As data-driven efficiencies in online advertising advance, demand side platform Mediamath may have marked another stage in that evolution. The firm acquired dynamic ad creation company Adroit Interactive last week, combining Adroit’s tools for creative customization and segmentation of ads with its own audience targeting and buying platform. The companies have worked together since Q4 of last year, integrated their technologies, and tested that initial integration. One advertiser that matches consumers to relevant local deals used the system to target specific messages to consumers in most DMAs across the country. “Our buying platform was able to buy media across all these areas, and then the creative took over to assemble the right geographic message,” said Mediamath CEO Joe Zawadzki. Mediamath integrates with third-party data providers such as Blue Kai, and media suppliers including Yahoo’s Right Media, Microsoft’s AdECN, and Google’s DoubleClick exchanges.

Read More: ClickZ

Joost Video Network Stuns With Big Reach: 67 Million Viewers Per Month

Straight out of left field, the Joost Video Network has assumed the number 2 spot in comScore’s Video Metrix “Top 100 Properties”, second only to Google. The Joost network, which is now operated by Adconion after the company’s acquisition of the ill-fated European startup’s assets back in November 2009, claims a reach of 67 million unique viewers per month. To put that in perspective: that’s approximately 38 percent of the total US Internet population who are consuming videos each month. According to Adconion’s press release, the Joost Video Network, which consists of hundreds of major video destination sites, showed an aggregate of over 100 million videos to consumers in February. Perusing through the current selection of channels on Joost.com, I’m fairly surprised that the network is drawing so many views, as it consists mainly of niche video destinations that I would estimate only a small number of people would be interested in.

Read More: TechCrunch

Marketers Watch as Friends Interact Online

Birds of a feather flock together. Or, in the Internet age, a customer’s friend is a potential customer. Embracing those truisms, some big marketers, including Sprint and eBay, are turning to small start-ups to help them tap social-networking data to find would-be clients among the friends and acquaintances of existing customers, to the dismay of some privacy advocates. EBay, for instance, used online tracking technologies to identify customers who browsed or shopped for products in the clothing, shoes and accessories section of its site. It then turned to New York-based start-up 33Across, which analyzed data from social-networking sites to map out the connections between the customers eBay had identified and other Web surfers, in order to serve up ads at the right time and place. New York-based 33Across tracks how consumers interact with one another—commenting on posts or sharing messages, for instance—across about 20 sites, online networks and third-party application companies, which build software like games and quizzes for social-networking sites. 33Across says those sites reach a total of 100 million monthly unique U.S. visitors. For example, if an eBay customer shared a movie review with an acquaintance, 33Across identified that connection and places a cookie, or anonymous string of tracking data, on the acquaintance’s browser so that they later could be targeted with a relevant ad whenever they visit certain sites.

Advertisers say the new wave of social-networking targeting is registering impressive results. Daphne Liska, senior manager of Internet marketing at eBay, said the 33Across campaign was more successful than standard online ads and that eBay plans to continue using social data to find new customers. Sprint, which also worked with 33Across, tested the approach last summer to promote the launch of the Palm Pre smart phone and quadrupled related online sales, says Joe Migliozzi, managing director of digital at Mindshare, the WPP-owned media agency that managed a campaign for Sprint. He says Sprint is considering the same approach for future campaigns. “A lot of what goes into a purchase comes from a general conversation between you and people in your group,” Mr. Migliozzi says. “We’re identifying the links between people.” 33Across is one of a handful of start-ups, such as Media6-Degrees and Lotame, that aim to make use of the reams of Internet user data behind social-networking sites for ad targeting. They all use complex algorithms to track connections between consumers. 33Across says it tracks five billion connections, then weighs them to determine the closest ties. “There are massive streams of untapped social relationship data,” says Eric Wheeler, chief executive of 33Across. Mr. Wheeler says his company collects user data from MyYearbook.com but he declined to name other specific sites, citing agreements with those Web sites. (Tracking cookies from 33Across were found by The Wall Street Journal on other sites, including popular Twitter-photo site twitpic.com, as well as music site lyricsmode.com and health site righthealth.com.) Not surprisingly, such tracking of friends and acquaintances has attracted the attention of some lawmakers and regulators.

