MediaMath is an important behind-the-scenes player for advertisers at a time when advertising networks, exchanges and platforms are changing the way advertising is bought and consumed. The New York-based demand-side digital media platform monitors activity on ad exchanges, where marketers bid to place ads on publishers’ Web sites, and helps them quickly buy the space and the audience they need. The system is helping turn advertising from a job for creative “Mad Men” to a numbers-based “real profession,” says MediaMath Chief Executive Joe Zawadzki.

Forbes:MediaMath allows marketers to directly buy, manage and optimize media. Tell us more.

Fifteen million impressions a day across exchanges, across different media. [We] simplify what could be a very complicated process into a series of pretty straight-forward stats, in terms of how to point all of the technology at the market’s problems.

What is the opportunity for publishers who want to sell ad inventory?

Ultimately, the more demand in an auction-based system, the higher the price. And for non-auction based systems, it’s bringing incremental advertising dollars that they’re not getting from direct sales. It’s like optimization is not zero sum. There has always been this tension between advertiser and publisher. People think that in the negotiation that someone wins and someone loses and, for the advertiser to get better performance, they need to beat up on the publisher. The reality is that, with optimization–because not everyone is looking for the same thing and because every advertiser has their own demand curve–they look for different brands, different audiences. If you do a good job with optimization, both the advertiser will see better performance and the publisher will see higher prices. It’s not an “or,” it’s an “and.”

Read More: Forbes.com

Do You Want To Succeed at Social Media or Social Media Marketing?

Do you want to succeed at social media or social media marketing? There is a huge difference. It’s the difference between using social media tools and adopting social media philosophy. The difference between sparking posts about your marketing and posts about your product or service. The difference between marketers who focus externally on how the brand is broadcast versus internally on how the brand is realized.

So do you want to succeed at social media or social media marketing? The answer is the former, but many marketers focus on the latter. I’d like to make this difference more real by sharing two examples — the first in the entertainment industry and the second my own experiences in a mall this weekend.

“Snakes on a Plane” is the entertainment industry’s greatest pre-release social media success story to date. The Guardian called it, “Perhaps the most Internet-hyped film of all time.” Fans produced their own T-shirts, posters, trailers, novelty songs and parodies. Producers organized a contest to select a fan’s music for use in the movie. The filmmakers added shooting days in order to implement changes suggested by fans on the Internet (including Samuel Jackson’s famous and unprintable line about snakes.)

But what were these people fans of? Not the product, apparently. As EW put said about the movie: “SOAP came in below even the most ridiculously cynical predictions.” Read More: MediaPost

The Fundamentals of Real-Time Bidding

When it comes to online advertising, there’s a common misconception that real-time bidding (RTB) is a whole new ball game, requiring a separate media strategy and an entirely new set of campaign goals. While it’s true that RTB is a different buying model for marketers to understand, the promise of digital display advertising remains “right message, right customer.” What RTB adds to the equation is “right price and right time.” Thanks to RTB and auction marketplaces, digital display can now be purchased in ways similar to search, and it dramatically improves a marketer’s ability to reach specific audiences at scale. It’s easy to think this might just be relevant for direct response campaigns, but in fact RTB delivers tremendous advantages for brand and branded response campaigns as well. Let’s look at how RTB enables all advertisers to more efficiently and effectively achieve four common campaign objectives.

1. Find custom audiences at scale
The fundamental concept of RTB is it enables marketers to target audiences directly, instead of using content as a proxy for audience. In auction markets, marketers bid (or not) on individual ad impressions based on the demographic and behavioral profile of a consumer, in contrast to traditional content-based buys where inventory is purchased to hopefully reach a targeted audience.

The beauty of RTB is that marketers target audiences based on their own custom definitions of which consumers are appropriate for a campaign. A classic strategy is to use remarketing data that tracks when consumers have visited the advertiser’s website. But with RTB, marketers can now take it to the next level and leverage their full customer relationship management (CRM) database for targeting. These data represent the advertiser’s full view of its customers (registration data, purchase history, loyalty tier, etc.). By using a CRM-capable demand-side platform (DSP), an advertiser can execute powerful cross-sell, up-sell, and retention campaigns.

However, these strategies, while extremely effective, tend to have limited reach. To increase scale, advertisers can use look-alike modeling to expand the size of the targetable audience. Look-alike modeling finds new consumers that closely resemble the demographic and psychographic attributes of an advertiser’s existing audience. How does this work? Imagine a dart board where the original remarketing audience is the red bull’s-eye in the center. Look-alike segments are the concentric circles that extend out from the center, with each circle increasing the scale of audience available at decreasing levels of similarity.

