While both iPad and Kindle traffic increased over the holidays, Kindle jumped from holding a 10% share of tablet traffic at the beginning of December to a 30% share at the start of 2012. At the same time, the iPad’s share over December shrank from 59% to 44%, while that of Android and other tablet platforms dropped five points to 26%, noted mobile ad network Jumptap.

Thanks to the proliferation of Android-powered smartphones, however, the Google platform strengthened its position as the dominant mobile operating system overall on Jumptap’s network, which reaches 95 million U.S. mobile users per month and 142 million worldwide.

Android’s traffic share jumped 21 percentage points in 2011 to finish the year with a commanding 59% piece of the market. That gain came at the expense of both Apple’s iOS, which dropped seven percentage points to 22%, and BlackBerry, which fell 11 percentage points to 15.7%.

Throughout 2011, however, iOS outpaced Android in ad click-through rates. For its year-end report, Jumptap compared click rates among the latest three versions of the rival platforms in wide use. While the rate for iOS has improved with each successive release, the opposite is true for Android. Apple’s new iOS 5 release had a click rate of .91% compared to .74% for iOS 4 and .61% for iOS 3.

By contrast, Android 3.0 had a rate of .59%, down from .69% for Android 2.0 and .75% for Android 1.0. The study didn’t evaluate click rates for Android 4.0, the latest version of Google’s mobile platform, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich.

The report also shed light on another long-running mobile rivalry — apps versus the mobile Web. While many predict HTML5 adoption will ultimately make the mobile Web triumphant, the Jumptap data showed apps actually narrowed the gap in traffic share last year. The two formats ended 2011 in a virtual dead heat after the mobile Web began the year with a 55.1% to 44.9% advantage.

Jumptap says marketers don’t necessarily have to have either a mobile site or app to advertise in mobile, however. Roughly one-third of its advertisers don’t have either, but are using mobile landing pages in their ad campaigns. Of course, if an ad is meant to drive traffic to a company’s own site, it’s best to have one optimized for mobile devices.

The study also looked at the effectiveness of data-targeted campaigns in the fourth quarter. The company works with third-party data providers, including Acxiom, TargusInfo, Datalogix and Polk, to provide information about consumer demographics from purchase history to income level to what cars people own.

Read more: MediaPost

Time Matters: The Role Of Real-Time Bidding for Publishers

Perhaps no single technology has as much potential to disrupt the advertising ecosystem of online publishing as Real Time Bidding (RTB). For an imperfect but simple 30 second visual primer on what RTB does, click here.  There is a shift happening and the surge of inventory that flooded onto exchanges in 2011 attests to it. As Demand Side Platforms (DSP) became ever more an executional tool of choice for many advertisers, the supply side has been pushed to follow suit and make their inventory available through marketplaces. Thus, the tried and true world of direct and network sales is threatened with disruption and the potential commoditization of inventory.

For small publishers, the advent of real-time, exchange-based marketplaces has been nothing but good. In many cases, it allows their impressions to compete on a level playing field against much more established titles, fueled by the individualized audience and interest information readily available through online data providers.

Large publishers, however, should be concerned that the growing importance and availability of targeting data on RTB platforms separates the importance of context from determining the value of the impression. In other words, if you can know what a person wants specifically, it matters less where you serve the display ad because you do not have to infer quite so much about them from where they are.

The impression transparency inherent in RTB environments causes some in the industry to fear that their use will cause CPMs to begin a “Race to the Bottom” as inventory becomes commoditized. Others think it a natural progression towards efficiency, especially for impressions that will always generate less demand such as those for remnant inventory. The Rubicon Project recently published a study that concurs with the latter and this study from Ignition One offers evidence for the former.  Obviously, the jury is still out.

So, if you represent a large publisher, what are you to think about the potential role of RTB in your organization? Is it friend or foe? There is no “one size fits all” answer to this question, but I do have some considered advice on an approach to find your own:

Read more: AdExchanger

In today’s digital advertising landscape where complicated acronyms are ubiquitous, it is often hard to tell who is in control.  In my experience, there are three main players: 1) Buyers, who are looking for ways to access media as cheaply and efficiently as possible; 2) Publishers, who it could be argued, have their heads in the sand blindly providing inventory to open exchanges in hopes of increasing the value of their inventory; and 3) Vendors, who are quietly taking advantage of the spread, buying inventory from exchanges and repackaging it as seemingly quality inventory.  In addition, other vendors, seeking to arm the main players with ancillary capabilities, have created a fourth group of players and added another layer of inefficiency and complexity to the process.  In the current scenarios, none of the players are truly in control, and certainly nobody wins.

