After months of beta testing, SocialVibe Inc. Tuesday launched the SVnetwork, a brand advertising network claiming to reach 80 million unique users each month, making it one of the largest on the Internet. The network, which includes its owned-and-operated SocialVibe.com, is affiliated with both Zynga, one the massive social gaming network, and Causes, the largest non-gaming application on Facebook.

“We’ve quietly been testing this for around eight months,” says SocialVibe Founder Joe Marchese, adding that more than 100 brand advertising campaigns already have been executed across the network, mainly on Zynga.

Among the marketers that have used the platform to date are Microsoft, Visa, Disney, Toyota, and Procter & Gamble.

Effective with the launch of the SVnetwork, Marchese says brand campaigns running via third-party social apps will be identified as being “powered by SVnetwork.”

The network’s roots began with SocialVibe.com, a cause-marketing social media platform that enables users to endorse brands in exchange for support of social causes.  Read More: MediaPost

How to Discuss Stock Options with Your Team

I was thumbing through Twitter messages on my Blackberry on Monday (I use Twitter as a “mobile first, web second” product) when I saw the following Tweet (see graphic).

I resisted the temptation to jump in with a response because I knew it was too complicated of a topic to discuss on Twitter.  But I thought I should do a quick post on the topic.

Read More: BothSidesOfTheTable.com

Privacy on the Web is a constant issue for public discussion—and Congress is always considering more regulations on the use of information about people’s habits, interests or preferences on the Internet. Unfortunately, these discussions lead to many misconceptions. Here are 10 of the most important:

1) Privacy is free. Many privacy advocates believe it is a free lunch—that is, consumers can obtain more privacy without giving up anything. Not so. There is a strong trade-off between privacy and information: The more privacy consumers have, the less information is available for use in the economy. Since information helps markets work better, the cost of privacy is less efficient markets.

2) If there are costs of privacy, they are borne by companies. Many who do admit that privacy regulations restricting the use of information about consumers have costs believe they are born entirely by firms. Yet consumers get tremendous benefits from the use of information.

Think of all the free stuff on the Web: newspapers, search engines, stock prices, sports scores, maps and much more. Google alone lists more than 50 free services—all ultimately funded by targeted advertising based on the use of information. If revenues from advertising are reduced or if costs increase, then fewer such services will be provided.

3) If consumers have less control over information, then firms must gain and consumers must lose. When firms have better information, they can target advertising better to consumers—who thereby get better and more useful information more quickly. Likewise, when information is used for other purposes—for example, in credit rating—then the cost of credit for all consumers will decrease.

4) Information use is “all or nothing.” Many say that firms such as Google will continue to provide services even if their use of information is curtailed. This is sometimes true, but the services will be lower-quality and less valuable to consumers as information use is more restricted.

For example, search engines can better target searches if they know what searchers are looking for. (Google’s “Did you mean . . .” to correct typos is a familiar example.) Keeping a past history of searches provides exactly this information. Shorter retained search histories mean less effective targeting.

5) If consumers have less privacy, then someone will know things about them that they may want to keep secret. Most information is used anonymously. To the extent that things are “known” about consumers, they are known by computers. This notion is counterintuitive; we are not used to the concept that something can be known and at the same time no person knows it. But this is true of much online information.

6) Information can be used for price discrimination (differential pricing), which will harm consumers. For example, it might be possible to use a history of past purchases to tell which consumers might place a higher value on a particular good. The welfare implications of discriminatory pricing in general are ambiguous. But if price discrimination makes it possible for firms to provide goods and services that would otherwise not be available (which is common for virtual goods and services such as software, including cell phone apps) then consumers unambiguously benefit.

7) If consumers knew how information about them was being used, they would be irate. When something (such as tainted food) actually harms consumers, they learn about the sources of the harm. But in spite of warnings by privacy advocates, consumers don’t bother to learn about information use on the Web precisely because there is no harm from the way it is used.

8 ) Increasing privacy leads to greater safety and less risk. The opposite is true. Firms can use information to verify identity and reduce Internet crime and identity theft. Think of being called by a credit-card provider and asked a series of questions when using your card in an unfamiliar location, such as on a vacation. If this information is not available, then less verification can occur and risk may actually increase.

