Report: Nearly 17% Of Exchange Ads ‘High Risk’

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

interCLICK Prez Katz On Strong Q2 Results

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

Zynga Nets $150MM Investment, Is Turning Japanese

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