The shoes that Julie Matlin recently saw on Zappos.com were kind of cute, or so she thought. But Ms. Matlin wasn’t ready to buy and left the site.

Then the shoes started to follow her everywhere she went online. An ad for those very shoes showed up on the blog TechCrunch. It popped up again on several other blogs and on Twitpic. It was as if Zappos had unleashed a persistent salesman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes,” said Ms. Matlin, a mother of two from Montreal. “It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it’s a little creepy, especially if you don’t know what’s going on.”

People have grown accustomed to being tracked online and shown ads for categories of products they have shown interest in, be it tennis or bank loans.

Increasingly, however, the ads tailored to them are for specific products that they have perused online. While the technique, which the ad industry calls personalized retargeting or remarketing, is not new, it is becoming more pervasive as companies like Google and Microsoft have entered the field. And retargeting has reached a level of precision that is leaving consumers with the palpable feeling that they are being watched as they roam the virtual aisles of online stores.

Read More: NYTimes.com

Integrated DR Marketing for Multi-Channel Retailers

Since the launch of AdWords in 2000, Google has worked with advertisers and their agencies to increase brand and product awareness — and to drive sales — by helping advertisers reach the right person, in the right place, at the right time, through the effective use of search advertising. The success of this tactic has generally been measured by connecting search advertising campaigns to revenue within the e-commerce domain.

As consumers have become accustomed to a multi-channel world, however, it has become important to look outside the “e-commerce box” to measure search campaign success. The goal in doing so is to find the correlation between search advertising and overall company sales, both online and offline, as customers are present in both places.

In recent times, a growing number of our customers have asked us and their agencies how they should approach the concept of quantifying online’s impact on in-store sales. We recently thought through the concept with Razorfish and came up with a joint POV; you can find that on the Razorfish site, here.

Read More: GoogleRetail.Blogspot.com

Microsoft and AOL are both rumored to be looking at AppNexus, a New York City real-time bid (RTB) advertising startup, for a possible acquisition.

RTB — in which advertisers pay for ad impressions to particular consumers based on tracking data at the moment a new web page is loaded — is growing incredibly quickly right now.

As RTB appears set to take over a large portion of the display market over the next few years, major advertising players are building, acquiring, or partnering their way into the market. Most recently, Google paid a reported $70 million for Invite Media, a demand-side platform that helps advertisers trade in the RTB market.

AppNexus is run by a couple guys who sold Right Media to Yahoo, Brian O’Kelley and Mike Nolet, as well as ex-Googler Michael Rubenstein. Souces from the company dimiss all this gossip as just that – “rumors.”

Read More: BusinessInsider

Is Ad Blocking the Right Approach?

A couple of months ago I read an article by Tom Hespos called “Is our ad delivery infrastructure overtaxed?“ Besides doing a good job highlighting the growing issue of complexity and latency issues in our ad delivery infrastructure, it reminded me of a debate that we’ve had here at Adometry: is ad blocking the right approach?

A number of companies have sprung up to block ads that would appear next to objectionable content. From a brand protection point of view, we understand the appeal of ad blockers. If you could ensure that you could stop your brand appearing next to inappropriate content 100% of the time, why wouldn’t you adopt one of these services? But when you look more deeply at the reality of what these services deliver and the potential unwanted side effects, the value proposition becomes less clear.

Additional Latency

Ad blockers work by inserting themselves in the ad delivery chain.  Ad blockers need to make a decision whether to allow or reject an ad on a particular page without delaying unduly the delivery of the page.  Most of the time, they do this by matching a URL in their cache. For a new URL, they schedule the page for examination in an “offline” queue.

How much extra latency is acceptable? While opinion varies, 100-150 milliseconds would be an upper limit, and most publishers would prefer to see something in the 40-50 milliseconds range or less.

How much latency do ad blocking vendors introduce into the ad delivery path using today’s technology? Our measurement of one of the leading ad blocking vendors indicates that they add an average of almost 500 milliseconds to the ad call.  Perhaps we measured them during a bad month; I’m not claiming we have enough data to be accurate about someone else’s technology. I am saying that if you’re thinking of adopting ad-blocking technology, you should measure for yourself the delay to the ad call.