Forecasts for 2012 anticipate upwards of $83 billion will be spent on digital advertising and approximately $2 billion of that will be directed toward automated systems (Real-Time Bidding (RTB), Exchanges and Private Marketplaces). These new automated methods of purchasing media create a host of opportunities and challenges for the market at large.  Automation puts more control in the hands of the buyer, delivering undisputed efficiency in the buying process – the ability to target exactly the right audience, without waste – as well as the elimination of paperwork for placing and optimizing media buys.  

Read More: Business Insider

 4 reasons why 2012 will be the year of “Social Enlightenment”

Big data and Facebook: two behemoths that became a much bigger part of the marketer’s lexicon in 2011. Large brands, particularly, invested more time into better understanding the enormous quantities of rich social data about their consumers. And, it’s no secret that advertisers will continue to pour greater resources into social networks, both in an effort to reach existing customers as well as the vast universe of potential customers with whom they’re associated.

Case in point: eMarketer reports that global ad revenues for Facebook alone will have increased 104% to $3.8 billion and Twitter is predicted to have tripled its earnings by the year’s end.

Yet it’s apparent that brands have barely scratched the surface in terms of how they harness big data and effectively reach consumers over social media. In 2012, marketers will tap massive data sets to gain deep consumer insights that would have seemed inconceivable as recently as a year ago. Insights, that, not surprisingly, will make a tremendous and lasting impact on marketing budget allocation throughout the year and into 2013.

With all of this in mind, here are four predictions regarding the 2012 social data evolution.

Read More: SocialBeat

Have you ever gone to a marketing company’s website and you still can’t figure out what that business does? After five minutes on the site, you leave wondering, what do they actually do?

Since the display landscape has changed dramatically in the past few years, this happens more than ever in the display ecosystem, and the plethora of solutions out there for accessing real-time bidding (RTB) inventory can be confusing.

There is a meaningful segment of marketers that say in effect – there is so much hype and so much incomprehensible talking in RTB that I’ll stick to what I know. But let me say emphatically, that would be a mistake.

RTB is worth it.

Every marketer should be buying RTB display remarketing. I suspect some of you read that last sentence and want to give a moment of silence for the part of you that died once upon a time when you tried to make some display effort of yesteryear work. Keep that justified, skeptical, and cautious guard up as we look at why this can be different.

Read More: ClickZ

Cox Digital Solutions Introduces New Entertainment Brand, Red Carpet Media

In Partnership with ABC’s OnTheRedCarpet, Offering Compelling Multi-Platform Solutions for Advertisers

NEW YORK, Dec. 6, 2011

NEW YORK, Dec. 6, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Cox Digital Solutions today introduced Red Carpet Media, the company’s new entertainment brand. With hundreds of entertainment sites and over 15 million (comScore) unique users per month, Red Carpet Media will be focused solely on delivering powerful solutions among entertainment content. Red Carpet Media will offer the same transparency, brand safety, and customizable solutions for advertisers, with the added benefit of compelling advertising usually reserved for single site media buys or portals including roadblocks, skinning, video, sponsorships and more.

In addition to reach across their entertainment sites, Cox Digital Solutions has exclusively partnered with ABC-owned OnTheRedCarpet (OTRC), a premium entertainment site reflecting a positive spotlight on style and celebrity. With front row access to premieres, award shows, and special events and a weekly 30-minute TV show and iPad app, OTRC offers advertisers a true multi-screen experience. Some of the opportunities on OTRC available through Cox Digital Solutions’ Red Carpet Media include: newsletter sponsorships, pre-roll video, and iPad app, after party and ballot sponsorships, just to name a few.

Read More: Reuters

24/7 Real Media Adds Panache, Ups Video Arsenal

Bolstering its streaming services, WPP’s 24/7 Real Media has acquired video ad software and services company Panache. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

24/7 plans to fully integrate Panache’s digital video ad technology into its Open AdStream ad management platform, giving advertisers greater reach and publisher selection.

“Panache’s technology capabilities and extensive selection of video ad formats are unmatched,” David Moore, founder, chairman and CEO of 24/7 Real Media, said Tuesday.

Along with rival ad firms, 24/7 has sought out new and more creative ways to connect digital ad dollars with premium online inventory. Most recently, it rolled out an expansion to Open AdStream dubbed 24/7 Connect.

Read More: MediaPost

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–24/7 Real Media, Inc., WPP’s ad technology company, announced today the availability of real-time bidding (RTB) within its proprietary ad management technology, Open AdStream®. With this new capability, 24/7 Real Media delivers the first enterprise-level technology solution that enables real-time bidding within a single ad management platform driving increased yield and superior control.