Read More: iMediaConnection

Today, during ClickZ’s Connected Marketing Week in San Francisco which brought together name-your-digital-pleasure marketers to discuss their respective marketing channel, ClickZ and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) also co-sponsored an Ad Networks & Exchanges event.

Editor’s note: It would seem the name of this type of IAB event may need to evolve. Demand-side platforms don’t want to be called ad networks. And, ad networks – to a certain degree – want to be known as demand-side platforms. Looking forward to the new name!

Just prior to the day-long event, the IAB released news (see it) that 16 IAB member ad network and exchange companies had become “the first to commit to comprehensive self-certification against the IAB ‘Networks & Exchanges Quality Assurance Guidelines,’ [which aims to] increase buyer control over the placement and context of advertising on ad networks and exchanges.”

In the third panel of the day, San Francisco-area media agencies provided their take on the fast-moving ad ecosystem and ad verification technologies, in particular.

Moderated by ValueClick Media’s Matthew Boyd, panelists included associate media director Kim Small of Universal McCann, senior media manager Pablito Padua of Signal to Noise (formerly Agency.com), associate media director Lindsay Wong of Razorfish and vp, digital strategy director Chris Unno of PHD.

Noting the new guidelines and their adoption by 16 member companies, panel members agreed they were heartened to see the step forward in adopting the brand safety measures. But Signal to Noise’s Padua added that he was disappointed that there weren’t additional networks on the initial list.

Read More: AdExchanger

Excess Ad Inventory Pushing Value-Added Services

The movement into value-added services by companies throughout the online advertising space continues to get more interesting. First we saw Google provide free tools and services to support online ad sales. Now search engine marketing companies have begun to provide free tools and platforms to small-and-medium size businesses in hopes of eventually locking them in to subscription services for life. Take that one step further, to find demand side platforms (DSP) building networks of tech offerings on top of real-time bidding platforms.

Xa.net built its platform as an integration hub to bring in data from BlueKai, eXelate and TargusInfo, as well as the media from ad exchanges and publishers. Add to that creative services and it gives advertisers a way to pull in targeting data, purchase ads, and design creative pieces.

The xa.net built technology that allows companies to access inventory from ad networks and exchanges through a real-time bidding system will also offer value-added services that assist companies with copywriting and creating ads. The company’s CEO, Rob Leathern, tells me xa.net began to build the platform earlier this year and will sign on five companies to augments its services. Think of it this way, Leathern wants xa.net to provide the underlying technology that connects complementary services to make everything work together. That includes ad creation for social media platforms, too.

One of those companies will become BoostCTR, a network of copywriters for text ads that will help xa.net clients improve the quality of copy written for Facebook ads. Others include 4Delit, a self-service system that lets small advertisers create Flash and rich media ads; Interpolls, which creates rich-media formats and widgets; OneScreen; and OggiFinogi.

Read More: MediaPost

Google TV plan is causing jitters in Hollywood

Google revolutionized the way people access information. Now it wants to transform how people get entertainment.

The search giant is touting an ambitious new technology, called Google TV, that would marry the Internet with traditional television, enabling viewers to watch TV shows and movies unshackled from the broadcast networks or cable channels on which they air. Users would need to buy a TV or set-top box with Google software that could connect to the Internet, along with a keyboard to type commands. Users could also use their iPhone or Android phone to operate Google TV.

The prospect of Google getting into television frightens many in Hollywood, who worry that Silicon Valley will upend the entertainment industry just like the Internet ravaged the music and newspaper industries.

Read More: LATimes.com

When Matt Freeman jumped from startup shop Betwave to Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Mediabrands back in January to head up its newly launched division called Ventures, which was responsible for overseeing 16 separate agencies, he landed right in the middle of the action.  The day after he joined the company it was announced that Nick Brien, former CEO of Mediabrands at the time, and the man who hired Mr. Freeman, was stepping down to run Interpublic’s McCann Worldgroup. Mr. Freeman, along with Matt Seiler, global CEO of Universal McCann; Richard Beaven, global CEO of Initiative; and Tara Comonte, chief operating officer and chief financial officer of Mediabrands, were then named to the office of the chairman, the new management structure that would run Mediabrands. But such situations aren’t really anything new for Mr. Freeman or all that daunting.  In fact, it’s probably nothing compared to the time his family moved to Italy and his mother informed him that he and his brother would be starting classes at an Italian public school that year. “We don’t speak Italian,” he remembers telling his mother. “Good luck,” she told him.

