33Across Acquires Publishing Data Gold Mine Tynt
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.
Mobile Video Primed, Ad Model In Early Stages
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.”
The Modern Agency
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.
Paid, Owned, and Earned Content…Ineffective Without Optimization
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.
Tremor Video Buys TubeMogul’s InPlay To Complement VideoHub Analytics
Tremor Video’s acquisition of TubeMogul’s InPlay ad analytics tool helps both companies respectively sharpen their value to a fast-evolving video marketplace. The deal, terms of which were undisclosed, gives Tremor yet another layer of insight into publishers’ ad management programs. At the same time, TubeMogul can be seen as more fully ensconced on the demand end of the digital video ad sales equation and is no longer trying to play both sides of the fence.
Analytics is the difference: Tremor plans to integrate InPlay, which TubeMogul created about three years ago to attract more publisher business, with VideoHub, its end-to-end video ad sales platform. While VideoHub serves both ad sellers and buyers, Tremor is largely aimed at working with publishers. At a time when video ad spending remains the fastest growing category of ad spending — eMarketer said last month that video ad dollars will rise 40 percent in 2012 to $3.1 billion — the providers of video ad services are primarily differentiated by their analytics and tech stack.
Video Ads Becoming More Interactive, Generating Better Results According to PointRoll’s Video Benchmark Study
PointRoll, a Gannett Company and the leading provider of digital marketing technology, today announced the findings of its recent Video Benchmark Study and revealed a robust new set of in-stream video formats. The study conducted concluded that 78% of viewers completed 100% of interactive in-stream ads, compared to 69% who completed 100% in-stream ads without interactive elements. Additionally, interaction rates, where users specifically took an action within the ad, for in-stream video ads were more than three times higher than that of in-banner video ads.
PointRoll’s Video Benchmark Study, which compared campaign results from April–December 2011, also revealed some interesting nuances across vertical ad categories. Among those that were top performing across interactive in-stream ads were automotive, entertainment and non-profit organizations. Consumer electronics manufacturers, consumer goods manufacturers and telecommunications companies were among the top three vertical categories for in-stream video ads that did not include interactivity.
