Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Getting Hyper With IPG Mediabrands’ Geomentum
IPG’s Mediabrands announced a new unit (or practice) today called Geomentum. Check out the new site here.
With graphical arrows pointing upwards on the site, Mediabrands appears to have a clear vision on the opportunity in cross-channel, local advertising – Geomentum’s core focus. Marketing-speak from the site: “See Deeper Hyper-local IQ unlocks market potential. Build Smarter Bottom-up planning yields breakthrough results. Drive Explosive ROI.”
The NY Times’ Stephanie Clifford, a very busy ad reporter, notes Geomentum’s scale: “Geomentum will be large, handling about $2 billion a year in local advertising for companies like Coldwell Banker and Nestlé Waters.” And once again, data is at the center of this initiative as Mike Hayes, the chief strategy, operations and development officer for Geomentum tells Clifford, “Now we can market all the way down to address.” Addressable media is literally here! Before the FTC comes calling, Hayes adds later, “It’s really more about aggregated purchase behavior at a household level. There’s too many issues around privacy with an individual name and address and specific transactions.”
- More on Geomentum and their CEO Dave Walker from Steve McClellan at AdWeek.
- You can also get your Geomentum fix by following the @geomentum team on Twitter.
TRAFFIQ Expecting Profitability
Following yesterday’s announcement about funding, TRAFFIQ’s Scott Portugal told AdExchanger.com what it all means:
Obviously raising a round is always difficult, especially given today’s macro-economic headwinds. However, the momentum behind our model and the growth of the business meant we were able to find two great partners in Greenhill & Grotech, as well as continue our partnership with CSV. We expect to achieve profitability with this round of funding.
Beyond expanding our sales and marketing teams, we’re going to continue to invest in improving many features of our platform, based exclusively on client feedback. Other announcements will be coming out later this year regarding these upgrades, as well as several pending partnerships we’re working on.”
Publicis: Shhh, We Like You Razorfish
As I discussed yesterday, seems like Publicis’ had been putting out a public smoke screen on its interest, or alleged lack thereof, in Microsoft’s Razorfish. Today, courtesy of a report from a team of WSJ reporters, not only is the enormous ad holding company interested in Razorfish, they’re in the lead among the Fish’s many suitors. As part of the deal-making, Microsoft has evidently continued to push for assurances by whomever wins the agency, that they will spend millions of dollars on Microsoft Advertising services. Dentsu is the other bidder but doesn’t seem to be providing the opportunity for Microsoft Advertising as Publicis is according to the WSJ.
Who’s Your Buddy? Math – And, Don’t Roll Your Eyes!
The NY Times’ Steve Lohr covers recent trends in the job market for college graduates, “For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics.” Considering today’s increasingly data-driven ad world, the need for the mathematically-skilled seems appropriate. Now, don’t get all panicky on me, brand marketers! Math is your friend and unlocks better insights on the consumer than you’ve ever experienced before.
More Search Wars Talk
New Media Age looks into the recent MSFT/Yahoo! search deal and finds those who believe the search war can be turned and those who believe “not so much.”
Mark Mitchell, group head of search at media agency OMD UK tells NMA, “The key challenge they face is Google’s customer service. The resources it provides right down the chain are well ahead of the others.”
Yahoo! Europe’s Rich Riley says, “We’re offering a great alternative, real choice, massive scale, higher quality at a more competitive price, more effective ways to run ad campaigns and improved relevance.”
Prediction: We’ll know who’s going to win this search war in about… maybe we already do.
Jeeves, Bring Me My Abacus
IDC has counted up the dollars regarding ad spend. According to a PaidContent.org article by David Kaplan, IDC believes (Read the release.) that global ad spending shrunk 5% in the second quarter of 2009 and the world isn’t going to see a turnaround in advertising until the middle of next year. WAH-wah. Kaplan notes that IDC’s prediction on display is a bit more dire than other sources as IDC sees a 12% year-over-year decrease in display spending in contrast to reports by TNS and Nielsen.
Context Is King For Religious Blog
Do blog readers care about their advertising? Why yes. Exhibit A: About.com’s Catholic blog responds to a reader who doesn’t like seeing his/her Catholic content mixed with ads from competing religions. Scott Richert, About.com’s “Guide to Catholicism,” takes the issue head on and pushes it back to the reader, “Encourage Catholic organizations to advertise. The Google ads will always remain fairly random, but the display advertising spaces on the Catholicism GuideSite are for sale.”
Will Yahoo! Buy ValueClick?
ValueClick reported earnings on August 4 and were able to beat street expectations even though the Street is all over the place on the value of ValueClick. As Yahoo! washes itself of search, it would appear that ValueClick would make a nice fit with its small, but growing display business among many of its moving parts. Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz has stated that display is the new search at Yahoo!. Scale wins in display as advertisers look for deep inventory in specific audience segments.
ClickZ’s Kate Kaye covers the earnings report and ValueClick’s CEO Tom Vadnais who reported that display ad revenues increased 3 percent quarter-over-quarter to $32.4 million with improved eCPMs.
On the Street front, Benchmark upgraded ValueClick to hold based on “valuation.” This was after a downgrade two weeks ago. The dip in ValueClick stock was likely initiated by Mark Mahaney of Citibank who issued a “sell” on ValueClick. ThinkEquity’s Bill Morrison remains cautiously bullish expecting an uptick in the stock’s performance in the coming year.
Digital Out-Of-Home Study Says Screens Addressing Audience
Arbitron released results of its digital out-of-home study (Release here.) that should interest the addressable media devotee. Arbitron claims that DOOH now reaches 67% of the U.S. population.
More stats:
- Nearly one in five (18 percent of) Americans aged 18+ noticed a video screen in a place serving food or beverages in the past month.
- 21 percent of adults have seen video displays at a movie theater.
- Twenty-two percent of U.S. adults have viewed a video screen at a gas station in the past month.
- 19 percent have seen video displays at an airport during the same time period.
- 7 percent have noticed video content while waiting for or riding mass transit.
Local.com Reports Chunk of Change
The “local” story continues as publicly-traded Local.com reported that Q2 2009 was profitable on a net income basis and Q3 will have the same result with “revenues to be between $14.1 million and $14.6 million with an adjusted net income of $1 million to $1.3 million” in spite of decreased in revenue per click in Q2. President and COO, Bruce Crair shed more light on RPC on the earnings call transcribed by Seeking Alpha:
“Of course, when RPC goes down, it perks on one end and helps on the other end, but as I mentioned in my comment, we are able to make up to the RPCs going down of the revenue side by increased click through rates and increased traffic and on the traffic acquisition side, we certainly took advantage of that.”
Boston Bizness
The Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX) has a new president, Kiki Mills. (Read the release.) BIMA and MITX serve as strong networking groups for Boston area interactive advertising and technology types.
