Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Whither The IPO
The Deal’s Matt Miller looks at the initial public offering (IPO) marketplace and says that even though some IPOs were successfully launched in the past month, overall, it’s still tough sledding to go public. Reasons for the sluggishness range from fewer investment banks to a “risk-averse” mind-set according to Miller. Read more.
What Comes First: The Platform Or The App
Betaworks COO and Founder Andrew Weissman says that if you’re going to build a platform, you better start with building an application. Sound like splitting hairs? Hardly, according to Weissman, as he makes his case looking at Yahoo, Google and AOL among others. Read more on The Business Insider.
Hespos On Exchanges
The presentation made by Underscore Marketing’s Tom Hespos at the recent iMedia Financial Summit in NYC is now available on iMedia Connection. It clearly shows how audience buying – particularly unduplicated, segmented audience buying through networks and exchanges – is taking over previous targeting tactics focused on site placements as marketers look to stretch their marketing budgets and improve ROI. See the presentation.
Journalism.co.uk’s Marek Miller interviews “Italy’s advertising network for publishers, the Premium Publishers Network (PPN)” as this pocket of European publishers is banding together to offer contextual advertising through its own network or display advertising through their agencies. The network is looking to grab some of the Google Content Network’s margin for itself. Read more.
Consumers Touching Brands Online
Cone Inc., a brand and image management agency, has released its 2009 Cone Consumer New Media Study, which looks at consumer interaction online. This year’s study found that “almost 80 percent (78%) of new media users interact with companies or brands via new media sites and tools, an increase of 32 percent from 2008 (59%).” Bring on the brand dollars! Read the release here. Download the study here (sign-up required).
Spanfeller Promotes Art of Display
In an opinion piece on PaidContent.org, Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller looks at the importance of art in a successful online display campaigns as well as how math – and presumably the math behind optimization – should not be considered the sole, key component of any campaign. Read it.
eMarketer and Borrell on Local Display
eMarketer has a few nice looking graphics available as it reports on a Borrell study which says that local online ad spend will increase only 5% next year after experiencing a 46% compound annual growth rate for the past five years and a 12% increase this year. Read more.
Rubicon Project Hires DoubleClick-er
Yield optimizer, The Rubicon Project, announced it has hired ex-DoubleClick-er, Jayne Leung, as director of its publisher development division for Asia. According to media.asia, she will work with her former DoubleClick boss, Kaylie Smith. Read the article.
VC Expand In India
PEub is reporting that Accel Partners has hired away Neeraj Bharadwaj from Apax Partners to run investment strategies and drive “growth equity” investments in India. According to Deborah Gage of PEhub, “growth equity” means Bharadwaj will be able to write $10-$50 million checks to growth stage – as opposed to seed stage -companies. Read more about VC activity in India.
Who’s Number One?
According to RECMA (REsearch Company evaluating the Media Agency industry – tough acronym!), WPP Group is still holding on to a decent, digital media agency lead over Publicis in spite of the holding company’s recent purchase of Razorfish. Read more from Joe Mandese at MediaPost.
Twitter Ad Network Funded
An ad network called Ad.ly has been funded to the tune of $500,000 – which may have already been spent on the launch party with twitterer Pee Wee Herman – as the firm looks to represent twitter users who have 7-figure followings. (AdExchanger.com remains well below this threshold.) The company provides in-stream tweets that often say “sponsored” and are written in 140 characters or less, of course. Read about it.
View-Through Rates For Pre-Roll
Daisy Whitney of Beet.tv writes on Huffington Post about a recent Yume study which shows users are only watching, on average, 70% of a pre-roll video ad. This means that 30% of the time the user never makes it to the content, which has to be troubling to publishers. Some of the blame is put on advertisers and agencies who run their TV ads online in spite of the different user experience involved. Read more. Or, download the study (PDF).
Entrepreneurship: Not About Getting Rich
– or, so says Eric Ries in a guest piece on the GigaOm blog. Ries says that most entrepreneurs pursue the building of businesses to be successful which does not necessariy equate to being filthy rich. As Ries states in his piece, “There are much easier ways to get rich” than being an entrepreneur. Read it.
