AdMeld, a New York City based ad inventory optimizer, just closed on a $15 million round of venture funding, in the latest sign that the real-time bidding (RTB) market for display advertising is on fire.  Last month, Google paid a reported $70 million for demand-side platform Invite Media. And just a few weeks ago, brand safety startup AdSafe, which will increasingly work with RTB platforms, raised $7.5 million.  The rise of RTB is the biggest story of 2010 in online advertising, and has been written about extensively in ad industry publications. But people outside of advertising don’t seem to know anything about it.

Read More: BusinessInsider

A Peek Inside the M&A Playbooks of Technology’s Top Acquirers

Last night a group of M&A gurus from the corporate development teams at top tech acquirers Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, Facebook and Twitter gathered to share insights into their business with a group of startups at a fancy-pants Los Altos Hills, Calif. mansion. Though Facebook and Google might have been the most notable active acquirers lately, everyone on the panel said they are out shopping. They each have a bit of a different style, and a bit of a different target startup. Below are the most notable bits from each participant:

Google‘s Amin Zoufonoun said that he looks at three types of acquisitions: a proven product and team, an uncertain big bet, or market and tech leadership (like YouTube and DoubleClick). He said recent acquisitions by Google and other companies like Apple point to the fact that mobile is not a core part of the DNA of many tech giants. As for advice, he warned startups that they always underestimate how long it takes to close an acquisition; for Google, deals usually take three to four months. As for areas he’s interested in, Zoufonoun said he thinks music is overhyped (an interesting comment given Google is reportedly looking to make a play in this space), and mobile user interfaces are underhyped.

Cisco‘s Derek Idemoto talked up the value of post-acquisition integration. His company has been incredibly acquisitive, with 140 deals in the last 20-odd years. Idemoto bragged that 75 percent of acquired employees are still at Cisco after four years. He said he thinks video is underhyped, and that he’s particularly interested in data. “The most, and most relevant data might win,” he explained.

Read More: Gigaom.com

Why Agencies Must Lead The Technology Charge

Countless articles have been written in recent years putting agencies in the hot seat to adapt their business models or die. Why? Never-ending budget cuts and the digitization of the marketing landscape have produced two key trends currently threatening the livelihood of the traditional agency:

• Media has become digital, multi-channel, multi-platform, and decentralized. These elements are forcing media publishers to be more creative in how inventory is packaged and sold (e.g., bundling offers cross channels from print, online, to mobile). Furthermore, media companies are tired of losing revenue to agencies for the production of creative assets and are thus building and buying their own capabilities in house.
• Innovations in technologies, from brand monitoring, audience targeting, and media planning and buying technologies, to social media and mobile content solutions, drive when and how brands connect with consumers. Many of these technologies are being developed outside of the agency ecosystem.

Read More: iMediaConnection

The backlash of large Web publishers against ad networks in the last couple of years would suggest that ad networks were taking over Internet advertising. But according to a data released Wednesday by Kantar Media, ads sold directly by publishers generated 78% of total impressions delivered from December 2009 through January 2010, compared to 22% from ad networks.  Among ad networks, the Fox Audience Network generated 34.7% of impressions, followed by the AOL Advertising Network (23.4%), ValueClick (14%) and 24/7 Media (13.6%). The other 25 ad networks tracked by Kantar for the study collectively accounted for 14.3% of impressions. The figures underscore the concentration of buys among the top four ad networks. (The study did not include data from Google’s AdSense network.)  The media research firm revealed the findings in connection with a new ad network tracking service it has added to its broader Internet analytics offerings. In addition to the 29 ad networks, the results reflect data collected from more than 4,500 sites ranging from premium properties to long-tail sites.

Read More: MediaPost

WPP Spent 20% on Digital in ‘O9, Building New Ad Tech

“There is no digital without data.” That was the mantra at WPP’s investor event last week, where the holding company said its media agencies spent 20 percent of their budgets in North America last year on digital. The data-driven firm talked digital at an investor-focused event in London last week, during which senior WPP executives placed a firm emphasis on the company’s data and technology strategies, with emerging practices such as real-time bidding and sophisticated behavioral ad targeting forming a central theme of the day’s presentations. Following an introduction from group CEO Martin Sorrell, speakers from the firm’s agencies including Wunderman’s David Sable, GroupM’s North American CEO, Rob Norman, and Brian Lesser, GM of WPP’s Media Innovation Group, presented on WPP’s outlook with regards to digital ad technologies, and the way the company is integrating and incorporating those technologies across its businesses. According to Norman, digital accounted for 20 percent of the group’s overall media spend in North America in 2009, of which 18 percent went to paid search. While search accounts for a far greater portion of online ad spending as a whole, WPP’s clients typically are brand advertisers that don’t spend as much on search.

