The Talent Gap In Digital; Interpublic Sees Strong Profits, Clients; AdWords Showing Ad Networks

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Digital Ad Talent Gap

If there’s one thing all companies have in common in the digital ad ecosystem, it’s the pain around hiring. In an article in The New York Times’ Tanzina Vega explores the shortage: “A talent gap is growing between the skills that many new advertising jobs require and the number of people who have those skills. The dilemma, one familiar to many industries across the country, is particularly acute for jobs that require hard-core quantitative, mathematical and technical skills.” Read more.

The Klout Ad Network

Center Networks’ Allen Stern has an interesting take on every VC’s favorite startup, Klout, which tracks your influence in the social sphere and has become a digital vanity license plate for the venture capital world. Stern sees an ad network developing, “The brilliance of this new advertising network is that it gets users of social networks to push a company’s message without it appearing as a full-on ad/shill. (…) I wonder if we will eventually see pushback from Twitter corporate to label these tweets as ads.” Read it.

IPG Reports

Liquidating some of its stake in Facebook helped agency holding company Interpublic Group post juicy 3rd quarter 2011 profits of over $200 million on revenue of $1.73 billion. Ad Age’s Kunur Patel quotes IPG CEO Michael Roth on the earnings call with analysts, “This doesn’t feel like 2008. Our clients have a fair amount of cash on their balance sheet.” Read more from Ad Age. And, read the call transcript. Finally, here’s the earnings release.

DSPs Exposed

Google’s AdSense has begun to expose exactly who and how many ad impressions each “Google Certified Ad Network” from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange bought from a particular publisher site. A screenshot of an example publisher includes buying reports from ad networks/DSPs RocketFuel, Quantcast, Invite Media, Turn, AdRoll, MediaMath and [x+1]. For the sample publisher report, Adwords is the biggest buyer by far and the Inside AdSense blog’s Vincent Zanotti admits, “We’re confident that our vast AdWords inventory can provide the highest paying ad, but on the few occasions when it can’t, this feature simply allows more ads to be eligible to appear on your pages.” Read it. Transparency here is good marketing for Google.. the more they show how meaningful they are to publishers, the more likely they are to retain publishers – and gain new ones – who may be hearing DSPs and ad networks knocking on their door. However, what still isn’t clear is the black box around the publisher’s revenue share. Will that be the next reveal? Currently, Google provides AdSense publishers only an overall rev share guidance (For content around 68% for pubs/32% for Goog). Will publishers get to see certified ad network bid prices, for example?

RTB Plumbing

Last week, real-time ad platform announced that it was working with Cox Digital Solutions on CDS Connect. Buyers who use AppNexus like an exchange in order to buy real-time biddable ad impressions will now be able to purchase inventory which includes Cox’ network of properties. Read more. AppNexus also announced a deal with Harvest Digital in the UK to power their buy-side trading desk. Read a bit more from Brand Republic.

Your Facebook Fans, My Facebook Fans

On the comScore Voice blog, comScore’s Peter Elbaor and Alan Vaughn give data junkies another fix with a look at the interconnectedness of Facebook fan pages. Among the findings was the idea that most brand pages have similar fans. One key metric revealed the similarity: “By calculating closeness, a measure that indicates the extent to which a node can reach other nodes, we found that the average brand was just 1.8 degrees removed from all other brands, and that the greatest distance between any two brands was three degrees.” So, does brand matter? Yes. Read more.

You’re Hired!