Read More: AdAge

Automating Success With Creative Optimization

Many sci-fi films portray a world where computers take control over mankind. It’s a scary concept and yet, in the near future, we may find even within our own industry, a world where computers make creative decisions for us.  But there’s no need to fear or panic. Unlike “Terminator” or “2001: A Space Odyssey,” these computers won’t turn against us. Instead, they will help us to facilitate smarter and more effective advertising.  The future is closer than you think and soon enough, creative optimization algorithms will change the way that advertisers interact with their target audience. It will enable advertisers to customize creatives and engage users on a personal level.  So what exactly is creative optimization? It’s a learning algorithm that receives constant feedback based on the user’s interaction with the ad. The algorithm changes the creative depending on the users’ feedback and can display the versions of creatives that are more likely to receive clicks, conversions, interactions or dwell.  By constantly comparing the results from each version of the ad, creative optimization automatically serves the most effective ads. Creatives can also be optimized to maximize performance for each target segment, taking the work out for advertisers who don’t have to waste time playing the guessing game. Advertisers can upload all of their creative ideas and let the algorithm serve the versions that users will respond to the most.

Read More: Adotas

The End Of Location Based Applications?

Online display advertising — an $8.7 billion market in 2010 — is undergoing change at a pace not seen since Google transformed search and invented PPC advertising. The change is welcome, as display catches up to the market for search advertising in terms of efficiency and targetability. But, the transformation will bring a sharp struggle for margin in the online ad delivery chain, leading to a new wave of digital M&A. Online display, primarily a brand advertising medium (as measured by revenue), has traditionally been sold on the basis of sites and specific media placements, or via ad networks that aggregate sites into vertical channels. Now, with the evolution of online ad targeting techniques and the rapid growth of a market for consumer targeting data, it is increasingly common to sell advertising on the basis of audience, reaching individual web users based on specific data about that user. The data — behavioral, demographic, geographic and contextual — is generally persistent and useable across ad campaigns via a tracking cookie.

Read More: AdAge

Yahoo’s Interest In Foursquare Is Real

Yahoo is most definitely looking to buy a location-based startup like Foursquare, a CEO at one of Foursquare’s many rivals tells us. He knows, because Yahoo (YHOO) approached his startup for acquisition too.  A source close to Yahoo confirms — kind of — telling us: “We talk to everybody.” Our startup source says Yahoo has made it clear that acquiring a company in this space was a top strategic priority. He says that he’s reached out to other executives in the space, and learned that Yahoo has been talking to everyone in the space for the past few months. If Yahoo can’t get Foursquare, he expects them to pay ~$25 million for a smaller player. But startups aren’t biting because Yahoo has a reputation for killing small companies it acquires. He says that startups in discussions with Yahoo learn that they’ll be slotted into Yahoo! Local, but still walk away confused about how their business would fit into the organization. In talks, he said “seven different people claimed” he would report to them.

Read More: BusinessInsider

An Open Invitation to Customize Ads

I’ll be the first to say that last week’s column painted a fairly rosy picture of the current state of online advertising: advertisers work hard to deliver relevant messaging and consumers respond positively, appreciative as they are for the more meaningful ads. Any digital marketer will tell you, however, that many consumers don’t feel advertisers are doing them any favors. If you can believe it, they’d just as soon not get advertising that’s relevant at all.  If that sounds crazy, you may be forgetting how strongly many Internet users feel about their privacy, and how they’re increasingly aware that relevant advertising generally can’t be achieved without following their online behavior. Late last year, researchers released the results of a study on consumers’ opinions about behavioral targeting. An overwhelming 66 percent of respondents said that they “do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests.” That number climbs to between 73 and 86 percent when those surveyed are provided with further detail about how their data is collected for this purpose.

Read More: ClickZ

For years, Web media planners have lived in fear of The Screenshot. That’s the e-mailed evidence from a client that shows its ads running where they shouldn’t, such as a pornographic Web site. More brand advertisers than ever are turning to the Web and they are now seeking to solve this problem by engaging verification tools and services to alert them when their ads run on sites they deem unacceptable. Misplaced ads aren’t a problem unique to the Internet, but the digital medium makes the problem even more acute. A client and agency can easily pick up a magazine and see their ad ran as agreed to on the insertion order. Yet the Web is incredibly fragmented, with attention spread across millions of sites. That’s led to an automated system of ad placement that is far from transparent, with many ad networks not even showing clients where their ads ran.  “There’s more opacity in the system than there’s ever been before,” said Joe Mele, managing director of media and marketing at Razorfish. “There’s less visibility into what’s going on. For some clients, that’s just not OK.”  Service providers in the ad-verification space, including DoubleVerify, AdSafe and AdXpose, use tracking pixels and human analysis to identify misplaced ads and give advertisers the ability to get them taken down — not to mention refunds from publishers and networks.

Read More:  AdWeek

Attribution or Media Mix Models for Search Marketing?