24/7 Real Media’s new RTB capabilities allow a publisher to put its inventory into a single ecosystem that dynamically allocates revenue and delivers optimal yield. This unique capability differentiates Open AdStream from other platforms in the marketplace today by allowing the publisher to filter and assign value to biddable inventory based on audience and context unlike other systems that require publishers to segment specific inventory for RTB. 24/7 Real Media’s new capabilities also give advertising clients a simple solution for bidding on premium, first-tier inventory from a trusted, accountable source.

“At 24/7 Real Media, we are always looking to innovate in ways that help our clients recognize new revenue opportunities,” said David J. Moore, Chairman, Founder and CEO at 24/7 Real Media. “By enabling publishers to open up their inventory for real-time bidding in a controlled way, we enhance the publisher’s ability to identify the actual worth of each segment of inventory on their site. Similarly, advertisers are guaranteed quality inventory from a biddable environment, where their messages are most likely to resonate with online users.”

Read More: Businesswire

ShareThis Creates New Social Measurement to Transform Media Buying Model, Starcom MediaVest Group to Test Methodology

New Index Empowers Publishers to Derive Greater Value From the Strength of Their Social Audiences

PALO ALTO, CA–(Marketwire – Nov 17, 2011) – ShareThis, the world’s largest platform for sharing and influence, today announced a new methodology to measure the social quality of sites across the Web. This new standard, the Social Quality Index, is the first measure of Web-wide sharing activity and will provide publishers and advertisers with site rankings across 27 key content categories. Sharing, as an inherently social activity, provides powerful insights on how valuable content is to consumers. As part of Starcom MediaVest Group’s ongoing partnership with ShareThis, the agency is assessing the standard’s ability to enhance their planning approach for a cross-section of their media buys.

The ShareThis standard derives a raw social traffic score by taking a combined measure of a site’s outbound share and inbound clickback traffic, and comparing it to page views. The resulting figure can then be benchmarked against the broader measure of social quality spanning the more than 1 million sites and more than 10 billion monthly sharing signals that make up the ShareThis network. This new measurement brings the value of sharing into consideration, adding more dimension to media buying models that rely more heavily on traffic and audience size. The measure:

• Favors rich content and audience interaction over broad reach
• Identifies users with higher purchase intent
• Identifies audiences who are more likely to disseminate content widely

Read More: Marketwire

As a real-time media buying platform for video advertising, TubeMogul processes a lot of data on ad spots available for bidding in a given day across both pre-roll and display inventory. In all, these marketplaces are bigger than the New York Stock Exchange in terms of daily transactions.

While it is widely known that display volume is large due to a glut in inventory, a less known fact is that pre-roll video advertising is steadily catching up. Aggregating across the major exchanges and sell-side platforms, from Doubleclick (which includes YouTube pre-roll) to spotXchange and beyond (see a full list of inventory partners here), and controlling for inventory pushed live due to new company partnerships, TubeMogul analyzed average growth in daily volume of ad spots available in the U.S. (inset).

In the past five months, pre-roll volume grew by an average of 34.9% per month, far outpacing display advertising’s 7.8% monthly growth rate. In November, we are seeing an average of over 200 million auctions per day.

Read More: TubeMogul

The Collision of Ad Exchanges and Sell-Side Platforms – Does it Matter?

We are in the midst of industry consolidation in online advertising. Companies are merging (MediaOcean), selling (MySpace, AdMeld, interclick), and buying (Tremor Video, Federated Media) as they adjust business models to meet market demands. Companies like ad exchanges, DSPs, ad networks and sell-side platforms (SSPs), continually innovate and add new offerings to create competitive advantages.

It’s inevitable that exchanges and SSPs collide, as they are essentially in the same space. I see it firsthand when my company, an exchange, is confused as an SSP competitor, even though we are actually a close partner and do business with the majority of SSPs.

Can publishers and advertisers manage this complex environment when both sets offer similar value propositions?

For publishers, they are inundated with choices to sell digital inventory. While looking to sell the most volume at the highest value to maximize yield, publishers also seek advertisers with similar brand values that are relevant to their audience. In sales, publishers want to monetize inventory through partners, while avoiding channel conflict and maintaining direct sales control.

Read More: MediaPost

Display advertising is changing rapidly and getting more and more confusing. And many people are looking to understand its landscape.

Here are five things you need to know that you may not have thought of when it comes to display:

1. There will be fewer ads per page. One of the problems with online advertising today is that there is no barrier to creating new inventory. Constructing a billboard alongside a highway costs capital. There are a limited number of :30 spots you can run during a top-rated TV show. But if you’re a publisher that wants to create new revenue, it is much easier to add more ads to a page than it is to get more users to the site, or to get the ads to perform better. I estimate that there is about five times more supply than there is CPM/CPC demand. The rest of the inventory is spent on CPA offers or site promotions. Smart publishers should be focused on their audience and properly pricing those ads, to make for a more efficient marketplace – rather than flooding the exchanges and networks with new inventory. As the market gets more mature, the market will get closer to a balance between supply and demand.

