There’s a land grab in social gaming, but at this point, it doesn’t look like there’s much room for advertisers.   On Tuesday, Disney acquired top-three developer Playdom for $563 million plus $200 million in incentives. Google, meanwhile, is reportedly in talks with Playdom, Electronic Arts and Zynga in a social-gaming push. And MTV Networks this month acquired social-game developer Social Express and plans to launch games based on its TV shows later this year.  With the draw of their established storylines and characters in social games — not to mention well-oiled marketing machines — established media companies hope they can use casual gaming to grow and interact with their already massive audiences.  “When media companies integrate their brands, it’s going to be easier for people to get into the games because they are familiar and that will expand the market,” said Justin Smith, founder of social-game research firm Inside Network.

Johnson & Johnson is Holding a Roster Review of its Estimated $3bn Media Business.

On Tuesday, Disney acquired top-three developer Playdom for $563 million plus $200 million in incentives. Google, meanwhile, is reportedly in talks with Playdom, Electronic Arts and Zynga in a social-gaming push. And MTV Networks this month acquired social-game developer Social Express and plans to launch games based on its TV shows later this year.  With the draw of their established storylines and characters in social games — not to mention well-oiled marketing machines — established media companies hope they can use casual gaming to grow and interact with their already massive audiences.  “When media companies integrate their brands, it’s going to be easier for people to get into the games because they are familiar and that will expand the market,” said Justin Smith, founder of social-game research firm Inside Network.

Read More: AdAge

Mixed Ad Message From Newspapers

Online advertising has turned into a good-news story for newspapers. Will it have legs?   Several newspaper publishers have reported solid growth in digital advertising revenue for the second quarter in recent days, helping offset continuing declines in print advertising. The New York Times, for instance, reported 21% growth in digital-ad revenue against a 6% drop in print advertising, keeping total advertising “roughly flat” with the year-earlier quarter. Digital now accounts for 26% of its total ad revenue, up from 22%.  But that is mainly because print revenue has shrunk so much, rather than because digital has got so big. At the Times Co., print-ad revenue for the news group fell $15 million, to $232 million, while its digital-ad revenue rose $8.3 million. Growth at the About.com portal also boosted digital.

Industrywide, print-ad revenue fell by nearly half between 2000 and 2009, a loss of about $24 billion. But newspapers’ online revenue totaled only $2.7 billion last year.  That includes online classifieds, a segment that has been under pressure from free alternatives. Display advertising, including video, is where newspapers have the most opportunity. The market still is relatively small, just $8 billion in U.S. revenue last year, or 35% of total Internet revenue, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. And newspapers are competing for display dollars with major portals like Yahoo and Google as well as lots of smaller sites.  One bright spot for newspapers is that their sites draw higher ad rates than most other categories, at least as measured by cost per thousand impressions, or CPMs, according to comScore. Precise CPM numbers are hard to come by, but these estimates offer some indication of the differences between sites.

Newspaper sites’ CPMs in April were $6.99, while the rate for portals was $2.60 and 56 cents for social-networking sites, comScore estimates. Newspapers’ traffic isn’t high enough for those rates to translate into huge dollars: Newspapers drew only 8.5 billion impressions in April, translating into a revenue estimate of $59.4 million for the month. Impressions were 69.7 billion for portals and 98 billion for social-networking sites, comScore reported, for revenue of $181 million and $54.7 million, respectively.  Professionally produced content helps make newspaper sites, at least those of major titles like the New York Times, attractive outlets for advertisers. Many marketers are reluctant to have their ads appear on heavily trafficked social-networking sites because of the uncertainty of the kind of content that appears on those sites.  Longer term, video and mobile advertising also offer hope. For now, though, investors need to be wary in assuming that newspapers’ digital potential can outweigh the challenges in their legacy business.

