Microsoft and AOL are both rumored to be looking at AppNexus, a New York City real-time bid (RTB) advertising startup, for a possible acquisition.

RTB — in which advertisers pay for ad impressions to particular consumers based on tracking data at the moment a new web page is loaded — is growing incredibly quickly right now.

As RTB appears set to take over a large portion of the display market over the next few years, major advertising players are building, acquiring, or partnering their way into the market. Most recently, Google paid a reported $70 million for Invite Media, a demand-side platform that helps advertisers trade in the RTB market.

AppNexus is run by a couple guys who sold Right Media to Yahoo, Brian O’Kelley and Mike Nolet, as well as ex-Googler Michael Rubenstein. Souces from the company dimiss all this gossip as just that – “rumors.”

Read More: BusinessInsider

Is Ad Blocking the Right Approach?

A couple of months ago I read an article by Tom Hespos called “Is our ad delivery infrastructure overtaxed?“ Besides doing a good job highlighting the growing issue of complexity and latency issues in our ad delivery infrastructure, it reminded me of a debate that we’ve had here at Adometry: is ad blocking the right approach?

A number of companies have sprung up to block ads that would appear next to objectionable content. From a brand protection point of view, we understand the appeal of ad blockers. If you could ensure that you could stop your brand appearing next to inappropriate content 100% of the time, why wouldn’t you adopt one of these services? But when you look more deeply at the reality of what these services deliver and the potential unwanted side effects, the value proposition becomes less clear.

Additional Latency

Ad blockers work by inserting themselves in the ad delivery chain.  Ad blockers need to make a decision whether to allow or reject an ad on a particular page without delaying unduly the delivery of the page.  Most of the time, they do this by matching a URL in their cache. For a new URL, they schedule the page for examination in an “offline” queue.

How much extra latency is acceptable? While opinion varies, 100-150 milliseconds would be an upper limit, and most publishers would prefer to see something in the 40-50 milliseconds range or less.

How much latency do ad blocking vendors introduce into the ad delivery path using today’s technology? Our measurement of one of the leading ad blocking vendors indicates that they add an average of almost 500 milliseconds to the ad call.  Perhaps we measured them during a bad month; I’m not claiming we have enough data to be accurate about someone else’s technology. I am saying that if you’re thinking of adopting ad-blocking technology, you should measure for yourself the delay to the ad call.

Read More: iMediaConnection

ShareThis Puts Value on Shared Content

ShareThis plans to release two analytics tools that allow advertisers and marketers to determine the value of content being shared across Web sites. Through both, Social Reach and Audience Index, brands have an opportunity to understand the value of social traffic.

Social Reach measures the true value of shared media across the Web by looking at inbound social traffic and outbound sharing, valuing the responder of a share as much as the sharer. The analysis aims to provide more data than buttons on Facebook, Twitter and Tweetmeme buttons that measure outbound sharing.

Audience Index measures and segments a publisher’s audience by influence, so it identifies who has shared, responded and viewed content from their site. It indexes the information by category and matches it against other sites across the Web.

Some early data shows that social traffic engages consumers more than search traffic, according to ShareThis CEO Tim Schigel. “It measures the social reach and allows publishers to measure it by article,” he says. “They also can index their reach from the articles on their site against the rest of the network.”

Read More: MediaPost

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 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: iMediaConnection

Pushing Boundaries: Exploring the Evolving World of Display Media 

Digital media agency, FRWD, hosted digital event Pushing Boundaries: Exploring the Evolving World of Display Media yesterday at the Fine Line Music Café in Minneapolis. Industry leading publishers, demand side platforms, data aggregators, verification and survey tool providers gathered to help each other prepare for, and profit from, the fast-changing world of online advertising.  MediaMath, Simpli.fi, BlueKai, DataXu, Lucid Media, ADSDAQ Exchange, [x+1], and Rocket Fuel; among others exchanged ideas on the direction of the industry during 4 panels and 2 keynote presentations.

The transfer of data integration into ad exchanges and DSPs coupled with technology and real-time bidding (RTB) capabilities are increasing at a rapid rate, almost as rapidly as the industry is changing. Joe Zawadzki of MediaMath predicted that the industry transformation from “Mad Men to Math Men” will occur by 2012 at which point “Don Draper will be replaced by your high school Dungeon Master.” 

Panel speakers throughout the afternoon explained the details of successful ad exchanges and DSPs, specifically the capabilities of combining data and audience research targeting with the need to assure brand protection, transparency, and the unique market dynamics of RTB.  

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)

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?