Read More: ClickZ

Apple to Charge a Premium to Put Ads in Mobile Apps

Setting a high bar for its debut in the advertising business, Apple Inc. aims to charge close to $1 million for ads on its mobile devices this year and perhaps even more to be among the first, ad executives say.  Apple is hitting the road to showcase its new mobile-device advertising capability, dubbed iAd, and has indicated it could charge as much as $10 million to be part of a handful of marketers at the launch, according to a person familiar with the matter.  Ad executives say they are used to paying between $100,000 and $200,000 for similar mobile deals.  Earlier this month, Apple unveiled iAd, a software system to offer ads in the applications available in its App Store. Ads are likely to start appearing in applications on its iPhone and iPod Touch devices in June, and its iPad later in the year, according to the person familiar with the matter.  Apple is making waves on Madison Avenue with its price tag, which comes with initial demands for greater control over advertisers’ marketing campaigns.  “It’s a hefty sum,” says Phuc Truong, managing director at Mobext, a mobile marketing business owned by Havas SA whose clients include Sears, Choice Hotels, Amtrak and Volvo. “What Apple is trying to do is certainly above and beyond what’s been done in the past.”

An Apple spokeswoman said the company will sell and serve the ads and declined further comment, except to reiterate that app developers will receive 60% of the revenue. Apple gets the other 40%. Apple on Wednesday said it has scheduled a developers’ conference for June 7-11, where it is expected to unveil its next iPhone. It would be up to developers whether they want to include ads in their apps, although the financial incentive is there. A handful of other companies sell ads that appear in Apple device applications, including AdMob Inc., which Google Inc. announced it would acquire last year for $750 million. AdMob says Apple’s entry into ad selling is going to boost competition and development in the space, says Jason Spero, vice president of AdMob North America. Zaw Thet, chief executive of mobile ad firm 4INFO Inc., said Apple’s move is likely to spur other mobile ad startups to shift the focus of their developments away from the iPhone to other mobile systems, such as Google’s Android. Despite the high price, ad executives at agencies from Boston to New York and San Francisco to Los Angeles have crowded into conference rooms in recent weeks to listen to the tech company’s pitch for iAd. Discussions over possible deals are ongoing but several ad executives said they are beginning to prepare creative ideas for campaigns.

One example Apple has been showing advertisers is an ad for Nike’s Air Jordan basketball shoe, says Baba Shetty, chief media officer at Boston-based ad agency Hill Holiday, owned by Interpublic Group. When a user is in an application, an animated banner ad appears on the border of the screen, along with an iAd logo. If the user taps on the ad, it expands across the screen, displaying a video, an interactive store locator and exclusive offers at local stores, among other features.  “It was very easy to think about the several minutes of interaction time consumers can spend with the ad. It’s incredibly attractive,” Mr. Shetty says. Apple is planning to charge advertisers a penny each time a consumer sees a banner ad, ad executives say. When a user taps on the banner and the ad pops up, Apple will charge $2. Under large ad buys, such as the $1 million package, costs would rack up to reach $1 million with the various views and taps.  The audience is sizable: Apple has sold 85 million iPhone and iPod Touches so far and estimates that users spend about 30 minutes a day using applications. Marketers will be able to target ads to groups of users based on consumers’ download preferences from its iTunes store, according to ad executives. For instance, a marketer could choose to show its ads to people who have downloaded financial applications or reggaeton music, horror movies or comedy TV shows.  Marketers also will be able to target ads to users in a general location like a city, although they cannot target ads to individual consumers or access personal details.

