Many of us in this industry have been fighting the good fight for a long time now to make display advertising a better outlet for brand dollars. And, if we get it right, everyone wins. But up to this point, the focus has almost entirely been on better technology. That’s not going to cut it.

From my rough calculations, the vast majority of venture-capitalist dollars, roughly $2.5 billion of $5.7 billion in the first half of 2011 alone, and strategic exits have focused on the automation of the sales and buying process, targeting and optimization.

Improving technology obviously has its benefits, but as an industry we have a bigger problem to fix: the essence of display advertising itself. We are all so caught up on acronyms and technology that we sometimes forget what it is that we are doing: We are in the business of advertising. The problem? A lot of display ads are not noticed. Beyond click-through rates hovering at fractions of fractions of a percent, 43 percent of users say they ignore and disregard banner advertising. To fix this, we need to change the economics: fewer and bigger ads. Not just bigger ads, but fewer.

Read More: Digiday

Meet Your Audience (for the Second Time)

These days, advertising and data platforms are giving marketers a wealth of information that can be used to validate their strategies and optimize their digital campaigns for better performance. There’s a lot of data to sort through – some more useful than others. Sometimes, good campaign optimization comes down to the basics: understanding who your audience is, and why they are doing what they are doing.

Let’s look at a real-life example of a digital display campaign, run through the digital ad agency of a popular mattress retailer. The agency wanted to test new inventory sources for the campaign by running broadly on general interest sites, evaluating the demography of audiences that showed purchase intent, and optimizing over the course of the campaign to maximize impact.

A theory being tested was that older audiences, who report more difficulty sleeping than younger demographic groups, would respond more favorably to the retailer’s online display ads. Campaigns were initially skewed to sites that over-indexed against an audience composed of ages 50 and older.

Read More: ClickZ

Unruly Adds $25M In Effort To Scale Social Video Campaigns

Anxious to scale its social video advertising platform, Unruly just secured a $25 million Series A investment from Amadeus Capital Partners, Van den Ende & Deitmer and Business Growth Fund. Since its debut in 2006, the London-based company claims to have executed over 1,400 social video campaigns, while delivering, tracking, and auditing 1.34 billion user-intended video views.

“We set out to help brands capture the massive opportunity in social video,” said Unruly founder and Group CEO Scott Button.

Unruly’s proprietary technology, RAMP (Real-time Amplification and Measurement Platform) powers social video campaigns for Old Spice, Electronic Arts, adidas, Unilever, T-Mobile and Coca-Cola.

It also had a hand in spreading Evian’s “Roller Babies,” T-Mobile’s “Life’s for Sharing,” Coca Cola’s “Happiness Factory” series, and Old Spice’s “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaigns.

Profitable since 2009, Unruly reported full-year revenue of $25 million in 2011, and a current revenue run-rate nearing $50 million.

Industrywide, social video campaigns generated 2.7 billion views in 2010 and more than 8 billion views in 2011, and are predicted to generate 20 billion views in 2012, according to Unruly.

Read More: MediaPost

NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – Dec 19, 2011) – AdKeeper, the service that puts consumers in control of their Internet experience by enabling them to save — or Keep — ads of interest for engagement on their own time, has partnered with Tremor Video, the largest independent online video technology company, to add the Keep functionality to Tremor Video ad units.

The partnership is the first time marketers can Keep-enable their video advertising, and in doing so, give consumers the option to Keep some of the web’s best and most powerful advertising to engage with on their own time and terms.

This partnership also brings the founders of one of NY’s most successful Internet start-ups — about.com — together again, revolutionizing the way consumers engage with the content and ads they see on the web. Scott Kurnit, former CEO and founder of About, is the CEO/Founder of AdKeeper, and Bill Day, former COO and co-founder of About, is the CEO of Tremor Video.

“Video advertising is certainly ‘Keepable,’ with engaging content and the benefit of sight/sound/motion that everyone loves,” said AdKeeper’s Kurnit. “Many of our partner advertisers are eager to Keep-enable their video and now, through Tremor Video, they can. Reebok is the first, with this ad for ZigEncore: http://bit.ly/tW8rnB.”

Charles Myslinsky, head of Business Development at AdKeeper, added, “Our Tremor Video partnership brings Keepability to millions of consumers who are exposed to high-quality and engaging video ads daily.”

Read More: Marketwire

Appssavvy Just Raised $7.1 Million To Build Ads That Interrupt Your Online Game Experiences

Appssavvy, a display advertising company that focuses on games and other interactive web applications, announced today it has raised $7.1 million in an extension to its first round of funding.

Appssavvy serves “activity” ads that appear directly in games. They pop up between activities in a game — which is typically when a viewer is most engaged, according to the company.

Appssavvy has raised $10.2 million in funding to date. True Ventures and The New York Times Company, which also participated in the most recent round, invested in Appssavvy in 2008. AOL Ventures participated in the most recent funding round.

Read More: BusinessInsider

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

Acquisition Enhances Ad Optimization Capability for Social, Search and Display Campaigns

SAN JOSE, Calif.—-Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Efficient Frontier, a leader in multi-channel ad buying and optimization. Adobe solutions are central to how digital marketing and advertising is created, managed, executed, measured and optimized. Adobe currently captures approximately five trillion digital transactions per year for more than 5,000 customers, including many of the world’s largest advertisers, publishers and advertising agencies.

The acquisition of Efficient Frontier will add multi-channel ad campaign forecasting, execution and optimization capabilities to Adobe’s existing Digital Marketing Suite. Along with the Suite, Adobe’s digital marketing capabilities include an enterprise-class data management platform, a leading video ad management and monetization platform, and an enterprise content management system. Adobe will continue to build upon the foundation of its independent ad buying and optimization platform for search, social and display, enabling the company to offer a more complete suite of capabilities to digital marketers, advertisers and publishers for reporting and analytics, personalized experiences, multi-channel campaign management and media monetization.

“With the explosion in global Internet advertising, our customers need to know where, when and how to spend their digital marketing dollars to get the greatest return,” said Brad Rencher, senior vice president and general manager of Adobe’s Digital Marketing Business. “The addition of Efficient Frontier will give our Digital Marketing Suite customers a leading platform for turning ad spend into business impact.”

Read More: AdExchanger

When Is Audience Targeting Worth It?

ADOTAS – The field of audience targeting – also known as audience analytics – has long proven attractive and effective to online marketers. Honing campaigns to focus on specific audiences is not only logical, but it promises to provide a better way to generate return on ad dollars for the goals an advertiser is trying to achieve.

Because advertisers pay a premium for audience targeting, it’s important to examine the return on investment as it relates to all aspects of a campaign. As online marketers are beginning to understand, it’s rare that any one dimension of a media campaign is responsible for success. Furthermore, they’re finding out that each dimension delivers different results depending on a number of variables.

Whether you’re trying to determine the best creative, the highest performing website, the right audience demographic or all of the above, the ability to simultaneously analyze these variables is key to determining the optimal mix of online ad campaign attributes.

Taking a holistic look at the ways audience analytics combines with other online marketing factors is essential to knowing how, when and where to invest in audience targeting. This is no easy task. A brand may be looking at targeting 10 different audience segments across multiple ad networks, making it difficult to determine the right combinations of creative, placement, timing and other campaign considerations that work best.

Read More: Adotas