Yahoo! CEO Thompson Re-Orgs; Tremor Video Hub Gets Viewable; IAB Brings Rising Stars To Video

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Yahoo! Re-Org

On All Things D, Kara Swisher shares a new memo sent by Yahoo! CEO Scott Thompson to Yahoos worldwide. The company’s being grouped into three silos – Consumer, Regions and Technology. Read it. Even Right Media Exchange makes an appearance in the “Tech” silo of the memo: “Core Platforms, led by Mark Morrissey (LinkedIn), will provide the foundational platforms, technology, and research to enable great customer products and leverage Yahoo!’s vast data stores to enable deep personalization and optimized monetization. Mark’s teams will lead Apt, RMX, User Data & Analytics, our content optimization relevance engine (CORE), Yahoo! Labs and other key technology functions.” Morrissey led the problematic search deal with Microsoft and architected Apt. Will he pour engineering fuel into it? Ad Age’s Jason Del Rey smells a possible sale of RMX. Also of note, former Chief Product Officer Blake Irving is no longer with the company. After reviewing the memo, a source close to Yahoo! tells AdExchanger that Yahoo has proven they can execute advertising solutions across their owned and operated properties and should continue to do so. But, challenges remain when providing solutions across the industry -and that perhaps it’s time to focus on the Company rather than the industry.

Video Viewability

Tremor Video is entering the viewable impression fray with its Video Hub technology as the company announced in a release “video ad verification signals that give advertisers insight into the viewability of their ads, including where they appear on the page, the size of the player, and the impact on the viewer experience. The new ‘Player Position’ and ‘Player Size’ signals are the first measurement features that offer advertisers and publishers full transparency into video ad position and size for video campaigns running across ad networks, direct publishers and video exchanges.” Given momentum in display and even video, the viewability metric seems to be destined to become a key, universal metric in short order. Read more. The overall goal is to improve an understanding of engagement with ads by the user on behalf of the marketer – and all of that presumably makes the marketer’s ad spend more efficient. On the ad verification side, and industry-wide, there remains no automated contextual or semantic scan of video content other than what’s on the page around the video. That’s a tough one.

Rising Video

The IAB is bringing its successful Rising Stars competition to video advertising. Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB says boldly in a release, “With these new formats, we will be creating advertising experiences in digital video that are as good or better than traditional broadcast.” This echoes the convergence theme of the recent IAB Annual Leadership Meeting where NBCU’s Peter Naylor was given the reigns as the IAB’s new Chairman. Read it. And, enter the competition with your VAST or VPAID-compliant entry. And speaking of video standards, the IAB has updated them and now include a skippable ad format among other features. Read that release. Finally, VivaKi EMEA audience buying maven Marco Bertozzi blows up certain “skippable ads” on his personal blog here.

Tracking Spend

ClickZ’s Kate Kaye covers a new global ad spend out from media buying giant GroupM as it predicted “global web ad spend will hit around $98 billion this year, a 16 percent leap over 2011. That number would represent around 19 percent of overall ad spending, said GroupM.” Read more. Google’s $200 billion ad spend prediction in display remains in the distance, for now.

About Q1

It may have been acquired, but Adobe’s Efficient Frontier continues to publish its ad reports. This one covers Q1 and according to company data DoubleClick Ad Exchange continues to “capture market share” from Yahoo!’s Right Media Exchange. Also, the report takes up Google’s CPC issues and finds, “Google search algorithmic changes contribute to growth in search spend: Increases in search spend are a result of increased click volume rather than increased CPC rates. This has been true for the past two
quarters, but is contradictory to trends in prior quarters. Algorithmic changes to Google in Q4 2011, such as increased site links, have led to a greater proportion of branded traffic that does not impact CPC rates.” More clicks, means users are more engaged with Google search, which means Google gets more data, which means Google gets smarter. Smart. Get it (Pay with some PII).

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The Modeler And The Audience

DataLogix and BlueKai announced a new partnership which positions the companies – both thought of as “data companies” at a high level – serving different and discrete functions. The release claims, “Together they will offer marketers in leading verticals such as Automotive, CPG, Retail and Travel reliable high-propensity audience reach at unmatched scale by marrying BlueKai’s valuable audience assets with Datalogix’s modeling capabilities.” Read more.

GOOG Prognostications

Citi’s Mark Mahaney is thinking about Thursday’s Q1 earnings call in a hote to investors. Mahaney talks about the decrease seen in CPCs for Google in Q4 – will it carry over???….”Should All Eyez Be On the CPC Prize? — We believe investors will be heavily focused on CPCs, which declined 8% Y/Y in Q4 — the first decline since the ’08 Recession — due to improved Ads Quality changes and the Mobile Monetization transition. We expect Q1 CPCs to be down a similar level. But we don’t view the drivers as negative structural factors. And we believe total Search spend (which also incorporates Paid Clicks) a much better measure.” It will also be interesting to see if Google breaks out its display revenues a bit more – maybe tell us something more about the Exchange’s success, GDN direct, or owned-and-operated display. C’mon Google.. gimme some stats.

“Stacking” Down Under

The Australian Financial Review (AFR) reports that technology licensed from companies such as demand-side platform MediaMath, DMP BlueKai and tag manager TagMan are part of a new company called Kinected in Australia. According to AFR, “Kinected’s co-founders, Gary Hardwick (also of Ikon), Mick O’Brien (former MediaMind) and Ross McNab (former MediaMind) are upbeat about using Australia as a beachhead into Asia.” The article says this is about social, but it looks more like digital audience buying is continuing to grow Down Under to me. Read it.

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