Mobile Ads Vs. The Download; Nokia Adds To Exchange

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Mobile Ads Suck

Turns out Steve Jobs was right. Consumers have high expectations of mobile advertising — expectations that app developers and marketers aren’t meeting according to a new Forrester study. The research, commissioned by mobile app network Tapjoy, says, “70% said they found automatically served in-app ads interruptive. Worse, marketers aren’t making a good impression with their current advertising inventory. Only 17% of respondents found current in-app ads interesting, 14% found them relevant, and 12% found them engaging.” Download it – no pun intended.

Yandex Personalizes

Russian search and media company Yandex announced its “Personalised Search” offering that is based “on a user’s language preference, their search history and their clicks in search results.” Looking back only a “few” months into a user’s search history, the company believes it can provide better relevance – for Russian speakers, you may enjoy these Yandex screenshots with examples. Yandex already offers search retargeting for display that targets by themes according to user search queries. It will be interesting to see if they go deeper in terms of audience targeting for display given the new personalized search approach.

Nokia Exchange’s Open Window

Two months after launching the Nokia Ad Exchange (NAX), which is built off of Inneractive’s technology, the telco is expanding the platform to Microsoft’s Windows 8. The Windows Phone 8 SDK for NAX allows for payment in all countries, compared to US-only restrictions on other platforms, TheNextWeb’s Josh Ong reports.“The WP8 ecosystem is poised to explode. We are committed to drive and create more demand for WP8 and provide a fully tailored WP8 SDK for NAX that gives developers the most complete way to generate revenue,” Inneractive President Offer Yehudai. Read more.

AOL Allie-Oop

AOL has tapped a seasoned B2B marketer, Allie Savarino Kline, to generate momentum for its ad tech platforms. AdAge’s Jason Del Rey sums up the reason: “While the Ad.com ad network business thrived over the past year, AOL has allowed younger companies such as AppNexus, Rubicon Project, MediaMath and Criteo to own the conversation around ad-tech trends such as real-time bidding and retargeting.” More. Back when she was just Allie Savarino, Kline was the marketing brain behind Pre-Cambrian-era rich media vendor Unicast. Later stints include 33Across and Brand Affinity Technologies, an athletic sponsorships play. Press release.

The Partner Directory

Google, following in the steps of Facebook (record scratch), has created its own partner directory with dropdowns as it looks to more publicly position itself as a platform for development. To be clear, the program was started last year. Partner Program Manager John Park says, “This directory lists all the DoubleClick approved platform partners who have developed innovative solutions and services for DFP. Publishers can pick and choose from over one hundred preferred partners to extend the functionality of their advertising platforms.” See the dropdowns.

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Ad Sales Googlization Of Yahoo

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is giving Henrique De Castro, her former Google colleague and the portal’s current COO, free reign to rebuild the company’s sales teams around advertiser categories in place of the previous organization, which was around particular ad products or geographies. As Digiday’s Jack Marshall notes, it looks a lot like Google’s ad sales structure. Read it. Observers are already applauding the move. “Google has been very smart about having a category focus with a robust agency overlay so that if that’s the role model, then that’s something I think the industry will be excited about,” says Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i.

PubMatic’s Mobile Leap

Mobile RTB is the next frontier and PubMatic is hoping to position itself at the right time. To do so, it’s tapped cloud-based mobile publishing platform MobStac. MobStac will be offered as a service through PubMatic’s PubLink enterprise app marketplace. “Publishers are challenged with keeping up with the fragmentation of content consumption with so many different mobile formats,” says Bob Walczak, PubMatic’s VP of mobile. “MobStac is a simple, easy, seamless way for a PubMatic publisher to create a mobile enabled site on any device and operating system with no direct technical integration involved.” Read the release.

Security Hole in the Browser

Dear Liza, dear Liza. A flaw identified by Spider.io could let bad guys track mouse cursor movements on a screen. TheNextWeb supposes, “An attacker can simply buy display advertising on a website you visit, and as long as that website is open, even if you’re not actively on it (IE is minimized, in the background, or you’re in another tab), your mouse movements can be tracked.” It’s unclear what the value of that would be to a hacker, advertiser, or other party. Even so, Spider.io tells AdExchanger two ad verification companies are exploiting the vulnerability, but said it could not identify them. Read more.

The PMP

From his Upstream Group blog, Doug Weaver says he is a programmatic media pessimist (PMP) in the near term. He writes, “…when it comes to programmatic buying and selling we seem to still be watching the undercard bouts; the heavyweights in content, brand advertising and analysis haven’t yet come into the ring. No question it’s going to get bigger and bigger. But right now it seems like mostly retargeting technology feasting on second tier inventory. I know we’re doing a hard sell on what’s to come, but let’s be honest about what’s real so far.” Read more.

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