Apple is seeking high quality ads from big-name marketers for the launch, ad executives say. The ads will go through an approval process, and Apple will build the ads itself during the first couple of months to make sure they work well and attain a certain aesthetic and functionality, ad executives say. Eventually, Apple plans to create a developer kit so that agencies will be able to design and create the ads themselves.

The process is causing tension among some ad directors, who are hesitant to give up control.  “As a creative director, I can completely understand that they created this new baby and they want to make sure it gets born looking gorgeous. But as a creative director, I don’t feel completely comfortable letting Apple do the creative,” says Lars Bastholm, chief digital creative officer at WPP’s Ogilvy. Marketers have been much slower to buy mobile ads than expected, largely because consumers had yet to visit mobile Web sites in meaningful numbers and the process of creating mobile ad campaigns was a technical and logistical feat.  Apple isn’t making that any easier, with requirements that advertisers use special technologies for its system, says Jordan Rohan, an Internet analyst with Thomas Weisel Partners.  But, ad executives say that if Apple nails its pitch, it could open up the gates for mobile advertising.  “I think the tipping point has come,” says Mark Read, chief executive of WPP Digital. “The absolute revenues now are tiny, but you can see how these things are starting to fit together.”

WSJ Article (Free)

Marketers that are eager to reach the perfect consumer track campaign budgets carefully, but ultimately want to have the ability to connect online and offline activity. Rocket Fuel is working on technology that will allow marketers to attribute online clicks to offline sales, Richard Frankel, Rocket Fuel president, tells MediaPost.  Advertisers offer a variety of ways to approach the problem of attributing clicks, research or ad views to the sale of an item. Some have tied codes on printable or mobile coupons to the in-store sale.  Frankel points to another approach: find a source that has sales data and build a bridge from that data to clicks on display ads the company supports.  “It mostly deals with cookies and IP data,” Frankel says. “There are a few companies that have this type of data, but they haven’t figured out how to work with companies like ours to make it actionable.”  That’s one problem that Rocket Fuel needs to tackle to make it work. Another is making it easy for advertisers to use the tools. And that’s not a simple task, Frankel says, because many companies that own the data don’t know how to support data projects on the Web.  The road map should put the tools in the hands of advertisers and marketers some time by June. Theoretically, the tools also could help advertisers understand that different types of media campaigns have real sales impact.

Read More: MediaPost

Watch Video From the AppNexus Summit

The AppNexus Summit focused on the evolution of ad networks and aggregators in the new world of real-time advertising. We moved beyond the hype and brought together a diverse group of speakers to share ideas and perspectives on what’s really working in online advertising. It was a fantastic day, and here are some highlights:

•   A keynote fireside chat with Aaron Easterly, General Manager of Network Strategy & Monetization at Microsoft, Johnathan Hsu, CEO of 24/7 Real Media, and Brian O’Kelley, CEO of AppNexus.
• A panel discussion on the business challenges facing ad networks with executives from AOL Advertising.com, interCLICK, Traffic Marketplace, XTEND, AudienceScience, TidalTV. Watch the video: What Works for Ad Networks: Business Challenges 
• We examined the technology issues and innovations in our industry with leaders from Chitika, Dapper, Rocket Fuel, Peer39 and eXelate. Watch the video: What Works for Ad Networks: Technology Challenges 
• John Ebbert from AdExchanger.com led a conversation on ad exhanges and inventory aggregators with perspectives from Pubmatic, AdMeld, The Rubicon Project, OpenX and Time Inc. Digital. Watch the video: The Role of Ad Exchanges, Publishers & Inventory Aggregators.

Read More: AppNexus.com

Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead Archive, scheduled to open soon at the University of California at Santa Cruz, will be a mecca for academics of all stripes: from ethno­musicologists to philosophers, sociologists to historians. But the biggest beneficiaries may prove to be business scholars and management theorists, who are discovering that the Dead were visionary geniuses in the way they created “customer value,” promoted social networking, and did strategic business planning.

