Facebook To Dominate Display Ads The Way Google Dominates Text Ads
It is customary to divide online advertising into two categories: direct response and brand advertising. I prefer instead to divide it according to the mindset of users: whether or not they are actively looking to purchase something (i.e. they have purchasing intent).* When users are actively looking to purchase something, they typically go to search engines or e-commerce sites. Through advertising or direct sales, these sites harvest intent. Google and Amazon are the biggest financial beneficiaries of intent harvesting. When the user is not actively looking to buy something, the goal of an online ad is to generate intent. The intent generation market is still fairly fragmented and will grow rapidly over the next few years as brand advertising increasingly moves online. P&G – which alone spends almost $4B/year on brand advertising – needs to convince the next generation of consumers that Crest is better than Colgate. This is why Google paid such a premium for Doubleclick, Yahoo for Right Media, and Microsoft for aQuantive (MS’s biggest acquisition ever).
Read More: BusinessInsider.com
Q&A: The Internet’s Traffic Cop
As more people go online for everything from video to social-networking updates, Internet service providers have to race to make sure the network has the capacity to deliver what customers expect. Behind the scenes, a company founded by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, works to ensure that that network is running more efficiently. Akamai is probably best known for storing things like videos on its servers, which are located closer to households. The closer the servers are to a user, the better the person’s experience is because the data doesn’t have to travel as far across the lines of the Internet. Akamai also uses algorithms to direct traffic on the Internet in the most efficient way — which isn’t always the way that normal Internet protocols would try to direct it. And the company has been expanding into areas such as security and “cloud computing” — where things like email and documents are handled and stored online rather than on a person’s computer. Digits spoke with Akamai’s co-founder and chief scientist, Tom Leighton, about how information is getting delivered to consumers and what needs to be done to speed up delivery. His responses are summarized below.
Read More: Blogs.WSJ.com
Adify Licenses NetSeer Technology To Lift Ad Conversions
The ad industry continues to automate systems to squeeze every dollar from campaigns to improve return on investments. Ad network Adify will announce this week that it has licensed NetSeer’s Contextual Services and concept-based analysis technology to better predict sites where ads will attract consumers to produce best. Knowing how to sort through the millions of Web sites to discard those with dribble and keep the ones with great content has become an art. NetSeer aims to help Adify find those sites to help clients gain the best ROI. John Mracek, chief executive officer at NetSeer, says contextual signals, when done correctly, can play an important role in increasing performance and understanding consumer intent. NetSeer will help create the “short list” that Adify will use to trim down and present to clients. It will give Adify a sense of the sites that fit specific criteria through NetSeer’s categorization abilities and KnowledgeBank, a concept graph supported by spiders crawling the Web to determine what’s important. It opens up advertising for companies that Gropper refers to as “mid-tail” — companies that fall well below those on the comScore 500 list.
Read More: MediaPost