Read More: WSJ (Entire Article Here)

Ad networks play a critical role in delivering monumentally effective advertising.  Every day, I see smart and successful ad networks like Brand.net, Collective, and Media6Degrees delivering outstanding results with innovative technologies, quality service, and deep analysis that their clients deserve. (Disclosure: These are all clients of my company.) Ad networks were the early adopters of real-time bidding (a game-changer in display ad buying) and have developed cool concepts such as social targeting (e.g., if I buy an iPhone, marketers can rightfully assume my “friends” will too). Significantly, ad networks are the biggest users of the ad exchanges and their revolutionary auction-based marketplaces.  Despite these innovative approaches, unfortunately, ad networks still have gotten a bad rap because many in our industry have been focusing on the wrong things.  Much of the negative perception about ad networks stems from assumptions that they make high margins. Why is this bad? Think about grocery shopping. Did Whole Foods grow the squash and bananas behind the store in its own little urban farm? Of course not – it buys from rural farmers and charges margins on those products. I don’t have a relationship with the farmer in Honduras and don’t really have time to fly there for my daily banana, so I don’t worry about the margin Whole Foods has earned. It should be a pleasure to help good vendors make the margins they need to reinvest in their business.

Read More: ClickZ

An Amazon-Facebook Alliance to Make Shopping More Social

On Tuesday, Amazon.com took a step toward making the shopping experience on its Web site more social.  For many people, shopping is as much about socializing as it is about buying something — a chance to run into neighbors at the farmers’ market or spend time with a friend at the mall. And people who go shopping with a friend inevitably ask advice before buying. But it’s hard to do that when online shopping.  Now, Amazon shoppers who connect their Amazon and Facebook accounts transport their Facebook friends to Amazon — and can get recommendations from those friends on what to buy.  Amazon was an early leader in offering recommendations based on previous purchases and product searches, and in posting customer reviews on the site. But it has been slow to incorporate social features, while start-ups like Go Try It On, Polyvore and Swipely have been experimenting with ways to make online shopping more interactive.  Amazon’s new feature is the company’s small first step toward tapping into the world of social shopping.

Read More: Blogs.NYTimes.com

Disney Buys Playdom For Up To $763.2 Million

Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS) is making a big move into social games, with the purchase of fast-growing social game developer Playdom for up to $763.2 million. The deal includes a “total consideration” of $563.2 million, in addition to a performance-linked earn-out of up to $200 million.  In a release, which is included in full after the jump, Disney says that by buying Playdom it “will strengthen its already-robust digital gaming portfolio, acquire a first-rate management team and provide consumers new ways to interact with the company on popular social networks like Facebook and MySpace.” The company hints that it will now be bringing its “characters, stories and brands” to games on social networks.  By acquiring Playdom, Disney will also be getting an existing portfolio of popular social games, which includes Mobsters, the top title on MySpace (NSDQ: NWS). Over the last year, Playdom has been rapidly expanding its lineup of titles through the acquisition of eight gaming startups. It now ranks as the top social game developer on MySpace and the fourth largest on Facebook. The company, which is profitable, said late last year that its sales were near an annual run rate of $50 million.

Read More: PaidContent.org

Download the Ad Networks vs. Ad Exchanges Whitepaper

This whitepaper compares ad networks and ad exchanges from the perspective of web publishers looking to maximize their advertising revenue. It outlines the fundamentally different ways in which ad networks and ad exchanges sell publisher inventory, highlights the benefits of ad exchanges over ad networks in terms of driving up publisher revenue, and explains why an ad exchange is an essential component of every publishers’ monetization strategy.

Read More: OpenX.org

NBC Universal is getting into the ad network business, first selling inventory across a handful of its own properties, then possibly expanding into others.  The network, called Universal Audience Platform, launched today with 21 NBCU properties, including Bravotv.com, NBC.com, Oxygen.com and Syfy.com. While advertisers have previously had the ability to buy packages that spanned NBCU properties, this is the first time they can buy display inventory based on audience segment rather than brand.  Asked why NBCU had chosen now to launch an ad network, Peter Naylor, VP of digital sales, said the company “has the impressions and uniques” to form “a credible entrance to the market.” But that doesn’t mean it will limit itself to NBCU properties.  “This is phase one,” he said. “Phase two is going to be when we welcome in some other sites we don’t wholly own and operate.”  Just when – or if – that will come to pass isn’t yet clear, said Naylor. But he did confirm that discussions were under way to find other suitable properties to add to the network.  For now, the formation of UAP means that NBCU will be “dialing down” its dependence on third-party ad networks, said Naylor. The company has made deals with BlueKai, Nielsen and Quantcast to supply the demographic data that it will use to sell audience segments to advertisers.