Read More: TheAtlantic.com

For years, Web media planners have lived in fear of The Screenshot. That’s the e-mailed evidence from a client that shows its ads running where they shouldn’t, such as a pornographic Web site. More brand advertisers than ever are turning to the Web and they are now seeking to solve this problem by engaging verification tools and services to alert them when their ads run on sites they deem unacceptable. Misplaced ads aren’t a problem unique to the Internet, but the digital medium makes the problem even more acute. A client and agency can easily pick up a magazine and see their ad ran as agreed to on the insertion order. Yet the Web is incredibly fragmented, with attention spread across millions of sites. That’s led to an automated system of ad placement that is far from transparent, with many ad networks not even showing clients where their ads ran.  “There’s more opacity in the system than there’s ever been before,” said Joe Mele, managing director of media and marketing at Razorfish. “There’s less visibility into what’s going on. For some clients, that’s just not OK.”  Service providers in the ad-verification space, including DoubleVerify, AdSafe and AdXpose, use tracking pixels and human analysis to identify misplaced ads and give advertisers the ability to get them taken down — not to mention refunds from publishers and networks.

Read More:  AdWeek

Attribution or Media Mix Models for Search Marketing?

I’ve never been a big fan of attribution models and have always preferred econometric models that do their best to generate a practical media mix model.  I’ve explained my reasons in different ways to clients, prospects, and show attendees, but I doubt I’ve communicated them as clearly as Avinash Kaushik did recently in his SES NY keynote. Kaushik pointed out the lunacy of some of the attribution models being used by search marketers who think of themselves as fairly advanced. Also, I’ve always been a fan of monitoring bounce rates of landing pages as closely as one monitors eventual conversion to leads or sales.  One of Kaushik’s now-famous pearls of wisdom regarding bounce rates is fully self-explanatory and never grows old: “I came, I puked, I left.” Clearly, for most of us looking at any analytics program, it’s boggling how high bounce rates can be, even for our most relevant and best-performing pages. Getting the bounce rate below 50 percent is doable, but it takes a lot of landing page tuning, copy testing, and layout adjustment.  If you take one thing from Kaushik’s crusade for better user experiences, it should be “watch your bounce rate.” While not everyone is capable of designing media mix and marginal attribution models, everyone has the ability to start improving bounce rates now.

Read More: ClickZ

The Display Market in 2010 – Revolution or Anarchy?

In the eleven years I have worked in and covered the display advertising market, I have never seen such a frenzy as I do today. In the past week, I  learned of three more DSP’s, two data companies and an attribution vendor.  Agencies are also in the game this time around. So what is causing this pile-on of new ad technologies to the market? There are a few things:

- Leveled playing field on the exchanges: The ad exchanges allow for innovation in ad optimization and bidding. Additionally, small companies can suddently compete for inventory that used to be locked up by ad network contracts.

- Better technologies: Cookieless tracking, container tags, real time bidding, data targeting and dynamic ad generation are all innovations that are hitting the hocky stick curve right about…now.

- Opening purse strings: We know that display advertising spending was essentially flat from 2008 to 2009. It appears that 2010 will show improvement. Marketers are getting budgets back and are ready to spend them.

- Desperate publishers: Publishers are grasping to find ways to make more money on their sites, so they are handing over the reigns to sell side platforms to help them optimize.

Read More: Blogs.Forrester.com

We’ve heard it all.  Oversupply.  Glut in inventory.  Commoditization.  This exciting new era in digital marketing will be the death of the publisher.  Providers of quality content simply won’t survive.  All people care about is pushing for a lower eCPM and driving the cost down.  Yadda, Yadda, Yadda.  I go to a lot of conferences and attend a lot of panels (basically I don’t turn down free beer) and representatives of the buy-side always seems so charged up while the sell-side looks like they woke up to learn they managed the Pittsburgh Pirates. But it doesn’t make sense.   Digital spending continues to grow, budgets continue to shift online, and display spending is predicted to grow at a strong rate over the next five years.   Meanwhile, the number of people online has plateaued.  More dollars divided by same number of users should equal rising revenue and profits for publishers.  Right?  Well, actually, no, that’s not what is happening.  Publishers are seeing downward trends in pricing and are finding that buyers don’t actually care about them or their site, they simply want to find a specific audience and, barring porn and malware, they don’t care how or where they get it.  And the chorus screams “Commoditization!”  I don’t actually believe there is commoditization of display media.  And while the symptoms of it do exist, I believe this can and will be solved.  Commoditization implies that all individual units of a good are the same and are capable of mutual substitution.   I’ve seen site level performance reports and the data simply does not bear out that all media is created equal.  Rather than commoditization, what we have here is insufficient tools for buyers and sellers to really value impressions.  It all looks the same, or at least I can’t figure out how it’s different, so I’ll assume it’s all the same and not worry about it.  That’s how buyers are thinking.

