Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Right Media Intros Audience Sharing
Right Media Exchange announced new features – including audience sharing – at its Right Media forum this week in New York City. From the Right Media blog, Ramsey McGrory, VP & Head of Right Media says, “Audience Sharing provides sellers or segment owners, including data providers AlmondNet Data Division, BlueKai and eXelate, control and transparency when sharing their segments in our marketplace. Buyers or segment users can target audiences from multiple data providers, and Right Media’s platform takes into account user overlap and attributes data according to recency.” Read more. The “recency” component can be a key optimization lever as users are often more prone to interacting with ads early in a web browsing session versus later.
AdMob Adsensed
Good news for advertisers who want to target popular mobile applications such as Angry Birds. You’ll now be able to target mobile apps that use the AdMob network through the Google AdWords/AdSense network. According to Google product manager Jason Morse on the company’s Mobile Ads blog, “We’ve worked hard to make it as easy as possible for AdMob publishers to access this new inventory. Publishers using a recent version of the SDK will not have to update their code. Reporting will integrate directly into your AdMob account, and you will continue to receive a single check from AdMob each month.” Read more. And, read more from MocoNews Tricia Duryee.
Aol Earnings/Outlook Impress
Aol reported that Q3 2010 revenue declined as Wall Street expected but the company showed a relatively strong profit from cost-cutting and asset sales earning “$171.6 million, or $1.60 a share, compared to $74 million, or 70 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Asset sales and cost cuts helped to bolster the results. On a continuing operations basis it earned 93 cents a share…” Aol stock responded and gained a couple of dollars at the start of trading yesterday. Read Marketwatch. In the Aol earnings press release, the company offered some positive display ad news: “Domestic display advertising revenue fell year-over-year in Q3 2010, but increased sequentially for the second consecutive quarter.” Also, “Apart from the impacts of AOL-implemented initiatives, advertising revenue further reflects declines in search and contextual, display and Third Party Network revenue. (…) Domestic display revenue [year-over-year] declines of $9.3 million reflect a slight decline in premium inventory sales as well as less AOL Properties inventory monetized through our network, resulting primarily from our efforts to improve the consumer experience. Premium inventory sales declines reflect the fact that the Company began Q2 2010 with a significantly smaller pipeline, due to the impact on sales of a salesforce reorganization in Q1 2010, which was largely offset by incremental revenue generated intra-quarter.” Read the release. All Things D’s Peter Kafka notes the buying spree that Aol went on last quarter with the acquisition of TechCrunch and 5min among others as it spent close to $100 million not including incentives. Read it. ClickZ’s Kate Kay quotes Aol CEO Tim Armstrong who said, “We expect in 2011 to start showing the signs of a turnaround. I would personally be disappointed to not be back at industry growth rates for advertising, and we are pushing every single thing in this company as fast as possible to get back there.” Read more on ClickZ.
Safeguard Scientifics reported its quarterly earnings as well on its holdings which includes demand-side platform MediaMath. From the press release, a capsule of MediaMath’s quarterly progress: “[MediaMath launched its enhanced media buying platform, TerminalOne™ (T1) with a user interface that allows marketers to directly manage campaigns according to specific objectives. (…) MediaMath’s revenue is expected to more than double year-over-year in 2010. Safeguard has deployed $6.7 million in MediaMath since July 2009 and has a 17% primary ownership position.” Read more.
Display Shifting In UK
In a new survey from the IAB and IASH in the UK, display advertising spend is examined between ad networks, publishers and demand-side platforms and the study shows “that rather than phasing out ad networks, ad exchanges will complement and diversify existing buying channels.” Sounds about right. Read more.
Verifying Before Bidding
Ad verification company AdSafe Media announced that its ad verification technology is integrated into publisher side yield optimizer AdMeld and providing what it says is “pre-bid brand safety.” In other words, before the buyer buys an impression via a real-time bidded (RTB) auction, Adsafe says it can check the impression for “brand safety” according to what the advertiser has specified as brand-safe before the impression is ever bought. This is different than previous iterations of some verification technology which would check after the impression was bought – if it wasn’t brand safe, the buyer sends through a PSA or something along those lines. Read more.
Video Ad Networks Hold Hands
According to a release, in an effort to promote the services of video ad networks more holistically and instream video advertising in particular, YuMe, ScanScout, and BBE got together to create a case study to show “how effective digital video is at driving brand awareness and purchase intent.” Helping provide the analytic side to the case study was Vizu. Read about it.
Data Siphoning
Ad targeting technology company VisualDNA (AdExchanger.com Q&A) announced the addition of sales exec Leighton Webb as the company turns to address the U.S. publisher market with its audience data platform services. VisualDNA CEO Alex Willcock says in the release, “Most publishers are under assault right now. For years advertising networks have been siphoning away their audiences.” Read more.
Privacy In The Crosshairs
ClickZ’s Kate Kaye reports that now that congressional power in the U.S. is shifting to Republicans, Texas congressman Joe Barton (R., Texas), “indicated dissatisfaction with Facebook’s answers to a series of questions he posed following allegations of a Facebook user data privacy breach [and added,] “In the next Congress, the Energy and Commerce Committee and our subcommittees are going to put Internet privacy policies in the crosshairs.” Read the article.
Demand Media IPO Nears
From last week, content machine Demand Media released its latest quarter of financial results in advance of an expected initial public offering. The company posted revenue 65.4 million and “posted a net loss of $305,000 in the latest quarter, narrower than the $4.2 million it lost the preceding quarter and the $1.9 million it lost a year earlier,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Read more.
Data Being Driven In APAC
APAC digital strategist Sonal Patel offers a few thoughts on display advertising momentum in the Asia-Pacific region on her “Ad Solver” blog. She writes, “The new trading game is now Data. Data rules the advertising world and if you don’t see it, you will very soon. Data leads to the ROI every client wants to strive for. In Asia we don’t have a real data play here yet but the heavy weights are coming; audience science set up in Japan, Bluekai has strong relationship with key ad networks in Australia so the wave is coming.” Read more.
More Shopping
New ad tech companies continue to focus on shopping and e-commerce as WinBuyer joins the hit parade to launch the “Shoppers Audience Network,” which it says reaches 35 million users “at the point-of-purchase (POP).” Read the release. How can they reach users at the POP? All the sites in the ad network are shopping websites with placements for the new ad network – that’s how. Observation: there continue to be more ad networks, not less.