Read More: SpectatorBytes.com

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

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, 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

Even as the buzz builds toward the April 3rd ship date of the iPad, Apple is preparing to announce its “next big thing” — a new personalized, mobile advertising system that could well be called the “iAd” — Online Media Daily has learned. The new ad platform, which will be officially unveiled to Madison Avenue on April 7th, has been described as “revolutionary” and “our next big thing” by Apple chief Steve Jobs, according to executives familiar with the plan. Precise details of the system and its features could not be discerned at presstime (and calls to Apple had not been returned), but it is believed to have been built on top of Quattro, the mobile advertising developer Apple acquired in January for nearly $300 million, and it is expected to be the first real battle of a Silicon Valley Holy War between Apple and arch frenemy Google that is shifting its front line to Madison Avenue. The war has been mounting ever since Google introduced its Android mobile operating system to compete with Apple’s iPhone, and agreed to acquire mobile ad firm AdMob for $750 million, but it is expected to reach ballistic proportions following Apple’s April 7th announcement, which insiders say will be every bit as important as other recent marketplace introductions, including the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad launches.

Read More: MediaPost

The Business Upside of RTB: “Trust Us, There Is One…”

As I sat at my desk the other day, I remarked to our lead analyst that after reading what feels like hundreds of articles on RTB, I still didn’t know from a business point of view what it really did, or how it would help us make more money. Chew (our lead analyst) whose opinion I greatly respect, and who was recently invited to (and gave) a talk to TED on chaos theory, went on to give me a long and detailed explanation of how RTB causes a market to function more efficiently. “Yes, I can see how that is true”, I answered. “But, ultimately what I see is a technology being pushed at us, which does not bring either more supply, or more demand. In fact, all it does is cause prices to become more efficient, which creates a more effectively priced market place… but unless the benefits of that outweigh the costs of applying the new technology, then from a P&L viewpoint of our business and our clients, I do not see why we would be interested in it. After all, it’s not increasing the amount of money in exchanges, or our ability to get more of the existing money.” When I challenged him to show me how RTB would increase the total amount of money in the exchange market as it currently is, or demonstrate how it could bring our business more of the current money in the market – he couldn’t. In fact, what we both eventually agreed on was that the only way RTB could bring more money into advertising exchange environments is as a marketing device to lure more participants into trading in the exchanges, and therefore increase liquidity. But is pricing efficiency what the major agencies and publishers who do not trade in exchanges are really worried about? Because I’ve never heard them say anything like that; in fact, I don’t think they would even be able to begin to fathom what all that means in the first place.

Read More: AdExchanger

Mediabrands’ Cadreon Shifts Focus To Verification, Studies Whether Targeted Ads Are Hitting Mark

Mediabrands’ Cadreon unit, which focuses on buying targeted audiences rather than inventory, has launched a new program, “Audience Movement,” which aims to verify that targeted ads are reaching Web users who are interested in purchasing the products advertised. In February, the company quietly shifted the focus of its platform technology group to verifying audiences. Previously, that four-person unit focused on implementing the rollout of its offering. Now, two of the unit’s members — out of 34 Cadreon employees total — are focused on verifying the audience. The program aims to answer a simple question, says Michael Brunick, vice president, media technology for Cadreon: “Are we messaging to the right people?” A recent case study conducted by the agency shows that current methods of evaluating whether users want to purchase particular goods or services sometimes fall short. For the study, Cadreon questioned approximately 1,000 Web users who had been identified as potential buyers of a particular computer brand. Cadreon served those users with banner ads that contained a survey asking users if they had been shopping for that type of computer.

Read More: MediaPost

AdSafe Media, the rating standard of online media, today announced an expanded list of key partnerships that secure the company’s position as the market leader in preventative brand protection for the display advertising industry. Through these partnerships, AdSafe will enable its partners to control the placement of display advertising via its Content Rating System and Brand Safety Firewall. AdSafe’s Content Rating System is a standardized measurement platform which rates the brand safety of content on individual web pages, allowing brands, agencies, networks and publishers to ensure that display advertising only appears adjacent to appropriate online content. Premium partners utilizing AdSafe to help ensure brand protection include: AudienceScience, Break Media, Collective, Invite Media, Kitara Media, Media6Degrees, MediaMath, Ourstage, Rocket Fuel Inc, Scripps Networks, Traffic Marketplace, Turn and [x+1]. “We are proud to announce a list of partners that are all true innovators in the display advertising space,” said Kent Wakeford, Co-Founder and EVP of AdSafe. “These partnerships signify how essential brand safety has become to the industry as a whole.”