Read More: DisplayAndSearch.com

Magnetic Makes Search Data Accessible for All Demand Side Platforms

Magnetic (www.magnetic.is) announced partnerships with several leading demand-side platforms (DSPs) today, including Invite Media, MediaMath, XA.net and [x+1]. The Magnetic data marketplace provides DSPs, advertisers and publishers with user search data, which is then used as a key indicator of intent that can be applied for any ad campaign. Other DSP partners include DataXu, Lucid Media and Rocket Fuel Inc.. Interactive media and data buyers interested in accessing the marketplace can visit www.magnetic.is or send email to signup@magnetic.is.

By making search data easily accessible to DSPs, Magnetic is evolving a new class of ‘search DSPs’ and empowering their businesses with the potential of the SEM market:

• “Our partnership with Magnetic offers our clients easy access to search targeting data,” said Nathaniel Turner, Invite Media’s Founder and CEO. “Our Bid Manager© platform gives media buyers a competitive edge through the effectiveness of SEM on highly targeted display media across a massive pool of inventory.”
• “MediaMath is focused squarely on delivering best-in-class technology that enables agencies to better manage day-to-day strategy without always having to contend with execution,” said Marta Martinez, MediaMath’s senior vice president of operations and business development. “Integrating Magnetic’s data into our industry-leading TerminalOne platform further enhances our ability to drive results for enterprise-class clients.”
• “Our CPMatic ad platform now allows large and small advertisers alike instant, easy access to keyword data for their display campaigns,” said Rob Leathern, CEO of XA.net. “Whether they are buying self-service via cpmatic.com or via our account team, every advertiser can leverage their keyword learnings to immediately benefit using search data from the Magnetic marketplace.”
• “We’ve been encouraged by data we’ve applied through Magnetic,” said John Nardone, CEO of [x+1]. “Together, we’ve allowed marketers to identify high-quality prospects who have made their purchasing intentions known. With the precise segmentation capabilities of our online targeting platform, enhanced with Magnetic’s search data, we are making display advertising more relevant than ever before.”

Read More: Magnetic.is

Software Is Media

I’ve made this point in several talks I’ve given recently so for those of you who attended or watched the talks on video aren’t new to this meme. But I thought I’d share it with the AVC community.  As software has moved from running on local machines to running in the browser a number of important things have happened. One of the most important changes is software has become media.  Here’s a definition of media I pulled from TechTerms

“media” refers to various means of communication. For example, television, radio, and the newspaper are different types of media. The term can also be used as a collective noun for the press or news reporting agencies.

Media are the tools that are used to communicate. And software that runs on the web is part of the media landscape. That has certainly been true for things like online publications and online video and they are accepted as part of the media landscape. But I think all software should be characterized and thought of as media.

Read More: AVC.com

With the inauguration of its ad model, Twitter has made its first direct overture to the thousands of companies – big and small – that use it to converse with customers and build awareness. The resulting ad product, “Promoted Tweets,” is both more and less than advertisers might have hoped. More, in that Twitter has promised targeted ads will eventually appear directly in users’ Twitter streams and on third party clients. And less, in that the program will begin modestly, showing up only in search results – where CEO Dick Costolo confessed Twitter’s volume of page impressions is tiny. “It’s a very small piece of the overall traffic,” COO Dick Costolo said yesterday at the AdAge Digital Conference. Additionally, Twitter is still vague on many of the platform’s crucial components – such as how pricing and targeting will work. But in his comments Costolo unleashed enough details to set agency execs’ mouths watering – and in some cases scratching their heads – as they dashed off point-of-view statements to clients. Below is a summary of what’s known, and what’s not, about Twitter’s new ad platform:

