DAA Transparency Survey; Success Cards

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

DAA Transparency Survey

The Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) recently polled approximately 1,000 US adults about their thoughts on ad transparency. More than 57% of respondents said they wouldn’t visit any of the free, ad-supported sites that they currently use if those sites converted to pay models. And 51.3% said they’d be more likely to click on an online ad that included an icon that allowed them to opt out of ad-related information collection. “Americans expect ads to provide them with transparency and choice, and are more likely to do business with advertisers that provide it,” said DAA Managing Director Lou Mastria in a statement. Read more.

Success Cards

Webtrends took advantage of Twitter’s lead-generation cards and built a socialcentric campaign to promote its product to marketing professionals. The company employed a number of different methods for figuring out which keywords and users to target, and saw a 500% decrease in cost per lead and a 300% decrease in cost per engagement. “Previously, Twitter was just an awareness mechanism for our marketing team. Now it’s the focal point of all our social lead-generation initiatives, especially when it comes to net new name acquisition,” said John Lee, manager for brand and social marketing at Webtrends. Read more.

The Native Ad Wagon

The Associated Press is the latest publisher to jump on the native advertising wagon, Digiday’s Josh Sternberg reports. The sponsored content will be text, video and photography, and will only run on the AP’s site, not on those of its syndicates. “We’re not trying to make people think this is something AP produced,” said Ken Detlet, the AP’s VP of digital advertising strategy and sales. “They’ll know it’s something the brand is bringing to the table.” Read more.

Boom Or Bust

Depending on whom you ask, ad tech is either in a golden era or peaking. A paper written by Tim Hwang and Adi Kamdar of the Nesson Center for Internet Geophysics paints a really grim picture for digital advertising’s future, but Doug Weaver, founder and CEO of Upstream, vehemently disagrees with their predictions. The penmen of the working paper see advertising as a commodity market, but Weaver feels advertising is “a thousand different models across a dozen channels.” Read the blog post here.

Picture Of Success

There has been a lot of talk about Instagram ads since the company was bought by Facebook last year, and after the company’s first sponsored post, the results point to a promising future. Analytics company Nitrogram said an ad brought Michael Kors more than 33,000 new followers, and it generated 370% more likes than the average of the company’s last five nonpromoted posts. Not all users were thrilled however, as 20% of comments on the ad were negative in nature. Read the report.

VP Of Programmatic

Of all the types of companies in advertising, it seems weather is the ideal candidate for the real-time nature of programmatic advertising. That could be a good reason why The Weather Channel has created the role of VP for programmatic and given it to Jeremy Hlavacek, formerly VP of operations and strategic partnerships for WeatherFX. He will report to Jeremy Steinberg, SVP, digital ad sales, who said, “Programmatic buying is already a rapidly growing revenue channel for The Weather Company, and we know under Jeremy’s leadership of our programmatic efforts we’ll see even more impressive growth.” Read the release.

Cookie Jar Not Empty

Third-party cookies are in limbo right now, but 47% of impressions measured in AdMonsters’ Index Quarterly Cookie Report are cookies matched to third-party data. Only 17% of impressions have no cookie at all, suggesting the little bites of code are still vital despite the surge in negative press. Privacy issues aside, mobile is really driving a shift away from cookies, as AdMonsters found 41% of mobile impressions were not cookied. Read more.

Programmatic And The Agency

Not everyone is heralding the arrival of programmatic, as Adweek’s Sam Thielman points out, there are still some groups, such as TV buyers, who don’t care for automation. Thielman spoke to the Rubicon Project’s Jay Sears, who gave a little more insight into programmatic and the agency role in its future, saying, “We’re quite certain automation will touch every corner of advertising. If you want to see the way the world is going, you need to be studying the display market, the mobile market and, after those two, the video market.” Touch more.

Pay Fast

J. Crew is joining MasterCard’s MasterPass program, which streamlines the checkout process for consumers. MasterCard is joining the likes of companies such as PayPal, Amazon and Google, among others, who are trying to make headway in the digital payment space. Mobile Commerce Daily’s Rebecca Borison points out that as consumers gear up for the holiday season, they may be looking for ways to get shopping done more quickly, the perfect opportunity for something like this to take off. Read more.

But Wait, There’s More!