Today’s social media networking sites are conduits to build, expand, and reinforce brands’ relationships with its target audience. Social media in today’s brand management arena is not just about setting up a Facebook Page and post content that is no different from similar editorial material found on the corporate website. It is about brands building an online relationship with its customers that encapsulates trust, reliability, and service-centricity. Indeed, the intent of any social networking strategy must mirror the same focus and attention that offline relationships are built on over the years.
What this means is that it takes time for companies to create a profile on the social media environment to engage with the online community. Invariably, this approach raised questions on how brands should measure the success attributed to social media. This is especially tricky. Some brands perceive social media similar to the many digital channels available to advertisers, whereby there’s an implicit perception that measurement standards adopted for online advertising applies in social media.

In my opinion, the success metric from social media networking is improved sales revenue, and it has to be clearly attributed to the social media strategies implemented by the brand or its appointed agencies. This approach builds on the belief that discussions that that originate from social media networking will lead to revenue opportunities for brands and advertisers.
Read more: ClickZ
AOL Ad Platform Customizes Display
Hoping to attract more brand dollars, AOL has debuted a technology platform for marketers to customize the design, delivery and management of display advertising. Pictela Enterprise gives ad agencies a guided self-service interface to manage their clients’ brand assets and serve them directly into online display ads.

“We are putting the power of publishing in the hands of the ad agencies and their clients,” said Greg Rogers, senior vice president, premium formats at AOL and CEO of Pictela — which AOL acquired in late 2010.“Think of [Pictela Enterprise] as a content management system for ads.”

The platform is certified to serve its ad units across AOL, Advertising.com and most major online publishers.

Building on AOL’s Project Devil initiative, Pictela’s product suite of products and services includes a cloud-based platform for the creation, delivery and analysis of premium ads.

At launch, the system supports six IAB standard ad sizes, including 300×1050, 300×600, 970×90, 728×90, 160×600 and 300×250.

Read more: MediaPost

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–PubMatic (http://www.PubMatic.com), a media technology company that enables premium publishers to realize the full potential of their digital assets, today announced PubDirect. PubDirect is a new management suite of tools and services powered by PubMatic’s optimization engine that accelerates the publisher’s ability to monetize their guaranteed and non-guaranteed inventory in a private marketplace that covers all demand channels.
“Top publishers struggle to directly offer comprehensive premium and reach solutions to advertisers,” said Rajeev Goel, Co-founder and CEO of PubMatic. “With PubDirect, we are introducing a unified optimization engine and insights for publishers to package in the best way to ensure that they meet the needs of their advertisers and don’t miss new revenue opportunities.”
The PubDirect suite of management tools offers premium publishers what they need to navigate the increasingly complex digital marketplace.

•Unified Optimization Engine allows publishers to monetize guaranteed and non-guaranteed inventory against multiple demand sources with a unified strategy to maximize publisher revenue at the impression level.

•Audience Direct gives publishers the ability to respond to the growing demand for audience buys by helping them to create and manage the variable value of their audience in real time. By combining first-party and third-party data sources, publishers can sell audience- targeted campaigns on a guaranteed basis using their existing ad server relationships.

•Deal Management enables pricing and brand controls and enhanced floor and deal modeling to help publishers do more than examine campaign performance. PubDirect tools and services facilitate action.

•Unified Insights enable publishers to understand their inventory and revenue across guaranteed and non-guaranteed sales channels and delivery platforms. In addition, publishers can identify and package new revenue opportunities and easily access PubDirect via their iPad. This first-ever iPad application allows publishers to conveniently view performance at anytime and from anywhere.
Read more: BusinessWire
The ABCs Of DSPs
To the uninitiated brand marketer, the term demand-side platform, or DSP, can be very intimidating. When one ventures into the nascent world of video DSPs, where the definition often changes from provider to provider, things get even more confusing.

DSPs have made a nice foothold in display advertising, and while they are attempting to provide value to video marketers, the technical differences between display and video are forcing some to stretch their claims.

It’s a bit like getting a massage. One service can differ greatly from the next. A Napa Valley resort might offer stress-relieving hot rock massages, or you could endure some of the torturous, yet effective, sports massages I’ve experienced in my past life as a runner. Of course, the massage hawked on Las Vegas Boulevard is a completely different animal (so I’ve heard). Just as the treatment (and resulting sensations) can vary, so too can the promises of each DSP.

A. Brand Safety By their very nature, ad exchanges offer little transparency into the content or pages where their inventory resides. As a result, DSPs are often unable to utilize brand protection in these environments.

Consequently, most video DSPs that promise “superior brand protection” are really offering “implied brand protection,”aka. placing sites in predetermined buckets. This strategy works some of the time, but we all know that premium news sites, for example, carry professionally made content about natural disasters, violent crimes, and other topics not fit for brand adjacencies.
Read more: MediaPost

Mobile video now accounts for half of all mobile traffic; and on some networks, that number is as high as 69 percent — a testament to the rise of smartphones and tablets as the mobile devices of choice for consumers, and their growing interest in using these devices to do a lot more than just make phone calls.

The data, from quarterly report on mobile data usage out today from mobile analytics firm Bytemobile, also found that Android is generating more mobile ad volume than iOS devices, and that Google now accounted for 75 percent of ad-generated data across all platforms.

Bytemobile says it has collected this data from a cross-section of its mobile carrier customers. It focuses on usage of two main platforms, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

As many have already suspected, tablets are driving significantly more data traffic than smartphones. On Apple’s iOS platform, an iPad user generates three times as much traffic as someone using an iPhone; while on Android, the figure is twice as much when comparing Android tablets and handsets
Read more: TechCrunch
Real-Time Advertising Bidding Offers Publisher Control

As publishers attempt to make online advertising a profitable and engaging business model, real time bidding on Web inventory by prospective clients is becoming more prevalent. Conde Nast launched a private Web ad exchange with AdMeld for select clients in late 2011, and now smaller publishers are getting in the game.

Tech company Casale Media designed real time bidding (RTB) platform CasaleX after several clients expressed interest in the burgeoning model. Andrew Casale, VP of strategy, says the draw of real time bidding lies in publisher control. “There are two extreme models of real time bidding for publishers,” says Casale. “The first is when a publisher has all their inventory in a private exchange, so a human interaction is necessary for a sale to take place.” Another option is for publishers to place online space not sold during more traditional sales efforts on the virtual block. Casale client GateHouse Media, a local newspaper network, sells the majority of its ad space through the RTB platform.

Casale says that valuable space, like homepages, are landing top dollar through the live bidding process.
Read more: Folio