Limelight Echoing Akamai Strategy; Video Buyers Like It Direct Says BrightRoll Study; Social Display Spend

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Aiming At Media

If you have your fingers on big data associated with commerce and advertising, why not open a marketing services business? Akamai has been doing it for a while with ADS – as has competitor Limelight Networks which announced on Monday a “tuck-in” acquisition of Clickability, a provider of web content management tools. Limelight’s CEO Jeff Lunsford said in a release that the Clickabilitiy will complement the “Limelight Video Platform business, where we are seeing strong traction and where revenue has doubled since we acquired it six months ago…” He claims that the platform can offer “effective monetization utilizing closed-loop marketing.” Read more. Everyone’s aiming at media! The transaction cost Limelight $10 million in cash and stock.

Tracking The Holding Company

Agency holding company, MDC Partners, announced its first quarter 2011 revenues late last week that included an $8.7 million (or 31 cents a share) loss on a jump in revenues of 217.5 million. In the press release, the company stressed momentum through the end of the year and its focus on organic growth after being on the acquisition trail and scooping up various boutique shops in the past couple of years. Read the release. The company also announced a dividend. According to NASDAQ, Wall Street analysts are bullish on MDC.

Video Hotness

BrightRoll has published a media buyer survey which says that online video is HOT! – and that’s a good thing for BrightRoll which has a video ad network and BrightRoll Exchange. The survey reveals that publishers remain large-and-in-charge when it comes to acquiring video inventory: “For the third year in a row, buying directly from online publishers was reported as the dominant means of purchasing inventory (52%), followed by ad networks (31%), broadcasters (10%), portals (6%) and ad exchanges (2%).” Read the release. And, download the study (PDF). This ought to be popular with video ad sellers – and not just BrightRoll’s.

Social Display Ad Spend Guess

Research firm BIA/Kelsey offers its latest estimates on ad spend and says “social” is surging with the help of its good friend “display.” From the release, BIA/Kelsey says, “Currently, the predominant ad format [in social] is display, spending on which the firm expects will increase from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $7.7 billion in 2015 (CAGR: 30.4 percent).” Read the release. To put it in perspective, eMarketer said total display ad spend which includes video was $8.88 billion in 2010.

Maxing Your Ad Seats

A popular analogy with online ad inventory management is the airlines as it manages its own flavors of guaranteed and non-guaranteed inventory such as first-class, business, coach, wing (hey, it’s cheap.). In a video with CEO Tim Cadogan, OpenX compares its new ad serving system to that of the airlines and coins a new term “Revenue Serving” whose raison d’etre is maxing out yield for each impression. See the video.

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Teens, Tweens And A Gorilla

Gorilla Nation made a rare appearance in the media yesterday as the site representation firm was touting another vertical network called “Youthology,” which extends a recent deal it says it made with youth website network Sodahead for its inventory. Given the complexity of legal requirements in serving ads to children (Gorilla says this vertical targets “Teens and Tweens”), creating a separate vertical would appear to be a necessity from a regulatory and policing standpoint – let alone creating a compelling audience for advertisers. Read the release. ‘

This Is The Police! Get Your Mobile Ads In The Air!

According to ClickZ’s Zach Rodgers, police in South Korea stormed (my word) into Google’s Seoul, South Korea offices as part of its “investigation into whether its AdMob mobile ad unit illegally gathered user location data.” I wonder when Foursquare will be declared illegal? Read even more from Reuters.

But Wait. There’s More!