Read More: ClickZ

Insights from OMMA Behavioral Conference on Display Marketing

Several members of the EF team attended the OMMA Behavioral Conference in San Francisco last week. The focus of the conference was to explore how behavioral targeting has changed from simply targeting audiences by the Web pages they have recently viewed to utilizing targeting data from multiple sources such as social networks, site and search re-targeting, and various third party data providers. Because there are so many targeting channels, attributing conversion to the appropriate source has become very difficult for advertisers. The difficulty of attribution modeling quickly became a hot topic at the conference.  Abhishek Pani, our Director of Research & Quantitative Marketing, discussed a new attribution framework in his presentation titled “Evaluating the Marginal Value of Display”.  Optimal budget allocation across channels is the fundamental problem that advertisers want to solve but given the lack of proper attribution models, they are forced to rely on simple heuristics to allocate revenues. Current attribution offerings in the industry ignore important variables such as the effect of time and cross channel demand elasticity (change in demand in channel A that results from a small change in spend in channel B). Incorrect attribution will result in sub-optimal budget allocation and lower the return on advertising investment. Because our platform manages across all channels of advertising (search, display, and soon social), we are able to measure, experiment, and build very accurate allocation models based on marginal contributions of each channel.  Abhishek discussed our modeling strategy in greater detail during his presentation.

Read More: blog.eFrontier.com

BuzzLogic to Announce New Social Media Ad Units

By combining ads with content BuzzLogic believes it can give consumers using social media a better ad experience and better integrate advertising with the content against which it is presented.   “We’ve been running all kinds of IAB sanctioned rich media for a while, but the BuzzRoll product is much more customized and gives marketers more options,” said Peter O’Sullivan, BuzzLogic’s VP of sales, in an interview with paidContent.  “BuzzRoll, as a social media ad unit, will drive greater engagement among blog readers, since it encourages them to share everything from a company’s blog content or a white paper, and Twitter feeds, to video and Facebook apps. This is just a simpler way for marketers to do it.  For example, if a product wanted to associate itself with a green image it could place an ad on a blog about green issues and, by careful keyword selection, program it to pull in content about the topic from around the Internet. That information is then scrolled along the bottom of the rich media ads.  According to ClickZ, the units can also host video and Facebook applications via Facebook’s APIs.

Read More: BizReport

It was a typically vexing week for Facebook. On the one hand, the social-networking service signed up its 500 millionth active user. On the other hand, it was found to be one of the least popular private-sector companies in the United States by the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Apparently, Americans were more satisfied filing their taxes online than they were posting updates on their Facebook page.  It is a continuing contradiction: Facebook is widely criticized for shifting its terms of service and for disclosing private information — and yet millions of people start accounts each month.  Analysts always grasp for analogies to explain Facebook’s tortured relationship with its users. Facebook has been called the sterile suburbs to the gritty urban Internet; it is a “walled garden” in the organic messiness of the Web; it is Russia under Vladimir Putin; it is (and this one stings in tech circles) today’s AOL.  But perhaps the most telling metaphor compares Facebook to the other companies lurking at the bottom of the American Customer Satisfaction Index: cable companies, wireless telephone service providers. Utilities. Here are services everyone uses, no matter how much people dislike the companies that provide them.  Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argues that Facebook fits that mold.  On her blog in May, she posted:  “I hate all of the utilities of my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them.”

