Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Funding For Video Ad Marketplace
VentureBeat’s Julie Klein noticed from the SEC’s funding wire that video ad marketplace Adap.tv is recipient of $4.5 million worth of funding from existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Gemini Israel Funds and Spark Capital. Read more. See the SEC filing.
Brand Value Metrics
Havas Digital provided new results from something it calls “the Brand Sustainable Futures Quotient (BSF QuotientTM)” for retail brands. According to the release, BSF provides a way to rate a retail brand by measuring “the perceived performance of a company’s sustainable activities and the contribution these make to brand equity.” This echoes InterBrand’s popular, brand value list which marketers live and die by. Read the Havas Digital release.
Search Suggestions In UK
Efficient Frontier’s Dr. Siddarth Shah, continues his analysis of the impact of Google Instant – Google’s new search feature which guesses what you want as you type in the search query box. In his previous post on the topic, Shah founded the propensity for Google to suggest branded terms – diabolical! This time he looks at the impact on UK users of Google Instant – and guess what? Correct. Read about it.
There’s a new demand-side platform in town and VC Sequoia Capital has placed its bet on Taykey according to TechCrunch. TC’s Roi Carthy writes, “From a business model stand point, Taykey is basically a Demand Side Platform (DSP). When it recognizes a trend, it goes out and buys the relevant audience for the relevant amount of time. It then charges advertisers a premium CPM to deliver the ads, and uses arbitrage to maximize its cut.” Read more. And, visit Taykey’s website.
Aegis In Australia
Ad holding company Aegis is another step closer to acquiring an Australian (and larger Asia-Pacific) footprint according to AdWeek’s Steve McClellelan. McClellelan writes that Australian media agency Mitchell Communications shareholders approved the proposed $360 million purchase (by Aegis), with 99 percent of shares voted in favor of the deal.” Read more.
New World Pub Buys Old World
B2C auto publisher AutoTrader.com announced the acquisition of Kelly Blue Book which has provided book value of used autos for consumers for years and has steadily built out a significant online presence that automotive advertisers covet. The price is estimated at $500 million according to the Wall Street Journal. Read more. These are both privately-held companies.
Doing The Nasty Re-Org Thing
Conde Nast is pushing its digital ad sales out to individual magazines as part of a new strategic shift at the rag trade holding company. Read more on Ad Age. PaidContent’s Staci Kramer cuts and pastes the internal memo from Conde Nast CEO CEO Chuck Townsend on the strategy which includes this directive: “To optimize brand revenue growth, we will shift responsibility for single-site, digital sales and marketing to the brand level. Publishers can now fully leverage their offerings across all platforms. Next month, we will begin newly established brand management meetings where the publishers and editors jointly discuss the growth strategies for their brands.” Read more.
Facebook Ad Sales Chief Leaves
Facebook’s head of ad sales Mike Murphy is “leaving the (Facebook) building.” Facebook told the WSJ that Murphy “will leave in December to spend more time with his family.” Read more. Murphy had been with the company for five years and helped drive the company’s annual revenue to between $1.2 billion and $2 billion in 2010, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The Business Insider released a link baiting piece – which I will now link to – called “The Silicon Alley 100: New York’s Coolest Tech People In 2010.” Among luminaries from the data-driven ad ecosystem, Invite Media’s Nat Turner finished 11th, MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki came in 21st, MediaBank’s Bill Wise came in 60th and ADstruc’s John Laramie came in 61st. See the list from 1-100.
AdExchanger.com reached out to Bill Wise for this thoughts on “coolness,” and he suggested 7 more that should be added to the list:
- Terry Kawaja, LUMA Partners and conference video master
- Ari Paparo, ex-DoubleClick and Google, now evp at Nielsen
- Matt Freeman, CEO of MediaBrands Ventures and board member of eXelate
- Scott Meyer, CEO of Better Advertising
- Peggy Conlon – CEO of the AdCouncil. The Advertising Council has embraced technology and the use of
social media in keeping up with the times. - Helene Monat- CEO of AdSafe Media, former president of Catalina Marketing.
- Matt Keiser- founder/CEO of Live Intent; founder of Perky Jerky
The Google Analytics “Visit”
Convertro CEO Jeff Zwelling (AdExchanger.com Q&A) offers his thoughts to marketers regarding deficiencies in Google Analytics as they enter the holiday buying season and try to understand ROI. Zwelling writes, “The truth is, relying solely on Google Analytics “visits” as a metric of marketing performance can be misleading at best, and a dangerous business practice at worst. If you take a close look at how Google counts visitors across Google Analytics and AdWords, you’ll realize that oddities in some of their counting mechanisms, while subtle, have the potential to drastically alter where you, as a consumer of this data, think it makes sense to spend your advertising dollars.” Read more.
Scanning For Codes
If you’re riding the bus in Albany, New York, you are among the lucky few to see Quick Response codes – QR codes, for short – in action as commuters can scan codes in an ad for a chance to win an iPad. The feedback loop seems pretty clear from a DR perspective as smartphones scan a code which brings them to a website URL. But as the article shows, not all are familiar with the tech yet. Early days but intriguing – read more.
Ad Serving And Verification
Ad serving tech company ZEDO and ad verification company Mpire announced a new agreement which “will enable ZEDO’s publishers to activate verification, measurement, alerting and ad blocking services directly within the ZEDO user interface, and better collect, control and understand advertising data on their sites,” according to the release. Read more.
Launching The New
Peer39 has launched a new website highlighting what it calls, “The Semantic Advantage.” See it now. It also includes a growing glossary of internet ad tech terms here.
