New NBCU Ad Network Plans to Reach Beyond NBCU Properties
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
