in.media » Advertisers

News of the Day

Adam Glantz — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:07:58 +0000

Online Ads To Outpace Other Categories

Online advertising will continue to outpace overall ad spending, growing 14 percent next year to $51.9 billion, according to a new Borrell Associates forecast released today.

In contrast, the overall ad market is expected to increase less than 5 percent to $238.6 billion.

The fastest-growing segment of interactive advertising will be local online, anything targeted and everything involving social media. In 2011, local online is forecast to grow nearly 18 percent from $13.7 billion to $16.1 billion.

Both national and local advertisers are expected to tap targeted display, driving the segment up 60 percent to $10.9 billion. While national advertisers are expected to increase their use of targeted display by nearly 50 percent, local advertisers will double their use of local display, reaching more than $2.3 billion next year.

In stark contrast to targeted display, run-of-site display will decrease, dropping 14 percent next year to $8.2 billion for both national and local online.

Also on the decline will be national paid search, dropping 11.3 percent.

News of the Day

Adam Glantz — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:25:12 +0000

DoubleClick Ad Exchange Updates

Scott Spencer, Group Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Jason Miller, Group Product Manager, Google Display Network discussed the display media space as well as DoubleClick Ad Exchange enhancements with AdExchanger.com today.

AdExchanger.com: What is Google announcing today?

SCOTT SPENCER: Basically, we’re going to be rolling out a few more tools to help DoubleClick Ad Exchange buyers buy quality inventory, and to check their campaigns.

Taking a quick step back; when we launched the exchange about a year ago, we engineered it with best-in-market buyer and publishers controls, as well as extensive crawl-and-verify inventory screening. Together with the real time bidder, these were the biggest upgrades we made.

As part of a long line of improvements in this area over the past year, we’re taking the wraps off a couple of additional features to give buyers even more control, quality and transparency.

The first is “Site Packs” – these are manually crafted collections of like sites based on DoubleClick Ad Planner and internal classifications, vetted for quality. These allow buyers to get a set of high quality sites for their particular campaigns, covering anonymous and branded inventory.

Second, we’re making some changes to our Real-time Bidder (in beta). The biggest change here is for Ad Exchange clients who work with DSPs. Historically, Ad Exchange buyers were hidden from publishers behind their DSP. By introducing a way to segment out each individual client’s ad calls, inventory can be sent exclusively to an Ad Exchange buyer even when that buyer uses a DSP. It increases transparency for publishers and potentially give buyers more access to the highest quality inventory, like “exclusive ad slots” – high quality inventory offered to only a few, select buyers as determined by the publisher.

Thirdly, we’re soon going to be rolling out a beta of what we call “Data Transfer” – this is a report of every transaction bought or sold by a client on the Ad Exchange. Effectively, it’s a daily log file of everything that happened. Clients can then review every branded URL that they purchased to ensure everything was what they expected.

Read More: MediaPost

News of the Day

Adam Glantz — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:14:29 +0000

Building Trust With Ad Verification Systems

When marketers buy television spots, they can turn on the tube and watch them run. Magazines and newspapers? Marketers can flip to their ads. But when it comes to online inventory, the questions still linger: Are my ads truly running where and when I want them to? Am I wasting impressions and ad dollars serving ads in front of the wrong audience, or are they subject to impression fraud? Are they running next to content that might be offensive to my audience or on the same page as one of my major competitors? Most of us may have chuckled over humorous examples of the wrong ad in the wrong place, but it isn’t that funny if it’s happened to you.

Most advertisers are already sold on the value of good online marketing and understand how leveraging the digital world for their end goals is an important part of their marketing mix. So why are we seeing consumer media time online rise to almost 40 percent but online budgets still only represent a portion of that ratio?

When asked why the big dollars aren’t yet flowing like they could into the channel, most decision makers seem to have an issue with trust — whether it be in brand safety concerns, unproven measurement, etc. Ultimately, the currency of choice is trust, and for some marketers, especially ones rooted in deep, traditional advertising familiarity, the online world is still a bit of a mystery. In the same vein, can you imagine if you went to buy a thousand shares of Apple and instead were given a thousand shares of a worthless penny stock? Would you continue to patronize a restaurant where you weren’t guaranteed to get the meal you ordered? Even hardcore digital advocates admit that there are still questions — and a few bugs left to exterminate –within virtual inventory.