Read More: iMediaConnection

ShareThis Puts Value on Shared Content

ShareThis plans to release two analytics tools that allow advertisers and marketers to determine the value of content being shared across Web sites. Through both, Social Reach and Audience Index, brands have an opportunity to understand the value of social traffic.

Social Reach measures the true value of shared media across the Web by looking at inbound social traffic and outbound sharing, valuing the responder of a share as much as the sharer. The analysis aims to provide more data than buttons on Facebook, Twitter and Tweetmeme buttons that measure outbound sharing.

Audience Index measures and segments a publisher’s audience by influence, so it identifies who has shared, responded and viewed content from their site. It indexes the information by category and matches it against other sites across the Web.

Some early data shows that social traffic engages consumers more than search traffic, according to ShareThis CEO Tim Schigel. “It measures the social reach and allows publishers to measure it by article,” he says. “They also can index their reach from the articles on their site against the rest of the network.”

Read More: MediaPost

Online ad network Specific Media has been hit with a lawsuit for allegedly violating Web users’ privacy by using Flash cookies for tracking purposes.

In a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, six Web users allege that Specific Media failed to provide adequate notice about its online data collection techniques, including Flash cookies. The lawsuit also alleges that Specific Media used Flash cookies — which are stored in a separate location from HTML cookies — to recreate HTML cookies that users had deleted so it could “obtain personal identifying information, monitor users, and to sell users’ data.”

The company’s “privacy documents require college-level reading skills for comprehension and include substantial legalese, ambiguous and obfuscated language designed to confuse, disenfranchise, and mislead the users,” the lawsuit asserts.

In addition, the use of Flash cookies to recreate deleted HTML cookies “unfairly wrests control from users,” the lawsuit alleges.

Read More: MediaPost

Adap.tv Launches Brand Impact Offering for its Online Video Advertising Marketplace

Adap.tv, creators of the industry’s first online video advertising marketplace (atm) and the onesource video ad management (ato) platform, today announced Brand Impact, a powerful suite of tools that makes it easy for brands to increase the effectiveness of their online video advertising in the marketplace.

“Our customers are telling us they want brand safety, advanced targeting, increased measurability and verification for their online video ad campaigns. Only adap.tv’s Brand Impact incorporates all of their needs into a single offering, so they can have confidence in their video ad spend,” said Toby Gabriner, President of adap.tv. “Through partnerships with industry leaders such as Affine Systems and Vizu, as well as built-in tools, we provide brands with the necessary technologies to make online video advertising easy, targeted and impactful.”

Adap.tv’s Brand Impact provides five key benefits for brands that want to create powerful online video advertising programs:

Prevention – Through a partnership with Affine Systems, Brand Impact offers access to innovative new video targeting technology. Affine’s first-of-its-kind computer vision engine fully analyzes in-stream video content frame-by-frame, and provides ratings based on obscenity, production quality and violence. As brands expect more transparency and protection for their online video advertising, Affine’s data provides them with the protection they need to prevent their campaigns from running alongside harmful content and ensure their brand is safe.

Performance – Brand Impact will leverage Vizu’s Ad Catalyst solution to enable real-time measurement and optimization of brand advertising campaigns. With Ad Catalyst, advertisers using the adap.tv marketplace can move beyond basic clickthrough rates and apply a more relevant metric, Brand Lift, to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. Advertisers can also use real-time data on the performance of creative, targeting, and frequency to optimize in-campaign, for maximum Brand Lift and ROI for their online video advertising.

Precision – The adap.tv marketplace includes the industry’s most advanced data targeting and audience verification tools as part of its Brand Impact offering. Brands can leverage multiple targeting providers including eXelate, Lotame and TARGUSinfo across campaigns to reach specific audiences.

Proof – The adap.tv marketplace has a built-in URL verification system that automatically confirms a campaign only runs on the sites that have been selected. Brands have full visibility into the video inventory their ads are running against and the audience they are reaching.

Premium Inventory – With a roster of more than 1,400 of comScore’s top properties, adap.tv ensures access to premium quality inventory, giving brands a powerful environment to showcase their ads.

Read More: PRNewswire

The Rise of the Demand-Side Platform

During the past few months, this column has briefly explored the history of digital ad serving. This month, we’ll continue that journey as we look at recent ad serving developments that are creating significant changes throughout the industry.