Read More: NYTimes.com

An Ad Model Poised For A Comeback

It’s challenging for media buyers to differentiate among ad networks. From the network side, it’s difficult to develop a product positioning that is truly ownable within the space. In an era where anyone can start an ad network, virtually overnight, any networks getting traction with ad buyers quickly find themselves swimming in a sea of “me too” imitators.  On the publisher’s side of the equation, it’s even more difficult to tell which networks to use. It’s one of the primary challenges of the chief revenue officer to balance direct sales forces, ad networks, exchanges, and new ad platforms in such a way as to deliver a maximum return from month to month on a site’s pool of available ad inventory.  There’s a check that comes in from each network partner each month. From a CPM standpoint, the price paid is abysmally low when compared to deals struck by the publisher’s direct sales force. But it’s a check nonetheless, and most publishers choose to get a check for the incremental sales, rather than rely completely on direct sales channels and risk lower overall returns.  Simply put, two ad revenue streams are better than one, even if one undercuts the pricing of the other one, and publishers are unsure what’s being done with data collected from network and exchange campaigns. Even though many would see it as short-sighted, short-term revenue, pressure usually makes the publisher take the check rather than cut the channel to support the direct sales channel.

Read More: iMediaConnection

Closing the Tech Divide

If there was a single familiar refrain from digital shops over the past decade, it was that their older, traditional-agency brethren “didn’t get it” when it came to digital. But lately, that widely acknowledged gap has begun to narrow to the point where “older” agencies can claim more success in some areas of digital marketing.  Take the recent Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” digital campaign, an effort that is already a textbook example of how an advertiser can make itself a vital part of digital culture. The campaign didn’t come from any of the digital-agency stalwarts like R/GA, AKQA or Razorfish. Instead, it came from Wieden + Kennedy, a shop not long ago often labeled as wedded to TV and print.  The Old Spice success followed a strong showing for non-digital specialists in this year’s awards shows. At Cannes, for example, top honors in the Cyber category went to Wieden for Nike Livestrong’s “Chalkbot” and DDB Sweden for Volkswagen’s “Fun Theory.” The Cyber Agency of the Year Award went to Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

Read More: AdWeek

The following is an excerpted interview with Ramsey McGrory, Yahoo! VP and Head of Right Media Exchange.  McGrory discusses recently announced plans for Yahoo!’s display advertising exchange – Right Media Exchange.  Topics covered include:

The results of the Demand-Side Platform (DSP) Pilot Program…
A new Search Engine Marketing pilot on Right Media Exchange…
Demand Media, a publisher for RTB participants on Right Media Exchange…
On Right Media Open, an event produced this week by Yahoo! for its Right Media partners…

On the results of the Demand-Side Platform (DSP) Pilot Program…

RM: The specifics on DSPs are actually pretty good. We expected to see improvements in targeting. We expected to see, conversely, that would mean higher bidding, which is valuable to the publishers. And so I think we generally got what we bargained for. Which is the targeting efficiency, the control of frequency, the control of cost. The DSPs are, by and large, moving directionally on executing on that vision. That’s a good thing.

Read More: AdExchanger

The Career-Relevant Timeframe

I’m attending the Right Media Open in Chicago and, no surprise, change is in the air. Although there is a general consensus on where the industry is headed, I am seeing a healthy debate around the timeline for that change.  While discussing the importance of indirect, bid-based sales to publishers, Dave Zinnman from Yahoo pumped on the brakes, saying that if you believe exchange-based inventory will become dominant in a “career-relevant timeframe”, you need to “step back from the punch bowl.” For me, “career-relevant timeframe” is the most important phrase I’ve heard today.  No matter what your business, its important to have a realistic understanding of how fast your market is changing. Just today, VMM founder Darren Herman retweeted his 2008 post comparing the rate of innovation with the rate of adoption, and reminding entrepreneurs to build for today’s market. That’s the relevant timeframe for a venture backed startup between rounds.  Here in Chicago, the question of the day is: what is the relevant timeframe for advertising-related companies evaluating the momentous shift toward automation?  Up until now, I think media decisionmakers have been very confident in their ability to influence the rate and direction of change. At the 2009 24/7 Real Media Summit, I was struck by GroupM CEO Irwin Gotlieb’s remark that he felt it was, in some part, his responsibility to manage change in this new media landscape on behalf of various stakeholders. Consolidated media buying firms exist for the sake of exerting this type of influence and the comment made me think a lot about how and when the industry would change.

