Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Opera Gets An Ad Exchange
Everybody is starting their own ad exchange. It’s 2007 all over again! Opera Software says it plans to leverage its own mobile reach to get exchange-y. From the release: “The Open Mobile Ad Exchange makes the world’s largest mobile audience, 66.5 million Opera Mini users, available to advertisers, publishers, and wireless operators. With this launch, Opera opens the world of feature phones, where Opera Mini is the dominant browser, to mobile advertising.” Read about the latest aggregation sensation.
Yahoo! Buys Dapper Round-Up
As announced on the Yahoo! corporate blog, the “Yodel Anecdotal,” Yahoo! bought Dapper to help with creative message for display ads. Read it. The blog points to a post by Dapper founder Eran Shir who writes about why Dapper sold and references the ever-popular Kawaja ecosystem map and writes, “It is quite apparent to anyone looking at this ecosystem that the chances of building a huge business in this market today are extremely small. Aggregating a double digit percentage of the demand or the supply in such a fragmented market is virtually impossible.” Hence, selling to a big partner like Yahoo! where the opportunity for bigger impact exists says Shir. Read it. TechCrunch takes a guess that the acquisition price was somewhere between $20-30 million for Dapper which had received approximately $3 million in venture funding to-date. Read more. VentureBeat says that “Dapper’s vp of product marketing, Amit Kumar previously led Yahoo’s SearchMonkey platform before joining [Dapper] in September and could have been a strong connection in the acquisition.” Read more.
AppNexus Funding Signals Revenue
After corralling a whopping $50 million, TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld writes about the AppNexus funding announcement, “While he won’t disclose specific details, [AppNexus CEO Brian] O’Kelley tells me, ‘We’ve gone crazy on the revenue side in the past year.” He’s also been hiring, going from 23 employees at the beginning of the year to about 65 today.'” Read more. On his popular personal blog, Mike On Ads, AppNexus CTO Mike Nolet announces the funding news and adds, “I think this is a great validation not just of the company, but also of the real-time bidding (RTB) space in general.” Read more.
Former IAB Chief Greg Stuart is moving to head a new trade organization, “CEO of the struggling Mobile Marketing Association,” according to ClickZ’s Zach Rodgers who adds, “Stuart faces a challenge at the MMA, since other groups including the IAB have already taken up the rallying cry of mobile and adoption is so widespread that marketers are wide awake to the opportunity.” Read more.
Identifying The Content Challenges
SocialVibe Network Prez Joe Marchese identifies the coming challenges for content owners in his MediaPost column. Viewer engagement issues come to mind and Marchese says, “Digital media in general, and social media specifically, offer an actual solution to the long-time promise of interactive programming. How should you create programming knowing that viewers will have at least two screens, and likely three (television, PC, phone), at their disposal while watching your content?” Read more.
Foundry Group Raises New Funds
The investment group which has already placed its bets with investments in Triggit and AdMeld announced that it has raised an entirely new $225 million intended for early stage investments. Reuters quotes The Foundry Group’s announcement: “We will continue to do exactly what we have always done: invest in seed and early-stage investment opportunities in the software and IT space that are located across the United States.” Read more.
Orange Ad Network Flexing
The Orange Ad Network is flexing its mobile muscle with Orange Mobile Targeting Monitor (OMTM). According to the release, OMTM is “a new campaign-planning tool for the advertising industry in Europe. (…) The new tool is designed to help brands better understand and target mobile media users.” Some of the findings from the OMTM already include, “In the UK, mobile media use encourages people to watch more television (14 per cent) and surf more on the Internet (25 per cent) – showing synergies for brand communication across multiple platforms.” Read more.
Australia Privacy Concerns
The Sydney Morning Herald has run two articles this week regarding concerns around online ad targeting data. Echoing similar concerns raised by The Wall Street Journal beginning in August, the Herald notes the prevalence of cookies on Australian websites, “A review of the top 10 most-viewed Australian-owned websites – or those with an Australian subsidiary – revealed a startling picture of this extensive, and increasingly intrusive, practice. Ninemsn.com.au installed the most tracking devices – 109. Bigpond.com had 93 and smh.com.au 86. Google tracks users on the more than 1 million websites that display its advertisements.” Read more from Tuesday. And, read the Wednesday article which loops in BlueKai intent data.
Scale Versus Performance
NetMining’s Dean Vegilante takes on the conundrum of achieving scale versus performance in an article on iMedia Connection. He suggests a plan of attack: “Wrapping remarketing around your contextual ads lets you hone in on people who are more likely to buy, and enables you to create a dialog, drive them to a page, and ultimately convert them into buyers.” Read more.
Reviewing The View-Through
Hollis Thomases reviews the view-through argument bubbling throughout the digital advertising ecosystem in a piece and draws a few conclusions on ClickZ. She provides her own succinct list of “How View-Through Data Should Be Use” including “VT metrics can be looked at independently, or combined with click-through or natural search metrics for any conversion tag; Reach and frequency reports show conversion activity mapped to multiple exposures per user on any of four levels (campaign, site, placement, creative); Site overlap and path-to-conversion reports expose crossover activity between sites.” Read more.
You’re Hired!
Sarah Baehr, the former media lead at Razorfish, has been hires as SVP, director of digital publishing solutions at MediaVest USA. AdWeek says Baehr’s hiring is “is part of a broader effort by the print division to better align with the publishing industry as it embraces an increasing array of digital platforms.” Read more.
