Can you accurately measure the impact of online video advertising on offline consumer purchases?

Videology is going to try. The ad platform, formerly known as TidalTV, is entering into dual partnerships with database marketing and behavioral targeting services provider I-Behavior and Kantar Shopcom, which runs a database containing information from 231 million consumers across 270 CPG, retail, travel, lodging and services categories.

The goal is to help marketers reach users based on their demographic makeup or in-store activity, explained Kevin Haley, Chief Scientist at Videology.

“What advertisers really want to know is if their advertising moves soap off the shelves,” says Haley. He says the ability to provide advertisers with ongoing, offline ROI measurement should have a “significant impact on advertising strategies within the digital video space.”

With the three-way partnership, advertisers can target offline purchase-based segments across Videology’s in-stream video network of more than 80 million consumers, Haley promised.

Meanwhile, given the volume of data that will result from the enterprise, Haley sees an opportunity for analysis of purchase behavior at the brand level, including increases in sales volume, frequency of purchase and retail penetration.

Launched in late 2007, Videology was known to the world as TidalTV until earlier this month. The name change was meant to convey a more video- and technology-heavy image.

Read more: MediaPost

Future Publishing and The Guardian have encouraged companies to embrace private exchanges while there is still time to learn.

Agencies and publishers have downplayed calls this week for more industry education (nma.co.uk 19 January 2011) to reduce nervousness around private ad exchanges.

Marco Bertozzi, MD of research firm VivaKi Nerve Center (right), said, “I don’t buy the nervousness anymore. A year ago not many publishers were as involved as they are now. Most didn’t trust it. Nine months later it’s a very different story. If you can get the FT to work with you in a private marketplace you can get anyone.”

He reckons almost every publisher is “dipping their toe in the water”, with feedback showing that they are seeing better returns through the exchanges than selling to ad networks.

He points to The Guardian, Future and Associated as some of the early adopters.

The Guardian began trading premium performance inventory via a private exchange with Rubicon Project in October 2011, but it first experimented with exchange trading in 2008, which it scaled in 2009 before developing new UK inventory to trade programmatically in March 2010.

Tim Gentry, Guardian News & Media’s commercial effectiveness manager, said the early move was driven in part by being able to gain experience while volumes were relatively low and the market was relatively immature. “The short-term aim for us is to grow our share of market by capturing trading-desk spend that was previously going to networks,” he said. “Longer term, we are aiming to gain the skills and experience that will make us one of the best premium publishers.”

Read more: newmediaage

Facebook may be the biggest social network on the planet, but social ad targeting firm 33Across says it now has the distinction of managing the world’s largest social and interest graph.

The company was set to announce today that it has acquired San Francisco-based publishing sharing tool Tynt, which says it reaches more than 1 billion global users monthly. Ostensibly, the acquisition expands 33Across’ data footprint to more than 1.25 billion people worldwide (which the companies say eclipses Facebook’s 800 million, although comparing Facebook’s network to 33Across’ isn’t exactly an apples to apples comparison).

Tynt, which tracks when readers cut and paste content forsharing via email and other social channels, has more than 500,000 publisher clients, including NBCUniversal, Sports Illustrated and MarthaStewart.com. 33Across will maintain the Tynt brand but take ownership of all of the company’s assets, including technology, patents, filings, analytics and tool sets, as well as its roughly 17 employees, including senior leadership.

Read more: ADWEEK

Growth in mobile video consumption is so poised, it’s difficult to predict how high and fast the curve might move, while the same goes for advertising and other revenue streams.

“The opportunity appears to be enormous by any stretch of the imagination,” said Nielsen Senior Vice President Scott L. Brown, noting the boom in smartphone penetration.

Mike Bloxham, the executive director of the Media Behavior Institute, said: “There’s a huge amount of growth yet to come in mobile-related revenues … we’re almost at a Jurassic stage of development.”

Bloxham did caution that analyst suggestions that the mobile advertising market would parallel growth in usage could be too ambitious. If mobile accounts for 8% of media consumption time, that hardly means 8% of ad dollars would be apportioned in the space, given the many other factors that impact media buying.

“That’s complete garbage,” he said in joining Brown on a panel at the NATPE event. “Media money is not allocated based on time spent alone. It’s much more complicated than that.”

Read more: MediaPost

Ad agencies are engaged in a wrenching transition, driven by technological change. The very underpinnings of the agency business are shifting, as the business confronts a variety and challenges in digital media. Digiday is embarking on a series of video interviews with agency leaders to discuss how the modern agency is built. There’s little doubt there is not an easy blueprint for the “agency of the future.” There will be new agencies, evolved “traditional agencies,” and even new hybrid marketing companies that are part agency, part tech and part media.

The series is made possible through the sponsorship of Videology, the video advertising platform until recently known as TidalTV. To introduce the series, I sat down with Videology CEO Scott Ferber to get his view on how technology is shifting the agency’s role. Ferber, who founded Advertising.com and sold it to AOL for $435 million in 2004, believes that agencies will evolve to become technology enablers, stitching together pieces of tech created by others. He’s mostly down on the idea of agencies owning technology. See the full interview below.

Read more: DIGIDAY

If content is the crux of all our marketing efforts, we should be learning, adjusting, and optimizing. If not, it will lead to a negative consumer experience.

One of my first columns for ClickZ was the importance of content and its role as a tangible media format. In the last few months, content continues to be a hot topic. The volume of content being distributed is increasing and the way an advertiser collects and uses data is changing. In our everyday professional lives, it’s easy to “set it and forget it,” but this can counter all the hard work put into content development and distribution.

So where to begin? The most common way a user will reach your content is through a basic search, meaning that search engine optimization is vital to your content planning approach. The optimization plan will need to take into account how all the content is distributed, be it via web, video, mobile, tablet, and social posts.

With media planning in its traditional sense merging with these specialized fields (search, social, mobile, experiential, and video), it’s important to make cross-channel content optimization central to any strategy. To do so (and remain sane), here are a few guidelines:

1.What are consumers already telling me? Social behavior, social trends, and search queries represent some of the best data for determining content needs and optimizations across all channels. It’s easily accessible to advertisers and beneficial when tied to syndicated and longer term research.

Example: Use data from Twitter, Facebook, or Google. The consumer is already being vocal, and as an advertiser you have access, so mine this data to improve content development and inform optimizations for existing content.

2.Is my content relevant to the experience? What is your consumer seeking? Take the research from step one and apply it to their experience, get a basic understanding of the consumer’s needs in a specific environment, and make sure your content answers their question.

Read more: ClickZ