Digital advertising, unlike more traditional mass media marketing, doesn’t rely on group exposure models for its success. In reality, online advertising is less about reaching the greatest number of eyeballs and more about reaching the right eyeballs. This means that standard “blind” ad serving models (where ads are being served to any open ad slots on any available pages within the ad network) are being replaced by “smart” ad networks that look for the best recipients for an ad’s message, regardless of where in the network they visit.

Not only does this approach mean that consumers receive more relevant ads, but it also means that advertisers get better results and higher conversion rates for their campaign because they’re reaching a higher percentage of consumers who may take future action in line with the advertiser’s needs.

But there’s also a third winner in this scenario in the form of publishers who are able to better monetize the impressions they serve on behalf of the advertisers. Historically, most websites needed to divide their available inventory into a tiered value model to identify which pages were most popular (attracted the greatest number of eyeballs) and which were less popular. As a result, ads that appeared on the popular pages of a site cost more per impression than those on the less popular pages.

Because advertisers are able to rely on more behaviorally-driven ad models today, which page an ad appears on is becoming less and less significant. Instead, second or third tier online inventory can now be sold at a premium price, not because of where or when the ad runs, but because of who is seeing it when it does. This allows publishers to increase the value of all of their site impressions without having to weigh in on a page popularity contest first.

Most ad networks today utilize some level of audience targeting which allows publishers to better identify site visitor characteristics and behaviors that can be used to help define possible future interests and actions. Through the use of cookies, each user’s browser is tagged and when that consumer revisits a site or ad network, that history is used to direct ads that are more in line with the personal needs and interests of the consumer.

Read More: ClickZ

Online advertising will continue to outpace overall ad spending, growing 14 percent next year to $51.9 billion, according to a new Borrell Associates forecast released today.

In contrast, the overall ad market is expected to increase less than 5 percent to $238.6 billion.

The fastest-growing segment of interactive advertising will be local online, anything targeted and everything involving social media. In 2011, local online is forecast to grow nearly 18 percent from $13.7 billion to $16.1 billion.

Both national and local advertisers are expected to tap targeted display, driving the segment up 60 percent to $10.9 billion. While national advertisers are expected to increase their use of targeted display by nearly 50 percent, local advertisers will double their use of local display, reaching more than $2.3 billion next year.

In stark contrast to targeted display, run-of-site display will decrease, dropping 14 percent next year to $8.2 billion for both national and local online.

Also on the decline will be national paid search, dropping 11.3 percent.

Read More: AdWeek

Why The “Black Box” Ad Network Is Going The Way of 0% Home Financing And Enron Accounting

The days where ad networks glamorized themselves as a black box of information which held deep dark “proprietary” data knowledge and secrets is officially over.  We all remember how five and ten years ago we heard outrageous claims of “a billion points of data per month”, and “we harness data from over one million domain-level URLs” in boasting about the breadth and volume of intelligence a network had.  Of course, no one could prove anything, and the networks who made the most outrageous claims were the most opaque. But there is no longer a need for any opacity.  Full transparency is now coming around, so expect to see some previously-made claims debunked, and some technologies that were previously overlooked becoming more valued.  Here’s how you can employ new transparency tools, and avoid being swooned by grandiose claims.

Read More: GoodwayBlog.com

MediaMath is an important behind-the-scenes player for advertisers at a time when advertising networks, exchanges and platforms are changing the way advertising is bought and consumed. The New York-based demand-side digital media platform monitors activity on ad exchanges, where marketers bid to place ads on publishers’ Web sites, and helps them quickly buy the space and the audience they need. The system is helping turn advertising from a job for creative “Mad Men” to a numbers-based “real profession,” says MediaMath Chief Executive Joe Zawadzki.

Forbes:MediaMath allows marketers to directly buy, manage and optimize media. Tell us more.

Fifteen million impressions a day across exchanges, across different media. [We] simplify what could be a very complicated process into a series of pretty straight-forward stats, in terms of how to point all of the technology at the market’s problems.

What is the opportunity for publishers who want to sell ad inventory?

Ultimately, the more demand in an auction-based system, the higher the price. And for non-auction based systems, it’s bringing incremental advertising dollars that they’re not getting from direct sales. It’s like optimization is not zero sum. There has always been this tension between advertiser and publisher. People think that in the negotiation that someone wins and someone loses and, for the advertiser to get better performance, they need to beat up on the publisher. The reality is that, with optimization–because not everyone is looking for the same thing and because every advertiser has their own demand curve–they look for different brands, different audiences. If you do a good job with optimization, both the advertiser will see better performance and the publisher will see higher prices. It’s not an “or,” it’s an “and.”

