Amazon Ads At A Billion? Social Eating Ad Exchanges? WSJ Hackathon? - Yes!

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Amazon Ads at $1 Bil?

According to an anonymous source, The Business Insider’s Henry Blodget hears that Amazon is trucking along at an ad run rate of $1 billion a year and is providing a serious challenge to Google in that regard. Blodget makes his case, “One big threat to Google’s core search business is the potential for Amazon to usurp Google’s position as the ‘start point’ for many product searches and skim off the revenue that goes along with it.” Read more.

Social And Exchanges

A new report from Advertising Perceptions says that social media spending is going to EXPLODE in the coming year. What’s more, according to Ad Age’s Jason Del Rey, “The study says the budget gains for social seem to come at the expense of other platforms, with a decreased percentage of spending on ad exchanges and networks, as well as a slight downtick in the share of budgets going toward spending on portals.” Social is sexy! Read more.

Googling Publishers

The Doubleclick Publishers blog announced “DFP Optimization” yesterday as it appears the popular publisher ad server is progressively getting into predictive analytics for guaranteed and non-guaranteed media by using machine learning to optimize a pub’s inventory. According to the blog, DFP Optimization “is fully integrated with the DFP ad serving platform, and can be easily implemented across all of a publisher’s inventory. After activating DFP Optimization, the system will continually learn, process, and adapt; this happens all without any manual intervention from your ad operations team.” One less person in ad ops? Read more. And, read about new ROI algos that the DoubleClick Search blog says will impact “CPA, ERS, and Floodlight tag bid strategies.” ERS = effective revenue share. I knew you knew that.

WSJ Hackathon

The Wall Street Journal is sponsoring a weekend-long hackathon called “Data Transparency Weekend” which will encourage the creation of “tools that let people see and control their personal data.” Will ad tech companies choose to participate? According to the landing page, “The event is free but is open only to qualified participants — those with engineering, product-development or technical research backgrounds. In particular, we are looking for great coders.” The WSJ’s Julia Angwin, who is in charge of the ‘What They Know‘ editorial, will be leading the event. Apply here.

Marketing Content

Content marketing tech company Outbrain has released its very own “The State of Content Marketing 2012.” No surprise, the piece shows interest in content marketing. And in addition to visuals, there are insights gleaned from a survey of marketers including the marketer’s favorite content marketing opportunities. Can you name them? According to the study, “87% of marketers create video content, making it the most popular medium. Written content, such as blog posts (67%) and articles (44%), also has a place in content marketing strategies.” Content marketing – feel the fever. Download it.

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Gimme More Mobile Ad Tech

In Adweek, Mike Shields and Ki Mae Heussner takes a look at new mobile ad platforms from SessionM (no relation to FunctionX) and Zumobi. SessionM is run by Quattro Wireless (which became iAd) co-founder Lars Albright. Adweek writes about SessionM, “The idea behind SessionM is essentially to increase app usage and retention for publishers while improving mobile ads overall. (…) SessionM’s answer is a standardized platform that lets publishers weave advertising into apps of all sizes while borrowing elements from the gaming world and even credit card reward programs.” Read more. More and more mobile tech cos. are running into the marketplace as targeting is at a premium – let alone the impending decline of the PC. Schwaaaaa???

Funding Spillage

Seth Levine (AdExchanger Q&A 2010) at venture capital firm The Foundry Group says he’s worried about the current startup environment. But, it’s not so much the startups that are the problem… well… He writes, “I’m worried that in offering term sheets after a single 60 minute meeting, and in pricing early stage deals like they were already late stage successes and most egregiously by constantly running around self promoting and self aggrandizing, VCs are falling prey to a cult of personality about themselves and forgetting that their jobs are to help companies be successful.” Read it all.

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