Mobile Vs. Desktop; Power To The First Party

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Mobile Vs. Desktop

Pandora reported better than expected (but still a loss) fiscal fourth quarter earnings late Thursday as the company continues to concentrate on a mobile future. See the release (PDF). The Wall Street Journal digs into the details, “Mobile ads still aren’t as lucrative as those on traditional computers. The latter garnered $52.82 per 1,000 listening hours, compared with $25.05 for mobile.” Read the WSJ (subscription). The earnings call transcript discusses the Mediaocean and Strata integrations and where Triton Digital fits in for monetizing online radio. Read it (registration).

The Human Algo

Sure, technology is enabling plenty of ad targeting online and other areas of automated innovation, says The NY Times’ Steve Lohr, but humans are still critical. He calls it the “man-machine collaboration” and references examples with IBM’s Wason, Google and comparison engine FindTheBest. Read more.

Power To The First Party

Daniel Jaye, CEO of Korrelate, discusses the potential impact of Mozilla’s decision to block third-party cookies that help track browsers and target advertising. Jaye tells Ad Age’s Kate Kaye, “In the long run if this becomes adopted by [Google] Chrome and [Microsoft] IE … you could see a world where the only data-enabled third party networks are those owned by the large first parties.” Read more. On Street Fight, former Korrelate-er Matt Sokoloff points out, “…advertisers and advertising technology companies have claimed that when a browser defaults a user’s preferences to blocking third-party cookies, that isn’t the same as a user opting out. This leaves the door open to some advertisers using cookieless tracking technology to continue to track users” – e.g. Akamai’s “pixel-free” tech. Read more. Related from CNET: Mozilla Says “No” To iOS.

Media Storm

Media monger or branding genius? The Daily Beast’s David Freedlander looks at the Weather Channel’s relentless efforts to dominate weather forecasting. “In the world of media behemoths, the most voracious may well be the Weather Channel…The network, which grabbed the Weather.com domain back in the earliest days of the Internet, now draws some 163 million monthly unique visitors to its sites.” More.

Fill It Up With Premium

Benjamin Humphry from audience targeting platform nugg.ad wades into the “programmatic premium” discussion courtesy of a think piece on eConsultancy. He offers, “Premium Programmatic is a noble goal, but it’s a tough challenge, and innovation needs to happen before it can be considered solved.” He’s not a believer -yet. Read more.

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Bad Actors

On The Makegood, Casale Media’s Andrew Casale reveals one way his company is finding “bad actors” among websites cranking through millions of ad impressions – the recency of the date a domain name was registered. He writes that one such site “had no audience in August 2012 yet two months later in October 2012 it was posting 400,000 unique users.” Read it.

Programmatic ESPN

Digiday’s Josh Steinberg says that ESPN display inventory is appearing on exchanges at a $3 CPM as the sports media giant takes steps toward programmatic. ESPN media exec Lisa Valentino tells Steinberg, “Our core business is always going to be multimedia sponsorship,. (…) I really see this as a growing business, or we wouldn’t have invested in it. But it’s secondary to our core: content across every screen and translate that in meaningful ways for clients.” Read it.

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