Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Meeker Means More Mobile
In an update to her Internet Report from late last year where she said 2010 would be the year of mobile, Mary Meeker spoke at an event at Google yesterday and delivered an “Internet Trends” report. Fear not, mobile is still the topic du year. Read more from GigaOm on her presentation. Download it here (PDF). (source: @bradberens)
Monday Is Acquisition Day
All Things D’s Peter Kafka noted yesterday, “It’s Monday, which means that Google has purchased another company.” This time the acquisition is a visual search company called Plink. It’s a pretty cool idea- you search by taking a picture of something with your phone. Graphical display ads matched against these images’ results can’t be too far away. Read more.
Make Millions Per Month!
Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Jeremy Liew offers a post on the VC’s blog on how startups can get to millions in revenue per month. It’s easy! Liew says, “All these companies [currently making millions per month] are taking advantage of relatively low customer acquisition costs. If you understand your customer lifetime value, and you can acquired customers for 20-30% of the lifetime value, you are going to make money.” Read more – like how media is a lot cheaper than it used to be.
In a tip of the cap to former paid search engine GoTo.com, Idealab’s Bill Gross has started Tweetup – the idea for which came during a recent visit to a TED conference in Europe according to an LA Times article. Gross says he tried to catch up on conference happenings on Twitter but among 10,000 tweets, he only found 200 or 300 useful. It’s at this point that “he seized on the idea of surfacing those [200 or 300].” Perhaps the GoTo.com experience helped, too. Just sayin’.
Glory Days For Tech
Jeff Bussgang, General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, says it’s “glory days” for U.S. technology firms. His measure is the market cap for these tech bellwethers: Apple, Cisco, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. Bussgang writes, ” In these 18 months, while the Dow fought its way back to par, these seven companies saw an increase in their market capitalization of over 60 percent!” Read more about the Tech Bull.
Monetizing
CEO Tod Sacerdoti of online video advertising network, Bright Roll, was interviewed on Fox Business Live recently and ends up defending the general concept of monetization. Apparently, the hosts found the concept of monetization suspect. See it.
When Licensing Software
IDC Research identified last week what it sees as its top, must-have, software licensing policies. If you’re licensing software, these may be useful and include at the top of the list: “Subscription: Almost every software vendor does some subscription pricing, a large portion of which is custom. Although creating a subscription pricing policy will not be easy, it is possible and, increasingly, a competitive necessity.” Read all of ’em.
Mike On Ad Serving
Mike On Ads’ Mike Nolet continues his exploration of ad serving with a post covering how innovation and scale concerns can come into play. Regarding innovation, Nolet writes, “Stability is the evil enemy of change. Change, sadly, is a requirement for innovation.”
Read more.
Everyone Is An Exchange
From his Reaction Wheel blog, angel investor Jerry Neumann is looking around and seeing a lot of companies turning into exchanges. But, “The ad exchanges know that running a marketplace should not command what they are charging, and lie awake at night fearing that their customers might someday come to the same awful conclusion.” Read what happens next.
FAIL: Advertisers Who Pool Media Buying
Maybe the following story goes without saying, but this is the first piece of good news regarding the agency model that I’ve seen in a while. In a signal that media agencies STILL have more power than many advertisers alone, AdWeek’s Steve McClellan writes that PepsiCo and A-B InBev have been unable to pool their ad dollars effectively in recent upfronts: “Sources familiar with the discussions say that Turner, NBC, Conde Nast, Time Inc. and others have all rejected the PepsiCo/A-B bid to jointly buy time and space at sharply discounted rates.” Read more.
Segmenting Display
Jonathan Mendez writes on his blog that the fluid and huge scale of display can ultimately make optimization of display segments difficult to manage in comparison to search. He adds, “In my opinion (and there will be more than a few start-ups that disagree with me) truly optimizing segments (to the point of diminishing returns) across an ad exchange or a network is a Google level problem.” Somebody’s stirring the DSP pot!
Magic And Newspapers
On his personal blog, VivaKi exec Rishad Tobaccowala publishes his entire keynote address given at Newspaper Association of America event yesterday. In the keynote, he urges publishers to embrace technology and adds, “We are living in an age of magic. Software coders, hardware designers, application developers and a whole lot of technologists are key to the future. You must embrace them and make them key (either hire them or partner with them).” Read more.
ValueClick Looking To M&A, Buybacks
Citibank analyst Mark Mahaney said in a research note that new CEO Jim Zarley (who replaces retiring CEO Tom Vadnais) will look to focus on M&A and share buybacks. Mahaney added, “Mr. Zarley stated that the company is overcapitalized ($180MM of cash as of Q4 or 21% of market cap) and he plans be aggressive (when prudent) with stock buybacks, and will look to grow VLCK’s existing business segments through M&A. We view this as consistent with how VCLK was run when Mr. Zarley was last VCLK CEO. We believe the company could use M&A to beef up its O&O strategy, as well as expand its affiliate network sites.”
Buying Trends In Online Video
Marketing exec Shane Steele of online video ad network, Tremor Media, talks to Digiday Daily about her company as well as the health of the industry, in general. Regarding buying trends, “The largest category is consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, since they have the money to spend. Other big verticals are telecom and retail.” Read more.