Read More: FRWDCO.com

Google and the Search for the Future

To some, Google has been looking a bit sallow lately. The stock is down. Where once everything seemed to go the company’s way, along came Apple’s iPhone, launching a new wave of Web growth on a platform that largely bypassed the browser and Google’s search box. The “app” revolution was going to spell an end to Google’s dominance of Web advertising.

But that’s all so six-months-ago. When a group of Journal editors sat down with Eric Schmidt on a recent Friday, Google’s CEO sounded nothing like a man whose company was facing a midlife crisis, let alone intimations of mortality.

For one thing, just a couple days earlier, Google had publicly estimated that 200,000 Android smartphones were being activated daily by cell carriers on behalf of customers. That’s a doubling in just three months. Since the beginning of the year, Android phones have been outselling iPhones by an increasing clip and seem destined soon to outstrip Apple in global market share.

True, Apple sells its phones for luscious margins, while Google gives away Android to handset makers for free. But not to worry, says Mr. Schmidt: “You get a billion people doing something, there’s lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We’ll get lots of money for it.”

“In general in technology,” he says, “if you own a platform that’s valuable, you can monetize it.” Example: Google is obliged to share with Apple search revenue generated by iPhone users. On Android, Google gets to keep 100%. That difference alone, says Mr. Schmidt, is more than enough to foot the bill for Android’s continued development.

And coming soon is Chrome OS, which Google hopes will do in tablets and netbooks what Android is doing in smartphones, i.e., give Google a commanding share of the future and leave, in this case, Microsoft in the dust.

Can it all be so easy? Google’s stock price has fallen nearly $150 since the beginning of the year. Financial pundits have started to ask skeptical questions, wondering why it doesn’t give more of its ample cash back to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. Some suspect that all that temptation merely encourages Mr. Schmidt, along with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page—the triumvirate running the company—to splurge on gimmicky ideas that never pay off. Fortune magazine recently called Google a “cash cow” and suggested more attention be paid to milking it rather than running off in search of the next big thing.

But to hear Mr. Schmidt tell it, the real challenge is one not yet on most investors’ minds: how to preserve Google’s franchise in Web advertising, the source of almost all its profits, when “search” is outmoded.

The day is coming when the Google search box—and the activity known as Googling—no longer will be at the center of our online lives. Then what? “We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledges. “I mean that in a positive way. We’re still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.”

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.

Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn’t know you wanted to know. “The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically,” Mr. Schmidt says.

Mr. Schmidt obviously has an eye to his audience, which this day consists of folks with an abiding devotion to the newspaper business. He speaks in sorrowful tones about the “economic disaster that is the American newspaper.” He assures us that in the coming deluge trusted “brands” will be more important than ever. Just as quickly, though, he adds that whether the winners will be new brands or existing brands remains to be seen. On one thing, however, Google is willing to bet: “The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads. That’s our business.”

Mr. Schmidt is a believer in targeted advertising because, simply, he’s a believer in targeted everything: “The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

That’s a bit scary when you think about it. But for investors and executives the big question, of course, is which companies will control these opportunities. Google may see itself as friend and helper to the media business, but it also clearly sees itself in control of the targeting information. Says Mr. Schmidt: “As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that’s basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time.”

Between here and there, though, the company faces ever-growing legal, political and regulatory obstacles. The net neutrality debate, which Google has led, has taken a sudden turn that has many of its former allies in the “public interest” sector shouting “treason.”

What was most striking about the set of net neut “principles” Google produced this week with former antagonist Verizon was that they didn’t apply to wireless. “The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy,” Mr. Schmidt told one news site. “And that’s really an FCC issue, not a Google issue.”

Wait. Isn’t the future of the Internet wireless these days? Isn’t wireless the very basis of the new partnership between Google and Verizon, built on promoting Google’s Android software? But Google has now broken ranks with its allies and dared to speak about the sheer impracticality of net neutrality on mobile networks where demand is likely to outstrip capacity for the foreseeable future.

If that weren’t about to become a sticky political wicket for the company, it also faces growing antitrust, privacy and patent scrutiny, fanned by a growing phalanx of Beltway opponents, the latest being Larry Ellison and Oracle. “There’s a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledges resignedly. “The first opponent will be Microsoft.”

Mr. Schmidt is familiar with the game—as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, he was a chief fomenter of the antitrust assault on Bill Gates & Co. Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do—make sure its every move is “good for consumers” and “fair” to competitors.

Uh huh. Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find “creepy.”