9) Restricting the use of information (such as by mandating consumer “opt-in”) will benefit consumers. In fact, since the use of information is generally benign and valuable, policies that lead to less information being used are generally harmful.

10) Targeted advertising leads people to buy stuff they don’t want or need. This belief is inconsistent with the basis of a market economy. A market economy exists because buyers and sellers both benefit from voluntary transactions. If this were not true, then a planned economy would be more efficient—and we have all seen how that works.

Read More: WSJ.com (Entire Article Here)

Facebook Ad Network – Is It Coming?

On August 27, Mashable reported Facebook has a $33.7 billion valuation – wow. Too high? Maybe to some, and maybe not to others. Instead of debating that point, let’s look at some things that Facebook might do in the future to a) serve advertisements and b) make more money.

Facebook has some pretty amazing things going for it. It’s becoming ubiquitous in terms of its appeal, so all walks of life are flocking to it. Second, people spend tons of time on Facebook and visit it on their computers and phones every day – if not more. Third, with its massive loyal user base, no matter what your niche audience looks like chances are you can effectively target them and reach them in large numbers on Facebook. Finally, user growth is still expanding and has a long way to go before peaking.

What does this mean for online marketers and media buyers? Well, consider these two factors: unprecedented targeting to a massive audience and the possibility of a new ad network layered over the social graph already installed on millions of sites. (You know all those Like and Share buttons, Facebook Connect, and fan widgets?) In many ways, these sites are already connected to Facebook on code/technical levels.

Let’s explore these two things with the disclaimer that a lot of what I outline here is based on predictions on what Facebook could do – not necessarily on what it will do.

Read More: ClickZ

MediaMath is an important behind-the-scenes player for advertisers at a time when advertising networks, exchanges and platforms are changing the way advertising is bought and consumed. The New York-based demand-side digital media platform monitors activity on ad exchanges, where marketers bid to place ads on publishers’ Web sites, and helps them quickly buy the space and the audience they need. The system is helping turn advertising from a job for creative “Mad Men” to a numbers-based “real profession,” says MediaMath Chief Executive Joe Zawadzki.

Forbes:MediaMath allows marketers to directly buy, manage and optimize media. Tell us more.

Fifteen million impressions a day across exchanges, across different media. [We] simplify what could be a very complicated process into a series of pretty straight-forward stats, in terms of how to point all of the technology at the market’s problems.

What is the opportunity for publishers who want to sell ad inventory?

Ultimately, the more demand in an auction-based system, the higher the price. And for non-auction based systems, it’s bringing incremental advertising dollars that they’re not getting from direct sales. It’s like optimization is not zero sum. There has always been this tension between advertiser and publisher. People think that in the negotiation that someone wins and someone loses and, for the advertiser to get better performance, they need to beat up on the publisher. The reality is that, with optimization–because not everyone is looking for the same thing and because every advertiser has their own demand curve–they look for different brands, different audiences. If you do a good job with optimization, both the advertiser will see better performance and the publisher will see higher prices. It’s not an “or,” it’s an “and.”

Read More: Forbes.com

Do You Want To Succeed at Social Media or Social Media Marketing?

Do you want to succeed at social media or social media marketing? There is a huge difference. It’s the difference between using social media tools and adopting social media philosophy. The difference between sparking posts about your marketing and posts about your product or service. The difference between marketers who focus externally on how the brand is broadcast versus internally on how the brand is realized.

So do you want to succeed at social media or social media marketing? The answer is the former, but many marketers focus on the latter. I’d like to make this difference more real by sharing two examples — the first in the entertainment industry and the second my own experiences in a mall this weekend.

“Snakes on a Plane” is the entertainment industry’s greatest pre-release social media success story to date. The Guardian called it, “Perhaps the most Internet-hyped film of all time.” Fans produced their own T-shirts, posters, trailers, novelty songs and parodies. Producers organized a contest to select a fan’s music for use in the movie. The filmmakers added shooting days in order to implement changes suggested by fans on the Internet (including Samuel Jackson’s famous and unprintable line about snakes.)