Read More: Forbes.com

Do You Want To Succeed at Social Media or Social Media Marketing?

Do you want to succeed at social media or social media marketing? There is a huge difference. It’s the difference between using social media tools and adopting social media philosophy. The difference between sparking posts about your marketing and posts about your product or service. The difference between marketers who focus externally on how the brand is broadcast versus internally on how the brand is realized.

So do you want to succeed at social media or social media marketing? The answer is the former, but many marketers focus on the latter. I’d like to make this difference more real by sharing two examples — the first in the entertainment industry and the second my own experiences in a mall this weekend.

“Snakes on a Plane” is the entertainment industry’s greatest pre-release social media success story to date. The Guardian called it, “Perhaps the most Internet-hyped film of all time.” Fans produced their own T-shirts, posters, trailers, novelty songs and parodies. Producers organized a contest to select a fan’s music for use in the movie. The filmmakers added shooting days in order to implement changes suggested by fans on the Internet (including Samuel Jackson’s famous and unprintable line about snakes.)

But what were these people fans of? Not the product, apparently. As EW put said about the movie: “SOAP came in below even the most ridiculously cynical predictions.” Read More: MediaPost

The Fundamentals of Real-Time Bidding

When it comes to online advertising, there’s a common misconception that real-time bidding (RTB) is a whole new ball game, requiring a separate media strategy and an entirely new set of campaign goals. While it’s true that RTB is a different buying model for marketers to understand, the promise of digital display advertising remains “right message, right customer.” What RTB adds to the equation is “right price and right time.” Thanks to RTB and auction marketplaces, digital display can now be purchased in ways similar to search, and it dramatically improves a marketer’s ability to reach specific audiences at scale. It’s easy to think this might just be relevant for direct response campaigns, but in fact RTB delivers tremendous advantages for brand and branded response campaigns as well. Let’s look at how RTB enables all advertisers to more efficiently and effectively achieve four common campaign objectives.

1. Find custom audiences at scale
The fundamental concept of RTB is it enables marketers to target audiences directly, instead of using content as a proxy for audience. In auction markets, marketers bid (or not) on individual ad impressions based on the demographic and behavioral profile of a consumer, in contrast to traditional content-based buys where inventory is purchased to hopefully reach a targeted audience.

The beauty of RTB is that marketers target audiences based on their own custom definitions of which consumers are appropriate for a campaign. A classic strategy is to use remarketing data that tracks when consumers have visited the advertiser’s website. But with RTB, marketers can now take it to the next level and leverage their full customer relationship management (CRM) database for targeting. These data represent the advertiser’s full view of its customers (registration data, purchase history, loyalty tier, etc.). By using a CRM-capable demand-side platform (DSP), an advertiser can execute powerful cross-sell, up-sell, and retention campaigns.

However, these strategies, while extremely effective, tend to have limited reach. To increase scale, advertisers can use look-alike modeling to expand the size of the targetable audience. Look-alike modeling finds new consumers that closely resemble the demographic and psychographic attributes of an advertiser’s existing audience. How does this work? Imagine a dart board where the original remarketing audience is the red bull’s-eye in the center. Look-alike segments are the concentric circles that extend out from the center, with each circle increasing the scale of audience available at decreasing levels of similarity.

Read More: iMediaConnection

Scott Spencer, Group Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Jason Miller, Group Product Manager, Google Display Network discussed the display media space as well as DoubleClick Ad Exchange enhancements with AdExchanger.com today.

AdExchanger.com: What is Google announcing today?

SCOTT SPENCER: Basically, we’re going to be rolling out a few more tools to help DoubleClick Ad Exchange buyers buy quality inventory, and to check their campaigns.

Taking a quick step back; when we launched the exchange about a year ago, we engineered it with best-in-market buyer and publishers controls, as well as extensive crawl-and-verify inventory screening. Together with the real time bidder, these were the biggest upgrades we made.

As part of a long line of improvements in this area over the past year, we’re taking the wraps off a couple of additional features to give buyers even more control, quality and transparency.

