Adnxs (AppNexus): What is it and what does it do?
What is adnxs.com?
Adnxs.com is run by AppNexus, a company that provides technology, data and analytics to help companies buy and sell online display advertising.
The technology it uses can plug into other advertising serving platforms, such as Google’s Doubleclick, and “data aggregators”, such as Quantcast, which provide behavioural targeting. In essence, this makes AppNexus an an “advertising exchange for advertising exchanges”.
AppNexus offers a number of different services, including:
Ad exchange An auction marketplace where advertisers can bid for ad slots on certain websites.
Data aggregator/supplier The company collects data from a range of online and sometimes offline sources and provides data to advertisers directly or via its exchange.
Demand-side platform Technology provider that enables advertisers to buy ad inventory from other ad exchanges.
Read more: theguardian
How to Manage Your Brand’s Social Life
Consumers are investing serious amounts of their time in social-media platforms, with 16.6% of all online minutes now spent on social networks. With so much focus on social as a marketing tool, it’s worth stopping and mapping out a smart social strategy. A new Ad Age Insights report, “Managing Your Brand’s Social Life,” aims to help brand managers plan for which platforms should get the investment of limited staff and time, what to consider when creating internal social-media guidelines, whether to handle social media in-house or outsource it and what measures a brand should be looking for to get at return on investment. You can measure the ROI of social media, but it may not get you far.
“There is definitely a quantifiable ROI, but the truth of the matter is that it’s very difficult to measure ROI within social media,” said Edelman Digital Senior VP Michael Brito. If a straightforward numbers game is what you’re after, Olivier Blanchard, author of “Social Media ROI” notes that the ROI numbers game remains the same: “It’s still purely a financial measure.” But, he adds, “engagement is not a measure of ROI. There’s no way to actually calculate the relationship between a dollar investment in a particular activity and the number of likes.”
Read more: AdAgeDigital
5 Ways to Add Value to Your Banner Ads
Your banner ads comply with your brand’s style guide. They’re consistent with your other marketing materials. They feature a strong call to action and functionality that’s intuitive to the consumer.
So why aren’t people clicking?
Online banners – regardless of their size, shape, or format – are held to a high standard by Internet users. Consumers know what they like, and what they loathe. In fact, they’re experts on the subject (a massive daily dose of just about anything will do that to a person).
This attitude compels digital marketers to keep their creative fresh, but it isn’t always fresh enough. It doesn’t always leave site users nodding their heads in appreciation or thinking, “Now that’s a useful ad.” What follows are five ways to enhance your existing and upcoming banner ads to stimulate clicks, shares, and buys.
1. Track mouse movements. Internet users may feel that they’ve seen it all in rich media advertising, but several jaw-dropping technologies are still relatively underutilized. One such technology is mouse tracking. Some brands allow mouse movements to alter the look of their banners (a concept so hip even Google is using it). Others take the more traditional route by inviting users to hover over in-banner hot spots.
One ad for Royal Caribbean created by MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) combined mouse tracking technology with an expandable banner in an IAB Sidekick format. In it, the user could hover over hot spots throughout an image of one of the company’s cruise ships to reveal information about special services and features, and click to get even more detail…all without leaving the site page.
With Help From Facebook Timeline, Viddy Becomes Top Free iPhone App
With the skyrocketing popularity and billion-dollar sale of Instagram, there’s an ongoing race to apply Instagram’s wildly successful photo sharing model to mobile video. There are a number of startups vying to claim the “Instagram for Video” title, with Socialcam, Viddy, Klip, Mobli, and even the infamous Color all in the running. Yet, today brings evidence that Viddy may now be the one to beat, as the social video sharing app became the top free iPhone app on the App Store — with much of that growth emanating from its new Facebook Timeline app.
Viddy, which celebrated its first birthday on April 11th, enables users to shoot, customize, and share 15-second video clips directly from their mobile devices. Its video creation platform allows users to choose from custom video overlays and audio effects from their favorite musicians, movies, and celebrities, and share their short video clips across across social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubes.
The startup closed a $6 million Series A round back in February from investors like Battery Ventures, Greycroft Ventures, Qualcomm, and Bessemer Ventures, bringing its total funding to $8.2 million. Viddy saw over 40 million app views in January, thanks to the effort the startup has put into recruiting celebrities and influencers custom premium Video FX layers, giving artists, movie studios, etc. a way to promote their brand through mobile video.
CEO Moore On 24/7 Media: We’re A Tech Company, Not An Agency
At a time when data and technology are an integral part of the advertising/marketing chain, the concept of the traditional ad holding company is changing.
Once thought of as mere tools to be accessed on an ad hoc basis, data and tech are now central to the process of media buying and planning. That was probably part of the thinking of WPP Group’s Sir Martin Sorrell five years ago when he surprised many tech M&A observers and beat out Microsoft to acquire interactive shop 24/7 Real Media for $649 million, which last week shortened its name to 24/7 Media. It followed that small, but noteworthy, bit of news with word of a strategic partnership with DG’s MediaMind, that is intended to put third-party online ad serving and TV ad delivery squarely in 24/7 Media’s hands.
Although unrelated, the two announcements reflect the changes taking place in the larger business of advertising: on the one hand, it’s about the nature of expanding the function of the interactive disciplines within the agency realm.
It’s also about figuring out how to constantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of digital buys along audience buying by asking whether its best to build these skills in-house or out. The answer, Dave Moore, 24/7 Media’s chairman and CEO, told us, is sometimes all of the above.
Read more: AdExchanger
7 Ways to Make Your Brand More Pinteresting
Pinterest has recently emerged as a top social media site, and last month it was officially the third biggest online web property. It seems that Pinterest emerged from nowhere, and it is now the quickest growing independent web property ever.
For those who are new to Pinterest, it is an online pinboard where you can pin content that is interesting to you, organized on different boards.
Why Is Pinterest Great for Marketers? Pinterest is powerful for marketers for a few reasons. First and most importantly, people are on Pinterest and when they are there they are open to exploring. Fish where the fish are.
Marketing is about building awareness and getting in front of your audience, and as your audience flocks to Pinterest, so should you. Second, and perhaps surprising to some, Pinterest refers more traffic to other websites than LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+ combined. This is because people in Pinterest are in browsing mode – they are looking for new sites and interesting content. The content on Pinterest is all linked to the originating sources. This means that it can be a huge source of traffic to your website. ”Pinterest is the #1 source of referral traffic to my website…”
Read more: ClickZ