But what were these people fans of? Not the product, apparently. As EW put said about the movie: “SOAP came in below even the most ridiculously cynical predictions.” Read More: MediaPost

The Fundamentals of Real-Time Bidding

When it comes to online advertising, there’s a common misconception that real-time bidding (RTB) is a whole new ball game, requiring a separate media strategy and an entirely new set of campaign goals. While it’s true that RTB is a different buying model for marketers to understand, the promise of digital display advertising remains “right message, right customer.” What RTB adds to the equation is “right price and right time.” Thanks to RTB and auction marketplaces, digital display can now be purchased in ways similar to search, and it dramatically improves a marketer’s ability to reach specific audiences at scale. It’s easy to think this might just be relevant for direct response campaigns, but in fact RTB delivers tremendous advantages for brand and branded response campaigns as well. Let’s look at how RTB enables all advertisers to more efficiently and effectively achieve four common campaign objectives.

1. Find custom audiences at scale
The fundamental concept of RTB is it enables marketers to target audiences directly, instead of using content as a proxy for audience. In auction markets, marketers bid (or not) on individual ad impressions based on the demographic and behavioral profile of a consumer, in contrast to traditional content-based buys where inventory is purchased to hopefully reach a targeted audience.

The beauty of RTB is that marketers target audiences based on their own custom definitions of which consumers are appropriate for a campaign. A classic strategy is to use remarketing data that tracks when consumers have visited the advertiser’s website. But with RTB, marketers can now take it to the next level and leverage their full customer relationship management (CRM) database for targeting. These data represent the advertiser’s full view of its customers (registration data, purchase history, loyalty tier, etc.). By using a CRM-capable demand-side platform (DSP), an advertiser can execute powerful cross-sell, up-sell, and retention campaigns.

However, these strategies, while extremely effective, tend to have limited reach. To increase scale, advertisers can use look-alike modeling to expand the size of the targetable audience. Look-alike modeling finds new consumers that closely resemble the demographic and psychographic attributes of an advertiser’s existing audience. How does this work? Imagine a dart board where the original remarketing audience is the red bull’s-eye in the center. Look-alike segments are the concentric circles that extend out from the center, with each circle increasing the scale of audience available at decreasing levels of similarity.

Read More: iMediaConnection

During the second quarter of the year, the highest-risk inventory was served via ad exchanges. That’s according to a report to be released Wednesday by AdSafe Media, a company that markets proof-of-performance and content safety solutions.

A full 16.9% of inventory served by ad exchanges was high risk for advertising, while 6.3% of inventory served via ad networks was high risk, and 3.8% directly via publishers was considered high-risk.

What’s more, inventory transparency is the lowest on ad exchanges, which served 64.4% IAB Category I inventory — with full transparency regarding referring URL — while ad networks served 82.6%, and publishers directly served 97.4%.

Publishers, the study found, tend to follow geotargeting requirements more than any other buying channel. The study revealed that 1.9% of publisher inventory fell outside of geotargeting requirements, while 3.9% of ad exchange inventory and 4.3% of ad network inventory fell outside of geotargeting requirements.

Read More: MediaPost

P&G Execs And VCs Want Startups With Branding Potential

The Internet turns branding and marketing dreams into reality. For Procter & Gamble executive Dave Knox that means transforming Cincinnati, Ohio into the Silicon Valley of consumer marketing. Knox, who works at P&G with venture capitalists and startups by day, sees moonlighting as an opportunity to take the business model built by TechStars or Capital Factory and apply it to startups focusing on branding and consumer marketing.

So, Knox and fellow co-founders J.B. Kropp, Dave Knox, Bryan J. Radtke, and Robert W. McDonald launched The Brandery three weeks ago. On Wednesday they close submissions that give five startups a 12-week launch program, earn $20,000 in seed funding, and provide access to partners, mentors and resources typically reserved for major corporations. The lucky winners will pitch to a group of angel investors, VCs and strategic partners.

In exchange for the seed funding, each company will give up 6% equity that goes to The Brandery, a non-profit, 5013C organization. When these startups emerge through successful exits, the equity will fund operating capital for The Brandery.

Mentors include Get Satisfaction’s Wendy Lea, P&G’s Lucas Watson, Third Screen Marketplace’s Suzanne Tosolini, Venture Investments at the Kraft Group’s Steve Schlafman, and E.W. Scripps’s Adam Symson, among many other industry executives.