I’ve never been a big fan of attribution models and have always preferred econometric models that do their best to generate a practical media mix model.  I’ve explained my reasons in different ways to clients, prospects, and show attendees, but I doubt I’ve communicated them as clearly as Avinash Kaushik did recently in his SES NY keynote. Kaushik pointed out the lunacy of some of the attribution models being used by search marketers who think of themselves as fairly advanced. Also, I’ve always been a fan of monitoring bounce rates of landing pages as closely as one monitors eventual conversion to leads or sales.  One of Kaushik’s now-famous pearls of wisdom regarding bounce rates is fully self-explanatory and never grows old: “I came, I puked, I left.” Clearly, for most of us looking at any analytics program, it’s boggling how high bounce rates can be, even for our most relevant and best-performing pages. Getting the bounce rate below 50 percent is doable, but it takes a lot of landing page tuning, copy testing, and layout adjustment.  If you take one thing from Kaushik’s crusade for better user experiences, it should be “watch your bounce rate.” While not everyone is capable of designing media mix and marginal attribution models, everyone has the ability to start improving bounce rates now.

Read More: ClickZ

The Display Market in 2010 – Revolution or Anarchy?

In the eleven years I have worked in and covered the display advertising market, I have never seen such a frenzy as I do today. In the past week, I  learned of three more DSP’s, two data companies and an attribution vendor.  Agencies are also in the game this time around. So what is causing this pile-on of new ad technologies to the market? There are a few things:

- Leveled playing field on the exchanges: The ad exchanges allow for innovation in ad optimization and bidding. Additionally, small companies can suddently compete for inventory that used to be locked up by ad network contracts.

- Better technologies: Cookieless tracking, container tags, real time bidding, data targeting and dynamic ad generation are all innovations that are hitting the hocky stick curve right about…now.

- Opening purse strings: We know that display advertising spending was essentially flat from 2008 to 2009. It appears that 2010 will show improvement. Marketers are getting budgets back and are ready to spend them.

- Desperate publishers: Publishers are grasping to find ways to make more money on their sites, so they are handing over the reigns to sell side platforms to help them optimize.

Read More: Blogs.Forrester.com

As data-driven efficiencies in online advertising advance, demand side platform Mediamath may have marked another stage in that evolution. The firm acquired dynamic ad creation company Adroit Interactive last week, combining Adroit’s tools for creative customization and segmentation of ads with its own audience targeting and buying platform. The companies have worked together since Q4 of last year, integrated their technologies, and tested that initial integration. One advertiser that matches consumers to relevant local deals used the system to target specific messages to consumers in most DMAs across the country. “Our buying platform was able to buy media across all these areas, and then the creative took over to assemble the right geographic message,” said Mediamath CEO Joe Zawadzki. Mediamath integrates with third-party data providers such as Blue Kai, and media suppliers including Yahoo’s Right Media, Microsoft’s AdECN, and Google’s DoubleClick exchanges.

Read More: ClickZ

Joost Video Network Stuns With Big Reach: 67 Million Viewers Per Month

Straight out of left field, the Joost Video Network has assumed the number 2 spot in comScore’s Video Metrix “Top 100 Properties”, second only to Google. The Joost network, which is now operated by Adconion after the company’s acquisition of the ill-fated European startup’s assets back in November 2009, claims a reach of 67 million unique viewers per month. To put that in perspective: that’s approximately 38 percent of the total US Internet population who are consuming videos each month. According to Adconion’s press release, the Joost Video Network, which consists of hundreds of major video destination sites, showed an aggregate of over 100 million videos to consumers in February. Perusing through the current selection of channels on Joost.com, I’m fairly surprised that the network is drawing so many views, as it consists mainly of niche video destinations that I would estimate only a small number of people would be interested in.

Read More: TechCrunch

Marketers Watch as Friends Interact Online

Birds of a feather flock together. Or, in the Internet age, a customer’s friend is a potential customer. Embracing those truisms, some big marketers, including Sprint and eBay, are turning to small start-ups to help them tap social-networking data to find would-be clients among the friends and acquaintances of existing customers, to the dismay of some privacy advocates. EBay, for instance, used online tracking technologies to identify customers who browsed or shopped for products in the clothing, shoes and accessories section of its site. It then turned to New York-based start-up 33Across, which analyzed data from social-networking sites to map out the connections between the customers eBay had identified and other Web surfers, in order to serve up ads at the right time and place. New York-based 33Across tracks how consumers interact with one another—commenting on posts or sharing messages, for instance—across about 20 sites, online networks and third-party application companies, which build software like games and quizzes for social-networking sites. 33Across says those sites reach a total of 100 million monthly unique U.S. visitors. For example, if an eBay customer shared a movie review with an acquaintance, 33Across identified that connection and places a cookie, or anonymous string of tracking data, on the acquaintance’s browser so that they later could be targeted with a relevant ad whenever they visit certain sites.

