Apple’s Spat With Google Is Getting Personal

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 Takes Second Shot at IPO

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

Collective Adds Engagement Metrics to AMP

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