Yahoo’s Bartz Promises Movement on Ad Products and Revenue

Yahoo’s Carol Bartz hinted at new offerings for CPG advertisers and the long-awaited transition to the APT ad serving platform this morning at the company’s annual meeting for investors. Repeating the firm’s recent “science, art, and scale” mantra, Bartz promised investors the company will deliver when it comes to driving revenue and better monetizing ad inventory.  Bartz said Yahoo has been actively marketing its display offerings to advertisers and agencies, but more surprising, said the firm has been running product tests on behalf of consumer packaged goods advertisers. She hinted that Yahoo is helping CPG advertisers better understand how online activity informs real-world shopping behavior.  “We’re very, very immersed with some customers in how to marry the online/offline experience,” she told the investor audience. “CPG is getting very interested in these things,” she continued, adding that Yahoo can set up product sample trials at scale with two million consumers rapidly. “We’re out there testing that; we’re out there marketing it,” she said.  Bartz also hinted the company will unveil new display ad capabilities later today during the investor event. “You are going to see special creativity, special art for online advertising,” she said. “Not enough creativity has gone into what the medium will allow,” said Bartz, lamenting that currently online advertising is not creative enough and often simply mimics print or other media creative.

Read More: ClickZ

Zynga Teams With Yahoo On Social Games

Highlighting efforts to ease its reliance on Facebook, social game company Zynga Wednesday announced a partnership with Yahoo to offer its games throughout the Web portal’s network including the home page, Yahoo Games and Yahoo Mail.  The deal comes on the heels of a new five-year agreement that Zynga struck last week with Facebook, where it operates hugely popular games like “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars” that have aided the social network’s growth.  But relations between the companies have more recently become strained over Facebook’s plan to take a 30% cut of revenue from Zynga’s sales, forcing it to use Facebook’s virtual currency in applications. Zynga had reportedly also considered leaving Facebook altogether to launch its own social gaming network.  Terms of the Facebook-Zynga deal were not disclosed. But by pursuing more outside distribution deals with major sites like Yahoo, boasting 600 million monthly users, Zynga can presumably expand its user base beyond Facebook.

Read More: MediaPost

Wired Introduces Adobe-Built IPad Edition

Wired magazine has introduced its much-anticipated iPad edition, a slick $4.99 app that was built by Adobe in a 10-month development process despite Apple’s midstream ban on software written with Adobe Flash. Adobe wound up writing the code in Objective-C, an Apple-approved language.  At first look, the app, an enhanced version of the June issue, appears to push magazines further toward their potential on tablet computers. That’s partly because the graphics that play a big part in Wired’s print edition lend themselves to interaction and animation, but the app also introduces some elements that other magazines can readily adopt.   Readers can slide their fingers on certain pages to see a Lego Lamborghini assembled brick by brick, for example, or to rotate Mars and pull up information on the spacecraft that have landed at different spots on its surface. Video could show the same progressions, but touch control seems more involving.

Read More: AdAge

Targeting Gets Social

Data is at the heart of any successful marketing strategy. Decades of research have produced scores of theories and best practices on how advertisers can best reach their target audiences. Marketers have seen an array of targeting techniques, most focused on context, demographics and psychographics. With the explosion of the social Web, a whole new approach to building brand audiences that is based on the connections among people and between people and brands has been discovered. This new approach is called social targeting.  Social targeting is taking the old model of audience targeting and turning it on its head. The old model associated a brand with personal attributes — age, gender, income level, various cultural attitudes — and then targeted media that best matched those attributes. The new model, enabled by both social media and audience bidding technologies (ad exchanges and real-time bidding), uses social graph data to assemble custom audiences and reach them where they are most receptive to a marketer’s message.  Theories about targeting based on connections among consumers have been around for several years. In research published in 2006, AT&T Research and New York University’s Stern School of Business showed that the best way to find new customers for a given telecommunications service was through connections between prospects and existing customers. Evaluating a wealth of data to define cohorts based on personal profile and purchasing patterns, the research team found the best way to identify future customers was to target the people who called existing customers and were called by them most recently and frequently.