Advertisers say the new wave of social-networking targeting is registering impressive results. Daphne Liska, senior manager of Internet marketing at eBay, said the 33Across campaign was more successful than standard online ads and that eBay plans to continue using social data to find new customers. Sprint, which also worked with 33Across, tested the approach last summer to promote the launch of the Palm Pre smart phone and quadrupled related online sales, says Joe Migliozzi, managing director of digital at Mindshare, the WPP-owned media agency that managed a campaign for Sprint. He says Sprint is considering the same approach for future campaigns. “A lot of what goes into a purchase comes from a general conversation between you and people in your group,” Mr. Migliozzi says. “We’re identifying the links between people.” 33Across is one of a handful of start-ups, such as Media6-Degrees and Lotame, that aim to make use of the reams of Internet user data behind social-networking sites for ad targeting. They all use complex algorithms to track connections between consumers. 33Across says it tracks five billion connections, then weighs them to determine the closest ties. “There are massive streams of untapped social relationship data,” says Eric Wheeler, chief executive of 33Across. Mr. Wheeler says his company collects user data from MyYearbook.com but he declined to name other specific sites, citing agreements with those Web sites. (Tracking cookies from 33Across were found by The Wall Street Journal on other sites, including popular Twitter-photo site twitpic.com, as well as music site lyricsmode.com and health site righthealth.com.) Not surprisingly, such tracking of friends and acquaintances has attracted the attention of some lawmakers and regulators.

Such ad-targeting approaches are facing increased scrutiny from federal regulators who are investigating privacy issues tied to the Internet. Some lawmakers, concerned about Internet privacy, say they are preparing to introduce legislation in the coming weeks to make more transparent Web sites’ tactics for collecting information on their users. “To the extent that ad companies are using social-media information to deliver ads in a way that is not transparent to consumers or consumers don’t understand what the source of the basis of the ads are, that could present an issue,” says Christopher Olsen, an assistant director in the privacy and identity protection division of the Federal Trade Commission. The ad-targeting companies say that they abide by industry standards and that the information they collect is anonymous and can’t be traced back to individual users. Industry trade groups are introducing standards that let consumers know when they are being targeted by an ad as a result of tracking.

Both Facebook and MySpace allow marketers to target ads on their sites to consumers based on the information users include in their profile, such as occupation, age, location and interests. (MySpace is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.) The new group of start-ups thinks that the data mapping connections between people—rather than their profile information—are more valuable. Facebook ran into a privacy debacle in 2007 with an advertising tool called Beacon that allowed Facebook to track users’ activities on certain external sites, then show updates on the site about those activities, such as retail purchases. CEO Mark Zuckerberg later apologized to users and changed the site’s privacy settings. The new targeting technique is rooted in decades of research about social behavior. A New England Journal of Medicine study from 2008, for instance, found that smoking behavior—such as quitting or not— spreads through social ties. “These companies are on to an important factor in the market that we haven’t tapped into well, which is how consumers are connected to each other and how they influence each other’s purchases,” says Emily Riley, an analyst with Forrester Research. Still, ad executives say they are seeking more transparency about where the data come from and where their ads appear. “Agencies are still trying to wrap their heads around it,” says John Nitti, senior vice president and digital director at Publicis Groupe’s Zenithmedia.

WSJ: Full Article Here

Over the last year, the emergence of real-time biddable marketplaces for ad inventory has roiled the online media industry and revealed a potentially disruptive channel in the digital marketing landscape. As Mike Baker noted in a column on the topic, in fact, real-time biddable inventory has the potential to revolutionize the ad industry on the buy-side and sell-side alike. Those familiar with Clayton Christensen’s, “Innovator’s Dilemma,” will recognize both the threat and opportunity in this disruptive new technology. And agencies and marketers alike are retooling processes, teams, and states of mind to make sure they are not left behind. The forces reshaping the media landscape and bringing real-time bidding discussions to the forefront have little to do with “real time” anything. Currently, RTB inventory represents a small fraction of the overall media inventory traded daily across ad exchanges. The best estimates I’ve seen indicate 5 percent to 10 percent of biddable, exchange-traded media is purchased through real-time bidding today. But by all accounts exchange-traded media is working, and working well. At our agency, for example, we find exchange-traded media among our most efficient channels, often performing at comparable levels to search marketing from a direct response standpoint. So if “real-time” bidding isn’t driving this success, what is? The answer is clear: micro-segmentation and de-averaged pricing, neither of which need to be done in real time to be effective. (Here’s how de-averaged pricing works: Instead of paying a single price for one lump segment, you break the lump segment into its component parts and pay a unique price for each of those parts. This represents the “de-averaged” price.)