 Read More: GregHills.com

RockYou Strikes Virtual Currency Deal With Facebook

RockYou has entered into a five-year agreement to make Facebook Credits the exclusive payment option in its social games and applications on the social network. The deal, unveiled Thursday, is a boon for Facebook, as RockYou is one of the largest developers on the site, with about 34.6 million monthly active users and 2.7 million daily active users, according to Inside Network’s AppData.  The move helps ensure that Facebook’s virtual currency will gain wider distribution across the site. Until recently, Facebook Credits, which cost 10 cents each and allow users to buy virtual goods in games and apps, had only been available in a limited number of apps for testing.  But Facebook has lately been trying to build the user base for Credits through deals with significant developers, who get a 70% cut of revenue from sales suing the virtual currency. Some developers, principally game maker Zynga, have resisted offering Credits because of the 30% cut Facebook takes.  In a five-year deal announced in May, however, Zynga broadly pledged to expand the use of Credits in its games, which include wildly popular titles like “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars.” Separately, smaller developers including CrowdStar and Lolapps have also signed exclusive five-year deals to use Facebook Credits exclusively.

Read More: MediaPost

iPad As A Business Tool? Probably Not Yet

AT&T’s activation of 3.2 million iPhones in the second quarter got the attention of the tech media Thursday, highlighting the Apple device’s continued importance to the company’s wireless business.  But during its earnings conference call, AT&T also shed some light on that hot-selling Apple product, the iPad. The carrier said it activated 400,000 to 500,000 iPad 3Gs in the quarter, with usage about as expected — higher than a typical iPhone user, but less than someone using a laptop. Apple said last week that 3 million of the Apple tablets had been sold since its April 3 launch.  Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, said during the company’s conference call this week that it is selling iPads and iPhone 4s as fast as it can make them. And apparently the iPad doesn’t appeal only to consumers. AT&T’s Chief Financial Officer Rick Lindner said Thursday the company has been surprised by the level of interest among business users.  When the iPhone was first launched, he noted that businesses, and especially chief information officers, were reluctant to adopt the phone as a business tool. “Over time that’s changed dramatically,” he said. But “right from the beginning with the iPad, we’ve had a number of business customers express interest.” Lindner also suggested some companies might even use iPads to replace laptops.

Read More: MediaPost

Real-time bidding (RTB) is the fastest-growing form of display advertising delivery and will significantly impact publisher CPMs and the amount of ad inventory we see from advertisers. The technology has been described as revolutionary and, in a nutshell, it gives advertisers the ability to target messages to the right user, in the right place, at the right time. The goal of RTB is to achieve the highest possible value of a single ad impression by dynamically delivering reach to targeted users on an impression-by-impression basis.  This is a competitive bidding environment in which advertisers attempt to reach individuals based on specific demographics and psychographics, assigning a value to each impression used to reach specific users in real time. This is a brave new world for the publisher, where networks and exchanges will look to take ownership of our users and our data, segmenting our audience in an attempt to deliver the most highly targeted eyeballs for advertisers. We need to take ownership of our users and our data, earning premium CPMs through targeted ad delivery and the use of RTB technology.   To that end, let’s take a closer look at real-time bidding and the ecosystem in which it operates. There are burgeoning industries and players within them that you may have never heard of, so we’ll take a deep dive on this subject and spend time looking at RTB enablers, agency buying desks, DSPs and sell-side platforms, ad networks and exchanges and the data providers that make this all possible.  Sell-side platforms have become real-time bidding technology providers. You can see this in the offerings of two of the major online advertising yield optimizers, Pubmatic and AdMeld. Working with them comes in a couple of flavors. One, layer their product onto your existing ad serving platform and have them deliver RTB ads—over your site or network of sites—that they have sourced; or two, and better yet, take the product to advertisers yourself, using the sell side platform’s technology to target demographically using dynamic bidding. 