Read More: MediaPost

The People’s Web

At Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg’s D8 conference a couple of months back, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, stated that one of Facebook’s objectives was to “rethink the web stack around people.” This statement echoed the thoughts I shared in a recent post concerning the way social networks are poised to change all types of digital experiences over the next few years. In this posting, I will expand a bit on the implications of this transformation from a “site-centric” Web to a “people-centric” Web in the area of content.

Today, content experiences are built around a link-based architecture, in that links are aggregated to create static channels. Relevancy of a specific link is determined by how it relates to other links or analyzing the metadata used to describe that link. Generally, sites are designed to act as a holistic product rather than a modular one, although sites have certainly become more modular as they optimize themselves for search engines.

However, the overall product is designed to be controlled by the publisher rather than the users. Users’ ability to impact the way most sites package content has been primarily through click-through activity. User comments to a certain extent introduce user participation but that is probably where users’ involvement stops.

So, what would a content site designed with people as its primary focus offer?

Read More: SpectatorBytes.com

Online advertising network InterCLICK announced its second quarter 2010 earnings on Wednesday. According to the release, “Revenue was $21.7 million in Q2 2010, a 103% year-over-year increase. (…) Gross profit was $9.6 million in Q2 2010, up 102% year-over-year.” Read more.

AdExchanger.com: Looking at InterCLICK’s 100% year-over-year Q2 growth and projected 2010 revenues of $90 million + , are there any observations you can share about how clients are spending?

MK: Delivering the most effective audience-centric campaigns is dependent on our ability to properly value targeting data and solving the operational challenges associated with running data enabled campaigns. We won a record amount of new business this past quarter and client retention reached a new high watermark. This is a hyper competitive space and I believe that our investment in our technology and our team has paid off tremendously, as evident in our results.

What about data? Has using data exchanges and other third-party providers been a key part of your offering? How do you see this playing out for InterCLICK?

The challenges in display advertising require effective supply chain management. The goal is to find the optimal alignment among data, inventory, and creative. Quality inventory has been accessible for quite some time, and through data exchanges like BlueKai, rich targeting data has been made quite accessible. So data exchanges allow for easy access and implementation. The real challenge is in the execution, which is what we have invested significant capital and resources in addressing.

Read More: AdExchanger.com

Inside the Numbers: How Demand Media Will Pitch a Billion Dollar IPO

Demand Media is a money-losing company. How will it convince Wall Street to value it at a billion dollars or more?   By directing investors’ attention to a set of numbers which say it’s a very profitable company.  The official term for these numbers are “non-GAAP financial measures”. In English, that translates into “accounting you can’t try at home, but which shows off our company in the best possible light.”  And it does! Depending on which set of numbers you want to look at, Demand lost either $4.3 million or $22.3 million on revenues of $114 million in the first half of this year. But Demand’s “Adjusted OIBDA” numbers show a company that made $25.6 million on revenue of $108 million. Much better!  Some investors may balk at these non-GAAP numbers, but Demand, Goldman Sachs (GS) and its other underwriters clearly think there’s a market for them. And there’s certainly a hunger in the tech world for a big, brand name IPO to break the dry spell. You can feel people willing this thing to work.  If Demand did, say, $55 million in OIBDA this year, it would need a multiple of 18 times trailing 12 months earnings to get to a $1 billion valuation. It would need 27x to get the $1.5 billion number that people are whispering to reporters.  Another way to get to $1.5 billion: Project OIBDA of $100 million for 2011, and ask for 15 x on that number. Reminder: $1.5 billion would make Demand worth more than the New York Times (NYT).

Read More: AllThingsD.com

Adapt.ly to Manage Ads Across Multiple Social Networks

As advertisers begin to run ads across an increasing number of social networks and sites, startup firm Adapt.ly has developed technology to help manage those campaigns from a single platform, and to help digest and evaluate the resulting performance data more easily.  As Adapt.ly co-founder Nikhil Sethi points out, most social networks offer self-service ad platforms, which exist in complete isolation of their competitors’. As a result, advertisers are forced to manually construct individual campaigns on each, despite the fact they’re attempting to reach essentially the same audience. “Managing all these campaigns by hand is a pain in the ass, and analyzing the data from all the different platforms becomes a nightmare,” Sethi said.  It’s that heavy lifting that Adapt.ly is attempting to relieve, providing a service that will handle campaign creation, targeting, and optimization automatically, and from a single point of entry. “We’ve built a system that allows us to take creative and to normalize it across a range of networks. We ask advertisers two simple questions: What are you advertising, and who are you trying to reach? The system will then optimize targeting across the networks,” said Sethi, adding that users are given the option to specify creative for individual platforms if they wish, or to simply let Adapt.ly take care of it.