2. RTB will be the primary way to retarget and your DSP technology will be the difference between success and failure. For some, this goes without saying. Only a demand-side platform (DSP) accessing all of the major ad exchanges can provide enough reach to power retargeting at scale, particularly when there are any kinds of restraints, like targeting by geo. A good DSP is like a racecar or precision surgical tools – it allows the buyer using the DSP to distinguish between good inventory and bad, cheap and expensive, and premium and remnant.

Read More: ClickZ

Limelight Networks Announces Its Dynamic Site Platform for Mobile to Enable Publishers to More Effectively Create and Manage Mobile Web Presence

Service Allows for Tailoring of Content-Rich Web Sites — Ensuring Content is Displayed as it Should be, Regardless of Device

TEMPE, Ariz., Nov 8, 2011 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) — Limelight Networks, Inc. /quotes/zigman/105873/quotes/nls/llnw LLNW +0.63% today introduced its Dynamic Site Platform for Mobile, an innovative new service that enables publishers to create and manage their mobile web presence. By providing the ability to create mobile-specific sites and repurpose content for multiple devices, the solution ensures that content-rich sites are optimized for every device — regardless of screen size, processing power or bandwidth.

Limelight Dynamic Site Platform for Mobile is built on the company’s cloud-based Dynamic Site Platform to integrate all web content management tasks — saving time and money while ensuring that publishers’ brands are expressed consistently across all online platforms. Using industry-standard languages (XML, HTML, CSS and Javascript), it allows web designers to create mobile sites that leverage the content and features already built into corporate sites. The solution eliminates the need for a separate mobile CMS, further speeding time to market.

Read More: MarketWatch

Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL Share Display Inventory

Still no merger news, but Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL have agreed to share unsold “premium” display inventory among their respective ad networks.

The partnership, announced Tuesday, appeals directly to Madison Avenue’s desire for scalable reach — something that has been increasingly hard to come by via TV, but not yet achievable online.

“This agreement should begin to change the industry’s perception of premium” inventory, Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo EVP of the Americas, said on a conference call late Tuesday.

More to the point, “this is about differentiation,” Levinsohn added, in response to a direct question about increasing competition from Google and Facebook, and whether their rise brought Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft together.   

A clear and present threat, Facebook and Google are expected to increase their share of domestic display advertising this year by 9.3% and 16.3%, respectively, according to eMarketer.

Yet by adding greater scale into the equation, the partners hope the deal will increase demand for their premium display ad offerings.

Read More: MediaPost

Introduction

Recently, a top journalist confided that he primarily thinks of real-time bidding “as a way to do direct-response campaigns in display.” This is an often-heard refrain, despite many recent launches in the video exchange and platform space (i.e. BRX on the supply side). Why? Newness probably plays a role, but a deeper reason might be that much of the real-time bidding space is often measured and judged by direct-response metrics, such as clicks.

While clicks and impressions make sense for direct-response, many brand marketers buying video obviously care more about the medium’s ability to raise awareness and persuade a target audience, goals for which clicks are a flawed proxy at best according to recent research by Nielsen.

The question then arises: can real-time buying in video advertising deliver on brand metrics or is it all just a bunch of direct-response hot air?

Methodology

Leveraging its partnership with leading survey vendors, TubeMogul executed brand surveys on five video advertising campaigns totaling 44.7 million impressions and 4,487 random survey-takers. Four of the five brands are from Fortune 500 companies, and the list reflects the automotive, consumer packaged good (CPG), insurance and restaurant industries. In terms of format, only 0:15 and 0:30-second pre-roll ads bought via real-time bidding on TubeMogul’s platform were included (more on the inventory TubeMogul aggregates here).

Read More: TubeMogul

DVA to Grow 25% Over the Next 12 Months

Survey of Advertisers and Agencies Shows Increase in Video Ad Spend in the Next Year, But More Than One Third of Advertisers Struggle with Planning, Creation and Execution

NEW YORK – (October 26, 2011) – Casale Media Inc., a leading premium online media company, today published a research brief showing that advertisers and agencies will increase spending on digital video advertising by 25 percent over the next 12 months and would amount to about 23.8 percent of total online ad budgets. “Digital Video Advertising: Removing Barriers Equals Greater Opportunities,” is based on an October 2011 research study conducted by Advertiser Perceptions for Casale Media that surveyed more than 150 media buyers, managers and planners at leading advertisers and agencies in the United States. The report examines the factors contributing to online display and video media decisions.

Read More: Casale Media