Read More: minonline.com

Ad Networks & Demand-Side Platforms

The interactive ad industry is widespread with buzzwords, catchphrases and acronyms. Which new, abbreviated, “next gen” solution will unleash its “game changing” power on the digital marketing landscape? Will Demand Side Platforms (DSP) rule this brave new world? At Epic Media Group, we don’t believe so. With information moving so quickly, it is no surprise that there are so many opinions and a great deal of confusion. Hot topics like data, transparency, real-time bidding (RTB), trading desks, and search re-targeting further complicate the industry landscape for most industry onlookers rather than simplify it – fueling circular conversations that last for months.  Demand Side Platforms are making noise, sure, but just like a trendy new band, the sound may be different to your ear. Simply put, a new genre does not make all previous genres irrelevant. In fact, if you deconstruct the name Demand Side Platform it becomes far less complex than it seems. As our CMO, Mike Sprouse, recently pointed out on this blog, advertisers want online advertising to be simpler and we think that will begin happening in the near future. Simplification begins with our industry’s acronyms.  The term “platform” – a word we use a lot at Epic Media Group – means a plan of action, scheme or design. Platform is also defined as a raised, level surface – like a train platform or a stage. Technically speaking, it is a hardware architecture and framework that allows software to run.  Strong platforms should be designed to support all of a company’s business channels, allow for cross-channel functionality, and leverage massive amounts of data and data analytics to deliver advertiser campaigns across all channels. The “P” in DSP references the capability to place bids, in real time, for impressions available on inventory exchanges with a user interface that provides some degree of reporting. A strong technology platform must encompass a lot of things and is an integral part of any ad intermediary’s business.

Read More: EpicMediaGroup.com

Dead Metrics Walking

I was recently asked about the relative ROI of different advertising channels – from TV, print, and radio, to direct mail, e-mail, and banners, to search ads, social media marketing, and location-based and mobile marketing. In comparing these diverse channels, it became clear that they really couldn’t be compared easily because the types of metrics were all different and measuring different things.  Let’s take a closer look at these metrics, grouped into three buckets: 1) push advertising – approximations of reach and frequency, 2) direct response, and 3) pull marketing – user-initiated ads.

Read More: ClickZ

Rocket Fuel has developed a formula to lower cost per action (CPA) and engagement metrics by an average of 43.75% compared with other targeting methods. It built custom campaigns combining BlueKai data based on specific audience models using key metrics to serve up ads in real-time with its own suite of targeting algorithms, analytics, expert analysis and real-time impression-level bidding.  The campaign, designed for an unnamed consumer packaged goods company, focused on indentifying in-market audiences that could scale as needed. Rocket Fuel simplified the problem through rapid testing and automation of multiple kinds of data to target the correct audience.  Tapping into this model to combine technology with data brought success to automakers, retailers, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and those in the travel industry. “It’s not just about one sector or one kind of metric,” says Richard Frankel, president of Rocket Fuel. “Direct-response marketers have one type of metrics, and brand and packaged good marketers have another.”

Read More: MediaPost

Cars May Not Be Flying Off Lots, But Auto Ad Volume Is Higher Than Ever

The recent hard times in the automotive industry have not dented the industry’s display ad volume, according to a new report from campaign management firm MediaMind (until recently known as Eyeblaster).  On the contrary, even as automakers were experiencing declining sales, there has been a significant increase in automotive ad impressions served by MediaMind, and specifically in the average impressions served per advertiser.  Data on online display advertising impressions served by MediaMind from 2007 to 2009 suggest that the global slowdown in automotive sales has actually done well for automotive Display Advertising.  In 2008, the number of total impressions increased and there has been no decline in the average impressions per advertiser. Furthermore, from February 2009, impressions increased significantly, potentially reflecting tighter competition for every customer and plans by governments in Europe and North America to launch new car rebate programs to stimulate the economy.  Last year — one of the worst years in recent memory for automakers — online display impressions per advertiser served by MediaMind shot up even further.  This shows that when ad budgets are becoming tight, advertisers are trading offline budgets for more targeted and efficient online campaigns, the report suggests. “For automakers, online display advertising represents a cost-effective way to interact with prospective customers.”

