Yahoo’s Carol Bartz hinted at new offerings for CPG advertisers and the long-awaited transition to the APT ad serving platform this morning at the company’s annual meeting for investors. Repeating the firm’s recent “science, art, and scale” mantra, Bartz promised investors the company will deliver when it comes to driving revenue and better monetizing ad inventory.  Bartz said Yahoo has been actively marketing its display offerings to advertisers and agencies, but more surprising, said the firm has been running product tests on behalf of consumer packaged goods advertisers. She hinted that Yahoo is helping CPG advertisers better understand how online activity informs real-world shopping behavior.  “We’re very, very immersed with some customers in how to marry the online/offline experience,” she told the investor audience. “CPG is getting very interested in these things,” she continued, adding that Yahoo can set up product sample trials at scale with two million consumers rapidly. “We’re out there testing that; we’re out there marketing it,” she said.  Bartz also hinted the company will unveil new display ad capabilities later today during the investor event. “You are going to see special creativity, special art for online advertising,” she said. “Not enough creativity has gone into what the medium will allow,” said Bartz, lamenting that currently online advertising is not creative enough and often simply mimics print or other media creative.

Read More: ClickZ

Zynga Teams With Yahoo On Social Games

Highlighting efforts to ease its reliance on Facebook, social game company Zynga Wednesday announced a partnership with Yahoo to offer its games throughout the Web portal’s network including the home page, Yahoo Games and Yahoo Mail.  The deal comes on the heels of a new five-year agreement that Zynga struck last week with Facebook, where it operates hugely popular games like “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars” that have aided the social network’s growth.  But relations between the companies have more recently become strained over Facebook’s plan to take a 30% cut of revenue from Zynga’s sales, forcing it to use Facebook’s virtual currency in applications. Zynga had reportedly also considered leaving Facebook altogether to launch its own social gaming network.  Terms of the Facebook-Zynga deal were not disclosed. But by pursuing more outside distribution deals with major sites like Yahoo, boasting 600 million monthly users, Zynga can presumably expand its user base beyond Facebook.

Read More: MediaPost

Wired Introduces Adobe-Built IPad Edition

Wired magazine has introduced its much-anticipated iPad edition, a slick $4.99 app that was built by Adobe in a 10-month development process despite Apple’s midstream ban on software written with Adobe Flash. Adobe wound up writing the code in Objective-C, an Apple-approved language.  At first look, the app, an enhanced version of the June issue, appears to push magazines further toward their potential on tablet computers. That’s partly because the graphics that play a big part in Wired’s print edition lend themselves to interaction and animation, but the app also introduces some elements that other magazines can readily adopt.   Readers can slide their fingers on certain pages to see a Lego Lamborghini assembled brick by brick, for example, or to rotate Mars and pull up information on the spacecraft that have landed at different spots on its surface. Video could show the same progressions, but touch control seems more involving.

Read More: AdAge

Real-time-bidding platforms are the buzz in the digital advertising space, heralded as the future of the ad biz with the potential to return the industry to the profitability of Mad Men glory days. Proponents argue that the efficiency that RTB platforms provide will have a transformative effect, altering Madison Avenue’s business from selling “sizzle” to the Wall Street model of delivering returns. Yet given the evolving state of the advertising business and Wall Street’s recent flirtation with our economy’s collapse, are we ready to bet the future of our industry on an unproven model? More importantly, what lessons can be taken from the recent banking debacle to ensure that RTB platforms are able to deliver on all the hype?

1. Standards – Financial markets are predicated on the idea that information about assets is what drives market efficiency. If RTB platforms are to deliver on the promise of efficiency, the display markets need a trusted source of information. Even in light of the recent economic crisis, few would dare buy a financial instrument that had not been rated by an independent, third-party authority. Like financial trading markets, RTB platforms will require a standardized system of metrics that enable buyers and sellers to evaluate transactions across common terms. And in the case of digital media, such standards must encompass the quality, the brand safety and value of those impressions being traded. Without a standardized set of metrics through which to evaluate inventory, RTB platforms will just be another iteration of rate-card-based buying.