Read More: PRNewswire

Improving Marketing ROI: Towards a More Equitable Conversion Attribution Model

While last-click attribution is an easy default mode for digital marketers, this practice can lead to serious marketing missteps, including inflated digital marketing estimates and misallocation of marketing spend. The underlying issue is that a frequent assumption of online marketing — that the last click is the prime contributor to the sale — is flawed. In fact, there are a multiplicity of factors (touchpoints and exposures both on and offline) that have helped pave the way for that click. Unfortunately, last-click attribution models create an illusion of “marketing science,” when in fact the results are often grossly overstated, resulting in erroneous findings that can dramatically affect marketing ROI. Marketers instead need to consider a more sophisticated analytical approach to tackle the issue. The best approach utilizes a staged system of multivariate equations to determine the relative contributions of different elements across the marketing mix. Through this advanced analytic approach, one can quantify the true effect of investments in upstream media vehicles such as TV, print, display and e-mail in driving consumers to search or to marketers’ websites and subsequent conversion. Ultimately, the insights derived from this technique lead to smarter, more effective spend allocation decisions for both online and offline sales success.

Read More: MediaPost

Break Media Sees Data as Display’s Savior

Male-centric Break Media is betting on data to enhance its display advertising business. The company, which manages sites such as Break.com, MadeMan and Chickipedia, has inked separate pacts with BlueKai, which aggregates in-market shopper data for brands, publishers and ad networks, and eXelate, which manages an exchange for behavioral targeting data. Break will leverage both companies’ data to offer its advertisers the ability to target more specific, narrow audiences — including audiences that are intent on shopping for or purchasing specific products. “These partnerships, combined with the size of our network and the breadth of our ad offerings, will ensure that Break’s advertisers will be able to reach as much of their intended audience as possible, and do so with maximum efficiency and effectiveness,” said Andrew Budkofsky, Break’s evp of sales and partnerships. With these deals, Break joins a growing number of online media companies turning to outside vendors that specialize in layering audience data on top of a site’s data with the promise of delivering the right ad to the right users. The approaches vary, as publishers experiment with blending offline shopping data, online cookie data and data from companies that claim to be able to find “look-alike” users based on modeling technology. For example, MTV Networks recently signed a deal with the analytics firm Quantcast to bolster its online video ad sales.

Read More: AdWeek

Demand-side platforms (DSPs) are all the rage in online advertising today. Why? As buying and selling of online inventory moves from the relationship-driven, “three-martini-lunch” deal to a programmatic, impression-by-impression auction, advertising buyers are salivating at the opportunity to “cherry pick” the best inventory. So fire up your DSP contract, set your traders loose, and bask in the glory of online advertising victory! But hang on. The DSP promises of convenience and efficiency are certainly compelling. But the path to achieving real success in finding, engaging, converting and retaining your audiences and prospects online is much more complex than DSPs will admit.

Here are five functions a DSP cannot do for major advertisers…

Read More: MediaPost

Engagement Is Key For Rich Media Video Ads

When it comes to rich media ads on the Internet that employ video, engagement matters enormously. Environment, not so much.  
That’s the major and in some ways surprising takeaway from a new study conducted by VideoEgg and comScore. The study examined the effectiveness of rich media video ads vs. traditional banners. The goal was to prove the theory that banner ads containing video are more engaging. In addition, the study gauged whether site environment — particularly contextual relevance — played a role in how well such ads performed. Overall, video ads proved to be more engaging — and engaging ads move the sales needle better than standard ads, the study found. (It was no surprise that VideoEgg’s AdFrame units — expandable placements that take over portions of Web pages — were roughly twice as effective as standard IAB banners at driving awareness.)

Read More: AdWeek

GroupM Will Be Watching Where Its Clients’ Ads Run, And Where They Should Not

In the biggest push yet by a major Madison Avenue player to gain some control over the sometimes capricious way that their ads run online, WPP’s GroupM unit has cut deals with two of the leading online ad verification services, and will integrate their systems as part of the tool chest that WPP’s agencies use to plan, buy and post their online display ads. The deals with AdSafe and DoubleVerify follow an intensive review of the major ad verification services, which included a month-long test involving half a billion impressions of online advertising inventory. “There’s always been the issue of are we getting what we asked for,” John Montgomery, COO of GroupM Interaction, one of the largest buyers of online media, tells Online Media Daily. “Just think of the staggering number of impressions we are delivered — there is no way of knowing that we are getting what we paid for.” Montgomery, who was part of the GroupM team that rewrote WPP’s terms and conditions of online advertising buys last year to gain more accountability for its clients’ ads and media buys, said the verification systems pick up where the T&Cs left off.

Read More: MediaPost