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

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

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

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

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

Read More: MediaPost

P&G Execs And VCs Want Startups With Branding Potential

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

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

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

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

Read More: MediaPost

The People’s Web

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

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

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

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

Read More: SpectatorBytes.com

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