Read More: ClickZ

PointRoll Opens Insights To Connect Rich Media Engagement With Campaign Data

Rich media provider PointRoll on Wednesday is expected to unveil its Open Insights initiative, which aims to help marketers improve their creative campaigns. At launch, the initiative includes seventeen partners spanning audience understanding and identification, targeting, dynamic creative versioning, and reporting integrations. Open Insights works by connecting rich media engagement metrics with other campaign data to better understand the relationship between advertisers’ creative and media goals. Partners include AOL, QuadrantOne, Google Content Network, ContextWeb, and ADISN. Other real-time parameter integrations with Nielsen PRIZM and BlueKai have been put in place to increase dynamic ad generation and optimization in scale across publishers and ad networks. Of key importance, Open Insights offers a consolidated view of ad effectiveness across creative, targeting, media and delivery, according to said Max Mead, VP of business development and analytics for PointRoll. “Better data means better decisions,” said Mead. “We’ve heard from marketers that they’re looking for new ways to use data to understand and find new audiences, and to make sure they’re serving the most relevant, personalized creatives to different types of users.”

Read More: MediaPost

iPad Is The Google Killer

Forget the Kindle.  The Kindle was dead as of 9 AM April 3^rd, and had been on life support for the previous six months anyway as people put off buying a Kindle until the iPad came out.  The iPad, however, is not the Kindle-killer.  At least not anymore.  The iPad is the Google killer. Now I see why Google is so focused on Android and Chrome.  Now I see why Eric Schmidt left Apple’s board. Google is afraid for the first time, and it’s not Microsoft it’s worried about.  I reached this epiphany this weekend as I spent some quality time with my new device.  Here’s how it happened. I was sitting on my couch, getting to know my iPad.  Of course, I wanted to check out some apps, to see if there were better or newer ones than the ones I had for my iPhone.  I searched through the categories – entertainment, news, navigation, etc. – chose a number of apps, opened them, and played around.  I read articles from the Wall Street Journal.  Checked the weather reports on the blustery Seattle day we were having.  And I looked at some recipes in the Epicurious app.  I played some games.  I downloaded a book and read a bit of it.  I watched some YouTube videos. And then it dawned on me.  I had just spent hours consuming content, connecting with brands I like, and discovering new and wonderful things to do with my iPad.  And I never opened my browser. I didn’t need Google. I did all of these things and never touched the web.  Never typed in search term.  Never clicked www anything.  I got a bit of a shiver.  Then I bought more Apple stock. Here are some revelations that came to me this weekend:

• Apple has trained us to look for apps and use apps, not web sites. The iPad just furthers this behavior that Apple is training in us.  I don’t need to open a browser anymore to get to my favorite content, my social networks, my maps and weather, etc.
• The disintermediation between Google/search and customers has been usurped (or soon will be) by Apple. Via apps, music, movies, and books, Apple now owns the customer “search” relationship.
• The app store is a discovery tool. Search is not. Search is a research tool because it assumes I already know what I am looking for, at least in part.  This makes search useful for some things, but frustrating for others.  As users discover this, they will use search less.
• All of this means that search will become less of a navigational tool over time. Today, search is often the first place people go on the web. In the future, that will become less necessary.  You will start with your apps.
• Forget bringing your laptop on vacations anymore. You won’t need it.  The iPad was made for planes and for consuming on the go.
• In fact, the PC will continue to exist, but solely as a productivity device. I think that Microsoft can actually breathe a sigh of relief because the iPad does not do away with the need for Office or Windows. It just makes the PC a more utilitarian device rather than the do-everything device it is today.

Read More: Mele’s Musings

Display ads will incorporate a variety of social elements in future campaigns, but integrating creativity and dynamic data today can provide marketers with indispensable consumer mindshare and loyalty. The technology now exists to create these opportunities. The challenge may seem daunting to some marketers, but technology has made opportunities creative and dynamic ads limitless, Neal Mohan, vice president of product management at Google, told OMMA Global attendees in San Francisco Thursday. Google has the ability to integrate real-time data into display ads that serve up messages based on the time of day, the weather in a specific region, and more. “It’s a combination of taking in real-time data and determining what elements of the ad should go where,” Mohan told MediaPost. “You need to do this on the fly across millions of impressions every day. You can’t do this once or twice daily, but all day long.”

Read More: MediaPost

Google and Partners Seek TV Foothold

Google and Intel have teamed with Sony to develop a platform called Google TV to bring the Web into the living room through a new generation of televisions and set-top boxes. The move is an effort by Google and Intel to extend their dominance of computing to television, an arena where they have little sway. For Sony, which has struggled to retain a pricing and technological advantage in the competitive TV hardware market, the partnership is an effort to get a leg up on competitors. The partners envision technology that will make it as easy for TV users to navigate Web applications, like the Twitter social network and the Picasa photo site, as it is to change the channel. Some existing televisions and set-top boxes offer access to Web content, but the choice of sites is limited. Google intends to open its TV platform, which is based on its Android operating system for smartphones, to software developers. The company hopes the move will spur the same outpouring of creativity that consumers have seen in applications for cellphones.

