Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Facebook Creates Agencies
The growing, Facebook services and agency trend is featured in a piece by The Wall Street Journal’s Emily Steel and Geoffrey Fowler. Among the companies mentioned are Blinq Media (AdExchanger.com Q&A), Kenshoo (AdExchanger.com Q&A) and Webtrends as Facebook’s opening of its internal ad system to select companies in 2009 appears to be paying off for both the vendors and Facebook. Cadreon’s Mike Brunick appears in the article, too, and says his agency buying desk won’t be working with one of the smaller companies since, he says, “We want to have the relationship with Facebook directly.”Read more.
Jumptap Gets $20 Million
Mobile ad network Jumptap has hit the funding jackpot for $20 million (that’s a total of $90 million since they started tapping venture funding). According to Mass High Tech, the investors may include cci communications, which is a division of Dentsu: “In December, [Jumptap’s] Jorey Ramer told Mass High Tech that the company had landed a ‘seven figure investment’ and an exclusive business partnership with Japan’s cyber communications inc. (…) The business deal calls for cci to be the exclusive partner for Jumptap technology in Japan.” See the SEC filing.
Millions For Email Ad Network
Vator.tv’s Faith Ferino says that email ad network Ividence has managed to raise $4.2 million in funds for its “SaaS platform that provides email lists for advertisers’ customer recruitment campaigns. (…) The company connects advertisers with potential customers based on users’ behavioral characteristics, which indicate whether or not they’ll be receptive to a certain brand or ad.” The round of financing was led by A Plus Finance according to Ferino. Read more.
Sell-side platform PubMatic has published another whitepaper which says that private, real-time bidded marketplaces are models for which advertisers are more comfortable – and that publishers should pay attention. Among the findings of the PubMatic/Digiday research, “74% of advertisers prefer to use DSPs and ad networks to target audience.” Nearly 70% of buy-side entities (agencies, marketers, agency trading desk) said they’d prefer to be buying via real-time bidding (RTB), too. Download the PDF here.
Do-Not-Track Heading Your Way
Mozilla’s Alex Fowler announces that the Associated Press is the first to implement a Do-Not-Track header in its network of 800 partner sites that will allow users to opt-out of cookie tracking. Not only that, “The Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), which includes the five major media and advertising agencies, is initiating a process to explore incorporating the DNT header, as proposed by Mozilla, into its Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA).” Do-Not-Track is picking up steam as both a self-regulation and regulatory option. Read more. And, read a summary on PaidContent.
From Agency To Supply
Chango CRO Dax Hamman looks back at his first 90 days at the search retargeting firm and says things are going swimmingly in a company blog post. He says, “The transition from agency life to supply side is not as big a change as the switch from supply side to agency life was 4 years ago. Back then I was running the European arm of Bluestreak (an ad serving and email delivery company) providing technology and services to agencies and the occasional direct brand, and through a failed acquisition of that company, I ended up at iCrossing.” Read more.
The Purity Of Data Management
Lotame’s Jeremy Pinkham delivers a think piece on AdMonsters titled “How Pure is Your Pure Platform?” on the popular subject of data management platforms. Pinkham says the competition has it wrong about Lotame’s offering: “The point they are trying to make is that a company that has both a licensable SaaS product and a media network poses a conflict of interest and is a dangerous option for those in the market for a product to manage their own data. We obviously could not disagree more vehemently.” Read his reasoning.
Larry Page’s First Day
Larry Page’s first day of work as CEO of Google is today as the San Jose Mercury News reports that there will be no parades or spanking machines at the Googleplex to honor Page in his new role. The Mercury News Mike Swift writes, “The absence of pomp underscores Page’s intense focus on the job ahead — spurring Google to innovate faster as it battles Facebook and other competitors, to react more like a nimble startup even as it zooms past 25,000 employees.” Read more.
Mobile Getting Smarter
On Friday, comScore released its latest figures for mobile subscriber marketshare in the United States for February 2011 and Android has reached 1/3 of all smartphone platforms. Apple’s iOS is at 25%. Overall, “69.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in February 2011, up 13 percent from the preceding three-month period.” That compares to 234 million Americans who used mobile devices. Follow me? Read more.
Email Security Breach
Whenever someone uses the word “breach,” it’s never good news. On SecurityWeek, Mike Lennon says that the bad news continues for email marketing services company Epsilon and its big brand clients after a hacker was able to infiltrate Epsilon’s systems and grab names and email addresses. Lennon writes, “Due to the growing list of brands disclosing they’ve been compromised as a result of this breach, I’m going to go ahead and tag this as a massive breach. And I only expect it to get bigger as more announcements come out from Epsilon customers.” He thinks this opens up “phishing” possibilities for the bad guy(s). Read more.
The Full-Page Takeover
Tessa Wegert looks at what she considers is a successful, full-page takeover by a Ralph Lauren ad campaign. She begins, “There’s more to a great digital campaign than great ad creative (…) it may incite an immediate response…but if that’s where the action ends, so too does the brand experience.” Not with RL says Wegert. Read more.
Understanding The Genius
Want to understand why the Genius for Apps feature in the Apple Store suggests the apps that it does for you? Former Flurry/RMX-er Greg Yardley says he has the answer and reveals the details on his personal blog. Digging around the Apple iOs architecture, he says the database info is there, “it’s just a matter of knowing where to look and how to read it. I’ve been asked about this a few times by a few people, so I figured this post was due.” So here it is.
But Wait. There’s More!
- Erasing the Digital Past – The New York Times
- McDonald’s Tests Geotargeted Twitter Ads – ClickZ