Read More: MediaPost

NYC Officials on Charm Offensive to Woo Emerging Media Firms to City

New York City government went on a charm offensive today at two tech industry events in the hopes of attracting new media and tech business to the Big Apple. Mayor Mike Bloomberg was an unexpected speaker at today’s TechCrunch Disrupt event in New York, while his deputy mayor for economic development spoke at a Google event touting the company’s economic impact.  As the city recovers from the financial industry meltdown and its negative effect on its tax base, it aims to establish itself as a rival to Silicon Valley and a place for small and large tech and new media firms to set up shop.  “We would welcome [Google] as you think about moving your headquarters here to New York City,” quipped Robert Lieber, New York City’s deputy mayor for economic development, while speaking at an event held by Google today. While the event, held at home goods retailer Gracious Home, was intended to promote Google and its contributions to New York’s economy, Lieber took advantage of his attendance by suggesting that the city aims to “create the kind of environment that supports” innovative companies like Google.

Read More: ClickZ

Audience Reselling: Data Aggregators

In the upcoming posts, I’ll look into the impact data aggregators (pure-play and ad networks) have on publishers.  Do data aggregators provide bi-directional transparency?  What are the implication of transparency?  What are the issues associated with attribution of data sources?  What realistic contribution margin can selling data have to the bottom line of a publisher?  Data aggregators have been a big force behind the movement to audience buying.  For the most part, they are the ones doing the audience selling, or reselling as it were.  Essentially, they aggregate audience members from publishers and then repackage and resell them.  Their goal is to build a big enough audience (i.e., pool of cookies annotated with rich information) for sale to advertisers and agencies for targeting.  Creating differentiated cookies and understanding their traffic patterns, is the secret to building margins in their business models. 

Read More: Blog.ScoutAnalytics.com

Social Media Ad Spending Lags

Social media use is exploding, but ad spending in the sector continues to be a blip on the radar for most brands.  Razorfish, one of the largest digital ad spenders, compiled data on its 2009 digital ad spending. It found that social media display advertising made up just 3 percent of its clients’ budgets. Non-display in social media accounted for another 1 percent. The figures pale in comparison to the time spent online. According to comScore, U.S. Internet users spent 11 percent of their time online in 2011 on social media sites.  The spending figures reflect that, all the chatter about Facebook, Twitter and iPhone notwithstanding, online media is dominated by traditional vehicles: vertical sites, ad networks, portals and search accounted for 88 percent of buys. Vertical sites got the biggest share of spending, 31 percent. Search was next with a 25 percent share and ad networks received 20 percent. Other emerging media remain blips: mobile accounted for just 2 percent of Razorfish’s spending.

Read More: BrandWeek

If 6 Turned Out To Be 9

It’s no secret that Google has been shopping for a so-called Demand Side Platform (DSP) for some time.  With the AdMob acquisition signed off by the Feds, the rumors are that Google will acquire Invite Media (http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100523/with-admob-out-of-the-way-is-google-set-to-buy-invite-media/), a DSP known primarily for a user interface that enables audience buying across exchanges.  This move seems sensible enough as a way for Google to shore up its exchange user interface, which even Google concedes needs more care and feeding.  But would it undermine the core value proposition of the DSP?  A history lesson: before DSPs, online display advertisers have had to rely on the sellers of media to target, price, and optimize media.  That’s why agencies have become so reliant on ad networks.  And that’s why their clients increasingly are questioning the value added and the fees paid for media planning in the digital era.  Enter the DSP.  Using a DSP like DataXu, an agency and its client can for the first time effectively crunch their own proprietary data, develop their own campaign algorithms, and seek price/performance optimality across multiple sellers, effectively breaking the reliance on the seller to deliver all the value.

Read More: Dataxu.com

Razorfish Outlook on Ad Exchanges

Razorfish has released its 2010 Outlook Report and includes a section on “How The Ad Exchange Ecosystem Works” with an abbreviated ecosystem map and a prediction: “While there are no hard industry estimates of the size of the ad exchange market, industry observers suggest agency trading desks, which execute deals on ad exchanges, will control $500 million in media spending in 2010.”

Read More: RazorfishOutlook.com