The first is “Site Packs” – these are manually crafted collections of like sites based on DoubleClick Ad Planner and internal classifications, vetted for quality. These allow buyers to get a set of high quality sites for their particular campaigns, covering anonymous and branded inventory.

Second, we’re making some changes to our Real-time Bidder (in beta). The biggest change here is for Ad Exchange clients who work with DSPs. Historically, Ad Exchange buyers were hidden from publishers behind their DSP. By introducing a way to segment out each individual client’s ad calls, inventory can be sent exclusively to an Ad Exchange buyer even when that buyer uses a DSP. It increases transparency for publishers and potentially give buyers more access to the highest quality inventory, like “exclusive ad slots” – high quality inventory offered to only a few, select buyers as determined by the publisher.

Thirdly, we’re soon going to be rolling out a beta of what we call “Data Transfer” – this is a report of every transaction bought or sold by a client on the Ad Exchange. Effectively, it’s a daily log file of everything that happened. Clients can then review every branded URL that they purchased to ensure everything was what they expected.

Read More: AdExchanger

Seven Reasons Tech Start-Ups Are Setting Up Shop In New York

When Carter Cleveland, the CEO of the art-trading website Art.sy, moved his fledgling company from Palo Alto, Calif., to New York City he left behind arguably the best place to start a tech business in the U.S.

Home to giants like Facebook, Google, Apple, Intel and eBay, Silicon Valley is well known as the Mecca for high-tech companies – and entrepreneurs hoping to start one. One third of US-based venture capital investment happens in the Valley, according to PriceWaterhouse Coopers and the National Venture Capital Association. By Cleveland’s own admission, he “couldn’t go into a cafe without hearing pitches” in San Francisco.

So why go east? A recent Princeton grad, Cleveland said he left primarily because of his customers. Art.sy is an online trading post for fine art and, according to Cleveland, over half of his market is in New York City. But Cleveland added that location isn’t everything. New York’s tech scene is booming, and Cleveland wanted to join the party.

“Palo Alto is like Google,” he explained. “Big and established. New York City is like Foursquare. Not as big but tons of hype. It’s going through a growth period and very exciting.”

Read More: Blogs.WSJ.com

Appolicious Adds New Yahoo, Android Sites, Expands Search

After entering into a partnership with Yahoo in April, social-flavored app directory Appolicious is building on the alliance with a new property dedicated to Yahoo apps. And highlighting the rapid rise of Google Android’s platform, the startup has also revamped its site for Android apps and introduced its own Android app.

The new co-branded yap.appolicious.com and AndroidApps.com sites feature original text and videos, user-curated app lists, personalized recommendations, ratings and reviews. Links to original articles from the sites will be featured in relevant content across key Yahoo properties including news, sports and finance.

As with the main site, the words “in association with Yahoo” appear at the top of each page on the new Yahoo and Android app sites. The properties are linked to Appolicious.com via tabs that appear prominently on the home page alongside a third for iPad and iPhone apps. Yahoo users will be able to join the sites automatically using their Yahoo log-in information.

Appolicious has also taken steps to upgrade search. The search box is centered at the top of each page and functionality has been broadened to encompass the Yahoo and Android app sites. Besides returning relevant apps, the new results page now features related user app lists and staff articles as well as a list of apps generated by the site’s recommendation engine.

Read More: MediaPost

Investment analysts, agency media buyers, and executives speaking here this week all agree on one thing: The resurgence of online display ads is real, and will proceed apace for the next several years. But they disagreed about nearly everything else. For instance: What’s the future of CPM pricing? To what extent will media agencies be disintermediated in coming years? And just how important is Google in this space?

On a Connected Marketing Week panel featuring investment analysts, all four participants said they were bullish on display – predicting overall demand and pricing will rise. However the specific outcomes they described were very distinct.

Doug Anmuth of Barclays Capital said discussions with advertisers have convinced him large consumer goods sellers will make it rain this year and next.

Researchers and agencies anticipated such an influx of brand ad budgets way back in 2007, but that was before the bottom fell out of the economy. Now Anmuth believes the time is ripe again. “At CPG companies, [we're seeing] reinvestment in their brands,” he said.

