Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
DSP Chango Gets $1.4 Million
Demand-side platform Chango (AdExchanger.com Q&A) which is focused on bringing search and display together announced in a release that it has raised $1.4 million in Series A financing from “Metamorphic Ventures and Geoff Judge [which adds] to their existing investor syndicate that includes iNovia Capital and Extreme Venture Partners. Lewis Gersh, Managing Partner at Metamorphic, and Geoff Judge, angel investor and cofounder of 24/7 Real Media, will join Chango’s board of directors.” The Toronto-based company also said that it would open a New York City-based office in the coming months. Chango CEO Chris Sukorynyk tells TechCrunch, “We’ve just launched in private beta. We are still selecting which advertisers we are working with, and will probably launch a self-serve option later this month.” Read the release.
MSNBC.com Backpedals
According to ClickZ’s Douglas Quentana, reports that MSNBC.com would do away with the banner ad appear to be incorrect. (Read the Mediaweek article from earlier in the week.) Bold statements from MSNBC.com execs had said that they were moving to an OPA-ad-only format, but as Quentana points out, that hasn’t happened. He gets a new quote from Kyoo Kim at MSNBC.com who says, “The spirit of the story was right. We are systematically going through and de-prioritizing the 728 by 90 banner ad.” Read more.
U.S. Display Ad Data
ComScore says that a recent study showed rich media and flash ads (wait, isn’t Flash rich media?) make up nearly 40% of all U.S. display ad inventory. The big winner in terms of format is the trusty JPEG format checking in with a 42% market share. 728×90 leaderboards took the digital display “dimension” top honors with 23% in the U.S. Read more fun display stats. Comscore’s Jeff Hackett adds that he sees a resurgence in display.
Twitter ad network, Ad.ly, is taking its in-stream ads to Twitter apps. According to a release, “The new platform, called Ad.ly for Apps, leverages an API to serve contextually and locally targeted ads to app users based on the streams they are reading and where they are located.” Read the release.
NetMining In Europe
Innovation Interactive’s NetMining (AdExchanger.com Q&A) announced that it’s launching its audience-driven ad network into Europe “with further growth forthcoming in the UK and Germany.” Also, the company said that more than 100 marketers in the U.S. have already used Netmining’s audience ad network for retargeting and audience targeting since its launch 8 months ago. Read the release.
Ad Network Gets Patent
Grocery Shopping Network (AdExchanger.com Q&A), an ad network of supermarket websites, announced a patent which “covers the displaying of available varieties of ‘on-sale’ products. For instance, if a top selling product is on sale, the patented process is a method for taking a general sales item and helping shoppers find exactly the items they want by displaying all varieties of an available product at a specific brick and mortar location.” Read the release.
Display And Search
In Australia, search agency Downstream Mareketing has entered the era of display and search with a little help from Efficient Frontier. Downstream’s CEO Steve Knowles says in B&T, “We had increasing demands and requests from our client base to move into performance creative due to the dynamic data-driven insights we have via the Efficient Frontier platform and our planning approach to consumer engagement.” Read more.
New Creative Multi-Variate Tool
Limelight’s EyeWonder hasn’t stopped cranking out new products since being acquired late last year. In a release, EyeWonder announced the launch of a new multi-variate creative tool called AdVolve which “[analyzes then optimizes] the performance of the creative elements that make up a display advertisement.” Read more. And, it’s cloud-based.
Uptick In M&A In 1st Half 2010
I-bank Jordan, Edmiston Group (JEGI) announced that it is seeing a strong surge in mergers and acquisitions both from an activity and valuation perspective in the first half of 2010. From the release, “Overall, six market sectors saw strong growth in M&A in the first half: B2B Online Media (number of deals up nearly 4x), B2C Online Media (+64%), Business‐to‐Business Media (up nearly 4x), Database & Information Services (+90%), Marketing & Interactive Services (+96%), and Mobile Media & Technology (+188%).” Download the release which includes a nice historical chart (PDF).
On BeliefNet Selling
BeliefNet was sold by News Corp a few days ago after Rupert Murdoch’s company decided that the spiritually-focused property no longer fit into their media plans. Read more on PaidContent. Yesterday, investment banking firm DeSilva + Phillips announced that it was there to lend a helping hand to BeliefNet as it was acquired by BN Media. Read more.
Mobile Brand Effectiveness
Medialets announced that it has entered into a partnership to bring Dynamic Logic’s brand effectiveness methodologies to mobile and Medialets rich media ad solutions for mobile apps. From the release: “Through this partnership, advertisers will gain access to a unique measurement solution which directly ties together ad engagement and brand impact. Medialets and Dynamic Logic will be using WPP’s Safecount to power the technical integration, enabling relevant data points to be combined into one analysis.” Read more.
Pay Per Click Offers
Inuvo (AdExchanger.com Q&A) is now accepting Pay Per Click offers through its online leads platform. Differences for PPC offers (from its CPA offers, evidently) includes: “Each PPC offer has a built-in limit of one transaction per hour per IP address. The ability to limit transactions to only specific domains is not available (…).” And, there’s more.