Such ad-targeting approaches are facing increased scrutiny from federal regulators who are investigating privacy issues tied to the Internet. Some lawmakers, concerned about Internet privacy, say they are preparing to introduce legislation in the coming weeks to make more transparent Web sites’ tactics for collecting information on their users. “To the extent that ad companies are using social-media information to deliver ads in a way that is not transparent to consumers or consumers don’t understand what the source of the basis of the ads are, that could present an issue,” says Christopher Olsen, an assistant director in the privacy and identity protection division of the Federal Trade Commission. The ad-targeting companies say that they abide by industry standards and that the information they collect is anonymous and can’t be traced back to individual users. Industry trade groups are introducing standards that let consumers know when they are being targeted by an ad as a result of tracking.

Both Facebook and MySpace allow marketers to target ads on their sites to consumers based on the information users include in their profile, such as occupation, age, location and interests. (MySpace is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.) The new group of start-ups thinks that the data mapping connections between people—rather than their profile information—are more valuable. Facebook ran into a privacy debacle in 2007 with an advertising tool called Beacon that allowed Facebook to track users’ activities on certain external sites, then show updates on the site about those activities, such as retail purchases. CEO Mark Zuckerberg later apologized to users and changed the site’s privacy settings. The new targeting technique is rooted in decades of research about social behavior. A New England Journal of Medicine study from 2008, for instance, found that smoking behavior—such as quitting or not— spreads through social ties. “These companies are on to an important factor in the market that we haven’t tapped into well, which is how consumers are connected to each other and how they influence each other’s purchases,” says Emily Riley, an analyst with Forrester Research. Still, ad executives say they are seeking more transparency about where the data come from and where their ads appear. “Agencies are still trying to wrap their heads around it,” says John Nitti, senior vice president and digital director at Publicis Groupe’s Zenithmedia.

WSJ: Full Article Here

Over the last year, the emergence of real-time biddable marketplaces for ad inventory has roiled the online media industry and revealed a potentially disruptive channel in the digital marketing landscape. As Mike Baker noted in a column on the topic, in fact, real-time biddable inventory has the potential to revolutionize the ad industry on the buy-side and sell-side alike. Those familiar with Clayton Christensen’s, “Innovator’s Dilemma,” will recognize both the threat and opportunity in this disruptive new technology. And agencies and marketers alike are retooling processes, teams, and states of mind to make sure they are not left behind. The forces reshaping the media landscape and bringing real-time bidding discussions to the forefront have little to do with “real time” anything. Currently, RTB inventory represents a small fraction of the overall media inventory traded daily across ad exchanges. The best estimates I’ve seen indicate 5 percent to 10 percent of biddable, exchange-traded media is purchased through real-time bidding today. But by all accounts exchange-traded media is working, and working well. At our agency, for example, we find exchange-traded media among our most efficient channels, often performing at comparable levels to search marketing from a direct response standpoint. So if “real-time” bidding isn’t driving this success, what is? The answer is clear: micro-segmentation and de-averaged pricing, neither of which need to be done in real time to be effective. (Here’s how de-averaged pricing works: Instead of paying a single price for one lump segment, you break the lump segment into its component parts and pay a unique price for each of those parts. This represents the “de-averaged” price.)

Read More: ClickZ

PointRoll Opens Insights To Connect Rich Media Engagement With Campaign Data

Rich media provider PointRoll on Wednesday is expected to unveil its Open Insights initiative, which aims to help marketers improve their creative campaigns. At launch, the initiative includes seventeen partners spanning audience understanding and identification, targeting, dynamic creative versioning, and reporting integrations. Open Insights works by connecting rich media engagement metrics with other campaign data to better understand the relationship between advertisers’ creative and media goals. Partners include AOL, QuadrantOne, Google Content Network, ContextWeb, and ADISN. Other real-time parameter integrations with Nielsen PRIZM and BlueKai have been put in place to increase dynamic ad generation and optimization in scale across publishers and ad networks. Of key importance, Open Insights offers a consolidated view of ad effectiveness across creative, targeting, media and delivery, according to said Max Mead, VP of business development and analytics for PointRoll. “Better data means better decisions,” said Mead. “We’ve heard from marketers that they’re looking for new ways to use data to understand and find new audiences, and to make sure they’re serving the most relevant, personalized creatives to different types of users.”

