Microsoft and Yahoo! Deal Gets Clearance

Microsoft and Yahoo received approval from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Union to move forward on the search deal aimed at taking market share from search engine giant Google. In a joint announcement Thursday, Microsoft and Yahoo reported that the two will now turn attention to implementing the deal that should begin in the coming days. It will involve transitioning Yahoo’s algorithmic and paid-search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ search advertisers globally, according to the companies. Aside from periodic phone, email and webinars, the two companies will communicate the transition to advertisers through a dedicated Web site. Microsoft and Yahoo execs believe the team spearheading the project can make the transition in the United States by the end of this year, but may wait until 2011 if they find it will disrupt sales for retailers during the holiday season. All global customers and partners are expected to transition by early 2012.

Read More: MediaPost

The Rubicon Project Details Future Plans

Digital advertising infrastructure company the Rubicon Project today at the PaidContent 2010 conference has outlined its corporate strategy going forward. Essentially, the company is declaring that you’ll soon be able to stick a fork in the ad server, and to underline its vision it has published a fairly interesting manifesto on its website that’s well worth a read if you have a vested interest in the Internet advertising marketplace. The company also announced that it has tapped Allen & Company as its financial advisor to support the company’s goals, which it says will include strategic acquisitions, platform expansion and other paths to accelerated international growth. The Rubicon Project, which launched in 2007, in its manifesto takes aim at players in the ad server technology market, saying that it is currently in a ‘dangerous’ state of status quo. The company says it will fight to overcome the increasing price erosion that publishers have witnessed over the past few years because the balance in the marketplace has so far favored the demand-side of the equation.

Read More: TechCrunch

Why Doesn’t Amazon Build A Huge Ad Play?

Amazon is just a fascinating company.  I have never worked there and their performance over the years has been amazing to watch.  In particular, it hasn’t always been obvious that their  heavy R&D expenditure over the years was justified compared to their low operating margins.  Look at the companies in recent years from cloud services like EC2 to the Kindle.  And of course, you can see there e-commerce growth truly outpace the competition. I really don’t know why they are not thinking thru ways in which to more greatly to broaden their reach.  I did a post last year on why Amazon should buy Twitter.  Out of all of their investments in non-ecommerce related businesses, I have always wondered why Amazon had not more fully invested in building a world-class advertising play.  Amazon possesses all of the necessary components to build a world-class advertising platform. Amazon has a huge affiliate network called Amazon Associates.  A guesstimate is that an Amazon affiliate network has 2 million affiliates generating on average 5,000 impressions per month per publisher, or 120 billion impressions per year.  This is an imperfect estimate but most certainly if Amazon were generating less than 20 billion impressions per month via its affiliate base then it would not currently be ranked as a top 30 ad network as it is today.  The three big guys make Amazon’s advertising capability look like market share mice nuts – the  top three ad networks (Platform A, Yahoo, and Google).

Read More: StartupWhisperer

Video Ad Networks Embrace Retargeting

Video ad retargeting is emerging as a new way for direct response advertisers to leverage in-stream video advertising. Still largely nascent, the practice is showing signs of wider use by ad buyers as a means of recapturing leads and boosting ad effectiveness. As one might gather from the name, video retargeting is a variation of display ad retargeting – a practice frequently used by online retailers and other direct marketers to deliver ads to shopping cart abandoners and other non-converting site visitors while they’re surfing other properties. A subcategory of behavioral targeting, retargeting is common on large ad networks and exchanges such as ValueClick, Advertising.com and Right Media. But it hasn’t been widely offered by video ad networks. Until recently, that is. A growing number of video ad networks have lately rolled out the capability. They include YuMe, Tremor Media, and SpotXchange. Google does not yet offer retargeting on its in-stream video ad network, but an exec told ClickZ that it may do so in 2010.

Read More: ClickZ

Tumri CEO Calvin Lui Discusses Marketing Analytics Offering

AdExchanger.com: It would seem that Tumri could use these new tools to create its own demand-side platform. How much longer until you pull the trigger on the Tumri DSP?

