Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Thumbs Down On CPMs
Lightening rod, David Koretz (AdExchanger.com Q&A), takes a less controversial position than usual and says that the CPM is dead save for a few large sites (WSJ, NY Times, etal.) which can still provide a unique branding experience for advertisers. Koretz says on MediaPost, “The rest of us will be forced to sell on performance pricing models.” Read more.
Yahoo! Display Up
On Friday, Kaufman Brothers analyst Aaron Kessler is so optimistic on Yahoo!’s future that he upgraded the stock. Kessler said in a research note that given Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz’s comments at the UBS Media Conference this past week, Kessler is expecting “improvement in display demand and pricing in the fourth quarter” which bodes well for the company’s shares. Read more from TheStreet.com.
Location Matters
Eyeblaster Director of Digital Experience (great title!), Dean Donaldson, says in Ad Age that, yes Virginia, it’s not all about audience, it’s about context and location whether its online display advertising or email or other digital destinations. Donaldson argues, “We’re wasting data from ineffective advertising if we’re not using it to determine how to improve creative concepts against the actual consumer data shown in the various environments.” Read it.
On the Bruce Clay blog, Susan Esparza live blogged the display ad panel at last week’s Search Engine Strategies (SES) event in Chicago. Moderated by Incisive’s Matt McGowan, the panel titled “Search Becomes the Display OS” featured Steven Kaufman of MediaMath, Jonathan Mendez of RAMP Digital and Dax Hamman of iCrossing as they discussed the growing innovation in display. The opening of the blog post shows how far the search industry has yet to go (exceptions exist like Efficient Frontier and iCrossing) before it understands, or is interested in, display: “So I’m not really sure what this panel is going to be about because I originally had something else scheduled…” Congrats to Incisive Media (SES owners) for pushing forward. Read more.
eXelate and ZEDO
The partnership party continues to pulse as members of the digital ad ecosystem reach out to complimentary partners with the goal of driving business. Last week, eXelate was one of the latest to announce a deal – this time with with the ad serving company ZEDO who will re-sell eXelate targeting data. Read more on BizReport.
PubMatic Talks Tiger Yield
Tiger may be suffering, but publishers aren’t. CEO Rajeev Goel of yield optimizer PubMatic spoke to BusinessWeek about the surge publishers are experiencing in regards to the Tiger Woods drama. Goel told BW, “Some of PubMatic’s news and entertainment customers have seen traffic double since the Woods story broke.” Read the article.
Targeting Co. Gets Ammo
alarm:clock reports that UK-based Grapeshot has raised 1.5 million pounds sterling to grow it’s ad targeting business which effectively targets according to user behaviors and context. Grapeshot is also “a type of anti-personnel ammunition used in cannons” according to Wikipedia. No word on the connection to the 21st century version. Read more on alarm:clock. Or, visit Grapeshot’s website.
New CEO At AdReady
AdReady CEO Aaron Finn (AdExchanger.com Q&A) will move to the Chairman of the Board role and former aQuantive and Microsoft GM, Karl Siebrecht, will take over the chief executive position at AdReady, a display advertising technology company. In discussing the current challenges of display advertising, Siebrecht tells Gregory Huang on Seattle’s Xconomy that “If you’re really big, you can get display to work quite well. If you’re small, you’re not even in the market.” Read the article.
Gannett Eyeballing Video
PaidContent’s David Kaplan says that according to Gannett’s chief digital officer, Chris Saridakis, in two weeks Gannett will roll-out a new video platform running on Brightcove (was Maven) and that this will benefit Gannett’s rich media, video ad provider, PointRoll. Read more.
Scammers Makin’ Money
Robert McMillan of IDG News Service reports that the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint (ICC) center issued an advisory on Friday (see it here) that warned about phony anti-virus software being delivered through pop-ups. If it happens to you, shut down your browser and run a trusted anti-virus program. Or, just suck it up and pray to your maker. Read more about the $150 million that the FBI alleges these scammers have earned on PC World.
DOOH Audience Targeting
In the digital-out-of-home (DOOH) marketplace, Digital signage vendor Future Software is adding audience targeting capabilities from Quividi to its digital signage product line. DigitalSignageToday.com’s Bill Yackey writes, “Future Software is able to provide customers with a full reporting suite of audience data so that operators can demonstrate the effectiveness of a DOOH campaign.” Read more.
Agencies Are Not Commodity Orgs
On TechCrunch, SocialMedia.com’s Seth Goldstein (AdExchanger.com Q&A) discusses the move to audience buying in his guest article, “The Medium Is No Longer The Message, . . . You Are.” Goldstein notes IPG’s Cadreaon and Publicis’ VivaKi Nerve Center as an indication that “agencies are tired of being treated like commodity procurement organizations.” Read more.
