Efficient Frontier Buys Leading Australian Digital Marketing Firm
Seeking Deals to Expand Product Offerings, Geographic Footprint

Efficient Frontier, one of the larger remaining independent digital marketing firms, is getting a little bigger. The company is buying one of the largest digital agencies in Australia, Downstream Marketing, for an undisclosed sum.

The deal gives Efficient Frontier immediate scale in Australia and the opportunity to expand in Asia as the company seeks to tap faster-growing international markets. Downstream Marketing’s clients include American Express, Avis, Vodafone and Weight Watchers. The 30-employee company is run by CEO Steve Knowles, former head of marketing for eBay in Australia.

It’s the second big deal in a year for Efficient Frontier, which acquired social-agency Context Optional in May for a reported $50 million.

Like a lot of foreign markets, digital ad spending is small but growing fast. Online advertising spending in Australia reached $2.45 billion in the 12 months ending June 30, 2011, up 20% from a year ago, and is on track to surpass $3 billion in 2012, according to the Australian Interactive Advertising Bureau. “Those aren’t small numbers and it’s another extension of our business,” said CEO David Karnstedt.

Like a lot of firms born in search, Efficient Frontier is attempting to expand beyond its original purpose into all areas of marketing where automated auctions are transforming media buying. Originally that was search and then display advertising, but has since expanded to ads on social networks such as Facebook, video and mobile.

Read More: AdAge

5 Ways to Reinvent the AOR for the Digital Age
 
I had a lively conversation over lunch last week with an agency head and his largest client. We were talking about digital media, connected consumers, and how they’re shaking up the advertising business as we’ve known it. We each saw things a bit differently, but we all agreed that the traditional ad agency business model is fatally broken and needs to change.

The client chided the agency head: “We need you to do more with less, especially when it comes to execution tasks like media planning and buying. I don’t want to pay by the head for monkey work.” Ouch. More generously, she said she valued the agency’s strategic message and program development work and hoped they could make better use of analytics to connect total client investment to results.

The agency head noted that the client’s procurement department had squeezed the AOR (agency of record) fees so tightly that it made it difficult for the agency to invest in innovation efforts – like analytics – that would enable it to become more strategic. “Procurement has drained the life blood out of agency-client relationships.” The client nodded sympathetically.

I had to chime in with, “Isn’t this why programmatic buying was invented?” I qualified my question by explaining that tech geeks like me are excited about the rise of ad exchanges, demand-side platforms (DSPs), real-time bidding (RTB), etc., but the reason these things are being adopted so quickly is that they solve a fundamental business problem for both the agency and the client. Using smart software to help do “monkey work” means – at least in theory – that the agency can reallocate staff and resources to focus on more strategic messaging and communication work that moves the brand forward.

Read More: ClickZ

Media6Degrees Becomes Ad Matchmaker Via RTB, Data

Media6Degrees will officially roll out a tool dubbed Planner next week that gives advertisers and publishers access to targeting data.

For advertisers, the report provides a list of the best publisher sites. For publishers, the report provides the same for advertisers. The tool relies on technology that creates matches based on data collected from Web page tags, or code, placed on advertisers’ and publishers’ Web sites. The data represents clusters of consumers with similar likes.

Calling the data that creates this “fingerprint” unique to a specific customer base, Andrew Pancer, COO at Media6Degrees, describes the code as a targeting pixel that gathers information. He believes the data can help publishers generate premium sales from real-time bidding insights, along with revenue generated from putting remnant into exchanges.

Publishers have been looking for ways to take advantage of RTB, but most don’t like the idea that inventory gets sold without the support of their direct sales force. These days it’s about adding “value” and “efficiencies” to inventory, which RTB allies suggest will bring to the process.

Read More: MediaPost

It’s 9 p.m. Do You Know Where Your Ads Are?
By George John

“Change is good.” So goes the tagline of arguably the first viral commercial – a Doritos ad featuring recently defeated governors Ann Richards of Texas and Mario Cuomo of New York talking about “change” as they munched Doritos from the newly changed and re-branded packaging.

Change has come to the $30 billion digital advertising industry. The “Mad Men” days are over (well, the suits and secretaries are gone, but you could argue drinking, ennui, and client resentment are still fixtures of Madison Avenue). In the old days, agencies used to place an ad in relatively few places. “Give me the back cover of Life magazine and a TV spot at the beginning of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” a media director could say, and then the agency and client could just buy the magazine and turn on the TV to see that the ad was correctly placed.

If you could teleport “Mad Men”’s media buyer Harry Crane directly from 1968 to 2011 and ask him to plan a campaign, he wouldn’t believe we now talk in terms like online ad networks, real-time bidding, inventory exchanges, data exchanges, and offline metrics studies.

Read More: Forbes

Yang eyes Yahoo buyout with private equity

(Reuters) – For the last few years, a widely circulated joke about Jerry Yang was that he had the best tan in Silicon Valley from all the time he spent on Stanford University’s golf course.