Read More: MediaPost

When Matt Freeman jumped from startup shop Betwave to Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Mediabrands back in January to head up its newly launched division called Ventures, which was responsible for overseeing 16 separate agencies, he landed right in the middle of the action.  The day after he joined the company it was announced that Nick Brien, former CEO of Mediabrands at the time, and the man who hired Mr. Freeman, was stepping down to run Interpublic’s McCann Worldgroup. Mr. Freeman, along with Matt Seiler, global CEO of Universal McCann; Richard Beaven, global CEO of Initiative; and Tara Comonte, chief operating officer and chief financial officer of Mediabrands, were then named to the office of the chairman, the new management structure that would run Mediabrands. But such situations aren’t really anything new for Mr. Freeman or all that daunting.  In fact, it’s probably nothing compared to the time his family moved to Italy and his mother informed him that he and his brother would be starting classes at an Italian public school that year. “We don’t speak Italian,” he remembers telling his mother. “Good luck,” she told him.

Read More: AdAge

Automating Success With Creative Optimization

Many sci-fi films portray a world where computers take control over mankind. It’s a scary concept and yet, in the near future, we may find even within our own industry, a world where computers make creative decisions for us.  But there’s no need to fear or panic. Unlike “Terminator” or “2001: A Space Odyssey,” these computers won’t turn against us. Instead, they will help us to facilitate smarter and more effective advertising.  The future is closer than you think and soon enough, creative optimization algorithms will change the way that advertisers interact with their target audience. It will enable advertisers to customize creatives and engage users on a personal level.  So what exactly is creative optimization? It’s a learning algorithm that receives constant feedback based on the user’s interaction with the ad. The algorithm changes the creative depending on the users’ feedback and can display the versions of creatives that are more likely to receive clicks, conversions, interactions or dwell.  By constantly comparing the results from each version of the ad, creative optimization automatically serves the most effective ads. Creatives can also be optimized to maximize performance for each target segment, taking the work out for advertisers who don’t have to waste time playing the guessing game. Advertisers can upload all of their creative ideas and let the algorithm serve the versions that users will respond to the most.

Read More: Adotas

The End Of Location Based Applications?

When AOL CEO Tim Armstrong joined the company in spring 2009, he announced he’d take just 100 days to figure out what to do to turn around the one-time tech industry leader.  In about a week, it will be a year since AOL celebrated the end of those 100 days with a big party in Dulles, Virginia on July 24, 2009.  It’s been a huge 12 months for AOL since. There were layoffs, a massive voluntary-buyout program, a re-branding, major product-rollouts, and of course, AOL’s December 2009 spin-off from Time Warner.  Also during that time: just about every corporate-level executive left the company – usually to be replaced with an ex-Googler.  Recently, we spoke with one of these former AOL executives to find out what it was really like when Tim Armstrong came to save AOL.  Here’s that inside story.

SAI: How did word break in February 2009 that CEO Randy Falco and president Ron Grant were out?

Former AOL exec: As soon as it happened Ron started calling his team. Word obviously spread incredibly quickly. Rumors started to break that afternoon because [Time Warner CEO] Jeff Bewkes made a surprise visit actually to the AOL headquarters downtown. For Jeff Bewkes to come out of the Time Warner building on the Upper West Side was highly unusual. So I think people were extremely sensitive to what was going on when he was spotted in the building — it’s a very open layout, the office space, so everything’s pretty visible.   Upon Jeff leaving people started twittering and everything else and I think that’s why Ron started picked up the phone so quickly and just started dialing.

