Fraud Is Easy; Triton Digital Gets Accreditation

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Easy Fraud

Fraud is a problem, but just how easy is it for someone to set up a site, load it up with inventory and then rake in the ad revenue? Digiday’s Jack Marshall did the legwork to find out and reported his findings. It turns out it’s very cheap and easy, and he generated a 30% profit in a matter of days from Sovrn. “Our system was designed for very long-tail publishers, and clearly this is a loophole that we did not anticipate someone exploiting,” Walter Knapp, CEO of Sovrn Holdings, said. Read the rest.

Measuring Radio

Triton Digital earned accreditation from the Media Ratings Council, bridging the gap between digital and terrestrial radio local ad buying capabilities. “What this does is give our clients a seat at the big boy’s table, which is the $17 billion terrestrial advertising industry,” Triton chief strategy officer Patrick Reynolds told VentureBeat. “Clients like Pandora now have an equal opportunity to compete for the same advertisers that buy local advertising on terrestrial stations.” Read more.

The Customer View

Marketo is experiencing a shift from B2B marketing to B2C marketing, the company’s CEO, Phil Hernandez, told Ad Age. “We see this complete crossover starting to happen between the techniques and systems that grew up in the b-to-b world now being applied into consumer marketing applications.” Hernandez predicts that B2C could account for 60% of Marketo’s business by 2016. Read on.

Weather Front

During its “allfront” sales event in New York today, The Weather Company boasted 136 million app installs and claimed advances in helping advertisers target based on weather data — such as dialing up beer ads ahead of heat waves. “Based on the success of a few major marketers having a weather strategy in 2013, we are now in the position to work with marketers to transact on sales that have the enterprise scale and analytics capability to partner with us,” chief global revenue officer Curt Hecht told attendees, according to a release.

Good Bad News

Demand-side platform Brandscreen’s chief revenue officer Jo Gaines tells AdNews in Australia that her company has been bought by U.S.-based Zenovia for an undisclosed sum. Gaines tells Adnews “that Brandscreen was seeking a buyer for some time before the administrators were appointed. She said the deal means it can bring back some staff made redundant and build out its products and reach. ‘It’s a good news story and a sign of the [programmatic industry] consolidation that has long been predicted.’” Read more.

February M&A

Boutique investment bank Petsky Prunier has tallied mergers and acquisitions for February and reports that 444 transactions took place. Furthermore, “Marketing Technology was the most active segment with 97 transactions, respectively. Traditional Media was the highest value segment with 16 deals, of which eight were worth $45.4 billion in aggregate reported value. eCommerce and Mobile Content/Apps were the most active subsegments across all segments, with 35 and 25 transactions…” Download the PDF.

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