Read More: ClickZ

Calculating The True Cost Per Acquisition

I had a conversation with a travel CMO excited at finally having cracked the code on her Display retargeting campaigns (prior to Google offering its own version of this link). Her cost per acquisition/booking (CPA) from this campaign was, let’s say, $18. And, let’s say she makes an average of $36 on each booking. So, great — she’s got it figured out, with a 100% return on ad spend (ROAS). Well, not exactly. While retargeting is a great tactic to get lost leads back to your site, what the vendors won’t tell you is that it’s greatly biased to overemphasize conversions if evaluated on a post-impression (a/k/a view-through) attribution model. Don’t get me wrong — I, for one, am a believer in the post-impression conversion. While Display ads have suffered from declining click-through rates since they debuted in the 1990s, consumers are still measurably affected by them and clearly respond to them to some degree. They may see that great deal to Cancun and go to your site on their own, and a great many consumers do this (there is even evidence that good Display drives search). So, clearly, I believe there is some effect that isn’t related to clicks.

Read More: MediaPost

Rubicon Unveils ‘Permission’ System, Shifts Display Market Control Back To Publishers

In a bid to help publishers regain control over the sale of their inventory through third-party ad networks and exchanges, the Rubicon Project this morning unveiled a new platform that it claims will “balance the digital advertising ecosystem.” The new platform, dubbed “Permission Control 2.0,” is an apparent move to give publishers tools for dealing with the shift toward so-called “demand-side” players who have shifted some of the online display marketplace power to ad agencies and media buyers. Rubicon described the system as a new “infrastructure” that will give publishers “complete visibility and control over which demand partners can sell their inventory, at what level of transparency and at what price.” In a related move, Rubicon said it is simultaneously launching a “real-time bidding” (RTB) beta program with a limited number of undisclosed publishers it claims will enable them to “safely capture all potential ad revenue, from all buying methods.” Rubicon did not disclose details about how the permission control system or the real-time bidding beta work, but said that combined, they would give publishers the ability to see and control “money spent through all industry buying methods – including real-time bidding (RTB), cookies, audience segments, content/contextual segments and site buys – without putting their pricing and direct sales efforts at risk.”

Read More: MediaPost

Ad technology firm The Rubicon Project on Monday announced two key hires in Ben Trenda as vice president of U.S. Demand, and Eric Matza as director of product marketing. Formerly VP of global partnerships at AOL, Trenda is tasked with growing relationships with ad networks, and other third-party sales channel partners. Meanwhile, Matza — former vice president of product management at email services provider Experian — will be responsible for bringing ad technology and data products to market. Taking direct aim at Google’s DoubleClick ad platform, The Rubicon Project recently hired Allen & Company to help finance expansion and possible acquisitions. The company also issued a “manifesto,” in which it criticized the current leaders in the ad-server technology market [read: DoubleClick] for failing to measure up to its own “publisher-centric” standards. Falling in line, Trenda took the opportunity on Monday to hammer home the idea. “The company does not sell directly to advertisers, so unlike other players in the digital advertising marketplace it doesn’t compete with its publisher clients or channel partners, and it doesn’t black box deals — all parties can safely and profitably get the transparency they want and need,” he said. As vice president of global partnerships at AOL, Trenda worked on agency partnerships, global programs and Latin America. Prior to AOL, Trenda led a West Coast sales team at Advertising.com. He has also held roles in the Strategic Alliances group at Yahoo and before that, in sales at Overture and GoTo.

Read More: MediaPost

5 Reasons Digital Agencies Will Fail

I’m not your typical agency exec. In fact, I never stepped foot into an agency until I started my own. I earned my BA/MA in anthropology and sociology, worked for the original social networks (associations) in the late 80s, and then jumped into the interactive publishing business in 1993. So, perhaps my view on what will make or break today’s digital agency is a bit skewed. Or perhaps it is simply unclouded. In a nutshell, there is far too much focus today on the technology (the “digital”) and not enough focus on providing a communications service (the “agency”). And that’s a dangerous land for any agency to live in, whether it is pure-play search, social, or a true full-service digital shop. Let’s face it: We are not the technologists — we have Microsoft, Apple, and MIT Media Lab for that. But we are the communicators and should be focused on what we do best — the creation and delivery of communication that connects with an audience on a rational and emotional level, ultimately driving revenue for a client. With that in mind, here are the top five reasons certain digital agencies will fail within the next five years.

