Yahoo!'s Facebook Patent Suit Percolates; Tap.Me Growing In-Game Ads; Spend Trends

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Patent Fighting

Jeff Roberts covers the patent Yahoo!’s patent lawsuit on paidContent and breaks out the 10 patents here. Meanwhile, patent fight broke out into the blogosphere yesterday – mostly against Yahoo!. VC Fred Wilson said, “I am not writing this in defense of Facebook. They can and will defend themselves. I am wrting this in outrage at Yahoo! I used to care about that company for some reason. No more. They are dead to me. Dead and gone. I hate them now.” But, entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who is a self-proclaimed “patent law hater,” appears to take the exact opposite stance from his personal blog, “If Yahoo’s patents truly are valid and recognize that they got Google to pay money for their Pay Per Click patent (acquired from Overture), then there is absolutely no reason why the same Patent shouldn’t be valid against Facebook. (…) The same with the patent for personalizing pages. My.Yahoo.Com was way ahead of its time when it was introduced. Facebook is built on personalized pages. If ever a patent in this patent environment should be valid, these two should be valid in today’s world.” Read it. Want more patent news? Try this from a former Yahoo!.

Tapping Ads

Chicago-based Tap.me has taken in another $3.2 million of venture capital for in-game ads. “Why should I care?” you ask. Because engagement that comes from reward-thirsty (virtual currency-thirsty) mobile, casual game players is very attractive to advertisers – Tap.me’s target market. Read more including a brief update from Tap.Me CEO Matt Spiegel (formerly of Omnicom and Accuen – AdExchanger Q&A 2011). According to the release, “Jeffrey Lapin, former Chief Executive Officer of Atari and veteran of Take-Two Interactive Software and THQ joins the company’s Board of Directors.”

Spending Trending

The New York Times’ Bits blog reports on a new spend trend update from Publicis’ Zenith Optimedia research group. The NYT’s Stuart Elliott writes, “Ad spending worldwide in 2012 will grow 4.8 percent compared with last year (…). That is a bit higher than the most recent forecast for this year by ZenithOptimedia, made in December, which called for a gain of 4.7 percent.” And there’s even better news in 2013. Read more. Are you ready?

Totally Site Rep

Evolve Media Corp, owners of site rep firm Gorilla Nation, announced its British invasion in a press release as the company brings its vertical ad network/media services business to the UK. From the release: “Evolve oversees the existing media services division Gorilla Nation, and has now unveiled their women’s lifestyle vertical, totallyher. Evolve’s business structure is designed to organize audiences, research, specialized ad products and sales efforts in order to produce and monetize premium digital content while offering programs to online marketers that deliver content, context and creative with scale.” Outsourced sales! Read more.

Right Time, Right Now

On Ad Age, appssavvy product marketer Eric Farkas preaches a data-driven sermon on scarcity and data-driven advertising in an opinion piece. “The key will be to look for natural breaks in the user experience and place highly targeted, relevant ads to users at that moment, when they’re most likely to engage. Furthermore, publishers should limit the ads seen by a user and make sure that ads are relevant to what the user has done or is doing.” Read it in real-time.

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Excel Optimizer

Marketers don’t want creative optimization says Booyah VP of creative Sarah Lockwood in an opinion piece on ClickZ. She sounds a bit fed up, “I believe that digital marketers today have become so comfortable in the safe cocoon of Excel spreadsheets that they have largely or completely left what they perceive to be the scary, intuitive creative to others. Both search and display marketers consider the creative a deliverable (a banner to traffic or a URL to link to), not an element with which they should be involved.” Read “The Crawl, Walk, Run of Digital Creative.”

Dance Of The 7 Display Ad Veils

MediaMind senior product marketing manager, Michael Tuminello, offers “7 stellar creative ideas for display ads” on iMedia Connection. Towards the end of the article, Tuminello offers, “Although Steve Jobs boasted of buttons that ‘look so good that you’ll want to lick them,’ we’ve never actually seen that happen. Although you can cross-taste from the list, you also have sound to work with – don’t let sight be the only sense you engage.” Lick here.

Targeting The UK

Microsoft Advertising is getting busy with segmentation and data in the UK. According to company blog post, the focus is finance: “Similar to Experian Mosaic targeting, Financial Strategy Segments (FSS), also from Experian, allow advertisers to target users online according to their financial status – offering highly relevant targeting for products and services where this information is important.” Read more.

But Wait. There’s More!