Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Facebook Faces Facts
Nick O’Neill on All Facebook says that Facebook is starting to take down certain ad networks from the social media juggernaut after posting a warning on the Facebook Developers blog (Read it.). O’Neill writes, “While we can’t be completely sure, it appears that IQ Quizzes and similar quizzes have been deemed unacceptable.” Read more.
Guaranteed Awareness
Think digital is effect the magazine trade? How about this? A new magazine called The Week is guaranteeing advertisers that their ads will be effective and “in the top one-third of magazines where an ad has run, or The Week will to run free ad pages for the marketer until it gets to that benchmark.” Read more from The New York Times’ Stefanie Clifford.
Ready For The Holidays?
Matt Greitzer of Razorfish makes recommendations to retailers with end-of-year budgets to spend and says that, above all, he recommends spending on site-side optimization. Fix your conversion funnel and Santa will come. Read more.
Orange Expands Ad Network
Suzanne Bearne of New Media Age in the UK reports the the Orange ad network is expanding its reach into the U.S. and Latin America and “will offer advertisers run of network, direct response and site specific placements.” Read more.
Friending Frienemies
Stuart Elliott of The New York Times reports that at the Annual Association of National Advertisers convention, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was stressing the friend part of keyword “frienemy” in front of audience members present for his address. (No confirmation that Schmidt had his emissaries place white lilies as centerpieces on lunchtime tables.) Read about it.
Elsewhere at the ANA convention – no more razmatazz! Effects of the economy appear to be driving some marketing strategies toward helping the consumer rather than selling to the consumer says Elliot. Read more.
Rafer Reviews Ramen
Scott Rafer, who recently shut down his company, Lookery, revisits the recent past in a profile on ReadWriteWeb. Rafer offers several nuggets of advice to startups including the importance of becoming “ramen profitable” where “If you can, bootstrap for as long as possible. You need to build something solid and meet those needs first. Then try to postpone fundraising until you’ve got scaling issues, not survival issues.” Read the advice.
Adconion: New Site, New Focus
After launching its new website, Adconion appears to be signaling a stronger emphasis on its video advertising network business. According to ComScore, in September 2009 the company ranked 19th among its subscriber ad networks with a total U.S. unique reach of 133 million. See the new website.
Adgregate Markets Clouds
Adgregate Markets announced its new ShopCloud platform
which it says allows businesses to easily build shopping carts and other transactional capabilities. As an example, the company offers an example from its Warner Brother client here (bottom left corner of page). Or, read the release.
More Hires At Rubicon Project
The Rubicon Project continues to make hires around the world as it recently announced the addition of Leon Siotis and Jana Jakovljevic of Fox Interactive Media’s (or Fox Audience Network’s) network performance team. PaidContent.org’s Robert Andrews notes that this comes after the high profile hiring of former MySpace Europe VP, Jay Stevens. Read more.
Scammy Ad Update
A glowing review of the social gaming and virtual goods space appeared in The New York Times on Friday as the dollars appear to be rolling in. Read it here. But over the weekend, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch called out continued alleged violations by social game network, Zynga, and pointed the finger at Facebook for not policing the game/offer networks more thoroughly. Read more. And then, Zynga said it would remove all offers for the time being.
Brand Protection for CMOs
Frederick Felman, CMO of brand protector services company, MarkMonitor, makes his (and his company’s) case for the importance of a brand protection strategy for CMOs. Among his ideas: the acquisition of a .brand Top-Level Domain (TLD) when the URL naming structure opens up next year. Felman argues, “With a ‘.brand,’ web surfers and search engines will be able to find your online venues more quickly and easily — netting you better-qualified traffic and improved ROI.” Read more.
Inside Angel Financing
Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures details the use of convertible notes in angel round financing. For any startup considering such a round, this post may be helpful – though it is definitely a mind-bender to understand. Math whizzes, enjoy – read it.
Targeting Display With Social Media
Ehren Reilly of Clickable looks at display options available in social media for search engine marketers. He argues that MySpace and Facebook provide a great opportunity for marketers to exploit all that the sites know about their users with their demo/psychographic targeting. Read more.
Linden On CF And Expert Opinion
On his “Geeking With Greg” blog, Greg Linden (recently of Microsoft) looks a recent white paper, “The Wisdom of the Few: A Collaborative Filtering Approach Based on Expert Opinions from the Web.” (PDF here.) Linden summarizes, “The results suggest that using a small pool of a couple hundred experts, possibly your own experts or experts selected and mined from the web, has quite a bit of value, especially in cases where big data from a large community is unavailable.” Read more.
