Bizo Adds URL Shortener For B2B Data; Display Is Like A Supermodel; Funding With Flash Cookies

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

Capturing The B2B Targeting Data

Bizo announced that it will look to the URL shortener world to generate more rich data feeds for its B2B data business. According to the press release, The Bizo Switchboard is “the first smart link shortener for business.(…) Switchboard will provide the ‘bizographic’ makeup of people that click on a shared link, a fully branded post-click experience and the opportunity to deliver offers and retarget display ads to key audiences that click on the links.” Read more. And, visit switchboard.bizo.com.

Display Is Like A Supermodel

Andrew Goodman does a prosaic turn across the dance floor to tee up a piece on ClickZ: “Too often, display advertising has been coddled like a supermodel: allowed to swan in late to the shoot; paid exorbitant sums for lackadaisical performance…as long as it looks good, someone will go to bat for it and it will get a repeat engagement somewhere.” He sees advertisers focused on CPA and e-commerce as helping to improve display as well as the supermodel’s performance. Read more.

Funding With Flash Cookies

PaidContent’s Joe Mullin looks at approval of the recent “flash cookie” lawsuit settlement which awarded $2.4 million to university research groups and lawyers from Quantcast and Clearspring. For the university groups, it’s like venture funding only through the court system -and there’s no pain-in-the-ass board meetings (you know who you are). Mullin wonders, “Going forward, it will be interesting to see what happens if privacy-oriented groups and universities continue to receive large awards from privacy lawsuits. If this trend continues, it could give those groups a vested interest in seeing such litigation continue.” Read more.

Engaging Mobile Audience

Compete release results of a new study which revealed engagement metrics for social media platforms via mobile. From the compete blog, “43% of Twitter account holders utilize the service through a mobile device compared to 34% and 9% for Facebook and LinkedIn respectively.” Twitter needs an ad network to leverage that audience. Read more. Twitter sales chief Adam Bain was happy so he tweeted it.

Google Display Toolkit

On the Google Inside AdWords blog, Dan Friedman announces that AdWords will offer a new metric called “Relative CTR” which will leverage data and insights on similar ad placements across the Google Display Network to give marketers a sense of how their creative is doing compared to other advertisers’. Need more? Read more. Also, get ready for “Impression Share” which Friedman explains as follows: “To help measure your online presence, we’ve created impression share, which represents the percentage of times that your ads were shown out of the total available impressions for which your ads were eligible to appear on the GDN. In other words…” were your ads worthy of delivery or not? And then there’s tool/metric #3 called “Content Ads Diagnostic Tool (CADT). Friedman says this “tells you why your ads aren’t showing on the Display Network. For example, you may see that your placement-targeted ad groups are not running because they lost the auction.” In addition to the AdWords blog, read more on ClickZ. Google is going to ramp display – in part – with cool tools that enable everyone to love display even more. All of these tools can provide more data points on which to optimize targeting.

Pricey Ad Ops

kbs+p’s Chief Digital Media Officer Darren Herman opines on his personal blog about the growing importance of ad ops from his agency viewpoint. “We’ve gone from $0.04 CPMs for Ad Ops budgets to now, well, very high. The Ad Ops budgets are reaching 10-25% of a total campaign. $20MM in media could equate to $2-5MM in ad ops budget. Does this Ad Ops budget come out of the media budget or is it separate budget? Big questions.” Read more and see how he defines “ad ops”.

Site Rep Firms Are Alive And Well

MediaPost’s Les Luchter reports that Altitude Digital Partners, “which reps more than 150 publishers, including Photobucket and LA Times.com,” has taken $1.5 million from investor Cypress Growth Capital. Luchter adds that Altitude “now serves more than 5 billion ad impressions monthly. That’s up from 2 billion monthly late last year.” Read more.

The Digital IPO

“Last one into the public markets, make sure you don’t forget to turn out the lights!” Online music radio service Pandora is to go “public” today with a $2.68 billion valuation. The Wall Street Journal reports that the service does not expect to be profitable until at least January. Read more (subscription). By the way, that’s more than double the current market cap of The New York Times.

But Wait. There’s More!