Read More: iMediaConnection

AdMob’s iPad SDK Coming In A Few Weeks

Mobile ad network AdMob — which is in the process of being purchased by Google — tells us that its first advertising product for Apple’s new iPad should be available to developers in the next two weeks. AdMob marketing boss Jason Spero tells us that his company is currently working on figuring out how iPad ads will look like and how they’ll work. Spero thinks the ads’ appearance may more closely resemble online ads than the small mobile ads that AdMob offers for the iPhone and other mobile phones. But he thinks the back-end of iPad ads may more closely resemble mobile ads than online ads. (He should hope so — he’d much rather have AdMob running iPad ads than Web-focused ad networks like Yahoo or AOL.) Why would publishers give their iPad inventory to a mobile ad network when they could probably get more money from an online ad network? One reason for this is that the iPad does not support Adobe’s Flash plugin, which most Web ad networks use for multimedia ads. So publishers can’t just copy and paste their Web ad code into their iPad apps. Another is that the “after-the-click” activity on the iPad may be different than it is for Web sites, and mobile ad networks seem to understand this better. On the Web, after users click most ads, it just takes them to another Web site. On an iPhone, it could take them to a map, the App Store, a mini-site, somewhere in iTunes, etc. It seems mobile ad networks may be able to offer a better experience here.

Read More: SFGate

Microsoft and Yahoo received approval from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Union to move forward on the search deal aimed at taking market share from search engine giant Google. In a joint announcement Thursday, Microsoft and Yahoo reported that the two will now turn attention to implementing the deal that should begin in the coming days. It will involve transitioning Yahoo’s algorithmic and paid-search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ search advertisers globally, according to the companies. Aside from periodic phone, email and webinars, the two companies will communicate the transition to advertisers through a dedicated Web site. Microsoft and Yahoo execs believe the team spearheading the project can make the transition in the United States by the end of this year, but may wait until 2011 if they find it will disrupt sales for retailers during the holiday season. All global customers and partners are expected to transition by early 2012.

Read More: MediaPost

The Rubicon Project Details Future Plans

Digital advertising infrastructure company the Rubicon Project today at the PaidContent 2010 conference has outlined its corporate strategy going forward. Essentially, the company is declaring that you’ll soon be able to stick a fork in the ad server, and to underline its vision it has published a fairly interesting manifesto on its website that’s well worth a read if you have a vested interest in the Internet advertising marketplace. The company also announced that it has tapped Allen & Company as its financial advisor to support the company’s goals, which it says will include strategic acquisitions, platform expansion and other paths to accelerated international growth. The Rubicon Project, which launched in 2007, in its manifesto takes aim at players in the ad server technology market, saying that it is currently in a ‘dangerous’ state of status quo. The company says it will fight to overcome the increasing price erosion that publishers have witnessed over the past few years because the balance in the marketplace has so far favored the demand-side of the equation.

Read More: TechCrunch

Why Doesn’t Amazon Build A Huge Ad Play?

Amazon is just a fascinating company.  I have never worked there and their performance over the years has been amazing to watch.  In particular, it hasn’t always been obvious that their  heavy R&D expenditure over the years was justified compared to their low operating margins.  Look at the companies in recent years from cloud services like EC2 to the Kindle.  And of course, you can see there e-commerce growth truly outpace the competition. I really don’t know why they are not thinking thru ways in which to more greatly to broaden their reach.  I did a post last year on why Amazon should buy Twitter.  Out of all of their investments in non-ecommerce related businesses, I have always wondered why Amazon had not more fully invested in building a world-class advertising play.  Amazon possesses all of the necessary components to build a world-class advertising platform. Amazon has a huge affiliate network called Amazon Associates.  A guesstimate is that an Amazon affiliate network has 2 million affiliates generating on average 5,000 impressions per month per publisher, or 120 billion impressions per year.  This is an imperfect estimate but most certainly if Amazon were generating less than 20 billion impressions per month via its affiliate base then it would not currently be ranked as a top 30 ad network as it is today.  The three big guys make Amazon’s advertising capability look like market share mice nuts – the  top three ad networks (Platform A, Yahoo, and Google).

