MMA Standardizing Mobile Display; Ad Targeting At Yahoo!; Driving Premium Yield At Facebook

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Standards For Mobile Display

Mobile Marketing Association chief Greg Stuart discusses the new standardization efforts (known as “The Universal Mobile Ad Package”) going on within his industry organization – a process with which he’s familiar from his past experience at the IAB. In an interview, Stuart discusses the outcome as Chief Marketer reports, “The Universal Mobile Ad Package consists of three small sizes geared to feature phones – 120 x 20 pixels, 168 x 28, and 216 x 36 – and three sizes of banner ads for use with the larger screens common to smartphones – 300 x 250 pixels, 300 x 50 and 320 x 50.” Read more. Stuart wants marketers to help drive adoption by asking their agencies, “Are you following these guidelines in creating my campaigns – or are you wasting my money on stuff that isn’t critical to moving my business forward?”

Ad Targeting At Yahoo!

From his personal blog, Greg Linden points to a new research paper from Yahoo! called “Web-Scale User Modeling for Targeting” that will be presented at an upcoming research conference. Linden summarizes, “The researchers describe a system used in production at Yahoo that does daily builds of large user profiles. Each profile contains tens of thousands of features that summarize the interests of each user from the web pages they have viewed, searches they made, and ads they have viewed, clicked on, and converted (bought something) on. They explain how important it is to use conversions, not just ad clicks, to train the system…” Read more. And, download the paper (PDF).

The Next Big Platform

CEO Amir Mir says the next big platform is virtual currency in an opinion piece on TechCrunch. And, he claims the ad industry is leading the charge: “The advertising industry has already seized the opportunity. Currently, if you’re playing poker on your iPhone you can earn virtual currency to use in the game by installing an advertiser’s mobile app. Advertisers have also begun rewarding consumers with virtual currency if they’re willing to watch a video advertisement. In the future advertisers will be able to create any action however simple or sophisticated and tie it to a virtual currency reward.” This is the next, digital stage of couponing or loyalty cards – and it will all be data-driven. Read it.

SXSW Ads

On Digiday, Brian Morrissey looks at the SXSW buzz around the intersection of ads and startups – and finds little. In fact, he thinks “a successful SXSW for most startups isn’t connecting with the brands and agencies critical to their long-term business success. There is no long term for these outfits. Instead it’s about capturing the in-crowd buzz and impressing venture capitalists until the flip.” Read more.

CMOs Just Wing It

New research by Columbia Business School says that in spite of talking a good game regarding careful research for a marketing plan, CMOs depend on historical data and a wing and a prayer. Ad Age’s Jack Neff summarizes, “The state of the art remains surprisingly primitive, according to the survey, in which half of respondents didn’t include any financial outcome when defining marketing ROI, and 22% use the most basic measure — brand awareness — to gauge marketing ROI without necessarily determining even whether the awareness is positive.” Read more. Neff points out that marketing effectiveness metrics these days aren’t so effective, so maybe they can’t be blamed?

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Mobile Ad P-Word

More Platforms – Flurry, which provides a range of mobile capabilities from analytics to monetization, announced on Friday Flurry AppSpot, claiming it as “the first data-powered app advertising platform.” Flurry and many others are driving deeper into the mobile ad space (mobile web and app) with targeting solutions as the limitations around the mobile, targeting cookie present challenges to marketers who are ready to spend more – but lack effective segmentation. Read Flurry’s release. Flurry says that it’s ready to help mobile publishers with sales services, yield optimization and free ad serving.

Facebook Premium Yield

BlinQ Media CEO Dave Williams discusses “Why Facebook is abandoning ‘likes’ for Sponsored Stories” on iMedia Connection. He writes, “The new emphasis on turning posts into ads will encourage more users to interact with brands’ most engaging content. Sponsored Stories will piggyback on that to drive even more engagement, consumer influence, and interaction, and at the same time help to improve Facebook’s yield. Sponsored Stories yield an average effective CPM premium of 60 percent, and advertiser results can far outperform that premium, so the shift to this strategy makes great sense.” Read more.

The Google Network

Google’s content creation efforts are paying off through partners on YouTube says The New York Times. “By introducing a layer of content closer to television than home video, YouTube believes, it will attract a steadier stream of viewers and advertisers, and the company is spending more than $100 million to help develop the channels,” writes The NYT’s Ben Sisario. Read it. Is this the beginning of the YouTube cable effort?

Crowdsourcing The Performance Agency

Facebook and search PPC marketplace Trada (AdExchanger Q&A 2010) was featured in The Business Insider late last week as the startup’s CEO Niel Robertson offered up some stats to TBI regarding the crowdsourced contractors who implement campaigns through the Trada system: “‘We now have a number of contractors making $65,000 a year and two making $200,000 a year,’ says Robertson. Trada itself takes a 25 percent cut. This isn’t an Amazon Mechanical Turk knock off, either. Most of the contractors are in the United States.” Read more. And, see the company’s indoor beach and tiki bar.

But Wait. There’s More!