Gaming With Amazon Coinage; Ad Block Whitelist

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Amazon Coinage

Amazon is adding a virtual currency with a gaming element. Yesterday the company announced Amazon Coins. From the release: “The new virtual currency for purchasing apps, games and in-app items on Kindle Fire. [It offers] app and game developers another substantial opportunity to drive traffic, downloads and increase monetization.” GigaOm notes, “App developers will get their standard 70 percent revenue cut on content purchased with Amazon Coins.” No need for ads? Read more. They still gotta promote – and that’s where the Amazon ad exchange/network comes in.

Ad Block Whitelist

Browser plugin kingpin Adblock Plus has given Reddit its blessing for meeting its “Acceptable Ads guidelines.” Press release. The whitelist program — enabled by default — is a way for users to opt in to reward sites with non-obtrusive ads (static ads only, preferably text-only). “Only 25% of the Adblock Plus users seem to be strictly against any advertising,” the company says in a FAQ. “They will disable this feature and that’s fine. The other users replied that they would accept some kinds of advertising to help websites.” More.

Boob Tube Profiles

AT&T researchers are testing ways to use channel surfing activity to create enhanced data profiles of TV viewers. MIT Technology Review explains: “The data—anonymized to remove identifying data such as names—included details of channel changes and volume adjustments plus some demographic information. By assuming that someone was watching a channel any time a TV stayed tuned to it for more than 20 seconds but less than one and a half hours, the researchers built up a record of which subscribers had watched what channels, and when.” Tune it in.

More Guaranteed

Ad network Undertone makes another “money-back guaranteed” pitch with a new promotion tied to display ad viewability and using Moat and DoubleVerify tech. The company offers a “make good” to advertisers with the “impression guarantee” and says in a press release: “Advertiser campaigns running across Undertone’s Preferred Publisher Portfolio will beat an aggregated industry benchmark for display ad viewability. The working definition of a viewable impression from 3MS (Making Measurement Make Sense) is a display ad unit that is fifty percent in view for at least one second.” In 2008, Undertone employed the money-back guarantee for brand-lift- and then again with Nielsen’s Vizu in early 2012.

New Global Agency: DigitasLBi

Publicis Groupe, which bought LBi in September, will merge the Amsterdam-based agency with its US-based Digitas. LBi CEO Luke Taylor becomes global CEO of DigitasLBi, reporting to Publicis digital honcho Bob Lord. Lord said in astatement, “One of the key strategic tenets of the combined DigitasLBi offering is the scalable, flexible technology and product suite that will help meet the full spectrum of marketer needs from audience engagement, to sense- and-respond content development and publishing, to real-time relationship marketing.” The combined agency has 5,700 employees and outposts in 25 countries. Press release.

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OPINION: Daily News Roundup

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Your GRP Is Showing

Video ad technology company BrightRoll, owners of BrightRoll Exchange, have produced a new whitepaper to explain the state of the GRP (Gross Rating Point) online and off. The company also positions BrightRoll products for marketers looking to buy GRPs online including a “comprehensive iGRP calculator.” Get the whitepaper (pay with some PII).

Diversify The Ecosystem

On iMedia Connection, Maxifier’s President Denise Colella says that more women are needed in male-dominated ad technology companies. She sees several ways this can change including: “Having more women in senior leadership roles will help address the lack of women in the industry for a number of reasons. First, they can become role models and mentors for other females as they overcome the obstacles traditionally associated with balancing home and work lives successfully.” Read the others. On his Upstream Group blog, Doug Weaver tackles “People Like Us” and makes the case for diversity in the digital media workplace across race, gender, education and age. In regards to the gray hair crowd, Weaver writes, “Recently a close friend of mine – an amazingly talented career media seller – shared with me how several recruiters told her – directly – that her age would hurt her in getting her next job in the industry. The fact that a recruiter was willing to talk about this directly tells me the problem is pretty awful. Experience, wisdom and the long view are things we need more of, not less.” Read more.

Google Programmatic

On Thursday, Google will be ripping the lid off of its programmatic strategy until the end of time! OK, that’s not how the GOOG put it, but the IAB’s Steve Sullivan will be quizzing DoubleClick Ad Exchange product maven Scott Spencer about the programmatic future – and you can tune in. Read more on the DoubleClick For Advertisers blog.

Malware Flag

Netseer was flagged for malware by Google’s Chrome browser on Monday. Danny Sullivan of Marketing Land has the story, “As it turns out, the main netseer.com domain was infected with malware, though subdomains used to distribute ads were not. Nevertheless, that subdomain got nabbed. As a post on the NetSeer home page currently says…” Read it. Netseer responded and said the problem was quickly fixed. A post on Netseer’s home page added, “Our ad serving infrastructure is completely different from the corporate website but shares the same domain (netseer.com). So although the malware never impacted the ad serving all our ad serving partners saw Chrome and other browsers flagging malware warnings to users. To reiterate, the malware was never served into ad serving stream and the browser behavior was completely due to ad serving and the corporate website sharing the same domain name.”

Call In The Red Cross

What to do when natural disasters hit? Call in the Red Cross or, if you’re in media, make available a phone number or link so viewers can make a Red Cross donation. Along those lines, the company which famously tracks hurricanes among other weather phenomena, The Weather Company, has added Red Cross chief Gail McGovern to its board of directors. Read more. At the very least, this is a savvy public relations move by CEO David Kenny. His company benefits from disasters as viewing surges – like it or not. It’s just the way it is.

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