Read More: ClickZ

Are Marketers Really Spying On You Online?

The ongoing “What They Know” series in The Wall Street Journal is drawing needed attention to some of the ways web analysts and marketers gather and track information about people online. As part of the series, they visualized the types of cookies and tracking files used by 50 top websites, including their own. However, the WSJ failed to fully explain what type of information is being collected about visitors and what marketers do with the data. Rather, they left the public to wonder if online marketers are actually spies.   I don’t deny that I use cookies and tracking pixels to gather a variety of details about you if you visit my site. However, most of the data I have is anonymous and the details exist across multiple systems, not aggregated in one tidy personal profile. Rarely do I feel like I have pieced together enough details to be considered a spy. But with all that data, what do I really know about you?

Read More: AdAge

Drawing further attention to the white-hot social gaming sector, Zynga on Thursday said it raised $150 million from Japanese wireless carrier Softbank. The partners also announced plans to develop and distribute social games in Japan via a new Zynga Japan joint venture.  Along with the obvious opportunities to expand its user-base, the Asian enterprise will allow Zynga to “gain insights from the Japanese market,” said Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga.  Based in Tokyo, Zynga Japan will attempt to tap into the country’s renowned passion for gaming and technology, while leveraging Softbank’s mobile and Web technology to produce new social games. “We share the same vision as Zynga in social games and look forward to working together to create a social game powerhouse,” Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of Softbank, said in a statement.  San Francisco-based Zynga creates games like “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars,” which have thrived on social networks like Facebook, as well as among early mobile app adopters.

Read More: MediaPost

App Store Not Named iTunes Heads To a Billion Downloads

Today, GetJar, a San Mateo, Calif.-based company, announced it is delivering over 3 million downloads a day to more than 2,000 different phone models. Adding support for Google Android devices last year has helped boost the daily downloads, as Android is already the second-most-used platform for GetJar customers. The company says it has seen tremendous growth over the past year, with downloads up 300 percent from the prior year.  GetJar bills itself as the “second largest app store,” boasting over 73,000 software titles. With roughly 225,000 apps, Apple’s iTunes App Store is the largest. But Apple’s store only supports a single platform in iOS4 devices, so GetJar goes after the remaining market, which is magnitudes larger. GetJar is a centralized software store for Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Java devices. With such a wide variety of supported platforms, the company is on pace to deliver 1.1 billion mobile applications over the next year.  GetJar’s app store is intelligent enough to determine what device a handset owner has, and only shows applications compatible with that device. And as a central repository, GetJar gains useful metrics and data on what consumers are downloading, which in turn can help developers. Today, for example, the company says that customers in India are downloading more productivity apps than consumers in Europe or North America. Armed with that type of information and support for multiple platforms, developers can target different types of software in regions where consumers are likely to buy it and thus earn per-download revenues.

Read More: Gigaom

There’s a land grab in social gaming, but at this point, it doesn’t look like there’s much room for advertisers.   On Tuesday, Disney acquired top-three developer Playdom for $563 million plus $200 million in incentives. Google, meanwhile, is reportedly in talks with Playdom, Electronic Arts and Zynga in a social-gaming push. And MTV Networks this month acquired social-game developer Social Express and plans to launch games based on its TV shows later this year.  With the draw of their established storylines and characters in social games — not to mention well-oiled marketing machines — established media companies hope they can use casual gaming to grow and interact with their already massive audiences.  “When media companies integrate their brands, it’s going to be easier for people to get into the games because they are familiar and that will expand the market,” said Justin Smith, founder of social-game research firm Inside Network.

Johnson & Johnson is Holding a Roster Review of its Estimated $3bn Media Business.

On Tuesday, Disney acquired top-three developer Playdom for $563 million plus $200 million in incentives. Google, meanwhile, is reportedly in talks with Playdom, Electronic Arts and Zynga in a social-gaming push. And MTV Networks this month acquired social-game developer Social Express and plans to launch games based on its TV shows later this year.  With the draw of their established storylines and characters in social games — not to mention well-oiled marketing machines — established media companies hope they can use casual gaming to grow and interact with their already massive audiences.  “When media companies integrate their brands, it’s going to be easier for people to get into the games because they are familiar and that will expand the market,” said Justin Smith, founder of social-game research firm Inside Network.

