Magnetic Appoints James Green CEO

Josh-Shatkin Margolis, Magnetic founder and former CEO, seems to have a successful habit of mixing things up. On Thursday, the company, which launched in 2008, will announce James Green’s appointment as head. Green is an ad industry veteran with experience in the movie industry. He worked at various media/tech companies in CEO posts, including Giant Real,  PVI and  24/7 Real Media. In the late 1990s, he worked as a vice president, marketing at Pixar Animation Studios, reporting to Steve Jobs.

After starting four companies, Green is ready to take on the CEO spot at Magnetic. The company supports display ad retargeting with search data. He will focus on driving overall company expansion and build out Magnetic’s search retargeting infrastructure.

During his year-long sailing excursion, from October 2010 until now, Green had time to think. Two trends in the ad industry stood out during the journey: data and technology. “I’ve been hired before to turn around companies having difficulties, and I didn’t want to do that this time,” he said. “I wanted to join a team in a company poised for growth. Magnetic is driven by technology and data.”

Read More:  MediaPost

AdSafe Media Launches New Real Time URL Analyzer Tool

Network Monitor+ Allows Brands To Instantly Check The Brand Safety of Specific URLs
More Than Half of the Top 50 Global Ad Networks Now Use AdSafe Media’s Network Monitor Solution

NEW YORK, Oct. 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Today, AdSafe announced the growth of its business with Networks and Publishers, as well as the release of a new feature to expand its Network Monitor product offerings. 

With the new Network Monitor+ feature, clients can manually input a series of URLs and instantly receive the brand safety ratings for those specific web pages.

AdSafe Media now monitors and protects over 1.5 billion impressions every day across their network and exchange partners. The company ranks individual web pages on a 1-1,000 numerical scale, — the most granular system industry-wide — measuring how brand-safe a page is across multiple content categories.  AdSafe Media’s proprietary and massively scaled system examines each page on a wide spectrum of data points to determine a page’s brand safety rating. With AdSafe Media’s continued growth and close partnerships across ad networks and publishers, the company now has visibility across 98% of the commercial web.

“Publishers and ad networks find our ratings invaluable. They proactively use these ratings to improve their Media Risk Index (MRI) — the overall content quality of their network,” said Scott Knoll, CEO, AdSafe Media. “On average, networks and publishers using the AdSafe Network Monitor record a 32% lift vs. the industry benchmarked MRIs. And now, with Network Monitor+, publishers and advertisers can instantly check on the brand safety of specific pages.”

Read More: PR Newswire

Efficient Frontier Buys Leading Australian Digital Marketing Firm
Seeking Deals to Expand Product Offerings, Geographic Footprint

Efficient Frontier, one of the larger remaining independent digital marketing firms, is getting a little bigger. The company is buying one of the largest digital agencies in Australia, Downstream Marketing, for an undisclosed sum.

The deal gives Efficient Frontier immediate scale in Australia and the opportunity to expand in Asia as the company seeks to tap faster-growing international markets. Downstream Marketing’s clients include American Express, Avis, Vodafone and Weight Watchers. The 30-employee company is run by CEO Steve Knowles, former head of marketing for eBay in Australia.

It’s the second big deal in a year for Efficient Frontier, which acquired social-agency Context Optional in May for a reported $50 million.

Like a lot of foreign markets, digital ad spending is small but growing fast. Online advertising spending in Australia reached $2.45 billion in the 12 months ending June 30, 2011, up 20% from a year ago, and is on track to surpass $3 billion in 2012, according to the Australian Interactive Advertising Bureau. “Those aren’t small numbers and it’s another extension of our business,” said CEO David Karnstedt.

Like a lot of firms born in search, Efficient Frontier is attempting to expand beyond its original purpose into all areas of marketing where automated auctions are transforming media buying. Originally that was search and then display advertising, but has since expanded to ads on social networks such as Facebook, video and mobile.

Read More: AdAge

5 Ways to Reinvent the AOR for the Digital Age
 
I had a lively conversation over lunch last week with an agency head and his largest client. We were talking about digital media, connected consumers, and how they’re shaking up the advertising business as we’ve known it. We each saw things a bit differently, but we all agreed that the traditional ad agency business model is fatally broken and needs to change.

The client chided the agency head: “We need you to do more with less, especially when it comes to execution tasks like media planning and buying. I don’t want to pay by the head for monkey work.” Ouch. More generously, she said she valued the agency’s strategic message and program development work and hoped they could make better use of analytics to connect total client investment to results.

The agency head noted that the client’s procurement department had squeezed the AOR (agency of record) fees so tightly that it made it difficult for the agency to invest in innovation efforts – like analytics – that would enable it to become more strategic. “Procurement has drained the life blood out of agency-client relationships.” The client nodded sympathetically.

