Online Ads To Outpace Other Categories

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

Advertising: More Science Than Art

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

DoubleClick Ad Exchange Updates

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