Read More: BusinessInsider.com

DoubleClick White Paper: The Value of Dynamic Pricing & Auction Pricing

We’re often asked to quantify the incremental value DoubleClick Ad Exchange can provide compared with publishers’ existing yield management techniques. According to proprietary research conducted in the first half of 2010, the combined effects of auction pressure and Dynamic Allocation in DoubleClick Ad Exchange resulted in an average CPM lift of 136% compared with fixed, upfront, pre-negotiated sales of non-guaranteed inventory.   In a new white paper, we take a step back to explain how publishers are managing yield across their pool of non-guaranteed inventory today, and what steps they can take to create efficiencies and boost overall revenue. Key elements of the white paper include:

• How publishers segment and sell ad inventory. How manual optimization processes often fail to capture all available revenue opportunities
• Dynamic Allocation explained. What it is, how it works, and what it means for publishers’ bottom lines.
• Auction pricing mechanics. Real-time pricing’s core advantages over the use of historical CPMs for non-guaranteed ad space.
• A brief look forward. The potential for DoubleClick Ad Exchange and its ecosystem of publishers, technology providers, advertisers and agencies.

Read More: DoubleClickPublishers.blogspot.com

The minute that marketers use multiple media buying channels for advertising campaigns, they’re faced with an attribution conundrum. At a basic level, attribution is the analytics process of determining how effective each media buying channel is at producing the desired advertising outcome. It drives most of the campaign optimization decisions, such as budget allocation and tuning of campaign tactics.  At first blush, the challenge of attribution may seem solvable by simply assigning tags, specifying conversion events, and then letting ad servers report the performances on all the tags. But like most things in digital advertising, it’s not that easy, and in a media landscape of multiple media buying channels with real-time bidding strategies, many marketers are left wondering if their less-than-perfect attribution model is providing sub-optimal performance or even wrong decisions.  The current attribution model is the “last-ad wins” model. Basically, the last ad impression before the user conversion event gets 100 percent of the credit. Savvy marketers know that this instant gratification model oversimplifies the consumer decision process. Let’s pretend you see a great ad while watching the World Cup finals online. Chances are that you’re not going to rush to your online store to make the purchase right away. However, the next time you shop online or in stores, the influence of that brand is very likely at work. Attributing this type of delayed influences gives marketers visibility into what combination and sequence of ad messaging leads to conversions. It also provides the needed dials to optimize during dialogs with their consumers.

Read More: ClickZ

Twitter Sees Sizable Ad Business

Twitter is ready to declare success in its initial revenue-building efforts, and casts an even wider net by launching limited-time deals feed @earlybird, which provides time-sensitive offers from advertisers.  Disney has signed up for the first offer: a two-for-one ticket promotion for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which debuts in the U.S. today. The tweet takes users to a Fandango page to purchase the tickets with a discount code.  The @earlybird program is the latest addition to a growing set of revenue makers Twitter is trying. Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer, said it would continue to test concepts that can accelerate activity already happening on the service. Many companies, including deal-of-the-day services Groupon and Gilt Groupe, use Twitter to spread deals.  ”There’s going to be lots of iteration and testing,” he said. “So far it’s working.”  The company divides its business into two pillars: advertising and commercial services. Under advertising, Twitter is offering brands both Promoted Tweets, which appear in search results, and Promoted Trends, which are on its home page. @earlybird falls into the commercial sector, which includes business tools.  Coca-Cola reported that it saw 86 million impressions in a day and a 6 percent interaction rate for its Promoted Tweets campaign tied to the World Cup. Those results, Costolo said, are “not atypical” for ad campaigns on Twitter.  ”I’m confident the ad platform already works for big brands in terms of the reach and engagement we can provide,” he said.  The key for Twitter’s advertiser approach is finding activities happening on the service and amplifying them, Costolo said. @earlybird, for example, will exist as a regular tweet from Disney’s account. The @earlybird account, which already has 46,000 followers, will retweet the message. Similarly, advertisers can only run a Promoted Trend for something that is already showing momentum on the service. Old Spice, for instance, ran a Promoted Trend yesterday to hype its ad campaign featuring the actor in its “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercials sending videos to well wishers in social media.

Read More: AdWeek