Microsoft and Yahoo! Deal Gets Clearance

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

Is A Demand-Side Platform The Future Of The Ad Network?

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.

Read More: AdExchanger

Google Disses the Yield Optimizers

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.

Read More: AdExchanger

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?

Read More: comScore.com

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.

Read More: AdExchanger