Read More: NYTimes

Yahoo No. 2 Steps in to Lead Sales on Interim Basis

Yahoo No. 2 Hilary Schneider will oversee ad sales at the portal for at least the next few months as it searches internally and externally for a replacement for Joanne Bradford, who left suddenly to be come chief revenue officer at Demand Media. In an interview, Ms. Schneider said all of Ms. Bradford’s direct reports would report to her to ensure a “level of continuity.” Ms. Schneider has been deeply involved with the integration of Yahoo and Microsoft search sales operations and said that effort, under way now, won’t be affected by Ms. Bradford’s departure. “My plan is to work with Joanne’s team directly,” Ms. Schneider said. “At the same time we are going to launch an external search which I expect will take a couple of months.”

Read More: AdAge

IT looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Three years ago, Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, jogged onto a San Francisco stage to shake hands with Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, to help him unveil a transformational wonder gadget — the iPhone — before throngs of journalists and adoring fans at the annual MacWorld Expo. Google and Apple had worked together to bring Google’s search and mapping services to the iPhone, the executives told the audience, and Mr. Schmidt joked that the collaboration was so close that the two men should simply merge their companies and call them “AppleGoo.” “Steve, my congratulations to you,” Mr. Schmidt told his corporate ally. “This product is going to be hot.” Mr. Jobs acknowledged the compliment with an ear-to-ear smile.  Today, such warmth is in short supply. Mr. Jobs, Mr. Schmidt and their companies are now engaged in a gritty battle royale over the future and shape of mobile computing and cellphones, with implications that are reverberating across the digital landscape. In the last six months, Apple and Google have jousted over acquisitions, patents, directors, advisers and iPhone applications. Mr. Jobs and Mr. Schmidt have taken shots at each other’s companies in the media and in private exchanges with employees.

Read More: NYTimes

Optimization Overdose

Demand side platforms (DSPs) are a giant leap forward for Adkind. They put the power back in the hands of the marketer to decide how much to pay for each audience segment, target them in real time, and hyper-optimize the campaign with the help of ingenious black boxes with Einstein-quality math equations inside. Dynamic ads are the other superheros. They empower marketers to tailor their message or offers based on performance (among other factors). More math equations that put more dollars into marketers’ pockets! Put them together and you get super-hyper-mega-optimized performance, right? Wrong! You get a mess. Here’s why: The DSP is optimizing against a specific creative. Let’s call it Big-Box Retailer Creative X. As the DSP sees a gradient of performance across different audiences shown Creative X, it optimizes your media buy to bid for more of those audiences. This scenario works great. Dynamic ads complicate this scenario in that Creative X is undefined. Put simply, the execution of the creative is determined by optimization performed behind the scenes, and whether that means showing pictures of a DVD player or a washing machine is determined each time the ad loads.

Read More: MediaPost

Hiring Freeze Starts To Thaw As Agency Business Hunts For Talent

After a nearly yearlong hiring freeze and having shed 14,000 employees, WPP chief Martin Sorrell had a bit of good news last week: The holding company is staffing up. It’s a welcomed announcement for an industry that lost almost 200,000 jobs between December 2008 and January 2010. Firms from Edelman to OMD to BBH are adding to their ranks, crediting a stronger business outlook and a need to add people with new skills. “Agencies had to respond to what was going on in 2009 by making some massive cuts,” said Pat Mastandrea, founding partner-CEO of the Cheyenne Group. She said when the market started to turn around in the fourth quarter of 2009 and budgets started to grow back, you had agencies that were too lean. “Now those agencies are in the process of having to address that by recruitment. And it’s even stronger in the first quarter of 2010 than it was in the last quarter of 2009.”

Read More: AdAge

Who Are The Online Publishing Companies That Matter

The ten largest online publishers own a disproportionate amount of the world’s web traffic. These busy sites, including subsidiary holdings, account for billions of unique visitors per month. They also comprise the most sought-after ad space in the world. However – and while the recession has played a role in the decline of the display CPM major publishers could acquire – an average $10 CPM, has in many cases, dwindled to $1CPM. For many publishers, display has simply not paid off. Search advertising revenues, however, have steadily increased during this same time. And, with roughly 90% of the major publishers’ revenue being derived from low-paying (and in many cases remnant) advertising networks, many would argue that it is just a matter of time before many of these sites begin charging users to access content; either on a subscription, or pay-as-you-go basis. The alternative, of course, requires an alternative approach to advertising — the fact of the matter is that publishers are not in the business of providing free content if they are unable to monetize their traffic.