CL: At a high level, Tumri’s mission is to provide marketers with a dynamic marketing platform that offers the following capabilities:

• Deeper marketing insights
• End-to-end, real-time decisioning
• Efficient execution

Today, Tumri is mainly known for our dynamic creative optimization technology. But we’ve also been asked to, and have delivered, media buying and optimization services for some of our clients. Media buying and optimization has not been our core competency, but for certain clients it is critical that we tightly integrate their media and creative optimization to accomplish their goals. So, we can offer a combined offering if an advertiser wants such an option. In our view, though, a demand side platform (DSP) is just one of the components of the end-game in “next generation” display advertising. Current discussions about DSPs revolve mostly around data-driven, real-time access to media inventory via exchanges and real-time bidding (RTB) environments. In addition to exchange and RTB executions, however, we believe that the long term solution will continue to need a way to marry analytics and thought processes across contract media buys, too. Dynamic creative works across all media executions and is a critical part of the end-game, as well.

Read More: AdExchanger

Google Buzz Could Become Web’s Open Social Hub

On the surface it may appear that Google simply created Buzz as a social network add-on for Gmail. But in reality the Mountain View, Calif. search engine launched the beginning of a hub that could eventually connect to forums, third-party PC and mobile applications, as well as other social sites. Google recognizes the need to allow data and people to seamlessly travel between portals and Web sites. Gmail Buzz users will get a better picture of that soon. In a Buzz post, Google Software Engineer DeWitt Clinton directs followers to code in Buzz Labs who want to better understand Google’s social network API strategy. It explains how the social network will connect with other sites and information through a variety of protocols, such as Activity Streams, Atom, AtomPub, MediaRSS, WebFinger, PubSubHubbub, Salmon, OAuth, and XFN.

Read More: MediaPost

MediaContacts Partners With Adify On Custom Ad Networks

Media Contacts, the interactive media agency of Havas Digital, has named vertical ad network Adify as a preferred ad network for developing custom networks on behalf of clients. “We are streamlining our business to partner with the best and most strategic partners for our clients,” said Ed Montes, managing director, Havas Digital North America, in a statement. “We selected Adify Media as a preferred network because it delivers unmatched quality of audience and transparency.” Adify, a unit of Cox Enterprises, operates more than 200 niche networks, including those run by Six Apart, Pajama Media, the Travel Channel and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. It claims a total audience of more than 109 million and has a proprietary ad-targeting solution to select sites where certain users spend more than 25% of their time.

Read More: MediaPost

Why Are Legacy Ad Players Losing The DSP Race?

I was reading Zach Coelius’s article defining DSPs the other day and it made me wonder, why does it seem like new companies, generally, are winning the DSP wars?  For that matter, how did no one jump into the space now dominated by Pubmatic, Rubicon, and AdMeld?

• Zach says that DSPs should have access to billions of impressions per day.  Ad.com had that years ago.  Valueclick was big.  Right Media, theoretically, could have tried to spin around and be a DSP.  One wonders how they let so many new companies enter this gap.
• Zach emphasizes reporting, impression attribution and other features as key aspects of a DSP.  Traditional third-party ad servers are all perceived as excelling in this area.

Certainly, there are features that they did not have, but it seems like extending the product would be easier than building a new product.  I can point to several things that probably made transitioning to this new exchange/DSP world difficult…

Read More: CogMap.com

Our Digital Lives Have Evolved — So Must Trust

After reading that headline, I can see some (maybe lots) of you scratching your heads saying: “Wait a minute — trust is a not a technology!” A decade ago that would have been true — it is not now. Our digital lives were once confined to e-mail, some web surfing and an occasional online purchase (for the braver among us). A mere decade on and our lives are increasingly being lived online. Yet, while our dependence on the internet has grown exponentially, the technologies we use to navigate the sometimes dangerous, somewhat untrusted waters of the internet remain the same — largely confined to incremental improvements in narrowly defined segments of security or access. The unfortunate result is that the trust gap is more “gaping” than ever. On a personal level, it’s difficult to authenticate what we see online, who we interact with, who we label an “expert” and what information is trustworthy. If we want to buy something online, we may know that an SSL padlock shows us that our interaction is encrypted, but it speaks nothing about the trustworthiness of whom we are encrypting with. Social networks introduce business rules to ensure privacy, but these practices are easily breached.

Read More: AdAge