Really? Some might be skeptical that a user with, say, a thousand photos on Picasa would find it so easy to walk away. Or a guy with 10 years of emails on Gmail. Or a small business owner who has come to rely on Google Docs as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Isn’t stickiness—even slightly extortionate stickiness—what these Google services aim for?

Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

“I mean we really have to think about these things as a society,” he adds. “I’m not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things,” he says.

Not that Google is a doubter of the value of social media. Mr. Schmidt awards Facebook his highest accolade, calling it a “company of consequence.” And though “there is a lot of hot air, a lot of venture money” in the sector right now, he predicts that one or two more “companies of consequence” will be born among the horde of new players just coming to life now.

A skeptic might wonder whether, despite present glory, Google itself might yet prove a flash in the pan. The company has enormous technological confidence. Mr. Schmidt describes how YouTube, its video-serving site, almost “took down” the company in its early days, thanks to the swelling outflow of video dispatched from its servers to users around the globe. Salvation was the “proxy cache”—lots of local servers around the world holding the most popular videos. “The technology that Google invented allows us to put those things very close to you,” says Mr. Schmidt. “It was a tremendous technological achievement.”

But with YouTube, as with lots of Google projects, there remains the question of how to make money. Google captured the search wave and shows every sign of positioning itself successfully for the mobile wave. As for the waves after that, your guess may be as good as Mr. Schmidt’s.

Read More: WSJ.com (entire article here)

News of the Day

Adam Glantz — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:39:44 +0000

Report: Nearly 17% Of Exchange Ads ‘High Risk’

During the second quarter of the year, the highest-risk inventory was served via ad exchanges. That’s according to a report to be released Wednesday by AdSafe Media, a company that markets proof-of-performance and content safety solutions.

A full 16.9% of inventory served by ad exchanges was high risk for advertising, while 6.3% of inventory served via ad networks was high risk, and 3.8% directly via publishers was considered high-risk.

What’s more, inventory transparency is the lowest on ad exchanges, which served 64.4% IAB Category I inventory — with full transparency regarding referring URL — while ad networks served 82.6%, and publishers directly served 97.4%.

Publishers, the study found, tend to follow geotargeting requirements more than any other buying channel. The study revealed that 1.9% of publisher inventory fell outside of geotargeting requirements, while 3.9% of ad exchange inventory and 4.3% of ad network inventory fell outside of geotargeting requirements.

Read More: MediaPost

P&G Execs And VCs Want Startups With Branding Potential

The Internet turns branding and marketing dreams into reality. For Procter & Gamble executive Dave Knox that means transforming Cincinnati, Ohio into the Silicon Valley of consumer marketing. Knox, who works at P&G with venture capitalists and startups by day, sees moonlighting as an opportunity to take the business model built by TechStars or Capital Factory and apply it to startups focusing on branding and consumer marketing.

So, Knox and fellow co-founders J.B. Kropp, Dave Knox, Bryan J. Radtke, and Robert W. McDonald launched The Brandery three weeks ago. On Wednesday they close submissions that give five startups a 12-week launch program, earn $20,000 in seed funding, and provide access to partners, mentors and resources typically reserved for major corporations. The lucky winners will pitch to a group of angel investors, VCs and strategic partners.

In exchange for the seed funding, each company will give up 6% equity that goes to The Brandery, a non-profit, 5013C organization. When these startups emerge through successful exits, the equity will fund operating capital for The Brandery.

Mentors include Get Satisfaction’s Wendy Lea, P&G’s Lucas Watson, Third Screen Marketplace’s Suzanne Tosolini, Venture Investments at the Kraft Group’s Steve Schlafman, and E.W. Scripps’s Adam Symson, among many other industry executives.

Read More: MediaPost

The People’s Web

At Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg’s D8 conference a couple of months back, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, stated that one of Facebook’s objectives was to “rethink the web stack around people.” This statement echoed the thoughts I shared in a recent post concerning the way social networks are poised to change all types of digital experiences over the next few years. In this posting, I will expand a bit on the implications of this transformation from a “site-centric” Web to a “people-centric” Web in the area of content.

Today, content experiences are built around a link-based architecture, in that links are aggregated to create static channels. Relevancy of a specific link is determined by how it relates to other links or analyzing the metadata used to describe that link. Generally, sites are designed to act as a holistic product rather than a modular one, although sites have certainly become more modular as they optimize themselves for search engines.

However, the overall product is designed to be controlled by the publisher rather than the users. Users’ ability to impact the way most sites package content has been primarily through click-through activity. User comments to a certain extent introduce user participation but that is probably where users’ involvement stops.