Read More: MediaPost

iPad Is The Google Killer

Forget the Kindle.  The Kindle was dead as of 9 AM April 3^rd, and had been on life support for the previous six months anyway as people put off buying a Kindle until the iPad came out.  The iPad, however, is not the Kindle-killer.  At least not anymore.  The iPad is the Google killer. Now I see why Google is so focused on Android and Chrome.  Now I see why Eric Schmidt left Apple’s board. Google is afraid for the first time, and it’s not Microsoft it’s worried about.  I reached this epiphany this weekend as I spent some quality time with my new device.  Here’s how it happened. I was sitting on my couch, getting to know my iPad.  Of course, I wanted to check out some apps, to see if there were better or newer ones than the ones I had for my iPhone.  I searched through the categories – entertainment, news, navigation, etc. – chose a number of apps, opened them, and played around.  I read articles from the Wall Street Journal.  Checked the weather reports on the blustery Seattle day we were having.  And I looked at some recipes in the Epicurious app.  I played some games.  I downloaded a book and read a bit of it.  I watched some YouTube videos. And then it dawned on me.  I had just spent hours consuming content, connecting with brands I like, and discovering new and wonderful things to do with my iPad.  And I never opened my browser. I didn’t need Google. I did all of these things and never touched the web.  Never typed in search term.  Never clicked www anything.  I got a bit of a shiver.  Then I bought more Apple stock. Here are some revelations that came to me this weekend:

• Apple has trained us to look for apps and use apps, not web sites. The iPad just furthers this behavior that Apple is training in us.  I don’t need to open a browser anymore to get to my favorite content, my social networks, my maps and weather, etc.
• The disintermediation between Google/search and customers has been usurped (or soon will be) by Apple. Via apps, music, movies, and books, Apple now owns the customer “search” relationship.
• The app store is a discovery tool. Search is not. Search is a research tool because it assumes I already know what I am looking for, at least in part.  This makes search useful for some things, but frustrating for others.  As users discover this, they will use search less.
• All of this means that search will become less of a navigational tool over time. Today, search is often the first place people go on the web. In the future, that will become less necessary.  You will start with your apps.
• Forget bringing your laptop on vacations anymore. You won’t need it.  The iPad was made for planes and for consuming on the go.
• In fact, the PC will continue to exist, but solely as a productivity device. I think that Microsoft can actually breathe a sigh of relief because the iPad does not do away with the need for Office or Windows. It just makes the PC a more utilitarian device rather than the do-everything device it is today.

Read More: Mele’s Musings

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

IT looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Three years ago, Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, jogged onto a San Francisco stage to shake hands with Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, to help him unveil a transformational wonder gadget — the iPhone — before throngs of journalists and adoring fans at the annual MacWorld Expo. Google and Apple had worked together to bring Google’s search and mapping services to the iPhone, the executives told the audience, and Mr. Schmidt joked that the collaboration was so close that the two men should simply merge their companies and call them “AppleGoo.” “Steve, my congratulations to you,” Mr. Schmidt told his corporate ally. “This product is going to be hot.” Mr. Jobs acknowledged the compliment with an ear-to-ear smile.  Today, such warmth is in short supply. Mr. Jobs, Mr. Schmidt and their companies are now engaged in a gritty battle royale over the future and shape of mobile computing and cellphones, with implications that are reverberating across the digital landscape. In the last six months, Apple and Google have jousted over acquisitions, patents, directors, advisers and iPhone applications. Mr. Jobs and Mr. Schmidt have taken shots at each other’s companies in the media and in private exchanges with employees.

Read More: NYTimes

Optimization Overdose

Demand side platforms (DSPs) are a giant leap forward for Adkind. They put the power back in the hands of the marketer to decide how much to pay for each audience segment, target them in real time, and hyper-optimize the campaign with the help of ingenious black boxes with Einstein-quality math equations inside. Dynamic ads are the other superheros. They empower marketers to tailor their message or offers based on performance (among other factors). More math equations that put more dollars into marketers’ pockets! Put them together and you get super-hyper-mega-optimized performance, right? Wrong! You get a mess. Here’s why: The DSP is optimizing against a specific creative. Let’s call it Big-Box Retailer Creative X. As the DSP sees a gradient of performance across different audiences shown Creative X, it optimizes your media buy to bid for more of those audiences. This scenario works great. Dynamic ads complicate this scenario in that Creative X is undefined. Put simply, the execution of the creative is determined by optimization performed behind the scenes, and whether that means showing pictures of a DVD player or a washing machine is determined each time the ad loads.

Read More: MediaPost

Hiring Freeze Starts To Thaw As Agency Business Hunts For Talent

After a nearly yearlong hiring freeze and having shed 14,000 employees, WPP chief Martin Sorrell had a bit of good news last week: The holding company is staffing up. It’s a welcomed announcement for an industry that lost almost 200,000 jobs between December 2008 and January 2010. Firms from Edelman to OMD to BBH are adding to their ranks, crediting a stronger business outlook and a need to add people with new skills. “Agencies had to respond to what was going on in 2009 by making some massive cuts,” said Pat Mastandrea, founding partner-CEO of the Cheyenne Group. She said when the market started to turn around in the fourth quarter of 2009 and budgets started to grow back, you had agencies that were too lean. “Now those agencies are in the process of having to address that by recruitment. And it’s even stronger in the first quarter of 2010 than it was in the last quarter of 2009.”

