Google Expands Remarketing to All AdWords Accounts
Google is expanding its retargeting program, available in beta since March 2009, to all AdWords accounts. The move gives thousands of small advertisers the ability to target non-converting prospects and other site visitors through display ad inventory on Google Content Network sites they later visit. Google began its retargeting trial a year ago as part of its interest-based advertising program. With that program, Google began maintaining behavioral profiles of users based on their Web activity (but not their search history). It also began offering about 500 beta advertisers the ability to track site visitors via a Google cookie and then retarget those users – a practice Google calls “remarketing” – on sites in the Google Content Network. Beta program participants included Infinity, Samsung, and InterContinental Hotels Group. In addition to retargeting their own site visitors, AdWords users can reach out to individuals who have interacted with their brand on YouTube, including either their YouTube brand channels or a YouTube homepage ad. Samsung said it was able to reach more than 100,000 users who interacted with its YouTube homepage ad on Valentine’s Day. Infiniti meanwhile used remarketing to drive awareness of its G Coupe and QX SUV series models during the NCAA March Madness tournament, in conjunction with its television advertising. And InterContinental substantially increased the size of its investment in remarketing, according to Google.
Read More: ClickZ
It’s Not Just The iPads That Are Pre-Selling; The Ads Are Going Too
Here’s some good news for publishers reeling from a horrific 2009: Ad units on the iPad are attracting big-name advertisers. The NYT reports that a high-end credit card company has purchased its iPad ad inventory for the device’s first two months on the market, while brands, like FedEx and Buick, are buying ads on the apps of other publications, including the WSJ, Newsweek, Time (NYSE: TWX) and Reuters (NYSE: TRI). The NYT says the going rate is $75,000 to $300,000 “for a few months of exclusivity” on one of these apps. That sounds respectable since—while there are signs that iPad pre-sales are off to a good start—it’s unclear how popular the device will really be. And, of course, that’s the big caveat here since, in the long-term, whether iPad ad sales can help offset declining print ad and even online ad sales, will depend on the device’s adoption. One other nugget for iPad watchers in the story: The WSJ’s app may cost $17.99 a month. As Staci points out, that’s a slight premium to the $14.99 a month the WSJ charges for a subscription on the Kindle.
Read More: PaidContent.org
Connexus To Merge With Epic Advertising
Connexus Corporation — owner of online ad network and social media company Traffic Marketplace — on Wednesday announced plans to merge with performance marketing company Epic Advertising. The combined company plans to provide various digital marketing services, from brand-building to customer acquisition. By combining their technology platforms, the companies expect to launch an integrated demand-side ad platform for clients. Given the increasing complexity and specialized nature of digital advertising, agencies can’t have too many resources, according to Don Mathis, CEO of Epic Advertising — formerly AzoogleAds. “Delivering successful digital advertising campaigns requires scale, technology and execution,” he said. “Scale is reach and scale begets data … And data begets relevance for the advertisers’ campaigns.” The Traffic Marketplace technology platform integrates data from multiple sources in an effort to increase relevance for advertisers, with a specialty in correlating intent-based data to improve its targeting and analytics. Epic’s technology, meanwhile, attempts to leverage a patent-pending approach to improving the effect of brand-focused campaigns on customer acquisition programs. The company claims to work with 45,000 advertisers and publishers in the United States and abroad.
Read More: MediaPost
AdSafe Announces Roster of Strategic Network Partners
AdSafe Media, the rating standard of online media, today announced an expanded list of key partnerships that secure the company’s position as the market leader in preventative brand protection for the display advertising industry. Through these partnerships, AdSafe will enable its partners to control the placement of display advertising via its Content Rating System and Brand Safety Firewall. AdSafe’s Content Rating System is a standardized measurement platform which rates the brand safety of content on individual web pages, allowing brands, agencies, networks and publishers to ensure that display advertising only appears adjacent to appropriate online content. Premium partners utilizing AdSafe to help ensure brand protection include: AudienceScience, Break Media, Collective, Invite Media, Kitara Media, Media6Degrees, MediaMath, Ourstage, Rocket Fuel Inc, Scripps Networks, Traffic Marketplace, Turn and [x+1]. “We are proud to announce a list of partners that are all true innovators in the display advertising space,” said Kent Wakeford, Co-Founder and EVP of AdSafe. “These partnerships signify how essential brand safety has become to the industry as a whole.”
