Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Please Be $100 Mil Or Less
The Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson reports that AOL divulged how much it can pay for any company in the ad tech space, or any other space for that matter, during the recent Credit Suisse conference in Florida. AOL CFO Artie Minson said, “our current credit agreement caps us at a $100 million deals. We’re out of the Hail Mary business.” Read more. For a transcript of the live blogging of the AOL presentation, click here.
Business Press Short Tech Shrift
CNET’s Dave Rosenberg reports that the business press isn’t giving technology companies a fair shake according to a new study by IT Database. “The report shows that Apple and Google dominate, while Twitter and Facebook are far more discussed in the business press than Intel, Dell, IBM, or even HP (the largest tech company in the world),” writes Rosenberg. Read more. And, see the study.
NY Times Hires For Digital Future
VentureBeat’s Paul Boutin reports that the New York Times is hiring digital for roles such as “Creative Technologist” and that this is a sign of a commitment to a digital future. Boutin says, “The jobs, located in New York City, will focus on expanding content distribution and advertising opportunities in the gradually recovering online economy.” Read more.
Consistently an important source of technology news features in the past, Mediaweek reports that Bloomberg’s newly-acquired magazine brand, BusinessWeek will relaunch April 23 and “will ‘reinvent’ the category, with shorter stories, 20 percent more editorial pages and three more issues for a total of 50.” Read more.
Marketer Truisms
In AdWeek, Mediabrands’ ID Media account director, Michael Baliber, provides “5 Digital Truisms for Marketers” and includes as a truism, “Auditing Will Help Protect Investments.” Baliber says that DoubleVerify identified an ad network that delivered 40% of its impressions outside of the U.S., when domestic U.S. users was the target. Read more truisms.
Improving The Trust
Better Advertising’s Scott Meyer talks to ScribedMedia.org in a video interview during the recent Internet Advertising Bureau Annual Leadership Meeting. Meyer stresses that for self-regulation to work, you need to prove you do what you say – the premise for Better Advertising – which will end up improving a level of trust that keeps agency and advertisers skittish today. See it.
The Entrepreneurial Philosophy
Have you ever thought why philosophers make great entrepreneurs? Me neither. But, former McKinsey consultant, entrepreneur and brainiac, Samidh Chakrabarti has thought about it and gives a thorough list of reasons including, “Philosophers aren’t afraid of risk.” Read more.
The Big Data Story
It’s not too late to check out last month’s feature in The Economist about data being everywherrrrre. A snippet from the article: “Joe Hellerstein, a computer scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, calls it ‘the industrial revolution of data’. The effect is being felt everywhere, from business to science, from government to the arts. Scientists and computer engineers have coined a new term for the phenomenon: ‘big data’.” Read more. (source: @ACEdge)
Blocking Ads, Forcing Ads
From The Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries writes about web publisher, Ars Technica, which has been testing the blocking of users who block ads. Editor Ken Fisher of Ars Technica said to users who were angered by the test, “Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn’t pay. In a way, that’s what ad blocking is doing to us.” Read more.
Ranking Video Ad Networks
ComScore released its January 2010 video rankings and the rankings for the “top video ad networks in terms of their actual reach delivered were: BrightRoll Video Network with 27.2 percent penetration of online video viewers, SpotXchange Video Ad Network with 19.8 percent, and Tremor Media Video Network with 16.6 percent.” See the rankings.
DIY Location-Based Services
The Attention blog points out a new service coming from Socialight which allows you to create your own “location-based communication channels” and provides an example of “a hotel concierge programming a channel highlighting all the must-do’s within a short walking distance of the hotel.” Do it yourself here.
Google Data Retention
Nate Anderson of Ars Technica looks at Google’s efforts in collecting and anonymizing user data. Quoting “security/privacy engineer,” Alma Whitten. Whitten says, “Wonderful things that can be done with an abundance of data.” And Anderson fills in the blanks writing, “When Google’s teams began looking at the data retention issue a few years back, they ‘started with zero’ and tried to see if they could make it work. They could not; Google would lose the ability to do too many useful things.” Read more.