Read More: MediaPost

A New Data Player

An old Ad.com colleague of mine, Mike Peralta, recently joined a newly launched start-up called Magnetic, which you can read more about here. In short, the company provides DSPs and their kind with search behavior data to use in display retargeting campaigns. I told Mike, I find it odd that this is the first time I’m hearing of a provider who does this. Especially since Yahoo! based their entire behavioral targeting business on this principle years ago. But here we are, with another way to retarget valuable customers, and I think its a really good one for a few reasons (not just because Yahoo already did it, which isnt always a good reason.)
- It will get more display marketers thinking about the interplay between display and search.
- Unlike offline data, search data is easy to update in real time or near real time.
- There is a lot of it, so a lot of people can play and experiment to find what works.
So while I have publicly cautioned against the “more is more” pile-on effect we are seeing in the data space right now, I do think search data has a justified place at the table.

Read More: Blogs.Forrester.com

News Corp. Looking To Sell Fox Audience Network, But How?

News Corp (NYSE: NWS) has been mulling selling off part or all of prized revenue-making digital ad unit Fox Audience Network for a long time now, and it is finally making the move, we have confirmed. The company has gone around the block with this idea for almost 8-10 months, our sources say, mainly because of the complications in separating the online ad network from MySpace and other properties; News Corp.‘s digital properties are the biggest component of FAN’s network, and selling it off (or even an IPO, a possibility that has also been mulled internally, but shelved later) would put a majority of MySpace ad network revenues in the hands of a third-party owner. One senior source I spoke to last week put it thusly: “it is like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) selling off AdWords.” The news was first published 30 minutes ago by Techcrunch.

Read More: PaidContent.org

Technological advances and a public now used to sharing information online has led to a new frontier for marketers, one in which they can mine rich data troves and serve up relevant and useful advertising. But marketers are risking the wrath of regulators and the public. Marketers are now taking offline data (income, credit rating, home value, savings) and merging that with online data. The offline data — including extremely sensitive, personally identifiable information — has been used by the direct marketing industry for decades. But only recently have marketers begun to connect it to online behavior. But it’s getting more common. “The line between merging online and offline data isn’t no-man’s land anymore; it’s becoming more of a common practice,” said Mike Zaneis, Washington lobbyist for the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Read More: AdAge

Why Online Ad Categories Are Won By New Entrants

In Silicon Valley, every startup fears than an established brand will one day acquire a rival or build a similar offering and instantly become the industry gorilla. When it comes to advertising, Google, which claims not only both the largest ad network and number of relationships with advertisers, but the most automated and profitable system on the Internet, is the most obvious example of this phenomenon. Ditto for Oracle and Cisco in the enterprise software space and eBay and Amazon in e-commerce. Yet while fear of the 800-pound gorilla rightfully looms, upstart ad ventures can take heart in mounting evidence that suggests online ad categories are not cornered by deep-pocketed brands, but by new market entrants. This has held true across several different categories, including Google in search, DoubleClick in ad serving, Advertising.com in display, NexTag in CPA, RightMedia in exchanges and AdMob in mobile. Each of these companies emerged from humble beginnings to become billion-dollar businesses, and did so in the face of large, incumbent competitors. Additionally, a slew of other firms exited at valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars, among them Overture (search), Atlas (ad serving), ValueClick (display) and Quattro (mobile), to name just a few.

Read More: Gigaom.com

Angel Investor Jerry Neumann Discusses The Online Advertising Value Chain

AdExchanger.com recently asked several members of the advertising ecosystem about “Middlemen” and, specifically:

• “Are there too many parties trying to insert themselves into the online advertising value chain? How do you see this playing out?”

The following contribution is from Jerry Neumann, an angel investor in The Trade Desk, 33Across, Domdex, CPM Advisors and Flurry and a co-founder of Root Markets, a quantitative marketing pioneer.

Once there was only one intermediary: the black box, the ad networks, AdSense.  They operated on a model that I’m personally familar with from raising children: you get what you get and you don’t get upset. Then the producers and users of ad inventory decided to grow up and take control of their own process -deconstruct the black boxes and start to learn themselves what works and why.

Read More: AdExchanger

Read More: DanReich.com