Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
FTC Recommending Self-Regulation
According to MediaPost’s Wendy Davis, it looks like the U.S. Federal Trade Commission will recommend that the online advertising industry continue to move forward with new, perhaps improved, self-regulation efforts rather than recommending Congressional action and new laws. Quoting FTC member Julie Brill at a privacy convergence on Tuesday, Davis writes, “The Commission isn’t calling for regulation right now. (…) We’re talking about a new self-regulatory framework.” Read more.
Expandables And The Exchange
Rich media expandales in the an exchange-like environment is a coming trend and Pointroll announced yesterday that it will be rolling out this offering to other sell- and buy-side opportunities but, initially, it is “enabling more inventory to be available within AdMeld through DataXu for expandable ads.” Read more on PointRoll’s site. It would follow that with improved engagement through expandable ads, the bidding could go up for publisher inventory in a non-guaranteed environment. Good for publishers as long as they have controls around expandable inventory they might consider too intrusive. On the buy-side, implementing this type of creative could be more costly. Regardless, non-guaranteed takes a step forward. Is digital, addressable TV inventory through an exchange that far away?
Adknowledge Talks Affiliate Business
After buying affiliate network Hydra Networks, Adknowledge released some data on Tuesday which it says shows that in the three months since the purchase, 81 former Hydra clients are running CPC offers and are happy campers. What’s more, the company says it is taking steps to clean up its affliate business with “guidelines (that) have recently been distributed to account management teams to ensure affiliate violations are kept to a minimum.” Read more.
In the U.S., social advertising reach was 62% on Facebook in September according to new ComScore data which is available grapically on the ComScore Data mine site. Facebook is nearly triple the reach of its nearest social competitor, MySpace. Read more. It should be noted that traditional ad networks still are a better opportunity for sheer reach as the top 25 ad networks “reached” better than Facebook in August (ComScore release), for example.
The New Pay Wall?
You’ve likely heard of the recent brouhaha regarding “carriage fees” between cable and content provider such as Cablevision and News Corp. On Slate, Farhad Manjoo ruminates about the war coming to the web and offers this use case with Yahoo! as a content provider who could demand a fee from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in order to give the ISP’s users access: “[Yahoo] has long struggled financially, but it’s still one of the most beloved sites online. If Yahoo demanded that ISPs fork over $1 a month per customer, would the providers balk? I doubt it. For many people, the Web without Yahoo isn’t the Web at all—if ISPs want to offer the full Web to their subscribers, they’d have no choice but to pay the carriage fee.” Read more.
Display Engine Marketing
In an interview, Mexad’s Sacha Berlik (AdExchanger.com Q&A) tells eConsultancy that he’s positioning his company as a Display Engine Marketing (DEM) agency, “Mexad is providing auction based bid management across multiple ad exchanges and yield managers. We offer this as a full service. (…) Our business model is comparable to SEM, Search Engine Marketing: we buy display media synchronised on behalf of agencies/advertisers across auction based technologies. We make a fixed commission for our service.” Read more. Display engine marketing was originally coined, to my knowledge, by AppNexus CTO Mike Nolet on his personal blog in February 2010. Read why he created the phrase.
Big Data Philosophy
IA Ventures Roger Ehrenberg reveals some of his thinking around investments in companies focused on unlocking big data. Ehrenberg writes on his blog: “At IA Ventures we structure our thinking about Big Data around three buckets: Visualization; Learning; and Scaling…” and then pointing to the opportunity, he writes, “The inexorable drop in the costs of storage, compute and bandwidth, with a related increase in network access has led us to a point where, in the words of Mike Driscoll, CTO and Co-founder at Metamarkets and author of the blog Dataspora, “The economic value of Big Data finally exceeds its extractions costs.'” Read more.
Massive Officially Redeployed
On the Microsoft Advertising blog, the closing of in-game advertising company was made official as Microsoft’s Rik van der Kooi discusses the “redeployment” of the Massive assets and employees including, “We will take the best of what Massive has to offer and redeploy its ad serving technology on one “customer platform” within Microsoft. In the future, game oriented advertisers will find it easier to do business with all Microsoft properties with a singular focus, unified sales force and unique advertising opportunities across a suite of gaming properties.” Read all the bullet points.
Frequency Capping Isn’t Child’s Play
Last month on DMNews, XA.net CEO Rob Leathern discussed why finding the best frequency for delivering ads to your target is difficult. He writes, “Part of this is the fault of legacy ad-serving technologies. (…) The result is a mishmash of data with no clear concept of how often a person is being exposed to a specific message.” Read more.
Brands Need Direct
Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger argues on his personal blog that he is fed up with brands and he isn’t going to take it anymore! … ok, maybe his rant is not “Network” quality as he writes, “The logic seems to be mostly around “I am going to shift my advertising from offline to online” with some “social” thrown in for good measure.” He says it’s time for brand marketers to take part in the unique one-to-one communication with the consumer that the Internet affords. Read more.
