With LinkedIn IPO, B2B Marketing Gets The Spotlight
Let’s face it: In the family of all-things-marketing, business-to-consumer (B2C) has long been the beautiful butterfly, showered with attention and accolades, with business-to-business (B2B) the boring bookworm relegated to reading heavy textbooks through thick glasses. The bookworm, however, is about to become a butterfly: LinkedIn, a B2B social network, is going public at what promises to be a huge valuation.
But first, why the raw deal for B2B historically? Granted, B2B marketers can be a little bit acronym heavy (you mean you don’t know what CRM or ERP means?), but really it’s just simple math. The marketing dollars spent trying to reach and sell products or services to businesses are significant but dwarfed by the hurricane of dollars unleashed annually by companies trying to reach consumers to sell them their next car, mortgage, vacation, cellphone or diet pill. In terms of advertising spend specifically, B2C ad spend will exceed $300 billion in 2011, with B2B about 10-15% of that.
Read More: Forbes
Getting the most from creative optimization tools
Online marketing is notorious for going through fads faster than you can say, click. But for many industry veterans, dynamic creative optimization (DCO) was different. It seemed like the real deal. Companies like Tumri and Teracent pioneered this new technology back in 2008, and ushered in an exciting change and opportunity for advertisers. The promise of self-optimized campaigns where machine learning algorithms shoot millions of ad variations into the virtual ether and ensure that consumers get the most relevant messages seemed to have marked the beginning of a new era. This really was the “next big thing.”
But was it all for naught? Even with all the buzz, creative optimization never really outgrew its awkward teenage phase; today, it’s still more of a niche solution. There are no formal figures that exist for this market, but our recent analysis looked at the commonly accepted categories of creative optimization: targeting, retargeting, and optimization/testing and estimated revenue for companies that provide solutions for each. This rough analysis suggested that in 2010 the combined revenue of these companies totaled around $100MM — $120MM, which doesn’t really spell success. (If you come up with different figures, I would love to see them.)
Read More: iMediaConnection
Pullen Takes Over As CEO, Hirsch Becomes President At AudienceScience
Today, AudienceScience is announcing that Jeff Hirsch will be stepping down as CEO of the company and Jeff Pullen will take over in the chief executive role after joining the company a year ago. Link coming to the press release.
AdExchanger.com: Why is AudienceScience making this change now?
JEFF HIRSCH: My desire to focus on my strengths and the needs of the company drove the change. I have been with AudienceScience for almost five years, taking over as CEO three years ago. In that time, we have more than quadrupled in revenue, established a solid global presence and expanded exponentially in terms of personnel resources. Of course, with that kind of growth the job of the CEO changes. There’s a lot more operational and human resource work than a lot of people realize, for example. Doing that job took me out of the market for the most part. My passion is working with clients to clarify what makes us a great company and talking about the changes that are happening in the industry. The job of CEO of a 200 person + company simply doesn’t allow enough time to be in the field. That’s where I want to be and that’s where the company needs me. With that, AudienceScience needs another executive to help steer the ship toward continued profitability and sustained growth. Jeff Pullen is the guy to do that. Jeff and I have been friends for years and have developed the kind of trust and communication that this configuration will require. We have worked together in the past and I’ve worked with him as a member of the board. We’re a formidable team.
Read More: AdExchanger
Video Advertising Strategy: Audience Optimization
Video is an increasingly important online advertising channel for both branding and performance. In last month’s column, “Video Advertising Strategy Part 1: The Metrics,” we discussed how to choose the right combination of metrics for your campaign success. This time, let’s look at how we can enhance the branding and performance of a video campaign using the latest real-time audience targeting and optimization tools. Video ads are highly engaging and much more expensive to deliver than traditional display ads; therefore, we need to be much more precise with our audience targeting approach.
Let’s look at the following four areas for a winning video ad campaign strategy:
Optimization: The required component of optimization is to apply the same predictive learning process available in display to your video campaign. Predictive learning is incredibly powerful when combined with a real-time feedback loop of the user engagement and campaign success metrics. Predictive learning optimizes both the targeting and bid price paid when buying a video ad impression and the technology should come as an integrated part of your media platform (aka demand-side platform or DSP). The effectiveness of the optimization depends on the quality of the platform’s algorithms combined with the type of success metrics fed into the system. Plugging in different real-time response metrics, such as ad engagement, advertiser website engagement, or brand survey responses will lead to correspondingly different optimization outcomes. Therefore, using the appropriate tools to monitor and understand the implications of these changes through in-flight analytics and data visualization is a must-have for maximizing video campaign performance.
Read More: ClickZ
Admeld Launches Strategic Advisory Services Group
Industry veteran Pooja Kapoor to lead efforts to help large publishers embrace holistic strategies to maximize their digital ad revenue
New York, NY – March 28, 2011– Admeld (www.admeld.com), the company that helps the world’s top online publishers sell ads smarter, today announced the appointment of Pooja Kapoor as director, Strategic Advisory Services (SAS). Kapoor, a seasoned online advertising veteran, will be responsible for developing and leading strategic consulting engagements with the industry’s largest publishers. She will report to Jason Kelly, Admeld’s chief media officer. Kelly was previously VP of strategy and revenue management at Time Inc. Digital, and prior to that he managed numerous strategic consulting engagements for premium publishers at Rapt and Microsoft Advertising.
“In an increasingly complex ecosystem, publishers are looking for guidance on how to realize potential revenue opportunities by evolving their sales, operational, and technical infrastructures,” said Kelly. “Pooja’s expertise will help publishers overcome these challenges and successfully implement strategies to maximize the value of their inventory and audiences.”
Read More: AdMeld
The Two Jobs of a Great Engineering Team
It isn’t hard to explain at a high level what Magnetic does. In the simplest formulation, we use search data to target online advertising across the Internet. That is the mission of our business.
To succeed in our mission we need to solve many engineering and business problems. First, we must provide our customers with access to enough of the right data for them to effectively target to meet their campaign goals. To do this, we give marketers a scalable, powerful and yet simplified solution to create, manage and review the success of their campaigns. Additionally, with billions of targeting actions per month being executed across Magnetic’s platform, we need to analyze our data in order to identify ways to better serve our customers.
So, while the high-level description of our business might seem straightforward, the engineering and product problems aren’t so simple. Above all, there are two rules we use to distill the responsibilities of Magnetic Engineering into a core team mission statement: keep our products running, and continuously improve our products.
Read More: Magnetic
Martini Ads Target Affluent Consumers’ Offline Buys
Usama Fayyad has joined Martini Media’s board of directors. A data analytics scientist and architect of the Yahoo data systems, Fayyad will help the company develop the next generation in ad targeting technology. The platform aims to connect advertisers with consumers generating annual income of $100,000+. This group makes up 25% of the Internet population, but holds about 70% of the spending.
Branding that leads online consumers to make purchases offline has become an art — rather than direct purchases — especially for big-ticket items, such as cars and gems. mInstinct, the new targeting platform from Martini Media, allows marketers to insert ads that brand companies, products and services.
Fayyad will work to move the platform from “applied research” to “theoretical research” to “Martini 2.0,” making sure it supports brands that want to quickly scale up campaigns. The work will close gaps between audience targeting methods — contextual, demographic, behavioral, psychographic, and social-graph targeting — developing a closed-loop system that creates a direct pipeline from publishers to the most affluent audience online.
Read More: MediaPost