Read More: AdAge

Who Are The Online Publishing Companies That Matter

The ten largest online publishers own a disproportionate amount of the world’s web traffic. These busy sites, including subsidiary holdings, account for billions of unique visitors per month. They also comprise the most sought-after ad space in the world. However – and while the recession has played a role in the decline of the display CPM major publishers could acquire – an average $10 CPM, has in many cases, dwindled to $1CPM. For many publishers, display has simply not paid off. Search advertising revenues, however, have steadily increased during this same time. And, with roughly 90% of the major publishers’ revenue being derived from low-paying (and in many cases remnant) advertising networks, many would argue that it is just a matter of time before many of these sites begin charging users to access content; either on a subscription, or pay-as-you-go basis. The alternative, of course, requires an alternative approach to advertising — the fact of the matter is that publishers are not in the business of providing free content if they are unable to monetize their traffic.

Read More: Permuto.com

Eyeblaster on Wednesday filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to $115 million in an initial public offering of common stock. The online ad campaign management firm did not reveal how many shares it plans to sell, their expected price, or where they will be listed. “A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the SEC but has not yet become effective,” Eyeblaster said in a statement on Wednesday. New York-based Eyeblaster actually filed for an IPO back in March 2008, but had to cancel its plans due to rough market conditions. Hardly an anomaly, at least 26 tech companies canceled their IPOs that year, according to Thomson Reuters data. Institutions and investors underwriting this latest IPO include J.P. Morgan Securities, Deutsche Bank Securities, Pacific Crest Securities LLC, FBR Capital Markets & Co, ThinkEquity, and Broadpoint Capital, according to a preliminary prospectus filed with the SEC.

Read More: MediaPost

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Digital Advertising for Brand Campaigns

Digital has never been more important for brands that are seeking to communicate and engage with their customers, this is especially true when speaking in terms of purchase decision-making and brand perception. As digital media battles for its share of cash and eyeballs in an increasingly saturated market, advertisers find themselves faced with the age old challenge of demonstrating return-on-investment (ROI) to their colleagues in the boardroom, only this time from online spend. Marketers have always known that time spent with an advert is an important measure. Couple this with actual active engagement with an ad (rather than passive viewing) and a truer measure of effectiveness emerges in the form of dwell scores. The method behind dwell scores involves combining the length of time spent actively engaging with an ad, multiplied by the rate at which it is engaged with. As a result, dwell scores offer much more valuable evaluation metric for brand advertising.

Read More: MicrosoftAdvertising.com

 Feds Likely To Oppose Google Mobile Ad Deal

Google’s proposed (and now delayed) acquisition of mobile ad network AdMob appears to be drawing even more regulatory scrutiny from the FTC. Bloomberg cites sources who say that regulators now want “sworn declarations” from Google (NSDQ: GOOG) competitors about the $750 million deal. The key sentence in the Bloomberg report comes from a former FTC general counsel, who says that “agency officials typically collect declarations ‘when they think there is some significant chance’ the agency will ask a court to block a merger, or seek to modify a deal.” Google announced it was buying AdMob in early November and said at the time it expected the purchase to close within “the next several months.” Soon afterwards, there were reports that the FTC was reviewing the deal, and in December, Google said it had received a “second request” from the FTC—meaning that regulatory officials wanted more information about the buy and that it would therefore not be closing right away.

 Read More: PaidContent.org

Aiming to expand reporting beyond the click, Collective Media has added the ability for customers of its AMP display ad platform to track interaction and exposure in addition to standard performance metrics. That means ad networks powered by the AMP system can now provide more detailed data on how users interacted with ads, mouse-over activity, how long ads were viewed and whether they were actually viewable in the browser. While these more in-depth measurements have long been available for rich media ads, Collective says it’s now bringing them to more common Flash-based ads as well. “These metrics apply to all ad impressions, not just rich media,” said Joe Apprendi, CEO of Collective, whose AMP platform allows advertisers, publishers and agencies to target specific audiences and manage existing ad networks.

