Efficient Frontier Launches Platform Supporting Display, Search Ad Buys

Efficient Frontier plans to announce its entry into the display advertising space Tuesday with an integrated display and search marketing optimization platform. The goal is to make marketers understand that the two advertising media should not live in silos, but work as an integrated campaign.  The features in that platform combine search and display advertising, supporting real-time bidding and the ability to leverage predictive modeling to forecast performance based on overall goals.  The platform integrates with advertising exchanges, such as Yahoo’s Right Media and Google’s AdEx. It also taps into Google’s real-time bidding technology and application programming interface to improve results for clients. Advertisers can also expect integration with Microsoft’s adECN.  The real-time bidding technology lets Google send an individual impression through an API. The technology identifies the impression and attributes, including the audience segment the profile might fit into. Based on those attributes, the platform determines the bid price for the Efficient Frontier advertiser and delivers it to Google.

Read More: MediaPost

Unleashing The AOL Display Ad Beast

Last week, AOL, owners of the Advertising.com ad network, announced Ad Desk, the company’s new, self-service platform for ad buying across the Advertising.com network and AOL properties. Read the release.

AdExchanger.com interviewed AOL execs Dave Jacobs (SVP, Publisher Services), Don Kennedy (SVP, Network Sales) and Jamie Fellows (VP, Product Management, AOL Advertising) in regards to the Ad Desk launch and AOL’s display ad strategy.

AdExchanger.com: Should we think of the new Ad Desk as a demand‑side platform?

Dave Jacobs:  The way I would think about it is, this is really the on‑ramp to AOL Advertising and accessing that inventory in a new way.  We talk a lot about the demand‑side platform, as others do, but what we don’t want to do is sort of characterize it or limit it in any way, around a particular business model.  We’re viewing this as the way for advertisers, mid‑size advertisers and agencies, to have the access and control if we’re buying on AOL, and the Advertising.com Network, that they never had before – leverage targeting, retargeting,  behaviors, and do things that we’ve not provided, from an access standpoint, across the Advertising.com and the AOL businesses, previously.  We think this is a great starting point to do a lot more in the platform space. We’re really looking closely at everything that’s happening out there right now. Mostly we’re listening to our advertising and agency partners, to help drive the requirements.

Don Kennedy:   All three of us have been on the ad.com business for around 10 years now. If you look at it over the years, one of the knocks on the networks was always the black box or blind network, if you will –“we’re not getting a lot of insight from you guys.” It was a one‑way communication in many cases.  Where we really want to go is to be able to put a little bit more control into a subset of advertisers’ hands to manage their business, to grow their business, to have access to a lot of the same, down the road, a lot of the same reporting and insights that we use on a day‑to‑day basis to drive our business. We really want to start to externalize that quite a bit. And Ad Desk is a step in that direction, a pretty big step at that.

Read More: AdExchanger

Facebook Expansion: ‘Like’ Data Shared with Site Partners, Marketers

Under Facebook’s expansion strategy, Web site partners that integrate the site’s functionality have access to certain profile data its users have not made private. They can use that data – including information derived from the universal “Like” button – to personalize content, target ads, or customize retail offers.  The user preference data is available to any Web sites that use the “Log in with Facebook” application, according to Bret Taylor, director of platform products for the Palo Alto, CA-based company. Via an “authorization dialogue,” sites deploying the “Log in through Facebook” capability can request parts of the user’s profile – for example, favorite movies – and then use that data to target and sell ads, among other actions.  “The best thing for [a Web site] to do would be to put in a ‘Log in with Facebook’ button on their site,” Taylor said. “And then when a user logs in with the Log in with Facebook button, the product that we’ve to date been calling Facebook Connect…then that site will get access to the user ID and the public parts of the user’s profile.”  Indeed, as Facebook suggested last week when it unveiled new social plug-ins, its advertising policies remain unchanged. But the implications of those policies have changed, now that the Like button is proliferating around the Internet.

Read More: ClickZ