Read More: AdAge

Mixed Ad Message From Newspapers

Online advertising has turned into a good-news story for newspapers. Will it have legs?   Several newspaper publishers have reported solid growth in digital advertising revenue for the second quarter in recent days, helping offset continuing declines in print advertising. The New York Times, for instance, reported 21% growth in digital-ad revenue against a 6% drop in print advertising, keeping total advertising “roughly flat” with the year-earlier quarter. Digital now accounts for 26% of its total ad revenue, up from 22%.  But that is mainly because print revenue has shrunk so much, rather than because digital has got so big. At the Times Co., print-ad revenue for the news group fell $15 million, to $232 million, while its digital-ad revenue rose $8.3 million. Growth at the About.com portal also boosted digital.

Industrywide, print-ad revenue fell by nearly half between 2000 and 2009, a loss of about $24 billion. But newspapers’ online revenue totaled only $2.7 billion last year.  That includes online classifieds, a segment that has been under pressure from free alternatives. Display advertising, including video, is where newspapers have the most opportunity. The market still is relatively small, just $8 billion in U.S. revenue last year, or 35% of total Internet revenue, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. And newspapers are competing for display dollars with major portals like Yahoo and Google as well as lots of smaller sites.  One bright spot for newspapers is that their sites draw higher ad rates than most other categories, at least as measured by cost per thousand impressions, or CPMs, according to comScore. Precise CPM numbers are hard to come by, but these estimates offer some indication of the differences between sites.

Newspaper sites’ CPMs in April were $6.99, while the rate for portals was $2.60 and 56 cents for social-networking sites, comScore estimates. Newspapers’ traffic isn’t high enough for those rates to translate into huge dollars: Newspapers drew only 8.5 billion impressions in April, translating into a revenue estimate of $59.4 million for the month. Impressions were 69.7 billion for portals and 98 billion for social-networking sites, comScore reported, for revenue of $181 million and $54.7 million, respectively.  Professionally produced content helps make newspaper sites, at least those of major titles like the New York Times, attractive outlets for advertisers. Many marketers are reluctant to have their ads appear on heavily trafficked social-networking sites because of the uncertainty of the kind of content that appears on those sites.  Longer term, video and mobile advertising also offer hope. For now, though, investors need to be wary in assuming that newspapers’ digital potential can outweigh the challenges in their legacy business.

Read More: WSJ (Entire Article Here)

Ad networks play a critical role in delivering monumentally effective advertising.  Every day, I see smart and successful ad networks like Brand.net, Collective, and Media6Degrees delivering outstanding results with innovative technologies, quality service, and deep analysis that their clients deserve. (Disclosure: These are all clients of my company.) Ad networks were the early adopters of real-time bidding (a game-changer in display ad buying) and have developed cool concepts such as social targeting (e.g., if I buy an iPhone, marketers can rightfully assume my “friends” will too). Significantly, ad networks are the biggest users of the ad exchanges and their revolutionary auction-based marketplaces.  Despite these innovative approaches, unfortunately, ad networks still have gotten a bad rap because many in our industry have been focusing on the wrong things.  Much of the negative perception about ad networks stems from assumptions that they make high margins. Why is this bad? Think about grocery shopping. Did Whole Foods grow the squash and bananas behind the store in its own little urban farm? Of course not – it buys from rural farmers and charges margins on those products. I don’t have a relationship with the farmer in Honduras and don’t really have time to fly there for my daily banana, so I don’t worry about the margin Whole Foods has earned. It should be a pleasure to help good vendors make the margins they need to reinvest in their business.

Read More: ClickZ

An Amazon-Facebook Alliance to Make Shopping More Social

On Tuesday, Amazon.com took a step toward making the shopping experience on its Web site more social.  For many people, shopping is as much about socializing as it is about buying something — a chance to run into neighbors at the farmers’ market or spend time with a friend at the mall. And people who go shopping with a friend inevitably ask advice before buying. But it’s hard to do that when online shopping.  Now, Amazon shoppers who connect their Amazon and Facebook accounts transport their Facebook friends to Amazon — and can get recommendations from those friends on what to buy.  Amazon was an early leader in offering recommendations based on previous purchases and product searches, and in posting customer reviews on the site. But it has been slow to incorporate social features, while start-ups like Go Try It On, Polyvore and Swipely have been experimenting with ways to make online shopping more interactive.  Amazon’s new feature is the company’s small first step toward tapping into the world of social shopping.