But the jests stopped about six months ago, when the Yahoo Inc co-founder and former CEO put away his golf clubs and began showing up on a daily basis at the Internet company’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, according to a high-ranking Yahoo executive.

Now, Yang is interested in a deal with private equity firms that would take the $20 billion company off public markets, according to people familiar with the situation.

Such a deal would involve rolling over Yang’s stake in Yahoo, which stood at 3.63 percent as of April 2. Yahoo’s other co-founder, David Filo, would likely follow Yang’s lead and roll over his stake, said other sources close to Yahoo. Filo held 5.90 percent of Yahoo’s shares as of May 11.

Shortly after firing Carol Bartz as CEO in September, Yahoo and its longtime advisers at Allen & Co and Goldman Sachs began working on a strategic review, which could include a sale of the Internet pioneer, after receiving unsolicited expressions of interest.

Read More: Reuters

Rocket Fuel Expands Executive Team Amid Record Year of Global Growth

Leading Real-Time Ad Targeting Company Names Peter Bardwick as CFO and Hits $50M Run Rate Milestone

REDWOOD SHORES, CA, Sep 30, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — Rocket Fuel Inc., the leading real-time ad targeting company, today announced that it has named media and technology industry veteran Peter Bardwick as CFO. The company also announced that Dinny Devitre, former CFO of Altria and current member of the Board of Directors of Altria, SABMiller, and Western Union, has become a strategic investor in the company. For the first half of 2011, Rocket Fuel tripled six-month revenues, quadrupled gross profit compared to a year earlier, launched a UK operation, and is on a $50M annual run rate based on August revenue.

News Facts:

• Rocket Fuel is announcing these key additions at a time of rapid growth and expansion. The company grew its headcount by 2.5 times in the last six months, adding nearly 40 employees. According to LinkedIn, Rocket Fuel is the fastest-growing digital advertising
  technology company in the U.S. — and the company continues to sign new leading brands and agencies each month.
• Bardwick is an IPO-ready CFO with a proven track record directing the financial strategies of high-growth technology and media companies. He was instrumental in taking CBS Marketwatch public and has supported over $10B in transactions. He joins Rocket Fuel from online brokerage Zecco, where he served as CFO. A former investment banker, he also has a wealth of hands-on operational experience, having served as CEO, CFO, COO and board member of a number of leading Internet, media, and data companies.

Read More: Marketwire

DoubleVerify Report Shows That Media Verification Improves Compliance for Online Advertising Industry

Trust Index Recognizes Best Performing Ad Companies — Ad Networks Are Proving to Be Brand Safe, and Advertisers Are Finding Value in Top Platforms

NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – Sep 30, 2011) – DoubleVerify, the pioneer and worldwide leader in online media verification and compliance, today published its 1H 2011 Trust Index. The report found a significant reduction of non-compliance among the industry’s best-performing ad networks and platforms. The findings illustrate that advertisers and networks are continuing to standardize their brand protection and compliance practices, ensuring their online media spend brings the highest return on investment. The worst-performing online advertising companies continued to demonstrate inconsistency in their ability to comply with advertisers’ preferences. According to the report, the most compliant ad networks from January to June 2011 were (alphabetically): AudienceScience, Casale Media, Dedicated Media, Epic Marketplace, interclick, Microsoft Media Network, Specific Media, Spectrum, a Centro product, Undertone, and Yahoo! Network Plus. Advertising platforms that were most compliant include (alphabetically): DataXu, Invite Media, The MIG’s Zeus Advertising Platform.

As advertisers have increasingly demanded verification to be included with third-party buys from ad networks, exchanges, DSPs and agency trading desks, the Trust Index has provided advertisers with in-depth data about partner compliance and brand safety trends in online advertising. Other key findings from the report showed:

• In the first half of 2011, the non-compliance rates for ad networks were at their lowest ever, since 18 months ago. The best-performing networks had an average non-compliance rate of 0.6 percent, but the bottom tier’s rate was 26 percent (compared to 2 percent and 35 percent respectively in 2H 2010).
• The most compliant ad platforms (DSPs and agency trading desks) maintained an average non-compliance incident rate of 4 percent, and the lower tier platforms decreased their average non-compliance rate to 20 percent — showing that ad exchanges can provide great value when verification is applied.

Read More: Marketwire

Ad Execs: More Than Half Our Display Ads Now Bought Via Nets, DSPs, Exchanges

More than half of all online display advertising is now bought via an ad network, exchange or DSP (demand-side platform), according to findings of an Econsultancy survey of advertisers, agencies, publishers and their reps released Friday by Rubicon Project.

By platform, the study found that ad networks still account for the majority of online display advertising buys, representing 55% of the inventory, according to the respondents, followed by DSPs (32%) and exchanges (30%). Those numbers add up to more than 100, because the purchasing platforms are not mutually exclusive and are frequently used together.

The study found that the role of DSPs is much greater in North America than in Europe. Half of all online display ad buys placed by American companies are now made through a DSP vs. only 27% in Europe.

The study also found that almost half (46%) of online display advertising media plans now include ad networks, up from 32% in 2009.

Read More: MediaPost