AdKeeper Goes From Private Beta To Public; Meeker On Mobile; Paywalls And AdWalls

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Worth Keeping?

AdKeeper has exited private beta and is now public. The startup launched by About.com founder Scott Kurnit this past fall with over $40 million in funding, is betting that consumers want an interactive ad clipping service. Media buyers have been a little skeptical – after all, don’t users hate advertising? Well, you can’t blame ad men for being jaded that users will bookmark ads for later retrieval. Still, for someone thinking about buying a car or someone planning their grocery list, it just might have some appeal. Read the announcement.

Meeker On Mobile

Morgan Stanley analyst turned venture capitalist Mary Meeker’s presentation on mobile comes with the usual avalanche of data. To be sure, it’s all very insightful and even surprising in places. But the biggest surprises comes in the area of mobile advertising. Meeker’s 24^th slide (out of 56) shows evidence of a broad shift to mobile and how the form is much more efficient than general online advertising. The least surprising is the next slide: despite the amount of time spent by consumers versus other, more established media formats, spending “is still out of whack.” Check out the slides here.

It’s A Deal

Just a week after local news curator Examiner.com signed a deal with Groupon-rival LivingSocial, metro guide network Citysearch has developed its own daily discount service in-house. The deals service automatically pushes coupons to consumers based on location – for consumers who opt-in, of course. Citysearch will tap its CityGrid Media advertising network, Mediapost’s Laurie Sullivan reports, which includes thousands of advertisers, to gather the deals. Read more.

Tag, You’re Not It

The time has come for place page tag moratoriums, says Domenico Tassone, writing on Tip of The Spear Blog. The problems, as he sees it, are thus: it causes confusion because the digital marketers and the IT/engineering teams are required to have a hand in executing the plan. Reporting is made more confusing, especially in an age of DSPs and OpenRTB, as performance information needs to be shared. And it leads to lingering questions about the whole process and the goal. “Exactly what is the specific benefit of retargeting, optimization or incremental conversion,” Tassone asks. “A simple litmus test is: proceed when and only when the level of benefit exceeds the level of effort.” Read more.

Up Against The AdWall

There’s a lot of debate in online publishing circles about the viability of paywalls – the NYTimes.com should be announcing its metered version any day now. Although online ad spending came back in a big way last year, publishers feel they can’t solely rely on marketers’ support to support their content. ScoutAnalytics’ Matt Shanahan has an idea that’s a slight variation on the current models being talked about. He proposes that a site’s non-subscribing visitors be offered the choice of seeing a 30-second ad in exchange for a daypass that gives them access to the content for a 24-hour period. “Ad units like adwalls are unlikely to erode any existing paywall revenue, because the fans that would pay for access would also likely pay to avoid the adwall for convenience sake,” Shanahan writes. “It actually has the chance to generate paywall revenue. As our CTO stated, he would gladly pay Google $10 a year to get rid of the ads in YouTube.” Read more.

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Daily Roundup

Daily News Roundup

You Think You Own That?; Patchwork Privacy, Meet AI

Meet Performable

Xconomy’s Gregory T. Huang is taking it upon himself to champion Boston-based Performable, which has a software that helps companies automate marketing processes and “sharpen their marketing analytics down to the level of individuals and actions.” It’s a new model of software-as-service offering that is similar and yet different from Google Analytics, Coremetrics or Adobe’s Omniture. “Performable tries to provide information about how each consumer interacts with a given brand across different websites, social media, and devices. Read more.

Music Lessons

Do ad agencies have anything to learn from the music labels, those perfect symbols of traditional media dinosaurs? Dan Hauck, ex-BBHer, currently celebrating a year as Planning Director at Sony Music UK, thinks so. In a blog post on BBH Labs, Hauck says there are some basic principles of brand planning that music labels that agencies can learn from. Primarily, his advice revolves around advertising as the art of persuasion. “Music is naturally viral – it’s something that people enjoy together, share with others, and use as an outward expression of their identity,” writes. “The question for a music campaign is not if a release will spread, but how.” That’s the same kind of thinking that agencies need to employ. Read more.

Stealth Commerce

GSI Commerce (owner of FetchBack and ClearSaleing) is one of the biggest drivers of e-commerce most people have never heard of. Business Insider’s Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry offers a primer on the company, which just acquired sports commerce aggregator Fanatics (read the release). The company is pursuing a strategy of running e-commerce networks as well as providing the software outside players in the deals space. Read more.

Media Conference Coming

Media news website paidContent is bringing its main conference – paidContent 2011 – to New York in two weeks and has a good lineup of online ad industry all-stars, including Federated Media CEO Deanna Brown; former IAB chief Randall Rothenberg, now serving as EVP, Chief Digital Officer, Time Inc.; Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis, Inc.; and Michael Walrath, founder, Right Media. The speaker list is still being finalized. Read more.

Holding Hands For Innovation

Turn CTO Xuhui Shao puts fingers to keyboard again in a think piece on ClickZ. This time Shao addresses the need for togetherness: “This is a crowded ecosystem with many great innovators, and the faster we can work together, the better the opportunity there is to grow data-driven advertising and achieve more market share.” Read what he means.

Buying Earned Audience

The Content Marketing Strategies conference begins tomorrow and aims to highlight how the marketer, who is increasingly looking to “be” the content not just an ad, can create an effective content strategy as part of their marketing plan. Among the participants are Story Worldwide CEO Simon Kelly and OgilvyPR’s Luca Penati. See the agenda here.

But Wait. There’s More!