Read More: Blogs.NYTimes.com

Disney Buys Playdom For Up To $763.2 Million

Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS) is making a big move into social games, with the purchase of fast-growing social game developer Playdom for up to $763.2 million. The deal includes a “total consideration” of $563.2 million, in addition to a performance-linked earn-out of up to $200 million.  In a release, which is included in full after the jump, Disney says that by buying Playdom it “will strengthen its already-robust digital gaming portfolio, acquire a first-rate management team and provide consumers new ways to interact with the company on popular social networks like Facebook and MySpace.” The company hints that it will now be bringing its “characters, stories and brands” to games on social networks.  By acquiring Playdom, Disney will also be getting an existing portfolio of popular social games, which includes Mobsters, the top title on MySpace (NSDQ: NWS). Over the last year, Playdom has been rapidly expanding its lineup of titles through the acquisition of eight gaming startups. It now ranks as the top social game developer on MySpace and the fourth largest on Facebook. The company, which is profitable, said late last year that its sales were near an annual run rate of $50 million.

Read More: PaidContent.org

Download the Ad Networks vs. Ad Exchanges Whitepaper

This whitepaper compares ad networks and ad exchanges from the perspective of web publishers looking to maximize their advertising revenue. It outlines the fundamentally different ways in which ad networks and ad exchanges sell publisher inventory, highlights the benefits of ad exchanges over ad networks in terms of driving up publisher revenue, and explains why an ad exchange is an essential component of every publishers’ monetization strategy.

Read More: OpenX.org

NBC Universal is getting into the ad network business, first selling inventory across a handful of its own properties, then possibly expanding into others.  The network, called Universal Audience Platform, launched today with 21 NBCU properties, including Bravotv.com, NBC.com, Oxygen.com and Syfy.com. While advertisers have previously had the ability to buy packages that spanned NBCU properties, this is the first time they can buy display inventory based on audience segment rather than brand.  Asked why NBCU had chosen now to launch an ad network, Peter Naylor, VP of digital sales, said the company “has the impressions and uniques” to form “a credible entrance to the market.” But that doesn’t mean it will limit itself to NBCU properties.  “This is phase one,” he said. “Phase two is going to be when we welcome in some other sites we don’t wholly own and operate.”  Just when – or if – that will come to pass isn’t yet clear, said Naylor. But he did confirm that discussions were under way to find other suitable properties to add to the network.  For now, the formation of UAP means that NBCU will be “dialing down” its dependence on third-party ad networks, said Naylor. The company has made deals with BlueKai, Nielsen and Quantcast to supply the demographic data that it will use to sell audience segments to advertisers.

Read More: ClickZ

Insights from OMMA Behavioral Conference on Display Marketing

Several members of the EF team attended the OMMA Behavioral Conference in San Francisco last week. The focus of the conference was to explore how behavioral targeting has changed from simply targeting audiences by the Web pages they have recently viewed to utilizing targeting data from multiple sources such as social networks, site and search re-targeting, and various third party data providers. Because there are so many targeting channels, attributing conversion to the appropriate source has become very difficult for advertisers. The difficulty of attribution modeling quickly became a hot topic at the conference.  Abhishek Pani, our Director of Research & Quantitative Marketing, discussed a new attribution framework in his presentation titled “Evaluating the Marginal Value of Display”.  Optimal budget allocation across channels is the fundamental problem that advertisers want to solve but given the lack of proper attribution models, they are forced to rely on simple heuristics to allocate revenues. Current attribution offerings in the industry ignore important variables such as the effect of time and cross channel demand elasticity (change in demand in channel A that results from a small change in spend in channel B). Incorrect attribution will result in sub-optimal budget allocation and lower the return on advertising investment. Because our platform manages across all channels of advertising (search, display, and soon social), we are able to measure, experiment, and build very accurate allocation models based on marginal contributions of each channel.  Abhishek discussed our modeling strategy in greater detail during his presentation.

