Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Online Video Is Coming
In an op-ed on AdWeek, Adap.tv’s Founder and VP of Product Teg Grenager makes a bold prediction: “Get ready, because in five years, half of TV ad budgets are going to shift over to online video.” He argues that TVs will become internet-enabled and thus drive the online video format. Grenager also asserts that millennials, who use online habitually today, will grow to be big consumers of internet-enabled TV. Read more.
Simpli.fi On RTB Display For SEMs
Simpli.fi (AdExchanger.com Q&A from March) announced that it is positioning itself as a real-time bidding display ad platform for search marketers. In a release yesterday, the company explained how it works: “Marketers simply upload their keyword lists, their CPM/CPC bids, and their creatives, and the Simpli.fi platform delivers banners to users who have searched on those specific terms within the last day, week, or month. Just like with search campaigns, all bidding, reporting and optimization are at the keyword-level – in real time.” Read more.
Captcha Ads And Video
A Canadian company called NuCaptcha has taken a page from Solve Media’s book (AdExchanger.com Q&A) and is offering advertisers a way to advertise via a combination of video and captcha. The New York Times Tanzina Vega writes, “The motion in a video makes it harder for computers to solve the captcha but easier for humans, said Michel Giasson, chief executive and co-founder of NuCaptcha. Users will be presented with a line of text floating over a video and will be asked to type in the last few letters of the sentence. Advertisers will be able to supply both the video and the text.” Read more.
Consolidation in Ops Land: Operative Acquired Solbright
If you are outsourcing ad ops to Solbright, there’s a new company in charge. One week ago, Solbright was acquired by ad ops tech and services company, Operative. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. According to the release, “Solbright employees will immediately play an integral role in the continued development of Operative.One (Operative’s new ad management platform) while also ensuring business continuity for existing clients.” Read about it. And, read Adotas’ Gavin Dunaway’s Q&A with Operative CEO Mike Leo.
Microsoft Software Chief Leaves
Hard to say where he’ll end up, but Ray Ozzie had a long parting memo on his personal blog, as Microsoft’s chief software architect indicated it was time for him to go. In the memo, Ozzie, notes the “big shift” that’s underway and, perhaps warning his current-soon-to-be-former employer about the implosion of its business model, “For each of us who can clearly envision the end-game, the opportunity is to recognize both the inevitability and value inherent in the big shift ahead, and to do what it takes to lead our customers into this new world.” Read Ozzie’s lengthy memo. Here’s an article on the “big shift” from Harvard Business Review in Dec. 2009. And, read about Ozzie’s departure in the NY Times.
RPM – How Do YOU Price The Click?
Trada CEO Niel Robertson (AdExchanger.com Q&A) says its time for publishers to recognize the RPM as a key metric pricing the ad click and understanding their own revenue models. He explains on the Trada blog, “RPM means Revenue per Mille (1000 in French). In other words, how much money does your site generate from 1,000 visitors. This is only something that most sites have started to think about. To give you an idea of how new this is, RPM doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia entry yet (as of the time of writing this entry).” Read more.
Attribution Debate
Jack Marshall covers the attribution metrics and modeling debate at the recent Search Engine Strategies Chicago event on ClickZ. Marshall says display and social media marketing were helping drive the discussion. Avinash Kaushick, analytics evangelist at Google, may have had the most compelling line of the day when he discussed the “Make Crap Up” system, “in which marketers base their assumptions on arbitrary factors such as the size of the team working on a specific element of a campaign, or the amount of budget already being allocated to it.” Read more.
Akamai Predictions
Citibank analyst Mark Mahaney reiterates his “hold” rating on Akamai stock in advance of Wednesday’s earnings call and offers: “1) Near term, we view Akamai as a beneficiary of the recovery in Online Retail; 2) Medium term, we believe that the overall growth outlook for eCommerce and ‘Net Advertising may not be fully factored into Street estimtes; and 3) Long term, HD Video could emerge as a new Secular Growth driver for Akamai. Key risks include: 1) Intense pricing on the CDN front; 2) New, well funded competitors in this space (telcos, Amazon, etc.); and 3) The combined impact of the above two factors on AKAM’s long-term margins and growth rate. Also at 29X ’11 P/E, we view AKAM’s valuation as relatively full.”
Mobile And Video Ad Exchanges
ClickZ’s Zach Rodgers gives an overview of recent announcements in the mobile and video ad exchange spaces. Rodgers quotes buy-sider and Hill Holliday’s Adam Cahill who says, “We’ve got lots of people getting up to speed and familiar with the mechanics of exchange-traded media. Today that’s predominantly in the display space. There’s some growing portion of digital media that’s going to end up in exchange environments.” Read it.
The Mobile Interstitial
On the Google Mobile Ads blog, the company announced – with the help of Google’s AdMob – the launch of “interactive video and interactive interstitial ad units on the Android platform. By identifying the screen resolution, size, and network connection speed we are able to serve users the optimal viewing experience.” See an example with popular game, “Angry Birds.”
Speeding The Process
Burt CEO Gustav Von Sydow (AdExchanger.com Q&A) provides some screenshots of his company’s “Rich” creative analytics platform for digital ads on the Burt blog. Von Sydow writes that they’ve completely re-written parts of the product since August: “Data storage, analytics engine, account API, payment management, metrics API, web app, ad testing kit – is brand new. The analytics engine is insanely fast: +100x compared to our previous Hadoop based solution.” See it.