So, what would a content site designed with people as its primary focus offer?

News of the Day

Adam Glantz — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:59:28 +0000

Brands on Sidelines as Disney, Google and MTV Charge Into Social Games

There’s a land grab in social gaming, but at this point, it doesn’t look like there’s much room for advertisers. On Tuesday, Disney acquired top-three developer Playdom for $563 million plus $200 million in incentives. Google, meanwhile, is reportedly in talks with Playdom, Electronic Arts and Zynga in a social-gaming push. And MTV Networks this month acquired social-game developer Social Express and plans to launch games based on its TV shows later this year. With the draw of their established storylines and characters in social games — not to mention well-oiled marketing machines — established media companies hope they can use casual gaming to grow and interact with their already massive audiences. “When media companies integrate their brands, it’s going to be easier for people to get into the games because they are familiar and that will expand the market,” said Justin Smith, founder of social-game research firm Inside Network.

Johnson & Johnson is Holding a Roster Review of its Estimated $3bn Media Business.

On Tuesday, Disney acquired top-three developer Playdom for $563 million plus $200 million in incentives. Google, meanwhile, is reportedly in talks with Playdom, Electronic Arts and Zynga in a social-gaming push. And MTV Networks this month acquired social-game developer Social Express and plans to launch games based on its TV shows later this year. With the draw of their established storylines and characters in social games — not to mention well-oiled marketing machines — established media companies hope they can use casual gaming to grow and interact with their already massive audiences. “When media companies integrate their brands, it’s going to be easier for people to get into the games because they are familiar and that will expand the market,” said Justin Smith, founder of social-game research firm Inside Network.

News of the Day

Adam Glantz — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:42:05 +0000

Rocket Fuel Finds Low-Cost CPA Formula Through BlueKai Ad Data

Rocket Fuel has developed a formula to lower cost per action (CPA) and engagement metrics by an average of 43.75% compared with other targeting methods. It built custom campaigns combining BlueKai data based on specific audience models using key metrics to serve up ads in real-time with its own suite of targeting algorithms, analytics, expert analysis and real-time impression-level bidding. The campaign, designed for an unnamed consumer packaged goods company, focused on indentifying in-market audiences that could scale as needed. Rocket Fuel simplified the problem through rapid testing and automation of multiple kinds of data to target the correct audience. Tapping into this model to combine technology with data brought success to automakers, retailers, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and those in the travel industry. “It’s not just about one sector or one kind of metric,” says Richard Frankel, president of Rocket Fuel. “Direct-response marketers have one type of metrics, and brand and packaged good marketers have another.”

Read More: MediaPost

Cars May Not Be Flying Off Lots, But Auto Ad Volume Is Higher Than Ever

The recent hard times in the automotive industry have not dented the industry’s display ad volume, according to a new report from campaign management firm MediaMind (until recently known as Eyeblaster). On the contrary, even as automakers were experiencing declining sales, there has been a significant increase in automotive ad impressions served by MediaMind, and specifically in the average impressions served per advertiser. Data on online display advertising impressions served by MediaMind from 2007 to 2009 suggest that the global slowdown in automotive sales has actually done well for automotive Display Advertising. In 2008, the number of total impressions increased and there has been no decline in the average impressions per advertiser. Furthermore, from February 2009, impressions increased significantly, potentially reflecting tighter competition for every customer and plans by governments in Europe and North America to launch new car rebate programs to stimulate the economy. Last year — one of the worst years in recent memory for automakers — online display impressions per advertiser served by MediaMind shot up even further. This shows that when ad budgets are becoming tight, advertisers are trading offline budgets for more targeted and efficient online campaigns, the report suggests. “For automakers, online display advertising represents a cost-effective way to interact with prospective customers.”

Read More: MediaPost

News of the Day

Adam Glantz — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:02:32 +0000

Google’s Three Screen Ad Strategy Heralds Its Second Act

Many pundits have criticized Google as a one-trick pony that makes money from one thing – search on the desktop. There’s certainly some truth to that, but Google’s moves over the last few years foreshadow an audacious three screen advertising strategy that, if properly executed, would represent a ground-breaking second act for the company. By aggressively pursuing platforms on mobile and TV in addition to their traditional perch on the desktop, Google is positioning itself to deliver ads across all three screens and trump the capabilities of both Apple and Microsoft, who have made far less inspiring moves in the advertising world.

