With AdMob Out of the Way, Is Google Set to Buy Invite Media?
Now that Google has wrapped up its AdMob deal, what’s next on its shopping list? One good bet: ad tech startup Invite Media. Industry sources believe Google (GOOG) is close to a deal for Invite, a three-year-old “demand side platform” designed to help buyers navigate high volume display advertising exchanges — like the one Google launched last year. A deal has supposedly been in the works for some time, and one theory is that Google has been waiting for the AdMob saga to conclude before moving forward. Estimates for a price are all over the map, ranging from $60 million to $100 million. The caveat: Google’s name has been linked to various DSPs for several months. “We have not entered into any agreement with any company,” Invite CEO Nat Turner told me via e-mail this afternoon. “I’ve honestly heard similar rumors about every other company in the space, so I don’t put too much credence in what people are saying these days.” A Google spokesman declined to comment on “rumor and speculation”. Whether or not it makes sense for Google to buy Invite or any other DSP depends on who you talk to. Some people think a DSP is a natural compliment to Google’s AdX unit, since it makes it easier for big ad holding companies to funnel money into the exchange.
Read More: AllThingsD.com
Yahoo Aims to Double Original Content in Ambitious Publishing Strategy
Despite Yahoo’s well-publicized strategy to corner a broad array of online businesses from advertising to search to content, it has more aggressively moved into the publishing space, increasingly looking like a content company. Last week, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based portal dropped $100 million on articles aggregator Associated Content, and in so doing has effectively proclaimed its stake on a media model that in many ways is strikingly similar to AOL, a once-faltering digital business that recently underwent a massive transformation into a content-driven business. Yahoo is the largest online content player in terms of traffic and audience, and it plans on doubling the share of original material it publishes with Associated Content, which manages a network of freelancers. Associated has built technology that predicts what kinds of content consumers want and seeds that content through natural search on engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing. “Yahoo is the world’s largest media company,” Exec VP Hillary Schneider told Advertising Age in the wake of the Associated deal. “Content is core to our strategy.”
Read More: AdAge
Google TV is Sony’s last stand against the Apple juggernaut
Everyone’s buzzing about Google’s new TV platform. But the real battle in your living room is Apple vs. Sony. Over the past few years, Apple has muscled its way past Sony as the top purveyor of premium, high margin consumer electronics products. Sony has long had a deep culture of NIH (Not Invented Here) ranging from Betamax in the 1980s to the Memory Stick in the 2000s. But the iPod replaced Sony’s Walkman, the iPhone replaced Sony Ericsson handsets, and the resurgent MacBook and iPad have leapt past Sony’s Vaio PCs. Apple’s unique blend of software, hardware, content relationships and rich developer ecosystem has eviscerated Sony’s core markets. The television set, Sony’s last bastion of premium consumer electronics, is already undergoing a relentless assault by Samsung. Now it’s facing a rumored Apple TV upgrade.
Read More: VentureBeat
iPad Mania’s Winners and Losers
Even with 1 million or so iPads out there, no print publishers can lay claim to huge numbers of downloads yet. But among the few that are giving out numbers, USA Today seems to be the big winner so far, with 371,213 downloads as of May 16. The paper also said it ranks no. 1 in news apps and no. 12 in free apps on the Apple tablet. It remains to be seen what will happen when the newspaper goes from a free app to a paid subscription model on July 4. The New York Times was a close second, with more than 300,000 downloads of its free Editors’ Choice app. The app provides a sampling of two free pages of content. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, has had about 230,000 downloads of its app and 100,000 regular users. The WSJ app, which offers news updates, videos and market data, costs $3.99 per week but is being offered free to existing subscribers for a limited time. For magazines, the iPad isn’t yet providing the lifeline they hoped for — which is perhaps not unexpected, given their aggressive pricing.