Read More: MediaPost

TARGUSinfo Breaks New Ground To Boost Lead Intelligence

In an October 2009 Forrester Research report titled The Intelligent Approach to Customer Intelligence, Andreas Weigend, Amazon.com’s former chief scientist, said “In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008.” That’s why today, TARGUSinfo, the trusted leader in On-Demand Insight® about prospects and customers, announced that it has deepened its investment in innovation, offices and personnel to further help businesses capitalize on the massive amount of data available. “We closed 2009 with great success by helping our customers achieve improved audience targeting, better customer experiences, higher conversion rates and increased customer lifetime values,” said George Moore, CEO and chairman, TARGUSinfo. “However, with the explosion of data continuing at a breakneck pace, our customers continue to choose TARGUSinfo because of our core ability to link predictive attributes to consumers and businesses in real time. We’ve committed considerable engineering man hours and financial resources to offer our clients even greater innovation through our verification, scoring and online targeting solutions.” Doing What Others Can’t—Taking a Giant Innovation Leap in Lead Scoring & Lead Verification By leveraging its real-time delivery network and robust repository of identities and attributes, TARGUSinfo delivers unparalleled intelligence at the moment of live interaction with prospects and customers.

Read More: Yahoo!

Tremor Moves in Real-Time

Video ad network Tremor Media on Thursday is expected to announce key improvements to its targeting products, including the use of real-time audience data. “Our Acudeo technology is the differentiator which gives us two key benefits — the ability to call multiple data providers simultaneously and the ability to get real-time updates,” said Jason Glickman, CEO of Tremor Media. “Calling multiple data providers simultaneously increases the chances of finding up-to-date audience data, which improves user coverage and reach,” added Glickman. “Getting real-time updates from data sources ensures that we access the most current information, which improves targeting precision.”

Read More: MediaPost

interCLICK, Inc. (NASDAQ: ICLK), the leader in data and inventory transparency, today announced that it has become the first partner to implement DoubleVerify’s BrandShield technology. First released on January 15, BrandShield is DoubleVerify’s new preventative ad solution that builds on DoubleVerify’s existing ad verification and remediation services, which currently verifies more than 20 billion monthly impressions for major Fortune 500 customers.

ReadMore: CNN

Perplexing Ethical Dillemas of Online Marketing

Something is rotten in Denmark. That’s the sentiment being conveyed by several of my acquaintances on the ad sales side when it comes to agency-side audience networks. They understand they’re getting insertion orders, or they’re having more success moving inventory through ad exchanges. But they’re left wondering whether the “data value drain” — to coin a term — is selling their publishing businesses short. That is, agency-side audience networks are leveraging the targeting data in which publishers have invested to target and segment audiences across the web. So, for instance, if a business website sells 30 million impressions against financial decision-makers, it suspects it may never see a buy like that from the same agency ever again. That agency will cookie those users, and if they pay the same site to reach them again, it will be at a $3 run-of-site CPM instead of a $25 premium CPM.

Read More: iMediaConnection

Something Old and Something New for Digital Marketers

When rich media company PointRoll released its “Top 10 Trends for 2010″ last month, interactive planners and buyers found themselves in some familiar territory. Ad relevance, data feeds, publisher integration, and social media, the company said, are all important to campaign success. Rich media creative developed by PointRoll — along with competitors like Eyeblaster, EyeWonder, Unicast, and the like — has indeed reflected these trends as brands vie for consumer eyeballs in a space cluttered with subpar ad offerings. But these strategies aren’t the only ones at the digital marketer’s disposal.

Read More: ClickZ

Limelight Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: LLNW) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held EyeWonder, Inc. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2010.

Read More: CNN Money

Attribution Modeling: The Value of a View

My previous post focused on the changing attribution model that online marketers are currently grappling with and the impact on the affiliate channel in particular. This provoked some interesting debate amongst affiliate marketers and analytics software providers on the subject of attribution modelling. I wanted to expand upon this model by debating the perceived importance of impression statistics and how these should potentially be weighted within an attribution model.

Read More: Econsultancy

A Question and Answer with Suman Basetty, Efficient Frontier’s Director of Product Management

What is new in the display advertising world?More and more non-premium inventory is being accessed through ad exchanges. A big addition to the exchange supply is AdSense inventory now available through Google’s Ad Exchange platform. Ad exchanges and publisher side yield managers are making inventory available through Real Time Bidding (RTB). With RTB, advertisers can decide which impressions they want to buy and at what price. Additionally, data exchanges are selling data independent of media, providing advertisers with information to better target their customers in non-premium inventory.

Read More: blog.efrontier.com