Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Agency Sign O’ The Times
GM has finalized its agency dance partners (for now) and for the first time in nearly 100 years, Chevy campaign duties will be split by perennial GM agency service provider, IPG’s Campbell-Ewald, and newcomer Publicis. There are no favorites in the agency world anymore. All hands on deck! Read about it on Bloomberg.
But Wait, There’s More
Brand marketers from companies, such as CPG heavyweight, Unilever, are naming global digital agencies of record. How does Unilever manage agencies across traditional and digital channels? No idea – must be tough. If they’re smart, they’ll – at least – “test” positioning, messaging and campaigns with digital agencies for all channels given the digital channel’s far superior tracking and near real-time reporting capability. Razorfish and AKQA are the lucky recipients of digital record according to Ad Age. Read more.
Inventory Tatto-ed
After making Facebook’s naughty list, Tatto Media is now leaving Right Media as the online ad network tells Adotas that it’s going it alone and reaching out directly to publishers rather than use audience aggregators such as RMX. “[Right Media] is no longer in our best interest here at Tatto” according a Tatto rep. Hmm… Tatto strategy shift or is this latest move led by Yahoo! and its “premium” positioning? Read more on Adotas.
VC Agnosticism
Brad Feld of new VC firm, The Foundry Group, discusses what he means by saying his firm is “syndication agnostic” on his blog at Feld.com. Feld says, “The common two themes from this for us is: (a) we only co-invest with people we like, trust, and respect and that like, trust, and respect us and (b) we view it as our responsibility to make a decision about whether or not we want to invest independent of any other investors (VC or angels) at the table.” Read more.
Displaying Search
Suman Basetty, Efficient Frontier’s Director of Product Management, goes display on EF’s blog and provides readers with a short primer on how search marketers can leverage the online display advertising opportunity. Among his many tips, “if you have visibility into the complete path to conversion, you can optimize your display campaign’s bids not just based on the direct conversions but also based on how they are assisting search keywords conversions.” Read more.
Smart Folk Predictions
PR maven and red-shoe addict, George Simpson, aggregates “Predictions for 2010 By Some Really Smart Folks” in his MediaPost column. Among the folks, Simulmedia’s Dave Morgan prognosticates, “Data-driven TV will come of age in 2010” and Catalyst:SF CEO John Durham says, “It will be the year of the niche. Mass is dead. A focus on being nimble and resourceful are the keys to winning in 2010.” Scratch more niche here.
Mobile Numbers
Millenial Media released its November “scorecard” last Friday which aggregates its own mobile ad network data and that of other industry analysts. Following the data crumbs on Millenial’s network, data showed “35% of the post-click actions in November included a Subscribe/Purchase action – a consecutive increase month over month of 2%.” See Mack McKelvey’s summary on the Millenial blog. Or, read more from the PDF. (Sign up required.)
Mobile Case Study
From the Google Ad Agency Solutions blog, Meredith Papp from Google’s mobile team provides a case study from Razorfish that tests keyword usage in landing page text for mobile devices. Razorfish search manager Brian Bartek in discussing the results says, “the three new [ad] versions provided over 9.3% lift in conversion rate over the strongest performing copy in their desktop campaigns.” Read the blog post. And/or, get the case study (PDF).
Banner Ad Top 10
Nick Cybela of Minneapolis-St. Paul-area ad firm, Cuneo, give his banner ad “Top 10” for auto advertisers on his “SpotOn” blog. At #10, “Is a $[x] CPM (cost per thousand impressions) a good price?”… At #9, “What does success look like?”… Find out these answers and more from Nick here.
ad:tech Chicago Is History
ad:tech expositions announced that it will no longer be doing a show in Chicago and will concentrate on shows in NYC and SF for the North American market. Susan McDonald, SVP of ad:tech’s parent dmg world media (what’s with the all-lower-case?), said in a release, “The decision was difficult. But we’re seeing a variety of signs that the industry prefers fewer, larger events.” Read more.
Angels Are In-Charge
Courtesy of a recent blog post by Cogblog mad scientist and entrepreneur Brent Halliburton, Bill Burnham writes, “Angel investors are becoming the dominate force in Consumer Internet Venture capital. The vacuum created by the withdrawal of VCs from traditional Seed and Series A opportunities in the Consumer Internet space has been filled by a motley collection of angel investors.” Read more.