Read More: AdWeek
Samsung Courts Consumers, Marketers
Timothy Baxter stares at a pair of aces displayed on the screen of his Samsung Omnia II mobile phone. He taps a few buttons on it and then looks at a Samsung TV. Up pops a poker table with a pile of cards held by his opponent–a poker buddy in another city. “There’s no reason these phones can’t interact with the TV,” says Baxter, president of consumer electronics at Samsung Electronics America. If Baxter has his way, Texas Hold ‘em is just the first in a series of synergistic exchanges among Samsung’s products. The South Korean company’s plans may include pushing interactive advertisements from other companies through Samsung’s phones and flat-screen TVs. Ads will likely be built into Samsung’s new application store that, similar to Apple ( AAPL – news - people )’s for its iPhone, lets consumers stream content from the Internet to–in Samsung’s case–a Web-connected television. Millions of Samsung’s ipTV owners now have access to 30 ad-free applications, such as movie-streaming programs Netflix ( NFLX – news - people ) and Blockbuster ( BBI – news - people ). By year-end they will be able to tap into more than 100 of them. Then marketers may start doing it, too, piping their own messages into the apps.
Read More: Forbes.com
Google TV: What Does It Mean for Advertisers?
Google opened up an entirely new store of inventory for advertisers today with Google TV, an interactive platform that collapses the wall between TV and internet in the living room. The service, created with hardware partners Sony, Logitech and Intel, will launch this fall on TVs, set-top boxes and Blu-ray players. ”Every ad on TV has the potential to become interactive,” Google TV Technical Director Vincent Dureau said at the I/O developer conference, where the platform was announced. “Your TV content just became more interesting.” TV is the final screen for the search giant after it made its name in online search 10 years ago and moved into mobile with Android in 2007. While interactive TV has long been in the works from other providers, technology and a host of other issues have kept it from reaching a scale that would attract more money from major advertisers. Google’s existing relationships with advertisers for search and display ads, though, could theoretically turn the tide for interactive TV.
Read More: AdAge
Google to Launch Chrome Web Store
Google said it plans later this year to launch the Chrome Web Store, the online equivalent of Apple’s App Store. Sports Illustrated has signed on as one of Google’s charter partners, and at present the only publisher, involved in the new venture. According to Google executives, who presented details of the project during the company’s developer conference yesterday, the Chrome Web Store will provide a central hub for users looking to discover applications and for developers to distribute them. The thinking is that until now, unlike mobile apps, Web-based apps (such as desktop applications) have been been scattered and disorganized. During Wednesday’s presentation, Terry McDonell, editor of the Sports Illustrated Group, presented SI’s entree in the Chrome Web Store — a new digital version of the company’s core magazine product which attempts to combine the strengths of Web and print. It is designed specifically for laptops, notebooks and tablets. For example, SI’s new Chrome-version, which employs HTML5, navigates in a left-to-right, flip-through-the-pages fashion. But it also enables customization and search while offering live content, such as the latest sports scores, as well as video. SI plans to charge an unspecified fee for the app.
Read More: AdWeek
The Exponential Growth of Advertising
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the DC Summit Series, an amazing gathering of some of the youngest and brightest entrepreneurs to ever grace this world. While there, I had the pleasure of hearing a futurist named Ray Kurzweil speak about the evolution of technology and where it will go in the future. He explained the phenomenon of how technology generally starts off linear, and moves into an exponential phase, where it grows at a rate faster than people can generally keep up with. I thought about this concept long and hard, and decided that it could be related to advertising in general. So, I did a little research and here is what I’ve come up with (this is in no way a complete history of advertising, just a few key points to explain my rationale):
Read More: CPXadnetworkblog.com
Traditional Ads Yield Social Traction
In March, Kimberly-Clark brand Poise ran a 30-second spot during the lead-up to the Academy Awards on ABC. In it, Whoopi Goldberg portrayed famous women in history who may have suffered from incontinence. Its goal was to get people talking about the widespread problem — and how Poise can help with it. What the advertiser and its agency, Mindshare Entertainment, discovered was the spot was most effective not while it aired, but in the ripples created through social media afterwards as people discussed the issue and Goldberg’s decision to be the face of it. Soon, blogs, including Gawker Media’s Jezebel and Perez Hilton, were writing about it. The online conversation then returned to traditional media when Saturday Night Live aired a spoof of the spot during Weekend Update, with Kenan Thompson playing Goldberg. The explosion of online interest culminating in the SNL skit yielded 200 million PR impressions, per Mindshare — all for the media cost of a single spot. “Earned media for traditional campaigns is a key component of every conversation with every client,” said Brian Stoller, leader of digital strategy for Mindshare North America. “I can’t stress [enough] how huge this area has become for us.” “[The] new saying is: ‘An idea that doesn’t generate more content isn’t a very good idea,’” added Edward Boches, CCO and chief social media officer at Mullen.
Read More: AdWeek