But not all will benefit. For instance, it’s unclear whether the rise of exchange-traded display ads on Yahoo’s Right Media and Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange will suit large brands. Two of four analysts lauded Google’s strategy of automating display ads, while the other two offered weak or qualified support.

One of those was Robert Coolbrith, an analyst with ThinkEquity. He said, “We’re positive on Google’s display ad strategy, assuming that automation of display will serve the interest of brand advertisers. The jury’s still out on that.”

Read More: ClickZ

Apple Shuts Down Quattro Wireless To Focus On iAd

Starting in September, Apple will focus its mobile advertising efforts entirely on the iAd, which runs ads in applications on the iPhone and iPod. As a result of that decision, the company is shutting down the Quattro Wireless mobile ad network it acquired in January for $275 million.

In a statement posted on the former Quattro home page, Apple said it will no longer accept new campaigns for the ad network and will wind down existing campaigns across different devices and platforms. “As of September 30, we will support ads exclusively for the iAd Network,” read the notice.

That Apple has eschewed running a horizontal ad network to concentrate solely on ramping up the iAd platform launched in April isn’t terribly surprising. With the company’s high ambitions for the new interactive format and commanding position in mobile apps, it’s become clear Apple is betting everything on the iAd to succeed in mobile advertising.

And after enticing a roster of blue-chip brands to sign on as charter iAd advertisers at least $1 apiece, Apple likely needs to turn all its Quattro resources toward preparing and running campaigns for its new batch of clients. A recent Wall Street Journal report indicated that the service has been hampered by campaign delays, with at least one announced partner, Chanel, shelving its iAd effort.

Read More: MediaPost

RIM Reportedly Shopping For Mobile Ad Network For BlackBerry

Since Google (NSDQ: GOOG) bought AdMob and Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) bought Quattro, RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) must be shopping for a mobile ad network, right? That’s what’s happening, according to people familiar with the matter, reports the WSJ.

The unnamed sources said the BlackBerry-device maker has been in talks with Millennial Media, an independent mobile ad network based in Baltimore, but that the talks have stalled over disagreements regarding the value of the deal. Millennial is reportedly asking for $400 to $500 million based on the recent prices that AdMob and Quattro were able to score ($750 million and an estimated $270 million, respectively). Both companies declined to comment, WSJ says.

Of course, there are other free agents in the space that RIM could investigate buying, including JumpTap and Greystripe, which have been very vocal about how much their networks are growing in lieu of the recent purchases by Google and Apple, which have successfully drawn attention and more advertising dollars to mobile.

RIM’s user base can be looked at as a valuable demographic for advertisers, given that a majority of its install base are business users. However, those users can be already targeted today by using existing mobile ad networks, so presumably, RIM would be able to bring something additional to the table if it owned its own network. Likewise, RIM would be able to skim some of the profits off for itself, which both Apple and Google are doing through its ad networks.

Read More: MocoNews.com

Today, during ClickZ’s Connected Marketing Week in San Francisco which brought together name-your-digital-pleasure marketers to discuss their respective marketing channel, ClickZ and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) also co-sponsored an Ad Networks & Exchanges event.

Editor’s note: It would seem the name of this type of IAB event may need to evolve. Demand-side platforms don’t want to be called ad networks. And, ad networks – to a certain degree – want to be known as demand-side platforms. Looking forward to the new name!

Just prior to the day-long event, the IAB released news (see it) that 16 IAB member ad network and exchange companies had become “the first to commit to comprehensive self-certification against the IAB ‘Networks & Exchanges Quality Assurance Guidelines,’ [which aims to] increase buyer control over the placement and context of advertising on ad networks and exchanges.”

In the third panel of the day, San Francisco-area media agencies provided their take on the fast-moving ad ecosystem and ad verification technologies, in particular.

Moderated by ValueClick Media’s Matthew Boyd, panelists included associate media director Kim Small of Universal McCann, senior media manager Pablito Padua of Signal to Noise (formerly Agency.com), associate media director Lindsay Wong of Razorfish and vp, digital strategy director Chris Unno of PHD.

Noting the new guidelines and their adoption by 16 member companies, panel members agreed they were heartened to see the step forward in adopting the brand safety measures. But Signal to Noise’s Padua added that he was disappointed that there weren’t additional networks on the initial list.