I had to chime in with, “Isn’t this why programmatic buying was invented?” I qualified my question by explaining that tech geeks like me are excited about the rise of ad exchanges, demand-side platforms (DSPs), real-time bidding (RTB), etc., but the reason these things are being adopted so quickly is that they solve a fundamental business problem for both the agency and the client. Using smart software to help do “monkey work” means – at least in theory – that the agency can reallocate staff and resources to focus on more strategic messaging and communication work that moves the brand forward.

Read More: ClickZ

Media6Degrees Becomes Ad Matchmaker Via RTB, Data

Media6Degrees will officially roll out a tool dubbed Planner next week that gives advertisers and publishers access to targeting data.

For advertisers, the report provides a list of the best publisher sites. For publishers, the report provides the same for advertisers. The tool relies on technology that creates matches based on data collected from Web page tags, or code, placed on advertisers’ and publishers’ Web sites. The data represents clusters of consumers with similar likes.

Calling the data that creates this “fingerprint” unique to a specific customer base, Andrew Pancer, COO at Media6Degrees, describes the code as a targeting pixel that gathers information. He believes the data can help publishers generate premium sales from real-time bidding insights, along with revenue generated from putting remnant into exchanges.

Publishers have been looking for ways to take advantage of RTB, but most don’t like the idea that inventory gets sold without the support of their direct sales force. These days it’s about adding “value” and “efficiencies” to inventory, which RTB allies suggest will bring to the process.

Read More: MediaPost

Can Audience Insights Boost the ROI of Social Media Ads?

Historically, marketers have adopted a boomerang strategy when forced to deal with a new media channel. Step one: spin up a division to deal with the new channel. Step two: mainstream the division when everyone starts to realize that the new channel is just an extension of the consumer’s life. Remember Young & Rubicam’s Y&R 2.1 or Ogilvy’s Ogilvy Interactive? Didn’t think so. They were early agency responses to this new thing called the Internet. How about the early agency efforts at mobile marketing, Omnicom’s IPSH, Publicis’ Phonevalley, or IPG’s Ansible? Sensing a pattern here?

History appears to be repeating itself with social media and its poster child, Facebook. Facebook media shops are springing up like zits on the face of a Facebook-addled teen. With more than 750 million users around the world, Facebook offers marketers an immense and granular audience. According to recent comScore data, Facebook accounted for 346 billion ad impressions in Q1 2011, putting it at the top of all online display ad publishers with 31.2 percent share of all impressions served in the U.S. But does Facebook even belong in the category of “display ad publishers”? Many observe that Facebook has built a “closed” web – its treasure trove of user demographic and psychographic information in a walled-off garden – where advertisers can sow seeds but grow their business largely in Facebook’s garden.

Read More: ClickZ

Yahoo! Announces Leadership Reorganization

Board Appoints Timothy Morse Interim CEO

Board Initiates Search for Permanent CEO

SUNNYVALE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), the premier digital media company, today announced a leadership reorganization under which the Board of Directors has appointed Timothy Morse interim Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately, replacing Carol Bartz, who has been removed by the Board from her role as Chief Executive Officer.

The Board has also named key senior Yahoo! executives to a newly formed Executive Leadership Council tasked with supporting Morse in managing the Company’s day-to-day operations until a permanent chief executive is appointed, as well as supporting a comprehensive strategic review that the Board has initiated to position the Company for future growth.

Roy Bostock, Chairman of the Yahoo! Board, said, “The Board sees enormous growth opportunities on which Yahoo! can capitalize, and our primary objective is to leverage the Company’s leadership and current business assets and platforms to execute against these opportunities. We have talented teams and tremendous resources behind them and intend to return the Company to a path of robust growth and industry-leading innovation. We are committed to exploring and evaluating possibilities and opportunities that will put Yahoo! on a trajectory for growth and innovation and deliver value to shareholders.”

Read More: Yahoo!

“Relationship” Cookies

The secret to online marketing is at the cookie level.  Every moment is 1:1 between the brand and the consumer.  For each individual impression we can measure the resulting actions (or inactions).

So we, the media buyers and digital marketers out there, buy cheap impressions – the cheaper the better as long as they “perform.”  We’re smarter with our dollars.  We have data and algorithms that tell us where our marketing budgets are working most effectively.  We’re 100% accountable with our media down to the cookie level.

But what about the consumer?  Have you ever stopped to think about the net impact to the consumer of all your online programs combined?

Direct response media is still direct response media.  A banner ad might not be as intrusive as a piece of direct mail, but there’s a certain element of pushiness in campaigns that routinely and overtly scream at customers to buy.  It seems even more distasteful when all those ads appear at page bottom of anonymous content.

Read More: PointRoll