A New OpenRTB Standard; Salesforce.com And Marketing

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

OpenRTB Revised

Guided by DataXu CTO Bill Simmons and Rubicon Project’s Neal Richter, and sponsored by the IAB, the new OpenRTB spec is in the wild (pdf). Simmons writes on the DataXu blog, “When OpenRTB was first announced in November 2010, programmatic advertising had captured just 4% of the display market. Fast-forward to today and the industry is projected to hit 22% by the end of the year. I believe that a large percentage of this growth is due to the reduced friction that OpenRTB protocol standardization has enabled.” Read more. Also, read Simmons’ original Q&A on OpenRTB from 2010.

Jumble Of Parts?

Enterprise cloud stalwart Salesforce.com has staked its claim in the sales and customer service sphere of CRM, but how about in marketing? VentureBeat’s John Koetsier didn’t mince words when he described the enterprise platform’s digital marketing stack as something like a “jumble of parts thrown together.” But, there is a method to the madness of sewing disparate parts of the system together, according to Marketing Cloud CMO Mike Lazerow, who says there is an underlying vision to link all customers or potential customers “across all of their devices, identities, social networks and media.” Read more.

Exploring In-Image Advertising

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released the “In-Image Advertising Primer,” which dissects their latest in ad types for native campaigns. By inserting product information into editorial photos across the Web, or by overlaying brand information onto videos or rich media, this report shows a 51% increase in viewability for in-image campaigns over their published counterparts. Could in-image ad campaigns be the next essential step for native ad campaigns? Read the full press release.

Amazon Data

BusinessWeek gives an overview of Amazon’s advertising business, focusing on the restraint it has shown in monetizing customer data this way. With margins constantly squeezed in its core commerce business, investors would like to see that change. “If Amazon is going to hold the line on margins and continue to subsidize shipping, you’d like to see them pull the high-margin levers they have at their disposal,” said Robert W. Baird & Co. analyst Colin Sebastian. “Advertising is a big one.” More.

Reimagining News Feeds

It’s no secret that newspapers are a dinosaur of an industry, but there may be hope for the business. Tribune Digital Ventures launched a new app called Newsbeat that aggregates about 7,000 stories daily, converts articles to audio and delivers a news stream to users’ mobile phones. Shashi Seth, president of the Tribune Co.’s technology arm described the new app as a Spotify or Pandora for news. Users can personalize newsfeeds, jumping to stories of interest and skipping others. Get the full story via Variety.

But Wait. There’s More!