Read More: AdExchanger

Excess Ad Inventory Pushing Value-Added Services

The movement into value-added services by companies throughout the online advertising space continues to get more interesting. First we saw Google provide free tools and services to support online ad sales. Now search engine marketing companies have begun to provide free tools and platforms to small-and-medium size businesses in hopes of eventually locking them in to subscription services for life. Take that one step further, to find demand side platforms (DSP) building networks of tech offerings on top of real-time bidding platforms.

Xa.net built its platform as an integration hub to bring in data from BlueKai, eXelate and TargusInfo, as well as the media from ad exchanges and publishers. Add to that creative services and it gives advertisers a way to pull in targeting data, purchase ads, and design creative pieces.

The xa.net built technology that allows companies to access inventory from ad networks and exchanges through a real-time bidding system will also offer value-added services that assist companies with copywriting and creating ads. The company’s CEO, Rob Leathern, tells me xa.net began to build the platform earlier this year and will sign on five companies to augments its services. Think of it this way, Leathern wants xa.net to provide the underlying technology that connects complementary services to make everything work together. That includes ad creation for social media platforms, too.

One of those companies will become BoostCTR, a network of copywriters for text ads that will help xa.net clients improve the quality of copy written for Facebook ads. Others include 4Delit, a self-service system that lets small advertisers create Flash and rich media ads; Interpolls, which creates rich-media formats and widgets; OneScreen; and OggiFinogi.

Read More: MediaPost

Google TV plan is causing jitters in Hollywood

Google revolutionized the way people access information. Now it wants to transform how people get entertainment.

The search giant is touting an ambitious new technology, called Google TV, that would marry the Internet with traditional television, enabling viewers to watch TV shows and movies unshackled from the broadcast networks or cable channels on which they air. Users would need to buy a TV or set-top box with Google software that could connect to the Internet, along with a keyboard to type commands. Users could also use their iPhone or Android phone to operate Google TV.

The prospect of Google getting into television frightens many in Hollywood, who worry that Silicon Valley will upend the entertainment industry just like the Internet ravaged the music and newspaper industries.

Read More: LATimes.com

Hearst-owned iCrossing has become the latest search agency to try and boost its display ad chops by partnering with a demand-side platform.

Scottsdale, AZ-based iCrossing will work with DataXu to support real-time ad optimization and bidding on ad exchanges such as Yahoo’s Right Media and Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

The move follows a slate of developments in which search agencies have made advances in the display arena. Recently, four search firms – Efficient Frontier, SearchIgnite, Kenshoo, and Marin Software – joined a Right Media pilot program involving real-time bid display ads. Back in April, SEM firm Efficient Frontier launched a DSP of its own, fusing real-time bidding functionality with search campaign management.

While not purely a search agency, iCrossing’s roots are in the search arena. Dax Hamman, the agency’s VP of display media, said in a statement that data integration is key to the company’s clients’ exchange ambitions.

“We wanted a partner…that could provide the technical framework in which we can test the effectiveness of multiple data sources for our clients,” he said.

iCrossing was not the only search firm to announce new moves into display this morning. Marin Software, a search management platform company that manages $1 billion in marketing spend annually, today released applications for managing Facebook Advertising. The new features allow clients to manage algorithmic bidding, segmentation, and ad rotation on Facebook, alongside their search campaigns on Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Read More: ClickZ

ShortTail, TidalTV Ink Video Ad Deal

ShortTail Media, a company that helps publishers deliver video ads to text-based portions of their Web sites, has signed a deal with Web video network and technology firm TidalTV.

As part of the pact, publishers in TidalTV’s network, including 30 newspaper sites owned by McClatchy, have begun selling advertisers ShortTail’s signature D30 ad unit — a video interstitial that appears as users click between Web pages.

ShortTail touts the D30 as a way for sites to better monetize text content, which still makes up the majority of publishers’ content outside of the YouTubes and Hulus of the world. The company already works with sites such as EW.com and The Huffington Post and has run campaigns for brands like A&E, Sonic, Jim Beam and General Mills. (See also: “Web Ads Get More Intrusive.”)

That monetization concept appealed to McClatchy, which is testing the D30 on the sites for newspapers such as The Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee and Kansas City Star. “We’ve traditionally had our own video and video from the Associated Press, but that requires users to say, ‘I’m going to watch video now,’” said Chris Hendricks, vp, interactive media at McClatchy. “We’ve had very limited [video] inventory because of that. This puts video front and center on our site, and it helps us compete from a volume perspective.” McClatchy’s sites reach about 35 million unique users, per Hendricks.