Read More: Permuto.com

Time is now on the side of online advertisers. Advertisers have been able to direct online messages based on demographics, income and even location, but one element has been largely missing until recently: immediacy. Advertisers booked slots in advance, and could not make on-the-fly decisions about what ads to show based on what people were doing on the Web. Now, companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft let advertisers buy ads in the milliseconds between the time someone enters a site’s Web address and the moment the page appears. The technology, called real-time bidding, allows advertisers to examine site visitors one by one and bid to serve them ads almost instantly. For example, say a man just searched for golf clubs on eBay (which has been testing a system from a company called AppNexus for more than a year). EBay can essentially follow that person’s activities in real time, deciding when and where to show him near-personalized ads for golf clubs throughout the Web. If eBay finds out that he bought a driver at another site, it can update the ad immediately to start showing him tees, golf balls or a package vacation to St. Andrew’s, Scotland, often called the home of golf. If a woman was shopping, eBay could change the ad’s color or presentation.

Read More: NYTimes

Google Gains Traction In Display Ad Push

Google Inc. is signing up marketers to use its latest display-advertising technology, pressuring rival Yahoo Inc. and advancing the search giant’s effort to change the way ads are sold across the Internet. Display ads, the eye-catching banner ads that appear atop and alongside most Web sites, have been under pressure as marketers question their effectiveness. Spending on banner ads in the U.S. fell 2.3% last year to $4.77 billion, according to eMarketer. Google is championing a new stock market-like system for buying display ads. Using its exchange, ad buyers and sellers are matched to ad spaces in a real-time auction. Ad buyers calculate how much they are willing to pay for a particular ad position on the fly, based on how likely the ad is to be seen by the types of viewers they are targeting.

Google released its new technology, called the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, in September. Yahoo has run its own exchange, called Right Media, for years, but has only recently begun to roll out real-time bidding. “Google has more firepower right now,” said Matt Spiegel, chief executive of Omnicom Group’s digital ad buying unit OMG Digital. “I’m convinced that the other key players in the space recognize the risk.” Google is pushing display ads as it seeks growth at a time that its core search business has slowed. Yahoo, which was eclipsed by Google in search but sells far more display ads, is fighting to avoid being leapfrogged again. At stake is the chance to control a market that could be as lucrative as search ads. While neither company expects all display ads to be sold through exchanges, they both expect it to be a growing part of the market that would help close the gap with the $11 billion U.S. search-ad industry.

Advertisers say the new exchanges allow them to better target their advertising, though the auctions don’t necessarily result in lower prices. In early testing, Google said its research found that the average price a publisher receives for ad space sold through its exchange is more than 130% higher than the average price of similar ad space sold directly to ad networks and other third parties. Richard Frankel, president of ad technology company Rocket Fuel, says Google’s real-time bidding is a significant advantage over Yahoo’s system. He has begun to exploit it heavily for clients like Nissan Motor Co.’s Infiniti brand. “If you have a formula for calculating the impression, you can be much smarter than everyone else to really home into the audience,” Mr. Frankel said. Overall, more than fifty advertising networks are now buying display ads through Google’s new exchange, said Google vice president of product management Neal Mohan, who oversees its display ad technology. Google’s success is pressuring Yahoo, which entered the display-ad exchange market when it bought Right Media in 2007. In recent months, Yahoo has enhanced Right Media by getting more selective about the sorts of Web sites it will allow to sell ads through the system and by starting to deploy its own real-time bidding software.

Yahoo’s vice president and general manager for advertising platforms, Bill Wise, said the moves aren’t a reaction to Google but part of the evolution of the service. He said Yahoo is maintaining a “significant” lead over Google. Yahoo’s exchange includes its own Web sites, whose massive audiences are often must-buys for advertisers. Neither side discloses how much revenue it is earning from the exchanges and the raw statistics are difficult to compare. Before exchanges, savvy advertisers relied mostly on ad networks that allowed them to buy ads targeted at certain types of users—such as moms who live in California—across a range of sites, instead of striking deals with individual Web sites. Now, exchanges are trying to broaden the pool of buyers by aggregating the ad networks.

To make the most of the services, advertisers are turning to technology companies that try to determine how much a particular ad placement is worth based on data about the Web site’s visitors and the advertisers’ customers. While advertisers say they see room for multiple exchanges, they also note that they would be inclined to switch to whatever performs better. “Once we get past the test phase, it’s really a math equation at that point,” said Joe Nunziante, an associate director at Spark, a Publicis Groupe marketing agency that manages ad buying on behalf of E*Trade and buys across both services. “The numbers don’t lie.”

Read More: WSJ.com