News of the Day

Adam Glantz — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:54:26 +0000

A Look at Who’s Getting What on Apple’s iAds

The first of Apple’s iAds are expected to start popping up on iPhones later this week, but don’t expect all the marketers that have committed to the platform to be there. A check-in with declared iAd advertisers found that many are still in the early stages of flushing out concepts and creative. Some are weeks — perhaps months — away from having an iAd in the system. ”Most advertisers won’t be there on July 1; there just isn’t enough time,” said one agency exec with several iAds in the works. Part of the issue is with Apple itself: The company is handling all the technical production of iAds, and telling agencies it will take six to eight weeks to produce an ad after the creative is produced. The July 1 rollout announced by Apple doesn’t necessarily coincide with the objectives of the marketers themselves, and many are staggering launches on the platform through the fall. Apple is telling marketers that the device considered most promising for advertisers — the iPad — won’t be on the iAd platform until November.

News of the Day

Adam Glantz — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 14:06:30 +0000

The Untapped Profit Opportunity For Ecommerce Sites

The first 15 years of online retail saw breakneck growth and little reason to focus on anything but transactional revenue. As the medium matures, the smartest retailers will recognize they are sitting on a gold mine of media impressions and consumer behaviors that can keep the bottom line growing even as transactional growth slows. Retail Web sites boast one of the best audiences a marketer could ask for: people who are actively researching and shopping products, practically raising their hands that they are currently in-market. In fact, brick-and-mortar stores have recognized this value for years, selling their suppliers premium placement such as end-cap displays, eye-level shelf space, and store circular ads. Yet most online retailers are barely scratching the surface of the potential. The untapped media sales opportunity in online retail becomes even clearer when you look at conversion rates. Typically less than 5% of a Web site’s shoppers actually transact — but 100% of that traffic is valuable to advertisers since many of those shoppers will go on to buy elsewhere. So why haven’t online retailers stepped up their game for in-store advertising?

Read More: MediaPost

YuMe Adds Brand Security

Online video has the undisputed numbers to attract advertisers, now it needs to inspire the confidence to seal the deal. To that end, video advertising technology company YuMe today announced that it has added brand security capabilities to its ACE technology platform. The new capabilities leverage YuMe’s proprietary domain detection technology, which can collect detailed information about the in-page environment of a syndicated or embeddable player when it makes an ad request, even when the player is not associated with a companion banner. This allows YuMe to prevent ads from running in video players that have been embedded on inappropriate websites, and to work with publishers to constantly monitor and improve the list of sites where their syndicated and user-embeddable players are appearing. “The majority of online video publishers—including some of the biggest media companies in the world—have chosen to syndicate their premium online video content and to offer user-embeddable video players, and we want to be able to reach these online video audiences while keeping our customers’ brands safe” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital. “We are pleased that YuMe has chosen to make an ongoing investment in brand security, combining regular monitoring and research with proactive technology to prevent inappropriate impressions before they happen.”

Read More: MediaPost

News of the Day

Adam Glantz — Tue, 18 May 2010 14:15:14 +0000

How Does Facebook Make Money?

Facebook revenues reached $500 million in 2009, up from $300 million in 2008, according to Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick, who cites “well-informed sources” in his upcoming book, The Facebook Effect. Facebook expects revenues to reach $800 million in 2010. Where did 2009’s $500 million come from? Self-service ads, which appear on the right side of the screen on Facebook, accounted for about $250 million to $300 million. They look like this:

Read More: MediaPost

On-the-Fly Advertising Swiftly Becoming More Commonplace

Time was that marketers, particularly package-goods marketers, were known for their deliberate pace. Media plans and ads were created months in advance, and mid-course changes took months. But in a growing number of cases even the biggest marketers in the world, such as Procter & Gamble Co. and Unilever, are adjusting creative and media plans on the fly within days, weeks or even hours based on changing events or the shifting tides of social-media feedback. Rapid-fire changes may still be more exception than rule for big campaigns, but they’re fast becoming routine in a marketing culture increasingly driven by real-time data dashboards. Consider Scotts Miracle-Gro making weather-triggered ads the centerpieces of its marketing plans; Visa running ads in the last winter Olympics featuring medal winners within minutes of their victories; P&G creating new Olympic ads based in part on social-media feedback from old ones; and Unilever’s Dove Men Plus Care putting video ads on major sports websites featuring New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees’ “victory shower” within hours of him winning the Super Bowl.