T. Batson. Addante adds, “My first goal was to make myself unnecessary to running the business internally. I was successful in accomplishing this.” Read the article.
The Future Of Flash
All Things D’s Kara Swisher talks to Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch about the future of Flash among other hot topics. Swisher writes, “Adobe is forging ahead with Google and other makers of smartphone platforms, except for Apple, to make Flash work better–as well as with a range of publishers to become the technology used in e-reader products.” Read more and see a video with Lynch.
Retargeting With Video
Jim O’Neill of FierceOnlineVideo looks at a new trend with video ad networks: retargeting. Citing information from video ad network, SpotXchange, O’Neill writes that during the company’s beta testing of video ad retargeting, it “converted 400 percent to 1,000 percent better than other forms of targeting.” Read more.
More People, More Beer
Dapper announced that its upcoming NYC event on Feb. 24 has been moved to larger venue due to growing demand and, assures event goers, there will be more beer! Panelists for the “Fixing Advertising” Panel include execs from Kayak, MediaMath, BlueKai, Dapper, Invite Media and AppNexus. Register here.
I Love The Smell Of Data In The Morning
Michael Finney of KGO-TV in San Francisco reports that social media offers a gold mine of personal information. Oh boy, here comes the oversimplification…. Finney delivers the napalm saying, “Companies like RapLeaf of San Francisco are quietly mining the information millions of people are sharing with friends on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media, then selling it.” Read it. – another example of why aggressive education by the advertising world is critical. Anonymous targeting unlocks value for advertisers, publishers and, most importantly, consumers.
Improving The Dash For SMBs
Self-service, display ad buying provider, AdRoll, announced a new advertiser dashboard. As they target a small and medium-sized business usability will be important. In this release, AdRoll blogger “Josh” points to improvements such as management of site-targeted and retargeting campaigns, charts, stats and more. Read and see here.
The Virtual Board Meeting
Bizo CEO Russ Glass reports on Twitter that his company has experienced it’s first ever “all-video board meeting with Menlo park, Israel and Waltham, MA.” I’d like to something else, but it was all virtual.