Read More: AdWeek

Connected TVs and set-top devices enabling consumers to view video from across the Internet on TVs could ultimately drive online video ads and marketing content budgets. The online video ad segment should grow at a 39% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) during the next five years, becoming a more than $5 billion market by 2014, estimates analyst firm Piper Jaffray, which released a series of reports Monday related to IPTV.

The slow shift of consumers spending more time with online video has already begun. The report explains some private video advertising networks admit to securing at least seven-figure budgets from major TV advertisers. Ad networks like Tremor, and those producing proprietary content like Adconion or BBE, could benefit from the transition. The bottom line, according to Piper Jaffray analysts, points to numerous Internet companies like Apple, Google and Yahoo, as well as Rovi, also capitalizing on this move.

Expect Google TV to comprise about 15% of the connected TVs by 2013, rising to 18% by 2014, according to Piper Jaffray. Intel’s CE4100 SoC and Google’s Android operating system is the technology platform that Sony and Logitech will build into products and release in the fall. Other set-top boxes, media players and TV makers have Google TV products slated for the first quarter in 2011.

Read More: MediaPost

Agencies Divided on Where to House New Mobile Units

In a matter of weeks, several new mobile units have sprouted up within adland, prompting debate in ad circles about whether the offerings should take root within creative agencies or form under media shops.

Omnicom Group recently launched a mobile-marketing consultancy called Airwave under media agency giant OMD. According to Jon Haber, U.S. director of OMD’s Ignition Factory, a media shop is the intuitive place to house a mobile unit.

“Mobile is bought in many of the same ways that digital media is bought, but it stretches across coupons, CRM, texts and out of home,” he said. “It bleeds into all other media types. An agency like OMD touches other media units, so it makes sense for mobile to be in-house so it can integrate into everything from TV to digital.”

OMD has also dabbled in mobile creative work; in 2009, it created the Dockers shakable iPhone ad with rich media provider Medialets. While paid media was a component of the Dockers campaign, it also received a lot of attention for creative.

Paid media has dominated recent buzz in mobile advertising with Apple and Google buying into the category. In January, Apple acquired mobile ad network Quattro and just recently launched its souped-up mobile ad unit, iAd, with big-budget advertisers such as Citibank and Unilever in tow. That followed Google’s $750 purchase of AdMob, which was under prolonged investigation by the Federal Trade Commission until just recently.

But for a platform that also includes brand apps, partnerships with developers and location-based services, there’s much more to mobile than display.

Read More: AdWeek

AOL’s Patch Aims To Quintuple In Size By Year-End

Patch, which has already established itself as the biggest network of neighborhood blogs in the country since being acquired by AOL last summer, plans to accelerate its growth dramatically. Patch President Warren Webster tells us the company will add a staggering 400 hyperlocal sites over the next six months, bringing its total to 500. In order to accomplish its goal, Patch will hire 500 more reporters in 20 states, making it—by far—the biggest new hirer of full-time journalists in the U.S.

AOL (NYSE: AOL) had already disclosed that it intended to invest $50 million to expand Patch this year, but the company hadn’t said exactly how it would allocate that cash. Back in April, for instance, when Patch had 46 sites in five states, Webster told us that the company expected to be “in hundreds of towns” by year-end but wouldn’t be more specific.

Webster says that Patch is selecting towns to expand to based in part on a 59-variable algorithm that takes into account factors like the average household income of a town, how often citizens vote, and how the local public high school ranks; the company is then talking to local residents to ensure that targeted areas have other less quantifiable characteristics like a “vibrant business community” and “walkable Main Street.” Patch hires one professional reporter to cover each community; each “cluster” of sites also has an ad manager who is the “feet in the street” selling ads.

The network, however, says that to date it hasn’t been focusing on generating revenue. “Our philosophy from day one was that the first priority should be to build an engaged audience through journalism,” Webster says. “The second phase is to leverage that audience for local businesses that want to target customers. We’re at the beginning of phase two now.” Right now, Patch is letting local businesses buy banner ads and also letting them set up their own business listings, which they can convert into ads.

Read More: PaidContent.org