Read More: StartupWhisperer

Demand Side Platforms (DSP) are hot! I can tell by the huge agency interest, and even more eager venture capitalists anxious to get in on the latest craze. Traditional ad networks and newfangled technology platforms are declaring themselves to be DSPs. Others who did much of the evangelical spadework for DSPs appear to be stung by the sudden rush. There is now an attempt to define a “true DSP”. At this stage, a “true DSP” as defined by a list of features serves little purpose and is as much a disservice to the industry, as it is disconnected from reality. In fact, many of the current DSP competitors—those with the most significant solutions already in-market—are successfully violating that definition of a “true DSP” to the benefit of their agencies partners. The truth is that a “fully self-service DSP” would be far too disruptive to most agencies at this early stage. There are far too many levers, knobs and buttons in a DSP robust enough to deliver the optimum cross-section of pacing, performance, and price for an agency to take on today. They range from mundane tasks like dealing with objectionable impressions and buys from non real-time sources to more arcane optimization tasks, RTB source integration, bidding strategies, discrepancy management, and post-campaign reconciliation.

Read More: AdExchanger

Watch The Videos From AdMeld’s Partner Forum

Read More: AdMeld

VivaKi’s David Kenny On The Agency Challenge, Creative And Automation

AdExchanger.com:  Everyone is talking about how agencies need to evolve media buying. Every major holding company has announced a media trading desk strategy. What areas of the workflow have not been addressed?  What is the “not obvious” stuff?”

DK: When the industry talks about media trading, they generally talk about negotiating clout and leveraging investment strength to drive lower prices on inventory.  The ability to do this is, of course, more important than ever given the economic crisis from which our clients are only just beginning to recover. But it’s really the price-of-entry. What we need to do more aggressively is leverage our scale to achieve advantages beyond price. For example, VivaKi faces the media owners and the networks to find new ways to add value to our agency brands and their clients. To aggregate data. To target people more accurately and effectively. We are building a smarter service model as an aggregator of scaled audiences that are identified for their passions, and we are building the pipelines like Audience on Demand that connect clients to those audiences in meaningful, relevant ways.

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This morning, Google released information on how publishers maximize revenues using the DoubleClick Ad Exchange as well as other Google products. The post by Neal Mohan, VP of Product Management, on the Google blog includes a one sheeter. View the post here. And, download the one-sheeter here. There’s not much that’s new here except for an explanation on dynamic allocation. Interesting that the one-sheeter sticks it in the eye of “traditional ‘yield management.’” They put ‘yield management’ in quotes. Google is clearly positioning DART For Publishers (DFP) as the yield optimization solution of the future as its “dynamic allocation” allows publishers to set minimum floors with exchange buyers when managing between direct sold inventory, ad networks or buyer relationships managed through DFP. So, if you’re a publisher, you get to test the market for your impression, compare it with your other relationships and then sell wherever you want.

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comScore Releases 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review

comScore presents the 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review, its annual report on the prevailing digital trends of the past year and their implications for the future. The report looks across the digital landscape to highlight the industry’s leading stories of the year:

• Which consumer trends dominated the digital media scene in 2009?
• How did the economic environment effect e-commerce spending throughout the year?
• What is the state of the digital advertising market?
• How has the popularity of Hulu influenced the consumption of online video?
• How are market enablers such as unlimited data plans, 3G penetration and smartphone adoption driving mobile media usage?

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AdSafe Media on Transparency Into Display Ad Inventory and the iFrame Challenge

AdExchanger.com: Given your observation of a decrease in non-transparent inventory in Q4, what is your sense of momentum for transparency into inventory?  Is UGC becoming more or less transparent? Any other momentum stories you can discuss?

DH: We see inventory non-transparency (meaning the lack of real time, source level disclosure of the URL on which an ad is to be served) as a large and growing concern in the display markets, especially with the recent increase in “audience buying” via networks and exchanges. Lack of source level transparency is primarily an unfortunate side effect of inventory “daisy-chaining” (or inter-network reselling) that currently helps facilitate high inventory liquidity in the display marketplaces. As more advertisers begin using these platforms as a primary buying channel, it’s essential that we as an industry balance the positives of liquidity with the risks of not knowing where an ad is being placed. In short, liquidity is good because it equates to more efficient markets and greater inventory utilization; non-transparency is bad because it results in more brand safety risks to advertisers in the form of bad ad placements, and thus less dollars online.

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