SiteScout's Mobile DSP; The Agency Model In Review

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SiteScout Goes Mobile

Demand side platform SiteScout is getting more mobile. The company has increased the amount of mobile ad inventory in its system and is showing off a number of new features to its ad-buying solution. It’s promising clients more than 30 billion mobile impressions per month. “We’re enabling advertisers to not only reach targeted audiences at home on their laptops and desktops, but also on the devices they take with them everywhere, like cell phones, tablets and e-readers.” Read more.

Pirate Ad Networks

Shiver me timbers! Jonathan Taplin, veteran film producer and director of the University of South California Annenberg Innovation Lab, thinks he’s come up with a solution that’s designed to hit content pirates’ pocketbooks and punish brands who don’t look closely at their ad environments. Taplin will produce a monthly report to shame and name brands and their advertising networks starting next year. “It is an attempt to bring a little transparency to the ad network business, which is the wild west in a weird way,” Taplin tells The Drum’s Stephen Lepitak.”It’s not really very clear how there’s an audit trail for advertisers to know where their ads are going, who’s watching them…hopefully it’ll be a way to bring a little clarity to that situation.” Read more.

Saving The Agency Model

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over the past few years about how the ad agency model needs to evolve in an era of demand side platforms and greater use of earned/social media. A piece on ExchangeWire argues that agencies need to do more – and fast – as marketers begin to take “block and tackle” marketing functions in-house. And it may even be too late for some agencies says ExchangeWire: “Reckitt Benckiser have long had video buying responsibility in-housed. Kellogg’s has repeatedly gone on record about working directly with Google. P&G have an extensive relationship with Audience Science. Long term, simply differentiating for the purpose of making money from media buying may not be enough.” Read more.

To Paste, Not To Push

It’s coming up on a year since social analytics company 33across bought content data provider Tynt and the two have some numbers about how plain old copy & pasting influences content sharing more than hitting a “share” button on a publisher’s page. About 82 percent of sharing is done through copy & paste, with the remainder done through a share button. “The exponential rise of content sharing is often incorrectly attributed to sharing buttons on a page,” said Greg Levitt, GM of Tynt’s Publisher Solutions and Co-Founder of 33Across. “In reality, content sharing is caused by a far more universal user behavior: copy & paste—the most intuitive way people curate and share the exact content that they want across the web. It’s surprising, but the old highlight and right click is more popular than ever.” Read the release.

‘Cleaner’ Google Shopping

Google began ramping up its e-commerce offerings this past summer and now Google Shopping is is getting its full international rollout. Still, as Sameer Samat, VP of Product Management, Google Shopping, notes, the paid product listings offerings are not done getting spruced up, as Google plans a redesigned, “cleaner” version goes up in February. The “visually cleaner results for shopping queries, including some new commercial formats on Google.com that will display products in a single unit, will replace current search results,” Samat said in a blog post. “These new commercial formats will be labeled as ‘Sponsored’ and appear in the space currently occupied by AdWords ads.” Read more. Separately, Google also said that its primary AdWords product is also getting a bigger, bolder look with a new 300×600 format. Read the AdWords blog post.

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Threads Will Have Ads Next Year; Perplexity, Gen-AI Search Engine, Already Does

AdBrite Adds Right Media DNA

After retooling its platform and exec ranks, AdBrite says it’s ready to compete with rival exchanges. A press release cites new brand safety features and says the company will innovate on price. “”We provide the air-bags without requiring you to drop a coin every time you drive the car,” says new(ish) CEO Hardeep Bindra, who along with CTO Joaquin Delgado hails from Yahoo’s RMX, in a press release.

The Ad Climate

On MediaPost, Simulmedia’s Dave Morgan steps off the conference circuit for a second to relay observations from Monaco Media Forum. About Weather Channel CEO David Kenny’s presentation at MMF, Morgan says, “I was struck by how much climate change issues are being integrated into his company’s strategy and mission. (…) While that may seem a perfectly logical association, there are other more subtle ways of aligning with global issues, like how newspapers functioned over the past century as a check and balance on government.”
Read it.

Programmatic Buzz
Upstream Group’s Doug Weaver comments on the recent Federated Media decision to move toward programmatic and away from its direct sales team display biz. He writes, “…there’s been a thoughtful running debate for close to four years around the role of ad exchanges and programmatic channels in the publisher’s world. To these thoughtful publishers, the revenue world looks like a series of dials and switches to be carefully turned and calibrated. So why the big announcement and all the breathless press coverage and Twitter chatter about Federated?” BECAUSE ADEXCHANGER SAID SO… Read more.

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