The Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011; TubeMogul Adds Video DSP; OpenRTB Expands For Standardization

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

Senators Present Privacy Bill

U.S. Senators John Kerry and John McCain announced their plans for a privacy bill. ClickZ’s Kate Kaye provides an overview of “The Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011” which she says addresses both online and offline data privacy. In a tip of the hat to the Do-Not-Track list momentum, Kaye says the bill would ask the “FTC (to) develop rules requiring that companies offer consumers ‘a robust, clear, and conspicuous’ opt-out mechanism from use of their personally-identifiable data by third parties “for behavioral advertising or marketing.” Read the whole story. And, see video of the press conference.
The Wall Street Journal’s Julia Angwin notes in a tweet, “McCain cites @WhatTheyKnow in Privacy Bill of Rights press conference (44:20).”

Video DSP

Video ad technology company TubeMogul announced that it has launched a “brand-focused demand side platform for video advertising.” According to the release, features for marketers include multiple, supported video ad formats and access, at launch, to “over 90% of the comScore Top 1000 sites are available to select from. In addition, private exchanges can be built between any agency and publisher directly for sites not generally available.” Read more.

Paywall Stats!

When you put up a paywall, less people will visit your site than if you didn’t put one up at all. (Self-head slap) I could of had a V8! Experian Hitwise director of research Heather Dougherty looks at the impact of the New York Times paywall on the NYT’s web traffic over 12 days according to her company’s data. She writes, “For the majority of the days, there was a decrease in the overall visits between 5% and 15%.” Read/see more.

Attribution Complexity

CEO Jeff Zwelling details some of his company’s attribution capabilities on the Convertro blog. He also notes existing misconceptions, “Although, some marketers use email address as a common key to tie multiple orders together and are able to credit some portion of the second order back to the first order’s marketing source, this is a less than ideal solution…” Read more.

OpenRTB Updates

The OpenRTB Consortium, whose stated goal is to “improve and accelerate the adoption of real-time bidding (RTB) through the creation of open industry standards,” provided an update on the latest OpenRTB news during ad:tech festivities in San Francisco. According to the press release, the initiative has grown as what was once six initial adopters of the OpenRTB agreement has blossomed to 70. Interesting to note that agency trading desks The MIG and Cadreon have signed on. And, still no Google, Yahoo!, Aol/ad.com… Also from the release: the OpenRTB initiative has yielded “fully operational block list standards among demand- and supply-side partners.” Read the release. And, see the OpenRTB site.

Partnering For DMP Sales

Red Aril and Cox-owned Tectonic (formerly Adify) announced a new partnership which will allow Tectonic to represent and sell Red Aril’s data management platform product outside of Japan and the United States. Kevin Tan has been promoted to the CEO position at Tectonic after Russ Fradin left to rejoin the startup world. Read the release.

Real-Time Optimization

Just in time for AppNexus’ Summit on Thursday (see agenda here), DSNR Media Group announced that it would integrate Traffiliate – its “dynamic landing page optimization solution” into the real-time ad platform of AppNexus. Read the release.

Regulating Catalog Mailing Lists?

Is the privacy debate moving offline? Turning an eye to the catalog business, The Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Valentino-Devries writes, “Merchants send Americans 20 billion catalogs a year, and more than 1,100 brands offer to share their mailing lists. That amounts to a lot of name sharing, which can turn into a headache for people who want to get off lists.” Read more.

Speed The Plumbing

Akamai and IBM announced a new partnership to accelerate apps across the pipes of the Web. Marie Wieck, gm, application and integration middleware, at IBM said in the release, “The new solutions we’ve created in collaboration with Akamai provide clients with a cost-effective and secure way of speeding the delivery of applications from the enterprise through the Internet to the end-user and back.” Thought not directly related, this type of agreement could have implications for the automation and delivery of digital advertising in the future as the web’s “plumbers” connect. Read the release.

Selling Right Media Exchange

Former Right Media CEO discusses his company’s exit in a video interview with angel investor Chris Dixon on TechCrunch. He recalls the days leading up to Yahoo!’s eventual acquisition of RMX, “‘As long as DoubelClick stayed independent nobody else had to do anything.’ But ‘once one went, then they are all going to go.'” Hear more about the dash for the exit.

Ads For the Kindle

Audiences are everywhere and you will soon be able to target them through an ad-supported Kindle, Amazon’s ebook reading device for $114 (a $25 discount to the one without ads). See it on Amazon.com. TUAW’s Michael Grouhaus writes about the new version of the device to be released on May 3, “Thankfully, Amazon is being rather tactful with the ads. They will not appear within the e-books themselves but will be relegated to the Kindle home screen and screensavers.” Read a bit more. Amazon has filed a patent for ebook ads according to a 2009 Gizmodo article. The WSJ says Amazon will run its own ads at first. Read more about Amazon’s AdMash technology for sponsored screensavers here.

Huff Po Blogger Lawsuit

Aol and The Huffington Post are being sued for $105 million as part of a class action that claims Huff Po bloggers deserve some of the $300+ million spent by Aol on Huff Po. Forbes covers the lead plaintiff Jonathan Tasini’s conference call where he said, “In my view, the Huffington Post’s bloggers have essentially been turned into modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation.” Read more.

Expanding RTB Inventory

CONTEXTWEB says that it now has 20 buyers (Chango, XA.net and Turn are the latest) of real-time bidding inventory available through its platform. From the release, the company claims to offer “access to 200 million daily impressions from more than 11,000 direct publisher relationships” which also includes “expandable, rich media-enabled” inventory. Read more.

But Wait. There’s More