Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Better Advertising And The “i”
Scott Meyer’s Better Advertising will be enabling the “i” as IPG Mediabrands’ Cadreon will use the new privacy icon initiative in an upcoming Microsoft campaign according to Wendy Davis of MediaPost. “The icon — an ‘i’ in a circle — will appear as an overlay in the ads. Better Advertising also is working on designing a landing page that will include information about targeting and instructions for opting out.” Read more.
The Digital Power Grab
Following several noteworthy elevations of digitally-focused executives within agencies such as Rob Norman moving to the CEO role at GroupM, ClickZ’s Douglas Quentana writes that worldwide digital director David Eastman will be the new North American President at JWT. Read more.
VC Pushing Exits
Venture capital firms are speeding up exits and “driven by pent-up buyers and sellers on both sides of transactions, time to liquidity is shortening in the venture industry” says an article in Mass High Tech. Read more. Here’s another heartening quote for a startup or VC: “Acquisitive giants like Cisco Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. were relatively unscathed by the 2008-2009 recession… Now, collectively, they have over $100 billion in cash burning holes in their pockets.”
More Pay Walls
According to the BBC, News Corp’s The Times and Sunday Times newspapers are going to start charging for access to their websites in June. It’s going to cost users £1 for a day’s access and £2 for a week’s subscription. The Times’ editor, James Harding, discusses the strategy with the BBC saying, “It’s less of a risk than just throwing away our journalism and giving it away from free.” Read more.
Slideshow Display Advertising
Scott Johnson of Compete questions publisher Boston.com’s slideshow strategy and whether its truly providing any value to advertisers. He writes on the company blog, “In the last month, at least one of our anonymous panelists was exposed 50 times to the same display ad in less than 10 minutes.” Johnson admits that he doesn’t know the terms of the deal that Boston.com has with the buyer. Nevertheless, this is a compelling post that shows some of the issues advertisers must grapple with and how the burgeoning verification and validation space may help. Read more.
More On Ad Exchanges
Tim Surowiecki of iMarketing LTD gives the basics of ad exchanges for the audience at iMedia Connection. Among the challenges he sees with exchanges, Surowiecki says, “Too much choice. Ad exchanges put the entire world of online advertising at your fingertips, which means you’ll have an endless array of possible targets, ad types, categories, websites, and more.” Some might say that choice is a strength. Read more.
Cadreon Moving To Verify Audience
MediaPost’s Wendy Davis notes IPG Mediabrands’ Cadreon unit is devoting two members from its 34-member team to what it calls “‘Audience Movement,’ which aims to verify that targeted ads are reaching Web users who are interested in purchasing the products advertised.” This could be an important data point in understanding what data is worth. But, that leaves 32 people to do everything else at Cadreon. The head count seems small from here given IPG’s size and digital media needs. An acquisition or three could take care of that quickly, though. Read more.
More Video Ads
TV Network, the CW, says that its going to crank out the online video ads in order for the math to work out for the online distribution of its TV shows such as Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries. According to Ad Age, the “intends to run just as much advertising during shows viewed online as it does on TV next season.” That’s 2:02 of commercials per commercial break. Read more.
Video And Display Ad Uplift
If you intend to crank out video ads on your video destination website, there’s more good news. According to a ComScore release, “Video and display advertising both successfully increased brand engagement in each of the four campaigns analysed. The average uplift across the campaigns saw site visitation increase by more than a factor of seven over a four week period following exposure to an ad, with consumers three times more likely to conduct search queries using brand or relevant generic terms in the same time period.” Read it.
Making The Sales Team Cross-Channel
Mediaweek/Adweek have chosen their magazine website of the year. (Oxymoron, right?). And, the winner is… nationalgeographic.com. Interesting note about the developments of the sales team at Nat Geo: “Cross-platform deals have been on the rise since last year when National Geographic adopted a platform-neutral ad sales model. Today, nearly half the site’s revenue involves at least one other medium.” Read more.
The New Digital Marketing Role
Joshua Porter, co-founder of Performable, discusses on the company blog what he sees as “a new breed” of marketing professional. Identifying it as the User Experience Designer, Porter says this new role “bridges both marketing and design to deliver the right product at the right time to the right customer. They find the right context, so to speak, basing design decisions on market research and then listening to the market after launch to verify their assumptions.” Read more.