Read More: blog.eFrontier.com

BuzzLogic to Announce New Social Media Ad Units

By combining ads with content BuzzLogic believes it can give consumers using social media a better ad experience and better integrate advertising with the content against which it is presented.   “We’ve been running all kinds of IAB sanctioned rich media for a while, but the BuzzRoll product is much more customized and gives marketers more options,” said Peter O’Sullivan, BuzzLogic’s VP of sales, in an interview with paidContent.  “BuzzRoll, as a social media ad unit, will drive greater engagement among blog readers, since it encourages them to share everything from a company’s blog content or a white paper, and Twitter feeds, to video and Facebook apps. This is just a simpler way for marketers to do it.  For example, if a product wanted to associate itself with a green image it could place an ad on a blog about green issues and, by careful keyword selection, program it to pull in content about the topic from around the Internet. That information is then scrolled along the bottom of the rich media ads.  According to ClickZ, the units can also host video and Facebook applications via Facebook’s APIs.

Read More: BizReport

It was a typically vexing week for Facebook. On the one hand, the social-networking service signed up its 500 millionth active user. On the other hand, it was found to be one of the least popular private-sector companies in the United States by the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Apparently, Americans were more satisfied filing their taxes online than they were posting updates on their Facebook page.  It is a continuing contradiction: Facebook is widely criticized for shifting its terms of service and for disclosing private information — and yet millions of people start accounts each month.  Analysts always grasp for analogies to explain Facebook’s tortured relationship with its users. Facebook has been called the sterile suburbs to the gritty urban Internet; it is a “walled garden” in the organic messiness of the Web; it is Russia under Vladimir Putin; it is (and this one stings in tech circles) today’s AOL.  But perhaps the most telling metaphor compares Facebook to the other companies lurking at the bottom of the American Customer Satisfaction Index: cable companies, wireless telephone service providers. Utilities. Here are services everyone uses, no matter how much people dislike the companies that provide them.  Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argues that Facebook fits that mold.  On her blog in May, she posted:  “I hate all of the utilities of my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them.”

Read More: NYTimes.com

An Ad Model Poised For A Comeback

It’s challenging for media buyers to differentiate among ad networks. From the network side, it’s difficult to develop a product positioning that is truly ownable within the space. In an era where anyone can start an ad network, virtually overnight, any networks getting traction with ad buyers quickly find themselves swimming in a sea of “me too” imitators.  On the publisher’s side of the equation, it’s even more difficult to tell which networks to use. It’s one of the primary challenges of the chief revenue officer to balance direct sales forces, ad networks, exchanges, and new ad platforms in such a way as to deliver a maximum return from month to month on a site’s pool of available ad inventory.  There’s a check that comes in from each network partner each month. From a CPM standpoint, the price paid is abysmally low when compared to deals struck by the publisher’s direct sales force. But it’s a check nonetheless, and most publishers choose to get a check for the incremental sales, rather than rely completely on direct sales channels and risk lower overall returns.  Simply put, two ad revenue streams are better than one, even if one undercuts the pricing of the other one, and publishers are unsure what’s being done with data collected from network and exchange campaigns. Even though many would see it as short-sighted, short-term revenue, pressure usually makes the publisher take the check rather than cut the channel to support the direct sales channel.

Read More: iMediaConnection

Closing the Tech Divide

If there was a single familiar refrain from digital shops over the past decade, it was that their older, traditional-agency brethren “didn’t get it” when it came to digital. But lately, that widely acknowledged gap has begun to narrow to the point where “older” agencies can claim more success in some areas of digital marketing.  Take the recent Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” digital campaign, an effort that is already a textbook example of how an advertiser can make itself a vital part of digital culture. The campaign didn’t come from any of the digital-agency stalwarts like R/GA, AKQA or Razorfish. Instead, it came from Wieden + Kennedy, a shop not long ago often labeled as wedded to TV and print.  The Old Spice success followed a strong showing for non-digital specialists in this year’s awards shows. At Cannes, for example, top honors in the Cyber category went to Wieden for Nike Livestrong’s “Chalkbot” and DDB Sweden for Volkswagen’s “Fun Theory.” The Cyber Agency of the Year Award went to Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

Read More: AdWeek