Read More: PRNewswire
Improving Marketing ROI: Towards a More Equitable Conversion Attribution Model
While last-click attribution is an easy default mode for digital marketers, this practice can lead to serious marketing missteps, including inflated digital marketing estimates and misallocation of marketing spend. The underlying issue is that a frequent assumption of online marketing — that the last click is the prime contributor to the sale — is flawed. In fact, there are a multiplicity of factors (touchpoints and exposures both on and offline) that have helped pave the way for that click. Unfortunately, last-click attribution models create an illusion of “marketing science,” when in fact the results are often grossly overstated, resulting in erroneous findings that can dramatically affect marketing ROI. Marketers instead need to consider a more sophisticated analytical approach to tackle the issue. The best approach utilizes a staged system of multivariate equations to determine the relative contributions of different elements across the marketing mix. Through this advanced analytic approach, one can quantify the true effect of investments in upstream media vehicles such as TV, print, display and e-mail in driving consumers to search or to marketers’ websites and subsequent conversion. Ultimately, the insights derived from this technique lead to smarter, more effective spend allocation decisions for both online and offline sales success.
Read More: MediaPost
Break Media Sees Data as Display’s Savior
Male-centric Break Media is betting on data to enhance its display advertising business. The company, which manages sites such as Break.com, MadeMan and Chickipedia, has inked separate pacts with BlueKai, which aggregates in-market shopper data for brands, publishers and ad networks, and eXelate, which manages an exchange for behavioral targeting data. Break will leverage both companies’ data to offer its advertisers the ability to target more specific, narrow audiences — including audiences that are intent on shopping for or purchasing specific products. “These partnerships, combined with the size of our network and the breadth of our ad offerings, will ensure that Break’s advertisers will be able to reach as much of their intended audience as possible, and do so with maximum efficiency and effectiveness,” said Andrew Budkofsky, Break’s evp of sales and partnerships. With these deals, Break joins a growing number of online media companies turning to outside vendors that specialize in layering audience data on top of a site’s data with the promise of delivering the right ad to the right users. The approaches vary, as publishers experiment with blending offline shopping data, online cookie data and data from companies that claim to be able to find “look-alike” users based on modeling technology. For example, MTV Networks recently signed a deal with the analytics firm Quantcast to bolster its online video ad sales.
Read More: AdWeek
RTB Platforms: Lessons From Wall Street?
Real-time-bidding platforms are the buzz in the digital advertising space, heralded as the future of the ad biz with the potential to return the industry to the profitability of Mad Men glory days. Proponents argue that the efficiency that RTB platforms provide will have a transformative effect, altering Madison Avenue’s business from selling “sizzle” to the Wall Street model of delivering returns. Yet given the evolving state of the advertising business and Wall Street’s recent flirtation with our economy’s collapse, are we ready to bet the future of our industry on an unproven model? More importantly, what lessons can be taken from the recent banking debacle to ensure that RTB platforms are able to deliver on all the hype?
1. Standards – Financial markets are predicated on the idea that information about assets is what drives market efficiency. If RTB platforms are to deliver on the promise of efficiency, the display markets need a trusted source of information. Even in light of the recent economic crisis, few would dare buy a financial instrument that had not been rated by an independent, third-party authority. Like financial trading markets, RTB platforms will require a standardized system of metrics that enable buyers and sellers to evaluate transactions across common terms. And in the case of digital media, such standards must encompass the quality, the brand safety and value of those impressions being traded. Without a standardized set of metrics through which to evaluate inventory, RTB platforms will just be another iteration of rate-card-based buying.
Read More: MediaPost
A New Data Player
An old Ad.com colleague of mine, Mike Peralta, recently joined a newly launched start-up called Magnetic, which you can read more about here. In short, the company provides DSPs and their kind with search behavior data to use in display retargeting campaigns. I told Mike, I find it odd that this is the first time I’m hearing of a provider who does this. Especially since Yahoo! based their entire behavioral targeting business on this principle years ago. But here we are, with another way to retarget valuable customers, and I think its a really good one for a few reasons (not just because Yahoo already did it, which isnt always a good reason.)
- It will get more display marketers thinking about the interplay between display and search.
- Unlike offline data, search data is easy to update in real time or near real time.
- There is a lot of it, so a lot of people can play and experiment to find what works.
So while I have publicly cautioned against the “more is more” pile-on effect we are seeing in the data space right now, I do think search data has a justified place at the table.
Read More: Blogs.Forrester.com
News Corp. Looking To Sell Fox Audience Network, But How?
News Corp (NYSE: NWS) has been mulling selling off part or all of prized revenue-making digital ad unit Fox Audience Network for a long time now, and it is finally making the move, we have confirmed. The company has gone around the block with this idea for almost 8-10 months, our sources say, mainly because of the complications in separating the online ad network from MySpace and other properties; News Corp.‘s digital properties are the biggest component of FAN’s network, and selling it off (or even an IPO, a possibility that has also been mulled internally, but shelved later) would put a majority of MySpace ad network revenues in the hands of a third-party owner. One senior source I spoke to last week put it thusly: “it is like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) selling off AdWords.” The news was first published 30 minutes ago by Techcrunch.
Read More: PaidContent.org
