Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Donovan And FatTail Partner
Donovan Data System extends its digital arms in a new FatTail (AdExchanger.com Q&A) partnership. In regards to the new partner for its iDesk agency media buying product, DDS’ JT Batson says in the release, “(…) Our mission (is) to improve efficiency in the whole sector, and most of all to increase productivity and cost savings for our agency clients. And there’s no doubt this integration also brings similar benefits for digital publishers.” Read the release.
Google Display Tuning Performance
Looking to fine tune its display network, Google announced two new features. First, Display Campaign Optimizer – “You simply provide us with your target cost-per-acquisition (CPA), creatives and budget, and the Display Campaign Optimizer goes to work, showing your ads in all the right places, automatically.” Goodbye direct sales team? Second, “The Contextual Targeting Tool builds tightly themed keyword lists for your display campaigns, which are used to contextually target your ads.” Seems like the old search keyword tool reconfigured for the display world. Why not? Read more on the Insider AdWords blog. MediaPost’s Mark Walsh has an interview with GDN product maven Brad Bender here.
Search Spend Up, Early Days For Display
Efficient Frontier has tabulated 3rd quarter marketing spend and says that search spend is on the rise with plenty of stats to prove it. But, EF says it’s still early days for certain display ad inventory sources. From the report: “Due to their earlier development stages, we have yet to see prominent pricing and spend trends emerge in the display ad exchanges or Facebook. However, overall advertiser interest going into Q4 2010 for both of these channels is high. We expect significant test budgets, particularly for Facebook, to emerge in Q4 across our client base.” Read the release. And, get the report (sign-up required).
Centro reports that Transis, its “web-based system that automates the media planning process” is getting great traction. Centro’s founder Shawn Riegsecker (AdExchanger.com Q&A) says in a release that “more than 40 advertising agencies have signed up to use Transis. Read more.
Microsoft Has Display Retargeting, Too
On the Microsoft Advertising blog, media specialist Katie Atkinson discusses the basic display advertising opportunities available through Microsoft Media Network and reminds buyers that retargeting is an option. She writes, “Remessaging, or retargeting, is an effective way to communicate with your audience after they’ve visited your site. When that customer visits any site across Microsoft Media Network, they can be remessaged with an ad designed around the specific actions that customer took- remessaging helps you drive high engagement and ROI with relevant messaging.” Read more.
MediaCom On Keeping Staff
MediaCom North America CEO Doug Checkeris gets on the Advertising Age soapbox and preaches to his agency brethren about the need for training and mentorship at the junior and middle management levels of agencies. If not, he says they risk losing the management of tomorrow, let alone a viable business. Checkeris thinks the 4As and other groups should be involved, too: “What would happen if these associations would invest even more outreach and money into seeding digital advertising/marketing programs with universities, ad schools and even select high schools in an effort to educating and demystifying digital marketing?” Read more.
YouTube Is Everyone
On the Google AdWords Agency blog, Google’s Laura Salzberg discusses the new YouTube Targeting tool and tries to demystify some of its capabilities such as this softball: “I am not sure if my clients’ audiences are on YouTube?” Answer: are you kidding me? She writes, “Your clients’ audiences are watching YouTube videos. YouTube has users of all ages and 32% of users are between the ages of 35 and 54*. In fact, if the YouTube audience were a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the world with over 420 million unique visitors every month.” So there. Read more.
Global Ad Spend Up
AdWeek’s Steve McClellan dissects a new global ad spend report from Nielsen. He notes: “Worldwide outlays jumped nearly 13 percent in the first six months of 2010 to $238 billion vs. the same period a year ago.” Read more on AdWeek.
Ad Networks Adding Social, Mobile
Adgregate Markets and Epic Media Group’s ad network, Traffic Marketplace, announced a strategic partnership which “enables Traffic Marketplace to integrate Adgregate’s distributed commerce solutions, including ShopAds and ShopFans, into their digital marketing campaigns and rich media ad solutions across desktop and mobile platforms,” according to the release. Ad networks are getting into social and mobile. Read more.
Twitter Click Magic
Sunday, the New York Times featured Twitter’s move to an advertising model. Among other opportunities, the article discusses the performance of the new Promoted Tweets product which appears along side a tweet stream: “According to Twitter, on average 5 percent of people who see Promoted Tweets are clicking on, replying to or forwarding the ads — much higher than the less than 1 percent of people who click on a typical display ad.” The “click” is back? Read more.
Targeting The UK Tech Niche
Vertical tech network NetShelter and ad network AdConion are partnering as NetShelter passes UK ad sales to Adconion. From the release: “Adconion will drive online display, video and bespoke sponsorship opportunities for NetShelter and will be responsible for all of NetShelter’s UK sales.” This extends a previous agreement with Adconion overseeing ad sales for certain countries in Europe and Australia among others. Read the release.
Leads And BT
Responding to what it sees as outrageous claims by some lead sellers with fancy behavioral targeting (BT) algorithms, The Lead Critic blog says, “The point comes down to this: Lead Buyers should not be fooled by the outrageous claims made by Lead Sellers and their revolutionary behavioral targeting algorithms. Lead Sellers must realize that there is an incredible amount of information to be gleaned from other sectors of the internet (e-commerce, for example). If they can figure out how to leverage that, their success will skyrocket.” Read more.
How (Digital) Out-Of-Home Works
Out-of-home advertising provider Clear Channel and Marketshare Partners (who recently bought JovianDATA) have collaborated on a new white paper discussing the OOH market. Among the findings, and did you know?, “The optimal OOH allocation lies between 5% and 25% of the total advertising budget for the majority of products and brands.” I did not know. Read the release with more tidbits on why you need OOH (PDF). You’ll have to send Clear Channel an email to get the paper.
Where Has All The Audience Gone
Traditional channels are hurting, notes Flurry marketing chief Peter Farago, in a new company blog post showing how time spent by consumers viewing media is moving significantly into digital channels especially the iOs channel – as in iPad, iPhone and iPod. Social, online mobile games now command a “size and reach rank somewhere between NBC’s Sunday Night Football and ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, and only 4 million viewers shy from beating the number one prime-time show on television, FOX’s American Idol.” See the graph so you can add it to your presentation deck.
