Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
OMG Digital And Fox Partner
Reminding everyone that Fox has a demand-side platform, too, Fox Audience Network (FAN) and Omnicom Media Group announced that FAN will provide its planning tools called Living Segments to the media services agency. According to the release, “The agreement marks the first time that an online advertising platform and media agency have forged an integrated partnership to create more effective consumer segmentation, and more efficient bidding and buying strategies.” FAN president Adam Bain calls FAN’s offering a “real-time audience planning and buying platform at scale.” Matt Spiegel, CEO, Omnicom Media Group said that the partnership would allow OMG “to deliver the information consumers want in the environments that matter most to them — quickly and cost effectively.” Read the release.
Yahoo Reports Q3 Earnings
Yahoo! reported slightly better than expected Q3 2009 financial statement with 13 cents per share earnings on gross revenues of $1.58 billion, down 12% from a year ago, and net revenues of $1.13 billion. Download release here (PDF). Get slides, too (PDF).
According to BusinessWeek’s Rob Hof who covered the earnings call, a nickel per share of the profit came from Yahoo! selling its stake in China’s Alibaba. On display ads, Hof notes Yahoo!’s improvement as guaranteed or “premium” inventory continued to sell and “Non-guaranteed (presumably Right Media Exchange) declined as a result of axing annoying ads. Instead of $75 million revenue hit, [Yahoo!] only got $15 million because of a slower rollout and less impact.” Read more from BusinessWeek.
Carol Bartz came up ill before the call so the presentation was led by Yahoo! CFO Time Morse. ThinkEquity analyst Bill Morrison asked during the call about a rumor that Yahoo! was no longer selling non-guaranteed (unsold, remnant, etc.) Yahoo! inventory in the Right Media Exchange. Morse said that to his knowledge they were still selling the Yahoo! site inventory on RMX. If this rumor was found to be true, among many questions, it begs the question of how Yahoo! would plan to monetize this enormous bucket of inventory, or is it going to run house-ads and increase scarcity of Yahoo! O&O inventory which in turns drive price of the direct sold (“premium”) display business. Read the transcript on Seeking Alpha.
AudienceScience Gets $20 Million
AudienceScience announced that it has raised an additional $20 million – a HUGE number – from Mayfield Fund, Meritech Capital Partners, Integral Capital Partners, and Mohr, Davidow Ventures according to ClickZ’s Kate Kaye. (Is the DSP space hot, or what?) In an interview with AudienceScience CEO Jeff Hirsch, it appears the company is looking to serve the growing agency demand-side platform (DSP) space and compares itself to the data available through Quantcast which helps target media against behaviors and demographics. Read more.
On Omnicon Digital
In answer to question during their Q3 2009 earnings call, Omnicom Group CEO John Wren provided an outline on the role of the new Omnicom Digital unit and its CEO Jonathan Nelson. From his answer, Wren wanted somebody that would “renew our activities both in training, developing, and changing up staff in our existing companies but also expanding some of the specialty services that we can offer [in digital].” Wren added that Omnicom will be looking to expand its digital footprint in Asia and the Middle East. Read the call transcript on Seeking Alpha. For a summary of the quarterly financial statement, which included a 22% quarterly, year-over-year decline in earnings, read Rupal Parekh in Ad Age.
Meeker’s Latest Internet Report
Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker presented her latest state-of-the-Internet economy-report at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Business Insider’s Henry Blodget notes that this “macro-trend” presentation created by Meeker, Scott Devitt and Liang Wu is a highlight of each year’s summit. Among the observations, Meeker sees the mobile web at an inflection point. See the pres here.
Yahoo! Hires New M&A Chief
In an interview with The WSJ’s Jessica Vascellaro, Yahoo CFO Tim Morse said, “Yahoo! hired former General Electric Co. executive Andrew Siegel as its new head of mergers and acquisitions.” Read about it. Kara Swisher notes on All Things D that this is more of an “unwinding assets” job than an acquisition job and also wonders where existing M&A chief, Greg Mrva, has gone. Read more on All Things D.
Pharma’s Ad Deductibility
ANA President and CEO Bob Liodice argues in his video blog that the legislative efforts to reduce the ability of pharmaceutical companies to deduct advertising expenses from business taxes owed is a dangerous precedent. Called “ad deductibility”, Liodice says the proposal in Congress needs to be stopped. Visit Liodice’s ANA blog.
Time Spent On Pages Matters
Ariel Geifman, a research analyst with Eyeblaster, plots a dwell time graph that shows the obvious – people spend the largest part of their time on Instant Message app when surfing. But, Geifman also unearths a trend showing that the longer users spend on a page with a display ad – the more likely they are to interact with it and that news, finance, sports and homepages lead in this metric called “Average Ad Duration.” Read more.
Leveraging Brand In DOOH Networks
The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones reports that it’s effectively leveraging its gold-plated WSJ brand to grow its digital out-of-home business to the tune of a 100% year-over-year increase in annual ad revenue so far in 2009 according to Digital Signage Expo. Read about it here. And, see the WSJ’s DOOH site here.
Bizo Business Boiling
B2B ad network Bizo said in a release that its outpacing the online display ad industry in terms of reach and revenue growth in 2009. The release adds that Bizo added “50 new B2B advertiser clients and more than 300 publisher sites, while maintaining a 150% revenue renewal rate among its advertisers” in the first three quarters of 2009. Read the release.
More Buzz On Exchanges
Dave Fidlin of Digital Media Buzz looks at the world of ad exchanges and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, in particular, in his feature piece on DMB. Fidlin quotes MediaMath’s Mark Mannino who talks about one of the key, scalable features of the 2.0 version of the ad exchange, “We’re now having access to the AdSense inventory, where before it really was a private playground.” Read more.
Walrath Making Movies
Yahoo! and Right Media exec, Michael Walrath, has teamed with his wife, Michelle, and several others on a side project to create a film on the bottled water industry and what the filmmaker views as its environmental impact. Walrath’s company, Atlas Films, was founded in 2008, and the company’s film, “Tapped,” was being screened in Sacramento as part of a local awareness initiative yesterday. Read more. See the film’s website.
