Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Old People Like Display
Recent research by the Yahoo Labs team suggests that, sure, display positively affects purchase – but wait! There’s more… According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “The research found an approximately 5 percent increase in spending among those who had seen the ads – with 93 percent of those sales occurring in stores. The potentially worrisome thing, however, was that among those under 40, the percentage was nearly zero.” Read about it. Click here for the Yahoo! labs project brief which makes no mention of the “under 40” discovery. (source: Peter Kafka)
Google Threatens China
Good headline, eh? Google says that it “detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.” And now the company is threatening to unfilter its search results in China and withdrawing. Read more on the Google blog. Or, read coverage from the New York Times.
Online Video On Rise
Nielsen reported that we all liked online video just a little bit more – 13% more, in fact – as online viewing increased in December of 2009. Trivia: How many video streams did YouTube broadcast in December? Answer: 6.5 billion. Read more from the Nielsen blog.
Yahoo! Display And Bebo
According to Sara Kimberley of Brand Republic, Yahoo! will continue to manage most of Bebo’s display and video ads as the social media site renewed its Yahoo! sales contract for another 6 months. It had expired at the end of the year. Bought by AOL for an ungodly $850 million in 2008, Comscore counted 435 million display ad impressions in July of 2009. Read Brand Republic. PaidContent UK says AOL is taking Bebo’s advertising in-house six months from now. Read it.
On the NY Times’ Media Decoder blog, Stefanie Clifford looks at research from the Publishers Information Bureau, which says 58,340 ad pages were lost in U.S. magazines in 2009. Among the losers was Hearst where titles such as “Town & Country ad pages dropped by 45.6 percent, and Veranda dropped by 48.1 percent. The best performer was Redbook, down 10.3 percent.” Can the Kindle save these mags? Read more.
An Agency Is Absorbed
Ad Age says that WPP’s Enfatico agency continues to be unwound by the holding company as its PR component is getting folded into Cohn & Wolfe Group’s Axicom PR firm. Enfatico was a 1,000 person agency just a year ago that was built to service Dell. Read more.
Digitas And Razorfish In Australia
Down under, Publicis Groupe has mothballed its Digitas brand following the acquisition of digital shop Amnesia Razorfish, less than a year after the agency’s launch in Australia. Is Publicis showing its hand and Razorfish (over Digitas) will be the dominant, agency brand worldwide? Read it.
Malvertising Facts
Rubicon Project announced a new partnership with ClickFacts and its Rubicon Security product that will help prevent “malvertising.” Rubicon Project defines malvertising (kind of lingers in your mouth doesn’t it?) as “a form of unwanted or malicious software that is typically distributed through advertising tags served through an unsuspecting publisher’s website.” Read the release. There’s a Q&A available with ClickFacts CEO Michael Caruso here.
The Social Agency
AdRants covers the acquisition by Powered, an Austin-based branded community provider, of three social media agencies Joe Jaffe’s social media agency, crayon, as well as Drillteam and StepChange as digital agency services are corralled in a social media context. Read more.
Shooting Trolls
Brad Burnham of VC compay, Union Square Ventures, is out to get trolls – i.e. patent trolls and says, “Almost a third of our portfolio is under attack by patent trolls. Is it possible that one third of the engineering teams in our portfolio unethically misappropriated technology from someone else and then made that the basis of their web services? No!” Read more. Brad Feld of VC Foundry Group agrees with Burnham here as does USV colleague, Fred Wilson.
Mobile, Mobile, Mobile
PubMatic is getting into the mobile “act” as the sell-side yield management company announced that its range of ad optimization products and services will now include the mobile world. Read the release.
B2B BIzo Bullish
Last I checked Bizo isn’t a public company. But that didn’t stop the B2B targeting platform and ad network from revealing its fourth quarter results. According to a release, Bizo had a “revenue run-rate to more than $5 million, representing a 600 percent year-over-year growth.” Maybe Bizo wants to be public? Read the release.
Tweet Ads
Twitter follower-rep firm, Ad.ly, among others is featured in a San Francisco Chronicle article on the sponsored tweet business. Tech blogger Chris Pirillo tells the Chronicle that he makes a “four-figure income” from his sponsored tweets using MyLikes. Pirillo shares that he earns 74 cents per click. Read more.
Semantically Speaking
OpenAmplify, announced a new product which identifies the most pertinent keywords on a web page via semantic analysis which the release claims can improve ad yield for ad networks and publishers. From the release, “Ad systems that use any form of keyword targeting can use OpenAmplify’s PinPoint to improve selection of keywords.” Read it.
When Not To Burn Cash
Super marketer, Sean Ellis, unleashes his product marketing mojo with part II of best practices on how to bring a product marketing on Venture Hacks. Regarding managing burn rate, Ellis says, “You have two low-burn periods in the business. The first is pre-product/market fit. And then the second low-burn period is once you accelerate the business you’re working within the parameters of your allowable acquisition costs.” Read more. Missed part I? It’s here.
