Collective and AppNexus Bring Sophisticated Audience Targeting and Brand Safety to Real-Time Display Advertising

AppNexus, the real-time advertising platform tapped by many of the leading ad networks, and Collective, a leading media and technology solutions company for display advertising, today announced that they are working together to expand real-time advertising opportunities on the Web for Collective’s brand advertisers and agencies.  Collective will now leverage AppNexus’ advanced ad platform, data management, and proprietary inventory monitoring tools for executing and optimizing real-time media buys using Collective’s industry-leading audience targeting and robust inventory protection.  In addition, Collective’s commitment to detect and target audiences across a premium ecosystem will be significantly enhanced by the single-point integration offered by AppNexus with the largest sources of inventory including the major ad exchanges like Google’s DoubleClick and Microsoft’s AdECN.  “At Collective, we have always had a laser-focus on audience; delivering the perfect ad, to the right person, in the best environment which is why the partnership with AppNexus, the most sophisticated real-time ad platform available today, is a natural fit for us,” said Jerome FitzGibbons, EVP, Collective.

Read More: CentreDaily.com

Foursquare’s New $20 Million Means More Hiring, New Offices and Much Investor Confidence

The $20 million of second-round financing secured by the mobile networking service Foursquare will go toward staffing up on engineers, getting offices that can accommodate expanding staff and supporting its rapidly expanding audience of users. Oh yeah, and it’s got a revenue model to work out too.  The New York company, which was only founded in March 2009, allows its users to “check in” to locations, such as the local Starbucks, via their mobile phones and see other members who have checked into the same location. Virtual rewards, such as badges and mayorships, are awarded for frequent visits. Foursquare currently has 1.8 million registered members and draws in 10,000 new members daily, according to the company.  Companies such as PepsiCo and Starbucks have enthusiastically engaged the service. “From a broad strategy point of view, there’s a huge potential with the ability to connect people to promotional experiences,” Bonin Bough, PepsiCo’s global director of digital and social media, told Ad Age in February. “We know where people are and can talk to them from a geo-located perspective — that’s a huge opportunity.”

Read More: AdAge

Report: M&A Market Hits $21B, Deal Values Up 291% 

Led by digital and tech-driven businesses, the M&A market for media, information, marketing services, education and related technologies rebounded strongly in the first half of the year, according to a new analysis from Jordan, Edmiston Group.  During the period, 445 transactions — with a total value of $21 billion — were announced, reflecting a 52% increase in deal volume over the same period last year, and a 291% surge in deal value.  The sharp rise in market deal value was driven by several multibillion-dollar transactions, including Madison Dearborn Partners’ acquisition of credit and information management company TransUnion for an estimated $2.5 billion, and the acquisition by Silver Lake Partners and Warburg Pincus of financial information provider Interactive Data Corporation for $3.2 billion.  Overall, six market sectors saw strong growth in M&A in the first half, including B2B online media; B2C online media, which was up 64%; B2B Media; database and information services; marketing and interactive services, which was up 96%; and mobile media and technology, which was up 188%.

Read More: MediaPost

Taming Online Chaos

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

interCLICK Implements AdSafe’s Preventative Solution

interCLICK, Inc , today announced that it has created a dual filtration solution for ad verification by implementing AdSafe Media’s preventative Brand Safety Firewall solution. The implementation of AdSafe Media’s platform follows a successful deployment of DoubleVerify’s Brandshield technology, which interCLICK announced in January of this year. Together, these preeminent solutions create a highly complementary, unified system that provides agencies and advertisers with the most effective ad verification solution on the market today. Helping ensure that advertisers are reaching the right audiences in brand-friendly environments, AdSafe provides page-level content ratings which enable clients to preventatively protect their brands while simultaneously maximizing reach. Clients utilizing AdSafe’s Brand Safety Firewall are able to select brand-specific content ratings to ensure that only ad placements consistent with brand guidelines and insertion order requirements are served.

Read More: MarketWatch

Friendship Data: 33Across Crunches The Data

If you leave a comment on this blog post (and I hope you do), how likely is it that you’ll be interested in the most recent book I bought on Amazon? (FYI, Chess Metaphors–Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind arrived just yesterday.) I’d say there’s an excellent chance that you would not buy that book. But even if 90% of you ignored an ad for it, advertisers would be thrilled if the other 10% clicked. In their world, a 10% click rate is akin to winning the lottery. That’s the thinking that drives 33Across, a number-crunching start-up in New York. The company, in offices perched high above the rail yards west of Penn Station, tracks social network behavior of some 115 million anonymous Web surfers in the United States. If one of them checks out, say, an office chair online, 33Across can lead an advertiser to the people in touch with that person. Maybe they forward articles to each other or comment on each other’s blog. (Another company chasing the same market with a different approach is Auren Hoffman’s Rapleaf. According to a Mashable story, the company has data on 389 million people worldwide.)

Read More: SmartDataCollective

AppNexus Is  A Real-Time Ad Platform

AdExchanger.com: Busy? What’s the hardest part of growing a successful start-up?

BOK: Yes, we’ve been extremely busy at AppNexus commercializing our ad platform with some of the most sophisticated online marketers, ad networks and DSPs in the business. Growing a successful start-up of course also means building up a team of the best and the brightest, and we’ve been able to recruit some serious talent over the past few months. We recently announced that Lauren Nemeth from Google joined us as Director of Sales and Timothy G. Smith from Vonage joined as our Vice President of Technical Operations. They are huge wins for us and we’re delighted to have them on board. We will be making more personnel announcements in the near future, but we also want the industry to know that we’re still hiring, and looking to bring on more superstars across the board, including sales, client services, engineering and marketing.

Is AppNexus solution for direct response marketers or brand?

Companies who care about performance, and leveraging data and intelligence in real-time are our main audience. We think that those goals transcend the traditional notions of direct response versus brand advertising. Our core constituents certainly include direct response oriented online marketers and ad networks but also extremely brand-conscious advertisers. We’ve invested a great deal in ensuring brand protection as a core value proposition at AppNexus. For example, we offer our clients a tiered guidebook of the available inventory on the web, from which they can pick and choose depending on their needs, so they can guarantee media quality. We’re really aggressive in the area of brand safety. Again, we don’t want to pigeon-hole the types of clients we work with, but they all fit a certain profile which is performance-driven, brand-aware, and data-driven.

How will you differentiate from other demand-side platform (DSP) competitors in the space?

We’re a real-time ad platform, and a number of our valued partners are DSPs. We prefer to get away from labels and talk about what’s unique with our model, which is that we’re the only player exclusively focused on being a true ad platform that can plug deeply into our clients online advertising businesses, allowing them to more efficiently optimize and execute what they’ve already been doing or aspire to do. The shift to real-time advertising is revolutionizing the way media is bought and sold, but it’s very expensive and difficult to manage. Think of the AppNexus ad platform as the on-ramp for companies like DSPs, direct marketers and ad networks to gain access to the real-time bidding (RTB) super-highway.

Read More: AdExchanger